Summer Hums Along

            August is a bee-loud season.

            We see them everywhere by this stage of the season.

            On the butterfly bush in front of the house. On the Autumn Joy sedum  (second pic) just coming into flower in the last two weeks.

            When we eat breakfast on weekend mornings in the perennial garden, we see them rushing through the black-eyed susans and the flowering mint (third photo). Bees particularly like wildflowers and native plants. The mint grows wild all over our garden, wherever I don't remove it, and the bees rush through the thick patches of fuzzy-blooming mint as if someone has given them the order to double-time through the day. It's amazing they keep out of each other's way. Each bee zooms through every blossom every other bee has already visited. 

            Are they all getting something? Is every pollen seed, every particle, a valuable addition to the health of the hive?

            The bees spend more time among the wilder plantings, but they're not snobs. They visit the potted ornamentals as well, dipping into the orange centers of the marigolds. And, remarkably (see photo) sampling the interiors of some two-toned pink pansies (bottom photo) that have been blooming in exactly the same place since some time in April. 

            Unfortunately, of course, bees aren't really 'everywhere' these days, and their numbers have suffered frightening declines.

            Two days ago, Aug. 16, I am told by an organization called Friends of Earth, was Honey Bee Day. For a couple of years now, since the beginning of the extinction scare that came be called "hive collapse syndrome," scientists and environmentalists have been calling attention to the role played by honey bees in our food production. Fruits, nuts and grains depend upon the fertilization of crops by bees and other pollinators.

            A sense of crisis propelled research into a complex of factors that were causing the radical die-off in bee colonies. One factor these studies isolated is the effect of 'neonicotinoid' (or 'neonic') pesticides as a key contributor to bee declines. Neonics are a new class of insecticides chemically related to nicotine.

            "Neonics aren’t just harming bees," the Friends of the Bees say in a recent post. "They also hurt birds, butterflies, reptiles, earthworms and soil microbes essential to healthy ecosystems and food production. Just one seed coated in neonics is enough to kill a songbird. ...Scientists around the globe are calling for immediate regulatory action to restrict neonics to stop what some are calling a second 'Silent Spring.'”   

            Here's the group's website. www.foe.org/about-us. 

            The Friends of Earth are urging people to write letters to newspapers to put pressure on government to restrict the use of this relatively new pesticide. "Thanks to the efforts of people like you, our campaign to save the bees is gaining momentum." they say. "Last month, you and thousands of others wrote letters to President Obama asking him to push for stronger action to save bees."

The link to their 'how to' page on writing to newspapers is here: action.foe.org/letter/?letter_KEY=1539.

            Even if they weren't central to keeping us fed -- no bees, no blueberries, to take one summertime example -- bees are an essential part of our world. We have a common interest with bees. Neither one of us can happily survive without summer, food, and flowers.

            Not only do they help keep our bodies alive, they buzz in some part of our mind or spirit that would not be the same without them. Poet W.B. Yeats coined the phrase "the bee-loud glade" in his poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Here it is:

       I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

        And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

        Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

        And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

        And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

        Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

        There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

        And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

        I will arise and go now, for always night and day

        I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

        While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

        I hear it in the deep heart’s core. 

          I think whenever we hear, or see, bees working in a flower patch, we have a little peace there. 

Vacation Days: High and Dry in the Garden

            I'm been on vacation, but the garden is still here. It doesn't get to go anywhere.

            The second week of August, when like so many others (as I know from experience, having met them on the highway) I motored away from home to summer places, the season in eastern Massachusetts fell into "the dries," a kind of valley of fatigue, a near-death valley. It happens some time every summer, but since I was gone so much I was slower to pick up on it. Back home this week I busied myself watering the potted plants, oblivious to the general collapse in the perennial beds. Pachysandra lying on the ground in a wilted state of mind, like flocks of thirsty beasts in a desert: never saw that before.

            It's time for cutting back, retrenchment. Humility. That drier, late-summer, less flowery aesthetic. Modest, buttoned down, trimmed back. Thrift arrives, at last. Moderation in all things. The Puritans are about to close the playhouses. Small distinctions matter more now; a second bloom left here and there. A late bloom, a renewed bloom, That rare and cherished late bloomer. A certain sedum's pinkish smile, the bizarre spotted lily. Those September stars, the asters. Those sea-creatures-on-land with their thirst for faraway places, the late-season anemones.

            When I finally realize that my one-man bucket brigade will poop out well before I water the whole critical-list dry-space, and that even some areas, some plantings I've hand-watered the day before are crying out once again for more the following day, I throw in the towel and dig the old sprinkler out of the shed. Every season I say 'let's see if I can get by with measured, anticipatory hand-watering, without resorting to the sprinkler.' Every season I'm wrong.

            So I sprinkle the whole back flower garden, after relying on the water can to cater to the high-priority vegetable garden customers (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil). And then, the following day, comes what the newspaper with its usual flair for horror flick hyperbole calls "a wall of water."

            I'm glad. I tune my frame of mind to acceptance. OK, it's middle August. At least after a good rain the plants will be able to decline for a week or two with dignity. "Grow old along with me," as the poem says.

            On the other hand, of course, I am aware of a certain inward tickling urge to go out and buy some more plants.

In the Thick of It: the Garden and the Novel

 

           As the month ends, a great month, a fantastic July for growing things, I have to wonder if it's time to pick some flowers.

            They grew tall this month, some of them, and thick, a lot of them.

            The tall phlox, with its pinkish violet blooms (top photo), push up to grab as much of the mid-summer sun as they can get while they're still fresh and young. They crowd each other and expand into any place they can take for their own before some other plant takes it. I find them in places where I don't really want, but I think, well in a month they'll flower.

            The phlox combine with the yellow blossoms -- the Rudbeckia (top photo, yellow blossoms), the taller and more persistent daylilies, the baby blue balloon (last pic) flowers, the white gooseneck loosestrife, which curve up and then down, little sine-curves of finger-pointing white blossoms, and the white Queen Anne's Lace (last) to make a busy upper-story in the perennial garden.

            Surely they could spare a few blossoms.  

            Bright colors also appear on the cone flowers, the red Mandeville roses (third photo), the red lobelia, the purple fuzzy Liatris, the ever-climbing morning glory (second photo), and a still lively array of newcomer daylilies that I'm grateful to for expanding the season.

            What of the fat fuzzy white "fairy candles"? The bees love them and drag their legs all through the cottony 'candles' of the tall stalky blossoms. The blaze in the shade.

            Should I take some inside. Will they flame as well indoors?

            D. H. Lawrence made the classic case against cut flowers in his iconic novel of young love and mother-love "Sons and Lovers."

            "I don’t want the corpses of flowers about me,” his biographical stand-in coming of age character Paul Morel maintains, in rejecting the desire of his first love, adolescent Miriam, to pick the wildflowers they both admire and take them home to put in a vase.

            Actually, he doesn't like Miriam's whole approach to nature. “You're always begging things to love you," Paul upbraids her, "as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--”

            Lawrence was a celebrated love poet ("Look! We have come Through!"), travel writer, and early theorist on modern psychology, in addition to novelist. His stand-in spokesmen have scathing things to say about his own early 20th century English society, in all social classes. His deeper characters, whether uneducated peasants, or anguished self-questioning aristocrats, have a deep connection with nature.

            Paul Morel, a coal miner's son just as "Bertie" Lawrence himself was, trekked all over the countryside, drew and painted plants, and bared his soul beneath the stars. It's not surprising he has strong feelings about flowers.

            While still la teenager, working class Paul takes his first fulltime job in a factory. "Already [Lawrence writes] he was a prisoner of industrialism. Large sunflowers stared over the old red wall of the garden opposite... He was being taken into bondage. His freedom in the beloved home valley was going now."

            Does that mean that Paul is right when he complains that cut blossoms are nothing more than "the corpses of flowers"?

            I don't thinks so. Flowers are the plant's way of persuading people to keep growing them -- and allow them to keep going and going and going. We'll never pick them all (and personally I never pick more than a couple). Some of the seed will always escape and find its own little piece of earth to start a new branch of the family. They spread their likeness, root, stem and flower in a deathless expansion of life.

            It appears to be working. Our black-eyed susans, to take one example, are all over the place.

Everything on Schedule: Telling Time in the Garden

 

   It's three weeks into July. One of the benefits of having a garden is that it moves you along through the seasons, even if you aren't doing anything major to it. Without any assistance from me to speak of, the native orange daylilies come and go. I started stretching the season last year by consciously planting different varieties of the astonishingly expansive daylily family. These start flowering at different times, some are just starting to blossom now, some are going strong. 

            The rose bushes, which have cruising along splendidly for a month and a half, have lately developed black-spot disease on their leaves. Conclusion: it must be the second half of July. So I fertilized them for the first time this year and spent a thorny afternoon picking off the yellowed, diseased-looking leaves. We'll see how that works. If the disease hadn't shown up, I would have been happy to go on doing nothing but admiring them.

            The butterfly bushes that looked dead this spring -- bare sticks, naggingly slow to leaf -- are back to their old shapes. They look remarkably like they did a year ago, even though I cropped them back aggressively last fall in an effort to make them grow fuller and bring their blossoms down closer to the ground. Instead they've grown tall and leggy, and bare on their lower branches, just as in previous years. Which only means that any day now I'll start reaching up to remove the dead blossoms and stimulate the new ones, and face the same old decisions about how to prune them in the fall.

            But the thing that tells me it's really high, full-on summer is the way the two hibiscuses have bonded. One is the plant, an annual variety, that grew big last year on the patio and produced a lot of classic pink, roseate blossoms. I took it indoors during the winter and kept it alive; it went on blossoming for some weeks in the fall and then ran out of solar energy. The plant survived the winter, but its productive urge slept. I lugged it outdoors again when the weather warmed up and waited for it to do its stuff in the manner of previous summer, but the now second-year annual took the longest time to re-adjust to prosperity.

            To give it the idea I purchased another hibiscus, a different variety called a Mandeville rose (also an annual in temperate zones), loaded with buds and dark red blossoms and lodged right up against the older plant. Sure enough the sleek vines of the Mandeville have begun curling around the branches of the bigger plant (top photo).         

            If this trend keeps up, we'll be started on our own rain forest.

            Because the natural world performs in the age-old manner -- you can set your calendar, so to speak, to some of these behaviors -- we think everything is the same and will always stay the same. There's nothing new, as the saying goes, under the sun.

            But everything under the sun is also moving on, always, if imperceptibly. In the next couple of weeks our family will celebrate a couple of milestones. Our niece will celebrate her 30th birthday. Anne's father will celebrate his 90th.

            We're somewhere in between. Every age is a stage, and each role in life has its own job to do. We'll keep the roses, and the lilies, and the hibiscus coming.

Macbeth in Plymouth: The Garden of the Mind

            Seeing Shakespeare on stage began for me back in graduate school at Boston University as a student studying the texts. One of my professors arranged for some film versions to be screened locally. Orson Welles played Falstaff in a version of the Henrys. Roman Polanski made a 'Macbeth' that was too Hollywood or just too weird. Then a theater in Boston began offering some Shakespeare plays: 'The Tempest.' 'As You Like It.' We saw a 'King Lear' at one of the college theaters. Even with a twenty-something in the role of the doomed king, who failed to become wise before he became old, seeing Lear live was a scary good experience.

            We began to make a regular thing of it. We discovered Shakespeare & Company, a then-new company performing in the woods outside the Edith Wharton estate in Lenox. We saw a Macbeth with a young actor in the lead whose New York accent got in the way of the play's Scots ambience. Still, the show had a grip on the audience, including our daughter who cried in the end when Macbeth dies. She was five, I think (what kind of parent brings a 5-year-old to a Shakespearean tragedy?) and though unable to follow all of the play's ins and outs (especially the notion that

Macbeth was responsible for most of the bloodshed) her reaction caught the paradox of tragedy. It's hard to not to identify, to go along some way, with a tragic hero.

            It's impossible not to care about Ross MacDonald's Macbeth in the Old Colony Shakespeare Company's ongoing production at the Spire in Plymouth. He's set up by fate. 'Oh, I am fortune's fool!' he might wail, as does Romeo in his play. And the set-up is more than the ominous, though tempting foretelling of the infamous 'three witches.'

            At the play's start, Macbeth is returning from battle, having put down a bloody rebellion against the king. Brave soldiers, military heroes, come back from the wars throughout the centuries, but do they come back to what they were before? Or does the trauma of violence 'start a spirit' (to use an Elizabethan phrase) inside them? -- especially in the days when being a war survivor meant coming back with blood on your sword.

            As MacDonald plays the part, Macbeth's loyal-soldier hinge comes loose right from the start. He is far too interested in the weird sisters' prophecies. When they say 'and king thou wilt be,' the words are dark music to his ears. Perhaps a crown would make poetic justice of the slaughter he's just committed on the king's enemies.

            And if a crazy, blood-born notion has been externalized by the witches' prophecy so that the war-hero must face it, the Macbeths' marital dynamic doubles down on the desperate gamble of usurping a throne by 'foul' means. Lady Macbeth is the dark lady of Shakespeare's tragic women. In fact the strength of Shakespeare's female characters throughout his opus may be one piece of his genius that's still under-appreciated. In play after play, it's the women who drive the action. In 'Romeo and Juliet' it's Juliet who says, 'well if you're really serious, show up tomorrow and we'll get married.' Female characters impel the action in all the 'romantic comedies' as well. In Macbeth, it's the hero's lady who says 'if you really want and need to be the top man in Scotland, let's not just sit around wishing.'

            But the play is Shakespeare's critique of vitalism. Macbeth has more energy, and certainly more poetry, than any of the other characters. But evil choices, as his sad tale shows, reduce even the best of men to the banality of the tyrant. Still, even as he degrades himself to gangster status, rubbing out the competition, Macbeth becomes the supreme poet of the banality of evil: " I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

            That's the tyrant's fate in a nutshell: killing people is tedious.

            Bay Colony director Neil McGarry has suggested that the husband-wife dynamic is also supercharged for a reason only glanced at in the text. "I have given suck," Lady Macbeth says at one point. Since the couple have no children now, the reasonable inference is they have lost a child, and the death of a child is a lingering trauma for parents. Lady M also pointedly raises the spectre of madness in warning her husband not to think about certain things too much.

            'Let's get life back on track,' she may be thinking when her husband raises the witchery of being king. 'If he wants to be king, well maybe that's the ticket. It stinks to have to carve up a nice old man in your guest room but, hey, life is tough.'

             It is tough. Lady M. falls prey to her own warning and doesn't make it to the end of the play.

            Watching a brainy and energy-packed interpretation of one the English language's masterpieces such as the show currently offered by Bay Colony Shakespeare Company is why we keep going to the theater. So many good things call out for notice. The cast's three witches (Poornima Kirby, Monica Giordano, Meredith Stypinski) offer glorious, wild, physical nasty-joy. Stypinski also finds more to do with the single speech of the darkly clownish 'porter' than one ever imagined was in there. Eric Simpson as Lady M was all-in, matching MacDonald's visionary loosing of the inner devils with a steely determination to fight a losing battle. And MacDonald's falling hero, summoning his own demons, anticipates the consequences even as he commits the acts that bring them on in a brilliant realization of one of literature's great creations.