A Garden Wall: But Just For Looks

            First disclaimer: it's a very low wall. But I built it. It took almost no time.

            I bought what I needed at Home Depot, cleaning out the available stock of a certain style of distressed concrete border block made to resemble a stone. I had measured the space -- eyeballing the approximate size of the blocks I needed -- with a piece of notebook paper since the tape measure was on sabbatical. I figured on buying a few extra blocks since they were not expensive. When I brought them to the cashier with a few other purchases, she was unable to find the item on her merchandise list and so decided to charge them as something else (and smaller) at about one-third the price I expected.

            I also bought three bags of black garden soil, stopping at that number because I was tired of lifting heavy bags.

            Home, I took the blocks out the car's trunk, two at a time and placed them along the edge of a slate walk we had laboriously constructed two years ago (with real digging) where I thought they belonged. They fit perfectly. I took no more than a couple of minutes to do this. I did not attempt to dig them into the ground because there is no ground to dig in this patch of hard earth bordering the slate walk. It's all tree root beneath a hard, leached surface covered in part by tough weeds, most of these showing ill use from a rain-less summer.

            Any loose, pliable soil in this patch erodes in the rain onto the walk. Hence the need for a low border wall.

            But now that my line of low concrete blocks was in place, I poured the new soil on the tree-root side of the wall. The wall holds the soil in place, and the soil helps to hold the blocks in place.

            Now I had a strip of soil to plant. It took me about two weeks to get to it, but I transplanted vinca from another piece of the yard. This was a much messier job. The roots and vines go every whichway and you can't cut them out neatly like squares of turf, but our groundcover vinca was outgrowing its allotted space and tangling up around a line of low boxwood shrubs while crowding the roots of the roses. I packed the roots of the transplants into the new earth and watered them deeply. Then, for variety and color, I added a few small hardy mums.

            I am not as a rule a big fan of walls. Something there is, as the poet famously said, that doesn't love how walls separate and divide the world up. That something is nature. I certainly do appreciate the walls keeping the weather out of my house and the need for them in all the rest of the buildings required by civilization in a temperate climate. But walls between countries, borders, prison walls, the infamous "separation walls" that  protect the conqueror from the people whose land they have stolen are all blatant evidences of human failures.

            Garden walls, however, are mere points of landscape design. Their purpose is aesthetic. They're a species of outdoor sculpture. They are, generally speaking, straight lines in a realm free of them. But that's what a garden is -- it's an imposition on nature. We make art out of the materials nature provides, changing the look to our own satisfaction. And something inside of us loves to do it.

            Or at least try.

Late Starters: September in the Garden

            Large, round, sky blue Morning Glory. Some of these flowers get extra big and look right back at you. They glow like the full moon at night. The center of this one holds the white-yellow blaze of the September sun when the sun shines directly on it.

            Looking like a leaf or a dusky flower itself  (second photo), a pale brownish moth comes to rest on the shaded leaf of a Coral Bell. The Coral Bell grows under the shade of the tree. The wings of the moth are as pale as a fallen autumn leaf.

            Sonya's ring of white Impatiens (fourth down), which she planted during her visit last month. A necklace for the root ball of the weeping cherry tree.

            Joe-Pye Weed. You see them in the wild. Anne and I saw them growing recently in a wildflower patch along the shore of a Quincy peninsula called Nut Island. I remembered then why I had wanted them for our garden a few years back -- they bloom in late August and September. The flowers have a fuzzy, rough-edged look to them, almost as they're made of rougher stuff than finer, more delicate flowers -- rose petals, or Morning Glory. Named for a man who used them to control typhoid fever, I'm told they attract butterflies with their sweet nectar and that they spread and form a large clump. I'm ready for that.

            Dark pink-red Impatiens (third pic down), the blossoms shadowed and bleached by overexposure to the sun. I'm using annuals to bring some color and contrast to quiet, late-season corners.

            The dark pink anemone (sixth down). This darker color is probably my favorite color of all the perennials blossoming now. The plant drinks in the shade of the declining sun and distills it to a rich color. The sun was too bright in this photo; I'll try again later for a better image.
            Soft pink Anemones (seventh down); this variety grows tall and blooms prolifically in a semi-shade location. I count them on them coming through this time every year.

            Blue Plumbago (seventh photo) bloom with phlox-like flowers in August in a semi-shaded spot. After years of nurturing them, picking out all the competing weeds that grow faster and take up the space, the air, the water, the light reserved for them, the Plumbago rewarded me this year with a fair showing of blossoms. The plant comes in different shades of blue and different sizes, including shrubs. Some Plumbago have flowers of a shade called Gentian blue -- a purplish blue. I love the phrase 'Gentian blue flowers.'

           

         

            Pink Chablis Sedum, blooming a little later this year than in other recent years. Named for delicate vintage, it's the signal for a seasonal toast. Drink up.

'And Make Our Garden Grow': Voltaire's Earthy Wisdom

            Let's put on a play, said the performers of the Berkshire Theater's second stage Unicorn Theater, who were celebrating opera with a week-long festival that climaxed with a production of Verdi's 'La Traviata.'

            Apparently a week of great music was not a sufficient outlet for their artistic energies, so the musicians put together a kind of classical cabaret last Saturday night(8.30) called "The Paris Salon." The show leaned heavily on the talents of remarkably passionate and learned pianist Michael Fennelly and talented soprano Megan Weston, plus lots of backup from fellow cast members.

            The result was an informal history of the kind and range of musical performances you might see if you were lucky enough (or rich enough) to get invited to the intimate setting of a salon -- some 20 to 40 people drawn to the living quarters of a cultured hostess who had the taste and foresight to encourage artists like Chopin and Liszt. In a time of wars and revolutions many of Europe's most gifted and ambitious artists migrated to France to stay ahead of the upheavals in their own lands, Fennelly told the audience. France was used to wars and revolutions; Paris shrugged them off.

            Weston sang arias from beloved and widely performed operas of Guonod and Donizetti. We heard piano works by Chopin, Liszt, his contemporary rival Thalberg, Debussy and others. Other selections included one of my favorite  arias, "The Flower Duet" from the opera 'Lachme'; the swan ballet from Saint-Saens's "Carnival of the Animals" danced by a beautiful young cygnet; a flute performance of themes from Bizet's "Carmen" arranged for solo instrument (a once popular musical genre).

            And then we reach the 20th century and the Americans get into the act, with two songs from Bernstein's "Candide" and a solo piano rendition of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."

            The night's finale, from "Candide," bears the wise and spectacularly appropriate title (for me) "Make Our Garden Grow." The phrase comes from the conclusion of Voltaire's satirical novel in which an innocent young man ("Candide") discovers the world is not at all like his teachers and priests told him it was. Chastened by experience, Candide and his beloved, the equally disabused (and deflowered) Cunégonde's sing:

You've been a fool
And so have I,
But come and be my wife.
And let us try,
Before we die,
To make some sense of life.
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
And make our garden grow.
CUNEGONDE:
I thought the world
Was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But, now I'll teach
My hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.
CANDIDE AND CUNEGONDE:
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
And make our garden grow.
[lyrics by the poet Richard Wilbur]

            The astute novelist and critic Julian Barnes describes Voltaire's oft-quoted "moral" il faut cultiver notre jardin as "a philosophical recommendation to horticultural quietism."

            It's clearly more than that. The philosophical advisory to "cultivate your garden" is recognized as a metaphor for taking care of business, doing the most with what you have, "cultivating" your own talents as a route toward satisfaction and happiness... and many other aphoristic interpretations. Still, it's hard to get away entirely from the literal impact of that concrete noun "jardin."

            Whatever else he may be implying, he's also telling us to get our hands dirty in making a home for ourselves in the place directly beneath our feet. To do what we can to make the piece of earth where we live productive, fruitful and beautiful -- at least in part because none of us can do very much to "grow" the world into the home we'd like it to be.

            Revolutions are short, and violent, and don't come out the way you want them to. Life is relatively longer (if we're lucky) and, on the micro level at least, can be improved.

What I Learned from Teaching My Summer Course: the Garden of Big Ideas

            It is hard to stand up and talk coherently for over an hour.

            You can over-prepare and still forget everything you planned to say and start babbling when the brain gets tired.

            Not as many people have read "Pride & Prejudice" as someone like me assumes. ('Someone like me'? Who dat?) It should be no cause for astonishment, then, to discover that few harbor an abiding admiration for the novel's famous first line.

            There is no good time to drive to Cape Cod on a Friday in August.

            If you state in a pre-course email 'Feel free to read these excerpts and print out copies to refer to in class,' some will feel free not to.

            Your printer will run out of both paper and inkjet the morning of the course when it occurs to you to print out extra copies.

            You think it would be a good idea to listen to relaxing music or an inspiring piece of literature on the long stop-and-go drive to the writer's conference. But none of your inspiring music has made it into the car and the book on CDs you took out from the library is a piece of junk.

            The city of Hyannis has many roads, both large and small, that serve utterly no purpose in taking you to your destination.

            Many other people are having a busy August weekend.

            It is very easy to allow very important statements prepared in advance to slip from your memory when the time has come to declare them to the world. Or have I said this before?

            Nobody even knows anybody who has ever heard of "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf. It is easy to forget to ask, "Have anyone seen the movie 'The Hours'?"

            At least one other person in the universe can match the sentence "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" to the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Whew.

            On the other hand, few people are impressed by the connection between the famous first sentence "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" by Tolstoi and the sentence "The place where you grow up is always the most boring place in the world. The place you leave behind is a source of endless fascination"... by, ahem, yours truly.

            When the Writing Conference session you have been preparing for for weeks is over, you will feel an astonishing sensation of relief.

            At the session's end some participants will come up to thank you for the course, including one or two you didn't expect it from, and say complimentary things about your choice of excerpts.

            Some of the others will sneak out the door before the session is actually over. These will unfortunately will miss the opportunity to fill out the course evaluation forms, on account of being gone by the time the instructor passes them out.

            When one of the more engaged participants raises his hand and observes, "So is it correct to sum up what you're saying as 'you only get one chance to make a first impression?'" you will think hard for a moment and then respond with an enthusiastic "Yes! Yes! See you all next year!"