The American Iliad

You may have asked yourself, as I asked myself, "Do I need to read another book about the battle of Gettysburg?" If you're thinking about the recent novel "Cain at Gettysburg" by Ralph Peters, and whether you're thinking about reading it because either you want to know more about the turning-point battle of the Civil War or you already know too much about it, the answer is probably yes.

            Much of the battle's storyline will be familiar to those who've read the earlier popular fictional treatment of Gettysburg, "The Killer Angels" or any of the many nonfiction books about his great fraternal blood-letting. The battle is America's "Iliad," in which truly valiant figures, some of them long inscribed in the nation's legends, struggled

over a great prize according to very personal code of honor, and thousands died in a terrible apotheosis of violence that can only be described as tragic and perhaps, in a fierce Homeric way, as poetic.

            The over-arching character conflict between hero of his fledgling nation, Robert E. Lee, and his best surviving general, Longstreet, remains a key stone in the narrative arch of Peters' novel, as it was in the recent books and films on the subject. Peters' contribution is giving equal focus to the neglected, underestimated Union commander George Meade, who was given command of the Army of the Potomac only a week before the climactic battle. Meade is often viewed as a stodgy, cautious general. What he was, as this book shows, was rivetingly competent. An engineer by training, determined not to make mistakes, Meade persevered and won a great victory that crippled the South's military capacity.

            My only quarrel with this novel is that while it teaches non-military types like myself more about how to run an army than I have ever learned from any other book, it spends too much time with generals and too little with its cast of heart-breakingly human privates, noncoms and lower-rank officers on both sides of the battle. Some of these soldiers are pure inventions, others are drawn from history but given a rare prominence they richly deserve. The great gift of fiction is that its best invented characters are often more "real" to readers than the those whose biographies are purely factual; perhaps, even, more real, to some of us, than those flesh and blood humans we meet in life but whose inner lives remains closed to us.

            The novel's deepest portraits are of the Confederate sergeant "Quaker" Blake, whose breakthrough into self-knowledge comes only hours before his last breath on earth. So it goes in war, the book seems to say, but having been through so much with this character we can't help feeling cheated that we don't get to learn how the rest of his life goes -- there's no "meaning" to his growth because there is no "rest of life." His death is one small measure, among thousands, of the price paid for Lee's desperate, hopeless gamble on the the battle's final, decisive day.

            I cared just as much, probably more, for an array of Union soldiers who fought in a regiment consisting of German immigrants who fled to the new world after failed democratic revolutions in their own country. America or, as we say, "history" never pays enough attention to this element of our past -- the story of immigrants who found sanctuary in this country for the best the reasons, because they had first risked their lives to make their own countries better and now were forced to bring those ideals here. They are educated, idealistic, often utopian, brave survivors; their minds molded by poets and philosophers. Having fought for freedom in countries like Europe, they came to the land of the free only to find themselves swept up in another cause, anti-slavery, that once again required an ultimate choice and too often an ultimate sacrifice.

            At the novel's end I wanted to know what happens to the fictional survivors of this battle such as the lieutenant who spent the war writing letters to a recent widow he has been in love with for years. This melding of this character's personal and Army life is moving and completely persuasive; but battle account novels can take us only so far.

            "Cain at Gettysburg" doesn't tell us what these incredibly courageous and human pawns in the great game of nation-building were fighting for. The novel is the other side of the story, a complementary cautionary tale to the idealism of historical portrayals such as the recent film "Lincoln." "Lincoln" tells us the cause. This book shows us the cost.

            Peters' battle scenes, especially the bravura yard-by-yard recreation of the accidental first-day battle, overlooked in most accounts, are incredible triumphs by an author with a military background coupled with a great gift for physical description of the way people move, sense, feel, and think in the most terrible and terrifying encounters human beings can have with one another. They die, or somehow survive, from the unbearable carnage on fields we've forgotten, ignored, or never knew much about because the mind has room to take in only so much bloodshed. Maybe that's the point.

            The Iliad, that great opening shout at the start of the western literary tradition, also devotes a great deal of language depicting how heroes died in battle. We still ask them to do it. Maybe that's why we have to keep reading these books.

Interest Blooms in Rediscovered Workshop

About a month ago, the day (Nov. 17) a Northeaster roared into Eastern Massachusetts, making for wet, windy and dark day, I met restoration carpenter Michael Burrey for a close look at the 18th century woodworker's shop recently rediscovered at a preschool in Duxbury.
With the coastal storm squatting in your sky it’s pretty dark at 4 p.m.. Inside the 16x32-feet shed, light bulbs hang from the ceiling, but the power has has long been shut off. Michael and his friend have flashlights and, happily, photographer Barry Chin arrives on time and says, Let’s go in while there’s still light. I am overjoyed with his optimistic, can-do attitude, because if it were me behind a camera I would be cursing the darkness rather than lighting a candle.
Inside we find a beautiful white-painted fireplace surround, a big wood frontispiece with carved moldings resembling the ornamental designs on Greek columns. In the workroom, among other 18th century joinery charms, we find a faded colored image of a man sketched on one of the walls; he stands, back leaning against a wall, one knee lifted, hand extended. The painting was never finished and the color has dulled, but much remains. Nearby, pencil drawings appear open on the old pineboard wall: a bird, a goose maybe, sketched for the design of a weather vane. Cross-hatchings over a door sill show the tallying of some quantity: bags of supply, boards, days of work?
In the store room, a date is written in big, blackish lettering on a ceiling joist: 1789. Do the workshop’s origins go back to that year?
A few weeks later the Boston Globe published my story on Luther Sampson's workshop.

18th-century woodworking shop a rare find

DUXBURY — What experts are calling “the rarest of the rare” and “a once in a lifetime find” — a largely intact woodworking shop dating from the latter half of the 18th century — has been discovered in Duxbury on the site of a private school for children.
“It is an extraordinary find,” said professor J. Ritchie Garrison, a specialist in American material culture who hurried from the University of Delaware to take a look at the shop last month when he heard about the find. “It’s National Historic Landmark status.”
The 16-by-32-foot shed-like building is on the site of the Berrybrook School on Winter Street. With the school’s approval, restoration carpenter Michael Burrey of Plymouth explored the outbuilding, now clad in nondescript vinyl and used by the school for storage, while taking down an old house that once served as the preschool’s main building on the property.
He said he was stunned by what he saw inside the building.
A drill bit bracket inside the 18th century craftsman's shop.
“All the benches were there. It’s likely to be the earliest known joiner and cabinet maker’s shop on its original site” anywhere in the United States, Burrey said. “The woodwork on the house [being removed] was probably built in the shop.
“The way the benches are in relation to the windows, how the light comes in to light an area, the location of the tool racks on the walls,” all tell of how the craftsmen used the shop, Burrey said.
Gary Naylor of Hanson, a specialist in antique woodwork and tools, said the shop’s interior revealed signs of a Federalist craftsman’s workshop.
“When I saw the [foot-operated] lathe there, I knew it was a highly skilled craftsman,” Naylor said. “A lot of different features in the building are untouched, intact. When I turned around and saw the opening for the fireplace, it was all coming together.”
The president of the school’s board of directors said Berrybrook had no idea of the building’s historical value.
“We really thought nothing of it. We had used it as storage,” Christopher DeOrsay, an architect, said recently. “We gave [Burrey] a tour. His jaw hit the floor.”
Since then the school has had more than a dozen experts come to see it, DeOrsay said.
Burrey showed off the shop’s period-specific features to visitors on a recent afternoon.
Framed in original sills, joists, and pineboard walls, the shop’s interior reveals two original work benches, one pitted with marks from hand tools. The second was a “planing bench,” lacking gouges or other tool scars because skilled millwork with wood planes was performed there. The wall above the bench has shelving to hold the planes.
The planing bench also reveals a groove added later to allow craftsmen to install a treadle lathe for turning wood, powered by a foot pedal.
The shop also has its original tool racks for chisels, awls, and brace (hand drill) bits, and a rack near the ceiling for handsaws. Holes in the wall board above the joinery bench and to the right of the window show where awls were stuck to keep them close at hand.
Sketches and hash marks on another wall preserve the living sense of a place where woodworkers spend long hours. Someone painted a sketch of a man standing with his back against a wall, one knee lifted, a hand extended. Much of the outline remains, the colors dulled but visible.
Sketches in pencil appear on another wall, including the outline of a bird probably sketched for a weather vane. Cross-hatchings over a door show the tallying of some quantity. Supplies? Boards? Wainscoting panels completed?
Cuts in the wall board reveal the location and shape of the shop’s fireplace, probably removed in the 19th century in favor of a woodstove.
Painted in black on a joist in the shop’s small storeroom, large digits spell out a date, “1789.” It may be a construction date, but Burrey says some construction techniques suggest an earlier date.
Burrey also shows visitors a millworked “chimney surround” removed from the old house. He believes the house’s decorative moldings were done in the shop, probably by the house’s owner.
Garrison, who visited the shop with a team of specialists from historical organizations such as Colonial Williamsburg, said the shop’s interior exhibited the pattern of work for woodworkers of the 18th century. Called “joiners” then (carpenters and cabinet-makers today), early American craftsmen worked with wood that came rough from the saw mill. Their first job was to plane it down to a smooth finish.
You can see which bench is the planing bench not only because it’s not scarred but also because it’s built against the wall farthest from the fireplace, Garrison said. Planing produces shavings likely to become tinder for a spark from the fireplace, and would have been a threat to burn the shop down.
Naylor said property records show that the shop belonged to a well-known “housewright and joiner,” Luther Sampson, in the late 18th century. Genealogy research revealed that Sampson was the craftsman who founded Kents Hill School in Readville, Maine.
Born in 1760 in Duxbury, Sampson served in the Revolutionary War and bought the 60-acre Philips farm on the west side of Duxbury, home of the Berrybrook School today. His high-quality handiwork, experts say, adorns the interiors of many fine houses built in Duxbury in the late 18th century, when the town was home to prosperous sea captains and merchants.
The survey team that visited the shop with Garrison last month concluded the building was worthy of National Historic Landmark status “due to its rarity and integrity,” Garrison said in an e-mail after the visit.
He urged preservation of the shop. “We won’t get a do-over with this building,” he said.
Preservation costs money, and supporters have applied for a $35,000 grant from Duxbury’s Community Preservation Act funds to help pay for an archeological survey of the site, some foundation repair, and to “repair deteriorating hand-hewn sills and joists to stabilize [the] structure.”
“While we have lots and lots of historical houses,” Garrison said in a recent interview, “as a woodworker’s shop it’s probably the oldest in New England” and possibly the country.
“It’s the rarest of the rare. And who knew? Found on the grounds of a preschool.”
DeOrsay said the school’s board of directors would be in favor of preserving the shop. “We’ll try to find out what the best option is.”

The Bird Garden of the Marsh

            I walk these days in the salt marsh off Quincy Shore Drive, even though last month I came home with a tricky black tick that ended up attached to my thigh before I realized it was there.

            In other years I have pursued the big wading birds who hunt for fish in the twists of water that curve through the tall marsh grasses, especially the two kinds of Spartina cordgrass (high and low). They shoot off ahead and wait for me as I turn a curve in the path used by pretty much no one but the two of us and flush the big birds heedlessly around the bend. Not this year. No big birds in the shoreline marsh this year. Was it something I said? No great blue heron or great white egret, or hawks such as the pair I spotted here a half dozen times last fall.

            I hunt the little birds instead. The black-capped hedge hoppers that make chick-a-dee-dee calls, chiding, going for the piercing effect rather than melody, the chick-a-dee-dee-dee sounding metallic and warning instead of a mere call-of-myself, an identity song, the way it sounds in warmer months. These chickadees, if that’s what they are, have a yellowish cloud in the breast area. A different variety from those we're accustomed to seeing in Massachusetts backyards? The Carolina version up here already?

            A platoon of them hop to the next elder thicket when I come close, as if observing some 10-foot-separation rule. But sometime one forgets, I get about six feet away and try to snap pictures of a little bird in thick snag of half dead clump of wild thicket with colors that mix amazingly well with these interesting little birds. You can barely see the bird in the resulting image: another snap of wild autumn thicket.

            A big flock of brown-feather, larger birds, starling size, keep an even stricter distance between us, zooming into the tree cover at the sound of my approach. What crimes have these birds committed that they are so sure the approach of a large, loud walking figure means someone wants to shoot at them.

            I come unarmed, though they all seem to take offense at the camera. They do not like to see objects raised to my face. Are they genetically predisposed to see bird-shooting slingshots everywhere?

            Though I don't see any charismatically big birds this fall, it may be because I am looking in the wrong places. When I walk on the road side of the marsh the next afternoon searching the cordgrass and tree line from another point of view, I spy nothing but a hurrying crow. Squawking all my himself, he clearly has something to say. But for long moments no feathered fellows rush to his side to take up the story.

            Sometimes squawking crows have something to squawk about. Even though only one has raised the cry, eventually I lift my eyes to the cloud-blown blue sky above and spot the high sailor, riding the air currents far above the marsh and every other little piece of earth below.

            It's a hawk, and he really is very high in the sky, though not high enough to escape a crow-eyed sentinel. It's gratifying, somehow, to know that he's back in the neighborhood.

Breaking the Fence

I gaze out the window behind my desk and a leaf falls. They fall one by one now.
The big autumn unleaving -- which gives us our age-old picture of "the fall of the year" -- is long over. We have had a Halloween hurricane -- a monster from another age of the planet dressed up as today -- this year followed a week later by a rocking Northeaster (business as usual in coastal New England), to give the trees a better than good shaking weeks ago.
Some beautiful yellow-gold weeks followed in eastern Massachusetts as the wind and the cold winnowed down the survivors.
Now when a leaf falls in the slanted light of late morning I'm not sure where it comes from. The big oak tree, generally a month behind the others, is down to a few score of leaves. Maybe a few still fall from there. The weeping cherry tree is down to its last few days of rusty bronze foliage. Those last leaves falling one at time float down past the increasingly bare umbrella skeleton of the cherry tree's branches.
After the leaves go, the view of the back garden is the view I will have for most of the next five months, to some time in April. Three or four years ago, in the early spring, three intrepid garden-makers went out to the back yard property line and threaded a bamboo fence along the old wire fence that separated us from our neighbors. Adding wood to the back fence was simply a matter of aesthetics -- a better background to set off the shrubs we have planted along the fence line.
I asked myself then how long it would take for the first plants we put back there to break the top of the fence line.
Well, the answer was not very long. The bi-colored (called "gold splash") Euonymus we planted our first summer in the house hovered by the ground for four or five years, thickening its roots perhaps in the mediocre soil, mostly fill we inherited here, enriched by wheelbarrow loads of purchased humus. But it was only after the bamboo fence went in (or so it appears to me, pretending as usual to read the mind of a plant) that the climbing branches got their fingernails into something that would hold and shimmied straight up the wood to the top. Now the light green and yellow leaves wave a good twelve inches over the top of the fence, as if still optimistic that the next handhold will show itself if they keep climbing. Some climbers have broken tiny creases between the bamboo slats and slipped onto the neighbor's side of the fence. They may tangle up the wire fence visible on their side of the line, but no one seems to mind.
The butterfly bush has topped the fence several years now. That hardly counts because it doesn't keep its leaves in winter and, besides, the bush is long and leggy rather than full as its kind is supposed to be because in the first summer's rush I planted it in soil too poor in a place of marginal sun for a shrub that likes full sun. Still it sends tall shooters up in the summer, blossoms repeatedly, and snares the attention of a few butterflies.
The best winter show of the fence line shrubs belongs to the black-fruited viburnum. The leaves turn a maroon-violet color in October and purple berries swell beneath them. The leaves darken and mostly hang on the shrub all winter, as the berries turn black.
Winter berries make an aesthetically delicious contrast against the snow, when they particularly stand out because most everything else steps aside in that season. The leaves fall, the skeletal branches retreat. The deep colors of few wintry sentries, holly, laurel, the maiden grass, and the bare branches of the rose of Sharon, and a few hardy evergreens shine out, along with the viburnum. Even now, as autumn's color goes underground, they hold forth against late November skies -- our bold enduring patriots in the country of cold.

Still Too Early

            I wrote this post almost exactly a year ago. The earth turns around the one sun one complete evolution and, one year later, it's remarkable how little has changed.     

            November sunsets are different (and special) because we've turned the clocks back. The time change means sunset catches us by surprise each day. It's too early. Each day's early dark is a shock to the system.

                                     "November Sunsets"

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. We live mostly indoors, instead of outdoors, like our ancestors. Few of us note the change in position of a sunrise from one season to the next, or 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. (DST) on the summer solstice.

            It’s the sudden loss of that 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 from work 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, 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 time we spend indoors, the more the spectacle of nature is reduced to one simple, remarkable, all-important fact: sometimes light, sometimes dark.

Sunset -- twilight -- early dark: it catches us in traffic on the way home. Or we pass a big plate glass window walking the corridors of some temple 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: hibernation recommended.

We’re still natural enough beings to feel 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 not-so 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 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.

“The Keats Brothers: The Life of George and John” by Denise Gigante

The brothers lived their lives under a cloud. The cloud, the disease we now call tuberculosis, took their mother when they were children (it may have taken other family members too) and with their father out of the picture, the Keats children were on their own. The eldest, John, nursed his mother to the end, probably picking up the infection then. The third brother, "poor Tom," died in his teens with both brothers John and George taking turns at nursing, John once again there at the end. When you nurse somebody who's dying from a failed respiratory system and struggling for breath, as the author points out, you're almost certain to be infected. If you're susceptible (clearly not everyone was), you get the disease. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes quick.
Today we have inoculations and treatments, but in the early 19th century you couldn't even rely on doctors to diagnose it correctly. Even well into the 20th century notables died from it - try D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell.
John Keats, who would become one of the "immortals" of English poetry, though only (the words themselves pile the irony on) after his death, diagnosed his own "death warrant" when he saw the color of the blood he was expectorating after a particularly cruel turn of fate. On a warm winter's day he rode into London but left his winter coat behind. The weather turned cold and he took an ill-chosen coach ride, sitting outside the box to save money and arriving home in a feverish state. We shake our heads when geniuses make tragic mistakes - earlier, a walking expedition to Scotland (a notoriously cold climate even in summer) left him with a throat infection he never got over; but John Keats always expected to die young.
George Keats, the second brother, and the person in his life that John relied on more than anyone else, lasted into his early forties. But George, when barely twenty, goes to America to make his fortune at a time when the American frontier was regarded as boomtown.
A more tantalizing subject (despite the unfortunate pairing of first names in the subtitle, which suggests an early attempt at the Beatles) can hardly be imagined.
Poetry freaks, English majors everywhere, and followers of the geniuses-die-young school of celebrity worship - we all have a soft spot for John Keats. Being great in your early twenties leads to what-ifs? How would Jimi Hendrix be playing in the 21st century? Harvesting golden oldies in Las Vegas; or escaping to a mountain somewhere to conduct secret recording sessions with the locals?
John Keats' poetry writing career lasted only a few years, and genius flared to its heights around the time in fell (tragically, of course) in love. It's a set-up that has people like me craving all the details I can get, and Gigante's book delivers more than I knew before.
Her book also delivers all sorts of details about George's life in the rude, crude American frontier (a place we have longed tamed into the Midwest). This is an intriguing tale as well, though here we have too many details for my taste, the fruit of the author's exhaustive research of everyone and every place that George rubbed elbows with (or might have) in his pioneering quest for a financial utopia. First on the "English prairie," a tantalizing name for a place so lacking in infrastructure and basic civility that it was hard to imagine anyone there reading a poem or for that matter getting out of the rain. George takes his investment capital (some of which arguably belonged to his brothers and a younger sister stranded with an unloved guardian) down river to Cincinnati and Louisville, first getting ripped off by local entrepreneurs (including no less an eminence than John James Audubon, who also went bankrupt); then persevering and getting rich when the frontier boom caught up to his neighborhood; then going bankrupt in the panic of 1837. A truly American story.
Just how bare and dirty and opportunistic (also drunk and lazy) the American frontier was at this time is an eye-opener and a compelling subject. I was a little put off when first reading the snobby English perspective on the USA. It was like England, John Keats thought, but lacking in the poetry and romance. He imagined it as an endless store counter with everything in the world for sale. In fact, Gigante's's portrait of the place backs it up. Fine English goods, we learn, were rushed to newly planted frontier towns before there were buyers for them.
George Keats, a man of culture and intellect in a land of the unlearned, becomes a conventional pillar of his community. He's married, has seven children, a few slaves, and seemingly sound business interests; and a lifelong sadness over the loss of his fantastically gifted brother.
John suffered the loss of his brother to the new world as well. George was family, companionship and security for much of his too short life, a life in which he knew only that he would die young and believed - as he once put it - "when I die I think I shall be among the English poets."
God, is he ever.

Hurry Up Please, It’s Time

            I’ve taken a long vacation from hands-on management of the garden.        

            After putting off the chore for a month or more, I finally begin the chore of putting the flower gardent to bed. This is a moment fraught with decisions.

           As the weather gets cooler and cooler in autumn, I stop spending time out there, standing, staring, squatting, being in the garden.

But you don’t have to do a lot this time of year to enjoy a garden. The seasonal changes that plants go through take care of themselves. When you have a lot of plants living and dying together, a lot of interesting colors and shapes are produced by forces set in motion by time, in the form of the seasons, itself.

            Time – the revolution of the earth around the sun, the seasons produced by the earth’s axis, the effects of this constant cosmic journey made manifest in the growth cycle of plants, trees, and all green things; the human art of cultivation – all of these come together as they do all the “time,” but with a concentration of dramatically visible impact this wonderful time of year.

            In short, the cosmos is doing all the work, and the anxious monkeying I’ve been doing in earlier months, especially the late declining months of summer to keep the show entertaining has come to its natural and inevitable end. I watch, happily, generally from indoors, as colors change, final blossoms emerge, dry out and fall away, or are vampired by cold on that first frosty night, the stuffing sucked out of them… It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful anywhere and everywhere that people haven’t torn up the last growing things by the roots.

            So I take a holiday. Several storms of autumn roar through, causing consternation elsewhere but luckily doing nothing much here except knock a few green tomatoes off the vine; and then, one silent but much deadlier pair of sub-freezing nights rolls through like a gang of marauders determined to prey on the weak and vulnerable: so much for those pretty annuals you’ve planted in late summer…

            And so, looking at the blackened branches of once lovely flowering plants, I realize at long last there are tasks I should be doing. For example, maybe cut down those dead stalks?

            Saturday rolls around. I try to take an organized approach; I go back to my notes from previous years. But a funny thing happens to memory. Those facts well set in stone from earlier years remain in place arrive with with ribbons on them when you go digging for them. Those later details, names, advisories, notes-to-self, resolutions, fine points, and veteran pointers you have accumulated in more recent years have all turned into fly-by-night operations. Gone when you look for them, driving down the street, honking the horn, looking for some action.

            The operative questions – when do you cut back the butterfly bush? (answer: later winter, early spring; or really whenever you’ve a mind to); or how much of the peony bush do you take down and when (basically all of it, leaving “cigar” sized stubs of the roots, and now’s a good time) don’t necessarily stay put in the mind’s top drawer filing cabinet. Especially when so many oddball subjects, data points, and individual plant types are tossed into the mix and no standard rules play across the entire garden-facts community. Trim the lavender? Well, from the shorn looks of it I’ve already done the trim. Hope it wasn’t too soon!

            Prune the lace-cap hydrangea? Sounds like a good idea because the leaves withered and flopped at the first touch of frost and the plant looks like hell, but I’d like to be careful since I want it, or a least a good part of it, back in the spring.

            Still, I squat down beside the beds, take out the clippers, begin with the easy stuff.

            It’s good to get a day’s work in. From November late morning sun to November sunset, it’s all good. And however much you accomplish or leave undone, in the end you’re happy for another excuse to spend a day with the elements and the elemental forces that turn green plants into compositions of wonder and of art.