The Garden of the Seasons: "English Weather" Good for the Greening

A friend of mine called it "English weather." That long bout of cool and frequently rainy weather that only ended last weekend, ushering in the current warm spell.
England is a green and flowerful place, and you can credit that otherwise challenging weather for the loveliness of the English countryside and the attractiveness of gardens throughout that country from tiny urban footprints to professionally landscape-curated estates. 
So while I'm delighted to have some "American" summer weather (even with the current operatic stretch of mid-90s), I'm grateful for that cool, wet growing energy that greened up our world and is in the process of creating a lush, colorful June. 
We lost most of a venerable rhododendron two years ago in the winter that wouldn't stop. The snow kept the ground too cold for too long, apparently, and the upper three quarters of the seeming indestructible plant showed that it was mortal. Other rhodies of a similar type and age in the neighborhood showed some damage, a few died, and the greater number survived virtually untouched. So I'm not sure what lessons are to be learned. Last summer I cut off a lot of the branches I presumed to be dead or too damaged since they weren't sprouting leaves, or the leaves they grew quickly softened, browned and died. 
This year with an oddly, unbalanced looking tree -- tall bare parts, groping lower limbs -- looking like a shipwreck unable to find its way through the ice, we took more radical measures. Anne rented a chainsaw from Home Depot and we attacked the really thick spine of the old tree that I could not cut with hand tools. After a brief chainsaw surgery, some fine-tuning with clippers, and some new fertilized soil, the remaining ground-hugging stories of rhododendron filled their old place in the colorful landscape, though at a reduced height, with fat violet blooms (as seen in the top, third down, and sixth photo down).
          Taken two weeks ago, the second photo down illustrates the fullness of the verdancy. In the lower left corner of that photo you can see the colony of purple Siberian iris coming into bloom. Iris, named for an Olympian messenger service, sent strongly self-congratulatory signals this year. You see examples of the blossoms in the fourth, fifth and ninth photos. You have to catch them when they're flying those big showy flags of theirs. Most of these blossoms dried and faded under the assault of our 4-day heat wave with temps in the mid-90s. The flag iris plants in the fourth photo have actually moved on to their second round of blooms today.   
Among other plants looking their best this year is the laurel. A reliable June bloomer, sometimes this plant has suffered from dry conditions, its leaves looking limp and the entire plant less full. 
You can see in the whole-plant shot that our laurel -- a family favorite in part because it blooms each year on our daughter Sonya's June birthday -- is in a happy state of bloom (seventh photo). The eighth photo down is a close-up on the pink-highlighted flowers. They're like delicate little cup-shaped vessels for fairy tea parties.

The Garden of History: A Novel About Those Who Would Murder Victoria and the Saga of the Boy Who Sought Help From the Queen for His Imperiled Family

 The history is fascinating in this crime novel by popular "thriller" author David Morrell ("Inspector of the Dead," 2015). The book not so much.

            As those of us who watched the recent Masterpiece TV dramatization of the early years of Queen Victoria's reign know, the queen was the target of an apparent assassination attempt while attempting the then-daring gesture of riding her carriage on a public way. A young man approaches and fires a pistol at Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. No one is hurt. No 'ball' (bullet) is ever found, and so the apparent assassin cannot be convicted of attempted murder, but is instead locked away in an insane asylum.

            According to Morrell's book, some witnesses claim that a boy ran up to the carriage attempting to attract the queen's attention just before the assailant fired. A theory emerges: the boy might have been part of the plot, serving to distract attention from the would-be assassin.

            This story -- shades of the "second assassin" motif in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories -- is the linchpin of Morrell's plot. And this is a book that is all about plot.

            Here's what I like about "Inspector of the Dead." The author, by his own account, has disappeared "down a rabbit hole" in his fascination with Victorian England -- both the big historical figures, Victoria, politicians, the writer Thomas De Quincey; and the gritty details of slum life and forgotten commercial mores such as the 'doctoring' of beer and gin by pub landlords to cheat customers.

            Morrell's resurrection of De Quincey is a potentially brilliant move. The author made him a central character in the author's previous Victorian crime novel, "Murder As a Fine Art," based on the "Ratcliffe Murders," an early attempt at the crime pattern now universalized as "the serial killer." To quote from description of this book on Morrell's website: "The Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 were the most notorious mass killings in their day. Never fully explained, they brought London and all of England to the verge of panic."

            Morrell's appropriation of this story places De Quincey and his daughter Emily (who also appears in "Inspector"), in the role of pursuing a Ratcliffe copycat killer who is somehow threatening all of London. Like the superhero novels of comics and cinema, super-detective stories require huge public crises.

            De Quincey owes his starring role in "Murder" to his "scandalous" Victorian essay based on the Ratcliffe killings titled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” The literary elite loved this wholly amoral ground-breaking take on human behavior. Among those cited its influence are Victorian novelist G.K. Chesterton and 20th century heavyweights Wyndam Lewis and George Orwell. We are also told that De Quincey's intellectual sleuthing influenced Poe (inventor of the detective story), who in turn influenced Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes).

            De Quincy's most famous work was the autobiographical 'novel' (to use the closest term), "Confessions of an Opium-Eater." Generations ahead of his time then, his influence is still under-appreciated today. His book was the first account of the now all too familiar state of drug dependency. In Victorian times doctors prescribed and petty much everybody self-medicated by the use of laudanum, a liquid preparation of opium and a close cousin of morphine and heroin. If you've had surgery (as I have) you know that morphine, still medicine's most widely relied on pain reliever, can give you wicked dreams and what might be described as 'paranoid-delusional states.' De Quincey literally wrote the book on that state of mind as a way of life.

            Just to round out the picture De Quincey also invented the term "subconscious," and the concept, in his essay "On the Knocking on the Gate in MacBeth."

            Now given all this deep, fascinating background material to work with, what use does author Morrell make of Thomas De Quincey?

            He's a slightly swifter Sherlock than other investigators on this case. Sorry, that's it.

            The book is skin-deep. It's a costume-mystery. Those of us who read it, with at least some enjoyment, are doing so because we like the props.

            This is probably just another way of saying that "Inspector of the Dead" is commercial fiction. Since I'm drawn to the history, but left lukewarm at best by its 'action-thriller' plot, it's no surprise that the most satisfying part of the book for me was the author's "Afterword," in which he offers such intriguing nuggets as the development of the 'thriller' novel. A product of 19th England, its plots were typically set among the horrors and disasters of other times and other places. What became known as "the sensation novel" emerged in the mid-19th century to imagine terrors taking place in contemporary settings, creating the thrill like that of today's disaster movies or terrorist conspiracy tales. Another genre, called "Newgate novels" (after the infamous prison), told stories of criminal types. Dickens's "Oliver Twist" emerges from this milieu.

            Since the fiction of "Inspector of the Dead" develops from a theory about the first assassination attempt on Victoria, we also learn from this book that altogether there were seven attempts on her life. The common theme is that they were attempts to gain attention by people whose lives were a misery. That misery has social and economic foundations. Foundations that reach to Lord Who-ha and whoever is residing in Buckingham Palace. But no one was allowed to question the social order in 19th century England. And this novel's character don't either.

            Morrell's invented story to explain why a poor Irish immigrant boy sought to attract the queen's attention points very strongly to the social, economic and political abuses suffered by the poor. He's trying to save his family from the callous injustice of the legal system. But none of this novel's characters take time from their breathless pursuit of the plot's 'serial' killer to reflect on, or even register, the deeper issue.

            Neither do the promoters of popular franchises of commercial fiction. The shamelessly pandering blurb on the back cover of "The Inspector of the Dead" claims the book "delves into the heart of evil." It most certainly doesn't. A false accusation of criminality, unexamined by anyone in authority (so Morrell's story tells us), leads directly to the destruction of the four members of our killer's birth family. Now multiply this case by thousands.

            In the light of this revelation, readers might wish to consider where the true 'heart of evil' resides. But "Inspector" doesn't tempt its readers to these reflections. It wants to get back to the chase.

            Still, this book makes me want to find the author's 'rabbit hole' and burrow down there for a while myself. For that I can thank David Morrell.

The Garden of the Trees: What is that Brown Stringy Stuff Falling From My Oak Tree?

            Oak trees have the same unblushing approach to reproduction that characterizes the plant world's expression of all necessary physical functions, including growth, nutrition, birth and death. Green plants do the weirdest things, and you never see them sweat.

            Oak trees, it turns out, fertilize themselves, having the necessary equipment for both male and female functions. The botanical term for this overdetermined status, according to the sources I have consulted, is "monoecious," an unpronounceable word meaning they produce both male and female flowers.

             So in the spring, when a green plant's fancy turns to reproduction, oak trees produce male flowers called "staminate" and female flowers called "pistillate," both on their own tree self. These flowers are such modest tints of green, yellow and tan -- unlike the reds and hot pinks and orange and lavender of shameless fruit trees resulting in events such as "cherry blossom time," or the pure alba of the dogwoods -- that you hardly know they are there.

            Yet quietly in the sturdy, straight-ahead manner characteristic of its kind, the oak gets the job done. The male flowers "grow into a thin, wormlike shape known as a catkin or an ament," according to my source (http://www.ehow.com/about_6465166_do-oak-trees-reproduce_.html).

            There we have it: "catkins," a word redolent of Victorian drawing classes and a famous love scene in a once-shocking D.H. Lawrence novel called "Women in Love."

            That 'wormlike' shape has a certain masculine sneakiness to the sound of it. Sure enough catkins consist of "stamens," the male flower part that releases the substance that so troubles allergy sufferers int he spring: pollen. I now know where to look for the cause of the many sneezes that have accompanied this year's early growing season. I recall the word "stamen" as one of those common "parts of a flower," now I know that stamens are in biological cahoots with 'catkins.'

            OK. Stamens give us pollen, which besides making people go red-eyed and sneezy, comes to rest (according to my source) on "receptive stigma in the female flower." That's pretty blunt.

            But add this: "with a little help from the wind." Ah, those pandering breezes of spring. 

            So I now know why those light brownish wormlike organic somethings are all over my yard, a fresh supply of them every morning on the 'bistro' table where we breakfast in warm weather under the oak tree. I have been picking them off the upper leaves of plants, just because their pervasive accumulation dulls the color.   

             We're ready to bring this indictment to a close now. The oak tree's female flower -- don't ask me what they look like, but I know they're not long and stringy like catkins -- "grow where the leaf stalks meet the branches or twigs." They are modest and unassuming, I suppose, but in the end they conquer, and endure, hang around all summer, and deliver the goods. Because by summer's end those "receptive stigma" grow into acorns. And here we are in familiar territory.

            How do these acorns, that we step on on the sidewalk and make that satisfying crunchy sound, come about? Now we know.

            One last term is introduced as our source informs us that acorns "sit in hard cups called peduncles."

            So do we all understand now why in a boom year like the current one we have brownish, yellowish tree detritus all over our yards?

           Well I'll be a monkey's peduncle.

The Garden of Spring's Abundance: No Maybes in May

Coming home last week from a quick visit to New York -- including two perfect weekend days, with irises blossoming in the back lanes between Henry Hudson Parkway and, considerably downgrade, the actual Hudson River, so quiet and lyrically vernal that you can't believe you actually are still in New York City -- we discover that the month of May in Massachusetts has achieved its major statement in our absence. 
        Come on, May, say it with flowers. 
         I've been hoping that our streetside lilac bush (or tree; photo at left) would actually blossom in a way that produces the immediate undeniable pleasure of lilac scent. The blossoms have been on the plant for a month, but didn't seem to want to open. And weeks ago we did see and smell lilac blossoms in the abundance of the Arnold Arboretum (in Boston). 

          But on returning home Sunday night, we could smell the lilac halfway down the block. This plant is a Korean variety.  You can tell the difference at a glance. The Asian lilacs are sold these days as a replacement for the classic New England/New York spring flowering plants, cited by the poets for centuries -- as in Whitman's lament "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd" -- which suffered from disease a few decades back and either died or stopped blooming. You can still see them on old properties. Often you can also see where the old trunks were pruned away in attempts to revive the plant. 
             So, I'm fine with a new approach to lilac -- but hey,  we've got a "dooryard" and we've got a lilac in it, so listen to the poet and bloom already.
             Anyway, this year at least it's worth the wait. An opulent parfumerie. 
              Right beside it is a wiegelia (third pic down), probably too large for the space I have it in, which I've also been expecting to see a bloom. Sympathetically, its blooms opened in rhythm with the lilac, but that means it's getting less attention.
              And the other thing you notice about all these classic spring perennials, is the bloom while sweet is tragically short. 
               The poppies (top photo: orange) lead the way in the quick-show category. We watched the floppy stems reach out with their fat, alien-looking pod-like buds for a couple of weeks. A few finally began opening in the days just before our weekend away, so I said, 'Fine, wait till we go away to do your show. See if I care.' 
               The poppies did open en masse in the two sunny days we were away (I did care). A couple of sunny days dried them out. Then came the latest re-make of spring stormy weather striking the Massachusetts coast. A couple of big rain days to make up for the no rain last spring (and summer) along with some lashing winds. The poppies started dropping their petals. They are all such conformists, these European imports. They bloom at once, blow at at once, decline at once, and wither away. No second acts in poppies. Still, they are a specialty act, a rara avis. And seem to know it.

           And the clematis started climbing. Somehow, thick and rich and darkly purple (fifth photo down) in the blossoming, the plant forgot how to pull itself up on the dried-out vines from last year's climbing days and fell to rolling around on its own new exuberant growth. I found enough string to attach one of the most vigorous vines to the porch railing. I figured I would tie each of the others in turn, but a couple of fast-growing days later found to my happy surprise that the other vines had shot upward and latched on to the porch rails on their own. Good clematis; getting smarter every year. 
          I've also been watching the columbine blossoms sit coolly in some demi-monde state, not quite the lush dark-pink performers I recalled from other years (sixth and eighth photos down). Clearly, the only problem was my impatience. They plumped up into shapely forms, tumbling upside-down trumpets of descending posture and tone. 
             As for the irises (fourth and bottom photos), I have no schedule for them, though I think of them as a June bloomer. Depends on the climate, probably, and the earliness or lateness of any given spring. Late May has triggered these white blooms. A very classical shape. You can say only that it looks like nothing else but what it is: Iris. Named for the "personification of the rainbow" and the messenger of the gods. 

            The message of the gods seems pretty clear these days: spring beauty.

The Garden of Literary History: The Mind of England, and the Pen of Shakespeare, When James I Wore Two Crowns

             What else don't we know about "history"? Every time I pick up a book as well-written, researched and formulated as "The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606," I walk around in a cloud of 'wow, imagine that, who would have known such-and-such?'

            Shakespearean scholars as learned as "The Year of Lear" author James Shapiro (how wide a set that can be?) seem to know a lot more about the circumstances in which his plays were written than they did a few decades ago when I was studying them in graduate school. We were certainly aware that the change from the Elizabethan period to the Stuart dynasty upon the ascension of James I to the throne of England in 1603 had consequences for Shakespeare and his crew. But "The Year of Lear" tracks the composition of three of Shakespeare's major tragic masterpieces against the pulses of the news cycle in the fraught transitional year of 1606.

            A number of strong political, cultural and religious forces buffeted English society in the years immediately after Elizabeth's death. Her death marked the end of an era when England took its place as a central player on the world (i.e. European) stage, fending off attempts at domination by larger powers just as 'Good Queen Bess' fended off marriage proposals from Spain and France. I think Shakespeare's history plays and other formative successes in the Elizabethan theater may have helped build a sense of a shared, significant national culture -- though Shapiro's book does not make this point. England now possessed an art through which to know itself. France and Italy had music and art. Spain had wealth; along with its own literary tradition of the "picaro" (or picaresque tale) that flowered in Cervantes, Shakespeare's contemporary and, in many eyes, peer.

            England fought off a Spanish invasion during Elizabeth's reign and sent its first expeditions to compete in the great game of exploration, world trade, and eventual colonization. On the home front it stabilized as a Protestant nation with a clearly outlined, though limited tolerance for Catholics. London became a teeming, populous, international trade center and world capital.

            But following the queen's death, the plague returned to London with the first warm season, after a few years of happy absence. James avoided the city like the -- well, thing in itself -- and his coronation was put off for two years. Parliament was reluctant to meet. The theaters were closed; "The Year of Lear" reports that the city had a law closing the theaters whenever the official "death list" from plague reached 30 in a week. Astonishing facts of a long-ago, but literate civilization: London kept a list of everybody who died from plague, though some of these records were lost in a later fire. Still Shapiro can tell us that Shakespeare's London landlady died in the plague at this time and that she was close enough to her prominent lodger to ask him to help arrange a marriage for her daughter. Records show this.

            Because of the epidemics, the king's absence from London, and the uncertainties of how to please the new regime, Shakespeare's company virtually shut down and -- astonishingly -- he wrote no new plays for two or three years after a decade of regular production of brilliant new work. From my studies I knew that "Lear," "MacBeth," and "Antony and Cleopatra" are considered the 'later tragedies,' but little of their circumstances. They were 'later,' I know now, because there were no outdoor, public theaters for 'The King's Men' to perform in, and no king in London to commission new works from the company to debut before him.

            When James finally settled in and new works were called for, several major social and political forces helped light a fire and provide the tender in the imagination of the world's greatest playwright. For me, this is the deeper insight that "The Year of Lear" offers about the nature of great public art, particularly of the literary and narrative sort: The problems of a given society feed the juices of great imaginations; their productions in turn nourish the ruminations of the people.

            The big issue dominating the early years of James Stuart's reign was his desire to merge the two kingdoms of England and Scotland into one united kingdom since he was now monarch of both. James was a proponent of the "divine right" of monarchs. Since God (he reasoned) had made him king of both lands, God clearly wanted them united. Furthermore, James dusted off an old legend that the two countries used to be one kingdom since they share the same geographical entity. God not only works in mysterious ways, apparently, he works in islands.    

            In fact, an old play based on a British legend depicted the terrible consequences of an aging king's decision to divide his kingdom. This story of course is "King Leir," which Shakespeare re-imagined as "King Lear." While a lot more is going on in Lear besides dynastic politics, Shapiro is clearly onto something when he points out that a play warning of the dangers of dividing a kingdom would likely find favor with a king who wanted to unite his two crowns to form Great Britain.

            "The Year of Lear" also mulls the play's (highly unpopular)  innovation of failing to offer a restorative happy ending to bring a troubled world back to rights. Shapiro provides the intriguing suggestion that the play's last lines spoken by Edgar, a member of the younger generation, "we that are young / shall never see so much nor live so long" as the previous generation, amount to a valedictory for Elizabeth's epic reign.

            Audiences are so troubled by the death of the "good" daughter, Cordelia, that subsequent productions consistently brought her back to life. My suggestion on the playwright's unconventional choice: Might not Cordelia's death stand in for the thousands of innocents slaughtered by London's plagues?

            When London finally appeared safe enough for James to make his court there and press Parliament to approve an "act of unification" of the two kingdoms, his new country is faced with an act of treachery that shakes it to the roots. In November of 1605, England endured a near-miss 911-sized catastrophe known to history as the Gunpowder Plot. An explosive attempt at a stroke of terrorism meant to destroy, king, royal family, government and much of the ruling class in a single cataclysm produced by tons of gunpowder and musket shot stored in the bowels of Parliament. 'Security' had a long way to go back then; the conspirators had simply rented the basement storage areas from the government.  

            The plot was also intended to set off a nationwide Catholic uprising to restore the "old religion," return the country to the authority of the Roman Catholic church, and install a Catholic monarch.

            Of further import to our story, many of the plotters had connections to the region of Shakespeare's own Stratford. How big a deal this plot -- reduced in current days to the devilry of "Guy Fawkes Day" -- was for post-Elizabethan England is recounted in greater legal and political detail than I needed. What I will remember is that the repressive laws against Catholics enacted in the wake of this plot swept up Shakespeare's daughter, who initially refused to swear a new 'loyalty' oath but was forced to recant.

            Shapiro make the connection between this near-disaster both to Lear and, more importantly, to MacBeth, a play about the treasonous murder of a Scottish king. Again, I think there's a deeper take-away. Tragedy was invented in Ancient Greece from the politically driven need for a citizenry to experience, at artistic remove, the disasters that befall those who seek to rule. Greek tragedy is about power, rule, and passion. We the people cram into the amphitheater to feel the terror of crime, misdeed, and failure.

We fear the terror of failure and crime; we find compassion in our own hearts for the human suffering displayed for us on stage.

            MacBeth is also a cautionary tale. What would happen if a plot to kill a king succeeded? -- as MacBeth's plot to kill Duncan does, and as the Gunpowder Plot to kill James I failed to. What happens is you get MacBeth, "in blood stepped in so far" that a nation must suffer more wars and the bloody removal of another king before the moral order is restored.

           MacBeth is also, Shapiro argues, a play about "equivocation," which James's England considered as bad armed rebellion. To them equivocation meant not telling the whole truth when you are put under oath to do just that -- as the courtroom oath says today, you swear "to tell the truth and the whole truth." If rebels, traitors -- particularly secret Catholics -- believed it was all right in God's eyes to hold back part of the truth from a courtroom or any official inquiry, then society would fall apart. You would never know who to believe.

            Hence in MacBeth we have witches telling newly elevated war hero MacBeth what he wants to hear in his secret heart, but only hinting, or perhaps omitting entirely, important pieces of the story. Shapiro closely analyzes a playful of other examples of 'equivocation,' of giving a misleading or partial impression. Oh, dear, it's everywhere.

            I'm afraid Shakespeare's day never knew the half of it. Today American citizens routinely listen to their elected leaders and come away saying, "Ah, they're all lying. That's what they do."

            Frankly, I suspect we all hold back some of the truth.

            I'm afraid I'm holding back any discussion of "Anthony and Cleopatra," the third of the great tragedies Shapiro finds bathed in the controversial waters of 1606, because it's a play I've never warmed up to. Also because the author's case for relating this play to specific events and the national mood at the time of its writing is too subtle for summation here. Besides, I've already forgotten so much of this argument that I need to read it again.

            But this is the beauty of reading history, especially when important times and great writers intersect. The truth is, there is always something new under the sun. 

           It's the old stuff we never knew.