Abundance in the Garden: July is Full of Everything

           I think a terrible winter must be good for a flower-filled summer. Was it the seven-foot snowbanks that surrounded the house like a frozen fortress for two months? Or the long, prolonged winter cold, owing to that heavy snow cover, which made life in Massachusetts feel like living next to a meat locker with the door open?

            Whatever the reason, this year's flowering plants and vegetables are lusher than I can ever remember.

            With my limited resources and equipment, basically me behind my Sony point-and-shoot, I'm striving for a few panorama shots.

            Here are some of the results: Photo number one. The yellow stella d'oro daylilies (in their second week of blooming) dominate the foreground. We also see some flowering stalks of both red and white astilbe, pink tufts of cosmos, and behind the contrastingly dark red blossoms of coreopsis.

            The second shot focuses on our large red spirea shrub. It blooms in June and is still carrying on these days, though most of the blossoms have faded. In the foreground you can see the thick patch of yellow loosestrife flowers (on dark, wine-purple stems); then the big native orange daylilies in the background; along with some bi-colored dogwood branches on the left of the frame. And, behind all these guys, in the background against the fence, an example of our newest arrivals, the Green Giant Arborvitae recently planted to provide some privacy coverage because by all accounts THEY GROW FAST. We shall see. We need some height back there to hide behind.

             The next photo focuses on the round flower heads of that maroon coreopsis, another recent arrival, since I planted it only this spring. These plants were wilting in the nursery, their long stringy stems tangling with one another, but something about the color made me think it was worth taking a chance on them. They perked up marvelously once I got them in the ground in a spot I think of as part-sun.

            I think it may be all that melt-water in the ground that's still nourishing the roots of pernnials like coreopsis. I know I'm not watering like I did last year.

            The fifth photo is a solo portrait of dark pink knockout rose bushes, that started late this year but bloomed all together. The plants waited until the end of June to thicken up and blossom, after wearing heavy winter coats of snow piled up from shoveling the front sidewalk time and again. We don't mind the wait. Experience shows they bloom on and on through the rest of the year. The challenge is staying ahead of the black-spot disease that claims both leaves and branches and the season goes on. Maybe the cold has killed off some of these spores.

            The next photo concentrates on a happy hydrangea. Also in the front garden, the lace-cap hydrangea gets bigger and more flowerful every year. Most of the blossoms are pink, but some show a kind of purple. Color change in hydrangeas reflects the soil balance between acidic and basic chemistry, a subject I'm completely remiss in. I've never had my soil tested.

            The fourth photo from the top shows the white Shasta daisies, which are simply stronger and more perfectly shaped than they've been for years. I know no reason for it. Do they too prefer a more punishing climate? They bloomed all June, the blossoms appear to be lasting longer. Behind these white blooms you can see the raspberry bushes with green fruit. I took the photo before the fruit ripened. Now I pick raspberries every day and can't get them all in before a few at least fall to the ground.

            The last photo shows the orange daylilies blooming behind the branches of the dogwood, and the arborvitae behind them against the fence. There's more color out there in nature, especially in the daylilies and the yellow flowering loosestrife than these photos captured, but light isn't strong enough to show them truly.

            I think I'll go outdoors and try to do better. Right now.

The Garden of Verses: Poetry from Here to Bombay

            Happy summer, everyone. We're just past the Summer Solstice, still enjoying the longest days of the year, and I'm still high on one of the year's highest points.
            A poem stemming from the wages of carrying too much water to thirsty plants last summer has seen the light of day in a book recently published in a distant clime. The Bombay Review celebrates the first anniversary of its bimonthly literary journal with an anthology of selections from the first year's contributions. My poem "My Aching Back" (a backyard gardener's injury) was chosen for inclusion.

            You can order a copy of the anthology off the publisher's website, but it will cost you 399 rupees. I've been checking our various collections of international money, a few pounds or pence here, a few thousand Lebanese Lira there, but so far not a single rupee. Happily, I believe they take American. Anne points out that we are relatively "rich in rupees," since by recent exchange rates those 399 convert to $6.38.

            ("Let’s get a few copies," she suggests. "And then go out for Indian food.")

            Here's the link to the anthology: http://pothi.com/pothi/book/kaartikeya-bajpai-bombay-review-0

            Another month, another new edition. The July Verse-Virtual, the fantastically industrious online journal that publishes scores of original poems at the remarkable pace of a new edition every month, includes five of my poems. These consist of an amalgam of three "Late Songs," my title for poems written to celebrate some songs I listen to frequently, but almost always late at night.

            Another of these poems owes its existence to a recommendation from fellow Verse-Virtual poet Luis Neer, who pointed me to Mary Oliver's poem "Out of the Stump Rot, Something," which in turn reminded me of an encounter with a black snake. The poem's called "Snake Crossing."

            The fifth poem concerns one of poetry's most enduring subjects and sources of inspiration, the seasons.

            Here's the link for these poems: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2015-july.html

Summer Begins in the Garden: Eveything's Still Perfect

            Of course it's not, but we can still pretend it is. No big disasters, dying specimen plants, that sort of thing. Any spring disappointments, or failures of return after a dry summer and a cold winter, have all been all grown over.

            Sunny June weather and enough water in the earth solves all problems. At least temporarily. And 'temporary' is where we live.

            Day lilies are opening up on the early side this year. The first stella d'oro blossoms preceded the summer solstice. The front garden is showing dark pink roses, a strongly lavendar crop of lavendar-- a color by far the best when it first comes out (second photo). A fresh second round of our explosion-purple clematis is also climbing the porch in the front garden (last photo).

            The yellow rose-shaped blossoms of the primrose (third photo down, taken of a colony of these flowers in the back garden) are everywhere. They spread themselves and I let them cover spots where other perennials find it hard to get a footing. The latest colony is glowing in the raised square of earth beside the front yard maple I keep trying to make bloom in the desert of tree roots and thin soil. This is unforgiving weed country. Even pachysandra struggles there. This year I'm enjoying the place's yellow period in early summer.

            White Shasta daisies (fourth photo) are having a strong year too. The blossoms look healthier. At times I think the entire local 'garden world' is a little healthier after a cleansing, snow-heavy winter. It's a theory. A few weaker plants, in some cases specimens that have barely managed to hang in there for years, were just put clean out of their misery. Possibly some plant diseases that take a bite out of certain perennials every year died back enough to make a difference. For whatever reason, the daisies are shining.

            Some seriously dark-red roses (sixth photo, taken by Anne with water drops on the petals), the mini-plants transplanted from a lingering decrepitude in a crowded situation elsewhere, are a shiny red this year. They managed to bloom this year even before the rose-eaters have taken an single bite out of their leaves.

            Other plants, even those not yet in flower, or already passed, are shooting their leaves up with chlorophyll. The scores of tints of green, and the variety of blossoms behind them (seen in the panorama photos).

            Caught in a sea of others, spiky red astilbe blossoms rise up from the crowd (group shot, top photo). The bi-colored leaves of the dogwood (healthier after a rescue intervention last year) hang over colonies of smaller folk (ninth photo).

             A thick crowd of low yellow blossoms of coreopsis moonbeam opened last week (fifth photo).

            The spirea shrub (seventh photo) grows behind the weeping cherry, its dense dark pink composite flowers leaning out over the brick path. We usually have to cut it back and then tie up to the tree to keep the circular path clear enough to have a prayer of walking around it.

            Meanwhile white flat-topped blossoms of achillea (yarrow) flower in the semi-shade border of the flower island (eight photo).

            Two potted varieties of a favorite annual, hibiscus (saving pics of these for next time), are also feeling their oats.

            After a rainy period last week, we got a new supply of bright, clear, dry air one morning and I ran outside to see what the light would tell us. The result was -- I took a lot of pictures. What a surprise.

            I can't help wondering if there's some synergy between the sky above and the plant energy below. Last Thursday's Boston Globe had a front page photo of northern lights glimpsed in Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. Dark skies north of Boston apparently had a good chance of glimpsing this stunningly bizarre phenomena. The sports section front also had a picture of the deep pink cloud bank over Fenway Park.

            That cloud bank was everywhere. You could see it in the parking lot coming out of the Quincy YMCA. You could see it on the Hingham shore, on the shores of Kingston, in Hull.

              The skies, I think, are celebrating the long days of what an earlier agrarian society called "midsummer." 

The Garden of Song: Quincy on the Front Lines of the Revolution

            Quincy history is all about the Adams family. John and Abigail Adams remain America's all-time power couple: John as the single most effective advocate for the nation-birthing break from British rule and a player of essential roles in establishing an independent United States. And Abigail as "founding mother" because of her advocacy of the rights and claims of women in political, moral and human terms in letters to her diplomat/absent husband and to others.

            I knew something about those letters. But it took a powerful work of art, a recently composed opera called "A Distant Love: Songs of John and Abigail Adams" performed last weekend by Chelsea Opera at the Adams National Historical Park, to make me realize how important, and universal, the letters still are.

            Anne and I know Adams country in Quincy, a municipality that back in Revolutionary days was known as East Braintree. We know Penn's Hill, the site Abigail took young John Quincy to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill is; we know that Dorchester Heights (where captured guns lugged across New England by Henry Knox drove the British out of Boston) overlooks the old city of Boston.We know where to find the more modest homestead the Adamses lived in before acquiring the handsomer estate where the national park is located today.

            So we figured we were on top of the subject of the English language opera commissioned by the John Adams Institute (music by Gary S. Fagin, libretto by Terry Quinn), based on the famous letters exchanged by John and Abigail during their lengthy separation as John served his newborn country in public ways, as men did, and Abigail kept the home farm going and the family safe even though the war at her doorsteps in the first years of separation and deprivation her family's constant companion until its end.

            But I not prepared to be as moved, patriotically and in all other emotions, as I was by the opera's ability to drive Abigail's passionate words into our hearts.

            After the performance I told Victoria Tralongo,who sang Abigail's role, how moved I was by her singing of the lyrics taken from the letters.

            "She has all the great lines," I said.

            "Yes," the singer replied. "But it takes the music to make you feel them."

            For 11 years, from 1774 when he left for the Continental Congress though his wartime service raising money and support for the revolution in Europe, John Adams' life was all about politics.     Politics of the international diplomatic variety meant painstakingly cultivating support while living among foreigners and enduring their customs is the subject of his letters. Adams despised the French appetite for courtly manners and the play-acting of the aristocracy. He came to admire the Dutch, from whose outwardly skeptical tight-fisted, but essentially "open-hearted" persona he won an absolutely essential loan to keep the America cause alive in dark days. His letters speak of getting used to life in Amsterdam, of canals, bridges, "shaking on a horse" (the Dutch view of exercise), communicating with the Dutch who spoke a language, called Dutch, "spoken only by -- the Dutch," the nastiness of a North Sea winter, a city turned to ice, and "skating, skating, skating."

             The letters reflect his sense of duty to the nation and the depth of his longing for his soul mate wife and his home: "When, oh when, shall I see those fields... and when shall I see them... with you?" 

            But it is Abigail's letters that have all the good lines. In 1775 when the fighting had begun around Boston, and the reality of war, and the fears for what that reality might prove to be for oneself and one's loved ones had become her new reality, Abigail writes of "canon mounted on Beacon Hill, entrenchments dug upon the Neck..." And of human consequences: "Warnings, rumors, Mothers hoarding goods, whisking children from the streets./ All males from fifteen to sixty hauling muskets to the training ground... Our once so placid lives in disarray! ... Refugees from Boston seek asylum at the house... Try to imagine, husband, how we live!"

            But the threats of an aggressive enemy only intensify a determination to resist. Once the shooting starts, these letters tell us, there goes the olive branch, and out come the bloody thoughts. To the Brits' offer of clemency to those who quit the fight, she responds, "They know not who we are! Once we have cut them down -- like grass before the scythe -- then, yes, we shall cease to fight."

               Even, she says (in a song the opera titles "Women"), if the "men" of the Patriots' army are ordered to withdraw from the Boston theater of war, "and we should be attacked, our common foe would find a race of Amazons in its path!/ No clutch of shuddering wives -- a race of Amazons in America!"

            I can't shake the power of that image: Amazons in America! OK, I tell myself, the country's in deep trouble -- bring out our Amazons!

            Abigail takes aim at Tories too, particularly those members of the Church of England who fill the pews "and pray for the king! A man whose boot presses on their necks!"

            And she has words to regret that original sin of the American nation both she and her husband are struggling to bring forth. In a song called "Slavery" she concludes: "We'll vow to die before we cede our freedom/ then turn and clap another's wrist in chains."

            I don't know if you can sum up the contradiction any better than that.

            And in a final song, "Avowal," Abigail promised that given her awareness of the importance of his task, she will never plead with John him to end their separation, in words such as these: "Come home, my love, come back to me./ The stars above wait no less faithfully..." 

             Ms. Tralongo is correct. I can share the words on the page, but not the impact of the music. If you get the opportunity to attend this musical production, whether or not Independence Day is just around the corner, be sure to go.