Up the Garden Path

           It's hard to live in the moment. But something happens in the last week of April and the first days of May that has me trying.

            The low phlox (top photo) blooming under the big maple tree makes a tiny stretch of tired sidewalk glow with color. It's the bright moment of the year for this little piece of the earth's surface.You have to enjoy while it lasts because, trust me, it doesn't last very long.

            It's tulip season (second photo). Tulips tend to deteriorate after a few years. Professional display gardens tend to pull up all the bulbs every other year and plant new ones. These yellow and red ones keep coming back. We forget about them from one year to the next, but they appear to keep track of time very well without us.   Some taller violet colored tulips fight their way up in a spot in front of the house crowded with shrubbery as well.

            Pale violets (third photo), spotted with purple dots. They will grow on your lawn, mixing with the grass and clover, if you don't use "weed killers." I think this batch moved with us from Plymouth.

            Up the garden path, front yard style (fourth photo). The stepping stones we put down the first year to mark the curving path from the so-called cottage garden in front of the house were overgrown and covered by dirt almost immediately. Some of the plants I tried to grow along them haven't survived there either. But the roses, lavendar, adromeda, butterfly bush, and maiden grass (too low to be seen yet but a fast grower when its new green spears come in) have all flourished.

            In the back garden (fifth photo), the fresh colors, and new leaves of plants emerging from the ground and beginning to take their proper shape make a jumbled but pleasing May Day early spring climax.It's the light that pulls everything together in this photo.

            Some taller plants in a view just a few feet to the left (sixth): the Chinese peony, the first leaves on the thin-limbed dogwood; the red Japanese maple against the fence.

            A closer view of this piece of the back garden (seventh photo) bring the vinca, day lilies and the dark green of the evergreens behind them into focus.

            A shadow-striped photo of  the right-hand side of the back garden (eighth photo), looking toward the oak tree. Spring vetch at the base of the tree is blooming purple. Also purple penstemon, the itea shrub, low artemisia, and too many other plants to remember all the names.
            Rediscovering all these plants in the certain slants of light of the just-now season is the peculiar pleasure of a time that can't last .You have to be there when it happens. I'm glad we had the chance to be there then. Because now it's now, and time is always fleeting.

Snakes in the Woods: (Almost) a YouTube Sensation

In the ancient Greek story, Tiresisas the seer is walking in the woods one day when he comes upon two snakes in the act of coitus. He strikes them with his stick and is instantly transformed from a man to a woman. Years later he comes upon another  pair of snakes in the same act. A quick hand with the stick and, presto, he's changed back to a man. Tiresisas is now in a postion to answer the eternal question the Greeks -- a famously philosophical, and scientific-minded, race -- put to him. Who has more pleasure in the act of love, the man or the woman? For the record, the seer's reply is the woman.

            I'm afraid we saw something different in the woods today. Two snakes -- one much larger than the other -- locked together. The reason in this case, however, was the large one was eating the smaller.

            It took a moment before we understood what was going on. Then came that little shock of disbelief. The larger snake, the only one we saw at first, was much larger than any snake we've ever seen around here. Its skin was black and the scales smooth. Accustomed to the homey little things we call garter snakes, I couldn't believe how big he was. Usually when you come upon a snake, it's hightailing -- or low-winding -- away from you, in a hurry to hide beneath some convenient underbrush or leaf pile as fast as its legless body can go. Not this one.

            While the snake had some patchwork patterning, like striations on his skin, I couldn't talk myself into believing he was some kind of eccentric variation of rattler. But he puzzled us by being half under a leaf and brush pile and in no apparent hurry to make himself scarce.

            One end of him corkscrewed out of the leaf pile and came into plain view.

            "So that's the head?" Anne asked.

            "It looks like the tail," I replied.

            "Then he has tails at both ends."

            That is kind of the way it looks. The other end of him is obscured by the leaf pile. Then some  other pointy end pops out.

            "No," I say when the picture comes into focus, "that's his head -- eating another snake."

            The big snake has his mouth open -- I can't say "wide" because it looks narrow for what he's attempting -- and is clearly around what must be the head-end of the smaller snake. Some blood shows on the smaller one's skin. We can't tell how much of the smaller one is already inside that mouth.

            What we can see is a lot of thrashing. The big one moves its body abruptly from side to another; it looks like some fancy computer graphic swinging a convex curve into concave and back again. Then it straightens its long body, as if to open the tube of its inner self some teeny bit wider to take more of the tube-like body of the creature it's consuming into its slow-moving digestive track.

            This may sound disgusting, but in the moment it's eerily fascinating.

            The skinny one -- the common garter snake, the kind of snake we're used to seeing in the woods doing that rapid rustle in the grass routine (producing the moment of consciousness Emily Dickinson brilliantly described as "zero at the bone") -- appears to be trying to move its tail. The skinny end of it wraps around the body of the larger one as if seeking purchase to pull the rest of itself back out. Or this may be, we speculate, a reflex from a creature essentially dead already. Maybe the far end of the tail hasn't got the message yet.

            In any event it's going to be a long day for the black snake even if he does get to the end of what he's -- bitten off?

            "His eyes are bigger than his stomach," Anne says.

            But I don't know how to measure a snake's stomach. Or is stomach a meaningless term for snake anatomy? I am a child in matters reptilian.

            What looks to us like a death-match struggle of unfairly matched contestants wrestling in the dirt may be the only way a snake of this size gets a full meal.

            The consumer yanks the consumed in one direction, toward us, and we jump back. Then he drags it back into the leaf and bush pile.

            I don't know how long we would have kept watching, and I doubt final consumption/consummation is imminent, but big snake now begins to slap its tail back and forth in the leaves, making a low noise.

            It's too much like the behavior of a rattler, only there's little real noise and no rattle. Still it looks to me like communication. I think he's finally realized we're there: two large creatures standing near and watching him work.

            "What's that?" she asks.

            I suspect it's meaningful, I tell her. "I think he's warning us to stay away. I think it's communication."

            "OK. Then let's go."

            We assure one another we were just about to get a move on anyway.

            Back at the house, Anne ID's the big snake as a "black racer," from 36 to 60 inches long, and sometimes stretching out to 6 feet. I'm estimating the one we saw at about 4.5 feet. A photo on line confirms the smaller one as a garter snake.

            I recall deciding right before we left the house for our walk that we didn't need the camera. Of course, what we really needed was a video camera.

            "Too bad," Anne points out. "It would have been a YouTube sensation."

A Garden High on New York City

Many ways of looking at the High Line, the new high-on-life public park on the site of a long-gone elevated train line.

            More people gather there in one place, well one long place -- 30 blocks? we never reached the end of it -- than venture into most cities all weekend.

            You know how great it is to go to the top of some tall building and then look out at the skyline, the rooftops, the buildings, streets and tiny people below from the superior point of view of putting all the world's smaller things in their place? The High Line offers that. Only it's not one elevated point of view. It's a moving perspective that changes every few steps.

            Somewhere well south of 23rd Street, but I can't recall if we're down to 14th St. yet, someone calls out "look to your left." And there, that strangely familiar tower with the gracefully curving point on top, turns out to the the Empire State Building. You look a little further, below the 14th Street stairway now, and off to your right is an more strangely familiar figure with a pointy hat holding a torch in the air. Someone says, "That can't be the Statue of Liberty!" But it is.

            Like people watching? You don't have to position yourself on a street corner or a park bench and pretend to be doing something else. All the people on that busy street corner climb up the stairs and rubber-neck along with you.

            It's almost too crowded. On a particularly inviting mild spring Saturday afternoon, judging from the amount of gaping and pointing and exclaiming going on -- not all of it by us -- many, many people chose to make their first visit to the High Line. What percentage of the country's total population -- and, comparatively, what percent of the total number visitors to New York City -- will eventually pay that first visit to the High Line? Later, when the day's travels took us close to Central Park in midtown, I was almost surprised to see that folks were relatively thick on the ground there too. Not to mention the Sikh music festival (many guys in lavender turbans) that closed down Madison Avenue.

            Much closer than the famous landmarks visible on the skyline -- including the Flatiron Building and a host of others Anne's parents knew the names of -- some new architectural conversation pieces loom right up against the High Line. One of them is a tall rectangle with a shiny glass facade. You could throw pink rubber ball against it, and enjoy the mirrored moment. Given the nearness of the objects and activity on the walkway, any sort of mirror would produce interesting light effects. But this building is also partially clad in big patches of rust-orange panels of indescribable shape, color and material that suggested to me the look of the rusty tan-orange mold that grows prominently on certain rock formations in the woods. It's a memorable look, with the strangeness of contemporary art.

            Art does happen here. Somebody organized a collection of sculptures suggested perhaps by actual figures or types in the urban landscape. The umbrella title for these is "Busted." Not sure why. They're not exactly busts. The one I photographed is long and skinny-legged like a Giacometti.

            The place is actually a garden too.

            The old rails are incorporated into most of of the -- let's call them beds, the lateral spaces that run alongside the walking path, generally on both sides. A lot of this space is filled with cement paving of an interesting repeated pattern that suggests it might have been lifted from something functional, but I can't imagine what. The pattern looks like the extended fingers of one hand, with the space between the fingers filled with dirt; and the dirt filled with plants. Lots of spring bloomers, from daffodils in some places to stunning young ornamental trees whose tightly packed pink blossoms flow directly out of the principal transverse branches.

            The floral color was very strong, enough to make me wonder a little what they would do in mid-summer when these spring perennials stop blooming. Judging from what's there now I feel pretty sure they have a plan.

            Even a little music. A man sits among the people, bowing the long string of a Japanese stringed instrument. Another plays hand-drums along with a drum tape. A little boy sits in on a couple of drums and plays them shockingly well.

            It's a fresh set of eyes on the city.

            It's both something new to look at. And someplace new from which to look at everything else that's always been here. Only some of it is new, and some of it might as well be, because you've never see it before.

            Almost everything works. Almost. The city installed some fancy elevators across the street from the stairways to take folks who need a lift up to the High Line. The reason they're not working, the sign tells us, is they were damaged by Superstorm Sandy.

            That was six months ago. The existence of the sign lets you that the bureaucracy is working even if the elevators aren't. Given the number of people there last weekend, they could probably take up a collection and get the things fixed.

More Color, More Life

I devoted a fair part of several fairly warm afternoons last week picking old brown leaves and new green weeds out of the groundcover that grows under a big shade tree in the back garden.
For me that's a sure sign of spring.
The groundcover back there consists of English Ivy, which grows wherever and however it wants (but which has not yet threatened to take over the universe), a few wild violets, and a grassy-looking spring bloomer that makes tiny white flowers whose name and provenance are a complete mystery to me.
But the signature groundcover of this stage of the springtime garden is Vinca minor. The small-leaved plant -- the leaves shiny, with a wax-like coating that discourages certain diseases and pests -- is also known as periwinkle and, incorrectly according to the sources, as creeping myrtle.

I look forward to a solid show by Vinca, with patches in both the front and back flower gardens, because its bluish flowers make the ground shine. It's an April bloomer, but here it is the last week of April before we've seen much in the way of color.
Still its arrival is a bright moment. After a long winter and slow-starting spring I'm not about to let the patch under the tree be overshadowed by the weeds that, despite the above-mentioned chilly spring, are off to their usual healthy head start. In particular, a light green weed with a slightly fuzzy leaf loves to slip in among the Vinca and obscure our view of the flowers by spreading its leaves above them if I let it, so I don't.
Pulling weeds involves sitting or squatting on the ground, so a little warm weather makes the task more attractive. I listen to the birds, it's their month too, woodpeckers knock about invisibly in the oak, pile up a small landfill of the extracted pale-green weeds that I apply directly to the newly turned soil in the vegetable garden to mask the smell of our recently-added compost.
We needed to remove a lot of half dessicated food waste from the compost bin this year because the thing was half tipping over and falling apart. Anne always volunteers eagerly for this job (this is the sort of remark I slip in to see if you're awake).
I dug the compost, both well-decayed and not-so, directly into the garden soil because we don't have any other place to put it.
The smell was remarkable; and enduring. I carried it on the soles of my sneakers for days afterwards. (No, the sneakers did no go indoors.)
So weeds always play this role in the garden's economy. The quicker I get their roots out of the soil the sooner I can use them to mulch the vegetable garden, that flash-mob of the annuals I am hoping to make grow from seed or seedling size in spring to tomato, bean, and eggplant jungle by late summer.
I'm late getting to work on the vegetable garden, but the proliferation of blossoms on the Vinca, the thickening up of the other groundcovers, the white flowers on the pachysandra -- plus the rapid population growth of the weeds, for that matter -- all show that spring is taking hold.
Traction in the earth. Sunlight in the skies. The green blossoms on the shade trees on both sides of our street. And in our exposed, pushy sidewalk strip, that little oasis of cultivation between the decaying sidewalk and the asphalt jungle of the street, the blue of the grape hyacinths is shining strongly now. Along with the pansies, planted by Anne, they give us some spot color to celebrate the high moments of April.
We enjoy those moments, those repeated but always new gifts of the cosmos,whenever they come.

Boston Underfoot

On the Saturday after Marathon Day, we went downtown to Boston to feel the city under our feet once again.
The city, official voices assured us after the famous Friday evening arrest, was back on its feet. We wanted it on ours too.Lots of other people had the same idea.
From Park Street we walked through Boston Common, circling a gentle grassy rise clothed with several hundred young people sitting in small groups facing this way and that. Was it Earth Day? Or merely Turf Day? The youthful gathering had staked out its turf in impressive numbers, and the smell of marijuana wafting on the April breeze was profound.
The nature of this gathering made me think of Central Park on some very (very) youthful occasions. Anne suggested the term "be-in." No uniformed public safety presence was anywhere in sight. We were told later that a crowd gathers in the Common every year at this time to celebrate the Earth by puffing on one of its products.
The uniformed personnel, not surprisingly, were all over on Boylston Street.
Before going there we hiked through the Public Garden, stuffed with people as well, but the Garden has a different personality from the Common. The Garden is for strolling, not for langing. The landscape desgin with its circular, winding paths has the classic Olmstead look, with a new vista at every turn. The design has formal elements as well: massed plantings -- the tulip buds were pursing their lips but not quite open; the pansy beds were turning their happy faces to the transitory sun. And romantic structural elements such as footbridge over the pond where the swanboats play in the summer. The bridge is ideal for picture taking. Pretty much every turn on a Boston Public Garden path is.
The gates of the Garden give way to the Commonwealth Avenue "mall," its green, tree-filled walkway separating two roadways. The west side of the street is lined with magnolia trees blooming last weekend in front of the avenue's classy stone townhouses, perfectly maintained private addresses with pretty public faces. Together they make a unified aesthetic piece, with a little bit of individuality in each tiny courtyard, like separate voices joined in a chorus.

The mall also provides a setting for a quirky cavalcade of monuments to some of Boston's best-known names mixed with lesser known sons whose backers apparently had an in with the city. In the first category, for example, we have an old-fashioned, 19th century "great man" statue of William Lloyd Garrison, accompanied by an inscription with his most oft-repeated declaration: "I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - and I will be heard!" Garrison is a Boston brand, but the monument nowhere states that he was an abolitionist, perhaps the single most important voice in that crusade. I wonder how long it will be safe to say, "Doesn't everybody know that?"
Don't worry. I didn't stop perfect strangers to take a survey.
But I took photos of the well-designed, very contemporary "women's voices" monument, with its images of Phyllis Wheatley (America's first black author); Lucy Stone (suffragist and the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree); and Abigail Adams, for whom the inscribed text quotes from the "remember the ladies" letter to husband John.
The crowd, and the cops, were thickest at the metal barriers and ad-hoc mourners' monument at the crime scene on Boylston Street. You took it in with a glance and there was no need to remain. Newbury Street proved more mobbed than usual on a spring weekend, so when we were finally allowed back on Boylston Street, near the Arlington station, we got coffee and croissants at a crowded Au Bon Pain and sat outdoors among people of different backgrounds and colors, several parties of Spanish speakers, a small flock of happy sparrows, and a news anchor from NECN (New England Cable News) who was instantly recognized on the street .
Ah, a typical urban melange. Same as it always was. Just what we wanted.
Somebody wrote recently (can't remember where or I would credit the author) that the thing that brings people back to cities is they find they have conversations there they don't have anywhere else. Sometimes they even have them with themselves.

The Garden of the Mind

When a great writer takes on a difficult subject, the results can be intriguing. In the case of Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed," the subject is a utopia that does not, as it typically would in the scifi or fantasy genres, turn into a dystopia. The planet of Anares, whose whose people founded their society on the principles of the great anarchist philosophy Odo, does have its problems. But then everywhere in the universe -- at least everywhere the human-like species in Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" can travel -- does.

            Le Guin wrote this book 40 years ago. I can't explain why I only got around to it recently. Maybe because 40 years ago I would have tried to figure out where it was and go there.

            Anares was once the satellite planet, or colony, of the much larger planet Urras. Urras mined it for minerals, much in the way the counties of the Earth plan to treat the Arctic, or maybe the moon some day once we figure out to exploit it. However life on Urras was dominated by greed, ambition, the exploitation of the less powerful by the more powerful, vulturish capitalism, the sort of corrosive materialism that corrupts the haves as it drains the life from the have-nots. This picture should sound familiar, though the novel claims this is not a portrait of Earth since in Le Guin's literary universe another world, called Terra, takes on that role. Terra, as should be instructive for us to learn, is a largely burnt-out planet trying to struggle back from a planetary-resources collapse that reduced the population from 8 billion to a few struggling millions. People from Terra tend to think that the cruel but wealthy planet of Urras is the cat's meow.

            However, the growing number of social and economic revolutionaries on Urras who followed the teachings of Odo eventually threatened the status quo sufficiently that the planet's leaders decided to buy off dissent by offering its "moon," Anares, to the Odonians for their "new world." Seven generations later, as our story begins, Anares is still small potatoes. The planet has an atmosphere but not enough water. It's dry and hot and hard to grow enough food there. It trades minerals for fuel from Urras. The truly charming piece of their relationship is that the people on each planet call the other "the moon."

            What Anares does have is idealism and brotherhood. Each person has right to call on every other for assistance. No one owns property. In fact to insult somebody for selfish or uncivil behavior you call him a "propertarian." People live in dormitories or something called "doms," which appears to mean "available housing."

            There is no money. When you need something you go to the storehouse and take it, though as is to be expected in a "scarcity society" much is rationed. A serious, long-lasting drought raises the possibility of starvation and shakes this group-oriented society to its roots. The planet would not turn to Urras for help because, in line with ideological purity, it won't have anything to do with Urras or any other world (beside that restricted trade in minerals).

            Having given herself such interesting ideas to work with, Le Guin then creates intriguing, complex characters with satisfyingly deep issues and drives them into an involving, unconventional plot. It's politics, ethics, psychology and international diplomacy, rather than action-adventure that motivates -- just as in any really good novel in any (or no) genre.

            And after the story resolves, and the fiction comes to an end, we're left with much to think about. We have, for instance, Le Guin's brilliant creation of a philosophical basis for this society founded on the ideas of the anarcho-ethicist Odo, a woman who does not live to see her ideas put into practice.

            In place of money, ambition, and ego, Odonians have brotherhood and the absolute right to mutual assistance -- along with the responsibility to provide it. And a looser idea of family, since everyone, including parents seek out (and are sometimes forced to accept) job postings anywhere in the world. Sometimes to work in your desired field you must go far from home. Sometimes the needs of the community lead you to sign up for long stretches of planting trees, for instance, in a virtual desert. Our hero's mother says, "the work comes first." The result is our hero, Shevek, grows up without a mother. Shevek, a physicist, is separated from his own family for four years because survival needs turn him into an agricultural laborer.

            But Odo was no back-to-the-land romantic. While decentralization is an essential element of anarchist philosophy, Odo "had no intention of trying to de-urbanize civilization," Le Guin writes. Her followers "knew their anarchism was the product of a complex and diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods and ideas." When they developed a new area, they built the roads first.

            Ideas such as these are folded into the narrative throughout. Our Shevek is not only a universe-class physics theorist, he's a deep psychological and spiritual thinker whose personal journey leads, shockingly to his society, to an actual spaceship journey to another world. It's rare to find a novel written these days, or any days perhaps, with this much intellectual/inspirational heft in so many directions.

            "The Dispossessed" assumes high technological standard, but its action isn't techno-driven. It's human-driven. That's a model that can still fly.