Author: Judith Fetterley

My name is Judith Fetterley. I live, write, and garden in upstate New York. I am also the owner and manager of Perennial Wisdom, a garden design consultation service.

Categories
Uncategorized

Purple Conversation

November 10, 2020

 

Purple Conversation

My brother and I were talking last Sunday about the plight of small colleges, many of which stand to go out of business due to the impact of COVID on their enrollments and revenue. I reminded him that our dad once said to me, “Judy, it costs just as much to heat a third-rate college as it does to heat a first-rate college.” My brother acknowledged that dad would have known. He served for many years as the first (unpaid) development officer for the small college in our Indiana town. Dad meant no disrespect by this statement. For its size and type, Franklin College was perfectly fine. It just wasn’t Yale, and in a pandemic that makes a difference.

I have been thinking a lot about my father these past few days. Born poor in a rich country, my father never forgot the better-off family across the road or the boy scout uniform he hid under the bushes and, when his father discovered it, was forced to return because it cost too much.  You might think these experiences would have made him a democrat. In fact he was a staunch Republican and I entered American politics chanting “I like Ike,” and arguing with my friend Nancy who favored Adlai Stevenson.  By the time of my first election, though, I was a democrat and proudly cast my first vote for John F. Kennedy.

My father and I argued constantly. He once left the dinner table because, home from college and enrolled in a course on American political history, I was defending the accomplishments of Roosevelt’s presidency. “Roosevelt was the worst president in the history of the country,” he claimed, as he left, and added, “I can’t believe I am paying for you to learn this kind of stuff.” I wonder what dad would have said about Trump.

My father was the kindest man I have ever known. No ball game was too far away for him to drive myself and my friends to. No bag of manure was too heavy for him to drag to my mother’s struggling garden. No call for help was too badly timed or difficult from him to naswer. One Christmas morning he responded to a call from our neighbor whose dog had suddenly become sick.. He went next door and managed to get a pill down the dog’s throat, only to learn later that it was rabid. A series of painful shots, injected in those days into the stomach, followed.

Dad retired early in part to help his friend who ran the Ford dealership in town avoid bankruptcy. Working with Justin gave him access to good, cheap second-hand cars. When my high school friend, Loyce, was finally freed from the psychiatric institution to which her parents consigned her after a nervous breakdown her senior year in high school, she returned to Franklin and immediately contacted my father.  She needed a car to get a job. She did not know my father had access to cars, she just knew he would help her. And he did.

In the early 60’s I became involved in the northern civil rights movement. My father could neither understand nor support my activism and he had no patience for movements. Yet it was my father who answered the call one night from a local police officer. It was my father who went down to the jail and persuaded the officer to drop the charges against the young black man, a student at the college, whom they were holding for some minor infranction. It was my father who later got this same young man a job after graduation and helped him through law school..

My father was never comfortable with my homosexuality, and we did not talk about it, ever. He would say, “All homosexuals belong in jail,” forgetting that I was one. In the next breath, however, he would ask for the list of chores my partner and I wanted him to do while he was visiting.  Joan liked to say that my father was the only true working butch she knew.

The summer between my first and second year of graduate school I taught myself German so that I could pass the foreign language requirement for my Ph.D. Through his connections at the college, dad knew a young man from Germany. He hired Gerhard to tutor me in German, no doubt hoping that love might follow instruction. I fell in love, for sure, but with his car, not Gerhard. It was a genuine German Volkswagen, rare in the United States in the early 1960’s, with green leather seats trimmed in red ‘velvet,’ and a cane shelf beneath the glove compartment.

When Gerhard went back to Germany that fall, he left his car behind.  I desperately wanted to buy it, but I didn’t have the money. I would have to have help from my dad if I were to get it. He argued for a different choice. He could get me a second-hand American car for practically nothing. I did not want to drive the $100 Buick; I wanted to drive the $500 Volkswagen. I kept talking, and my dad finally capitulated. “Alright,” he said, “I will pay half the cost of the Volkswagen if you pay for the other half, but I strongly suggest you get out of English and go into law. It is impossible to win an argument with you.”

Right now, I am not trying to win arguments. I am wanting to understand what is happening in our country. I am deeply troubled by how divided we are and how profound those divisions are. I want to think I can talk to people who think differently from me. I want to think I can have purple conversations. I’d like to believe that at least some of us can talk across our differences, agree on some things, work together to get them done, and make life just a little bit better for a few more people (and for the animals and insects and plants). It seems a modest wish, but in this climate it seems extreme. How strange and sad that is.

I wish I had tried harder to talk to my dad. Maybe we could have had a purple conversation as well as a purple relationship.

Thanks so much for reading my newsletter. If you are enjoying it, consider sharing it with one other person you think might enjoy reading it as well. I’d be grateful if you would help me reach more readers.If you aren’t already a subscriber, I’d be honored to have you as a reader.

You can sign up here.http://perennialwisdom.net.

http://www.perennialwisdom.net
Categories
Uncategorized

“the least lonely of the arts’

October 27

 

“the least lonely of the arts”

This past Thursday, we took down the Master Gardener demonstration gardens at the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Voorheesville, NY. I was late getting there, I had to take Sara to a doctor’s appointment.

Arriving at 10 a.m, I rejoiced at the sight of butts in the air and a wagon already filled to the brim with take-down. “We made it,” I breathed to myself. “We kept these gardens alive and functioning even in this terrible time. And we did it together.”  I wanted to shout, “You people are amazing,” but I didn’t want to interrupt the scene.

It has indeed been an art in itself to keep these gardens functioning this spring, summer and fall, and those of us able to be out there last Thursday admitted this to each other with a kind of shock. In ordinary years we usually have some 25 gardeners working together on a Thursday morning from mid-April to mid-October, developing and maintaining our 19 gardens.

This year we had plans for a series of classes in our gardens, for several open houses featuring different gardens and different seasons, and for a project that would link visitors to our gardens to other gardens in the Capital District. It all came to a crashing halt in mid-March.

At first, we were not allowed to go to the gardens. By late May we could go, but only two at a time, and only on two days. Finally, that number was increased to ten, but still we had to separate ourselves, some coming on Mondays and some coming on Thursdays. Some of our crew have felt uncomfortable coming at all and some have chafed at the required protocols: masks and social distancing.

This season, a smaller group and forced to be more solitary, we have tossed around the question of whether gardening really is more social than solitary, whether Joe Eck is right when he claims, in Elements of Garden Design, that “gardening is surely the least lonely of the arts.”

All of us spend time alone in our own gardens and find it deeply satisfying. We observe that in an ordinary season some of those caring for a particular garden come out to CCE only when no one else is there. We acknowledge that on occasion we can get upset if someone messes with “our” garden. But we always come back to the fact that what we love most is working together. That is why we show up Thursday mornings when others are there and not Friday afternoons.

When we work together, we talk, and the talk is often about gardens.

“What have you found to be the three best plants for dry shade”
“Are you having trouble with that new viburnum you planted?  Try giving it a bit of compost tea. It really helps to get plants established.”
“Did you know there is a dwarf variety of golden rod called ‘Golden Fleece.’  I love it. It adds just the right touch of wildness to my autumn garden. I’ll give you some next year if you are interested.”
“Have you ever tried growing antique roses?  Do they really have fragrance to die for?  Are they worth the trouble?”

Gardens are social spaces. Even this year, Ben has stopped by to check on the cankers attacking the Heptacodium and to talk about the situation of the blue spruces; Peter has helped me figure out why the grass in a certain section of the front lawn is coming up by the roots; Justin has rebuilt and stained the vegetable garden fence; Mary has offered to help me weed; and Sarah has told me she has a grass to share.
.
Most years I have visitors and classes in my garden, and often projects that involve others. This year I only have memories, but even they feel social. I cut down the pink iris, and remember how I came home one September day last year to find iris bulbs on my doorstep with a note that read, “Last spring when you visited you mentioned wanting these if I had some extra. Here they are. Love, Karen.” I remembered the iris, but I had forgotten my spring visit and its frenzy of desire. Karen’s remembering, and her gift, touched me deeply.

I take down the peonies and remember how Arlen gave me a piece of the peony that had been in the garden of her former mother-in-law. She wanted to make sure it kept on growing somewhere. I look at my very large crab apple tree and remember how Nancy and I brought it, a mere sapling, to Columbine Drive, and planted it in the middle of what was then my “nursery,” the place where I put cuttings and extras and ‘just had to have’s.’  Needless to say, the “nursery” is long gone but the crab apple tree just gets more beautiful.

And then there was Brenda. I have been known to say that my four favorite words in the English language are “head gardener and staff.”   Of course, I lack both the financial resources and the gardening status required to support a head gardener, much less a staff. But Brenda came close to being my head gardener. A horticulturalist as well as a hands-on worker, her knowledge of and love for plants was extensive. For ten years she helped me with my business and my own demonstration gardens.

We worked and we talked. We shared information – what do you find really thrives in dry shade?  We shared ideas for design — how do you think a dwarf lilac would look here?  We shared tips on tools and techniques – get Felco #2 pruners, they are the best. Brenda would point out the branching pattern on the Hinooki cypress and I would show her the color pattern on a daylily bloom. Sometimes we worked side by side, but often we were in different parts of the garden doing different things. It didn’t matter. We were comfortable and easy together, like a team of horses who have learned to adjust to each other’s pace and who help each other carry the load.

Brenda had to move on and for awhile I worked alone. Bu then, one Sunday morning, a few years ago, Kevin walked through the door of my Quaker Meeting. Tall, lanky, and relatively young, Kevin was swarmed by all of us wanting to connect. When he learned that I tended the gardens in front of the Meeting House, he shared that he worked as a gardener in New York City. He was looking for work locally, however, and I was more than game to hire him.

This year, almost every Friday since the middle of March, Kevin and I have worked together in the gardens at Columbine Drive. We keep our distance but we still talk as we work –about what needs to be done, about what should be added and what subtracted, about what should be moved where. We talk about what is going on in our personal lives – writing and internships, roofers and renting, dogs and cats. And, of course, we talk about our Quaker faith and practice, and about what we used to call at the Quaker college I attended “The Bigger Other.”  But mostly we talking about plants, mixing observations about them with a sense of wonder at their magnificence.

Our companionship through this difficult time has been a joy, as has the limited contact I have had with my Master Gardener colleagues and all the help I have received this season from others. As the darkness sets in, I will look out the window, frequently, and draw strength from the memories embedded in the shrubs and trees and remaining perennials.

http://www.perennialwisdom.net
Copyright © 2020 Perennial Wisdom, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.

Our mailing address is:

Perennial Wisdom

29 Columbine Dr

Glenmont, NY 12077-2971

Add us to your address book

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.
Categories
Uncategorized

Let’s Leave the Nasturtiums

October 13

Let’s Leave the Nasturtiums

There comes a moment in October that literally takes my breath away. I run, neck scrunched backward, eyes on the sky, searching for the source of the honking, When I find them — the geese, the real geese, flying high, flying south, not the ones who stay here all year and fly low – I stop and shout: “Have a safe trip. Have a good winter. Come back in the spring.”  I know they can’t hear me, but I can hear them, loud and clear. How can they be so high up and yet sound so near?  And why do they use up precious energy honking?  I guess they talk all the way to Mexico. For moments after they have disappeared from my sight, I stand there looking up. Then I go back to my fall tasks.

It’s that time of year when what came up must come down. I try to put off the taking down until the end of October or even early November. If I wait too long, though, I run the risk of sudden snow or Sara’s “way too cold for you to be out,” with the subtext of “especially at your age.” So I start slowly, in mid-October, doing some wee tasks, thinking about cycles, thinking about geese.

On Friday, I weeded Sara’s vegetable garden for the last time. Sara declared she was done with the job of stripping, chopping and freezing kale leaves for winter soups, so Kevin dug out the giant Dinosaur kale that has been a dramatic, even threatening, presence in our backyard for weeks. The tomatoes were already gone but out came the last bit of Swiss chard, and most of the by now scraggly marigolds.

We left the nasturtiums, though. They remind Sara and me of the trip we took to Monet’s garden in Giverny where, in September, the orange and yellow nasturtiums spill out over the main pathway and tangle your feet as you walk. Sara regularly cuts a few blossoms of our nasturtiums and sets them in a tiny vase on our kitchen table. Like Monet, we are mad for color and they satisfy. We agree to let the first deep frost be the cause of their demise.

I start on my own gardens slowly, cutting down the perennials that have turned raggedy – the Phlox, the Japanese painted ferns, the Filipendula ulmaria, the delphiniums. Cutting down the very ratty looking Filipendula rubra, I admit that I think it looks ratty all season long. I make a note to remove it next spring.

Reluctantly, I cut back the Brunnera, its green and white leaves now splotched with black and unsightly. I make sure, however, to spare the tiny new leaves, all freshly green and white, that poke up from crown, carefully cutting around them. I know it is ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. They are so perfect in color and shape and they remind me that, with any luck, there will be a spring next year.

Still more reluctantly I take down the Echinacea that I left up as seed for the goldfinches. There have been no goldfinches this year. I don’t know why but I fear the worst – population decline due to poisons in the eco-system. I miss their yellow dartings among the bronze seed heads.

Of course, I leave a few Echinacea seed heads for winter interest. It’s a delicate dance, though, this question of how much to leave up and how much to take down. I want to get a jump on the spring chores, but I have to balance that need against the pleasures of winter interest and the imperatives of eco-horticulture. Pithy stems provide space for bees and bugs to hibernate, but they must be left up for an entire season in order to be useful the following winter, If you have a meadow, this is possible; if you have a garden, it is not so easy.

Still, I have changed my ways around raking since becoming more ecologically aware. Now I leave the leaves and let them cover the gardens for winter, Big leaves like those of the maple must be shredded before they can be used as mulch and oak leaves are best removed as they will, even if shredded, mat up and smother. But leaf mulch provides a nice winter blanket for the garden. It keeps soil from eroding when pounding winter rains create major runoff. It keeps soil temperature even, making all those little microbes that create the secret of your soil happy. It returns organic matter to the soil when the leaves decompose, as they ultimately do under winter’s pelting.

As we begin to understand the complex needs of our local pollinators, we learn that many of them are ground dwellers. Leaf mulch gives them the cover they need to winter over safely. Of course, this cover can also provide a habitat for creatures like voles that will eat the roots of your favorite oakleaf hydrangea. But Doug Tallamy says that if a plant isn’t eaten it is not doing its job since the point of plants is the creation of food. Checking the huge and partially eaten leaves of my ‘Sum and Substance’ Hosta this fall, I reframe my dismay into a compliment and say, “Hey, Hosta, it looks like you’ve done your job.”

Ever since I read Sara Stein’s 1993 book, Noah’s Garden, I have been a believer in the ecological potential of the backyard. I am about to order Doug Tallamy’s latest book, Nature’s Best Hope, which also argues for the possibility of ecological restoration through how we use the space we have.

I don’t think we have a lot of time to decide whether or not we want to be backyard eco-horticulturalists. Just yesterday I was out in the garden and heard the sound of migrating geese. When I finally located their high-in-the-sky V, I saw why I was having trouble – they were flying north. What had they seen going south? Where were they headed? What did they know? I stayed quiet. No point in telling them they were going the wrong way. Because maybe they weren’t.

http://www.perennialwisdom.net
Categories
Uncategorized

Take the long view

September 29

Take the Long View

 

I have rarely been so disheartened. The loss of Justice Ginsberg, followed by the absolute contempt for process, integrity, balance of power, and the electorate demonstrated by the Republican Senate, has sickened me. Sara says I must take the long view. So when it took Kevin close to an hour to remove an overgrown shrub that should have come out in five minutes, we decided to take Sara’s advice, name the shrub “right wing power grab,” and believe that eventually we can dig it out.

Being out in the garden is for me, of course, the best restorative for my loss of heart. It grounds me in realities bigger than those of humans and restores my sense of joy and hope and balance. Luckily it is September and I am always madly in love with my September garden. In an ordinary year, early September is a perfect time for Sara and me to take a trip to Cape Cod. The crowds are gone but the water is warm and the shops still open. I go, joyfully, as long as we are back home by the second week of the month. Because, just like Lancelot who admits there is no season when he can imagine leaving Guinevere, I don’t want to leave my garden in September any more than I do in May or June or July or even August.

This September, however, has proved more challenging than usual for the fall garden lover. We are dry, dry, dry. I am out early every morning filling up watering cans for the trees and shrubs and hosing the gardens down. I teach a class on “Putting the Garden to Bed: A Fall Adventure.” I tell my participants that, unlike children, plants want to go to bed wet. If that is going to happen this year, it looks like I will have to provide the liquid. Still much of what comprises my September high remains.

Like Monet, I am obsessed with light. My September garden meets and satisfies my obsession. September light is tender. The sun’s lower angle softens all its light touches, bathing the garden in a golden haze, even at midday. The harsh middays of July and August promise a long evening light; the tenderness of September light reconciles me to the shortening days.

Like Matisse, I am mad for color, craving it more and more as the days get shorter and the dark times longer, needing to stuff myself with red and yellow and blue and orange so that I can survive the brown of winter. The September garden satisfies my passion for color. From my chair on the deck, I can see the Crayola-yellow plumes of the Amsonia hubrechtii, backed by the pink Joe-pye, backed in turn by the delicate mauve feathers of the Panicum ‘Northwind,’ partnered by the bruised purple of the dwarf ninebark. Mixed in everywhere are the still-blooming white Phlox ‘David’ and the pink Phlox ‘Robert Poore’ and the aptly named ‘Blue Paradise’ Phlox, survivors of the big brown chewers who for some reason lost interest in eating them in August. They took the long view and are making up for lost time with an explosion of color.

I don’t need chrysanthemums, a plant I have trouble keeping alive or getting to return and have finally given up on even though I love them, when I have the Anemone ‘Robustissima,’ the tall, fall-blooming hybrid that is indeed most robust. It covers itself with cup-shaped pale pink flowers dusted by dark rose shadings and is finished with a ring of yellow stamens. Or when I have the Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ which starts off a rosy pink, deepens to salmon, then to rust, and finally turns a rich brown in an evolution that takes place over many weeks, providing me with another gift of the long view. Or when I have the six foot tall white Joe Pye-weed as well as the lower pinkish purple cultivar (what is it about fall and pinkish purple?). Or when I have the golden sprays of volunteer goldenrods or the shockingly true blue of the low-growing Plumbago for fall color and interest.

I can live without the brash exuberance of the sugar maple I lost a few years ago to girdling roots because I have my Stewartia tree and my Fothergilla and Abelia shrubs to treat me to a riot of orange, red, and yellow fall foliage. The Virginia sweetspire, so magnificent in the late spring with its masses of tiny white, gloriously fragrant flowers that rise and then droop like a fine horse’s tail, turn varying shades of red, orange and gold as well and last and last and last. The Spiraeas create a yellow mist that feels like light trapped inside a leaf. And the Viburnum plicatum ‘Summer Snowflake’ defies the typical understanding of summer and keeps pushing out delicate white flowers until late October.

Most gardeners covet Azaleas for their spring blooms. I covet them for their fall reds, the color of my favorite Pinot. They entice me to end my day with a glass of wine on the patio where I can equally enjoy the just-turning leaves of the Bergenia. Who knew a plant called “pig squeak” could be so beautiful as it turns its fall leaves a lipstick red? (Yes, I did once wear lipstick and it was just this color of bright bright red.) This striking red will persist throughout the winter, will be there in the spring, a bit worse for the wear, ready to give way to new growth.

I adore the blackberry lily, also called the leopard lily because of the delicious spotting on its deep orange blooms. I have planted several of these lilies in my largest perennial garden. This year I left the spent flower stalks up after they finished blooming because I fell in love with their pear-shaped seed pods. It had never occurred to me to ask why this plant was named the ‘blackberry” lily. Helping Kevin last Friday to remove the shrub that had gotten too big for this garden but refused to let go, I noticed that the seed pods of the lily had split open and inside each pod were seed clusters that looked just like blackberries. Kevin suggested that taking the long view was perhaps the best approach after all.

Out in the garden a week or so ago, working in a bed infested by thistles, I felt something prick my finger. Of course, I thought “thistle,” so I drew my finger back. The prick continued, so I drew my finger back even farther. Prick turned into pincers and I began to get a bit panicked, thinking “snake.”  I jerked my finger out of the thistle patch, only to discover that I was being grabbed by the pincers of a praying mantis, probably in its last stages of life

I was inexplicably moved by this experience. No doubt the mantis mistakenly took my finger for some kind of prey, but I felt it was clinging to me in order to cling to life. I gently detached it –it had not hurt me in the least–and watched for a few minutes as it moved ever so slowly away from me.  For days afterward, I could feel the grasp of that insect on my finger, clinging to me, clinging to life. I’ve taken it for a message: Take the long view. Hold on.

http://www.perennialwisdom.net
Copyright © 2020 Perennial Wisdom, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.

Our mailing address is:

Perennial Wisdom

29 Columbine Dr

Glenmont, NY 12077-2971

Add us to your address book

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.
Categories
Uncategorized

Consider the Lilies

September 15, 2020

Consider the Lilies

I have been reading Marta McDowell’s Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, published last year by Timber Press. It was first published in 2005 by McGraw Hill as Emily Dickinson’s Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and Gardener. Its reprinting suggests the considerable interest both Dickinson and gardens generate today.

I first encountered Emily Dickinson in a course I took in college on American literature. Taught by a man who was a poet of some repute himself but also a bit of a patriarch, the course gave me the following information: 1) Dickinson was queer, definitely not normal; 2) she was queer because she fell in love with a man who was either unavailable or who rejected her; 3) therefore she wrote poetry to compensate; 4) the poetry was pretty good. Finding “the Man” who was the cause of the poetry occupied Dickinson scholars. He has not yet been found.

Even then, I wondered about this analysis, especially as I read the lines: “A loss of something ever felt I/ The first that I could recollect/ Bereft I was–of what I knew not”. This suggested an earlier, deeper grief than thwarted love.

A decade later, as a feminist critic, I returned to these lines and read in them Dickinson’s understanding of her position as a woman in patriarchal culture, trapped in her father’s house. She showed that she understood her position by literally refusing to leave the house (why pretend to be free?), and she resisted her definition as a minor by writing poems now acknowledged to be among the greatest in the English language.

Still later, as an openly gay academic, I included Dickinson in the course I called “Where’s Waldo.”  There have always been women attracted to women (Waldo is always there), but in cultures such as 19th century America where open expression of this attraction was prohibited we might need to work through a lot of code to find Waldo (Waldo is hidden in the crowd). Once we found Waldo, though, we might be inclined to say, “Good heavens, it was right in front of our noses, how could we have missed it. Of course I see the red-striped shirt.”

At that time it seemed obvious to me that Dickinson was in love with Susan Gilbert, a woman she met in the summer of 1850 when Dickinson was just 20. It also seemed obvious to me that Sue’s decision to marry Dickinson’s brother (they were married in 1856) created the conditions that produced Dickinson’s psychic breakdown of the later 1850’s: “I felt a funeral in my brain”. Dickinson recovered from this trauma, made certain decisions about how she would proceed to live, and continued to love Sue who became the co-creator of her poetry. Dickinson once wrote, “Where my Hands are cut, her fingers will be found inside”.

Then I thought Waldo couldn’t have been more obvious. Now what seems obvious to me is that Dickinson was far more complex than any single theory can accommodate, even mine, and that our knowledge of her human passions is speculative at best.

So it is a joy to read McDowell’s book and find documentation of a love affair I can be certain of and one that I know I share with Dickinson. Dickinson was passionate about plants. She wrote of this relationship in her poetry and letters. It lasted her entire life. McDowell packs her book with the many references Dickinson made to her gardening life and in the process lets us glimpse a far more delightful Dickinson than the one I encountered so long ago in college.

Dickinson had an acute sense of humor. Her struggles with the religious system of her time is legendary; her sense of humor is not. McDowell quotes from a late letter: “the only Commandment I ever obeyed – ‘Consider the Lilies.’”

I am adopting her pronouncement for my own, as I too engage the theological implications of my plants. However, I can no longer follow her literally in considering the lilies for my asiatics have all fallen victim to the red lily beetle, a nasty creature that eats the leaves, stems, buds and flowers of the lily and in a matter of moments can turn a vibrant plant into a stick of rotting mush. I have had to dig up all my  ‘Stargazer,’ the lily with extraordinary pink blooms, fringed with white and dotted with orangey-red spots on the petals; and even the ‘Viva La Vida’ and the ‘African Queen,’ one a bright yellow with a red tongue down the middle of every petal, the other a true orange beauty.

As wordsmith, Dickinson has no equal. In a recent class on pollinators I learned that the ubiquitous red clover, which I have always let grow in my lawn unharmed, provides excellent food for a variety of bees. Dickinson noted this phenomenon and wrote a poem in honor of what she called “the Purple Democrat.”  This perfect sobriquet inspires me to consider the clover as well as the lilies.

Some readers of my writing about gardens have commented on my apparent disinterest in the vegetable. I might, for instance, casually mention noticing Sara staking up her peas as I make my way to the delphiniums. I might describe, in considerable detail, the beauty of the delphinium, bloom and leaf and stem, but of the peas I would have nothing to say. Dickinson once wrote to her brother that Amos, a hired man, “weeds and hoes and has oversight of all thoughtless vegetables.”  She was not a vegetable gardener either. Perhaps she did not feel commanded to consider the carrot.

Many people nowadays do, however, consider the carrot. Horticulturalists, designers, and gardeners are beginning to appreciate the ornamental and aesthetic qualities of the plants we call vegetables, as well as their food value. There is a movement afoot to convince homeowners to turn their front lawns into vegetable gardens. This has the triple function of weaning us away from our reliance on grass to cover ground, of changing our understanding of what constitutes community and good citizenship, and of restoring us to an appropriate appreciation of our dependence on plants for our lives.  Excellent goals, but I think we will keep our veggie garden in the back and I will leave consideration of the carrot to Sara.

McDowell notes that Dickinson’s mother grew figs, entering them in the local Cattle Show’s fruit competition and sending a basket on at least one occasion to the local gazette. Growing figs in the northeast is no easy task. I tried once and failed, the first winter killing my specimen. McDowell speculates: “if a garden is a reflection of the gardener, what do fig trees tell of Emily Norcross Dickinson? Perhaps Dickinson’s mother accepted a challenge and savored the curious, the unusual.”

I could speculate further. If Mrs. Dickinson sent figs to a newspaper, she must have wanted her achievement to be noticed since the paper, predictably, remarked on receiving her gift. Perhaps she was proud, perhaps she craved attention. If we cannot answer key questions about the daughter, we know even less about the wife and mother. And of the sister, Lavinia? To her we owe the poetry, as she defied Dickinson’s command to burn all her papers at her death. Extraordinary. But think of what treasures we may have lost to sisters who were more dutiful and burned the papers.

Thanks so much for reading my newsletter. Please feel free to share it with family and friends. If you aren’t already a subscriber, I’d be honored to have you as a reader. You can sign up at http://www.perennialwisdom.net.
Copyright © 2020 Perennial Wisdom, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.

Our mailing address is:

Perennial Wisdom

29 Columbine Dr

Glenmont, NY 12077-2971

Add us to your address book

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.
Categories
Uncategorized

The Animals Arrive

September 1

The Animals Arrive

 

Last weekend Sara and I ventured out, our first such experiment since the pandemic shutdown in March. We went to an exhibit at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA. It was a small exhibit in their small gallery, so fewer people and less time inside. Safer.

The exhibit was called “The Animals Arrive.” I had to go.

The artist is Lin May Saeed, a German-Iraqi artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her subject, as one critic has put it, is the “complex entanglements of humans and animals.”  Of course, when I see the words “German-Iraqi,” I can’t help but think of the complex entanglements of humans with humans. When I read further in the brief biography provided by the Clark and learn that “her roots are German-Jewish” as well as Iraqi, I am even further entangled in the human to human scene.

Luckily, Saeed’s canvas is more encompassing and she takes me back to the larger scene, a world inhabited not only by humans but equally by animals other than humans. “With empathy and wit,” according to the introductory text at the Clark, “she tells stories, both ancient and modern, of animal subjugation, liberation, and cohabitation with humans, working toward a new iconography of interspecies solidarity.”  In explaining the intent of the exhibition’s title, the text notes that “many of Saeed’s animals arrive to reoccupy spaces that were once theirs; in other words, they return.”

For as long as I can recall, I have felt a kinship to animals other than humans. I grew up in Toronto at a time when both milk and bread were delivered by horse-drawn wagon. If I was home when the milkman or breadman arrived, I would go visit the horse, fascinated by the bag of oats often attached to its head, fascinated by the huge feet draped in hair, drawn to the eyes, touched by the horse’s massive calm.

In third grade we were given our first writing assignments. For one such assignment, we were asked to compose a diary. The instruction was to discover some facts about a famous person, then imagine a day or week in their life, and make up entries. I composed a week in the life of a blue jay.

We had taken in the neighbors’ cat when they moved away. Henry was an outdoor cat. On one of his adventures he must have bothered the nest of a blue jay, because one day he came home with a large hole pecked in his forehead. My dad, a pharmacist by training but a country boy by birth, pronounced it the work of blue jays. He cleaned, disinfected, and bandaged the wound, thinking the odor alone would dissuade the jays from dive-bombing the cat. It didn’t.  We had to keep Henry in to protect him.

When we could no longer stand Henry’s crying, my dad suggested I carry him out to give him some air.  “They will never attack him if you are holding him,” said my dad. But they did. I no sooner stepped out onto the porch than I was buzzed and once in the yard they swooped. My diary told what I imagined was their side of the story.

When we moved to Indiana and my relations with the human animal were temporarily problematic, other animals meant even more to me. Here I discovered cornfields with cows and cricks with crawdads.

The afternoon of the first day I spent in Indiana, my mother and I were standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window. Our new house backed up on an open field owned by the American Legion but rented to a local farmer.  As we stood there a procession of cows made their way across the field, heading home for milking, according to my dad.  I was mesmerized.  The next day I made sure to be out by the fence as they passed so that I could see them up close and perhaps have eye contact with some of them. Such large animals; such gentle, delicate eyes, brown and lash-fringed; such wonderful guttural sounds; such purpose to their progress. Watching them became my after-school treat.

On the way to school I crossed over Hurricane Creek, so-called because in the spring it was wild and flooded its banks.  In this creek, which I soon learned to call a “crick,” were crawdads, tiny crayfish that look a bit like a lobsters.  I loved to catch them, look at them, and then put them back in the water, hoping their day might be better than mine. I loved to wade in the creek, to feel the water-washed stones under my feet, and to poke in the mud for anything else that might be alive.  I learned to watch out for the junk people threw off the bridge and to swear I would never mess up a creek that way.

I vowed that when I grew up I would become a veterinarian. I wrote to Cornell for information on their school of vetererinary medicine. they replied that the did not accept women.

Ever since my family acquired Henry, cats have been part of my understanding of my world. Though my brother will remind me that we often treated
Henry very badly, dressing him up in outfits so that we could then photograph him, testing his ability to fall by holding him up and dropping him down from ever higher perches, I responded to his indifference. While our chums’ dog craved our attention, Henry couldn’t have cared less about us. Indeed, shortly after our move to Indiana he defected to the home of our next door neighbor who lured him with sardines and salmon and a satin bed. “Cats go where they’re loved,” Mrs. Brackett told my mother. “Nonsense,” said my mother to me, “cats go where they get the best deal.”

I still need a cat in the house to keep me honest, to remind me that there are other ways of being in the world than that of humans, to keep me puzzling over how and what something other than myself might see, feel, and think. Our cat, Tanner, currently has a problem. She has licked her lower belly bare of fur, a behavior our vet, a woman in a practice where all the veterinarians are women, calls “fur-mowing.” I tell Sara I she is bored and restless and needs to go out. Sara tells me I am projecting.

Sara is probably right and we are exploring allergies and bladder issues first. It is really hard to keep from making other animals into us. It is really hard to hold onto their otherness.

Which brings me back to Saeed and her work.  As part of the exhibit at the Clark, Saeed chose several works from the museum’s collection that present more traditional human-centered views of animals and provide a contrast to her own perspective. My favorite is the pairing of Durer’s woodcut of St. Jerome and the lion with her own interpretation of the scene in which the saint removes a thorn from the lion’s paw (see below). Durer’s lion sleeps at the saint’s feet, tamed and adoring. Saeed’s lion gazes straight into the saint’s eyes. We can’t predict what he will do once the thorn is removed, but it is unlikely to be fawning.

On her website, Saeed posts a question:

Hello to you all, how do you live?

Rabbit :
We live in small groups, have no fixed partnerships.
Build widely branching tunnel systems,
in which our young are born, naked and blind.
We still reproduce when imprisoned.

Hare :
I live solitary. Sleep in a shallow hollow.
My offspring are born with fur and open eyes.
I have never been domesticated.

Humans :
We don’t quite know.
Until we have found out, we wage wars.
Copyright © 2020 Perennial Wisdom, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.

Our mailing address is:

Perennial Wisdom

29 Columbine Dr

Glenmont, NY 12077-2971

Add us to your address book

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.
Categories
Uncategorized

The August Garden

August 18

The August Garden

In August Sara and I usually go to the Cape for a week, at least. Then there is the long weekend spent in Cooperstown at Glimmerglass opera, a glut of four in just three days. Sometimes we take another long weekend to visit friends who live elsewhere. Typically, August is a month when it is possible to leave the garden without worry or regret. Indeed, gardening friends and I have often agreed that August is a time when we should leave the garden because nothing is happening and nothing needs to be done.

This August I am, perforce, at home and in my August garden and I have made some discoveries. Even if there comes a day when we can travel again, I may not want to leave the garden in August because a lot is happening but nothing needs to be done.

My August garden proves to be  full of life. The hummingbirds are going mad for the last bits of delphinium blossoms. Their economy amazes me for surely they use up more fuel than their snack provides simply getting it. There are butterflies everywhere and the chipmunks scurry across the deck driving the cat to impotent fury. And then there are the flowers.

Since late July I have had a feast of constant color from the yellow Rudbeckia nitida, the red Hibiscus, and the purple and white Echinacea and Joe-Pye-weed. None of these blooms show any sign of quitting. I have, of course, always known that the flowers of August had staying power, that plants that bloom in late summer last longer than the irises or peonies or poppies of spring. This summer I have been able to appreciate what this means. In light of their longevity I am renaming all my spring bloomers “ephemerals.”

August is the perfect month to assess what needs to be done next spring. Nothing is quite so satisfying as going out in the early morning, pad and pencil in hand, and jotting down ideas for the improvement of the gardens, to be done some other time. It is easy to see where another wee Azalea should be planted and which Hostas need dividing, to identify the Potentilla that should be removed so that the Serbian spruce can spread out properly, to acknowledge that planting Miscanthus in the middle of the main perennial bed was a mistake and to make a note to replace it with more Baptisia. Does the Joe-Pye-weed need to go too?  Perhaps. But not now.

Indeed, nothing needs to be done now. In April we must wake the garden up, in May and June we must transplant and plant, divide and move. In July we must weed, weed, weed, and in September and October we must begin to take the garden down. In August we don’t have to do anything. It is too early to transplant, and too late to shop for new plants to fill old holes, especially this year. There are no plants left in the nurseries. Since May beginning gardeners have gobbled them up at a ferocious rate. Like all of us more seasoned gardeners when we started out, they want one of everything. None of the local nurseries are having sales this year; they don’t need to.

I weed in a desultory fashion, knowing that the life of these plants is soon to end and so it doesn’t much matter if I get them or not. Besides, there aren’t that many that can find a spot in the lushness of the August garden.It’s a choice, not a chore.

The front lawn needs re-seeding, but that is a mid-September project. For now, I will just  compost the bare spots. I could deadhead the Echinacea but why bother. Besides I love the look of the deadheads tumbling in and among the still-blooming heads. The goldfinches love the dead blooms too. They land on them, looking for seed, and bounce around, flinging a bit of their yellow into the purple and white mix. I can see that the Phlox planted around the Harry Lauder ‘Walking Stick’ needs  to be divided but that is a job for next spring. In the white garden, I see that there is some pink Phlox in the midst of my mass of David, a changeling that will have to go, just not now.

The August garden presents no pressure. I can work if I want to, but I can also just sit down and rest. I once heard a story about a woman, kept prisoner for years by her political opponents but finally rescued. Her companions in the resistance movement expected that she would immediately begin to seek office again. But, when asked about her plans, she said that God wanted her to rest. I think my August garden wants me to rest.

There is a lounge chair on the deck and a rocking chair on the patio. The deck has an awning and the patio has a shade tree. Or, now that I have removed a nearby wasps’ nest, I can sit on the bench I placed under the yellowwood tree this spring. I had not planned to remove the nest, thinking I could wait until winter. I don’t like killing any creature and besides the nest was beautiful. I thought we could co-habit. But when Ben came to trim the hemlocks and heard about the wasps, he advised me to act quickly, even offered to remove the nest for me. He identified the wasps as aggressive and capable of establishing a huge colony. And so, very early one morning, I donned my wasp-killing outfit, grabbed the spray can, and foamed them down. Sara, waking up and looking out, was sure we had an intruder.

If I sit on the bench under the yellowwood tree, I can see my butterfly bush. It actually attracts butterflies and, watching them swarm, I can see that there are butterflies in the world other than monarchs. Still the monarchs come as well, swooping and swirling and sucking, taking off and coming back, over and over, day after day, bulking up for the flight to Mexico, taking a bit of my garden with them. It’s a gift to watch something else at work.

Note: thanks to all of you who have written to tell me that you too weed your lawn.  It has inspired me to keep on with my own weeding. Kevin and I have weeded the front lawn and I am working on the side lawn too. I’ll get to the back eventually, just not now. Today I need to rest.
Categories
Uncategorized

Weeding My Lawn

August 4

Weeding my lawn, or should I say grasses?

I have been thinking a lot about lawns these past two weeks. I decided not to include anything about lawns in the “Tools and Tips” document I recently prepared for new subscribers and am also making available to previous subscribers (see link below). The subject deserves a manual of its own. But wrestling with the question of whether or not to include anything about lawns in my guide got me focused on the subject.

Perhaps that is why I decided that Kevin and I should spend our time together last Friday weeding the lawn. I have weeded the lawn sporadically over the years, removing as I mow or walk a piece of crabgrass or nut grass or a dandelion or purslane or some bittersweet vine or buckthorn. Friday we systematically weeded the front, the side, and the back yard, leaving for later only a little patch that needed some special attention.

It didn’t take long, considering the size of the lawn, a couple of hours, and we had fun, talking and yanking and imagining what the neighbors would think. Some folks, taking their daily walk, looked at us quizzically and some even asked what we were doing.  I wanted to answer, “Modelling the right relationship of person to plant,” but that sounded awfully pretentious so I just said we were getting rid of some things that absolutely should not be in one’s lawn.

But here’s the question that our morning’s work raised for me: Why don’t we weed our lawns? Why has it taken me so long to put it on my to-do list? Why would my neighbors be inclined to think me crazy for doing this? Why would Jim, my wonderful handyman, coming along later in the day, exclaim, “But Judy, nobody weeds their lawn.”

Perhaps it is time we did. The alternative, as most of us know, is not a good one.  More herbicides and pesticides are used on suburban lawns than in agriculture. These chemical plant killers create several major environmental problems. Ironically, they are not even good for the grass they are supposed to be helping. The secret of a healthy lawn lies in grass roots and the secret of good roots lies in the soil. The chemicals we put on our lawns negatively affect the soil, destroying organisms we want in our dirt and making it harder for our soil to absorb the organic matter needed to support a strong grass roots system.

Most of us want a healthy lawn but we tend to turn over to someone else the work of getting the lawn we want.  We hire companies with names like TruGreen or Bloomin’ Green or Tender Lovin’ Lawn Care. The practices of these so-called lawn care companies, however, tend to produce only a greater need for their services.

The mantra of lawn care is actually fairly simple. For starters, follow these instructions: Mow high (4 to 4.5 “).  Mow only as needed and when the lawn is dry. Mulch the clippings.

Once, during a difficult time in my life, I hired a lawn-care service.  Mr. B was an independent operator who clearly cared about lawns. He assured me that he cut high, on demand, and could mulch if that was what I wanted.  Other neighbors had hired him.  I hired him.  I never saw him again.

Instead, I watched as every Monday morning at 10 a.m. a surly unshaven youth, for whom the term “horticulture’ no doubt conjured up a world far removed from grass and grow, showed up in a truck.  He backed an enormous mower down a ramp, put on his ear protectors, revved the engine to roar and set off across my lawn.  It mattered not how short the grass nor how wet the ground.  He scalped, he bagged, and he took out anything in his way. After two months, I fired the service.  I could see that over time this approach would kill my lawn.

I understand Mr.B’s dilemma. He might actually about grass, but he is not doing the mowing. Besides, there is no way he could “cut on demand” and stay in business.  For him to survive, lawns must be cut every week, on the day of their schedule, no matter the cost to the grass.  And since most people want their grass cut short, the mowers are set to 3” or lower.  No one actually doing the mowing will take the time to change the setting of the machine for someone who wants their lawn cut high. Their livelihood depends upon speed and volume, certainly not on grass health.

A scalped lawn, however, quickly burns out when the weather turns hot and dry. This gives dandelions, crabgrass, creeping Charlie the conditions they need to flourish. Responding to the homeowner’s frantic calls, the lawn-care companies apply herbicides to kill the weeds they have allowed to grow by cutting the grass so short. This compromises the soil which supports the grass and leads to erosion of root strength. Observing puny grass, the homeowner makes another frantic call which results in the application of fertilizer. This provides a quick green flourish that comforts the homeowner but does nothing to nurture the roots. The result of this so-called care is grass in trouble.

Of late, I have had the great good fortune to know  Justin, a lawn-care person who actually mows the lawns he cares for himself. Justin sets the mower to 4” or 4.5”, depending on the current conditions. He mows when the lawn needs mowing and he mulches the clippings.

I am duly appreciative of this blessing. But were Justin to decide to move on, I would mow the lawn myself. My first job was mowing lawns. It can be a contemplative process if done in the late afternoon, and mindfully.  I am not sure why more people don’t enjoy it.  I am not sure why more people don’t mow their own lawns. I am not sure why more people don’t weed their lawns. I do think there is a problem with our wanting a lawn but not wanting to do the work of caring for it.

There is, of course, a movement these days, sometimes called the “Lose the Lawn” movement, to get rid of lawns altogether and replace them with meadows or low-maintenance perennial gardens or vegetables. There is much to be said for this movement and I applaud it.

But here’s the problem for me. I love grass. And I don’t just mean that I love the ornamental grasses, the Miscanthus, Pennisetums,  Panicums, so popular of late because of their lower-maintenance and winter interest properties. Many can imagine loving the purple-feathered ‘Little Bunny’ but few are saying they love the common ordinary grasses that make up a lawn in our part of the world. But these are the grasses I love, separately and collectively. I love the carpet made up of these grasses, that green “thing” we see every day, and mostly take for granted. We assume its presence, like a fish must assume the presence of water. Of course grass covers the ground around our houses. What else would?  We cannot imagine our world without grass and so we rarely pay attention to it.

But what would happen if we began to appreciate the miracle that grass really is? If properly cared for, my lawn comes back year after year. It gives me green, beautiful living green, for seven months of the year. It covers with this green every part of my property that is not house or garden. My grass lets me walk on it, play croquet on it, lie down in it, run and jump on it, all without much complaining. It frames and sets off my gardens, giving me an experience of calm to balance the exuberance of the gardens. an oasis of openness to balance the business of plantings. No other ground cover does so much work so widely and so well and with such beauty. Why shouldn’t I love my lawn? Why shouldn’t I care for my grass?

Perhaps if we began to think of grass as a plant like our roses or hydrangeas or our echinaceas or delphiniums it might change the way we think about our lawns and so perhaps our behavior as well. In Leaves of Grass, his poem of 1855, Walt Whitman writes, “I lean and loaf at my ease/Observing a spear of summer grass.”  Kevin and I did just that last week as we weeded and rested and weeded and rested.  We could see that the green carpet which constitutes my lawn actually consists of hundreds of individual plants with wonderful names like tall fescue and fine-leaf fescue, perennial rye and Kentucky blue grass, possibly some creeping red fescue. Realizing that grass is a plant could be, I think, a game-changer, one as big as the “lose the lawn” movement but with the opposite goal.

Maybe the way to accomplish this change of perspective would be to begin referring to our green gift not collectively but individually, not as grass but as grasses. I think I will try it out. I think I will ask Justin when he next plans to mow the grasses.  I think I will say to Kevin next week, “Shall we spend some time this morning weeding the grasses?”

Here’s the last of the good lawn care mantra.  Water infrequently but deeply. Spread a thin layer of compost over the lawn in spring and fall. Overseed in the fall. Fertilize for root strength in the fall. Aerate every three years if needed.

As some of you may know, I hired a consultant this spring to help me develop my writing “platform.”  You can read more about this adventure in a piece just published in Trolley, the on-line journal of the Writers’ Institute of New York. See this summer 2020 edition of Trolley. I called it “Travelling to Instagram.”

Dan is one of the most generous writers I have had the good fortune to encounter. Under his guidance I prepared the Tools and Tips for Garden Design document that goes to each new subscriber and that you can access via the following link: (http://www.perennialwisdom.net/tips-and-tools-for-designing-your-garden/).  If you enjoy it, let a friend or neighbor know about the newsletter.  If they subscribe, they will have access to this document.  And do let me know if you have questions or comments or want clarification or elaboration on any of the ideas contained in the document.
Categories
Uncategorized

Forefoot High-fives and Good Boots

July 21

Forefoot High-fives and Good Boots

It has been a fairly quiet two weeks here at 29 Columbine Drive. Things are moving toward the great August calm. Though I don’t hear it, I know it’s noisy in the early morning, though, because that is when the deer munch. And, my, have they been munching. They have eaten all my daylilies, every bit of Phlox, and most of the Hosta. Even the Phlox I think I have hidden from them, in corners of the garden they don’t usually visit, are gone.

Being home so much this season, I thought I could finally stay one step ahead of the deer.  I have bought Liquid Fence by the gallon and sprayed and sprayed and sprayed.  Alas, to no avail. If overnight rain removes it, before I can get out and spray again the big brown beasts have gotten the buds.
Jeff came this past week to sealcoat the driveway. “Do you weed all this?” he asked. He admired, profusely, the garden and my energy. Then he commented, with a bit of surprise in his voice, “It’s all green.” “Well, what do you expect when you live where deer walk down the street at noon?” I asked, defensively. Then I pointed out that green is a color too and not just one but many.  He knew about the deer from other customers but had to admit he hadn’t thought about the variety of greens available to the gardener.

Good people lament what we are doing to the deer. We are, they say, destroying their habitat, displacing them from their territory, and putting them in danger.  All this is true, and I respect the opinions of these good people.  But sometimes I suspect the 4 a.m. scrub brush gossip goes something like this:

“Hey, have you heard the news. They are putting in a new development across the street.  Cutting down all the trees, taking out the brush, and calling it Walden Fields.”
“Are they going to put in houses?”
“I think so, and you know what that means. We won’t have to eat this crap any longer. It’ll be just like my cousin in Country Meadows says, really tender sweet stuff, stuff she says are called Hostas, and Phlox and daylilies.”
“About time.”
And forefoot high-fives are exchanged all around.

When I find the rare daylily the deer have somehow missed, perhaps because it is practically buried under another plant, when I see its brilliant orange or tender peach, I have to reckon with what I have lost. I have to reckon with the fact that, despite my pitch, sometimes green is not enough. That’s when I want to write a new book for children called “Bam, Bam, Bambi’s Gone.”

Of course, I have no intention of killing the deer that are eating my color. I am the one who saves the baby rabbit from our visiting hunter cat. I am the one who carefully captures the spider in a Kleenex and puts her outside. Bugs lives are important too, I say, and especially to them. But I do lament the loss, especially this year when I have tried so hard to prevent it.

I have had another loss this week and it has also revealed something, like the limitations of green even for me, that I would just as soon have avoided knowing. I have been helping a friend navigate the transition from her current insurance plan to Medicare. Last Monday, sitting on her driveway, socially distanced, talking on the cell phone to the MVP insurance rep, I noticed that the sole of one boot had become detached from the rest of the boot. I was wearing my working-in-the-garden boots, since I had an appointment with a client later in the morning and wasn’t sure how much digging I might have to do.

I registered surprise –the boots were not that old—but not much else, until I began to pack up and leave my friend’s house. As I walked down the driveway to my car, my boot sole flopped free of the boot and flap, flap, flapped with every step.  I felt like a hobo from the 1930’s or a clown in an old movie.  Either way, I felt humiliated, ashamed, embarrassed. It was then I felt the full force of the phrase, “Clothes make the man.”

Flapping to my car, I felt the privilege of never having had to worry about my ability to afford decent clothing. I was stunned by the effect these broken boots—by now the other sole had become detached as well—were having upon my self-image. In these boots, I suddenly became a down-and -outer. I feared I would not be allowed in the Post Office, waited on at the kitchen gadget shop, treated with respect getting my watch a new battery.  I forgot all my errands, cancelled my appointment, and rushed home to put on the only other boots I owned.  My old Lawn Grips, still in the garage because I couldn’t bear to throw them away, no matter how dishevelled they had become, were still functional and still had their soles attached.

Like most gardeners, I am obsessed by the need for good boots. Without good boots, my feet can get hurt.  Tree branches and tree saws drop on them; rocks and roots stub them; bees sting and barberries stab. Good boots keep me grounded and balanced, solid and sure in my footing.  They protect and support the “brain” in my feet that my yoga teacher says is more important than the one in my head.

For many years I had the boot problem solved. Years ago, at our recently opened Farmers’ Market, head down and thinking only about vegetables, I had seen a pair of boots approaching and knew at once that they were the serious footwear I had been looking for since becoming a semi-professional gardener. They were made of heavy leather, had a reinforced toe, and a top that came up to and covered the ankle.  “I must have them,” I muttered as I lifted my head, prepared to accost a stranger with my need. To my delight, their owner turned out to be a gardening colleague, indeed none other than the designer whose work provided, indirectly, the inspiration for me to start Perennial Wisdom, my garden design business.  “Yes, yes,yes,” she exclaimed, “you simply must get a pair.  They are the best you can buy.  They support, they protect, and they stand up well to water.”

Imagine my despair, then, when after my third pair of Lawn Grips finally became dishevelled, I went to order new ones and discovered that Lawn Grips boots are no longer available. Oh, sure, it looks like you can buy them from Amazon but in two years they have never been in stock, there or anywhere else for that matter.  It is a tease.  I truly think “they” don’t make them anymore..

Now I am on the prowl for a replacement for the inferior boots I purchased two years ago whose soles have just detached.  A Saturday morning task, possibly at Tractor Supply.  At least, if I try there again, I can buy a colorful new tin rooster to sit outside Sara’s vegetable garden fence.  The old one, bought two years ago when I got those bad boots, has faded.  And have I mentioned – we need color in the garden because the deer . . .

Of possible interest to you is an interview with Paul Grondahl, director of the New York State Writers’ Institute, about gardening and writing and the pandemic. We are both a bit rough around the edges – he from a recent bout of bacterial pneumonia, me from the need for a haircut and the failure to know how to use my phone to show him my garden. Here is the link for the interview, in case you want to watch it.

 
Copyright © 2020 Perennial Wisdom, All rights reserved.
Categories
Uncategorized

I Think I Might Have Made a Mistake

Well, it’s been a busy two weeks in the garden since last I wrote. Kevin and I have been doing chores that I have never been able to get to before because I have never had the time. One of these chores was clearing out the dead wood on the several blue spruces that define my garden.

The Colorado blue spruce is doomed. It has fallen victim to the Rhizosphaera needle cast, a fungal disease, caused by Rhizosphaera kalkhoffii (don’t you just love the name?) that attacks the needles of Colorado blue spruce in the spring, as new needles emerge. Of all the foliar diseases affecting woody landscape plants and shrubs, needle casts are the most serious for the simple reason that coniferous plants do not have the ability to refoliate, or to produce a second flush of needles from defoliated stems.

I have been keeping my blue spruces alive for the last several years by means of an annual spring and summer spraying. This year, however, Davey’s has dissed me. After confirming that my annual treatment plan was on schedule, they have not showed up to spray nor have they returned my many, increasingly frantic, calls. I don’t mind so much that they dissed me, but dissing my trees is unforgiveable.

Unable to do anything about the newly emerging and rapidly dying growth, Kevin and I decided at least we could clean out the old dead wood, accumulated over years of gradual decline. For three hours we lopped, we pruned, we dragged away. We didn’t look at the results of our work until we were done.

In most cases the results met the two criteria deemed essential by this gardener: the job was good enough and the trees looked better than they had before we started. In one case, however, the result was painful to witness. At the end of the line of spruces that form the back boundary of my property was a tree with a huge hole on one side halfway up the trunk.

We were horrified. Kevin reminded me that Sara had come out and mentioned something about an emerging bare spot, and that I had told him to continue lopping because the choice was between a bare spot and a mass of dead branches. Neither of us was prepared for the size of the hole we had made. I think we might have made a mistake.

A perfectionist by nature, I have never liked making mistakes. In school,I always focused on what I got wrong, not what I got right. 99% correct? What did I miss? But now I am a gardener, and gardeners are persons who make mistakes, lots of them. Stephanie Cohen’s The Non-Stop Gardener, one of my favorite go-to books, carries an endorsement by Steve Aiken, the editor of Fine Gardening: “I wish I had the Non-Stop Garden when I was starting out. It would have saved me plenty of trial-and-error.” Nonsense. I don’t think Aiken really believes this. Every gardener I have ever known says the same thing: “Read all you want, but you will never become a gardener unless your get out in the garden and make mistakes.”

I have become a gardener and it has led me to think differently about mistakes. I recall, clearly, the words of my first instructor at the Institute for Ecosystems Study where I got my Certificate in Garden Design. As I absorbed her passion for native shrubs and perennials, I absorbed as well her exhortation: “If you are not out there killing plants, you are not doing horticulture.” From her I learned that mistakes are not the sign of doing something wrong but the sign that you are doing something right.

Don’t get me wrong. Terrible things can happen to plants in gardens. In future newsletters I am sure I will be unable to restrain my need to rant about bad pruning practices and murderous lawn care. But these practices deserve a word far stronger than “mistakes.” How about “arborcide?”

Making mistakes as a gardener is inevitable and most mistakes are fixable. Plants, after all, are remarkably resilient. The Clematis you accidentally snipped off while cutting back dead daffodil foliage will most likely come back. The Viburnum you top-pruned, producing an ugly array of sprouts, can be re-pruned into decent shape over time. The Hosta that you thought might take more sun than most can be moved when it becomes clear that it can’t.

Mistakes can even become the source of opportunity. Perhaps you realize this year that last year’s brilliant idea for a garden based on opposing colors—red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet—is not working out for you. Instead of demonstrating a fundamental principle of color, it is just a jumble, and way too busy. Now you have an opportunity to try a new “hot” garden of red, yellow, and orange. All you have to do is remove the blue and violet, and no doubt this removal will inspire you to start another garden of cool colors. Has that lovely red maple whiplash you planted a few years ago grown far larger than you thought possible, putting an end to your perfectly positioned sun-garden of poppies and phlox and echinacea? Consider it an opportunity to explore the magic of shade gardening and to focus on foliage.

Much creativity and energy can come from making mistakes, surviving them, and turning them to your own purposes. When people ask me how I came up with the design for my garden, I often quip that what they are admiring is simply the history of my mistakes. But now I have a problem. What should I do about the substantial hole Kevin and I have created in this one blue spruce by pruning out all its dead wood?

Do I leave it alone and enjoy the peephole it offers into my neighbor’s garden? Do I go so far as to label the hole “intentional,’ an effort to imitate on a small scale the Japanese art of the borrowed view? Do I go even further and prove my intention by pointing out the rather lovely shape of the hole? Do I try to plant a shrub underneath the pine that might fill the hole? Or do I look to hardscape for a solution, perhaps a sculpture? Then I could say as well that I made the hole on purpose to showcase the sculpture. Given this context, perhaps no one will notice the relative mutilation of the spruce tree.

I am leaning toward the latter approach and will let you know if I find an appropriate sculpture. But I must admit that the borrowed view is beginning to charm, especially as it includes a glimpse of my neighbor’s fish pond.

Meanwhile, many of you asked to see a photo of “The Grim Reaper,” aka “Hawaiian Dancer.” Here are a couple. You can see the blue spruces behind him or her.