Midsummer, PHS and Making the Garden that Pleases You

Post 77

Happy Midsummer.

By now, if all has gone well, you will have finished the hard work of Spring-- planting, transplanting and weeding. For the next few months, if all goes well (and here's hoping it will,) you will be able to take a bit of a garden vacation. A little weeding, a bit more watering, some deadheading, this will be all you have to do till late September.

There is no getting around the fact that gardens take work, sometimes a great deal of work . And, if the owner  wants to be fully engaged with the garden, or if they are on the budget, they will do this work themselves.

Hence the pleasure of pausing with the sun for a rest.

To be motivated to do all this work, to want to do all this work, it is important that you  love your garden.  Somehow that makes the work easier. And the best way to love your garden is to make it the one you have always wanted, the garden that most pleases you. If you make your garden to please others or to meet some abstract idea of what a garden should be, you will end up resenting the work it entails. And your garden will suffer. It may remain perfect in a technical sense but it will lose the liveliness, the panache, that depends on personal engagement.

If you love your garden because it comes close to realizing your vision of beauty, the work will not be labor, it will be vocation or avocation. And so you will keep at it, even as  the garden changes.


The garden may rest for a bit, but it will never stop developing. Things will grow and things will die. Proportions will change.It will grow--and so will you.

Your vision, your style, will develop, and, as it does, over time, you will come to better understand how  much of it -- has come from other people.



Others whom you have loved, others whose visions and styles have excited and pleased you. You will be aware of being part of a greater stream, a tradition, a shared pursuit that includes past, present and future.

For me, this is a good time to pause and give thanks.

And here is one thing I am very thankful for. We are lucky to have the Philadelphia Horticultural Society (PHS,) in our area  With its library, its webpage, its tree-tenders, green initiatives, City Gardens contest and more, it is a cornucopia of relevant gardening information, inspiration and delight. One of the main ways I learned about gardening is that I seeped myself in the vast collection of big beautiful garden books at PHS's McLean Library.

Which leads me to the happy news that this garden blog, Wissahickon Schist, has been included as a link in the "Good Reads" section of PHS's resource webpage for local gardening.Whoohoo. I am,as the English would say,  utterly "chuffed."

Happy Summer.

May/June, or When Gardens Explode (in a good way)

Post 76

In May/June, when gardens explode, for one's own safety, follow these instructions--

Take in a slow, scented breath and stand still long enough to contemplate the tableau before you.

Then repeat to yourself, "I did not do this."

Because you didn't. Nature did. You just did some work to help things along.

For which Nature rewards you.

Because as with all real work (versus a job,) there is something extra that appears. Something that must have happened when you were checking soil levels or weeding or planting seeds, in short, when you were doing some practical task that has nothing to do with love or dedication or ardor. Because somehow, the garden caught fire. 

So during the explosion (and there are often explosions (the good kind) when you are doing things you love,) keep calm and remember, you have no idea how this happened. You are just lucky to be around at the time.

What Makes a Style?

Post 75

Why do we like what we like? This week I've realized how much exciting times from my childhood have shaped my sense of style.

My small garden does not follow the usual  good taste model, that of planting in large drifts, with many plants of the same variety planted together. Large drifts work well for larger gardens, but for me, it can get boring in a small one. My eye needs to roam. It needs to be drawn in and then drawn forward,  moving in expectation and delight till it takes its moment of rest at a particular cynosure, only to re-energize and take off again.



 Part of my inspiration has been country meadaows, part late Medieval millefleur tapestries, part has been Fleur Cowles illustrations, but I've just understood another big, and highly unexpected influence: Lower Manhatten.

Growing up one of the most exciting things I could do was visit my Dad at his office in Hanover Place near Wall St in Manhattan. Which was very different than the city where I lived and spent my usual days.

The city I knew was the spacious grid of the East Side where light shone thru wide canyons that opened up in logical right angles. It was a spacious, rational, prediciteble world where 65th Street followed 64th, where the blocks were all the same size and views were long and  unobstructed. But down around Wall Street was a different world.

 The streets were small, cantered and illogical. The buildings were all over the place and almost seemed to be falling over each other.

This new, hodge-podge city was wonderful to me because I was with my Daddy and it was his world.

Everybody knew him, many called him affectionate nicknames I'd never heard of. Through good and ill it was his kingdom. He loved it and came fully alive there.

Above, you can see him as he is today, or rather as he was a few days ago, on his 100th birthdy, when he rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. He, I and the NYSE are much different from what we were when I first saw Wall Street in the late 50s, early 60s -- but the geography of the place remains the same. And now I am old enough to be conscience of its past and present effect on me, and how it has perhaps inspired and strengthening my delight in fetching disorder.

So perhaps this is why, whatever I'm creating, it will usually have a combination, a balance, of order and disorder. My garden has its quinquinix structure, over, around, thru and about which, runs perennial plants acting like random meadow annuals.

And here I am below as a teenager with my dad in his salad days. He and my mother (as I mentioned in my post about Fleur Cowles) have influenced my style in more ways than I can say, for childhood loves make for much in adult life. Our styles, if authentic, often come from what we have loved, and how strongly we have loved.

Sweet Air: Chanticleer and Shalom

Post 74
Ahhh, Chanticleer...

Enter the woods as ferns unroll,

And earth meets sky,

 

You'll roll down the hill as if you were five,

When lilacs crossed the sky.

Enlivened by color,

Peace enters in,

As though spores of pleasure

Blew in the wind.

What can you say

When all breathes Shalom,

Silent the bliss

That knows its way home.

It is hard to write prose about Chanticleer. Last Sunday I experienced the new woodland walk. It was as if I was on some favorite hike through a valley tween the Green Mountains, and all around me Nature was so happy, so fulfilled, so fully alive, that it felt as if it was coming alive in its heavenly aspect. Swathes of new foliage and wildflowers unrolled between the trees. The smells of this time of year, when the lilacs, ferns, lilies of he valley, and who knows what else, are so intensely in bloom that the air turns sweet to envelope consciousness. After about 20 minutes of this I started to feel such a peaceful, lively happiness that I could have blessed everything and everyone I have ever known.

Such moments do not last, probably are not meant to. But the garden is one of the best signs of them that I know.

A natural garden, if done well, is where the plants are happy, well-nourished, expressing themselves in all their fullness. It is as if they are singing as you walk, and you sing back. As if you sustain each other, nurture each other, enjoy each other, celebrate each other, making a reciprocal ecosystem.

And what is best is that when you get home to your own small plot, the beauty experienced at Chanticleer makes your own garden feel that much better. It enhances your sensitivity to the beauty  around you and the reciprocal relationships you experience.

Yes the world can still be a bad place. This is not a hallucination; it is an alternative. An alternative to cultivate and give thanks for.

The Perfectly Imperfect Woodland Garden

Post 73

I can imagine the perfectly imperfect woodland garden in spring.

For an understory it would have bluebells and forget-me-nots, daffs and species tulips, hellebores, trilliums, woodland poppies, primroses, may apples, wild ginger, ferns, barrenworts, money plants and plants I do not yet know the names of.

The midstory would be azaleas, rhodos, fothergillas, dogwoods, serviceberries and magnolias.

All this would be under ancient trees, with an modest farmhouse and a few well-used outbuildings sharing the plot.

And, of course, this bucolic kingdom (too small, comfortable and unpolished to be an estate,) would be somewhere near a convenient village center, but hidden away, maybe reached by a dirt road winding off a rarely-used street.

Could such a place exist? Yes. of course it could. In fact it does, tended by a retired geneticist who still comes out and digs up a primrose here and there to gift a worthy up-coming plant sale. May we all have her vigor, intelligence, generosity, humor, busy life and green thumb at 92! Hmmm, and would we had and have such virtues at an younger age too.

While few of us live in such natural splendor, many of us garden yards that are at least partially shaded by big trees. This expanse of spring loveliness is an inspiration of what can be done under such conditions.

All these plants spread on their own and grow well between tree roots.

Do you need some of the plants listed and pictured above?  if so, you are in luck. It is almost time for the Ned Wolf Park plant sale.

"Ned Wolf Park is located at the corner of Ellet St. and McCallum St. in the beautiful Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia.  This year we've scheduled our annual sale of perennials, shrubs, annuals & miscellaneous garden stuff for Saturday, May 11th from 10 am to 1 pm. "
http://nedwolfpark.blogspot.com/