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Tools

May 31, 2023

Tools

The package arrived on Friday, and so did guests. I left it sitting in the garage while I focused on the more important matter.

Yesterday, I opened the box. Inside were two tools, purchased from A.M. Leonard, supplier of horticultural tools since 1885. If you are also a gardener, you may know about A. M. Leonard and appreciate the discipline it took to leave the box unopened for several days, deferring the pleasure of handling good tools.

In the box was an asparagus weeder and a deluxe soil knife with a lifetime guarantee. Both are tools I have previously possessed and somehow managed to lose, despite the lifetime guarantee.

The asparagus weeder could be described as an ordinary weeder on steroids. Designed to go deep and dig up asparagus shoots, it is tough enough to uproot the deepest undesirable. It is also sharp enough to gouge my finger if I do not pay close attention to where my hands are when I am uprooting the undesirable. It came this time with a plastic shield over its tip. That detail says “watch out.”

I am never without an asparagus weeder. I always have two on hand. Because, despite my passion for good tools, I am often careless. Sometimes, when I have finished weeding, I toss my tool into the bucket of pulled weeds, forget to remove it and so dump it, along with the weeds, into the heap of garden trash along the side of the road waiting to be picked up by the town composters.

This past summer Kevin finally convinced me to spray bright orange paint on the handle of one of my asparagus weeders. I resisted because the tool is elegant and orange spray paint is not. Nevertheless, I agreed. I won’t, however, deface the handle of my new tool because this tactic did not save last year’s version from being lost. It is a testament to the struggles of this year that it has taken me until May to replace it.

My previous soil knife, also called a Hori Hori due to its Japanese origin, stayed in my possession for years, perhaps because it already had an orange handle. In March, when I began to clean and sharpen my tools for this season, I could not find my soil knife, anywhere. Sara had one in her bucket that I thought for a moment might be mine, but then I remembered her own exclamations of delight over the value of this tool for her vegetable garden. She knows it is hers, not mine. Gardeners can get very possessive about their tools.

I did not always grasp the importance of good tools. For years I accepted the maxim, “A poor workman blames his tools,” and assumed that if I had difficulties weeding or pruning or edging the fault was mine and not the tool’s.

One day, however, Brenda, my garden helper for many years before I had the good fortune to meet Kevin, showed up without her clippers. I gave her my pair of Felco #2s and prepared to manage with a non-descript pair I had picked up at a garage sale. After two hours, I was frustrated. I had done half as much work as Brenda, and I had not done it well. That is when it occurred to me that to give a person a second-rate tool, then blame them for doing a second-rate job, is simply a version of “blaming the victim” and a part of the oppressive social system I have been fighting all my life. If someone had told me then that “a poor workman blames his tools,” I cannot vouch for what piece of their anatomy I might have snipped off with my second-rate tool. That year I put an extra pair of Felco #2 clippers at the top of my Christmas list and dumped my garage-sale clippers in the trash.

I not only have a passion for good tools; I also have a passion for convincing others that it is worth the extra cost sometimes involved to get a good tool. Giving talks on any topic, I try to work in references to the value of good tools. When discussing pruning shrubs, for example, I shoe people my Silky Zubat pruning saw and my Felco #11 pruners. Pruning is an art but to be expert you need the right tool. Most important, you need tools that make a clean cut with relative ease so that the bark does not tear, leaving the plant susceptible to disease. Mangled shrubs hurt my heart.

When describing best practices for transplanting shrubs, I sing the praises of my “King of Spades,” a steel tool capable of cutting through roots and producing a clean and large root ball. When sharing ways to make gardening lower-maintenance, I talk about my Garden Bandit Hand Looper that can remove with one sweep a mass of the baby hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) that now infests all my gardens. And I display my asparagus weeder.

And then, of course, there is the edger.

When I first started to garden at Columbine Drive, I bought a Dutch-made wheelbarrow and a Dutch-made edger. Twenty-five years later I still have the wheelbarrow, but the edger broke apart some years ago. I searched and searched for a replacement, but each substitute fell far short of the original.

Often, when giving tours of my garden, I don’t have time to weed. I can always make time to edge, however, because I have the right edger. A well-edged garden distracts the eye away from the weeds. It offers the eye a crisp line that says to the viewer, ‘I am well-taken care of.’ This task is quick and easy with a good edger; it is more time-consuming and less successful if the edger is badly designed or dull from overuse. For years I had only badly designed edgers and hence I had badly edged gardens.

Then one spring Sara and I visited Keukenhof in Holland, the Dutch equivalent of Disney World, where tulips of every color and kind bloom non-stop for two months.

Whenever I visit a garden, I look for a working gardener and start a conversation. Sighting a gardener at Keukenhof, I noticed he was edging and with the very tool I had bought so long ago. I approached him, excited, and he kindly gave me the name of the company that made the edger. Not surprisingly, the company was Dutch. Even if I could have gotten to a garden supply store in Amsterdam, I could not have brought my edger through security nor paid the shipping costs to have one sent to Columbine Drive.

Returning home, I opened my favorite gardening magazine and lo and behold it advertised my edger as now available from a newly minted American distributor of Sneeborer tools. Sara bought me one for my birthday. I have been using it ever since.

Today I will put my new asparagus weeder in a safe spot, but the soil knife goes into the ground immediately. A long weekend without weeding has given the undesirables a head start. But it is nothing the Hori Hori, companioned by garden bandit and asparagus weeder, can’t handle.

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Two Masters

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Two Masters
JUDITH FETTERLEY

MAY 9

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May 9, 2023
Two Masters
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The garden seems bigger this year, much bigger. And the days to pass more quickly. It is almost mid-May and I have not yet finished the spring clean-up that I began in mid-March. The canna bulbs that should have been potted up in April and be ground-ready by now are still in a brown bag in the basement. I have yet to visit my favorite nursery to see what is new for this season. I have yet to purchase my annual supply of annuals. Could it be that I am slower? Could it be that I am older?
Older, yes, and slower, yes, but also with different priorities. In years past, I put the garden first, hoarding my spring weekends like Scrooge clutching his money bags. No going away in April or May, no long weekend visitors either. This year I have put beloved people first. A visit to Brooklyn to see Sonya; a visit from my brother to see, among other things, the Fetterley Forest at work; a visit to Northampton to meet a friend driving over from Boston. And the rest of May will witness more of this magic.
Given aging and slowing, given changed priorities, a different struggle plays out. Can I continue to be both a semi-professional gardener and a semi-professional writer? Can I do homage to age and its priorities and needs and serve two masters as well? And am I serving either one with a status of “semi”?
I may be getting slower physically, needing doses of Ibuprofen and a regular exercise routine to keep going, but my designing mind has not slowed down. Shrubs must be moved and removed; the wretched patch in the front lawn must be planted; something must be done to fill the space left by the removal of one of the blue spruces; a path must be made into the hidden garden so guests can enjoy my latest acquisition, Carex pennsylvanica ‘Straw Hat,’ a “dappled-shade-lover that has arching, soft, leaves, and in late spring, masses of LARGE, wooly, yellow flower clusters.” The gardens do not slow down just because I do.
I fit in “waking up the garden” between visits and, on a rainy afternoon back at the computer, discover I have missed a newsletter that should have appeared between my last of April 13 and now. I find as well that I have missed more than one submission deadline in a journal I had marked for possible publication. As for the longer project, what was it about? I forget.
So far this year I have gotten only rejections. To perhaps find out why, I signed up for a webinar entitled “From Rejection to Publication,” offered by Allison K. Williams, a teacher I have come to respect. At the end of her excellent presentation, Allison gave some guidelines for the number of pieces the semi-professional writer, the one who is not trying to make her living from words, should submit per week. The figure: one to two pieces. Her advice to all writers no matter their status: Make a lot of pots – i.e. write more, experiment more, and practice, practice, practice. Her last words? Don’t ever quit.
I don’t want to quit. Allison inspires me and she guides. I am ready to follow her excellent advice and to revise and resubmit. I also want to explore the multiple opportunities for connecting to other writers that Substack keeps offering me on a daily basis in my already over-crowded inbox.
But the weeds won’t put a hold on spreading while I attend to my writing. The Master Gardener demonstration gardens could really use more help this year, two days a week instead of one, as they begin to reach a new level of excellence. The Bethlehem Town Hall native garden, installed last spring, made it through the winter brilliantly. Now we need to plant the ground cover that, when mature, will suppress weeds and make it a truly lower-maintenance public garden. Until then, we must – you got it – weed.
And so it goes, each master calling my name, each time with greater insistence and irritation. I tell this to a friend and she replies, “Two masters? More like twenty-two.” And I know what she means. There are, to name just a few because it would in fact be quite possible to get to twenty-two, email master, medical master, house-maintenance master, exercise master, Quaker meeting master.
But above the din I hear most loudly the voices of gardening master and writing master. And I wonder, how did Persephone do it, serving as the center of two worlds? What happened below while she was above tending the garden? Did she miss opportunities for spring clean-up of the underworld, for remodeling some of its rooms? Did she wish she could be in two places at once?
This dilemma has no easy answer. Giving up gardening is not an option. But then neither is giving up writing. Particularly not writing about plants and telling the story of this extraordinary adventure I have been on for the last twenty-five years at Columbine Drive. Writing about gardening is as necessary to my understanding of what the practice of means, what being a gardener means, as the practice itself.
And so of course I will go on trying to serve two masters. I’ll plant the cannas today and on my way to a doctor’s appointment will visit my favorite nursery and pick up my annual supply of annuals. Perhaps I will even get a bit closer to finishing the spring clean-up. But before I head out, I think I will tinker a bit with that piece about uprooting the redbud. There is a call out from a good journal for pieces about uprooting and perhaps, just maybe, they will be interested in a piece that approaches the topic from such a different angle. Who knows.

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© 2023 Judith Fetterley
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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Reframing

March 25, 2023

Reframing

I was out in the garden yesterday, checking to see if it was ready for me to help it wake up. I’m ready to go but looking at next week’s weather I see nothing ahead but snow and rain. Nevertheless, short of a downpour I will begin the season next Saturday, starting as I always do with the gardens in the front of the house. Staying close to the house helps me make the transition from indoor person to outdoor person and somehow assuages my fear that I won’t know how to garden anymore.

I used to have that fear with writing. I could never believe when I finished a day of writing that I would ever be able to do it again. Each day I had to re-create myself as a writer, rebuild the universe in which such a thing was possible. Hemingway was reputed to have addressed this stress – will I still be a writer tomorrow? – by ending his writing day in the middle of a sentence, thereby ensuring that he would have an accessible re-entry to his work. Once I morph into outdoor gardener, I will need my project to be something I can leave in the equivalent of the middle of a sentence, something I can work on again without having to recreate the universe which makes me into a writer.

I have until next week to make this happen, then ready or not I am out in the garden again. The 2023 season will have begun in earnest and I will be sending you nature’s news as well as my own.

I will, however, be sending it to you on a different platform — Substack instead of MailChimp. You will see little if any difference in format, but the move is a challenge to my limited knowledge of how all this works. I am actually quite impressed that I know how to use the word “platform.”

Meanwhile, I have some thoughts to share on another subject. I recently attended a workshop on healthy aging. One of the most interesting presentations was given by the executive director of the Reframing Aging Project.

I have long tried to practice reframing in my personal and public life. It is part and parcel of my Quaker culture where we often talk about reframing an issue in such a way as to allow for non-violent exploration and settlement. And of course framing is one of the first principles of garden design. In the garden I am constantly framing and re-framing. I had not, however, thought much about how we might engage this process in our talking about aging.

But consider, for example, the difference between referring to a “silver tsunami” or the “tidal wave” of aging baby boomers, phrases that elicit fear and have the effect of distancing the speaker from the predicted horror, and instead talking affirmatively about changing demographics: “As Americans live longer lives, we want to look at ways to keep ourselves healthy and active.”

Or, instead of using the terms that “other” older people and reinforce stereotypes, terms such as “Seniors,” “the elderly,” “aging dependents,” try using more neutral (“older people/Americans”) and inclusive (“we” and “us”) terms. As in the slogan on their button: “Aging – so cool. Everyone is doing it!”

Perhaps most interesting to me was reframing issues of aging from a problem of individual choice to a concern for social contexts. Consider, for example, the difference between using language that implies that individuals alone are the determinant of aging outcomes, terms such as “choice,” or “planning” or “control,” phrases often found in discussions of problems older people face –you should have saved more or eaten better or lived in a less polluted neighborhood — and using terms that emphasize the social context in which aging occurs, as in “let’s find creative solutions to food deserts or to the presence of toxins in our air and water to make sure we can all thrive as we age.” Such reframing requires us to stop blaming the victim and look for larger solutions.

Among the speakers was also an expert on issues of dementia – its prevalence, its symptoms, and those behaviors that seem to function as delayers of onset or even preventers.

We know the obvious factors connected to possible delay or prevention of dementia– quit smoking, eat a healthy diet, get good sleep, avoid stress, take a walk. Of course, these recommendations did not take into account the social factors that might have made it difficult for individuals to accomplish these goals. I duly noted this, as his talk followed the one on re-framing. My attention, however, was quickly diverted to another asserted factor, tucked in amongst all these familiars: the quality of one’s education, but particularly that of primary school.

On reflection, I suppose it is not so strange a connection, if indeed it be true. Early stimulation of brain activity might very well carry over into heightened quality of brain activity in later life. Regardless of the science, however, his comment flooded me once again with gratitude for my own good luck in receiving such a high quality education in my first years of school. To Whitney School and its teachers, I credit my joy in learning, my love of words, my pleasure in music and art, my fascination with history. Though 1 in 3 people over the age of 84, according to this speaker, will experience some form of dementia, I at least am not there yet. Perhaps it is thanks to Miss Hibbs in second grade, Miss Dove in fourth grade, and Miss MacLeod, in fifth grade. Ironically, I cannot remember the name of my third grade teacher though it was for her that I wrote my first story, and it was she who did not say, “You should become a writer,” but rather said, “You are a writer.”

In this context, I can only lament the loss to the children of Florida of the harsh regime of repression sweeping over the state’s educational system, the banning of books, the refusal to talk of gay identity, the prohibition of conversation about systemic racism. Despite denials, it seems likely that the principal of a charter school was forced out of office over showing in class a photo of the statue of Michelangelo’s ‘David.” One can only wonder if the same furor would have arisen had the teacher shared a photo showing a naked or partly clothed woman. I suspect not, for after all, a considerable portion of Western art depends upon pleasuring the male gaze with images of women as sexual objects to be enjoyed vicariously via art. And the essence of this harsh regime is a reinstallation of the primacy of the male gaze, the objectification of women, and a pleasuring of the male in all ways imaginable. Perhaps the patriarchs think that keeping their parts private will help to ensure their identification with god.

A dark time is here. I am going out to the garden even if it is snowing.

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Tree

 

March 7, 2023

Tree

They are down everywhere in my neighborhood – the branches of the Bradford pear. I see them on my walk, half a tree torn away from a still-standing half, the still-standing half left gashed, wounded, open.

Beth comes by with the well-behaved Finnegan on his leash and asks me what happened.

“They are Bradford pears,” I explain to her. “Beautiful to look at but structurally unsound. They were the darling of the landscape trade once, but,” and here I point to the carnage before us, “not any more.”

I had one once myself.

I had purchased the lot and begun building a house in my suburban neighborhood in the springtime and as I walked the streets I was greeted by the sight of many ‘Bradford’ pears in full bloom. It gave me the feel of being in a snowstorm in May.

That first summer, as the house was being built and as I watched it go up, I saw the ‘Bradford’ leaves turn a dark and glossy green; they held that color throughout the summer, no matter the heat or drought. Walking in my neighborhood that fall, having finally moved in, I saw those same leaves ablaze with dark reds, yellows, oranges.

I fell in love with its shape too. The ‘Bradford’ pear does not look like the tree I learned to draw in kindergarten — a single main trunk and staggered branches coming off at 45-degree angles on alternate sides. Instead, the ‘Bradford’ has a short base with branches that grow up and over at tight angles so that, when mature, it looks like a brandy snifter and could even be said to resemble a pear.

This growth pattern gives it a lovely, symmetrical, uniformly rounded form. When it reaches maturity at 25 feet with a canopy of 25 feet as well, the tree is architecturally splendid and indeed unique; there is no tree quite like it. Add in the fact that the ‘Bradford’ pear is subject to none of the major diseases of trees and has no notable pest problems, and you have a home-owner’s dream-come-true tree.

I was smitten and determined to have one myself. I arranged for an October planting. Then came a severe September thunderstorm and I saw a different side of the Bradford pear. I saw there is a reason for wanting trees that look like the ones I drew in kindergarten. The branch structure that makes the rounded canopy of the Bradford pear so pleasing, those branches angled sharply upward from a stumpy trunk, creates a week tree, one that is susceptible to storm damage whether from wind or ice or heavy wet snow. In my neighborhood whole trees were down. Others had lost large limbs.

I reconsidered. I called the landscaper whom I had hired to plant my tree. Pat told me of the despair filling the landscape industry as they watched the ‘Bradford’ coming down everywhere.

“Yes,” he said, “we should have known it was too good to be true. But look, we now have a cultivar that does not have the same structural problems as the ‘Bradford.’ Let’s plant a ‘Cleveland Select.’”

We did. I called it “the cocktail tree” because, even when first planted and quite small, it provided shade for two people on my patio at four in the afternoon when the western sun was strongest and the need for a glass of wine the greatest.Over the years it doubled in size, then doubled again, and then again. Eventually it shaded the whole patio.

I believed I had found a cultivar with all the virtues of the ‘Bradford’ but without its structural problems. I don’t know why I believed this. ‘Cleveland Select’ looked just like the ‘Bradford’ and had its magnificent brandy-snifter structure.

Still, for seven years my pear tree grew; for seven years “too good to be true” seemed possible. But then one September a late afternoon tornado tore a path through my garden and found ‘Cleveland Select’ in its way. It broke in two, just like a ‘Bradford.’

Though I believe in allowing time to do the work of grief – my children have never forgiven me the year I made them wait before we got another cat — within days of removing the last traces of ‘Cleveland Select,’ I realized that I could not face the next summer’s sun without a tree in that spot off my patio. I had to replace it now.

But with what?  Surely I would not be so foolish as to select another Callery pear when there are so many trees to choose from. I went on-line, I read and re-read Simon Toomer’s Trees for the Small Garden, I consulted Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants. Pat suggested an Oxydendrum. I went to the nearest arboretum to see one; I rejected it immediately.

I used to tell the customers of my garden design business that there are always alternatives, especially native alternatives to the foreign invasives they often wanted me to plant for them. But as I sought an alternative to the Callery pear, itself a foreign invasive, I discovered something rather disturbing: sometimes there really are no alternatives, native or other.

I did not want to plant another Callery pear. I did not want to plant another tree so vulnerable to wind and storm. I did not want to be ten years older and once again have no shade on my summer patio. I did not want to plant a tree that is potentially invasive.

Still, I wanted a tree just like the Callery pear – one with an upright shape, yet spreading, but not too spreading; large enough to shade the patio but not so large as to reach the deck. I wanted a tree small enough to look good in the middle of my extensive patio garden, and one whose root structure would let me plant beneath it. Having lost my Japanese maple to verticillium wilt and my Merrill magnolia to scale, I found the disease and pest free attributes of the Callery pear irresistible.

I called Pat and gave him the news that I wanted, no, had to have,another Callery pear. A week or so later he showed up with a young tree.

“I picked the cultivar with the best structure,” he said. “It doesn’t have the same fall color, but it has held up better than ‘Cleveland Select’ in strength tests.”

“Yes,” I said, after reading the tag. “I saw the report on the New Jersey highway test. It gives Pyrus calleryana ‘Aristocrat’ the best marks for structural strength.”

“They all come down in twenty years,” said Pat, forgetting that he was about to plant a Callery pear for me, “and most of them don’t last more than ten.

My “Aristocrat” is still standing despite the storm that brought heavy wet branch-breaking snow to my corner of the world. It is not the same tree as the one I lost. It does not have the same magnificent fall color as my ‘Cleveland Select,’ nor does it have the same brandy snifter structure, but it provides needed shade in the summer and offers a resting spot for birds in winter. Just last week it was filled with robins gorging themselves on the tiny pears that must have just become sweet enough to induce such a feeding frenzy.

Still, every time there is a fierce wind sweeping across my backyard or a wet and heavy snow, I go white with fear.
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Disoriented

February 23, 2023
Disoriented
I’m disoriented.

Monday I was outside pruning the red-twigged dogwoods and the viburnums, something I typically do in February, when I heard a familiar sound, looked up and there they were –geese in V-formation flying due north, and honking, honking, honking.

Why, I always wonder, do they waste precious energy talking. And so I make up imaginary conversations to explain their yaaking.

“Mabel, get up here. I’m exhausted and it’s your turn to lead.”
“Not it is not. It is Matilda’s turn. I lead almost all day yesterday.”
“You did not. George did. Hey, George, get back in line, you’ll kill yourself if you keep taking extra shifts.”

Honk, honk, honk.

Well, it keeps me amused and I need to be amused because, as I said, I am disoriented.

Because, seriously, geese flying north in February?

Sara and I made plans this fall to spend the long weekend preceding Presidents’ Day in Provincetown. Worried about possible winter storms in February, Sara insisted we cancel.

No wonder I am disoriented. Instead of being buried in snow and thankful that we didn’t try to make it to the Cape, on Tuesday I started cutting down the grasses I left up for winter interest.

This is a task I usually undertake in late March or early April, at what is typically the very beginning of the gardening season. Tuesday was February 21.

Even more startling, I spent much of my time outside on Tuesday weeding.  Weeding? In February?  This is beyond bizarre.

Some years ago I bought some compost that was infested with one of those weeds that once you have them you can never get rid of them. Of course I did not realize this until I had spread the compost everywhere. Now I have an infestation.

Cardamine hirsuta, aka Hairy Bittercress, is an exotic invasive of the mustard family that emerges early, often in late winter. Advice abounds for eliminating this plant by means of herbicidal sprays. Others advise that, as a tasty edible green, one should eat it. I am neither spraying nor eating, just weeding it out as fast as I can in the hopes of getting ahead of it.

Weeding in February is messing with my rhythms. Persephone’s not ready to be done with winter yet.

I need to finish my Master Gardener presentation tentatively titled “Honey, I Shrunk the Lawn.”

Did you know that the average lawnmower mowing the average lawn spews out as much carbon dioxide as eleven new cars?

Did you know that more gas is spilled in a year by homeowners filling lawnmowers than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez disaster? That’s 17 million gallons. The Exxon Valdez disaster was 10.8 million.

Did you know that in 2017 the EPA estimated that, nationwide, we used 9 billion gallons of water per day on lawns?

Did you know that in this country we use more pesticides each year on lawns than we do on agriculture? This becomes less surprising once you realize that non-native European turf grass is the largest crop we grow in the U.S.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my lawn. It lets me walk on it, play on it, cook on it, lie down on it. It creates the necessary open space, what the Japanese call the “ma,” that I need to fully appreciate my planted garden. I even love the grasses that make up my lawn, the fesuces and ryes and blue-grass.

But my lawn is ecologically and economically expensive and I don’t need anywhere near as much of it as I have. This is true for many homeowners.  The solution is to shrink the lawn and I am  hoping that my presentation will demonstrate a variety of ways this can be done with a reasonable amount of time and money and effort.

I also need to conclude my season of writing.

Did you know that as a “writer” you can report a loss year after year after year and not be subject to penalty from the IRS? You never need to make a profit to claim it as a business and deduct expenses associated with it from your tax liability.  Most business require a profit to be shown in at least two years out of five. Not writing. You can lose and lose and the IRS in its infinite wisdom understands that this can be so because writers are crazy.

We pay to submit our work to journals that most likely will reject our work. If by some miracle there comes an acceptance, only rarely is there remuneration.

We keep writing and submitting in the face of endless rejections. My writing friends remind me that until you have experienced at least 250 rejections you are not a seasoned writer.

So common is rejection that many journals discourage submissions that relate to rejection.  Here is what Brevity, a major player in the field of blogs about writing, has to say on the subject:

“We receive numerous submissions dealing with rejection, motivation, and persistence, and while we are happy to consider blog essays on these aspects of a writer’s life, we are actively looking for other material and fresh approaches.”

In other words, if you write about rejection they will most likely reject you.  Need I say more?

Though I have not yet reached the 100th rejection, I am beginning to question whether there might be a better use of my time in winter, particularly if winter continues to erode into a short break between the end of November and the middle of February.

And then yesterday happened – snow and freezing rain and hazardous driving and the gardens with their load of Cardamine hirsuta completely buried.

Of course I am disoriented.

I am looking for a “recombobulation station.”  Let me know if you have directions to one.

 

 

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Connections

February 1, 2023
Connection
My feet in stirrups, a camera scanning my bladder in an effort to determine the source of all too frequent urinary tract infections, I find myself telling the doctor how much I love my community of gardeners and being told to keep my hands quiet. I had explained to her assistant that I was currently experiencing considerable back pain and had asked that she be careful when getting me set up. Willing to accommodate, she asked me if I knew the source of my back problem.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “Remember the drought we had last summer?  For three weeks I lifted heavy buckets of water two to three hours a day to keep my own gardens and gardens I care for as a Master Gardener alive. I felt something give on the last day, when rains were predicted and I was able to stop.”

“Do you have large gardens, then?” the assistant asked. “And have you been a Master Gardener for a long time?”

And so I began to tell both doctor and assistant about my gardens at home, about the gardens at the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and about the community of Master Gardeners. As the camera went on about its business, I went on about how much I loved gardening and gardeners. I urged them to come out to the CCE and visit us Master Gardeners some Thursday morning.

The procedure was over before I knew it, my urine pronounced “innocent,” and my bladder relatively healthy for my age. When I asked the doctor why I was subject to such frequent infections, she answered, “We used to die at 40.”

“Well, bring back the good old days,” I immediately quipped, feet now firmly on the floor, but she proceeded to prescribe estrogen cream and other remedies, the question of “why” being displaced by the instruction of “do this and this and this.”

I have been pondering the question of “and,” of conjunction and connection, a great deal lately. Kathryn Schulz devotes an entire section of her recent book, Lost & Found, to “and” and writes, “One description of hell holds that it is a place where ‘nothing connects with nothing,’ suggesting that the absence of attachment to the rest of the world is both an abdication of goodness and a form of suffering.”

I have been aching to get out in the garden lately, eagerly anticipating a day warm enough to allow for the seasonal pruning that begs to be done, looking for a day in the high forties. Beneath the thrum of “must do,” however, I have discerned something deeper. What I crave in being out in the garden is connection. Examining a viburnum disfigured by water shoots that must be pruned before the plant leafs out, I realize I have been examining this shrub for over 20 winters and pruning it for over 20 springs. Its name is written down in my “list of plants purchased.” I know when I got it, where I got it, and how much it cost. I have watched it grow. I have watched part of it die. I have a history of relating to this plant.

The connection I have to my plants, the intricate web of connection I have with each tree, each shrub, each mass of perennials, a connection characterized by time and care and knowledge and joy, is what I crave to experience again. As Schulz remarks, “the more deeply connected we feel, the more fulfilling we typically find our lives.” If I find my life rich, it is in part because of the myriad connections I experience when I am out in the garden.

Out in the garden, I am also, of course, outside and I am missing the connection I have with weather and sky and ground. I was a child of that generation of mothers instructed to put the baby out in the pram a certain number of hours a day, no matter what.  A November baby, I suspect I began life with snow on my face. Later hockey and igloos would keep me outside, skating on the rink my dad made in our back yard on the spot where in the summer he tried to grow carrots, admiring the ice structure my brother and I built off to one side of the rink.

Having dinner with friends the other night, the subject of fish came up and I was delighted to find that one of my companions had the same distaste for fish that I have. He asked me if I knew the source of my repulsion.

“Oh, yes,” I replied, “my brother and I used to fish in the summers at our cottage on lake Huron, but sometimes we did not have a bucket in which to put the fish we caught and they would lie on the bottom of the boat, twitching and wriggling and then dying and smelling. Not often, but enough to finish off fish for me forever.”

When I step outside into my garden I connect as well with what outside means to me– that child who loved hockey and hated fish and the adult who started to garden in this corner of the world some twenty-five years ago and the sky and the ground and my plants.

I have tried so many times to explain to interested listeners, like the doctor and her assistant, why being out in the garden and being in a state of joy so often come together. But yesterday, I could have explained it, had there been time and space. I could have told the good doctor and her assistant of how I walked the other day past the corner garden that holds the dwarf white spruce that Ben and I transplanted long after it was too large to reasonably suspect it would survive such a move, and how I looked at the spruce and how it hit me that I missed being with it. I could have told them that of course the garden is a place of joy because it is a place of connection.  Is it any wonder that the Hebrew text describes the end of joy as a separation from the garden?

Today is the first day of February. Long January has ended and short February, with its magical light, has begun. Though February is often colder than January here in the Capital District, I know there will come a lovely warmish day when I will be able to get out and do the needed pruning of my shrubs. Since March will then be just a short month away, it won’t be too hard for me to go inside again because I know that soon I will be back out. Besides, there is a great deal of my winter’s work still left to be done. I had best see to it.

 

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Shunning

January 20, 2023
Shunning
When I was ten years old I experienced shunning.

I had just moved from my home in Toronto to a small town in the U.S. midwest. I had a Canadian accent, naturally curly completely unruly red hair, and a healthy collection of stuffed animals. I did not play with dolls. If given one, I ripped it apart to see what made it open and close its eyes or speak when squeezed. I wore boys’ shorts and I liked to play with boys, particularly football, the kind where you tackle and might get hurt and most certainly got dirty. In fact I was a baby dyke, but I didn’t know it then. The girl who was supposed to befriend me, forced to do so by her parents who were friends of my parents, wore dresses, played golf, had perfect hair and a boyfriend. She most certainly knew something was different and wrong about me and she let me, and others, know it.

I had not had this experience before. In my circle of friends in Toronto I was central, leader of the pack of girls, and fully integrated into the world of my brother and my best friends, both boys. Naively, I expected the same would be true in my new home. And so, after finding myself shunned at school and parties, I confronted her on her front porch. I was then still capable of being angry, still not broken into conformity, and so I raged, demanding to know how she could treat me this way, insisting I be noticed and included and treated differently.

Of course, it made no difference. Indeed, it made things worse. Two years of misery followed until, moving to a different neighborhood, I found a different group of girls whom I loved then and still consider friends, though many are gone in one way or another.

Last week I arrived early to a meeting and chose a chair that gave me a view of the outside. Looking at branches helps me center and quiet and concentrate on the matter at hand. Others came in, but no one took the chairs next to me. As time passed and late-comers arrived, people began taking chairs in the back of the room though there were still empty chairs by me. This, of course, made sense. Late-comers did not wish to interrupt the meeting in progress.

I found myself, however, reacting with rage, real honest-to-goodness table-pounding heart- racing rage. I wanted to scream: There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t have a contagious disease. I’m a good person. Why will no-one sit by me?

I had to withdraw from the business at hand to calm down. But underneath the pounding was curiosity: why was I so full of rage at actions that had nothing to do with me? And then I remembered an encounter I had one late fall morning on the front porch of a house on the main street of Franklin, Indiana some seventy odd years ago and it felt as if it what triggered that encounter was happening that minute in this meeting.

I was alternately impressed with the clarity of my answer and appalled at its implications. For how terrifying to think that something that happened so many years ago might be determining my behavior today. How terrifying to think that we all might be ruled so powerfully by our past and not by our present. For in this instance there was nothing in people’s choices of seats that had anything to do with me. I could see that, I could know that, but I could not feel it. And so I had to wonder how much of my life today was being managed by experiences I had when I was ten or perhaps five or even two or as an infant.

I was grateful to recall in such vivid detail a day from my past. I was glad to see my ten-year-old self again. I was glad to be able to tell her that I admired her for speaking up in her own defense even if it didn’t make a difference. I was glad to be able to comfort her and to tell her I was o.k. now.

I was equally grateful to have acquired, somewhere along the way, enough sense to sort out the past from the present in a situation like this and at the right time to be able to invite people to join me at the table. Nevertheless, for the rest of the meeting I simply sat, rocked to the core by the force of that feeling, and remembered.

I remembered that, despite our culture’s toxic promotion of individuality over connection, connection is essential to healthy humanity. Consider that we consider the worst possible punishment to be solitary confinement. Consider that we consider shunning to be a primary form of social control, as witness our approach in the past to women who were pregnant but unmarried (see Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter). Consider that despite our separateness we are creatures whose well-being, indeed whose very existence, is predicated upon belonging. People who are shunned often go mad for it is, in effect, a form of major disconnection..

No wonder I went temporarily mad on that front porch in Franklin. No wonder I remember the experience so clearly. No wonder the fear and the rage came back with such force when triggered by empty chairs on both sides of me.

I am not going to start being late for meetings, but I may pay more attention to where I choose to sit.

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Perennial Wisdom

January 3, 2023Perennial Wisdom?
For several years now, I have been studying how I may compare this garden where I live unto the world. Unlike Shakespeare’s Richard and his prison, I have found it relatively easy, as witness “Site Visit” below.  But looking back over my newsletters of this past year, I realize I have dug into dirt other than the immediacy of plant life in my backyard or the extended metaphor of what it teaches me. Indeed, I have written about a Quaker retreat, my mother’s way of opening Christmas gifts, my trip to Milwaukee to visit my brother and his family, the dispersal of my library of 19th century books, and my first friend, to mention only a few of my non-garden posts.

My writing begins with a cut – a thought, an experience, an image, a sentence that brings blood to the surface of my skin, whether in pain as a wound or in joy as a rush of red. It seems these days I am finding the knife as much out of the garden as in it. And so I am thinking of changing the title of my newsletter from “Out in the Garden” to “Perennial Wisdom,” preserving the “brand” but somewhat changing the focus.

I realize as well that I need to re-design my website since I am no longer primarily in the business of providing help with garden design and installation. A re-design of the website and re-naming of the newsletter would seem logical twin tasks.

I would be very much interested in getting feedback from my wonderful readers as to this possible change of title and direction.  I always appreciate the responses I get to my postings and I am inspired by the connection I have with you.  And so at the beginning of this New Year I look forward to hearing from you and to possibly making some changes.  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy “Site Visit.”  It was written in response to a class I took a few years ago at the Berkshire Botanical Garden. It is a good example of what being out in the garden has taught me.
Site Visit

I am standing in the back yard of one of the sites on Walter Cudhohufsky’s “Traveling Design Clinic.”  Ten of us have enrolled in this class and we have been on the road visiting sites in need of help since 9 o’clock.  Now it is afternoon on this beautiful September day but most of us are not enjoying the weather.  The scene is unimpressive at best, boring and dreary at worst.  A large deck projects out over a gravel patch and looks down a grass slope to scrub brush.  The two sides of the yard are lined with blue spruces which, from my perspective, are about sixteen blue spruces too many.

We shuffle, scrunch, and twist as Walter keeps pressing his point: “We are not leaving this site until you can find the positives.  In your professional life, if you can’t find the positives, don’t take the job.  But please note, there are always plenty of positives.  You just need to keep looking.”  We look again, dig deeper (those blue spruces create a great privacy screen, the scrub brush provides habitat for wildlife) and finally come up with a list that satisfies him.  But I am thinking, Finding the positives that must be there would be a good way to approach the backyard of my life.

At the first site we visited, I got a hint about the direction this class would take.

Walter prepped us this way: “First impressions are crucial and you only get them once.”  When we arrived at the site, we took a few minutes to jot down our initial impressions, but instead of asking us to share these notes, Walter asked us to tell him what we saw on the site.

“Effective design starts with a response to existing conditions,” he said, “so the first thing you have to do is see what is there.”

Hands flew up as everyone rushed to share what they saw, thinking, Wow, this is easy, why was I so nervous.

“I see a large maple that looks to be diseased.” “I see a fence that seems to have no point to it.” “The driveway comes too close to the house.” “There is a problem of proportion between barn and house.”  Then a smart one, anticipating the later lesson about positives, offered, somewhat weakly, “I like the way the path leads to the front door.”

But Walter was shaking his head and not just because of the negatives.

“I want description, not judgment,” he said.  “If you start with judgment – the fence has no point, the tree is diseased, the driveway’s too close, the path is nice – you will rush to design before you even know what you have to work with.  You will want those value-laden adjectives at some point in the process, but not now.”

And then he delivered my favorite line of the day: “Preconceived notions are the enemy of good solutions.”

While the rest of the class struggled to supply him with observations stripped of judgment – “three white pines in a clump,” “clapboard house with wrap around porch,” “side lawn slopes down to stream” – I began to wonder if things might not go better in my life if I made an “inventory of the actual” before coming to judgments and designing solutions.

I came back from my reverie to hear Walter talking about feelings.  He was asking us to think about how the space made us feel.  He directed us back to our first impressions as a source of vital information and told us that after we made our inventory of what is there we needed to make a catalogue of the feelings the site inspired in us.

“Feelings are crucial,” he announced. “They drive the whole process, they keep it vital and local.  If the driveway makes you anxious because it is too close to the house, honor this feeling and see where it takes you. Chances are it makes your clients anxious too.”

By the end of the first site visit my head was churning and there were four more sites to visit.  By the end of the day I was exhausted from trying to absorb the lessons: See what is there. Maximize the positive. Honor your feelings. Use a level 2 solution for a level 2 problem; use a level 5 solution for a level 5 problem. Good design means providing generous landings.

As we leave the last site, it is clear that Walter could go on but he knows we can’t.  I head to my car to drive home when someone shouts: “Preconceived notions are the enemy of good solutions.”  We all do a high five in the air and swear that we will return for the sequel in two weeks. But I am thinking I have learned enough.

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A Christmas Memory

 

 

December 20

A Christmas Memory

One year, it took my family over 12 hours to unwrap the presents that lay under the tree in the sunroom of our house at 500 N. Main Street on Christmas morning. Of course, we paused to baste the turkey and took a break for dinner. We opened the door to our friend Justin who came bearing a new record player and stopped to visit with him. Still, we began at 9 a.m. and did not finish until 11 p.m.

This marathon occurred not because of too many presents. Beth and William, my niece and nephew, were still future possibilities, not present incitements to excess gift giving. Indeed, there were only five of us – my brother and sister-in-law, my mother and father, and myself. All our needs at the time were modest – a tie here, a record there, a gift certificate to Wayside Gardens. So why did it take us so many hours?  It was the way my mother approached the task. It was a way that would not survive the arrival of toddlers.

We started right at the agreed upon time, having eaten our traditional Christmas breakfast of grapefruit, loaded with brown sugar and topped in the center with a bright red maraschino cherry, and cinnamon yeast rolls, a confection I had been making since 8th grade home economics. Seated around the tree, we began with an appropriate admiration of its decoration and comments on the history and provenance of various ornaments. This was followed by an appropriate appreciation of the wrapped outlay underneath.

Despite her protests we made sure that my mother got the first gift. Since we rarely threw out a re-useable tag, she might read “To Mom From Judy” with the “Judy” crossed out and replaced by “Dan.”  Or perhaps it had originally been “To Dad From Judy” and so much revising would have occurred.

Given a gift, my mother would first comment on how beautifully the gift was wrapped – the neatness of the corners, the combination of paper pattern to ribbon color, the care employed to make sure the paper could be used for a future Christmas. Because we re-used the paper just as we re-used the tags, year after year, and some papers were downright historic, a fact that naturally led to the second stage of my mother’s approach. A paper used on gifts in other years might evoke memories of those past gifts and givers.And so, in this way, in true Dickens fashion, each Christmas came larded with memories of Christmas past and made provisions for Christmas future.

My mother began the opening by wondering what could possibly be inside the box. A gentle shake – perhaps glass beads for her flower vase? A tracing of the size — perhaps a book, Shepherd’s Historical Atlas? A hefting of the weight – could it be pruners?   Then she would begin to unwrap, asking always for the silver letter opener I gave to my father the first Christmas after I graduated from college. I was once again sane and had a job and an income that enabled me to be extravagant, so everyone got wildly expensive gifts that year. With the letter opener, my mother would carefully separate the scotch tape from the wrapping, making sure not to rip the paper. Once the gift was opened, surprise and delight followed, along with pleasure at the thoughtfulness shown in its choice.

My mother liked to put her gifts to use immediately, if possible, and so if glass beads were indeed the contents of the present she had just opened we would soon have flowers in a vase on top of the piano across the room from the Christmas tree. If the gift were an article of clothing, we would be treated to a fashion show.

Not all gifts could be put to immediate use, but there was no limit to admiration. Or to the stories that each gift might elicit about its origin – I heard you say you needed pruners; I thought the Atlas might help you with that course you are taking on World History; you really need a new sweater, Mom, and I saw this one and thought, that’s you.

And so it went. And so time passed. Each of us did the best we could to follow her example. Indeed, none of us wished to do it differently that day. Indeed, I could not imagine a different approach. This, I assumed, was the way everybody approached Christmas gifting.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that others often took a gift, tore off the paper, opened it up, said something nice, and put it down. Or, stranger yet, in some families people opened gifts at the same time. And never re-used paper or tags. Worse still, imagine my chagrin to discover that for many with whom I shared our approach, the very thought of taking that kind of time to open gifts struck them as a kind of hell.

I get that. But here’s the thing. Looking back, I think – what else would I have wanted to do that day? How could a day be better spent than by sharing it with my beloved parents and brother and sister-in-law, taking time to be together, talking, telling stories, remembering, caring?  Could a day have ended more perfectly than ours, as we listened, over cocoa topped with marshmallows, to the gift I gave my mother of the latest recording of Joan Sutherland on the new record player which Justin had given us and only had to be plugged in to work?

Consider Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for Living a Life.” They are as follows:

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Substitute “surprise” and “delight” for “astonishment” and you have my mother on Christmas morning.

Looking back, I think –my mother was not just sharing with me a way of approaching Christmas gifts. She was teaching me a way of approaching life.

Sara and I reuse our Christmas wrapping, and we have trained those who join us in the celebration to do likewise. We use the same silver letter opener that I gave my father so many years ago to separate the paper and the tape. I cranked a bit this year as I wrapped my presents because the only tags we had were ones that stick to the paper. Pasting one of these to the lovely papers Sara bought for us this year will make it harder to reuse it next year. So I had recourse to simple slips of white paper to mark the name of the recipient on the gift.

Next year I will get us the kind of tags you can slide under the ribbon. I look forward to seeing “To Judy from Sara” revised to read “To Sara from Judy.”  Not too hard a switch, I’m thinking.

Our tree this year. Looking forward to sharing it with friend Kathryn and daughter Sonya

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Listening

December 7, 2022

Listening

I spent this past weekend at Powell House, a Quaker Retreat Center in nearby Old Chatham. The theme of the gathering was blending faith, daily life, and activism. It was led by J. Brent Bill and based on his book, Hope and Witness in Dangerous Times.

Perhaps we have always lived in dangerous times. We certainly live in them now. Though I think of myself these days as more of a retired activist than an active activist, recent events in our country and elsewhere suggest that the time may not be too far off when I will need to place myself in danger again.

I have never wanted to join Edith Piaf in proclaiming, loudly, Non, je ne regrette rien.  I am tempted to say, Moi, je regrette tout. But that would just be another example of my penchant for hyberbole.  Nevertheless, I have many regrets from past commissions and omissions. Sometimes, out walking with Sara, I will flinch, involuntarily. “What is the matter,” she will cry, and I will answer, “Just another regret.”

I regret most particularly that I did not maintain my Quaker faith and practice during my years as an academic. I understand why, Sunday morning being my only unscheduled time, and I am tender with myself, but I still regret it. I do believe I would have made fewer mistakes, and so had fewer flinches, had I kept to both my faith and my practice.

The Quaker testimonies serve me like the poles I recently drove into the ground along the road serve the snow plows that keep the roads in my neighborhood open in the winter — they show me the way. They remind me that if I want peace, I must work for justice; and that if I want justice, I must work for equality. This is integrity. It is that simple.

At the workshop this weekend, however, as those of us gathered there struggled with how to reach across the divisions that currently define our body politic, we began to articulate an additional testimony, the testimony of deep listening.  Frankly, I would be satisfied with just ordinary, perhaps even shallow listening.

Sara and I spent a few days in New York City this past week celebrating my birthday. Having some time between our afternoon event and our evening train, we decided we would just hang out in the new food hall at the Moynihan section of Penn Station. I envisioned a quiet, restful experience after our busy day, a cup of coffee perhaps and a pastry to accompany it, both of us reading or gently talking.

What planet do I live on? I have rarely heard such noise as arose from the food hall – an endless pounding of male voices over an endless beat of drums, all at the highest possible volume. The message seemed both loud and clear – thou shalt not talk, thou shalt not communicate, thou shalt not connect, thou shalt not lift thine eye from thy cellphone. We opted for beer, more than one.

Sara and I rant  – and yes, I notice the contradiction – about the level of noise we encounter at restaurants whenever we eat out. Waiting in a doctor’s office we are subjected to the endless noise of the TV set. In stores, especially this time of year, music is everywhere, outside and inside. It makes you wonder what is so threatening about silence that it must be constantly drowned out.

How many times have you sat in a group and noticed how quickly someone jumps in to speak after another has ceased, as if they are just waiting for the noise to end so that they can say what is on their mind?  Is it possible that we only listen for the noise to cease, so that we can make some ourselves?

How often do we say, “Tell me more?” How often do we simply sit in companionable silence, certain that another has more to say and will eventually share it? How often do we create the quiet that might allow us to hear what is underneath or behind or embedded in the utterance of another? How often do actually listen each other into speech? Is it possible that if in the beginning was the ear not the word, things might have gone differently in Eden?

Quakers, of course, value silence, and not just for its capacity to settle the mind.  Equally important is the conviction that only through silence can we actually hear what matters. This conviction frames for me the testimony of listening.  We have to quiet ourselves if we want to truly take in what someone else is trying to tell us.  And we have to offer our silence to others, perhaps for some time, because it is unlikely that truth will arrive in the first rush of words.

Of course, there must be limits. Since listening is a form of respect, when the speech of the other becomes deeply disrespectful, it is necessary to disconnect, hopefully with gentleness and grace.  And if listening is a testimony, so is speaking. Listening activism implies learning how to speak one’s own truth in such a way that it might be heard.

At the workshop this weekend, I met a woman who, with a group of other Friends/friends, spent each weekend this summer going to neighborhoods other than her own, knocking on doors, making a simple statement and asking a simple question: “I am concerned about the divisions in our country. Are you concerned as well?”  With rare exceptions, a fruitful conversation ensued.  She called it “deep canvassing” and referred me to a link that provided information about its origin and practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN6O5LTaGyg&t=15s

I think about the effect of such an activism were it to be carried out all over the country. Might it make a difference in how we treat each other in every realm?

Perhaps not. But still I wonder: in a country so divided, why is so much energy devoted to keeping us from connecting?  Why is it impossible to have a conversation in the Moynihan Food Hall?