prosegarden

Butterfly Winter

2012-01-30T10:37:00.001-08:00

The day after most of our brief snow accumulation bled away in warm temperatures and misty rain that followed quickly after the snow, I walked in the marsh along Quincy’s shoreline which I visit repeatedly during the year. The path was squishy, with some patches lasting longer here mainly because a few of us have compacted the snow by our footsteps, so it melts slower. Otherwise, another mostly sunny, mild January day. Actually, more factually, this was an unusually warm day even for this turncoat January, and the temp would rise to about 60. It felt that warm in the marsh.
Then I saw the butterfly. It was black-winged – a Morning Cloak? Or maybe a day-flying moth. But though I cannot identify species I have observed butterflies quite a bit in recent years, they visit our garden, and I know, we all know, how butterflies move. This moved like a butterfly. I don’t know suspect it’s going to be happy with its surroundings long-term, but it flew across the trail in front of me and disappeared among the trees.
Maybe it was the recently melted snow, but the world had a fresh and shiny finish to it. The sea looked blue and creamy, as if someone had poured milk into it. The sky was a darker blue, and with so much light sent skyward off the leftover fast-melting snow it seemed deeper than winter skies usually are. The clear blue above showed autumn dense against the bare limbs of the taller trees.
Besides the butterfly, the day warmed up some other creatures. I saw birds, chickadees among them, working among the thickets, and stopped dead when my ears distinguished the characteristic woody pat-pat of the woodpecker. I could see nothing at first, but kept looking steadily at a close at hand bare-limbed tree. Finally, the woodpecker rounded a branch and leapt into focus. It was tapping not far above me, not apparently aware of me. Slowly, silently, I unzip the camera case. The thing is half out when the bird takes off. Not hearing me, in no particular alarm. It was just time to move on.
A red-headed woodpecker, I decide, with the skeletal spine-and-ribs white marking down his dark-colored back.
On my way out, almost back on the main path, I flush a rabbit out of a thorny patch of thicket, where I had no idea he was hiding just a yard or two from my path. I would not have noticed him. But he skitters away, his puffy white tail blazing his whereabouts. He shoots through the weeds and onto the main path, and is gone by the time I get there.
The marsh has attracted one more visitor this winter, a posse of Canada geese, grazing in the yellow marsh grass across the marsh in the direction of the school, the only large birds I see this day. But they see me come round a bend in the trail and stop and stare. I am far away, to far for photography, but perhaps at a shooter’s distance. Do they worry about intentions? Or do they stare at me simply because I’ve stopped to gaze at them.

Winter? That was fast

2012-01-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

We had winter a week ago. A soft, steady, rather modest snowfall fell on a Saturday and kept up all day, leaving us about four or five inches at the end. It was a very well-behaved meteorological event, arriving on a day when it wouldn’t foul up a commute and lacking the gusty winds that make for drifts. Still, the local plow crews hit the roads early and often, as if to make up for a snowless winter in one day. We made a snowday of it as well, not moving the car from the driveway or going outside except to shovel, pretending we were snowed in.
Two days later the snow was gone. So much for winter.
A warm winter is good for keeping down the fuel costs and for anybody suffering from substandard (or no) housing. But, as we say around here, “It tain’t natural.”
In many respects, the absence of a proper winter with its deep freezes and substantial snow packs may not in fact be good for nature and, need we be reminded?, we are all natural beings. The absence of a snow pack may result in water shortages in areas that rely on it to make the rivers and streams run hard in the spring and fill reservoirs, underground streams, and aquifers.
And where is the water that ordinarily gets tied up in snow accumulations in latitudes such as ours? Remember the recent record snow accumulations in locations such as New York City and Washington, D.C.? Is that water – that weather – going somewhere else this year? Our daughter reports a rainy winter in Beirut, but winters typically are rainy there, characterized by fierce downpours. What’s different this year is no sunny days between the rainy ones. So where did Lebanon’s sun go?
Other obvious concerns. Winter kills pests – insects, microbes, germs, diseases. Our ecology needs the deep, killing frosts to reduce the numbers of those tough, otherwise invulnerable creatures that make it hard on us in summers. Will a warm winter and early spring mean the mosquitoes get a head start this year? What about all those flu germs we ordinarily put out of mind until the next “winter flu” season. Will we start having warm weather flu seasons?
We have a common “black spot” disease in our roses. I don’t know if it’s properly a fungus, or a mite, or a mildew, or any of those other distressing names I read about in gardening books (and remain mostly ignorant of), or some combination of all. But I have to think winter cold sets it back each year, enough to gives us that annual booster wave of June blooms. I’d hate be fighting it with organic sprays and shamanistic charms any earlier than I have to as it is by mid-summer.
Every gardener has a plant disease story, and none of us really want to hear them.
So let’s get on to a happier subject – spring. But even here I am worried. Spring winds up its impact from the hard-rock resistance of winter. It builds on contrast. It moves insides us because of what has come before.
I want to know when winter is over so I can celebrate, and exult, and go quietly mad over spring. But how can winter be over if it never really happened?

Hawk-eyed

2012-01-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

The first time we saw it, it loomed on a solitary tree pretending to be a fat squirrel’s nest exposed by winter’s bareness. Anne pointed out my mistake. The hawk was alone, red-tipped at the end of its tale feathers, no other living creatures in view except for us. He must have seen us, but he didn’t seem to care as I expostulated over forgetting the camera and then the two of us helplessly fiddled with Anne’s phone trying to discover the magic of the cell-phone photo function. People hold up their boxy little phones and just push-button away, I think. Happens all the time. They must be accomplishing something.
The hawk ignores us, certain he’s in no danger from this comical pair. Anne finds the camera icon, so we snap away, mostly by accident while looking helplessly at one another. Since we can’t find a zoom, the results are not promising: little spot of something against a bare tree and open sky. We move closer still. The hawk finally gets sick of us and flies, majestically, across the marsh to find a tree on the other side.
The second time I see it I am by myself. Human being-wise, I mean, because I am alerted to the presence of something by the agitated squawking of some 40 to 50 starlings occupying the same bare tree as some huge ball of gray, contoured fluff that individual members of black bird flock, undoubtedly the antsy young males, keep flying up to in order to peck at it.
Oh. Huge hawk.
Must be 50 to 100 times larger by volume than his persecutors, but he can’t be bothered to respond to any of these feeble aggressions. The combined squawking of these pygmies of the sky is loud and sustained. Little birds keep flying up to the big one, making a quick dive, and flying away. What a shot. I take my camera out of my “man bag” and hit the power button. Nothing.
I remember.
The battery is resting quietly in a comfy charger plugged into the kitchen wall socket just over my plate of toast crumbs. I am tempted to rush home and get it. But there is work to do and, of course, tomorrow is another day. I walk directly underneath the branch of the tree on which the huge red-tailed hawk takes his afternoon break, unruffled by the displeasure of the locals. He pays me no more mind than he does the starlings.
The following day, empowered camera in my bag, Saul (home for a visit) beside me, I traipse around the marsh without running into mobs of starlings or any sign of a hawk. On the back stretch we come around a curve in the trail and there he is. I take out the camera, get off a few long-range shots. We decide to keep walking, see how close he’ll let us get. We stop, close enough I think, and I take a few more. Later, I discover that even with benefit of the zoom, a large bird has been rendered very small. It’s the world that’s big.
Closer, still. The hawk spooks and I snap a few in-flight shots. Probably the best of this group.
The fourth (so far last) encounter comes some days later. I do have the camera, but it’s cold and I see no signs of anything moving in the marsh – no ducks, gulls, nothing, as I round the same bend in the trail where we discovered the big bird the last time. Then, astonishingly, from the same area – not one, but two hawks shoot out from among the branches before I can even properly see them. The larger one flies straight to a tall pine. A smaller one, deciding on the wing to follow, arrives a few seconds later and, so it appears to me, takes something from him and then flies back in my direction and disappears in the trees. The first hawk, the big one, then flies across the long end of the marsh past me (click, click), eventually crossing its width to hide somewhere in a further tree-line. I keep walking, wondering where I will find the smaller one.
When I do, she is mostly hidden behind layers of branches, I have no clear shot, but she flushes immediately and takes off the in the direction of the pine tree where she’d last seen her mate. That’s when I get the best shot.
Later, Anne managing to blow it up for me on the computer, it’s clear that something is hanging from the bird’s landing gear that does not belong to the bird. Do they fly with such long claws (legs?) hanging free below? Not reasonable. No, that can’t be bird we’re seeing hanging down. She must be holding, carrying, something. We blow it up some more.
My god, that looks like rabbit legs to me.
With this new perspective the encounter feels something like stumbling onto a crime scene and finding the evidence in the photo. Or simply interrupting dinner. Sorry, guys.

Winter Comes to Quincy

2011-12-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

I step outside today, it’s late morning, the sun is shining brightly, and my breath immediately forms a steamy veil that covers my face. It’s shockingly cold. Impossibly cold. Not really, of course, since it’s December and the thermometer reads a seasonable 28 degrees. But it feels like another world to me, after a month of forties and occasional fifties.
But it’s not only me. The leaves of the rhododendron bush lose their greeny soul to a deep, sub-freezing night and droop. Warmer temperatures will bring them back; colder nights will cause them to pull all the moisture in their cells inward to try to preserve it from freezing.
Cold nights mean big days at the bird feeder too. After putting the feeder away for the summer we’re back to buying bird feed again, black-shelled sunflower seeds, which so far have drawn a busy tribe of little brown sparrows. One of them has a patch of red on the back of his head, but he flocks with the others. A couple of tufted titmouse too today, gray and crested and swooping in to take their chances with the others. Underneath, the squirrels are busy and multiple.
To combat squirrels climbing up the feeder this year, we’ve come up with a mixture of oil and hot pepper which we brush on to the metal baffle and the curve of the pole right above it. Some squirrels fly – no other word for it – right over the baffle, brace their back feet on the pole, lean over to the feeding ring and suck the seed out of the feeding tube. Their oversized presence on the feeding ring scares away the birds, leaving us with the prospect of watching fat squirrels feed instead of happy, chirpy birds. So far an application of cayenne, chili pepper and sunflower oil seems to chase them away for a couple of weeks before wearing off.
So the winter routine begins.
But if the nights aren’t achingly cold and the wind’s not searing my lungs, I like to walk in them. Here’s a poem about early winter nights.

Winter Transit

Anybody know where this world is going?
On a chilly, brilliant winter night,
Chinese spices smarten up the air
The city bus hums nostalgically into my sight
Ten, twelve faces frozen in the light,
The very same ones every night
A rumble from behind, a second sighting
– a two-bus astronomical transit! –
Passing like ships in the night
Catty-corner, a calligraphed tree imprints its shadow
On the speechless pavement, while from on high
Jupiter’s celestial eye casts an unwavering gaze
On the first night of the first month of winter…
Only one hundred more such tales to follow
Everything changes the same

An Old American Elm Tree Awaits Execution

2011-12-17T16:13:00.000-08:00

They live among fools.
The tree grew not far from our house, but a ways back from the main road. It had long grown on a considerable estate, shading a mansion which was taken down before we moved to town in preparation for a college expansion that was never built.
Recently the city bought the land where the tree still grows, shading the earth, cleansing the air, moderating the temperature, absorbing heat through the pulp of its tons of tree-matter. The city also bought a few other neighboring properties and knocked down an empty parochial school that stood on one of them, in preparation for building a needed new middle school. They city, or somebody working for the city, decided the job would be easier if they cut down the century-plus old tree American Elm Tree growing there in defiance of the Dutch elm disease plague that had taken almost all of its cohorts.
And so they said, the city’s spokesmen did, that the tree was dying and would have to be cut down. The tree does not appear to be dying, but perhaps a fool would not know what a healthy tree looks like. It grows a canopy of green leaves in the summer; it sheds them in the fall. In winter it holds its many limbs against the sky, one of nature’s more enduring candelabras of life.
But the city’s spokesmen aren’t really looking at a tree. They are saying what they have been told to say.
Then comes the cover-up. Who determined that the tree is dying and needs to be removed? It’s an obvious question. The answer comes that an arborist hired by someone working for the city said the tree has heart-rot and fungus and is dying.
The next question is also obvious. Who is the arborist? Can we see the report? The spokesmen don’t know. They say they will produce the report.
They produce a document written yesterday or the day before by someone who is not an arborist and does not evidence a professional knowledge of trees. The report does not say the tree is dying, but has some fungus, and is too close to the school and will probably be killed by the construction.
Obviously (again), this document is not the “report” on which a decision taken months ago could have been based. The likely inference is there never was a “report” by an arborist certified by the state of Massachusetts or any other one.
It’s just a story to fend off complaints. Sorry, couldn’t help it, had to cut down the tree. It’s diseased, you know, dying.
It’s a red herring.
The real reason? They want to cut down the tree, which plans show is located is the intended parking lot because it will be in the way when the builders start bringing in their machines. They don’t want to work around it. The real problem is the city doesn’t really have enough land to build this school.
This explanation sounds a little crass. It sounds better to say, too bad about the tree. We’d like to save it, but it’s sick. In fact it’s dying. Nothing can be done. It might fall down on the school. We have report, from an arborist (who? Wait a minnit, I must have the name here somewhere), which says so.
Here’s a poem called “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer, who died in action during World War I:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

It’s one of the best-loved poems of the American people.
Stylistically, this is greeting card verse. If you analyze its workings, simple da-dum rhythm, end rhymes, breath of vocabulary, it’s nursery rhyme simple. But every red-blooded American has liked this poem since its publication 100 years ago, particularly if they don’t like poetry in general (which was almost every red-blooded American for the last 100 years hasn’t).
Why do we all like it? Because it’s so obviously true. Because it speaks to something deep in us.
But not only are poems made by fools like me, so are political calculations, city hall press releases, building plans, and even needed schools.
For well over a hundred years, perhaps a hundred and fifty, the American Elm on Hancock Street has lived among fools, whom it tries to protect from the excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases our fossil-fuel driven society has put into the atmosphere. We overheat the atmosphere. The tree takes CO2 out of the air, which cools it, and releases oxygen, which we breathe. Its roots absorb runoff. It’s shade lowers the temperature. Its beauty raises spirits and, by the way, property values.
Now it is condemned to die among fools who fail to recognize its value.

Indoor Fun

2011-12-13T07:22:00.000-08:00

Now that’s December and I don’t have much to do in the garden any more, indoor activities assume greater deal of importance. For instance, one activity I’ve grown particularly fond of is asking myself why am I sitting at my desk so often staring absently at a screen.
Do I think my computer screen is a garden? Do I think it will start “blooming” if I look at it long enough?
Windows, I mean real ones, not the virtual/digital/computer meaning of “windows,” a term that encompasses the ever-increasing universe of “pictures” or “pages” or “screens” (or, redundantly, “windows”) which do in fact, in some sense, “bloom” on your computer once you start playing with it and saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!” (click, click, click) to the options, opportunities and offers afforded to you by the determinedly (even ruthlessly) indoor world of the internet….
So, no, that’s not what I mean by windows…. Windows, the real ones, become increasingly important the more time we spend indoors.
But don’t you, btw, love the digital, virtual vocabulary that has grown in our Age of the Screen? “Virtual” (along with “windows”) may be the best and most searching of these new usages. We can now have virtual lives. Virtual used to mean “sort of the real thing” or “close to the real thing” or “you really can’t tell the difference, can you?” That’s what we mean when we say something is “virtually the same,” isn’t it? But when we take a “virtual tour” of some place where we’re thinking of staying, for example, is it really anything like the same?
I suspect many people in our increasingly indoor lives have already figured out how to ‘grow’ a virtual ‘garden’ on a screen – a notion that’s just occurred to me. I’m about to say how pictures are great, I take them all the time, but a picture of a garden, or a plant, is not virtually the real thing… (but I think I’ll stop right there).
As for the real garden, it’s a very quiet place these days; and too cold for someone of my delicate sensibilities to spend much time in these days. When it comes to cold, I wish I were made of sterner stuff. Instead…
Windows, as I started to say, those actual glass portals on the world beyond, have assumed a centrality to my days that goes beyond their many valuable uses such as letting in the light, and the solar heat (especially now). They also have the practical use of allowing me to spy on our neighborhood. I can put this more positively by saying “check up on” or “keep tabs on” the neighborhood, with the implication that somebody might some day need our help. But mostly we’re looking for stimulus, sensory information. I may not want to go out there right now, as I would have up to a month ago, but I sure as heck want to see those birds outside our kitchen window competing like mad for a peck at the bird feeder. (The squirrels? Not so much.)
Even when there’s “nothing going on” to our fight-or-flight programmed, motion-detection senses, the greater world outside our window companions us. The sun shines, and we miss it if it doesn’t. The wind chimes sing through the seasons – until the gusts of winter storms make us bring them indoors. The rain threatens; or lets up. The traffic bounces over the “sink hole” in front of the house caused by the last repaving.
And for the last three weeks or, one of our national energy monopolies has cooperated by staging a long-running performance of “Let’s dig up the streets and plant new gas lines!”… a traditional neighborhood favorite any time of year.
It’s a garden of machines.
So now when I step outdoors to take in the sunset, every December day’s greatest show, I can get a photo of “Twilight over the backhoe.” Or the dump truck. Or the dirt pile with funny orange cones. Or the little tent with the plastic roof cleverly erected to permit digging tie-ins on a rainy day.
Yes, the world beyond my window is virtually a garden of enchantments. It’s just not the same.

The Pocketbook Caper

2011-11-30T21:01:00.001-08:00

Dumpster diving was nothing. Last night’s adventure begins with a cancelled meeting. Last minute cancellation, no notification, only a sign posted on a board once we get inside the church building.
We walked back to Park Street station through the Gardens and the Common, sharing an umbrella as a light drizzle grew stronger, then tapered off. We waited in Park Street, took the Red Line home to Quincy, stepped off the train at our station, and Anne announced she was no longer in possession of her pocketbook. We scream at the conductor; the train pulls away.
Downstairs, the station minder made some calls, and then we made some calls, but no one reported finding the pocketbook on the train. Around 10 p.m. Anne gets the idea to call her cell phone number. And a few minutes later we get a call.
“Did you just call this number?” a voice asks. “We’ve got your phone.”
Overjoyed! What a relief! How can we get it back?
But, overhearing the call, I get a funny feeling. The guy on the phone doesn’t identify himself, doesn’t say he’s calling from the MBTA, gives only a first name when asked for his name, and can’t come up with a street address for his building.
He says we can come get the pocketbook.
“Ask him for the street address!” I coach from the sidelines, hopping up and down on one foot in agitation. “How are we going to check it out?”
“Kenmore Square,” Anne says into the phone, repeating some information. “Beacon Street.” She hangs up.
“Please tell me you got a street address?”
“I got an intersection.”
She tells me some street names. An intersection, if it’s a major one, can have maybe 12 or 13 addresses, buildings, businesses, whatnot, on its various corner points, I point out. This one is major, Beacon and Chestnut Hill Avenue. We find it on a map. It’s a long way from Kenmore Square.
Nevertheless we get on the road; drive the expressway, take Storrow Drive to Kenmore Square, turn onto Beacon Street. It’s late enough by now so the streets have little traffic. We fly through the lights, drive through the darkness. It’s still a long way.
I’d been imagining out destination would be some busy T office in busy Kenmore Square. I’ll wait in the car and we’ll be out of there in minute and speeding cheerily back home. Now I think, “You’re not going in there alone.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I told him my husband is coming with me.”
Great, we’re safe now. “Did you tell him your husband is packing?”
More dark streets. I begin to have second thoughts about the whole expedition. What I’m thinking is…
So this guy, let’s call him first-name “Pete,” calls up and says he has her phone – which he easily could have acquired in any number of ways – and he doesn’t say he works for the MBTA until Anne explicitly asks him, and when she asks his name give his only first name, and when she asks him his office’s address can only give an intersection, and when she asks him what the building looks like says it’s “a station.” And who also says we can come pick up her pocketbook any time all night…
So while I’m driving down Beacon beyond Coolidge Corner, beyond Harvard Street, beyond any place in Brookline or Brighton where I’ve ever been, the headline I’m seeing in my mind is “Two White Middle-Class Idiots Murdered in Pocketbook Scam.”
I have half a mind to turn the car around.
When we finally get to this promised intersection, driving along the streetcar tracks, Green Line cars scattered everywhere as if suddenly abandoned by drivers who felt a pressing need to do something else, stores and buildings and businesses (as predicted) all over the place, cars parked everywhere with nobody in them and nobody on the sidewalk because it’s late, and no MBTA station anywhere, no T signs on any of the buildings, I ask, politely, “So where the hell is it?”
“I’ll call him,” she says.
I nose the car around a few parking areas; no place to park, and back out onto the avenue, ready to turn around.
A few attempts at dialing. What if somebody else answers the phone?
Then “Phil” is on the phone. Anne says we’re at the intersection; where’s the office?
The light turns, I take the green arrow, drive across the tracks right in front of a Green Line streetcar with nobody in it, and pull over to the side of the road.
“He says it’s near the Dunkin Donuts.”
Oh sure. Likely story. Is there any intersection in Greater Boston that doesn’t have a Dunkin Donuts? I peer out the windshield and say, “We’re at the Dunkin Donuts.”
There’s a narrow lane behind the store. “Is it down the alley?”
Phone: What?
“At the back of the Dunkin Donuts.”
Phone: Where are you?
Anne: “We’re at the Dunkin Donuts.”
Phone says something.
Anne to me: “He says there’s a road just past the parking lot.”
I pull the car around to the other side of the store. We see a parking lot. We see another narrow road just beyond it. Apparently “Phil” has never been to the back end of the Dunkin Donuts. He really needs to get out more.
This narrow road has streetcar tracks implanted down the middle. More cars, and a few streetcars, are parked every which way. A few feet down the road we spy a small, nondescript building with a glass door and a light on inside and an incomprehensible poster in the window, and no sign suggesting the place has anything to do with the T.
“Oh, here it is,” she says. “You can just stay here, I’ll be right out.”
“You don’t want me to go with you?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll just be a second.”
I stay in the car. I watch her enter through the glass door, disappear from sight, and return half a minute later with the pocketbook.
So no scam. “Phil,” she reports, is just as vague as he sounds. The business of his office is inexplicable. Somebody turned in the pocketbook somewhere on the T system and it ended up here. Phil never goes anywhere beyond Dunkin Donuts.
Pocketbook in hand, everything turning out all right in the end, we head light-heartedly home and run smack into a hellacious traffic jam on the expressway.
I think I may be owed something.

November Sunsets

2011-11-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

We rake leaves. We go to the store. Commuters drive home from work. I put the perennials “to bed” by drawing leaf mulch over them. Anne cleans up the sidewalks and curbs and driveways and patio and other places where the leaves can’t rustle around all winter without being a problem to someone. She walks home from the train in the evenings.
Whatever we do, wherever we are, once we’ve turned the clocks back, sunset catches us too early each day.
Early dark is a shock to the system.
Change, in the solar sense, happens slowly. The hours of daylight dribble away tiny bit by bit. Minutely might be the word, because it’s a matter of a minute or two each day. It’s hard to register slight daily changes.
Where was the sun yesterday? Where is it today? Our eyes can’t tell the difference. Since we live indoors instead of largely outdoors, like our ancestors, few of us note the change in position of a sunrise, from one season to the next, or note where it sets on the horizon now as opposed to where it set last June (when the hands of the clock climbed toward nine p.m.).
Or how high, or not so high, it stands in the sky at noon compared to where it stood at 1 p.m. (daylight savings time) on the summer solstice.
It’s the end of daylight savings time, the sudden loss of an hour, that puts the difference in our faces. We miss that extra hour of sunlight at the end of the shortened day. For many it’s the difference between coming home in daylight or in the dark.
Coming home in the dark is like saying goodbye to the world, certainly the sunlit world of nature, for the whole work week: “Take it easy, world. I’ll look you up again on the weekend.”
Those of us who work at home or have a more relaxed schedule, whose workday doesn’t hinge around the conventional end of the business day, find it easier to stick our face out of doors during daylight to register the new patterns in the bare trees, count the last orange leaves on the cherry tree, monitor avian life at the bird feeder (I wrote “bird fever”: what am I being told?), or stomp down to the corner store on any excuse to get a mouthful of fresh air.
Some of us watch the light fade from the sky every day, as if obeying a ritual in a private religion. For me sunset-staring is never more important than in the short days of November and December. The more we are indoors, the more the spectacle of nature is reduced to one simple, remarkable, all-important fact: sometimes light, sometimes dark.
Often we are in our car when the fundamental change takes place. It catches us in traffic on the way home, or racing a light to beat the traffic. Or we pass a big plate glass window walking the corridors of commerce, or medicine, or academe. The sky is painting its big message in broad strokes and bright colors. Daytime is over. Prepare for a lengthy period of lightlessness.
We’re still natural enough beings to notice this. The advent of electric lighting changed the human experience of night. Darkness is now more of an inconvenience we can quickly remedy (unless a freak storm takes the power lines down) than the serious barrier to human activity it posed for all the millennia of our species’ existence up to a century ago.
But sunsets still speak to secret places in our minds. Slow down, they say, have a care. Find shelter, warmth, companionship. Maybe a storyteller and a glass of grog.
And the annual plunge backward in time makes us more aware of them now than at any other time of year. Maybe that’s why they seem more beautiful, certainly more stirring, than ever.

Anne Goes Dumpster Diving

2011-11-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

I didn’t get a picture of this. You’ll have to take my word for it.
Saturday we found a pile of roof slates, most of them broken, a few still whole, raining down from the roof of a fine brick building.
Sunday we went back for them. It didn’t prove quite as easy as we thought.
We discovered them on our walk through the Neponset River Reserve, beside an estuarial river that runs along the border of the city of Boston. Men were throwing the skin of an old roof off the top of a handsome brick building. What looked at first like a great dark trash pile proved to consist largely of pieces of slate roof pieces. Later, on our way back down the same path, a worker in a hard hat was taking down the yellow caution tape; apparently roof removal was over.
“Do you mind if we take a few of these?” Anne asked.
“Take as many as you want,” he replied. He picked up a few unbroken slates to help us gather a haul. But we could only carry a few each; they were remarkably heavy and the sharp ends cut into your fingers as gravity tugged on their weight during our burdened trek back to the car.
A boy on a bicycle road by. “Scavenging,” he observed.
We made plans to come back the next day, park nearer the building, and scavenge with a vengeance. We wore work gloves. We wound our way through Dorchester streets to Lower Mills and found the business, let's call it “Superfluous Storage,” which had its own convenient parking lot.
Sunday noon. Mostly quiet. A young man raced across the apron on skates, playing street hockey with himself.
We parked, found the opening through the fence, walked down to the path and discovered the roof refuse pile completely cleaned up. They worked quickly, Anne observed. The answer was back up in the parking lot: a large black dumpster brimming with roof debris, most of it brilliantly shaped stone.
We back the car up close to the dumpster. The thing has tall sides, too all to reach inside from the pavement, but the dumpster has been parked next to a loading dock.
Anne walks up the dock, puts her feet on the lower rung of a black metal fence and reaches into the pile. She pulls out a few pieces, piles them on the forward corner of the dumpster. From there I can grab them and carry them to the trunk of the car.
After the surface pieces have been gleaned this way, my wife needs to extend her reach. She climbs a little higher on the fence, extends a foot experimentally into the dumpster and calls,
“I’ve been wondering if it’s safe…” – appearing to make up her mind in mid-sentence – “…to do this.”
The second foot lands with a lurch beside the first on the top of the pile.
She’s standing in the refuse. Dumpster diving.
“If I fall in,” she calls, “I know you’ll rescue me.”
As it happens, I’m simply the mule, carrying armfuls of recovered slate to the trunk of the car. We gather forty or fifty of them, maybe more, I lose count quickly.
The slates are beautiful in the way of strong natural materials worked by human beings into a general homogeneity of size and thickness. I realize I have no idea how rock is turned into roof slates. But whole or broken, they have character. They’re all the same “slate gray” color. Their striation patterns are all unique.
We take them home. It’s time to rebuild the garden paths.
Now we have something to walk on.

Learning to Say Borage

2011-11-20T14:57:00.000-08:00

It’s late on a Saturday afternoon when friends (well my wife’s brother and his wife, really, but they’ve been good friends for decades) come to look at the garden. It is the middle of November, and I can point to the autumn tones in the remaining foliage.
We walk the leaf-strewn paths until we get close to the vegetable garden.
Oh, she says, you have herbs.
In a little patch formed by sawed-off logs, I have planted some herbs. Oregano is the most faithful, and we still have plenty of pointy green fingers of chives. Do you have rosemary? Well, I cut the rosemary and brought it indoors to dry.
But there’s another plant flourishing here, with half a dozen stalks of good green leaves.
What’s that?
Borage. I pronounce it with heavy start, as it the first syllable were “bore.” Boring age?
She says, wait, I think it’s “bor- ajjh” with the accent on the second syllable.
“Let’s find out,” she says.
She pulls out her iPad. (Or maybe it’s an iPhone. How can you tell?) She tries some instant magic. It doesn’t work.
He pulls out his Ipad, says, Wait. Nothing happens.
We make a few other attempts at pronunciation: “boor-idge” accent on the “boor.” Another version with a heavy “ahddje” at the end.
Suddenly she thinks of something else to do with the machine, a dictionary site, and sure enough, there’s the word. According to the pronunciation marks, it’s a really short “o’ as in ‘or’ and quick ‘ej,’ Slight accent on the first.
On the screen it shows something like: “/bor-ij.”
I practice saying it a few times, but don’t really get the finer phonemes.
“You can pick the leaves for salad greens,” she says.
Now that’s useful. “Oh,” I say, “I’ll do it for a salad tonight.”`
We move on to look at the wasted canes of raspberries, black berries, the low green leaves of strawberries. I say I am putting lime on the strawberries to sweeten the taste.
We go inside. We drink tea, eat scones. Other relatives arrive, a pre-party for the family event on the following day. Anne roasts a chicken.
I forget to pick the borage leafs for salad greens.
I forget how to pronounce borage.
A week goes by, including a couple of nights diving below freezing. I finally remember to go look for “/bor-ij.”
The leaves look fine; I pick a handful. The plant is even trying to flower. The salad is delicious.

Putting the Outdoors Away

2011-11-17T15:20:00.001-08:00

I’m never happy when we put the outdoor furnishings away.
Anne and I carry our garden things, chairs and tables, barbecue grill, back into the shed for their dull winter sleep of thingness. A few of them are heavy or awkward. I strain. I bother my back a little by bending rather than lowering my own center of gravity before lifting, as I know I should. The only lasting effect from the experience is the little flourish of bleeding I get from trying to manhandle a black wrought-iron tabletop and running my finger heedlessly into a screw. I feel it later on when I put my fingers on the keyboard.
I’m a little tense about saying goodbye.
Meanwhile the sun comes out, and the garden bleeds fall color. A last few branches of the weeping cherry still wave their half-golden leaves. I’m weeping now, because most of the leaves fell before reaching this color stage – the overall story of this season’s less than perfect de-leaving. The Japanese maple has concentrated its powers into a brilliant deep red, the final stage on this beauty. I’m hoping these leaves hang around for a while. The dogwood is bare, its spotted leaves slunk away like beaten curs after a rain. I look forward to its blood red skeleton riding the winds this winter in a gray and rusty rain.
The slender Rose of Sharon shrubs are holding on to some of their yellow leaves. They’ll disappear soon. What will last longer are the lacy seed heads of the maiden grass, weaving the wind above gold leaves of these same grasses and those of the neighboring northern seat oats. The thick growing seat oats have their own subtler seed heads that turn a nice coppery color, though this year the color is less pronounced than usual.
And what else? The biennial foxgloves are still green, though they just sat around and pretended this year. I’m expecting more next year. A hearty young hydrangea holds both its color and shape.
I’ve clipped and cut and dug and buried. I’ve gathered woody branches and thick stalks and put them into brown so-called “yard waste” bags, sorry that in small spaces like an urban garden these products represent waste to us.
I pulled up my patch of zinnias with sharper regret, along with the remains of my veggie garden,. These flowers couldn’t hold up to a couple of recent cold nights. I miss them on the following run of winsome fall days they would have enjoyed.
Back indoors after putting away the outdoors, the sun breaks through for a few minutes here and there. I peer out the window and see a lot of greens, yellows, reddish oranges and bronzey-browns still in the untrimmed shrubs and the hardy low groundcovers. Dammit, the thing is still beautiful.

Once More, “To Autumn”

2011-11-08T14:32:00.000-08:00

So far November and October have changed places. Those beautiful, mellow, warm-hearted autumn days I longed for in October, we have them now.
It’s the side of autumn Keats’ great poem “To Autumn” summed up as “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
With his “close-bosom friend, the maturing sun,” Autumn conspires:
"To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells."

The bees don’t want to think it’s over, I still saw one today, a yellow-jacket, groveling in the low-lying blooms, and neither do I.
We are creatures of longing.
We long for the sublimely autumnal expressions of our climate, the modulated color tones, golden leaves flowing everywhere, over landscapes both wild and domestic, the year’s final flowers, the scents, the memories, the sense of natural and human satiety. We are fulfilled, we have come through another year, we are well at heart.
All this creates the longing for more life. Sometimes for a different life, or a better one. Sometimes renewal. A time of culminations and closures, autumn, is also a time of beginning. Because now we have to live with our indoor selves all winter.
This year we will remember the sweet, sensual days of the autumn weeks when we’re struggling through days of deep chill and thin light. This year we will remember to count our blessings and figure out how to pick the lock on our memory bank and pull out the beauty of yellow trees and a multi-colored carpet of newly fallen leaves beneath our feet.
Because it’s warm today and easy to linger out of doors and just stare at things, all the living imagery of the garden says “Autumn! Final Days! See it now!” The yellow leaves of the astilbe, the deep red final-stage color of the Japanese maple, the young wiegelia sticking bronzed branches up in the air in front of the older shrub as if waving its hand for attention.
Birds filled the back garden today, for reasons they didn’t share with me. I came outside with my camera, trying to make friends, and succeeded only in pushing them off. A woodpecker started in on a neighbor’s tree. I know this visitor, but I couldn’t spot him because the big hardwoods still have most of their leaves.
I stared upward at the ancestral oak whose leaves turn brown with a touch of maroon, looking a beautiful bronze in Keats’s “maturing sun.”
I am like a squirrel, burying my nuts everywhere. It’s a season to mature our longings and practice making better use of our own harvest of memories.
“Where are the songs of Spring?” Keats’s poem asks. “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
Here’s one attempt to catch a few notes:

What the Window Saw

From the window
Or so it seems
The fading Rose of Sharon
Extends a limb
Around the Arborvitae,
Though whether sheltering
Or seeking shelter
The window cannot say

Solar Collector

2011-11-03T14:34:00.001-07:00

On the first day of November I find myself getting in the car and driving toward the sun. I have only the vaguest idea of what my destination should be. The sun is already close enough to the horizon to reach out and hug it, so I won’t have much time to find a place.
I have a dreamy notion that I will find someplace where the sun is still warm and sit in the grass there, warming my flesh, and maybe read a little. This is the sort of thing I have done from time to time throughout my life, generally at this time of year or during the late winter-early spring transition when I am eager for the ground to warm up so I can sit on it.
I head west toward the city golf course. I am looking to find an angle on the setting sun, where there won’t be tall buildings, hills, or a high tree-line between me and sun. I am a solar collector.
It takes only a couple of minutes to satisfy myself that I won’t be able to get into the golf course on the “back” end, which faces the sun and where, I discover with envy, some slopes facing the southwest are still bathed in light. I drive experimentally down a back road but am immediately hemmed in by dead ends.
Abandoning this plan, I find my way back to a bigger road that I know is bounded by neither hills not buildings in its sun-facing direction. I look for places along this route to pull off the road, but I am in too busy a piece of the world here to find quiet, unobserved, semi-public places.
I keep driving, realizing now where I’m heading. It’s only a few minutes away, but I’ve crossed into the next city (Boston, actually), where we’ve found a parking area for a “Greenway” walking path. I park in a quiet place behind an office building, but it’s clear after a few rapid-paced walking that the path heading west will take me into shadows rather than sun. I need a higher spot; a clear perspective.
I run back down the path to the main road, take the sidewalk along it, walk over a bridge and find an unpeopled, semi-abandoned, unofficial-looking marina, with a couple large power boats parked on the earth next to an empty structure. The boats are surrounded by marsh grass turning gold in the setting sun.
I walk into the rough grass, face southwest, stand in the sun, and read most of an article in Sunday’s book review section.
This doesn’t strike even me as normal behavior. I can’t think of anyone else who would do it. But it seems to me that people, being natural beings, sometimes feel a physical craving for direct contact with solar energy. Plants strain toward the sun. I remember that this physical attraction toward a stimulus is called a tropism.
So great is their longing for solar that plants compete with their neighbors to grow tall and get more exposure to the sun. (This growth pattern makes too many of my own plants grow “leggy,” rather than “full.”) They are solar collectors too.
I’m not a very efficient solar collector and can’t power any electric devices (unlike the human batteries in “The Matrix”). But I think filling myself up with sunlight, especially after a period of challenging weather, helps keep me going.
Here’s a photo of a praying mantis clinging to the outdoor light on the front porch. I think he’s trying to store up some solar energy too.

10.24 Last Call

2011-10-30T16:20:00.001-07:00

Some flowers still blooming in the last week of October are pictured here. White Montauk daisies with yellow centers. A reliable October bloomer, but I’ve let this plant grow too tall and leggy. The flower-loaded branches fall to the ground as soon as they start to open. Someone told me the way to combat it is to cut back the branches each month in the spring. Sounds radical, but I may have to try it.
Lots of garden mums, like the lavender blossoms in this photo. They bloom (so far at least) every autumn and last a good while. Again, the branches have grown too long, but I almost prefer them falling to the ground, the way the colored leaves do in autumn, to staking.
The zinnias I grew from seed are still holding up too and making new blossoms. I started to cut and dry some of the blossoms indoors, and plan to save their seeds. Will find out whether the seed lasts over winter and can sprout next year.
The oddly shaped pink flowers are “Spotted Toad Lilies,” a reference to the dark spots on bright blossoms. The species name is Trycirtis. The flower stalks grow about three feet high, and the buds wait until the end of September before they begin to open.
A wild aster grows and blooms this month in a quiet corner in front of the white fence. It’s a true volunteer. The flowers are white until they start to fade, and then for about a week they have a delicious violet tint.
The maiden grass lifts up its seed heads against the front of the house. In full sun the grass grows very tall and very thick, and the seed heads turn a coppery brown color this time of year. The wiegelia in front of it is blooming a fall round of pink flowers; it’s big season is spring. We have to cut it back severely to allow the grass behind it to show off.
After a serious late summer slump, in which they lost most of their leaves to brown-leaf disease, the pink roses are rewarding my pruning, spraying and feeding attentions with a strong October.

A Growing Understanding

2011-10-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

With early winter storms headed our way last week, and darkness now falling well before six p.m., nature is telling us it’s time for us to do our growing – growing ourselves, that is – indoors. Film is a great way to teach history, and the arrival of the annual Boston Palestine Film Festival coincides with the coming of the “dark age” of the New England calendar. So we found ourselves standing on the street beside the tracks of Boston’s “Green Line” at 10 p.m. Thursday night with the freezing rain beginning to show white mush in the middle of the always-intimidating “winter mix.”
The film, however, was worth a little cold weather suffering. A lot of the films in the Palestine Film Festival are documentaries, often preceded by a couple of shorts, and many are prize winters at other festivals. The quality is uniformly excellent, and the series is hosted by the Museum of Fine Arts and some other sites, such as local town libraries and a few awkward venues at Harvard.
We saw “Gaza Hospital” Thursday night, a documentary about the volunteer-run hospital that saved lives during the war-torn 80s in Beirut. No voice-over, no narration verbally or in titles, no overt filmmaker’s point of view. The characters, people who were there, sometimes in archival footage, much of it in return visits to the scene in the 90s or later, and some contemporary footage shot in the sites where the Gaza Hospital stood, tell their stories in factual and remarkably restrained fashion. They say things like “it’s been 25 years since my son disappeared.”
Despite two visits to Beirut (where, as you may know, our daughter lives), I had never heard of Gaza Hospital. The film “Gaza Hospital” concentrates on the war-torn, calamitous 80s in Lebanon. I know of no useful, brief written histories of the period (though then-correspondent Thomas Friedman wrote a well-received book called from “From Beirut to Jerusalem”) and am not knowledgeable enough to provide one. But an abstract of the events that form the film’s background goes something like this:
During the horrendous Lebanese civil war (begun around 1975), Beirut was plunged into deeper disaster when Israel invaded the country in order to attack Palestinian military organizations, which held power in parts of Lebanon, including parts of the city, because they were better armed and organized than the Lebanese factions. We see the Palestinian fighters leaving Beirut in the face of the Israeli invasion. We Israeli bombs falling on pieces of the Beirut shoreline where Anne and I have walked, and then we see the burn victims coming to the volunteer-run, bare-bones Gaza Hospital. Its surgeons include an Asian female volunteer, who worked in London and knew nothing of the region until recruited into the humanitarian effort. Other volunteers include a Jewish American nurse.
The hospital appears to be located between or as part of two Palestinian refugee camps, created in the wake of the Israeli takeover of Palestine in 1948. Sometimes the hospital has no water, often no electricity. But care is provided free to all who seek it. Fighters and civilian victims from all factions are brought there. Refugees from the civil war street fighting in Beirut’s neigborhoods or other parts of the country, their numbers intensified by the Isreaeli invasion, live in the upper stories of the fortress-like cement block building which serves as the hospital.
After the Palestinian fighters left Beirut, the refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila were left behind, in the words of one as “hostages.” After the assassination of the leader of the right-wing Christian faction, who’s about to become the country’s president (Bashir Gemayal) in a country whose constitution requires the president be a Christian, the rightwing Lebanese Phalangist faction seeks revenge. Because right-wing factions blamed the civil war and everything bad happening in the country on the Palestinian presence in their country, Phalangist troops entered the camps of Sabra and Shatila massacred hundreds of civilians, whole families, etc. as Israeli troops look on. (One estimate placed the death toll at more than 3,000. The massacre is well documented; Wikipedia has a summary.)
Gaza Hospital’s volunteer staff, including many internationals, are forcibly evacuated from the hospital, threatened with death before being released, and the patients remaining behind are killed.
After all this, somehow the effort and resources are found to rebuild the hospital.
The civil war continues. The Palestinian camps, once again home to refugees, fall under siege, incredibly enough, by another Lebanese faction, Amal, a Shiite group backed by Syria, which seeks to fill the power vacuum in the city. Food is cut off, and the inhabitants begin to starve, but they fight back in what became known as “The War of the Camps.” By the time the siege is lifted, Gaza Hospital has been largely destroyed, its cement block interiors filled with rubble.
The refugees say they will rebuild it once again. But I don’t know what’s there now, since in the film’s later shots returning international volunteers walk through a hell of torn-up walls and piles of broken cement and trash.
People still live in the camps. They sing, dance a little, remember their martyrs. A Palestinian refugee who has lived there since 1948 restores his shop’s electric sign and goes back to business as a barber. His thirteen-year old son was shot to death by snipers during the siege.
We saw two other documentaries at the Boston Palestine Film Festival. “The Kingdom of Women” tells the story of the women who rebuilt their refugee village in southern Lebanon after it was destroyed in the Israeli invasion and the men were detained by Israel. “We Were Communists” is the story of four men now in their forties who were teens when they joined the Communist Party, generally because their fathers had jointed it as the social justice party for all elements of society, and found themselves fighting to resist, first, the Israeli invasion and then to oppose any other Lebanese faction that their leaders told them to fight. Twenty-five years later they think Lebanon still has a long way to go to get beyond factionalism.
There were at least a dozen other films I would have liked to see. The Boston Palestine Film Festival deserves more coverage than it gets from local news media, particularly the major players such as the Globe, a point that has to be made by somebody other than me since I’m guilty of association there. The films presented there are certainly worthy of a look by anyone who cares about our country’s continued involvement in the Middle East.

10/8-10/10 and 10/15-10/17: Visiting the Trees

2011-10-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

Every year around the middle of October we go to the cottage in Stockbridge, Massachusetts to fill up on autumn. This year Sonya went with us, so we went two weekends in a row since she was really low on autumns, having not been in this part of the world for a few years.
There are lots of things we like to do in the Berkshires, but when autumn comes most of those things have to do with trees. Our days have a rhythm: hike the woods and mountain trails during the daytime, and make fires at night. Basically, we spend a lot of time with trees.
One year a visitor from Lebanon came with Sonya and accompanied us first to the Berkshires, and then up to northern Vermont. He called home from the car and announced: “I am in a place where there are only trees.”
While a slight exaggeration (there are a few people around), that description has always struck me as getting to the essence of the Berkshires and northern New England. Especially, in October. What are we looking for? What are we looking at? Places with trees. Where do we find them? Basically, everywhere.
Still, there are favorite places. The lake across the street from the Meyersons’ cottage is known as Stockbridge Bowl. We watched the sky pink over the ridge line at twilight one evening and caught the first house lights reflecting on the water. Geese squawked overhead as they circled at dusk, for no apparent purpose but exercise. These not so wild geese are not going anywhere. In the spring they will fill the little sandy beach with poop.
Leaving the beach behind, we hiked along the wooded edge of this lake one late afternoon, arriving finally at the Place of the Favorite Tree, whose trunk extends over the water and can put up with some climbing. The next day we hiked up from Olivia’s Overlook to a view from a high ridge on a day too hot for October. You can tell because people look sweaty in the photos; is this really autumn?
Then we visited another favorite place, the Sacred (or Hidden) Pond in Kennedy Park in Lenox and gazed at gently spinning leaves, at spontaneously forming concentric circles on the surface of the pond that point to the life below the surface; at the high water levels of a heavy-rainfall season in the hills causing the springs to flow hard around us.
It was colder the next weekend, seasonal temps dipping sharply after dark, so this was a true weekend for fires. We have come to look at the trees’ turning foliage, but now it is time to rely on their substance. Experience proves that even with a purchased package of fatwood, we still need kindling to keep a good flame going in the fireplace. The trees complied. Dried branches waited on the forest floor only a matter of feet from the door.
For the limited needs of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots such as ourselves, the spoilage of the elements provides an embarrassment of riches. Storms, winds, insects, age, and competition for space and sun have culled the woodland.
After we layer up the fallen branch and twig kindling, our fires are a thing of a beauty and utility.
Deeper into the woods, older trees, some with thick trunks, have been brought down by the weather, the wet road-swamping hurricane of September, the occasional local near-tornado force micro-bursts, and the ordinary mortality of bugs and disease. Plenty of wood for the taking by those who rely on it for heat.
We catch a rain storm on our first hike on the second weekend. But we dry out and warm up hot cider, mulled wine, and even a hot tottie, after mincing fresh ginger and adding other spices. The next day is sunny and we explore a new path, a stretch of the Appalachian Trail that leads to fresh views of hillsides and high valley wetlands, before circling the rest of Bear Lake on the border of Montgomery and Lenox.
On the final day we pay a return visit to Kennedy Park, then clean and close up the house. Sweeping leaves off the deck and wiping down the outdoor furniture, I pile the chairs up on top of one another in a vain attempt to reach the leafy canopy above. It’s a tribute to the trees.

10.1 Suspects in the Conservatory

2011-10-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

Krohn Conservatory is where they keep the plants in Cincinnati. You won’t find many of these 3,500 species in my garden – or yours.
You will find a rainforest waterfall and hundreds of exotic plants on permanent display in the Palm, Tropical, Desert and Orchid houses, among other features, in free to the public Krohn Conservatory, located in Eden Park, one of Cincinnati’s well maintained urban parks.
The conservatory’s special collections include the Bonsai Collection, a roomful of mature but knee-high firs, pines and oaks that make you think there should be tiny Hobbits running around underneath them. A true fantasy forest in miniature.
The Desert Garden hosts succulents and cacti with principal families with names such as agaves, aloes, crassulas, yuccas, cereus, opuntia and pereskia – according to the sources I found online; these names are well beyond my competence. If I’ve got this right, a subset of one these families (cassulaceae) includes the sedum plants many of us have in our garden. Some of our Autumn Joy sedum are still flowering in a sunny, streetside spot in front of our house.
Low, spreading groundcover sedum, which flower in early summer, are marketed as “stonecrop” sedum. Stonecrop, I learn, is a term used for all the members of this plant family because of their ability to flourish on stony ground.
As summer was ending this year, I transplanted some well-diffused stonecrop sedum into a spot beside a steppingstone walk and gathered all the smaller stones I could put my hands on to lace in between the plants. So far, so good. Stonecrop sedum just naturally looks rights around stones.
The conservatory’s indescribably lush, credibility-mocking Palm House dominates the building’s 45-foot high central spine; here’s where you find that rainforest waterfall and a goldfish pond with some suspiciously large orange fish. These are not your 99 percent goldfish; these are the gobbling-up 1 percent.
The big canopy trees here are the palm trees, rubber trees and banana trees. The really cute (in a bizarre sort of way) thing about these imagination-stretching rain forest characters is that they also provide homes for “epiphytic” plants – plants that derive moisture and nutrients from other plants – such as bromeliads, orchids and ferns growing from them.
On our visit we found plants labeled “bromeliad” everywhere in this conservatory. It’s enough to make you want to learn something about them. The first thing you discover, to give an idea of the bromeliad’s range, is that the pineapple is one of them. It’s kind of a poster child for a family – “I’m a major fruit, the rest of you guys are just weird” – of 3,000 species native mainly to tropical climates in the western hemisphere.
Judging from the ground-hugging bromeliads we noticed in the conservatory’s rainforest rooms (Palm House and Tropical House), the tightly overlapping leaf structure at the plant’s base appears to be the common characteristic, at least to the unaided eye. The family’s diversity includes something called “tank bromeliads,” epiphytic plants, and a large number of desert-dwelling succulents which means we also found bromeliads in the Desert House.
It was in the Desert house, where the cool dry air creates a world’s-away climate that we found some gaps in the foliage and decided to them with the unlikely flowers you can see in the photo above.

9.30 A Garden of Song: Saul’s Recital

2011-10-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

It’s cold in Cincinnati in the last days of September. Anne and I fly in on a Thursday and rendezvous with Saul at the motel (a Holiday Inn off the interstate we remember from our previous visit), where he gives us his annotated maps with directions to the recital, the university, his new apartment, and several parks and other sights of interest. Then we go to an authentic Cincinnati chili house where they serve chili – over spaghetti – with lots of cheese and few interesting additions such as onions. I get “chili five ways” and the waitress laughs at me when I add, “over spaghetti,” because of course “chili five ways” means over spaghetti. I mean, don’t you speak Cincinnati?
The restaurant includes a collection of characters, black and white, the like of whom you are unlikely to find anywhere in Greater Boston. Traveling is so broadening.
The next morning we are off to one the aforementioned annotated park options (not Eden Park, can’t remember its name). The park’s parking lot brings you right up to a great overlook over the river and a piece of the city, and the air is fresh and full of a great, gray, windy faceful of autumn breeze prompting Anne to exult “Isn’t it wonderful!” just as I burst out with “God, it’s freezing! Why didn’t I bring my winter coat?”
We walk all around the place looking for a woodland trail and never finding one, though we go up and down a side road through a woodsy neighborhood long enough to tire us out.
Then we practice driving back and forth from the motel to the University of Cincinnati parking lot that’s nearest to the recital hall where Saul will perform his master’s solo recital this evening. If you’re not in the habit of driving back and forth from a motel to a parking lot, you may not realize how entertaining this can be, but just take my word for it.
The next plane-party of guests arrives in early afternoon – daughter Sonya and Anne’s parents, Marion and Jack – and we go out to lunch (not to the authentic Cincinnati chili place) before resting up for the recital. Some time in the late afternoon the last party of long-range guests, Walter and his father who lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, arrive and we arrange to meet at the concert hall before stage time. The complete roster of long-distance travelers is as follows: three people from Massachusetts, two from New York City, one from elsewhere in Ohio, and one from Lebanon. Sonya, whose place of residence has a view of the Mediterranean, wins the “came farthest” award.
Our son dresses in a black tuxedo. In addition to his personal fan club, the audience is swelled with the members of the College Conservatory of Music guitar program, some other students and friends, including an incredible singer and a soon to be incredible lawyer, and a family of young guitar students consisting of two parents, two young boys Saul gives guitar lessons too and a friend of similar age they have borrowed for the occasion. It’s a superbly attentive and excitable audience.
Saul performs each of his four pieces – a Romantic Spanish work by Tarrega, a Bach lute piece, a moody 20th century piece by Ernst Brouwer, and a grand climactic classical statement by Fernando Sor – flawlessly, bowing at the end of each to a great burst of sincere and enthusiastic applause, and walking briefly off stage before returning for the following work. With true professional sang froid, he does not speak a single word to the audience at any point in the recital (though he smiles a lot). The guitar does all the talking. It says all that needs to be said, it sings its part, orates, struts upon the stage, assumes the voice of each of its characters, expands each composer’s vision of the instrument, interprets his musical statement, enchants its audience.
Afterwards, there is a great and long-lasting pizza party at a favorite local haunt (Cincinnati pizza, we’re happy to report, is much like pizza in Massachusetts or New York), where an overtaxed oven made us wait for dinner but kept the beer and the appetizers flowing. A range of interests coalesced: Saul’s guitar professor Claire, the Phd. program opera singer, the third-year law student, building master Walter and his nonagenarian chemistry professor father, our New York and Massachusetts contingents, our resident internationalist – experts everywhere! At the end Claire said, “This is a party that wants to get together again.”
By all means let’s do Cincinnati again. But there can only be one master’s solo recital by Saul Meyerson-Knox. And we were there – and it was wonderful.

Oct. 15: Bonus Berkshires autumn weekend

2011-10-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

Late Saturday morning we drove to Bartholomew’s Cobble. It rained. I fell. The abstract:
The rain begins, gently at first, as we are walking Spero Trail along the Housatonic, the river that runs everywhere through the Berkshires.
We pause, wait under a pine tree, look for a more thickly leaved tree to keep off the rain – not so common this year – decide to go on. When I say “the rain is diminishing, let us go,” the rain increases. When I say “it will not be cold so long as the wind does not blow," the wind puffs out its cheeks and blows.” Still, we proceed until we come to the loop running through a field where river executes an oxbow curve. I propose double-timing through the open grass to the opposite bank; we start out. Ten seconds later the rain picks up. “Retreat!” I call. We turn back and head for the sparse cover of the half-leaved trees.
Under the trees we wait, hoping again for a slackening in the rain. Instead it comes harder. I’m for a full retreat now, I say. We make a plan to head inland and uphill and hope to find thicker tree cover there.
I run across a half-timbered bridge over a creek, exulting in my still youthful stride. Then it happens. A few strides farther on I take a running, tripping, tumbling, splattering fall in the rain. It happens when I look behind, over my shoulder, to shout some blithe observation passing for wit to Sonya – I have dashed ahead once we decided to outrun the rain, making a game of it – but fail to observe the protruding end of a heavy black branch, downed in some previous storm, sticking its thick finger onto the edge of the path as if determined still to play a role in the destinies of men. Thick and weighty enough that it doesn’t give when the outer edge of my sneakered foot comes into contact with it.
O’erbalanced, flying forward before taking in my predicament, I fend off the ground with both hands as if pushing off an attacker. I roll, pivoting my weight off my hands when the ground doesn’t give way, doesn’t behave like air or water, banging both knees against the earth and bouncing up. Nothing’s broke, I decide; no harm done. On my feet I look back for the cause of my downfall and spot the offending black branch, thick as a pike; first time I’ve seen it. I inspect myself. Mud on my knees and the tops of my sneakers. A stiffness in my hands and forearms.
Also, litter on the ground from my backpack. Somehow the zipper was closed tightly enough; it pops open and our picnic fare, apples and pears, slip along the grease-wet leaves. Sonya catches up and retrieves our goods, as I vouch for my survival.
It rains heavier, the skies lighten, then a sun shower has us looking for a sheltering tree once again; then the shower stops and we find ourselves under mostly bright skies just as we reach the last trail-turning. Do we risk going up to the summit after all? But by now we are wet and decide to take the path more chosen back to the car.
I have fallen in the Fall, but rise again.
Back in the Stockbridge cottage, we clean off our dirt-dusted fruit and eat it.

September Slants

2011-09-29T10:03:00.001-07:00

Pink Chablis sedum. Flowers darkening in a dark season. The so-called pink looks purple in this photo. I’m always surprised how late in the year these bloom. Every year they arrive as a strong, timely color surge when their neighbors have shut their eyes and gone to sleep.
The lavender blossoms of the autumn anemone, seen against the returning vigor of the daylily spears. The red blossoms are red salvia, an annual, I transplanted in when clearing out the foliage of faded perennials.
Late season blossoms from a new pink lobelia acquired in late summer to help make a statement in this part of the garden. I planted it next to a veteran red lobelia, which begins showing in July and is now down to its last few petals. Look forward to seeing how these two colors set each other off next year.
Pink guara, another hero of the late summer’s last stands. The stalks are tall and wispy. They probably grow more densely in a true full-sun spot.
Multi-colored zinnias, planted from seed in the cold frame this spring. An annual, they grow tall and start to lean over, especially in these recent sun-starved weeks.
The "rose" hibiscus, a vigorous annual -- at least in these climes -- growing in a large pot. Will we succeed this year in rescuing it in time from the frosts and bringing it indoors?
Intriguing pink (again) turtlehead blossoms. -- they hold this shape; no further opening. First year for this perennial as well. The red blooms are celosia, another fill-in annual.

9.26 There’s Nothing Wrong With Your Eyes, It’s Just Getting Darker

2011-09-29T07:18:00.001-07:00

It’s been warm and sticky for days now. But you can’t fool us. It’s not Louisiana in the summer. It’s not anywhere in the summer. If you leave work to go home at six-thirty, when you step off the train, the air may feel like July – but it’s dark.
The clock of the universe keeps moving. I thought I was enjoying my golden late-summer days, the serenity of August, followed by gently brisker, reliably dry days of September’s final summer weeks. But the play of the seasons didn’t follow the script. We got a succession of wet weeks, rolling up the days like a newspaper to slap at the endless supply of small, quick, late-born, in a hurry, blood-hungry mosquitoes. No garden work is attempted without their inevitable, head-buzzing accompaniment.
It’s actually darker more than half the time now. We passed that dividing line between longer days and longer nights when the sun ducked below the autumnal equinox last week.
What happened to those long, lingering outdoor suppers, when the light hung in the sky until nearly nine o’clock?
We move forward through time, gaining natural light, gaining outdoor time until by the same linear process we start to go backwards and find ourselves in a circular universe once more. We’ve had all the long evenings we’re going to get this spin of the globe.
Just as we have “less time,” fewer minutes and hours, that is, of natural light, the unripened fruit in the garden has less opportunity to be kissed by the sun. The unopened buds on the coreopsis have less urge to open themselves to the light. The flowers that have not yet managed to bloom are increasingly less likely to do so. I wait for them to open, but they just sit there, waiting for a Prince Charming who’s not going to come.
I’m not sure what the grasshoppers and crickets think of this development. The bees are if anything busier. The grasshoppers still hop away at my approach down some garden path that brings me too close to their current stations, provoking great acrobatic leaps into the void, or to the next cluster of leaves. The song of the crickets seems as consistent when my windows are open now to the strangely humid weather the newsprint meteorologist attributed to something “pesky” in the upper atmosphere, as they did in the stirring late summer dark of a couple weeks ago.
But I hope they don’t need a lot of natural light to finish their season’s business. They won’t be getting a lot of it.
It’s a good thing the twilights and early evenings this time of year are so beautiful, because we get to enjoy them at an earlier hour.

The Secret Lives of Birds

2011-09-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

A bird dives down from the Great Beyond, which is to say beyond the view from my window, and rattles the last red flower blowing on my red Lobelia on his way down. Was he aiming for it? The bloom shakes back and forth, then settles, pointed skyward on a doughty stem. (Good for another day? Still a target?)
The bird has disappeared from view. Was he aiming for the dense fluffery of the garden geranium? Does he have an appointment out of sight in the bowels of my crowded plant scape? What’s going on? Whatever it is, or isn’t, it’s utterly unintelligible to me, supposedly the only intelligent life form in this picture. Hmmm, could that be a matter of perspective?
What governs the sudden motions of birds?
What are they saying?
A rustle in the leaves and a slight, but distinct tapping somewhere on the other side of our screen door. I stare into the sunshine of a Saturday morning and spy the quick movements of the bird in the young Chinese elm tree between the sidewalk and the street. He hops and pecks again. The white pattern on his dark back feathers looks like the backbone and ribs design on a skeleton costume. He perches on the tree trunk right side up, medium sized, some reddish tint around the head. Once I realize it’s a woodpecker, I hope he’s not finding good eating in the Chinese elm, which the city planted a few years back in the sidewalk strip because we had put our name on the list for the tree planting program.
Shade trees along the street define a livable city. No single element in any urban, suburban or small town neighborhood says “nice place to live,” “cheerful,” “peaceful,” “good neighbors,” and “cool place to be in the summer heat” than shade trees along the roadway.
Why do the same residential blocks look harder, starker, colder, and less alive in the winter? Because the trees are no longer in leaf.
A few second later the woodpecker, sensing me watching, maybe, flies off from the elm tree into the big maple tangled up with power lines nearby. And from there, quickly, disappears from sight. Didn’t mean to scare him off.
Birds sing, and poets sing.
When human beings imagine divine beings, these superhuman beings fly. Birds fly.
We talk about contact with the “aliens.” Some kinds of aliens are here already.
But, of course, I will be told, once again, we mean contact with “intelligent life.” Perhaps we do not yet fully appreciate the intelligence of other creatures.
I never really know what’s going on in bird land. But we share a world, a space-time continuum, a “habitat.” And we both need trees.

9.15 Set in Stone

2011-09-15T20:10:00.001-07:00

A leaf from the Garden of Memory:
I call in the 3-line “personal sentiment” to Calverton National Cemetery, where Mom was buried on Monday. I am happy that they will take this message over the phone – after all, these words are set in stone – rather than asking for a fax, or something in writing.
So, here goes.
-- First line, I say: “Loving wife and”
-- That’s too long, the voice on the phone says. “And” won’t fit.
-- It fits.
-- Did you count?
-- I counted.
(She counts). -- It just fits.
(Oh, was I not supposed to use the last character? Is there a setback rule?)
-- Next line, I say: “Mother. Colon. Space –“
-- They won’t do that. No punctuation.
-- No punctuation? Why is that?
-- It’s military. It’s a military cemetery.
(Who knew the military gets along without punctuation? That might explain a few things.)
-- Can we have two spaces after “mother” and before the next word, “look.”
-- I can ask the engravers. But I can’t say they’ll do it.
…
So, we lose the comma in the third line after “homeward” too. Apologies to Thomas Wolfe, whose title for his first and most famous novel – “Look Homeward, Angel” – I borrowed for Mom, desiring it for the connotations of both “home” and “angel.” And to John Milton, from whom Wolfe in turn harvested the phrase, taking it from Milton’s “Lycidas,” a poem about the loss of a beautiful youth.
But the voice on the phone assures me the inscription on Mom’s headstone will done within 30 to 60 days. They wont notify us when it’s ready (“because there are so many”).
After those 30 to 60 days we will pay Calverton a visit. Maybe on Mom’s birthday.

9.14 “Tis an Unweeded Garden

2011-09-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

The garden is a mess after my uncharacteristically long period of neglect. We were gone for the three-day Labor Day weekend, getting home after dark Monday night. It rained the next day, cold and rainy, but at least that meant no need to water. Also too wet to pick through the vegetable plants. It rained the day after that. I close windows, dig out sweaters.
The next day, a Wednesday, it’s sunny. Mom picked a good day to die.
So I’m away again from Thursday to Monday of this week (Sept. 12). Last Thursday, as I drove away for New York, it poured torrents, worse than the hurricane. So when I finally get a closer look at the front and back gardens yesterday (Tuesday) I’m shocked at the dry earth and the number of suffering plants. I have indoor work to do both Tuesday and Wednesday, two lovely late summer days, a little balmy, a little sticky, clouds in the late afternoon, bright moon at night – good days to live – and my digestive odyssey continues to impinge on outdoor activities. I need to build a public restroom in the back yard to cut down on travel time.
But things will brighten and please yet again.
I’ve added color with annuals forked in amid fading and clipped down perennials, working with a more lavish palette than previous years, a lot of dark reds. The green of perennial foliage sets them off. These are less interesting to me as plants, but keeping them watered and trimmed for the color effect is a September challenge. I’m harvesting color.
And the darker anemones, a rich violet hue, are showing now. And the bordering mums are beginning to bloom.
It’s a pleasure, each day, to walk on the surface of the earth.

9/12 Jean Doris Congreve Knox: 1920-2011

2011-09-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

(This is a flower from the Garden of Final Appreciation, which is to say an obituary with attitude. I’ll supply the attitude.)

Jean Doris Congreve Knox was a child of the 20th century. Born at the start of the roaring, expansive, liberated twenties, her early life went up and down like a roller-coaster. Her father died when she was seven. Her family lost the business the entrepreneur, restaurateur, and muscle man John Congreve had begun, called Congreve’s Tea Room. So mom’s childhood visited some temporary addresses before the roller coaster went up again when her mother remarried to a successful recording engineer, known to the family as Dad Cheney, who moved the family back to easy street, a big house in the leafy Long Island town of Baldwin, where Mom grew up and graduated from high school.
Before that happened, however, the crash of 1929 wiped out Dad Cheney’s business and life was once more shadowed by worry over money. These facts are the origin of the house drama in Mom’s early life. Her twice-widowed mom eventually lost “Dad Cheney’s big, beautiful house,” as Mom described it, and the family moved back to the Flushing brownstone where she was born, and Mom took a job in an office to support the household.
What she wanted from there on in was a house of her own. That took a war, the arrival of Dad, Alva Knox, whom she married in 1946, surviving the postwar housing crisis in Flushing where the married couple lived with her mother, her older brother Mark, and whoever else helped pay the rent – and her first born, me – until dad’s income and the postwar building boom on Long Island succeeded in providing one, at 54 Downs Road, Hempstead.
What did Mom want in her life? She wanted a house. A house meant security, stability, the banishment of anxiety – who among us doesn’t understand that?
She wanted other things, of course. She wanted to go to college after earning a regents scholarship to a teachers college, but her family needed her to work. Every life has regrets and sacrifices. Mom looked back some, but she didn’t let it spoil today.
Mom had an easy touch as a mother, no heavy guilt trips, no ill-concealed surrogate ambitions for her children, no intrusive hands-on management style. As her son, I honor her motherhood. She kept the show going at home and did a fair amount of getting out of the way. Mom was also looking to have some fun. So we went to the beach, we stopped for Carvel, we were encouraged to throw ourselves in the ocean and learn how to jump the waves. We got an endless series of chocolate cakes, Mom refining her style over the years to arrive at the heralded chocolate chip, Saturday night special. We ate supper on tray tables in front of the TV when Dad was working late or going to his bowling league. We had had spaghetti with meat sauce on Saturday nights and melted cheese sandwiches with bacon on Sunday nights.
We played games. Mom was a devoted card player for the fun of it. Mom liked people, like socializing, liked having fun, laughed easily over little things. She taught us rummy and kissena. She played cards on the beach with her children and their friends, wind blowing sand through the game and into her plastic bags of beach snacks.
Mom had a gentle way with people. Her daughters-in-law, a set of two, bless the skies for a mother-in-law without a forbidding command presence. In our little way, her kids were going multicultural. Jews, Catholics? Mom was cool. Mom would have been polite if we’d brought home a gorilla, but in the event she was loving and accommodating to new family members as she was with the old ones. It takes some of us more demanding types a good many years to appreciate these qualities.
Mom didn’t want to be the life of the party. What she wanted was the party. People came to her house because it was an easy place to be. She never liked the quarter-mastering and food prep side of the hosting business, but she had her chops down to make you feel welcome.
Sonya, her first grandchild, who’s not here because she lives in Lebanon, recalled these routines from childhood visits: “All sorts of memories keep surfacing, but the ones hitting me most clearly are watching her set up the Ritz crackers and Triscuits and slices of orange cheddar cheese on the wooden cutting boards (carefully all layered up on each other) any time any guest arrived to the house on Downs Road…. And watching her charge out of the surf at Jones Beach.”
Mom loved the ocean so much we went to Jones Beach during a hurricane, rather ironically named Bob.
Mom’s memories, when we pulled them out of her, were of little pleasurable things – pet rabbits and cats in Baldwin (and more cats, plus a few dogs, later in Hempstead), visits to the farms of her older relatives, boat rides in the waters off Queens, the uncle who woke up visitors by playing “heigh-ho heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go!” on his record player at dawn when she stayed at his farm; flowers, and childhood friends, family visits, and bowling leagues with Dad. In my dreams I plant flower gardens at 54 Downs Road – didn’t happen, but Mom planted flowers there and planted the seed of growing things in me.
She took us to church, where the elegantly metaphysical language of the Episcopalian liturgy still rings through my thoughts. And she played the piano like the gifted student she always was – “practicing” as she called it on Tchaikovksy, and Debussy and Beethoven and Rachmaninoff, looking at musical scores that turned the pages black with crowds of flying notes and after a while getting tired and saying, “Oh well, it’s really too hard for me.” A lot of that music stayed inside of us as well.
And you could be the life of the party on the piano, as she was for uncountable family gatherings. We stood around the piano and sang songs because mom could actually play them. She played old songs and new ones, read sheet music at first glance, played background numbers for church fundraisers, accompanied prima donnas, banged out “The 12 Days of Christmas” for yearly gatherings at John’s house so we knew it really was Christmas, entertained at the Hertlin independent senior living center and the Nesconset nursing home, and eventually at age 90 whittled her repertoire down to her swan song, “It had to be you.”
She never made anyone feel bad. She wouldn’t have known how if she wanted to. She rolled with the punches, took what came, found reasons to feel good, found the right thing to say.
We die old, if we’re fortunate. But we live all our ages. We remember the mom, the grandma, the mother-in-law, the neighbor, the friend who mattered to us. I see her laughing and exclaiming how lucky she is to scoop up a pot of pennies by going out in a Michigan Rummy Game. Maybe they were pennies from heaven.

The poem of Mom’s Last Days goes something like this:

Near the end
Mom becomes an angel
Or perhaps merely a weightless, ethereal figure
Quiet, gentle, easy to please
Forgetting all the stress and character acting of mortal existence
Give me wings to fly, her final phase seemed to say,
And I will leave you all behind

Between the Labor Day weekend
And the 10th anniversary of nine-eleven
Mom let go
Picking her spot, not bothering anyone,
Leaving quickly by a side door
Known only to one who covered the ground carefully
And did not take up too much room

9.7 Look Homeward, Angel

2011-09-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

So now I get to write Camus’s famous sentence: Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.
It usually rains for funerals. Which day do we want it?
So does this mean we never got to say those meaningful things we never manage to say, even if we have all the time in the world? Even if given an appointment by the lord of death, I’m not sure I would have said them. Or what exactly they were. Would it have meant something to whisper them in the ear of an unconscious, or semi-conscious, old woman. Who was, all insist, not in pain.
Aside from the observation that she was declining, I don’t know what we’ll say she died from. We had frequently observed that her vital signs were good. “It was just time.” Does something in a person know when it’s time? That there was little of life left, or little of the person who lived it.
I’m not sure she knew who we were at the last visit during the summer, though she behaved as if she she did. Her conduct toward me as it has always been in the last years dominated by what we called “memory impairment.” She struggles to listen, and then to make sense, offering occasional murmurs or replies. And if I’ve made an impression, then she asks a question that relates to some aspect of what I’ve said. And who’s that? Where did you come from? You’re staying with John?
That last time, June, when we sat outdoors in the pavilion on the nursing home grounds, I called Sonya over to sit beside her. And so she had a turn of saying things to my mother, her grandmother, as well, and we recalled things. You loved the beach, Grandma. I did? You loved going in the water and jumping the waves. Mmm… Do you remember? Mmm, maybe.
Saul was not there on that occasion, but he was there for the “snowstorm birthday” on Dec. 26. I will say that he had a last visit too. “Last”? “Time”? It’s all relative – and then it’s final.

9.7 Faces Come Out of the Rain

2011-09-15T19:40:00.001-07:00

The world wears a sad face. This is a hard season for me. I don’t even want to go outdoors. After days of incoherent weather forecasts I finally read in a newspaper story, a news brief which seeks, helpfully, to sum up what has been going on in the atmosphere – and what’s more important than the atmosphere? – and informs me that the remnants of Tropical Storm Story Lee, which soaked New Orleans, collided with a cold front along the East Coast giving us cool, dark, very wet days. I had foolishly wished for some rain over the weekend before we left for the Berkshires.
Be careful what you wish for.
In Berkshire County, the air was as humid as it had been all summer. Then it rained, really rained, way more than our so-called hurricane.
Back in Quincy Monday night, we opened all the windows and put on the fans and it was still stuffy in the house. Some time in the middle if the night the chill rains found us – somebody pressed the button for the cosmic cold service – whoosh poured in the chill, dank air of some other season, not late summer, not mellow September, the room temperature dropped twenty degrees in wind chill and I got out of bed to close the window.
O where has my late summer serenity gone?
I don’t even want to leave the house to look at the back garden. That’s saying something – something I don’t want to hear. This is not stay indoors time of year. I will find my sweaters. I will find an old hat (I left my good one somewhere) with a brim to keep off the rain, dig out an even older raincoat, and remember that this is the right time and even the right conditions to do the ambitious transplanting, moving some of the groundcovers around for stimulation and esthetic effect, re-arranging the furniture, so to speak.
Ah, I will get back on the job of seasonal beautification.
I will package my sadness in a trekker’s knapsack and get my hands dirty and my feet wet. I will stretch and strain. It will be good for me.
I will peek over my shoulder from time to time, glancing left and right, and look for subtle arrows of the sun.

After the Flood

2011-09-02T07:52:00.001-07:00

Is there a better day than the one that follows a hurricane? I mean, of course, granting we’ve been spared any serious losses. No trees have fallen on the house, no roofs have been blow off, no floods have washed through the basement (or worse), and – thanks be to dumb luck – the power is still on. Since, for many, it wasn’t.
Granted all these dispensations, the day after a near natural disaster is as sweet as a day can be. And the days that followed this week extended our good fortune.
After a big, ballyhooed weather disaster, we have all become a little bit like Noah and his extended family, chosen to ride out the flood in safety. Our arks have sailed on the roiled waters of TV images of watery and gale force destruction, dire forecasts, battered expectations, surges of desperate rhetoric, tidal flows of bad tidings – and now, some hours or days of forced idleness later, we have come through.
Our dove returns with a green sprig in his mouth. Our arc settles on Mount Ararat. We find ourselves in a cleansed and sanctified place – all rough weather, darkness, and humidity blown away
No crystal shines clearer than this day. The air is dry and the rain water swallowed deeply by the earth. Leaf and flower gleams with satisfaction.
We look about for signs of the change, and what do we see? A few blooms on the seasonal shrubs. We see a white Rose of Sharon. This name, I learn, first appeared in the King James Version of the English Bible, likely as a mistranslation of a Hebrew word for crocus. The word “Sharon” comes from the name given to a coastal plain bordering the Mediterranean Sea. An invented name for a flower which has pleased generations ever since, the Rose of Sharon first bloomed literarily in a translation of the Song of Solomon.
When we plant, look at, admire, or otherwise reference this common English shrub, we are evoking the ancient notion of a “holy land.”
Words preserve old ideas in a language carried from generation to generation, even after we forget their origins. But those origins tell us something. Do we not all live in a holy land?
After the flood, the earth is cleansed and restored. In eastern Massachusetts we just had a little dust-up of wind and rain, of course. No transformational catastrophe. But for a time we suffered the loss of resources, of pleasures, we might ordinarily enjoy. We stayed indoors, kept out of the rain, watched wind blow, reacted to the bigger gusts. We lost a summer Sunday; some a whole weekend. Maybe we worried a little, or reflected on our shortcomings.
But look! we have come through (to quote D.H. Lawrence’s book of poems). The world has given itself back to us.
It glows. Is there anything more beautiful than perfected sunlight? It is the father of delight. In its embrace the earth reveals its beauty.
I’m not Jewish but my wife is, so I have learned to regard the coming month as a sacred season, in which the “high holidays” approach. And oh, yes, the holy month of Ramadan has just concluded as well. Eid Mubarak!
I look at the world and I answer my own question. We live in a holy place.

8.27 Before the Storm

2011-08-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

The neighbors are discussing storm preparations.
We decide to cut some flowers to bring indoors. I am apologetic walking among the beds of the back garden, half believing, though still really disbelieving, that hurricane force winds will flatten all the plants and strip all the blossoms. I tell myself that the roots are strong, most of the plants have been in the earth for some years now.
Hot and sticky; occasional flashes of sunlight in the morning, that strange light that water-soaked sky sometimes permits.
I gather what I find in the mostly played-out vegetable garden; the squash and cucumbers are gone. I take some oddly shaped tomatoes and some immature peppers, fearful they won’t survive. Bees are active, particularly the sumo-wrestler size which work though the tall phlox here in late August. Grasshoppers jump away as I come to near without seeing them; bumper crop of them this year. But no sign of the squirrels or birds. The cat demands to go outdoors this morning; so much for this species’ shrewd weather instincts.
I pick another handful of deep purple-black blackberries too; complemented by a dozen or two late bright red raspberries.
I decide that the zinnias, my best annual crop this year, should sacrifice some head blooms to furnish the indoors. Some of the plants, transplanted too close together, no doubt, have tangled; it’s not always easy to tell which stem goes to which. I take some new blooms where they are most abundant; I cut off a few others that have blown as the English would say (faded) and toss them on the mulch. And I cut a few more to display that are mostly faded but still show some of the character of the way they were. I think there’s an autumnal beauty to this faded beauty.
Then I pick some of the violet tall phlox, being careful not to dispossess the great harvest bees which crawl in and out among the blossoms, making the world of flowers as they provide sustenance for the future generations of their collective selves. Who can comprehend the lives of bees? So selfless, so utterly unindividualized, yet so determined. Nature’s finest statement of altruism.
Yet, of course, we don’t know how plants think either. Do tall phlox want so much to make more tall phlox that they have fallen on the happy expedient of making abundant attractively colored blossoms so we will assiduously plant and cultivate and breed and disseminate them over the earth?
The strongly colored phlox flowers are the dominant color of the garden in the last week of August. Their presence is echoed by another variety, a light pink blossom on an attractively bi-colored leaf, which I acquired though some happy accident I can no longer remember.
I wanted to take a rose of Sharon bloom as well. But all the white ones, blossoming freely for the last month and a half, were part of little clusters of buds. I hate picking a branch with unopened buds unless I have a good reason, generally reason, to believe the new buds will open as well. I moved over to the pink rose of Sharon, where only flower was open; but no unopened buds were sharing the same twig, so I clipped it, discovering only then a slender, yellow-flecked bee creature hanging around inside. Not like any honey bee I knew, so I didn’t feel too bad about dispossessing him. If he’s looking for an attractive shelter from the storm he should try the white ones next door.
I will arrange the flowers indoors, as we make our own shelter from the storm. Anne gets batteries, candles inside of glass, and remembers to take a plastic bag of matches (which we use only outdoors on the charcoal grill) in from the shed. Unlike the bees and the flowers, we have roof over our heads and a fair distance from the sea. But a storm is an act of nature, and somehow I think the green world will still be there when the storm is over.

8.19 Best New Plant of 2011

2011-08-20T12:26:00.001-07:00

Some changes this year. Best pick of 2011 in the new plants category: The purple verbena in the so-called “purple room” of the garden. The leaves have a purplish tint and the tufted blossoms are filled with tiny purple florets. It was good for months and got really good in August. Constant color, very cheering. We’ll need to find it again next year, because the plant insists on being an annual.
I transplanted some zinnias into this area too, to fill in. They’ve blossomed, but I’m still hoping they’ll produce some new buds before the first flower fades and dries up. Also new in the purple room we planted another dark, purple-tinged leaf plant called a “beard tongue dark towers” Penstemon hybrid. That’s a lot of name. It showed some nice violet blossoms, but the flower stalks did not produce any new ones after these faded. And no new stalks either.
Two first-year red blue star Amsonias, acquired from different places, planted across a brick walk from each other in the purple neighborhood. Same story. Initial wave of buds, nice color, but no follow-up despite dead-heading. Have to learn the ways of these new residents.
In the rear of the purple room, where the purple theme stops and give sway to plants like stonecrop sedum and the ornamental lilies which blaze in July and attract a horde of bright red beetles, we planted a largish “summer snowflake” Viburnum, based on its reputation. The round, healthy shrub was purchased by a birthday gift certificate and planted in a spot where Anne had cleared out a thick patch of northern sea oats (which she doesn’t like). Given some bare ground, I dug a hole and sank the big new shrub, which positively hated July and displayed its displeasure by allowing leaves to wilt and turning its white blooms brown.
You’re supposed to get blooms all season – and scent – from this variety. Not this year. Is this one of those plants which earned high marks in a milder, more even-tempered climate? I hope it does not require, as we say these days, “high maintenance.” This is New England, we do a lot of “sink or swim” gardening here.
At the end of the brick path in this direction – kind of a spoke sticking out from the circumference of the tree circle (is there a name for this pattern?) and going as far as it can until it runs into the neighbor’s fence – I piled a few leftover blue granite paving stones in a sort of representative diorama of a stone wall. The stones are heavy; they stay put. I use them as staging for a rock garden motif, but it’s a challenge to keep enough dirt between and beneath the stones to keep “alpine” rock garden plants alive. We have an Iberis (white flowers in spring); a stonecrop, growing fat, a “Hardy” companion to the slender Stan Laurel iberis. This year I planted some white-flowering plants that have largely done the job, staying alive all summer through damp times and dry ones. One is opal innocence, which we’ve had elsewhere in the past, one a copa (actually “Bacopa”). And the catch is – once again – they’re annuals.
Across the brick walk from the purple room is a planting bed I call the “peony room” because the peonies are the biggest plants on that side. It’s colorless at this time of year, and I notice that one of the green groundcovers has run right over the top of another low green groundcover, a small-leaf euonymus, a plant whose tiny, dark-striped leaves are attractive all season. I don’t want it covered over; and I do want more color. The solution: dig up some of the other spring-blooming groundcover and replace it with – yet again – more annuals.
I set to work, the sunny sky clouds over, and in less than three minutes it’s showering hard. I’ll be working in wet ground (good for transplanting) later today.
The moral I guess, is that you have to keep trying new combinations and learning from experience. Which, I also guess (or perhaps conclude), is like any other activity, anything else in life, worth doing.

8.12 An Annual Celebration

2011-08-16T15:13:00.000-07:00

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as I tell the valet parking attendant at the hospital. His smile has endured all summer, more reliable than the weather. The plants in the containers outside the hospital, red petunia and yellow marigold annuals, seem to smile as well.
In fact, it’s a great time for annual plants. Gardens need them now more than ever, since while most of the perennials have shot their bolt, many annual varieties are just beginning to mature. Such is the case with the zinnias I started from seed outdoors in May and transplanted when I got around to it, most of them already on the leggy side by then since I neglected to thin the seedlings. Thinning seedlings means killing plants that have already performed the miracle of germination, moving from inert, lifeless seed to green growing biota. I hate to be the one to cut short their journey.
Every living thing is a wondrous accomplishment. To know intellectually that living things grow from seeds is one thing; to have them unveil their mysterious selves from your own seeds is quite another.
Spaces appear these days in the perennial garden where old flower stalks have faded and both leaves and blossoms decayed. The strong color of annuals, if they’re healthy enough to keep renewing their blossoms all summer, shines through those spaces.
A month ago I slipped some of the zinnias (grown from a multicolored seed packet) into a few of these holes. They’re just beginning to flower now. Out front I do the same thing with purchased cosmos – much less successful this year – and snapdragons.
I’ve worked to naturalize my crop of snapdragons, planting new ones in pots and then transplanting them into the soil in September. Some of these survive the winter and start blossoming early the next season. They go through the typical so-so annual flower process of blooming from stalks that have to be cut back or deadheaded in order to produce new blossoms. It’s stop and start color all season.
The alyssum on the other hand, also purchased, are a complete disappointment. Still alive, they just sit where they’re put for months, quietly doing nothing. Consider the lily? It may neither toil nor spin, but it sure produces something worth looking at. The nursery-grown alyssum? Not so much.
Fortunately, August is also a great month to buy some new annuals, so long as you can find a garden center with late-arriving stock, so the plants aren’t quite beaten down to scrawny, root-bound adolescents crammed into kindergarten outfits, as is so often the case with unsold annuals.
Even better, if you do find six-packs of flowering annuals still in good shape, they’re quite likely to be on sale because at this time of year only fanatics like me are still looking to buy summer annuals.
I am ecstatic when I find packs of annuals on sale for $1 at my favorite South Quincy plant center. They are my new toys. I want to take them home and play with them.
New color spots, new voices in the choir, now sing in the places where the stalks and leaves of last month’s perennials have died away. Somebody’s swan song is somebody else’s opportunity. The lilies will be back. But for now their air space is filled with blooms of red salvia.

8.11 Perfect Day, Gracious Month

2011-08-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

A spectacular morning in August, the most serene of months. It’s been raining much of the time over the last five days, heavily on a few nights, with occasional flashes of later summer brilliance. Now the thing is here for good, the polished gold of late summer, the serene well-tempered August light.
The earth needed the rain, so I can put aside for the time being the endless mid-summer debate over how much watering I need to do to make everybody happy.
Walking through the perennial beds in the morning shine, light breeze, perfect temperature, the layers of the green world fall into place.
The purple flowers on the butterfly bush look good, finally. The plants have a sleek, well-watered look, leaning against each other as if to make sure that everybody is standing straight, present and accounted for, doing their best for the good of the team.
They follow, one two three in a row, sometimes, though rarely, more, those golden gracious days of late summer.
For now it’s a beautiful day, an unbeatable day, in the season’s most graceful month. Forces that have nothing to do with my desire for new garden toys have done all the heavy lifting. Sun and earth and rain. The tilt of the earth’s axis. A few billion years of plant evolution. The bacteria that break down humus in the soil. The worms that wriggle through the most heavily cultivated patches of soil. The bees that crawl over the surfaces of the blooms, puzzling out the hidden elixirs.
The forces that have made my garden have made me too. As they have all of us. They have trained us to do such things as plant flowers, harvest tomatoes, scatter seed, eat fruit, poop seed, feed birds, spread more seed, sing praises.
That’s our role, finally, I sometimes think. We are needed to sing praises. Somebody has to pay attention. Somebody has to see and know and be conscious of beauty.
At day’s end a golden signboard from eternity hangs over the western sky, where the sun has been slipping out of our ken. It’s a piece of forever land, where we go when we– well, let us say when we’re ready to leave our current performance: the place where everything is explained.
We walk the neighborhood, beneath this perfect sky, on this perfect day, under this golden sky-capping palm from ever-ever land that turns each block into its own small village where folks sit on their porch, enjoying an evening from another century. (This last folkish detail requires some imagination.) Each aspect of earth below and sky above complete in itself, unruffled, at peace, composed. The perfect day turns time into forever.

Late Summer Early

2011-08-04T11:55:00.001-07:00

Suddenly late summer. Before the end of July, the late summer flowers have begun blooming. Now that it is August I wonder how long they will last.
Blue balloon flowers grow in close circumstances with black-eyed susans on the far side of what we call the flower island. It’s a dry spot, because I can’t reach it easily with a hose. Around this time of year I usually give in to my worries about drought turning the ends of leaves brown and the soil below gray, and turn on the sprinkler. So far this year I have resisted.
Both the balloon flowers and the black-eyed susans were late summer flower when we started growing them a half dozen years ago, most of them waiting for August before they blossomed. Now they begin blooming early in July. The balloon flowers have spread themselves through the garden, and I let them, expecting them to add a spot of color here and there in August, but most of their blossoms are gone or fast fading now.
Other typically late season bloomers have made strong showings in July. The tall phlox, most them with dark pink blossoms that are almost violet, have been with us for a couple of weeks too. A big stand of them grow up in front of the bi-colored leaves of the dogwood tree.
The cone flowers, light violet petals around dark centers, grown in a couple of places including the tree circle, have been up for weeks as well.
Queen Anne’s Lace, the exuberant white-topped wildflower (or country lane weed), made a big comeback this year. They cover the front walk with fountain flows of long, white weeping flowers, an extravagant and unconventional face to present to the world. They too are beginning to fade – the blossoms close at night, knitting themselves up into small fists, and fewer return each day – just as they do on the borders of the marshes on the Quincy shorefront or along the country roads in the Berkshires. A new succession of wildflowers will take their place in the woods and beside the marshes, but our resources are fewer here in the haunts of civilization.
Grasses, both weedy grasses, the kind of plants that grow all season, and the varieties we plant, are working steadily to fill in the gaps. On the other hand, the daylily foliage dies away with conspicuous speed, leaving us to look at a patch of seemingly dead plants or requiring some sort of emergency redecoration. I’ve been trying the latter course in recent years. I planted the pink guara this time last year to distract the eye. Red lobelia is blossoming in front of one patch, and plumbago – another newcomer last summer – is making quiet little blue flowers that may eventually make an impression but probably not this year.
Through one thing and another, we still have a good show of color and variety in the August garden. In addition to the plants I’ve mentioned we have a very dark orange daylily in a shady spot, big floppy white rose of sharon and a more decorous pink one (both already in bloom), the big pink hibiscus blooms of an annual plant growing in a pot on the patio, and a stand of delicate light pink anemones, my September flower. (What are they doing out so early?).
But this is the point in the annual growing season when I grow restless to try something new, especially something that will flower now – and now, and now, and now.
I don’t expect to resist that urge very long.

7/25 Losing A Limb

2011-07-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

Not mine, fortunately. A limb belonging to the double-trunked oak tree, which holds down the earth in the sunrise corner of the garden like the colossus it is.
I suspected something up when the noise of the tree-chipper machine in a neighbor’s yard went on too long. It’s a distinct noise, not rare enough among the domestic mechanical voices which disturb our humble attempt to cocoon ourselves in a little paradise of green. It tells us that someone is chipping away at the urban forest.
After a half hour or so of intermittent grinding, I stick my head out a window and locate the source. Yes, the house behind our right-hand neighbor. A couple of workers appeared to be taking down a mid-sized tree in the back yard of a man who lives, seemingly alone, in a house fronting on the next street over. I have seen him; I presume he has seen me. We do not share a common tongue.
I think of a line from Finnegan’s Wake. “You are inedible to me.”
But the noise kept on too long. Pausing in my work a while later – no doubt at the point where any excuse would do – I stare out the window again and noticed my neighbor’s harmless, unassuming tree has been reduced to a little stub of a thing, a broken toy disregarded on the face of the earth. And still the work of destruction goes on.
Then I guess. They must be up in my tree.
I put on some shoes – it’s gray, rain-threatening day – and trot out back to my fence. Four young men in blue shirts that say the name of their company wait in a loose line against the wall of neighbor’s house. One of their colleagues, at least, is strapped among the limbs of the giant oak, working his chain saw. Some small branches have fallen. Some sawdust covers my fence, and leaves have fallen on both sides of the fence that separate’s the Chinese gentleman’s and our right-hand neighbor’s yards.
The four spectators stare at me, but say nothing. I make the “over here, bud” gesture with an index finger to them. Somebody speaks to somebody else, and one of them comes trotting over to the fence to mollify me with politely offered explanations.
They are only cutting from the fence line, polite blue-shirt tells me. He has taken a class in handling older neighbors who grow crotchety over losing favorite trees.
No part of the tree on my side will be cut, blue-shirt assures me.
Damaged? I say.
Or damaged, he adds.
Since most of the tree by far is on our property, and only one fat, yardarm-pointing branch runs over to his, the tree should still be healthy after this loss of limb. Of course how can blue-shirt be so sure?
I seek assurances that they won’t cut any part of the tree over my right-hand neighbor’s yard. Oh no, he says, we won’t cut any part of the tree over her fence line either.
“But he has the right to cut the part of the tree over his property?” I persist, wanting it all spelled out.
You have rights and responsibilities for tree maintenance in the air over your property line, he tells me, but not over your neighbor’s.
Liability too? Yes.
So much to the good, I think, since we had worried that we would some day be responsible for pruning out tree away from the house of the Chinese man, who was now clearly taking matters in his own hand. Of course, I am taking the word of a tree-trimming service for this. But I decide to, and walk back into my house, unwilling to watch the dismemberment continue.
And so a gigantic limb – I do not see it (or hear it) fall – disappears that afternoon. Turned to ragged mulch and saw dust by the tree-eating machine and the men who fed it.
I see its absence, however. In the garden at the end of the day, I picture in my mind the place where this many-tonned horizontal expression of the might of trees, the aristocracy of the green plant world which sustains animal life (such as human), had reached mightily into the cosmos.
No more. In its place, plein air.
It feels like there’s a hole in the universe. A piece missing from the puzzle.
The kingdom of the squirrels has been reduced, which may be to the good. But also of the birds; a loss. The elderly gentleman who lives in the house now freed of the shadow of a mighty oak will have more sun and sky to himself. I hope he can do something with them.
As for me, I miss this customary sidetrack extension of the oak tree’s heavenly highway. Less for the use the squirrels and birds made of it, but for the good it brought to us. Shading a good piece of our outdoor breakfast area from the morning sun. Less practically, but further-reaching, deeper, enclosing our make-believe paradise in the crook of its great arm clothed in curtains of green.
This thrust into neighboring air space was part of our protective coloration, our hiding in plain sight. I feel more exposed, not longer quite so sheltered under the massive arms of the heavy oak. I fantasize planting tall shrubs, tall pointy conical cypresses, maybe, against the back fence to help build back our bubble; and make tentative plans to transplant a tall perennial from the front garden back here.
I am over-reacting. But the loss of something comforting, familiar, and possibly sheltering poses a dilemma. I don’t like the idea of shutting other people out, but I very much do like the idea of enclosing myself in, protectively, privately, naturally. There’s a contradiction here, and I am loath to face it.

7/16 July Happens Fast

2011-07-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

Chained to my diet
Watching heirloom tomatoes
Turn red with envy

The high summer month goes by fast, changing its aspect like a diva with a full wardrobe closet.
There are the days when the world grows up quickly around you, covering all you see with glittering morning light. The plants hold the cool of the night and radiate contentment. Leaves flowers glow in the shade, a subtle sideways light, playing on the moisture wherever it finds it.
Good days. Early, crisp, cool, sun on the way. The insects have stayed up late and aren’t awake enough yet to find you by the tantalizing smell of your blood.
The first hot days of summer. When the evening comes, the cool is delicious. The first nights of the year when you can’t possibly stay indoors. When the house is quiet, and the street dead still, some houses already dark, you step out on the porch to look at the night sky and feel the cool touch of the night air. Then you walk out into the middle of the street and crane your head upward toward the moonlight, if it’s that time of the month, or the starlight if it’s not. You wonder why everyone doesn’t spend their nights out of doors and their afternoons indoors, asleep.
The hot and humid days arrive. At first only a few, no more than two in a row. But you see what these days do the earth and to the more sensitive plants: those in pots, those which hang their leaves like old rags at the first sign of water-loss.
The days when the first thing you do in the morning is put flip-flops on and walk outdoors, where the temperatures is exactly the same as it is indoors, and turn on the hose. The lace-cap hydrangea is already suffering. The ground feels likes a waste lot after a visit from a steamroller. Little marginal sprouts of this or that show you they are nearing the end. One more day like the last one, they soundlessly promise, and you’ll be sweeping up their remains.
You hose some water on the worst spots, the driest plans. You remember why July is not a good month for transplants.
The quiet overcast day arrives. Maybe there’s been a storm, if we’re lucky. If not, something has happened in the cosmos to mask the sun. The humidity seems to have receded as well. The droopy plants have undrooped, their leaves reach up to the sky like supplicants. Still, it’s a good day to water, since the soon won’t suck up your effort right away, just in case…
Let us welcome the perfect day. You work in the garden, cutting back decaying leaves and stems, removing the old layers of spring-blooming plants, which have already had their season in the sun, the better to show off the new acts which now take the stage. The red bee balm, the hydrangea, the stella d’oro, and when they pass, the black-eyed susans. They do pass quickly.
On the perfect day you may also rest, trying out chairs and outdoor perspectives you haven’t used yet this year. Because while it’s a fine day to do things, anything really, it’s also the perfect day to do nothing. You’re not too hot or too cold. The wind doesn’t blow your papers away. The beverage tastes good. You have absolutely nothing planned.
Then there are the rainy days. Just enough of them to get tedious. Those tomatoes will really shoot up now, you tell yourself, when the sun ever shines again. Whenever is that going to happen?
The days that look different. The expanding colony of blue balloon-flowers steal the attention of the eye: something new under the sun. You have cut down faded blossoms and used up stems before, but then you said, Oh these were the June flowers. Now you are cutting back the day lilies. Aren’t these my July flowers? Has it all happened so quickly?
But it is not true that the season is done with you, or you with it. Headlines proclaim the news: Hot and Humid Weather Heading Our Way… Here comes the Heat Wave. July still has some cards to play.

Please don’t eat the flowers

2011-07-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

I’m on a “low-residue diet.” What that means, basically, is do the opposite of everything else you’ve been trained to do. No fresh fruits or vegetables. No raw vegetables, only frozen, canned, or “well cooked” peeled vegetables like the pieces of carrot that show up in cans of chicken soup. No skins, seeds, or nuts. No dried fruit. Ripe banana only. Pasta made from refined flour… What kind of bread do you want? Whole wheat, of course. No, excuse me – how silly of me – make that white.
Well-cooked meat is okay. Actually I don’t eat that much meat, but when I do one thing I don’t want is “well-cooked.” How about hotdogs? Absolutely no hotdogs.
No whole grain cereals, such as real oatmeal.
But cake, pastry, ice cream? That’s fine. Chocolate, no. But ice cream, yes. How do you draw that line?
All that stuff that’s growing out back in the vegetable garden? Forget it. Just as things are getting good.
So now I tend the garden and pick greens and berries for Anne and Saul. (Full disclosure requires me to point out that Anne spends much of Saturday cooking blender soups such as carrot dill for me to eat all week.)
It’s raspberry time. We have lots of red and black raspberries this month. The bushes keep pushing out anything that’s growing near them and have probably smothered some of the strawberries underfoot, just as I warned, but in their season they are abundant and brightly colored and cheerful. Anne bakes a pie of at least four different kinds of berries, the black and red raspberries, mulberries from a tree in our yard, and some store-bought blueberries. It looks good enough to eat –
Sorry! And I quote, “No berries of any kind.”
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world (that’s a quote too), when I have to eat only processed foods, and abjure the company of all things fresh and natural, in order to cure myself of a disease. Well, more exactly, to lower the unpleasant side effects from the radiation treatments to cure a disease.
These treatments are curiously timed to last through the fresh produce season. Corn on the cob? Don’t even think of it. Chunky tomato sauce? Salsa? It is to cry.
The tomatoes are getting big, though still green. Some sweet peppers are full size; some chilis need a few more sunny days to turn red. Zucchinis and cucumbers are on their way. Green beans to follow. We’ve picking leaf lettuce for months. Peas for a week. Somebody needs to do something with the cilantro.
It’s hard enough to give up recreational eating. When you can’t eat the healthy things growing in the backyard, you know that somewhere the universe is laughing at you.

The Last, Best Day

2011-06-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

So June saves its best day for the last.
Perfect dry air all day, beautiful but somehow soft light.
I sit in back garden, on the patio, while my son cooks dinner. A bird, probably not a thrush, but just as melodious this evening, repeats its call, singing from somebody else’s tree. Ours are thickly leafed, having survived another caterpillar spring.
Given the number rainy days this month, growing conditions are close to perfect when the sun finally comes out. Perennials (I say once again) don’t need as much sun as we do. I complain and moan whenever we get a wet spell – oh will I ever see the sun again? – while the plants drink deeply and wait for the next solar holiday.
We have come to the show-off moment for the part of the garden surrounding the bistro set beside the oak tree. I like this midsummer cohort of flowers best when they first emerge, the first full flush of plus-sized primary colors. The spiky red tops of the bee balm; absurd corkscrew feather-like petals kicking up from a humble stalky herb. From the point of view of my seat on the patio, they line up in front of a phalanx of fresh-blooming daylilies, ruddy orange towers of flower, the region’s native skyscrapers.
Below them a dense development of five-floor co-ops – all crayon-yellow evening primrose, undergirding the summer scheme. A few remaining floxgloves from an earlier period of the growing season’s archeology watch from the side. Behind these, a low spot on the horizon of fence, a barely blue hydrangea flowers opens its summer season with a program of showtunes and light classics.
Up close, from the patio, a thin filter of skinny spires from the pale yellow small-blossom race of foxglove-imitators elevator into the view. Higher and slighter in their girding, loose-gowned Queen Anne’s Lace announce it’s time to wander down high summer footpaths beside perfumed mowings. A second-year colony of coreopsis begins a golden sunrise.
Up closer to the patio, in the so-called “violet” section, things are quieter. But the coral bell is blooming – pinkish white flowers over red-violet foliage – along with a little first-year pincushion flower with pink flowers, and a verbena offering up a deep violet flower, which I’m trying to forget (for pity’s sake) is only an annual.
On the far side of the weeping cherry a modest little deep blue geranium offers two flowers at a time – never more than two. I walk over to say hello, a quick visit with an old friend, who prefers a low profile.
On the other, or north side of the weeping cherry, the “yellow” section began unveiling its summer collection about a week ago. A few yellow sedum, followed by thick beds of yellow primrose, yellow tufted achillea (yarrow), and a buttery collection of low stella d’oro daylilies. A few low red roses sing a different but hot tune as well.
Purple spiderwort mixes in there as well. Behind the primrose a couple of fat, expanding astilbes, glowing blood red and papery white, lead the entourage surrounding the sundial, which almost overwhelms it now. Some purple blooming climbing flowers show their color there now too, whose I wrote down last year but have now forgotten.
All of these sing in the midsummer sunshine. But they’ll take be just as happy if a few dark, rainy days come along as well to keep them going.

Unreal City

City of flowers
Make believe summer skyline
Magic to the eye

The Angel of Death

2011-06-28T13:02:00.001-07:00

Some time in June a search and destroy party arrives in the back perennial flower garden and sets to work reducing the biomass. You could call this weeding, but really that homely term doesn’t do it justice. The party of one, who has christened herself the Angel of Death, brings a civilizing influence to the wild overgrowth she encounters.
She wants to drain the swamps to eliminate disease. She wants to thin the heavy rushes back to the borders of polite, thinly-fingered Maiden Grass to flush mosquitoes out of their hiding places. She runs her critical eye over planting beds thickly strewn with low, middling, and tall plants and decides which of these things is unlike the others. She vows to put an end to overweening stalky intruders, sniff out volunteers masquerading as “real plants,” counterattack aggressive colonies which have expanded well beyond their natural and historic borders. She wants to know what she can get rid of.
At the end of her reign of terror, an afternoon or so, old friends have re-emerged from the overgrowth. Larger shrubs once again have rounded forms, full sides, feet which touch the ground. Pathways emerge where wilderness had threatened to close over the roads. Little flowering things drink fresh air into their lungs, pleasantly surprised to see the sun once more.
Death is part of life, the Angel says. Foresters know that “trees kill trees.” If you don’t thin the herd in the woodlot, none of your trees will grow tall and strong and full. Every thesis, the dialectical philosophers used to say, generates an antithesis. Without the “editing” shears, clippers and (on occasion) shovel the Angel brings to the management of the “world” of the perennial garden, overpopulation will overthrow the balance of nature. There will be no room left for babies, children, all manner of little guys taking root where soil and sun meet, until some monstrous plague arrives to kill off all the unweeded elders.
The poets back her up. That outraged Puritan, the young Prince Hamlet, images his mother’s world of license and decay as “an unweeded garden, rank and gone to seed.” We know what “seedy” means. We don’t like “swamps.”
And so the wilderness vision of the Creator takes a beating around this time every year. In early spring, given the illusion of a blank slate, the Creator plants anew, divides and transplants, acquires new births of floral beauty, re-arranges the furniture to give more scope to favored children, and finds new homes entirely for laggards which may yet be saved by the right conditions. He hopes all his ventures prosper.
But, inevitably, when his plants do prosper, they soon begin to get in one another’s way. The creator unsheathes his grass clippers to primp and trim and cull and prune, relying also on his supple fingers to slip out the unwanted species by the roots from the midst of those many mixed border regions where worlds collide. But those clipped edges and policed borders soon run riot again. He’ll be fine-tuning all summer, running from hotspot to hotspot, and dangerously close to losing the war.
He needs an intervention.
I am here, says the Angel. I will deliver you from chaos. I will restore order to the universe and vision to the eye – Look! Thou may behold the big picture once more.
Just don’t watch me work.

Diversity in the Garden

2011-06-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

A Day in June

On hot days,
People cook hamburgers
And the smell
Bloodies the air.

It wakes the carnivore
In everyone.
I go forth
To eat flowers.

It is June and Sonya and I have been gardening together. We are both supposedly working in our money-making occupations as well. She on her laptop, I in my study room staring at this desktop machine and making words. But we both knew we just want to get enough done to soothe our consciences so we can go outside again and mess around in the garden.
In the garden we discover the natural politics of diversity. It turns out the answer to every question in life is “more diversity.” Who you should marry, who should get tax breaks and who shouldn’t, where should people live, where should we go to eat, how do we replace fossil fuels and save the planet…? Whatever the question, whatever the issue, policy question, political question, workplace question, diet question, the way forward is whatever choice encourages more diversity, more experimentation, innovation, change, new combinations. Cross breeding, as gardeners and botanists know, produces a strain that is strong and fertile.
Varieties, as Darwin realized, fuels evolution. It doesn’t work if everything is the same.
And so we apply this principle when “weeding the garden” – an inadequate phrase for reducing the biomass of the entire property in whichever direction you look. So I leave a few of various kinds of our most expansive volunteers – violets, mint, wild geraniums, lots of others I recognize from long acquaintance but don’t know their name – dandelions, even, soft-leafed lamb’s quarters – the tall spear greens that make small blue flowers around their middles --- and of course the northern sea oats, which are not really volunteers since I planted them, and transplanted them, and intentionally spread them, but now like the magic water bearers of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice are everywhere, multiplying and unstoppable – some of these also I have left in various locations. Who knows what they’ll get up to? Blue flowers will shoot out of nowhere when the native orange daylilies flag in their efforts. A couple of “wild” geraniums turn out to be a small blue geranium I bought and planted a couple years back and have carefully kept from being squeezed out by everything around it that grows faster and bigger.
Because if you don’t preserve your rare personalities, your dreamers and eccentrics, the desired diversity will be overwhelmed by the burgeoning colonies of evening primrose and the Anthony’s Waterer spirea which eats ground like a defensive tackle, expanding clusters of tall phlox, big-leafed green carpet vine which is once again climbing underneath everything less densely textured than a steel tank to pop up and tangle the delicate flavors of mosses and edging plants and anything you really care about.
So it turns out that weeding – holding back nature with one hand while you cultivate with the other – is essential to preserving diversity in the garden. And if your approach, like mine, says yes to all comers until they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have to say no, then the constant gardener turns out to be the constant weeder.

6.6 So Rare

2011-06-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

The main thing about June is how beautiful the days are. We had a tough May, until the last week of what is often my favorite month, and a cool, dark April. So far this month we’re getting compensated by a run of clear, sunny, often spectacular days, ranging from clean, clear angels-walk-this-earth mornings to balmy heat-soaked afternoons when evening breezes stream in like little rivers of bliss. (We also have Sonya visiting this month, her birthday month, so what can be bad?)
Okay, so why do we feel good when the weather is good? And bad when it’s bad?
Maybe the plant kingdom can offer a clue.
Pansies like cool weather. They like sun, plenty of it, but they don’t care how low the temperature goes. Gardeners put them out in early spring and these days even supermarkets sell them in April. If you can work the soil, the plants are pretty much certain to take root. Give them a few weeks to get used to being in the ground and they light up the cool earth with bright colors. As soon as you get a run of hot days, however, even in early June, they start to fade. Their stems lose their stuffing. The blossoms falter, dry, fall over. New blossoms are slow to open and no new next generations appear on the floral conveyor belt. Once July settles into a hot, humid spell, it’s all over. Wilt city. Some years I dig them up and try to hide them in the shade somewhere in the back until it gets cool enough to bring them out again.
Basically, pansies like the same weather Anne does.
Most of the other plants like the same kinds of weather I do. Cool, warm or hot; sunny or moodily dark; lightly showering (though not all day, and only when the garden needs it); dry air rather than humid, though I can take a hot, sticky day once in a while.
Nobody I know really likes long stretches of hot and humid. Plants, at least the temperate zone ones, are the same way. They like the same weather we do. When my garden is wilting, thirsty all the time and begging for somebody to turn the heat down and open a window, I’m generally tending in that direction myself.
When my plants are happy, I’m happy. That’s an easier equation than most partnerships allow for. Plants are generally happy. All things considered, they’re just happy to be here.
Temperate zone perennials do however have a far greater tolerance for cold than I do. This year’s chilly April and the long windy, rainy stretches of May that I found dreary, eminently avoidable, and bearable only by regular recourse to the indoors do not seem to have bothered the perennials. They were gathering their strength. Drinking deep. They thought they were in England.
I need to take a lesson here. Sure, let’s enjoy that great stretch of end of May and early June weather. Those room-temperature, scintillating sunny, dry-air days. Those dreamy late afternoons giving way to delicious after-dark cooling off periods that feel like a benevolent parent’s reward for being a good boy on a hot day. Some brilliant, optimistic mornings when we say, with Wordsworth, “This morning gives promise of a glorious day.”
Those days make us forget the disappointing ones, when raindrops kept falling on our head. But we should have known the good ones were coming. They always do – and that should be enough to keep one’s spirits up. Apparently it was for the lilacs and the roses and the clematis and the poppies.

Shows-Offs

2011-06-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

After six years of building a garden from scratch in Quincy, we have a good showing in irises. I transplanted them from a semi-shady (or really shady) place on the side of the house to a redesigned half-moon hangout directly in front of the vegetables. We have a big orange flag iris and cool blue one with an interesting white inner pattern (very much resembling the iris of the eye), which I just bought at a garden club sale and dug into the ground – which is really cheating. And a couple of rows of vivid Siberian irises, the little guys, but abundant enough to make a spunky show.
We had lilacs this year. They opened the perfume bottle in late May. Last year the light-blue iris in the front garden didn’t bloom at all. I kept waiting, a groom left at the altar. The garden center said, try lime, they like lime. A “master gardener” in another center I complained to said “Beat them up. Stick a fork in their roots. They respond to that.” So I bought lime, surprised I hadn’t thought of this, and kept digging it in; and also probed a little gently around the root with a pitch fork. I don’t have the heart to beat up any of my plants. Whatever the cause, probably its own inner logic, the plant lit up with pale blue candles this year and stunk sweetly of the perfume counter.
I gave some of the same treatment, lime mainly, to the Korean lilac in the back garden against the fence and got the best result we’ve had yet from that plant’s red-violet blooms. We cut these and brought them inside for the classic New England spring scent.
The wiegelia grows tall, wide, and colorful, looking a little odd – like a bicycle wheel with its spokes unsprung – from my attempts last fall to tame its wildly exuberant growth. It didn’t hold a grudge, pumping out the usual array of pink and white trumpet-shaped blooms.
I did a major trim job on the rhododendron, which lost leaves and whole branches to the winter, the weather, age, disease, life, who knows what, and was full of brown holes this spring. I cut all the brown stuff off – snipping a few buds along with them – and the big old trooper of a plant pulled it together for its spring turn on the runway. This is one case where the pictures look better than the real thing,
The white peonies. I bought a couple of divided peony plants, thinking it was one but finding two in the pot, at the garden club sale probably six years ago, planted them in spare conditions, too little soil, too little sun, suffered with them, built up the soil, and rejoiced at seeing a first opened bloom a few years back. This year they stood up to the skies with flowers in every raised fist. Peonies ball their fists – they have a dozen or so of them – then open them in sudden June bursts, generally with the assistance of ants. Wow, I thought, they are so tall and I don’t even have to stake them. When the snowball-sized flowers opened this week, the branches promptly fell over the brick walk. We staked them.
The first, white foxglove opened along our curved back garden path. The perennial geranium opened at the same time. It makes rows of delicate pink-peach, mostly bleached flowers, lighting up its neck of the woods for maybe a week and a half. As is so many matters, enjoy them while they last.
The clematis came around the same time as everything else referenced above. Disappointingly thin last year, it’s thick with both vines and blue plate-sized blossoms – crab nebulae on the vine – this year. Again, I had cut back the vines last year, thinking what the hell. Maybe it was good for them. But, again, almost everything seems to be strong this year.
I too am stronger this year. The hard winter? The sudden exuberance of spring with its infusion of solar energy? I don't know, but the garden gods are smiling. I am creating in their image.

5/30 Floral Runway

2011-06-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

When the windows are open, which they are all the time now for most of a week, the scent of the lilac broadcasts inside. (Its favorite song is “Lust for Life.”) You can smell it everywhere now, particularly in the warm humid evenings. The perfume-counter scent saturates the air.
In the midst of our second week of warm weather – as if the divine stage manager had made an announcement and the veil of shadows fell away – a parade of early summer favorites are stepping up on the seasonal runway for their turn in center stage.
The fat orange poppies bending over the front sidewalk like a benediction on a world that passes by.
The blowsy, deep-pink tree peony blossoms say an exhausted goodbye. They pass from wrinkled to rumpled, collapsing like tired ballerinas and decadent old ladies.
The deep blue clematis, climbing the front porch trellis. Thick with vines and stems, it opens its big blue thumb-thick petals in time for Decoration Day weekend.
The striving pink foxglove peers over the rose bush, and the pink dianthus raises its skinny skin arms, scores over them, over its head.
Lagoons of pink-violet mazus. Working its way between the stones.
The mullein. Stalks of delicate white flowers, with a hint of pink veins on opening.
The Korean lilac against in the back. Its deep red-violet blossoms shout the first scent of summer.
Clusters of white flowers, opening in unison from a dozen different points, wherever it escaped being pulled up last year. White stars from tiny bulbs strong enough to raise strong, thin grassy stems and grow all over.
Sonya and I plant the warm-blooded members of the vegetable garden on Memorial Day weekend. I plant potatoes on a hot, humid Sunday afternoon. Deep rows, with mounds on top. She plants 2 cucumbers and 2 zucchinis. I plant two rows of bush beans and a row of soybeans, then a cluster of broccoli plants.
Sigh. Breathe the air. I plant the next generation of perennials, the argetum and the scented heliotrope, finishing off my new display bed.
And then the irises sweep away all previous impressions. Big showy yellows. Delicate blues. Slim, ice-blue Siberian blooms.
They take their turn. They bow. Take a good look. They won’t hang around for long.

5/30 May shines up, lines up

2011-05-31T20:14:00.000-07:00

Last week somebody threw the switch on the warm air current. The first day was a Tuesday: up to eighty and humid by the hump of the afternoon. A warm, sunny week led to summer-like Memorial Day weekend, humid at times, occasional bouts of fog, threats of thunderstorms, and windows open all night. Birdsong at four-thirty a.m. comes in loud and clear.
I revel in the opportunity of so much fine outdoor weather; an endless stream of happy high-on-fresh-air hours. I go from glancing nervously at the sky, wondering whether I will get the next little pie-faced Green-man Scottish Moss in the ground before the clouds open up again, to putting everything else in the ground I’ve been keeping around for over a week.
Those six-packs of eager little annuals – lobelia, alyssum? Your time has come!
I make space for them by lifting up a carpet of thick-leaved viny monochrome green groundcover, which I’ve been using for years for outdoor flooring. It’s taken over a triangle in a highly visible place – the oxbow twist in the winding central path that divides the back garden. A site for a showplace. I dig the big green groundcover out, en masse, and re-set the pieces in some difficult terrain under the oak tree.
I set the low, cheerful lobelia and alyssum along the newly freed borders of the path. I work in the one-of-a-kind perennials, fresh discoveries picked up at last weekend’s garden club sale – which has come to rival a Home Depot of stock choices, though with plenty of stales personnel and selections divided into “sun,” “shade,” “groundcovers” and a long demonstration table with examples of the plants to be found displayed in their proper departments along the long Wollaston Congo church Driveway of Fertility.
It was actually too crowded and no longer a place for unexpected discoveries and face to face encounters with the growers of the specimens you’re planning on taking home. It had changed from a tag sale to an auction.
I fill up a cardboard box with precious dirt and plant material – the gifts of fertility – to a weight heavier than I can decently carry and struggle down the street, straining under my loot. Can’t wait to take advantage of the big vernal dig.
I spend big hunks of each day outdoors. Each day slightly different, each one marvelous in its own way. A dry brilliant day, clear as cool water. A warm, thunderous day, ending with gin and tonics outdoors. A day with a long evening walk, just cool enough to make moving a pleasure while we lecture our poor visiting daughter on the twists and turns of "Lost." A hot humid Saturday, interrupted by a bout of fog, highlighted by a trip to buy advanced vegetable seedlings and to begin planting tomatoes.
A day when the green seedlings planted three weeks ago finally revealed their identity.

Ground Spice haiku

At last cilantro
The soil asks to be taken
The spice box opens

A Human Bee-ing

Flowers are the sex organs
Of hot momma nature.
We all love the colors, the shapes,
the delicate constructions.
They bring us together.
Do not ask what makes
that deep, persistent buzz
what hovers above zouavish skirts and bell-flared trousers,
transparent angel wings extended,
and wiggles its nose between stamen and pistil.
It is us.

Rain Forest Massachusetts

2011-05-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

All things that grow are greener than green in the very-wet merry month of May. Even under solidly overcast skies, the foliage shines. A beam of green light emerges from of the raspberry thicket where I have focused the lens of my unabashedly malevolent gaze on the squirrel climbing the pole to the birdfeeder. Move that lens a silly centimeter and what you have see are green vines, low green branches of heavy-leafed trees, tall green shrubs, a spurt of red azalea blossoms, and an overflow of ruggedly burgeoning raspberry canes, all of them green, green, green!
Weeks of rain and chill have put me behind in my planting. As for weeding, some sections of he back garden have already reached the you’ll-never-catch-up stage, and the usual portfolio of all-consuming, back-again-this-year, completely adaptable volunteers have leapt into the breach. When I sneak out between fresh wettings for an hour or so, I go to the places where appearances will be noticeably improved once I yank up or trim away the armies of enthusiastic followers which nudge hopefully against their powerful patrons – the over-dressed peony tree in the clock circle, for instance. Its neighboring astilbes, two fat brothers happily soaking up the green juice of spring. The garden germander, a low herb-like creature growing in asymmetrical weaves like a weed itself. I work to free a colony of Forget-me-nots (tiny baby blue florets; a few pale pink), adept spreaders themselves limited only by the herd of wild violets, marauding primroses, and posses of local homeland weeds tussling the space away from them.
To free them up, I pull handfuls of the nameless, big-leafed groundcover which grows like a bouncy mat – the green eraser – wherever I let it out of the spongy earth. Only when I’ve exposed enough space to see bare dirt can I think about inserting some new color into the borders of the stone path that wanders like a river through the heart of things, from patio to fence. It’s the central wiggle in the garden path.
I’m a tactile designer. When I can feel the cool, wet dirt through the finger tip holes in my glove, I decide where to place the two yellow-green clumps of a low mossy plant (called Scotch Moss by the plant center) to improve the density of the half dozen we planted last year along the stones of the central path. As I begin interring these, making my bet against nearby footfalls, returning weeds, and nosy squirrels, a steadily darkening sky turns down the thermostat on a late afternoon. The day had been dreary but still and rather warmish – fine weather for squatting in the damp and getting your clothes dirty. Now the air drops ten degrees in five minutes (coat goes back on) and begins to drip. Quick with the shovel, the ground too moist for pre-planting watering. Pull the root ball apart, dig a small hole, marry the roots to the soil. The rain picks up. In a tumble I get my second plant in; the rains sends me scurrying.
Indoors, I hear the thunder rumble.
Or… Maybe not a rain forest. Maybe just rain-merry old England. Gardens always look great there, and things are looking pretty good here too.

Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty: A Poem

2011-05-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

(“You must come to see me,” he says. “I will show you my garden.” Then when you go just to please him you will find him with his rump sticking up somewhere among the perennials… – from The Gardener’s Year, by Karel Capek)

I do it because it is outdoors
Because I can
Because you can do it alone
And you need – very little – but not nothing
You need a growing season.
(What am I doing in New England?)
I take no prisoners
I take no shit
(except out of the manure bag)
I need growing things – creatures willing to grow
Any volunteers?

Let me tell you about spring,
When the earth looses its madmen
And ambitions grow like weeds –
No, that would take too long.
Summer is ravishing, ecstatic, nature on steroids.
Summer is falling in love – wild, messy, overheated.
Lush. Inebriated.
Too damn short.
In addition to which, nothing you do then is ever good enough
To satisfy the wild sense of possibility
You smell like the desire of the stamen for the
Honey bee’s many legs
And even if it were, you can’t stop time

And at the end, when it’s all in the rearview mirror,
Or all in your head, make-believe, even,
when you are sobering down with a good glass of hoar frost
And a fresh delivery of number two heating oil

In the garden, even then, death is beautiful
Autumn is beautiful, like death.
Life is only valuable because we die
(If you don’t believe that, imagine life without flowers,
Families without babies)

We are obliged to be happy
We look at the fading asters, or the Montauk daisies, or the furtive, modest, ravishing anemone and realize, with some degree of calm,
That we are all on our way, in time, out of time,
To the same place
Which, if we are lucky,
Will strongly resemble a garden

In the garden, I know,
That everything is forever and always was
Until it isn’t
And even then I’m hedging my bets
Because, understand, there’s a garden metaphor for everything,
Even the things we haven’t thought of

5.11 Something New to Work With

2011-05-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

Some of my plants didn’t make it back this year. Some bare spots appear in the planting beds. Since there are a lot of planting beds here, bare spots are nor surprising –I think of them as opportunities for improvement.
Oh, boy, I get to buy something new!
Three days – or its five – of a May northeaster, with the wind blowing clouds and occasional rain passages off the ocean, so improvements are on hold. I’m dying for some sunshine. The persistent wind is even worse. Hey, guys, we’re burning May. The wind makes the air feel colder than the temperatures. A high of sixty with no sun and the wind blowing in your face is just not the same as sixty in the sun, still air, and the birds singing.
We finally get our sunny day for the week. It’s Friday. I am busy finishing one story and writing another from notes taken the day before. It’s late in the day before I get outdoors, but I make time for a trip to a small, local plant store. Sunny days are good buying days; it puts you in the mood.
Saturday morning, another cloudy day, Anne and I hit the plant market in Quincy, a gypsy-like seasonal business that pops up under a tent roof on a parking lot squeezed between a supermarket and a car dealer at peak selling times such as spring planting, pumpkin harvest, and Christmas tree season. The annual seedlings all look great, vigorous and colorful, they haven’t outgrown their little ice-cube measures worth of dirt yet, and plants such as alyssum which often arrive scrawny and weak in early summer are well grown and in flower. It’s been a good year in plant production world.
So, after a pair of shopping expeditions, by Saturday afternoon we have some 20-odd little round plastic containers or six-packs of colorful new plant life to paint the beds with. I tell the garden it must be its birthday.
Working against the threat of a rainy week in the forecast I set to work under overcast skies to patch the new life into the places where it may help to elevate the current beds up to a higher expression of whatever it is we are working together to do. The prospect that almost nobody will notice the difference except me never intrudes on the trance of gardening.
Almost at once I have entered the zone in which what other people think – and what I ordinarily might be thinking about – no longer matters. This is what creative work is. Possibly this is what work really is, period, or should be. In the ideal world if you’re painting a barn, or digging an asparagus patch, or patching a road, or writing a poem – it doesn’t matter how hard, sweaty, inward or outward the process is, what matters is how much you care about and are thoroughly involved in what you’re doing. You care about the result. You care about doing it right, making it work, making it beautiful, or making it useful (or some of both), about helping someone, or improving the situation for all of us, or repairing the world. That’s what work is.
When you’re really there, doing it, that’s what the “trance” of gardening or any real occupation is – so-called because you’re not looking at the clock. You are occupied by the task. You’ve eliminated time – the objective, measureable march of the hours, minutes, and seconds. Or at least pushed it far into the background.
In the foreground is dirt, on your gloves, on your fingers, any part of your body or your clothing that you touch with your hands. And plants – including the weeds, which you will now scrupulously remove, after overlooking them for weeks, in order to clear the area where you are considering berthing a new plant. And your body, which you will have to maneuver into some far too small and uncomfortable space by kneeling, squatting, standing awkwardly between the plants and places you don’t want to be stepping on while you bend or stretch or otherwise get at the portion of earth where you think a particular example of biota will improve the state of the world – which in this instance means the look or balance or future prospects of a particular planting bed.
It’s a little thing, but our own.
Let us fill the bare ground. Before the weeds do. Let us connect one patch of green to another. Let us add color, intensifying the color that is already there, or adding some complementary hue. Let us paint with plants. Or add a line to the story.
Let us sing in the sunshine.
(If and when it finally comes back.)

5.12 Killing the Squirrel

2011-05-14T21:21:00.000-07:00

We are two animals in a territorial fight.
He – the new lean and mean super-athletic squirrel; aka the little bastard – runs up the pole to the bird feeder. No other squirrel has done this in the three years we have had this set-up. I leave the garden hose, with the faucet turned on, looped through the fence on the front porch. When I see him working his mouth into the glass clear plastic container, I open the kitchen storm door, release the hose and squirt it directly at the bird feeder. He hears me come out to the porch (the door squeaks) and detach the hose, waits till the last moment, then throws himself off the bird feeder and dashes across the neighbor’s lawn a split second before the stream of water arrives.
The other day, a gray afternoon parsed by bouts of drizzle, super-squirrel and I perform this maneuver 20 times in a row. He is on his way back to the feeder by the time I have replaced the hose and stepped back into the house. When I pause by the kitchen widow to see if any birds have found their free lunch, I see his gray hairy rodent form climbing back up the pole.
Open door. (Noise alerts squirrel). Detach hose, aim. (Squirrel lifts head). Squeeze trigger on hose gun. (Squirrel flies off bird feeder perch.)
The thing is, I have pretty well given up on feeding birds for the season. We generally stop around this time of year, with nature back in bloom. The birds will find us again when it’s berry season in a couple of weeks. Some of them found us today when I hear a chorus of chirping and look up to the lightly leafed oak tree and see a pack of black birds working their way through the tree. That means that caterpillar infestation season has begun. The tiny inch worms are too small still for my eyes, but the birds know they are there. They have a bird’s eye view.
So it’s not about saving the bird seed for the birds. It’s the principle of the thing.
It’s about who’s boss.
Today, when the sun comes out, first time in three or four days, I slip outdoors regardless of the status of a story over deadline and begin work on a backed-up chore list: plant the perennial Anne got for my birthday in the spot chosen in the front garden. Weed that area and consider whether the fast-rising Clematis – it’s on steroids this year – needs intervention yet. We’ll have to tie it to the trellis eventually, but I decide it’s still climbing straight up on thin air rather than leaning over and leave well enough alone.
Clip the old leaves off a cluster of ornamental grasses, called liriope, most of them purchased last fall and just beginning to put out new round-edged baby fingers. Since I have the clippers in my hand, begin thinning the long, falling locks of a climbing – in this case falling – wild rose whose extensive vines are obscuring the azalea just as all the azalea’s dreamy red lights are switching on. Stop, briefly, to consider that some perennials, like the azalea, are having the best season they’ve had in several years. Can only speculate why. Then move on to the next task on my punch list, uncovering the mulch around the pea plants to see what’s up.
As I’m pulling old leaves away from the peas’ wire towers, uncovering a so-so level of germination, I hear, almost subconsciously, a familiar sound. The base of the bird feeder tap-tapping lightly against the pole. I look up, sure enough, super-squirrel is hanging in a familiar position, determined to dig the last few sunflower seeds out of the cylindrical feeder. I stand and take a step toward him. He hasn’t realized I was on the other side of a blackberry bush, mostly concealed, and is a step slow off the mark. I lift the trowel in my hand and throw it hard at the feeder. It’s a long, heavy projectile, with a bit of an edge. I am thinking, if I hit him in the right spot it may do some serious damage.
In short, I am trying to kill the squirrel.
My aim is a little off. The trowel-projectile tangles in some raspberry canes before it reaches the feeder pole, but the ferocious malevolence of the act – wild animals are pretty good at reading intentions – sends him in panic flight out of the berry patch and racing for the nearest cover. Which turns out to be underneath the car in the parking area.
I gather up my weapon and go back to the peas. Later, it occurs to me that what I could have done is go get the hose, aim the stream underneath the car with one hand and be ready to throw the trowel with the other when he bolts.
I’d probably miss, but I might get lucky
It’s not about the bird seed any more, Mister Bushytail. It’s territorial. This garden is my territory and a squirrel is welcome only if he follows the rules. No climbing the bird feeder; no digging in my plantings. The squirrel rules also include running for cover at the sight of me, the lord and master of the realm.
Fear me, squirrel. I am out for blood.

5.5. Out of My Head

2011-05-05T19:54:00.001-07:00

Doctor’s appointment for a hormone shot, scheduled for 11:30. I get a late start leaving the house, drive like maniac, reach the Sherman building with about five minutes to spare, decide at the last moment to go past it and park in Brookline instead to save the parking fee. The street is packed but I squeeze into a borderline legal spot, then get out and run back across the Riverway, across Brookline Street, into the building, and take the elevator up nine floors to the oncology/hematology department, where the clock shows I have five minutes to spare. Guess my watch is fast.
I check in, sit and wait. As I said, 11:30 appointment. I get my shot at 1 p.m. Just one of those things.
I’m supposed to call them if I get a rash from the shot. I leave the building, run back to the car, and manage to get to the highway before the afternoon build-up. Back home I try to catch up on my work, and sort of get somewhere, and then get tired.
Eventually I get myself out of doors. It’s about four thirty, but after a day of some rain, more threats of rain, and a steady cool wind, there’s some sun in the sky. I work on the vegetable garden, because I want to plant some more peas and get some greens in the ground, and the hard work with the shovel will warm me up. Half an hour later it starts to rain hard; run back indoors. Looks like my outdoor time is over.
But fifteen minutes later, the sun is out again.
It’s chilly now, but the light looks great on the fresh green plants. I squat down beside a patch of Mazus, a low thatch-like colony of light green “stepable” plants that make a delicate pink flower once they settle in good for the season.
I finally get what I need.
I stop having the usual thoughts. And start having different thoughts. It hardly matters what they’re about.
Green thoughts.
Not about the “green” in nature, but green in the sense of newly grown. And of course they’re not really “new” to me, or probably anyone else. But green as in the sense of fresh. We eat the green leaves off plants, like lettuce of spinach, because they’re fresh. Deer eat the green shoots from plants, including the ones in your yard.
Green as in newly emergent. Not “new,” but new again.
The produce you buy in the market, or pick from your market, is fresh – but a fresh carrot or tomato is hardly something new under the sun. It’s different materially – not the same carrot you ate last year, but definitely a carrot – the same in essence. That’s Platonism 101.
My thoughts are like my violets, my Japanese primrose, my ever-spreading blue “forever” flowers. The fresh expression of seasonal product.
Which is why people spend time doing things they like, why they need to. My “gardening” is a really a matter of spending time with plants. After a while I stop thinking about what I should be doing better, and then the fresh thoughts push their way up from beneath the surface of whatever we are. The earth of us.
We feel refreshed.

4.28 The Green Rush

2011-04-30T20:17:00.001-07:00

Sun in snatches only this week. On Easter morning, and a few hours here and there. A warm front came up from the south and ran into ocean-chilled cold air on the coast, resulting in clouds and sort of half-drizzle days where it seems it’s about to rain for eight hours and then drizzles a little bit after dark.
Yesterday, the warm air finally won as the temperature went from sixties to seventy, back to sixties, then spiked up to eighty. We went from a nice early spring
morning to a mid-summer afternoon all in one day -- the classic New England April weather-shock.
I’m trying to remember. Does shock treatment cure insanity, or cause it?
But something there is that likes all this moisture. Plants.
Today, for the first time this year, the back garden has its definitive green look. Not all that much color yet, color in spots – the Labrador violets are a glamorously vivid purple backed by all that green – but green over all the land in spears and leafy shrubs and low interwoven groundcovers, pulling up the green juice from the earth, mixed with a lot of rainwater. It’s the visual equivalent of a sugar rush.
The green rush.
I’m working on the hypothesis that it’s good for the soul. Has anybody worked out a calculus yet between sensual stimulus and the state of the soul… or maybe even something as sociologically measurable as self-esteem?
After the minimalism of the winter landscape, plus all that clothing, and the deprivation of growing-flowering-fertilizing smells, spring’s new greenleaf time feels like coming home. Remember the first thawing days when even mud, decay, and chilly breezes smelled good? A kind of early March cocktail? It was good to be able smell outdoors, period.
What the thawed earth does for smell, and bird song for the ears, green does for the eye – and when it comes to the senses we humans are first of all creatures of the eye. Think how much we like pictures.
We’re seeing pictures all the time now. When it’s not raining; weather permitting, that is. Even in the rain, there’s plenty to see. Whole strips of pavement color-spattered with pink cherry blossoms or the red vanguards of leafing time on the maple trees.
Here the bi-colored leafs on the small dogwood tree have just emerged. They are delicate and stunning against the reddish hue of the bark. The stella do’oro daylilies have thickened up marvelously, eating up the brown earth between them in a lively color contrast. Even the light-green color on the fresh leafs of the raspberry canes – an unsentimental and thornish plant – adds light to the picture. And, yes, the wild, ordinary, lawn-creeping violets are beginning at last to bloom.
How can we keep from singing?

4.23 Who Are "You"?

2011-04-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

In the garden, I know that you live forever until you don’t, and forever may begin at any moment. In fact, it may have already started.
I wrote that two years ago. But who am “I” talking to? Who are “you”?
Substituting “you” for “me” is an interesting stylistic tendency of modern English that can probably be traced back to somewhere in the twentieth century. When we use it, we objectify (or distance) our feelings and experiences and name their subject “you.”
We report our mental, conscious life, our thought process, and we say, “you think things will change,” “so then you wonder,” “you can’t help wishing,” “you wish you could do it over” and a million other common locutions putting “you” in the driver’s seat when the consciousness behind the wheel of thought is clearly me, myself, and I.
So is the “you” the one who knows that you live forever? My thoughts will forever, is that what I mean? That the realm of time, in which human life is bounded, and the realm of human consciousness are not exactly identical?
It’s a bold idea to claim as one's own, so maybe that’s why I want to pawn it off on some unidentifiable “you.” But it if were my proposition, maybe this is what I would say in its behalf.
Proposition: We are living in forever. Not merely in the temporal dimension in which all things material come and go and slip away like the pages from the calendar.
Do I experience this transcendence of linear time in the garden – and believe others experience it too – because plants live in time, as we do, but also persist through a different sort of time?
In the garden there will always be oak trees, they will always leaf in May and de-leaf in autumn, bombard the earth with acorns, and sprout again in the spring. In some ages of the earth, conditions do not permit oak trees to grow here, but the earth will always be what it is – and not something else – because oak trees have grown on and under and above its surface. They have mediated the atmosphere, breathed in its carbon, shaded the rays of the sun, held down its soil, turned its richness into tree – woody trunk and branches, green photosynthesizing leaves, water-seeking roots.
In the garden native daylilies grow and disappear and come back again each spring. The same ones? A successor generation? We can consider the lilies, but it’s hard to consider an individual lily. The plant has a root, but that root expands, colonizes, produces new shoots, combines and mats with other roots. Do lilies have a common root? You have to cut them apart to make an individual for purposes of transplanting. Are plants “individuals” aside from the distinctions and divisions our way of seeing things imposes on them?
Plants give a new meaning to sameness and collectivity. Maybe there are genius lilies and oaks out there in the plant kingdom, painting masterpiece blooms and pioneering new strategies for spreading the seed, but what we experience is reliability, conformity to type, the predictable return of an old friend each spring.
We don’t mourn for the loss of the leaves in autumn, the drying and falling off of the flower and foliage from perennial, favorite plants, because they will be back again. They don’t grow old, not the way we do, and when a plant “dies,” we know they are replaceable because their existence is predictable. Truly it is, as the poet says, Margaret that we mourn for.
We will name a dog, but not a tree. All plants partake of plant-ness, nature. And nature is always here, it’s forever. If it’s not, we’re not, and then there’s no one left to consider all that is the case.
So in the garden we live forever, at least a little bit the way that plants do. We are always loosening the earth in spring, pulling weeds, picking up handfuls of last year’s brown leaves. Admiring new sprouts, exulting at fresh blossoms. We do as people have always done. And the world is what it is, and not something else, because we do it.
And “you”? You, perhaps, are simply something that knows. And you will still be here when we short-lived beings of flesh are no longer.

4.23 Waiting for Gardot

2011-04-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

A not very good pun on Beckett’s famous play about the uncertainty of meaning in a world we never made.
I could also call this “waiting for April,” because I have a persistent notion that spring is about to burst into color this month, but April is running out of days. Was I mistaken? Or am I thinking of some other month?
I am still waiting for the orange flowers to pop open from the anonymous plant that looks like a miniature Lady’s Mantle, round omelet-sized leaves forming a mounded plant shape with protruding flower stems. Though I can’t pin a name on this early performer by searching the internet for photos, I have clear memory picture of the bright poppy-orange blossoms that provided a dramatic splash of color in the early weeks of spring.
Looking on the brighter side of things, the weeping cherry tree has opened like an overturned bowl of freshly exploded popcorn, the blossoms still tight and self-contained but offering a brilliant cool-weather focal point for this muted April. Last year the white cherry blossoms opened fast in much milder weather and probably faded faster as a result of the same warm temperatures. Today they get rain and forties. I get to stay indoors and contemplate the scene through the window.
In truth, some spots are shining up well beneath the cool, shady-day April rain. When the sun is damped down behind cloud cover, the world is under-lit by the bright green and multi-hued foliage sprouting from the earth. We have daffodils open to full bloom today out front. Not there yesterday, when the sky was mostly clear and a cool wind blew, but shining today like buttery little suns. They’re joined by a few early-showing red tulips, a scattering of blue star bulbs and some heavy-handed pink hyacinths that flop over unconventionally but show a bright pastel color. Other plants in the front garden are greening up as well – the row of sedums along the sidewalk strip, which don’t blossom till fall, have leafed out bright green. The strip is also brightened by pansy heads and a few bulbs, including a good thatch of deep-blue grape narcissus.
The really stunning difference between this and every other spring since we’ve been here is that I am still waiting for the semi-wild purple violets to blossom. They emerge from the cool earth late this year, and their flowers are still later. Starting from our first summer here six years ago I have transplanted them, and they have multiplied their holdings nearly everywhere throughout the garden. Their absence from our April bouquet makes me how much I rely on them for the deep purple that complements the new green.
We shall know thee by thy absence.

4.2 Braving April

2011-04-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

Classic April Fool’s weather. A snowstorm on April 1. For us a few inches of white slush. Locations not far west or north of here got eight inches.
Anne goes to work as always, rain snow or sleet, that morning and keeps a sharp lookout for the well-being of assorted spring blossoms. Her report, from Boston’s Park Street station:

At One Beacon Street
The pansies are shivering
In the snow

As much as the gathering slush was dousing my enthusiasm for a go at the back garden, I had been staring at a green banner raised by reliably strong early showing by the daylilies. On the basis of that strength I felt a reply was called for:

At One-Seven-Four
The lilies lift their fingers
To wave in the slush

Saturday, forecast as a sunny, low fifties good outdoors day, turns out to be a good deal cooler in the morning, and the wind keeps up all day. I rake in the afternoon, feeling cool whenever a cloud gets between me and the sun and the wind blows, as it’s determined to do. Then there’s a good patch when the clouds miss my sun on their trek to somebody else’s sun and I am too warm to wear my jacket. That’s the place I want to get to more often.
I should emulate the indifference of the crocuses. I had worried that the snow would harm their blossoms, which were late enough opening this year. But even before the snow had finished melting on the sidewalk strip, the crocuses were standing up straight and strong, brightly colored faces raised to the sun.
They are the very image of bravery, Anne said.
Inspired by landscapers of Beacon Street, Anne and I decide to go buy some pansies our own and plant them out front in that strip. A few rain drops fall from the now cloud-furrowed sky as we drive back home. We go to work anyway, digging up a patch in front of the house, but then the wind picks up and the clouds thicken and move with apparent determination toward steady drizzle.
We go indoors to have tea.
The sky clears and bright heavens beam from behind the storm door and windows. It’s too late.
When you cool your jets too many times, it’s hard to start them up again. That’s the way the days go in April.

3.29 Everything Is An Herb (In Its Own Way)

2011-04-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in a coat pocket I have a list of all kinds and descriptions plants that merit the title of herb. It’s a long list, but still a very partial one. An herb, according to one widely cited definition, is a plant “that is valued for flavor, scent, or other qualities.”
The Herb Society of America, presumably an expert on the subject, states that it is dedicated “to promoting herbs for use and delight.”
Does that mean that so long as a plant is grown consciously for “delight,” it can be considered an herb? If so, then if you planted it – unless you’re a masochist – it’s an herb. And your garden, whether you know it or not, has some call to be considered an herb garden.
This expansive definition is good news for those of us (and I am among them, pretty much always) looking for reasons to acquire some new and interesting plants. Basically, we don’t need a reason to do this, it’s kind of a steady-state condition, but it does get more extreme in late March, like the return of an old addiction. (O Cynara!, the poet cried, I am sick of an old passion!)
Anglers are lured and baited. Sailors shiver their timbers. Plant lovers go buy plants.
Those of us without an expansive knowledge of the Latin names of plants can learn from the expertise of Doveflower Cottage Designs. That list in my coat pocket, which I have now recovered, was provided by Doveflower’s master gardener Susan Leigh Anthony at a lecture we attended at a flower show.
Susan Leigh Anthony, who cited the Herb Society of America’s credo of “herbs for use and delight,” offered us a “big tent” approach to herb gardening. Come on in and invite your friends.
Here are the names, some common, Latin, of herbs chosen almost at random from Anthony’s long list. Herbs of low height: sage, miniature basils, santolina, comfrey-Hidcote blue. Annuals: nasturtium, prostrate rosemary, English daisy, nigella. Medium height: tarragon (French), anchusa, garden sage, anthemis tinctoria, lovage. Tall herbs: fennel (bronze), dill (annual), angelica-patrinia, valerian.
I for one truly appreciate a list of good names.
Some of the plants on her lists of herbs we have in our garden (or at least had last year) include: chamomile, lady’s mantle, catmint, lavender, parsley, alpine strawberry, oregano, ajuga, dianthus, germander, phlox, artemisia, beel balm, tarragon, basil, aliums, some roses, tall peonies, lilac, butterfly bush, and mint.
We’ve planted some of the annuals on her list too, with mixed success. I tried some nasturtiums late last summer, and found the remains of a dried orange flower under the melted snow. I’m a little surprised to find English daisy listed as an annual; I was under the impression that I had acquired a perennial. Maybe I shouldn’t be expecting back. And dill is something I have remind myself to put in every year.
Other names I welcome as opportunities for learning. What is santolina? Comfrey I remember, though I don’t remember what it looks like or what it was supposed to cure. There’s a “garden sage”? (Is that one of those little stone Buddhas?) Why is rosemary prostate? (It sounds slightly indecent.) Lovage is a lovely word, but I know nothing of thing itself. Valerian makes tea and cures stomach upsets, but what’s it like to grow it?
This inclusive approach to the green and charming universe of herbs puts to shame our tiny, segregated so-called “herb patch,” a modest affair surrounded by log-shaped extra lumber pieces, cut to a modest, chunky size. This patch has, judging by what I see so far this March, chives which come back every year, something that I believe is a garlic-leek, which is rather surprisingly back this year, and oregano, which also has come back every year reliably.
Oregano, or “joy of the mountain,” is one of what Anthony calls “the Mediterranean herbs,” which need sun and well-drained, though not necessarily rich soil. We had rosemary last year, which smells like pine, but I’m told to my surprise not to expect it back this year. Once again, I assumed perennial status. We’ve have tarragon, which has hung in there for a few years, but I don’t see it yet this year. We had some thyme, but it’s gone.
We have parsley – is that an herb? Isn’t it also a green? Does a popular folk song give it a special status? So far our parsley winters over and then throws down some new seed to keep the patch growing. I don’t know why we don’t have sage.
Here’s just a few – the few whose names I can remembers – of the dozens of attractive and remarkable plants Anthony’s slide-lecture introduced us to.
Daphne – Carol Mackie. There appear to be lots of varieties of this plant, all called Carol Mackie (there’s fame for you). Lots of starry pink flowers, some with variegated leaves, three feet high, flowering in May.
Viburnum. A plant with lots of shapes and floral patterns, and a variety called viburnum plicatum Summer Snowflake (quite enough name for anyone), blooms white at various months (depending on the variety), looks good as a tall background shrub, produces a late summer fruit – and smells good. I’m sold.
Fairy candles (Actaea racemosa), which have other-worldly, pointy flower spires of tall white blossoms that live up to their name. They’re partial to full shade, 4-6 feet high, bloom in midsummer, and like their soil kept moist.
Borage. It looks classical herb-like to me. Beautiful small blue flowers and fuzzy leaves. An annual, it self-seeds, blooms midsummer, grows 18-36 inches. Dead head it to keep blooming; attracts bees. I’ll put it on the list.
I am glad to be reminded that there’s plenty of unexplored territory. In a journey of a thousand miles I feel well on my way along the first half-dozen steps or so.
We’re looking forward to taking a few new ones this year, just as soon as the April Fool’s snowfall melts off.

3.24 Lenten Rose

2011-03-30T08:04:00.000-07:00

The flowers are sort of yellow. Maybe a yellowish green. But mostly sort of white. They come so early in the season you forget to look for them. I think I probably forgot about the Lenten Rose after planting one a couple of years ago.
When I discovered the blooms, low to the ground, disguising themselves among the foliage, last spring they had probably been open for a week or more. They hug the ground among the stems and leaves of their own and other plants which emerge in early spring and hide them. The cup-shaped “rose” flowers do not necessarily turn their face up to the sun. So you have to get down to their level.
Getting down to their level, I pick out the dry leaves by hand. It’s a sensitive time of year to look for surprises from the garden. My job this month is removing the dried, brown leaves of last autumn from the flower beds and groundcovers where we leave them all winter to provide a mulch cover which, we hope, is appreciated by the recipients of this effort.
A lot of snow sat on top of those leaf-covered beds last winter, especially during the coldest period. But when the snow melted away and the weather slowly got warm enough for me to stand outdoors, though that’s still a work in progress, the perennial groundcovers were already showing their green – as if a New England winter, snow or no snow, had not made an enormous difference one way or another. As for my leaf mulch, I’m not smart enough to figure out whether that makes a difference either.
But the leaf mulch does take time and labor to remove. You’d like to rake it off, which is easier to do in beds where only the roots of the perennials or a strong skeletal branch-frame remains. Among groundcover like vinca it’s trickier. Rake with vigor and you inevitably pull up some vines. The tangled small leafed and delicately-vined low thymes and other stoppable, groundcover plants are even harder to clean out. You either rake and accept your losses, or hand-fork; or simply pull out the dull brown leaves with bare (or gloved) fingers… one or two at a time.
So you spend hours down low, interviewing patches of foliage on a one-to-one basis. How are you this year? How was your winter? What are your goals and aspirations?
With some of these fellows, it’s hard to read the body language. You look pretty good – or don’t you? Is this where I left you last year? Where are your friends?
It’s still too early to know what to expect from most of these families of plants. The hardy survivors – pachysandra, day lilies, stand up and bow – are present and accounted for, lining up for attention. But I have a long mental list of marginal performers, which make me fret. They may be slow getting out of bed, or they may not get up at all. Time, the answer to most of these question, will tell me something. But it won’t necessarily tell me why.
In this delicate and sometimes uneasy transitional stage, it’s heartening to be rewarded by something you don’t see every day. You get down to the ground, pull away some fallen twigs and old leaves and there are the happy bells of the Lenten Rose.
The color is very, very pale – modest and thin, like, I suppose, the Lenten diet of late winter.
But it feeds some very deep hunger inside.

3.20 We’re All Back

2011-03-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

The big hand of the seasonal clocks is the warming of the earth. When the earth warms, whether it’s late February or middle march, the green plants wake.
I pull off the top cover of leaf mulch spread over the groundcovers last fall, and find, to everybody’s delight, that we’re all back. The crocuses are here, the tulips are fingering out of the earth, the pachysandra is as bright and bouncey as it gets, and some of the steppable thyme patches are in mid-season form. And here I am, waxing philosophical over our familiar, re-imagined landscape as I rake off, or lift off or cut away the old skin of the old year, winter’s wrinkles giving way to the snipping of a new sky and a bright laser light of the turn of the year.
The spring equinox means the equal division of the day into light and darkness, which means a big gain for the light side over the narrow-eyed winter months. When you add daylight savings to the end of the day, where most of us live, it’s a big change from a month ago when it was still dark at five p.m. Now the light lasts until seven p.m. (and all we need to make life livable is some sunny weather, dammit). The light sits higher in the sky this time of year, making the late afternoons glow when the sun shines, and the bowl of sky find still new shades of twilight blue when the sun finally fades.
We remember all this and rejoice.
I pick among the detritus that the long snow gathered and froze and dirtied on the sidewalk strip and reveal the tiny green spears of the crocus, more or less where I left them. Dogs have walked these thin precincts, a spume of litter from overturned garbage cans made its way down to the earth, who knows how much road salt, sand and dust may have insinuated into the snow that baked itself into a cold gritty omelet of ice crystal, silt, and sad gray corruption – still, the green shoots poke their way upward.
We excavate through layers and reveal the remains of the old civilization of spring.
That’s the first afternoon. The second morning the crocuses are showing their yellow faces. The rest of the front yard need a facelift as well. We walk the ground inch by inch… Red-streaked tulip leaves. Fat narcissus, opening like upside-down umbrellas.
Old stalks which need clipping. Brown leaf bags filling up like fat babies.
On Sunday, I stake out the first circles in the back garden. The little green ears of the mini-daylilies under the cherry tree need a trimming. I rake around the patch of purple crocuses in the lee of a dogwood tree. These doughty fellows required no help from you or me to find the sun. But raking off the chaff emphasizes the color, set off by the old-new-renewed green of neighboring groundcovers.
They’re there again. They’re there just where they were, as they were. They’re a renewable energy source because looking at them makes us feel green inside.
I work my way around the wide flower island: lady’s mantle, purple salvia, bare semi-sad hydrangea, a tuft of hearty columbine, dry stalks of aster, and over to the achillea, the garden geranium, and the variegated carpets of familiar ground-hugging green back beneath the dogwood.
I move in a circle. We too are winding up the clock of the seasons, the clock of the green world.
It winds me up as well.

2.21 White Light in My Mind

2011-03-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

White too bright to see
My eyes seek tree trunk shadows
White light in my mind

While snow sinks into the ground or goes up in smoke in coastal New England, the wild wintery frontiers of the Adirondack Mountains grow only whiter. We traveled up there on the Presidents Day weekend to stay at Gwen and Dave’s lakefront camp.
The snow gardens of northern mountains were freshly whitened by a fall of several inches of powdery white on Friday night as we were sloshing through a vicious February thunderstorm on the eastern half of the Massachusetts turnpike.
More snow swirled on the road Saturday morning, when we drove north after a night Albany. I woke in the early pre-dawn hours that night to a wind-maddened snow frenzy that seemed more dream than reality. Reality however turned into snow squalls on our windshield the next morning.
And new snow again on the plowed private road that winds along the lake in Inlet, where my sister’s camp is located.
Snow showers in the afternoon and again after dark, whiting out the moon. Turning the frozen lake and the white-washed landscape into a brilliant and dazzling monochrome.

Fresh Powder

Snow crystals, millions
of tiny mirrors multiply
daylight made of ice

Next day the color of the sky is a deep, improbable azure above the blazing white snowscape. Why is the sky so deep, so dry? Mountain air is drier, perhaps. The temperature drops but does not sting like our moist, coastal freezes. So much reflected snow-light turns the sky a photo-shopped blue.
Against the hillside, the thin bare trees make cooling shadows, interruptions of snowlight. Little slashes, secret hideouts where the eye may escape bedazzlement, for an instant or two. Then we are back to our improvised Arctic.

2.11 Old Snow Has Some Crust

2011-03-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

We are snowbound (mentally, at least) another week. It doesn’t snow, though the temperature drops down to extremes on several evenings. The snow, which melted last weekend and on a Monday that elevated to 40 degrees in the afternoon, crusted on top.
I began going back to the waterfront on Tuesday, having avoided the area for weeks because of the deep snow and inaccessibility of my favorite path. Few footsteps pack down the snow on my path around the marsh. I try it anyway this week. Sometimes you can walk on the top of crusted snow without breaking through with each heavy step. At other points you fall into some sort of repetitive clown act. I remember a girl friend heavy-footing through sun like this in Connecticut while I walked beside remaining magically on the top. Ah ha, I think, the trick is moving faster.
This day the snow played a game with me. I could go a few steps, almost get up a head of steam, then I would lose my gravity-suspension license and plunge through, going up almost to my knee. Then I would be all right for a while, then a succession of false – or falling – steps. A kind of walking roulette. Shadowy spots made for a thicker crust. Sunny spots a minefield of inevitable blunders.

Snow Field Jaunty

Walking in the air
I feel free said the joker
Falling through the crust

1.27 Icicles Bar My Window

2011-01-30T15:56:00.000-08:00

‘Snew? Snow. Snow what?
New snow swallows our driveway
Now our car’s snowhere

Found art: A completely smooth-surfaced snow sculpture, with shapely flowing lines rising to a rounded summit like an old mountain, something in the Appalachians. Somebody, or something, has fashioned a terra-formed geological formation in our driveway. It was a very cold night to work. Nothing out there, as far as I could imagine, except the wind. And the snow, the medium, the wind could work with.
Found art: now I have to find my car.
After the storm blows through, fast but very efficient – according to reports dropping several inches of snow per hour – the sun came out and we had a nice morning for shoveling. It wasn’t heavy wet snow. But it had a heft to it, and it had filled all the empty places cleared since the last storm – just about a week before – so in between the banks something more than a foot of fresh snow filled the stairs, the walks, the sidewalks, the driveway. Even in these modest dimensions it was tiring work.
I didn’t want to drive anywhere, because I couldn’t imagine how there would be anywhere to park once you got somewhere, so I left the car untouched.
Later I went out and took photos of the back garden and the icicles forming from the roof, growing along the side of the house, and extending over the outside of the window in this room. They kept growing for another day until it appeared I would have a parallel series of icy bars covering the window, and could only hope that the sun would penetrate threw the silvery translucence of ice to bring me news of the outside world. Was there a squirrel in the tree? Doing what? Birds? Neighbor activity on the large snow ridge erected next door by shovel for sledding opportunities.
Late Friday afternoon, after a much warmer day, my bars let go with a thundering crash.
I kind of miss them. Maybe icicles are winter flowers, growing in their-short lived season. Growing in airy minerals – air, water, sun, gravity. They grow down, not up. When they have unfolded to the full potential these circumstances permit, their glassy, elongated, tapered, pointy, perilous blooms come crashing down.
Snow still lies thick on the roof. Sun still melts. They’ll be back.

When Ice Flowers Fall, Watch Out

Ice blooms in winter
Glassy forms descend like bars
sealing my window

1.20 More Snow Coming

2011-01-30T15:54:00.000-08:00

The blue snow of twilight.
The silence of the snow day. Snow falling, nothing moving.
Above a snow-filled landscape another beautiful blue twilight… pink on the horizon… light welling up from the snowy yards and banks.
On my daughter’s Beirut balcony, the olive tree grows new leaves.

1.17 Trees Under Ice

2011-01-18T12:09:00.000-08:00

January: a poem

More snow-scape today
The world is so beautiful
And I am so cold

So the second blizzard of the season, the first January storm, was a wicked northeaster coming up from the South, of all places, and hitting us with a wet blast that accumulated fewer inches than predicted, but turned to ice too fast to melt. The snow was so wet and heavy, and followed so quickly by cold air that the thick coatings of frozen white coating – you can’t call it snow – are still hanging on tree limbs and trunks and signposts, the tops of shrubs, and the sides of buildings almost a week later. “Clunk,” you hear, standing outdoors, if you dare, and an ice cube falling off a branch lands at your foot. In downtown Boston they put signs outside buildings warning you against falling ice. Solid ice cubes dropping great distances are solid dangerous – but are you supposed to do?
It looks like ice cotton. Clumping onto surfaces, and hanging. Fingers too cold to pick it.
It sits so heavily on the tall maiden grass in the front garden, the queen of that garden portion’s “winter interest,” that I’m not sure when, or even if, the long limbs of bronzed grasses will fly their feathery flags again this season.
I’ve surrendered the outdoors for all but fast-tromping hikes, and am less interested in the conditions of plants than the condition of my toes.
We go walking in the Arnold Arboretum over the Martin Luther King Day weekend. Three days after the heavy-snow blizzard, the tree park is a surrealist landscape, snow blanketing all storm-facing planes of the fine-grown specimen trees. Over fifty percent of these exposed surfaces still show a thick snowy veneer in some quarters. We hike up hill and down through the park, find side paths where small parties of cross country skiers are working their way down while we climb in their tracks upwards.
The storm has also brought down limbs from some trees, including some varieties we have admired before (whose identifies I can’t find because the snow has covered their nametags). Back home, we don’t seem to be suffering any damage to the woodier plants. But the sub-freezing days that followed the storm has turned so much wet snow to ice that I’m afraid to walk around for a closer look. Who knows what I’m stepping on.
Every evening, though, the sunset and twilight reflections off frozen white surfaces are stunning. Sun too weak to melt. Sun enough to dazzle.

Ice Light: a poem

Reflections off a frozen field
Sun too weak to melt
Sun enough to dazzle

Tuesday morning snow falls again. Fat fluffy flakes cover the frozen, chunky surface, making the surfaces more beautiful. The temperature is still a few degrees below freezing, so I think maybe it will last.
But the predicted rain comes in the afternoon. All of the new snow turns to slush. What if these wet slushy puddles freeze again tonight? What will that do to the plants below?
Every year, every season, is a living laboratory for the world outside my window.

1.10 Why Am I Wasting a Tree?

2011-01-17T11:21:00.000-08:00

This year I’m wondering why there are all those six-foot evergreens suddenly sticking up in the roadside snow banks. Oh, right. We’re throwing them out.
Does this make sense?
It doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m one of the people who’s doing it.
We’ve always had live Christmas trees. When I was growing up, my parents had live trees until the kids grew up, and then my mother didn’t want the bother of vacuuming up the fallen needles so they switched to an artificial tree. Not me. We’ve had the “real thing” for 30 years. Now I’m realizing that following the natural path means that I’m artificially shortening the life of a healthy tree. Isn’t there something wrong with throwing away trees?
My response to this ah-ha moment is a strong desire to dig a hole in the frozen earth of the garden, stick the sawn-off trunk in the ground and make believe it will grow. But then I have a tendency to respond to real problems with fantasy solutions.
Okay, assuming we don’t want to give up the pagan custom of decorating a living tree inside our homes as a Christmas holiday ritual, let’s pretend for real. The ritual might be better with a druid to preside and a small party of dancing elves to liven up the ceremony, but I like the tradition of digging out the old boxes of “ornaments” which are not used to “ornament” anything else in the house at any other time of year, but for a few weeks every year must dangle shiningly from the many branches of an adolescent evergreen which believed it was still just putting down roots, branching out, and reaching for the stars. Well, no, the star was our department too.
Still, despite cutting short the natural aspirations of a perfectly good tree, we like the whole business and don’t want to give it up. So how to make the best of it? Assuming the custom came from Northern European cultures which abounded in forests of evergreens, how did these people dispose of their winter solstice holiday ritual trees? I have to believe the trunk ended up in the firewood pile, even if they waited a year for the wood to dry before they threw it in the fireplace.
Maybe they also knew which of their plants benefited from the acidic foliage of the leaves and chopped off the branches with an edged tool – stone, if they didn’t have a metal edge – and tossed them on the berry plants.
I suppose we can follow suit…
But I have social engineering fantasies too. We’re supposed to be planting trees, aren’t we, to take some of that excess carbon dioxide out of the air. Why doesn’t each municipality designate the planting field that could use some trees to hold the soil, slow erosion, soak up flood waters and serve as a wind break? Why don’t we all buy our trees dug up, instead of cut down, with a wrapped root ball below the trunk which we would insert into our suitably large Christmas tree planter – instead of a stand? And then, when the season is over and we want our living rooms back, why not remove the tree with its still-wrapped root ball, and carry it out to the DPW back-loader jammed with a neighborhood’s Christmas trees and ride down to the site to help plant them in the designated planting area?
Why not, as it were, “borrow” our Christmas trees instead of executing them?
Do I think this is likely to happen? No, I don’t, for all the usual reasons, including the inconvenient truth that we almost always choose short-term comfort and convenience over long-term investment and effort. On these grounds, I would probably go for chopping off the branches for the blueberries and saving the trunk for a putative fence post.
But it would be nice if we could think of Christmas trees as living things rather than consumer products. The habit might grow until it extended to other trees, other plants, and then the earth we live on.
But not this year… When the post-holiday clean-up came, we put our tree out for the trash.

12.22 Snow Fell

2011-01-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

Snow fell and everything was beautiful.
Snow fell and it dusted the grassy places first, or the places where there were only weeds because nobody really owned them like the edges of the rumpled sidewalks where just a curbstone separated safety from the rule of the road. Snow fell, and then it began to pile like coarse sand on the raw asphalt of the sidewalk, or like sawdust piling up from the place where the carpenter powered through posts for a new house or addition.
A half hour later, long after I’d expected the slow flutter of random flakes to stop altogether and the world to go back to being plain, old, cold gray, the snow had begun to accumulate on the road in front of our house. And then the cars seemed to disappear altogether. There were usually a few parked round, here and there, belonging to whomever, but now the street seemed empty. It grew very quiet.
Snow fell, and I kept putting down my book and walking over to the front room window to watch it. It’s funny, because there really isn’t anything to watch, certainly not any action,. No people, no movement, no story line. Snow just falls, and maybe blows a little if a breeze comes up. This wasn’t a real storm; hardly any wind to speak of. And the fall itself wasn’t thick. The flakes were about as invisible as they could be. You didn’t really see any one of them. You saw instead a kind of wave in the air. A nearly invisible interruption of the space between you – and the world, whatever you were looking at. There were a couple of tire treads in the middle of the road, so some vehicle must have rolled through. Even as I stood by a window and watched the tread trail left behind by the tires gradually began to fill with the miniscule chaff of soft, tiny particles.
That was time, falling out there, I remembered thinking. An odd thing. Time passed, inside the house, inside myself, while I was reading or cleaning up my desk or standing in the kitchen thinking what to eat. But I couldn’t see it ordinarily. I couldn’t see the sands disappear from the hourglass.
Now looking through the eyes of the front room windows I could. Time was coming down. Accumulating, lying there in the road.
And as it did, things were changing. The world was turning from one thing to another.

12.16 Not Ready For Winter

2010-12-20T15:31:00.000-08:00

There is a lot I didn’t get to.
I feel bad about the pots of hardy mums I never got to transplant into the ground. There is limit to how hardy mums can be when you leave them inside the pots where the soil freezes hard after a few nights in the twenties. They do a lot better in the earth, which holds out some hope against a sudden, deep freeze.
Some plants and shrubs that should have been pruned were not. How far down do I want to take a butterfly bush or an autumn joy sedum? I didn’t decide quickly enough, put the decision off, so now they’ll winter in their current unkempt condition and straggle in the snow like their cousins in the wild wood. Actually, I’m looking forward to a snowy background for that straggling.
I did not make much progress on the spreadsheet we started on plant care, which, if I ever do find the right information and plug it in, should remind me what to do when. I have notes from previous years, a bundle of loose papers. Redaction is required.
Am I violating the social contract with my perennial plants, the ones I’m counting on to perform again next year?
Or is the green world with its own let-it-be, let-it-go response to winter’s bitter cold showing me the way? The Tao of winter may be just this: give up, the fight is over. For a season. You can go back to hands-on management in March when the sprouts of the survivors begin pushing up again.
The naked branches of a lilac or wiegelia or the new little viburnum I put in in October may look cold and bare, but I don’t think they’re suffering. If they are, it’s too late for me to do anything about it. I had my chance in the now balmy-by-comparison days of short-eared November. Nothing is gained by feeling guilty.
Learn by example, the garden says, rest and go back to your roots. In my case that mostly means reading, plus a fair bit of lying about.

12.15 Closed for Winter

2010-12-20T15:28:00.000-08:00

Shut down. I contemplate (through a window) the garden. No greening urge manifests.
Was December always like this? The cold is colder than it used to be. I look at the numbers on the thermometer, thirty, twenty-something, and I feel worse than I think I used to when I experienced those numbers. Clearly, you have to make your peace with a little cold weather. When I feel shocked by it, instead of prepared for it, or gradually accustomed to it – acclimatized (there’s a word) – or whatever I imagine I used to feel, I think something’s wrong.
Follow the Tao of the seasons, I tell myself. When it’s too cold to be out of doors, crawl down into some low, warm place and huddle in your furs. Maybe keep a couple of large, warm-blooded animals around for additional body heat. Hopefully, the food stores are in, because you eat a lot between bouts of unconsciousness. Most of your food intake goes to fueling your body temperature.
Does winter cold always come this quickly? This absolutely?
I have assumed that perennial plants like deciduous trees go down to their roots to the vital spirit alive and survive the winter. But the ground itself got hard in a hurry this year. Do the roots get down deep enough to feel the earth beneath the crusted layers? What part of them stays alive, to receive the signals of warming earth and lengthening light next spring?
What are the winter dreams of plants?
Frigid, windy nights are punishing. It’s a struggle to stay outdoors long enough to put the garbage out.
The next morning the garbage man picks up the newspaper barrel, bangs it repeatedly against the jaw of the refuse truck to loosen and tumble out the contents, succeeds also in loosening the layer of ice on the barrel’s bottom, and then tosses it to land upside down on the pavement.
A couple hours later when I go outside to retrieve it, putting on my winter parka even for so momentary a chore, I can’t move the face-down barrel. It’s frozen to the pavement. I have to kick it a few times to loosen it. The glacial bits that crack and fall out of the barrel remain frozen days later on the street.
It’s only December. Winter doesn’t even begin until next week.

Stuck Up

Barrel upside down
Pavement locked by lips of ice
What dreams hide inside?

12.2 Stumped

2010-12-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

One of the items on our running list of long-range lifestyle improvements for several years is (or, I can now say, “was”) a tree stump. More accurately, a piece of thick tree trunk cut straight enough to serve as a low, rustic-looking drink table for our woodsy retreat beneath a tree, already furnished with two gracefully varnished Adirondack chairs and bordered by thick green ivy, purple-flowering vinca, a shade plant with fuzzy blossoms called goat’s beard, pink-flowering bi-colored lamium, and our usual supply of volunteer violets and ferns.
It had for some time been our plan to furnish the wood-chip floor between those two comfortable chairs with a stump table. How we would acquire it was another matter. But trees do come down, even big ones, and people sometimes cut thick trunks into usable, though barely movable hunks. We had seen some candidates in a wood in the Berkshires after a sudden global-warming freak storm had taken down a range of trees. But the Berkshires are a long way away, and the place where we found the table-size trunk-chunks was a good distance from the nearest road. And they looked very, very heavy.
Two possibilities: We would figure out how to maneuver some intimidatingly heavy object back to our house from not too far off. Or someone would somehow sense our need and deliver one to us. On our list of needs and desires, it ranked somewhere in the “cross your fingers and wait for the right circumstances to come along” category.
And that’s sort of how it happened.
A neighbor who remembered our wish for a table-sized stump – pretty amazing that anyone would remember such a thing about little old us – and who makes a practice of walking the neighborhood regularly with her dogs happened to come upon a large tree felled and sliced into what appeared to be usable sizes just a few blocks away. She raced over with the news.
Some days later our home-for-a-visit daughter Sonya and I took a walk through the neighborhood to get some air on a gray afternoon. I decided it was a good opportunity to check out the goods. A few blocks away, thinking aloud, I said, “Maybe when some guys come with a truck to take the pieces away I can persuade them to drop one off at our house.” What sort of inducement should I offer, I wondered. Probably more than a couple of beers.
As it happened, just as we approached small apartment complex where the tree had been felled I saw a pickup truck parked in front and a couple of guys standing around a lawn generously spotted with fat hunks of tree trunk.
I picked out the guy I thought looked like the boss and said something like, “Do all those pieces have a home?”
“Do you want one?”
How did he guess? Before I could formulate my request – “what would it take to get you to drop one off?” – he said, “It’s yours if you can take it away.”
Generous. But problematic.
I stared at the thick circular slabs of tree trunk, deciding to try to pick out the one I wanted first before moving on to the considerably harder question of how I would move it. Go get the wheel barrow? Go get the car? Could my daughter and I lift it into either of these?
The tree boss watched me dither.
“You could roll it home,” he said. Then he made the choice for me. “There,” he pointed, “take that one.
Suddenly the thing was decided for me. He helped me lift the slab up onto its diameter. I pushed it forward. It rolled, bumping over a low curbstone barrier and onto the neighborhood’s lumpy asphalt sidewalk, where it wobbled but didn’t fall, and so – even more suddenly – we were off. We shouted thanks. Then the three of us (me, daughter, stump) began rolling in what was happily the right direction because of a gentle decline in the elevation.
We rolled it into the street because all the sidewalks here have bumps. We were mildly fortunate in that no cars were coming; these are quiet streets and I thought it was even money we could make it home without encountering a moving vehicle.
But I would never have made it without Sonya. The slab’s diameter wasn’t perfectly circular, of course, so the thing rolled a little one way, then a little the other way, and it became important to make sure it didn’t encounter a parked car too solidly.
After the first block, the street leveled out, and without gravity to help keep it going I was soon winded. Sonya volunteered to take over and took it the next two blocks. Then we somehow together steered into a right-angle intersection that led directly to our driveway.
We were lucky that our trunk-rolling journey encountered no real checks – save for the moment a door flew open and an older woman with an authoritative look stood in the doorway and demanded, “Did you get permission to take that?”
A remarkable question. (Why? Is that the one you wanted?) What would she have done if the answer were no?
Our assurances that the men with the truck had given their blessing satisfied her, and we made it home at no greater cost than a certain shortness of breath.
Our new “table” now sits under the garden tree awaiting the attentions of warmer weather. I hope it feels at home.

Down to the Parsley

2010-11-30T20:23:00.000-08:00

It’s cold the day before Thanksgiving. And it’s time to say goodbye to the faded round of lilac mums I picked from the garden, matched with a few bright yellow and burnished orange ones. I dispose of them in one of my various mulch-pile resting places for old plants, but when I go out to the garden to search among the remaining mum blooms for a few that haven’t lost their bloom the wind is blowing too hard and the low afternoon sun has gone already to shadows. I give up the job after half a minute or so without picking any new ones. With only one near-white blossom preserved from the previous group of blooms, I let it stand by itself in the vase.
A single flower. “Very Japanese,” I say.
But “lonely” is the adjective Anne provides for my single-blossom arrangement.
Thanksgiving morning a delivery car driver calls the house saying she has a delivery for Anne from a Milton florist, but is hopelessly lost. We try to give her directions. Suspense builds over the next twenty minutes, the driver calling back once more for help, until she finally arrives at the front door with a bouquet of harvest-looking blooms – gold and yellow blossoms, some of them mums or overfed daisies, accompanied by sprays of interesting round little berries not resembling anything I see out of doors. The Thanksgiving bouquet is bright and bountiful looking.
Before we go through the woods for grandma’s house, or in our case up Route 95 to Uncle Joel’s, Anne goes out into the garden and finds a few branches of still shiny light-violet mums to join the single white in the vase.
But the big story is the pickings are thin. We have nothing homegrown for the Thanksgiving dinner table (except the kids). The cranberries Anne uses for the cranberry sauce are locally grown because I bought them at the farmers market, and the pumpkin for Sonya’s pumpkin bread was locally acquired from our local supermarket in a canned condition.
Cold weather, especially the windy sort we got for the weekend, keeps me from wanting to meditate in the meditation garden. Outdoors I desire only to keep moving. We go for walks. Saul and I take in the sunset with a quick circuit of the marsh walk one early evening.
“It’s still not five o’clock!” he says, shocked, as we arrive back home in the dark. Where he lives, in Cincinnati, at the western end of the Eastern standard time zone sunset clocks in at almost an hour later.
We hike in the Blue Hills quarries one day last weekend, and traipse through the Arnold Arboretum in Forest Hills the next one. Still thankful, by the time Monday night rolls around we have eaten everything in the house, leftovers included.
I remember, however, my last vegetable garden resource, the redoubtable parsley, which has grown slowly all summer and fall and shakes off cold weather like the Canada Geese and other local waterfowl turn their tail feathers on the icy skim which wrinkles the ponds of the arboretum.
I clipped a couple of handfuls to bring inside – along with a few buds of broccoli – when the wind died down on Sunday. Monday night Sonya mixed the parsley into a simple sauce for pasta, and garnished the meal with the last garden tomato slices on toast with pesto made from our basil.
The garden is passing, but the children are home.

New Wrinkles

The geese do not mind
The skim of ice which threatens
To wrinkle us all.

11.26 The Season

2010-11-29T20:30:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered the real reason why we love this time of year. Like most so-called discoveries, it was really the recovery of something forgotten and it came by accident – sort of like Columbus running into America when he was looking for Japan. Not that I’m any Columbus.

It had been a dark, almost smoky afternoon, going to full black of night by the time I pulled into the misshapen urban hole of angry traffic and scattered, frightened pedestrians the center of the small city where I live routinely turns into at this time of day. Rush hour; end of day. Only an important mission would bring me here at this hour: I was having trouble with my eyes. I needed new lenses, in order – nota bene – to see.

I pulled into the first curbside parking place that presented itself, even though I was unsure of my destination, because parking can be especially difficult this time of day. Commuters vulching over your taillights eager to grab the next millimeter of forward progress, incredulous that anyone would want to go somewhere in this place rather than through it to somewhere else. And one wrong move in the irrational world of city center streetscape, as I have discovered to my sorrow, can mean long minutes of regret, frustration – and the boiling claustrophobic anger road failure breeds in the hardiest of spirits.

So, with this experience in mind, I took the corner spot, stepped out of the car, and stuck my hand out to feel for rain. We had already been through some weather that day – the sudden flurry of thickened precipitation, raindrops growing cold and sticky, bumping and clumping together on the way down. The misty, vaporish rain, less like precipitation than somebody continually ringing out damp sponges over the city, accounted for the air’s violet tinge. The air was very damp; it was also soaked in a wet smoky clinging umbra that was both theatrical and silent.

Somehow day had become night. There is not much late afternoon left in the last week of November, of course, so a dark afternoon becomes night in a soul’s whisper.

No real rain moistened my extended palm as I stood on the solitary sidewalk, though dampness coated the air like sweat on a glass; so I relaxed, knowing I could proceed at any easy pace. I took a few steps in what I hoped was the right direction and, suddenly, with no warning, utterly unexpectedly, the wonder of it was…

Everything was beautiful. Irrationally, piercingly, the way only something seen fresh because it is also completely remembered can be. Founded, I decided, on a unique moment in solar time: twilight hour in early winter, helped along by the slow advance of early, wet, wintry gloom.

This is what we mean, what we really mean, by “the season.” The way I parse the moment’s warm but lonesome poetry, the effect stems from the conjunction of lighted shop windows over dark streets. The world goes dark, shockingly early; the lights go on. This conjunction – nature darkening, city streets lighting up – takes place only at this time of day at this time of year: darkness before five o’clock, a time when it’s still “business hours” on commercial district streets – and therein lies the magic. After five o’clock, those shops and small offices start turning off their lights; employees go home. The effect weakens.

As the year advances beyond the winter solstice, the sky stays lighter longer and the commercial blocks have no need to beam their contrasting windows of light into the world’s darkness.

It’s the poetry of the lighted shop windows – irrespective of what may or may not be in them – that wakens our nostalgic love of “the season.” And it’s this hour of the day, this moment of darkness’s heart-stopping arrival in a time of dwindling daylight, that opens the “season” to our senses.

Winter days begin to lengthen after Christmas. We all feel the change in January, it’s already a different season then. Still winter, but the world is growing lighter, an effect heightened by snow cover. Soon daylight lingers beyond five o’clock’s closing time, and we no longer have the crucial conjunction of dark sky and lighted storefronts. Only businesses that stay open nights, restaurants, bars, tattoo parlors, light up the city streets – it’s not the same. It’s another season then (cabin fever winter, maybe); it’s not this one.

This brief, once a year overlapping of light and dark is what makes the holiday season. These are the physical sensations that trigger the memories, a conditioned response to light and dark (probably colder temperatures play a role too) that releases the flood of sensations and associations built up over the course of our lives. Routines: rushing home in the dark; getting off the bus; driving a tired highway to make it home for Christmas; the glinting low-angled sun, even at midday, when we round a familiar bend and look at a stand of bare trees; when we smell the smoke of someone’s fire place or the pinch of someone else’s pine tree, taste a liquor on the tongue we virtuously avoid the rest of the year, see a round of familiar faces. Older; but still familiar…

I wander down the city center street, into the evocative gloom, interrupted by geometries of human light. Cars drive past the holiday lights and the nativity scene where “Baby Jesus” was stolen from the manger two years ago and the local paper blared the “story” on the front page day after day. Pedestrians double-time halfway across main street to the traffic island, a desert isle where they wait, stranded, desperation straining their features, for the change of the light to rescue them.

But the violence of crazy machines flying through downtown is assimilated this season into the wild fluency of the looming love-hungry urban dark, as the clock nudges past four thirty. A mother and a daughter walk slowly on a shop visit of their own. Clerks stare from the temples of their lighted interiors at the few passersby, registering a solitaire like myself without expression, counting the day’s last minutes to close-up maybe, or hoping to reel in a last fish. The wider lighted interiors of the furniture showroom; a bare martial arts studio. The towering urban mall edifice with floors of offices inside, doctors’ offices, talkers’ offices, many of these lighted, some already dark, some to stay lighted for hours.

The heavy beasts of the metro buses panting with fatigue and contained fury as they hang in the intersection, judging the moment of the lunge into the main way; the gritty smell and scraping rattle of the engine.

The season is not these things, which are always there, though somehow transformed this time of year. It’s not the department store music, which we’re tired of. It’s certainly not shopping, though some people claim to enjoy it (I’m skeptical, personally). It’s not what we think it is.

It’s something more universal. It’s the light; and the darkness. It’s the universe calling us, buttonholing us, making us pay attention.

I am going the wrong way, I realize at last, after a skeptical reading of street numbers. I turn around and walk back down main street until I come to the store in front of which I have fortuitously parked my car. It’s the shop I wanted. I go inside to get my new lenses. I have remembered how to see.

11.17 Spare Beauty

2010-11-17T08:51:00.000-08:00

The garden has a spare, glinty beauty today. It rained last night, and the sun flared out suddenly this morning. Some more leaves have come down. I was sorry to lose them from the trees, but they glistened on the ground, the orange maple leaves from a volunteer tree sheltering under the oak lending a color patch next to a fence and the burnished cherry tree leaves circling around the garden’s focal center.
Big dark-blue berries on an evergreen planted in front of the evergreen fence. The caramel leaves of the chocolate flower decaying into tissue paper, soft material against the still solid foliage of the grasses, the evergreens and a butterfly bush which for some reason maintains its green as if it were July. The deep red foliage of the Japanese maple bush full at its own feet like flowers tossed before royalty.
Flattened yellow spears of the day lilies mingle with brown tree leaves. The spirea holds its foliage. The leaves of the plumbago have a deep rusty-iron red. The low, light-green thyme groundcover mats are still bright – like grass, like the parsley in the vegetable plot, they like this time of year – but are striped now with brown leaves.
I cut down some stalks last weekend – perennials, cone flowers, balloon flowers, everything that had given up the ghost and was wearing out its gaunt, harvest season welcome. Removing that layer of fading foliage and stems spared down and sharpened the look of the back garden landscape.
The space has a composition as a whole because, like a wild place, there’s enough variety. The colors and textures and different shapes and sizes weave together in a natural way. The garden is a miniature park. I wander along the maze of the curving paths, getting lost – mentally, that is – for a few moments here and there. That’s what you want. That’s the point.

11.16 November Cool

2010-11-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

It’s a gray day. A little flash of mostly sunlit sky earlier this morning, highlighting the autumn colors in the garden, but now we’ve settled into a kind of a mild overcast. But the gold and bronzed colors still stand out. The weeping cherry tree hangs at its peak, a lighter yellow-orange mingling with darker bronzed-orange leaves.
It’s not cold. It’s not “a beautiful fall day” – words which suggest deep blue sky and a crown of October-yellow trees. There will be no blue sky today.
But what we have is perfect in its own way. It’s the perfect “cool, gray day.” Not cold. Not windy, no wind at all. Very still and meditative. The world keeping a low profile and mulling things over.
Walking down a street, any ordinary residential street, on a day like this is evocative. It evokes all the other such days – and there are a lot of them. Walking home at lunchtime in elementary school. After school in junior. Is there a school yard nearby, the sound of a basketball? The cool gray days of childhood, youth, middle age.
The day is redolent of all other such days, which if you add them up, would probably produce a very high total. The days before winter starts; the days when winter ends. This one reminds you of things. What it mostly reminds you of is being alive.
I start in my own garden, then walk around a block. Add a few more blocks, turning the world into a garden.
The empty sidewalks, silent houses, quiet landscape tell their story. It’s a story about a still, cool, comfortable, palpably thoughtful mid-November day. And nobody, which is to say everybody, is telling it.

11.10 Acquainted with the Twilight

2010-11-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

A day passes, then another. I’m still staring out the window (well, with breaks).
The western sky turns gold at four-eighteen today. There’s hardly been any sun all week, but this evening there’s just enough to smear a partly clear sky with a golden and pink haze of November sunsets.
All months have great sunsets, but in no month are they more important than in November, when we are re-acquainted with The Dark. I am one, Frost tells us, who is acquainted with the night. But really, Robby, we’re all pretty familiar with those dark nights of both soul and body. And in the northern latitudes those nights come very soon in November.
November is the shock month for sun-worshippers – or dark-cringers (for whom declining sunlight gives a case of the SAD) – because of our quaint, civilized habit of screwing around with the clock. Since we run our lives by the clock – it’s pretty much the most important tool we have (after language, maybe), for millions of us the clock says when to go to work and when we can leave – lurching back an hour precisely at the time of year when sunlight is dribbling out of our daily quotient at a rate which made primitive folks “light beseeching fires” and which still worries our inner savage with the dim possibility that we may be running out of it altogether is something of a shock. It’s a wake-up, so to speak, when what we want to do is go to sleep.
People who make a practice of staring at the western sky at the end of the day do so this month at an abruptly earlier time of “day” – to use the word loosely – because we’re used to thinking that our labors run from “sun to sun.”
At the moment, however, now 4:37, the crimson tides of the heavens have taken over half the visible firmament above our heads, a virtuoso display by the Early Evening Painters of November Skies. As if to prove something.
I think it’s proven. I am astonished, shaken to my roots. Cosmic influences really do run the show. Light and darkness tell us what to do. And when we mess with the rhythm, our psyches scurry like un-hilled ants.
Admittedly, we’ve loused up the original signals by the invention of artificial light. And our profit for it, to paraphrase Caliban, is we know how to work. Long days in the office, at the computer, minding the shop, caring for kids, continue regardless of nature’s signals. (One thing, though, aside from scraping away at some leaves there’s not much to do in the garden.)
Peasant farmers knew what to do in the winter. They rested up. They took it for granted that by mid-summer day they’d be working sixteen hour days once again and feeling rather good about the prospect of having a crop. But in winter it was time for the farmer to drink up his cider, as one of those childhood rhymes had it. Time to climb under a forgiving haystack and sleep away dull hours. Increasingly there will be less to do (and less to eat) as the cold months deepen, then wear away at the edges.
We’re supposed to go with the flow, but these days we have to go against it. Not so hard to do in brilliant October, the Disney season of psychedelic nature, but suddenly we’ve been short-weighted in a bargain we didn’t know we made.
Nevertheless, sunset’s earlier arrivals, its importuning twilights, make us pay attention to the big picture by the simple device of arriving so much earlier.
Sunset’s pink-lavender extravagance (at four forty-four) has been rolled up by a sudden accession of cloud bank, except for a deepening glow-field banding the horizon and putting a dark pink background behind the black silhouettes of bare trees.
Now look at it, a few minutes later, suddenly a stunning violet-dark, everything Flemish tinted, a Rembrandt in every window. It’s almost worth that extra hour.

11.8 Bare Statements

2010-11-10T14:39:00.000-08:00

November is the hardest month of the year, because it gives us the best part of the day before we’re ready for it. It’s happening in the fours this week, as most of the country turns back the clocks to daylight standard time. It’s happening now, right now. My windows darkening, perceptibly, by the minute, as I sit in an artificially lighted interior. Every time I glance over there is less definition, less to see (I suppose, since we prefer to see distinctions, not undifferentiated planes), darkness filling in more of those shapes still visible. Trunks of a tree; of course; what would there be in the sun-short months of the northern latitudes? The façade of a neighbor’s house, dimming around the lighted rectangles of two well-set windows, like eyes cut carefully in a jack-o-lantern.
Above, between the branches, the sky is a single shade of inky purple, the foreground nothing but a darkening blur. Soon reflections of those lights from inside the room will eat up all there is in the visual field of a darkening window.
It’s the big change, which takes place at the end of each day (some days a lot more clearly than others), the cosmos big-footing in and defining our condition. It’s astronomy’s big statement, and it’s easier to catch it when sunset comes so early in the course of clock-driven “day” – which is of course, not over, though the magical closing hour of five o’clock is fast approaching.
It’s not easy to appreciate, however, because in the human-measured time of day, we’re still on the job; or, worse, gob-smacked in the commute. Where did the day go?…

11.1 Cold Front

2010-11-08T14:01:00.000-08:00

Once again tearing a page off the calendar has correlated with a pronounced change in the weather. Cold and clear, thirties this morning. I worried about the Mandeville rose, a conspicuous but exposed annual, sitting in an oversized pot on the corner of the patio. But it looked fine. The deep red tubular flowers, which age and drop in the manner of all flowers, are still doing their thing.
Our plan, or rather intention, is to take this plant indoors before the first real-frost day. But the pot is very big, filled with heavy soil, plus a wooden arbor frame for its climbing, twining branches, and doesn’t give much when I tried an experimental drag… We all know about good intentions.
Then, a few days later, we get a couple of rainy days. Not particularly cold, but a steady enough rain to bring down the colored leaves of October. Half of the orange-red leaves of the maple shade tree out front fell one day; the other half the next.
The rain stopped, but the leaves continued. The mulberry tree on the side of the house, which I risked life and limb trimming this summer, waited until the last week of October to turn, then went totally yellow on a long golden day as I kept turning my head to watch. One breezy, brighter day in the first week of November all those pale yellow leaves began slowly pouring out of the great pitcher of sky.
I went back to the salt marsh along the Quincy shoreline. Pretty much all the leaf-bearing plants there stripped bare too. Color in the marsh lives in low shrubs, saplings, and viney crawlers. Those deep reds and yellows I had enjoyed last week were passed now.
It grew cold, and clear. But breezy. I looked out the study window into the golden midday light to see a flotilla of brown leaves sweeping down. The oak tree? Even the oak, this soon? Memory suggests that the great oak out back held onto its rusty red-brown leaves a lot longer than the other trees in other years. What does it know that we don’t? (Well, a lot.)
November so far is a succession de-leaving days. It’s the opposite, I suppose, of succession planting in the spring.

November Rain

Beautiful trees, birds
Their calls falling through chill hours
Yellow leaves like rain

10.23 Late October, Home and Away

2010-10-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

We didn’t bring the camera.
The sky was gray, the air cool, the atmosphere – melancholy.
Romantic melancholy, full of all that had passed.
The woods were sere, brown leaves thick on the paths below my feet. Red-leaved shrubs fired up along the roadsides.
The trees had a different look. Tightening up for the serious season. Toughing it. Letting go of superfluities, all of those light, fluttery, lacey sun-catchers. Summer stuff.

Late October, Berkshire Hills

A new look, sere, bare
Full of all that was passing
The trees? Fortitude

There are always two ways (at least) in the woods. Behind Stockbridge Bowl, the path off of Olivia’s Outlook, called the Walsh Trail, breaks time and time again. I take the first one toward the ridge. The red blaze on the tree looks thirty years old. Who has come this way and not returned?
Alone, with the chance to get lost by myself, I watch my step carefully. I will be gone long enough, but not too long. The trail is tricksy. I break off and reconnect time and time again. I find the view from the “Ridge Trail” which I remember from previous visits. Go a little further, a little higher. A second, relaxed sort of summit with a cleared top, where someone built a rude wooden bench long ago. I stand on the bench to get the best view. In one direction I am impressed to see a hillside about seventy percent bare of leaves, stands of evergreen interrupting stretches of bare branches. In the other direction the trees are still turning, with few or even no bare trees.
We drive home Saturday night, and on Sunday, back in Quincy, a city, discover more of the same business happening here among the trees.
The maple in front of the house is peaking. Orange-leafed, orange-red, some reddish spots too. Some plants in the perennial back garden show autumn colors as well. The leaves of the green-leaved evening primrose turn dark red, then drop. The blue-flowered balloon flowers turn a pale, ripe yellow, almost like beech trees in the wood. The ornamental grasses have tossed up their seed heads. A grass called Northern Sea Oats makes thin, flat-sided delicate seeds – like stamped coins in the shape of arrowheads – tiny embryos bared without much cover, and let their leaves fade to a dull gold.

Who hath not seen thee [Keats asks of Autumn] oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor…

He’s here too, all around us.

10.29 Carpet of Leaves

2010-10-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

Orange leaves with red patches among them cover the walkway between the driveway and the house. The big maple fighting for space with power lines, beautiful for weeks, is now on its season-ending half-life for autumn color. Peaking, earlier this week. Then a rainy night; not a bad rain, a soft rain, but coming at just the wrong time for leaf maintenance. About half those perfect color orange leaves lay on the ground in the morning. They make a bright carpet around the house.
Now it is well known feature of the fall season that many people get in their automobiles and drive scores or even hundreds of miles into the “country,” to look at the color compositions of the New England woods. They drive and look, adding their share of carbon loading to the atmosphere, and stopping occasionally at designated view points.
Meanwhile back in the cities and towns of the same New England, folks can’t wait to wrap up every last fallen leaf and stuff them into bags, black plastic mainly though some have adopted the recyclable paper bags, and have them promptly removed. Hooray! they say, We’ve done it! Bare pavement once again!
What is this haste to reveal the impervious surface, the asphalt underpinning of settled American life?
Why not leave the still colored leaves on the ground where nature put them and enjoy the effect? The novelty will last at least a few weeks, then wear off as the leaves dry and turn brown. Then you can remove them, giving yourself good reason to spend a few hours outdoors in drear times.
Right now, though, while trees are thinning overhead, bald patches appearing here and there, the thick blanket of orange and yellow on the ground reflects the burnished orange in the cherry tree in the back garden and enlivens the scene from bottom to top.
The leaves of a pair of young rose of Sharon bushes turn yellow, the top-heavy structures looking like two lemon-yellow ice cream cones, the rusty-tawny leaves of a big hosta beside one of them complementing the color. The leaves of a recently added plumbago have turned a coppery red-brown, and the drying blossoms of a low hydrangea offer slashes of carmine.
But the biggest color field stretches from the crowns of the shade trees to the carpets of color those trees spread beneath their thinning canopies on the ground.
Why is anybody in a hurry to get rid of that?

10.27 Great Blue Herons in a Quincy Marsh

2010-10-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

10.27 Great Blue Herons in a Quincy Marsh
First, it was beautiful. More beautiful than it had been in a year.
Where wild low vines crawled over the earth, their leaves had turned maroon, charging the landscape with dark red patches. Where the marsh grass stood up, the late afternoon light had caught the bronze autumn coloring of the grasses and burnished them with gold.
And wherever the marsh cordgrass (spartina patens) lies flat – which is most of any salt marsh – on what is generally dry ground, water had submerged the surface, shining in pools amid the grass.
Maybe it was a recent rain, or the unusually high water level in the marsh, but all the colors in the marsh were shining. Along with pale yellow leaves in the bordering wood, reddish scrub and vines, bronzed two-toned marsh grasses consisting of waves of reddish-brown crossed by lines of golden-tawny.
And then the stick figure of the wading bird. For a bird its size, the folded-up stock-still version of the great blue heron can be hard to see. I am walking straight toward before its image materializes in my vision. Even then it looks like a sapling stick, a little bit twisted up besides the tall grasses. It’s also perched in an unusual place at very edge of the narrow walking trail, a normally dry surface. But today that that part of the marsh is half afloat.
Now the thing is, because the day was cloudy, the light unpromising, when I left the house I considered taking the camera but decided, no, don’t bother. So I have no camera. Now the sun, which has apparently been hiding itself by the shore, is gold-sharp and shiny with watery reflections.
Fortunate heron, free of undue stalking by me. But since the path is taking me directly toward him I have no choice but to approach. A few steps later, the bird uncoils his anatomy, opening his enormous wings to increase his body surface by about 800 percent, and takes off around the bend.
He doesn’t know the trail will round that bend as well and bring me straight toward his new hiding place.
This pas de deux happens twice more as the trail curves, bringing the out of sight intruder back into bird’s eye view. I approach, he looks askance, considers, then opens his lithe grey-blue sky-finders and glides away. At the third sighting I realize there’s another great blue, identical battleship coloring in the marshes directly behind him, about two hundred feet away. This one sees me first and even though I’m keeping a considerable distance is the first to extend wings and lift off. He/she (matey?) flies all the way across the marsh and is lost to sight.
The first bird takes a shorter hop, in response, but as I draw close once again a tall colony of marsh grass intervenes between his silent wading perch and my slow trail so I get within fifteen feet or so before he realizes someone’s popping up again. This time he takes off without a backward look, grabbing more air, and disappears from sight. I go back to marveling over the great color in the marsh grass.
It’s wet underfoot in places where I usually walk without fear of wet feet. After a little squishing, I take some detours, and finally get back on trail in the second half of the loop, well on the way to returning. Then the heron explodes, though silently, out from some trees and flies low across my path over the marshes before disappearing over a distant tree line.
I can’t count how many good shots I’ve missed.
So the next day, of course, I bring the camera, and the sun is shining. But it’s too much sun. The colors aren’t the same, beautiful by any standard and only failing to measure up the heights set the day before. And the marsh is no longer wet and shiny; maybe that takes some of the luster off. Whatever happened to the tides or the tide management at the watergate has drawn off the water.
I do see one of the great blue herons. It’s a long away off, though, across the flattened grass, a place not interesting to a fish-hunting wading bird because it now has no water, and even then gives me a fish-eyed glance as my trail comes round and leads me toward him. He’s still a long way off when he lifts off and I start clicking.
It’s too far. The perfect happens only when it chooses, and never on schedule.

The Perfect Moment

Great blue in the grass
Red marshes shining behind
Camera at home

10.22 A Buzz on My Thumb

2010-10-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

More adventures with my little friends. I’ve been sorry to see the abundance of summer life die off this time of year. I leave a pair of thick, rubberized garden gloves on the front porch under a chair. The weather gets colder. I do no outdoor work for several days. The sun comes out. But the wind is strong on a Friday afternoon, and since we are going away the next day I want to pick any tomatoes with enough red on them to make it possible for them to ripen on a window sill before we go. It may soon get too cold for the remaining fruit. I may be running out of time. So I pick up my gloves, mostly because my hands are cold, and go out to the veggie garden to pull off cherry tomatoes and hopefully something bigger.
As I work there’s this odd sensation in my left hand. It’s like a nervous tick, or the slight spasm of an overstressed muscle… in a funny place, though. The surface of the large knuckle on my left thumb. A nerve twitch? A muscle spasm – on the edge of my thumb?
I go into denial. Busy. Not really feeling anything. Sometimes you imagine a mosquito on your arm or leg because you know they’re around. You have just felt them; you have just killed one. You skin pickles, it writhes with imagined insect presence. Imagined ants crawling on your stomach and back. Sitting on Crane Beach when the greenhead flies arrive. Who has not suffered imaginary (or real) insect attacks? … Let’s not go there.
I need both hands to pick the tomatoes. Hold the branch with one hand, detach with the other, drop the little red ball into the bowl. But I feel it again. Ignore it. Feel it again.
A light turns on. Oh, damn. Something inside my glove? I rip the glove off my left hand. Shake it hard. Something seems to happen. But it happens fast, and I can’t really see what.
I look on the ground in front of me. I look at the front of my sweatshirt. I shake the glove again, but now I’m convinced something was moving in there and I simply refuse to put it back on. I drop the glove in the corner of the container, among the little red tomatoes, and go back to picking. My eye falls on a dark spot on my shoulder.
It’s a bee.
I brush it off reflexively.
…So that’s what the buzz of a bee feels like on your skin. The tactile equivalent of the buzz, the shaking to life of the half-frozen honey bee. What it’s like to have a bee, warming back to life after too much cold, buzz itself to life on your skin.
I don’t know if the bee made it back to the land of living sufficiently to find his way to winter quarters’ warmth within the hive before the cold wind of late afternoon slowed his motor a final time. But I kind of hope that he did.

10.20 Off the Shelf

2010-10-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

It’s the time of year when I haunt big box stores for plant sales. This year it’s a Lowe’s in a neighboring town that I would never imagine going out of my way for – except for noticing on an unrelated errand that the store boats a “garden center,” half open to the elements, the way they are at all the big box stores. We went there looking for stone to beef up some of the paths in the back that get overrun by weeds over my thin layer of blue-gray pea stone. I like pea stone, and I don’t even mind overgrown paths, but that’s another story.
Having filed in my memory the intelligence that a plant sell-off of leftovers was taking place, I snuck back there the other day when the sun was shining on the chance that prices would be better than at the Home Depot stores I’ve already checked out. They were. I had a concise mental shopping list. Something for “winter interest against the back fence.” Some more shade-loving but flowering plants, a rarer combination to come across by accident, intended for the shady side of the house along a stone path made of irregular blue granite. We’ve already invested, both money and muscle, in this area, so I’m determined to keep improving it.
So far we have spring flowering groundcovers there, but not much for the rest of the season. By late summer it gets dull and this year a little barren along the path’s shady border. Worse, the long dry season this year took a toll on some of the groundcovers. The pitiful October roster: Violets that dissipate by autumn, with weather-bitten leaves. Hosta that begins losing interest in life as soon as their flowering season is over. Lilies of the valley that have done a vanishing act long before fall begins. The sweet woodruff which this year executed a classic bubble, to borrow a term from the still depressing dysfunction in the financial services sector, expanding at a stunning rate in the spring and dying back spectacularly in the hot months, leaving browned out patches where factories have shut down, main streets rolled up, whole families fleeing to the edge of cities to live in shantytowns. Someone should investigate, really.
So I need revival, renewal. I need to attract new industries. Or buy them, actually (which is why gardening is better than economic planning); and while fall is reputed a good planting season, October is running down, and the plants you can find on sale in plant centers have for the most part spent months growing root-bound in undersized plastic homes.
Location: a strip mall in Weymouth. In the near-empty garden center of a Lowe’s, one woman going round the joint with a shopping cart and a rather dashing hydrangea, no other evident customers, I find some good stuff, what might be just the stuff I’m looking for, and am confronted almost at once with a choice of generously under-priced holly shrubs to buy for the “winter interest” spot along the back fence. Where I can gaze at it all winter and be thankful for something green. There are hollies with red berries and then something called a “blue holly.” The blue holly have small berries in the formative stages of existence which currently appear whitish with a patina of what looks like freezer-fuzz but almost certainly isn’t. I am intrigued. It will give me a cold weather occupation, going out back every once in a while to check on the status of the freezer-fuzz.
So I settle on the blue. But how to choose which blue holly plant?
Oh sure, the best or healthiest looking. But I’m taking the longer view here. Most, even possibly all – at this time of year – of the rest are likely to end up in the dumpster. Or some sort of “recycled” equivalent adopted by a supplier; dumped on a mulch pile, perhaps. I suppose suppliers may take back some of the bigger, costlier products, the trees, if the investment in them justifies further costs, and winter them over, re-pot them in the spring, and give them another season of shelf-life.
But – shelf-life, think of it. What kind of life is that?
They wait in the garden center all season hoping someone will come and say, oh that one’s cute, and buy and take it home and release it into its proper element – the earth, I’m thinking here – and maybe give it a little water at the start and then basically get out of its way.
So now here I am, the last chance shopper, choosing one holly bush off the shelf – just one from a whole extended family of imprisoned plants -- to sit by a back garden fence and give me visual company. I’m playing god. It’s a customer selection which is different from most kinds of shoppers’ choices because after all I’m dealing with living things. And almost all the other aspiring trees, shrubs, and perennial flowering plants in the joint are likely to end up in some version of a trash can.
How “contingent” are the lives of living, natural beings! Contingent, the word I learned in philosophy class back when everything in the world was about to change (but didn’t), means dependent on chance. On the unpredictable, on breaks; on forces larger than oneself.
People are living, natural beings too. We’re part of the game as well. We take our chances. Someone picks us off the shelf and helps us grow, or doesn’t. Gives us a job or a scholarship, or gives it to someone else. All our constituent parts come together properly to form a healthy little unit, or they don’t. Some families function well; some don’t.
We make choices as well, certainly. We’re part of that greater “contingency” – and our choices affect others. But only those under the sway of the ruling American mythology, and truly only those when young, really believe that the course of our lives is up to us.
Stay healthy. Sure, but health is not always within an individual’s control. Work hard. Yeah, but you might get laid off or any number of macro-economic contingencies can pop up to constrain your prosperity. Survive. Good idea – so don’t smoke, drink and drive, text and drive, take drugs, have unprotected sex, chew and talk, put a slippery rug in the bathroom, or find yourself in a war or on an icy road. Clearly, there are a lot factors which may come into play, if you look at the big picture.
So mostly, understandably, we don’t look at the big picture. We look at the view close to home. At a garden, perhaps. At a small blue-holly shrub, which is now planted against a fence.
Odds are that bush isn’t thinking about all the others left behind in the store… I, however, may go back and buy them all.

10.10 Sunday in the Park

2010-10-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

10.10 Sunday in the Park

We find a new land today in a state forest that has been here all the
time and ignored by us for no apparent reason. No one is there in the
guardhouse, so we save the $2 entrance fee. In the parking area
children investigate brook-fed pond with a waterfall, watched by a parent with a camera.
The trail head is just across the road. The trail goes up up up, gradually, steadily…while the stream that fed the pond follows at a lower elevation. Yellow
leaved trees, beeches; a few brilliant reds with small leaves. Between
them streaks of moving water in the stream flashing through the trees,
louder in hearing than seeing. At some point the water disappears from sight while it grows in the silence of the wood. We find a slightly slower path that brings
us closer to the ravine where the stream twists amid
rapids. We listen and look down and snap a few photos.

The Stream Spoke Truth

Its roar follows us
We have seen its happy end
Ripples flash through trees

Later when the path, still ascending, comes to a fork, we try the inland path, moving away from the stream in hopes of finding the trail loop to take us back to start. But this fork wanders, still rising, maybe to the so-called Honee mountain, from which there is no reported view; but it lacks markings or indications of any sort.
Without certainty that we are on a loop back to a known destination,
growing a little weary in the climbing muscles though the route is
beautiful, we call a halt, turn back and retrace our steps. We find the lower path that takes you close to the rush and shine of the rapid stream again and make a picnic there: orange, bread, cheese, a chocolate cookie each.
The way down is easier, but still dazzling, winding gently through shadows shot with light. Tree tops parting the sky. The sky perfectly blue, a deep unreasoning blue, though later Anne notices a few chalky cirrus swirls against the blue, the shape of wind. A few birds skipping ahead. Absolutely no one else crossing our way.
We drive a paved forest road that leads past the Azalea Wood to an off-road lookout from a bald summit over a wide sweep of horizon-filling mountains. North, toward Greylock? We’re not sure. We see a trail that starts up here behind the turnoff on the summit, the skyline trail. We think of trying that one next time.
That evening we watch the sun set and twilight deepen from a sensible place with a great view: the dining room of the cottage.

What to Make of the Moon

It hides among trees
A pilgrim’s light among hills
Bringer of new time

10.9 Paradise Retreat

2010-10-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

Classic fall day in the Berkshires. We drive to a nature conservation
property we have visited many times, probably every Columbus Day
weekend for the last dozen since we first discovered the site far enough away that, when you look down from the high point (Hurlburt Hill) on a spectacular tree-lined mountain view you have your backside on the Connecticut line….
It’s the annual October retreat. Three days without work, TV, mail, internet, almost anything but nature and the family summer place called “the cottage.” The evening activity is looking at stars or making a fire. We don’t go out to eat. We bring a bottle of wine, make simple meals featuring lots of bread. We go for hikes.
So on Saturday, a classic cloudless mild October day, we go to Bartholemew’s Cobble, a nature preserve located on the – take a wild guess – Housatonic River and which we have visited enough that I almost know the way. Here’s the report.

What the Trees Think

Roots sunk in rocks, you
Wait for winter winds to shake
Your heart is evergreen

Geese Flew Overhead on a Perfect Autumn Afternoon

Fighting the wind to
Keep their ranks in order like
Soldiers on parade

Where the Current Flows

The river moved slow
Brown the tint of memory
Shallow lies the soul

The Forest Tribe Thrives Together

Grow high, if at all
Lean in on one another
Falling, feed the roots

First Fall Twilight

First blue, then pink, the
Sky turns black above the hill
Painting in the cold

10.7 A beautiful day

2010-10-12T15:18:00.000-07:00

After three cool, overcast, rainy days in which all I think about is
whether I’m cold and how much work I have to finish when, the sun comes
out on a Thursday afternoon and I am suddenly unreasonably happy for no known cause. The time and place of this happiness is, oddly enough, getting into the car and driving down streets I regularly drive in order to bypass a traffic light; finding more after school
traffic where it usually lurks; fighting through that and arriving beneath a gloriously sunlit cosmos – October blue sky, turning trees, a bend in a
local stream, bizarrely affecting music on the radio (a version of
Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, everybody’s favorite guitar music, but without guitar and with vocals instead – sung in French!) – … at yet another busy intersection and pushing my way through and over to the fly-by-night outdoor plant vendor plunked down on a parking lot between a supermarket and a new car sales lot.
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot, then put a little bit of paradise back on top. Hundreds and hundreds of hardy mum plants. I don’t
need mums. I have plenty of perennial mums in the back garden, and I bought some new ones in pots for the front steps somewhere else the other day. I want
asters; here at the poetically named Route 3A Artery Plant Center there are only some blue ones in large pots for $20 each. Ahhh… no sale. However they also have music, loud FM radio piped-in rock music that I ordinarily detest. Yet on this occasion, while walking between rows of hundreds of mums to enjoy a last blast of color, I am captivated
by an even more deeply affecting piece of music than the Frenchified Rodrigo – a high energy and emotionally supercharged rock song from (it can only be ) the late
sixties because why else would I care? It’s as if I hadn’t heard it
since then and am immediately transferred to some earlier careless day. Why does it fill me with such piercing joy?
Well, I am ready to go home at last since the universe is still a beautiful
place even if I can’t find my asters, but I decide, what the heck, to check out a place
I’ve already checked on before on this quest. I see the owner’s truck, know he’s in,
cross the street brazenly in front of traffic, nobody wants to kill
anybody in the sunshine, right?, and find some barely serviceable blue asters
with the dead leaves trimmed off, squeezed into square-shaped pots that I don’t
remember seeing there before, or else they were also discouragingly overpriced. I go
inside the shop, ask Alan, the owner, how much are the asters – he says he doesn’t
have any – then remembers – he’d given up on selling these ones – and gives
them to me for $1 each since he was only going to stick them in the ground himself.
I take five, go home and in the still enchantingly autumn-lovely late afternoon light find places, dig in the dirt, soak, cut up the pot-bound roots, fertilize, plant, and admire my new acquisitions. The one with the brightest remaining blossoms lines up behind last month’s happily acquired pink guaras to continue the new fall color zone. Yes! Life is worth living.

10.4 It’s Cold

2010-10-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

October. First full month of autumn. The classic fall weather month begins on the rough side. One nice day. Then it turns windy, cool, and rains.
Everything changes in October. It’s the obverse of April, freezing you with hints of winter, teasing you with nostalgic reprises of summer warmth.
I stop worrying about watering all the potted plants – and all the “sensitive plants” – and worry instead about turning on the heat, pulling all the storm windows down, finding warm socks and long-sleeved shirts. Other seasonal preoccupations: keeping my feet warm, making tea in the afternoon. Hoping it will turn warm again so we can breakfast outdoors a few more times. Wondering what I will find to do outdoors when it gets too cold to simply wander among the plants and, well, contemplate.
Outdoor lovers have nowhere to go. The honey bees begin stiffening on the flowers, caught in the act by the season’s unseasonable weather. Bees – as I have noticed when trying to take their picture – are always in motion when they’re on a plant. They don’t ever simply take five while digesting the nectar from, say, a fat red bee balm blossom. There is no balm for busy bees. When you see them stuck on a mum blossom after a cool rainy day, it’s a sign that the days of buzz and honey have come to an end.
Nature is changing the guard. The crickets have mostly been silenced. I see the grasshoppers still on occasion atop the flower stalks but they are reluctant to hop away; they let me get close enough to cup my hands around them. Moths seek the indoors, hanging some days against a newly lowered storm window. Only the spiders, a wary and resourceful tribe, are still at work. They suspend from a single strand attached beneath the shingles. When I turn the hose lazily in their direction, they ascend their rope ladders instantly like special forces in a training exercise.
The bird world is changing too. A woodpecker comes through and knocks away at the mulberry tree one afternoon, but after a day he is gone. Hawks are passing through as well. Crows gather at the exposed lip of the highest branches of a neighbor’s trees and bark away, behavior I take for the raptor early warning system.
At ground level the furry-tailed rodents are busier than I like to see. Where I disturb the ground, transplanting small migrants to new homes, they follow, digging up the loosened soil to see what I might have hidden.
I wait for that other, mellow face of autumn –

“Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,
close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…”

-- that Keats depicts in the ode addressed “To Autumn.”

“Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; \
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep…”

It’s the season of satiety, the poem suggests, among its various aspects. I’d agree that we’ve had enough of growing too, if only we could see a little more of that friendly, maturing sun.

Autumn Mums

2010-09-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

Mums the word/haiku

Autumn mums the word
Lips of color set to part
Psalmists to the sky

It’s fall, so I buy some hardy autumn flowering mums. Who hasn’t? I get one rather large one, which fills a spot near the front steps where previous annuals have failed to prosper, and three much smaller ones. When I line the short ones up on the porch steps, their size seems just right. They look like happy little dots at the end of parallel clauses.
But a strange warm, wet wind hasn’t got the word and keeps blowing them off the porch steps. Today my short squat potted mums look like little boys who keep getting knocked over on the playground.
Eventually I give up and move them up to the top of the porch where the wind can’t get at them, the blowhard still manages to knock them off their feet. Eventually I line them up close behind a low wooden-box planter, as if seeking protection from the big kid.
New stuff. Shorter days. The season’s September song. Once again the end days of months are liminal moments this year, and this month has gone out with two unseasonably warm days. More outdoor time for summer’s lovers.
It wasn’t the weather, or at least not the recent weather, but autumn’s bloomers have brightened up the place considerably. The back garden’s perennial mums have started to open, the first big white flower heads on my overgrown Montauk daisy opened earlier this week, and now the toad lilies – probably the last of the fall perennials – have offered up their intricate, oddly spotted flowers, bringing new life to “quiet’ corners.
I helped things along by a planting a few more of next year’s perennials now, two discounted members of family called “pink guara,” which I have just learned is a native of Texas, spreads widely, has spikes 2 to 4 feet high, and delicate dancing pink blooms. I am almost ready to hire an orchestra.
I wasn’t aware of the Texas connection when I bought them, but the shop owner did advise me to “mulch” them over winter. Since I mulch everything, I take this to mean mulch especially well. I will buy little fur coats made of squirrel hair and organic leavings and button them up tight.
It’s an odd thought that plants which did well in spring and pooped out completely in the summer, are willing to take a chance at flowering again now. We have second rounds of roses, a few blue clematis climbing the front porch, a range of fuzzy pink spirea clusters, a few small foxgloves, and one perky pink pincushion flower.
Petunias, as I have learned other years, come back and bloom now if you manage to keep them alive through the heat.
Some annuals take all summer to get good, and some others I acquired late in the season when we needed an infusion of late-season color and the specimens looked like they were strong enough to survive a late-season transplant are adding color. In some cases they didn’t survive the transplant.
And asters. You don’t think about planting them in the spring. When they are doing nothing but green, and some produce tall leggy spikes regardless of pruning, you think you must have enough of them. But when they start showing deep purple in September (or, this year, in August), you wish you had planted more.
Flowers tend to get planted in their flowering time by short-sighted gardeners like me.
But instant gratification has its claims as well – just ones, I would say. After all, it’s always now.

What Happened to the Sunflowers

2010-09-29T20:41:00.000-07:00

What happens to a very tall sunflower when you bite its head off? It grows lots of little new ones.
A couple of sunflowers planted themselves in the vegetable garden this year. They looked good there, so I left them, and one in particular grew very tall and picturesque with classic yellow-petaled, sun-like seed heads. The squirrel first tried climbing up the smaller of the two, perhaps to get at the seeds in its fat round flower-head – do squirrels even know about sunflower seeds? (I’m not a follower of rodents.) I found its big fat seed head detached and lying on the ground after the deed.
Next time I saw the crime take place, from indoors. The squirrel climbs the taller sunflower stalk, then appears to fall off when the stalk finally collapses under his weight. I knew at that moment the flower head was minced meat. Later in the day when I looked at the damage, the fat, round flower head was nowhere in sight. He may have dragged it off to one of his favorite chewing sites, like the arm of one our chairs, and minced it into plant mush there. The decapitated stalk was still standing, though now clearly missing something.
Though they looked like a crime scene, I left the bare flower stalks in the garden as a memorial to sunflower ground zero. A few weeks later I saw a curious round bulb forming on the smaller of the two stalks, and a while after that was surprised to see it morph into a classic round – but very small – sunflower.
A little later, the tall stalk began forming not one, but about eight new bright-yellow, little round sunflowers at various points in its upper story. Their little yellow petals catch the sun. Will they make new seeds that ripen before winter? I don’t know, and suspect it’s beside the point.
How much smarter are plants than people. Somebody bides their head off and they just go to plan B. Instead of one big one sitting-duck head, a bunch of little ones.
The sunflower’s strategy is mirrored of course by other plants. After I pick the first big broccoli seedhead (the part you eat) off the main stem, the plant diversifies. New slender stems, new small offerings of edible broccoli. With luck, the plant keeps producing these through November. Crop your petunia’s first bloom-bearing stems – so they tell you – two-thirds the way back down the stem for a thicker, better, more flowerful plant. (Personally, I can never bear to do this.)
When people get their heads bitten off, on the other hand, we go straight to re-thinking the meaning of life and brooding. Which may not be the best state of mind in which to ask the big questions. A better approach to thinking about the meaning of life would probably be some disciplined approach such as meditation, religious practice, keeping a journal, or holding a focused philosophical conversation with a friend.
A better approach to getting your head bit off might be to spread your energy in a half dozen useful ways – whatever needs doing, really; there’s always something – and store up some seeds while you’re at it for the long, cold winter.
You probably had too big a head, anyway.