Category: Uncategorized

March 30, 2021

The Garage

The season has begun. I am out now every day that is warm enough and dry enough, beating my April 1 starting date by some two weeks. Plants are coming up faster than I can get ready for them.

Kevin and I have had our first workday. I am seriously editing the garden this year, taking out shrubs that have gotten too big for their space and creating space for bird and bee friendly natives. Working on one particularly tough customer, Kevin snapped Sara’s 50 year-old long-handled shovel, a tool she particularly adores. Astonishment gave way to remorse, remorse to grief, and grief to worry. We told Sara when she came out to ask us if we wanted coffee. Ever resourceful, Kevin was soon on his phone and eBay, locating a replica – same white ash handle, same length, same heat-forged pointed iron spade. It will arrive this week. Meanwhile, I am looking for a blacksmith who might be able to mend the old one.

Things break in the garden, including hearts. It’s inevitable. Something is destroying my front lawn. I rake for leaves and clumps of grass come up, roots as well as dried blades. The damage is slowly progressing. The blue spruces which form the back border look dreadful, far worse than they did in the fall, so bad I may be forced to take them down. And will the Heptacodium survive the canker that disfigured it last season?

But there is so much joy in encountering my garden once again. The robins are back, the red maple tints the horizon with its buds, and my garage is cleaned up and ready to get to work.

I love my garage.

I did not always know I felt this way. My revelation occurred one January evening, some years ago. I was sitting at a long table in a cold room at the Berkshire Botanical Garden. Around me huddled seven other women in thick down jackets, each of us there for the first night of a twelve-week course called Designers’ Toolkit.

Our instructor was talking about ‘the car.’  We students didn’t care about cars, we cared about plants. When he cracked a joke – “I’m a landscape architect who loves plants, all sixteen species equally” – we laughed, but apprehensively, concerned that perhaps he really did think there were only sixteen different species of plants and would therefore be of no use to us with our hundreds. As he handed out sheet after sheet of statistics on the space different makes and models of cars require to back out of the garage, turn around in the driveway, and enter the street headfirst, our horticulturalists’ distrust of landscape architects seemed confirmed.

“You have to start with the car. People need a car to leave home, but they want to forget it when they are home. You must site the driveway and garage first. Otherwise your design is useless.”  Listening to him, I thought, “Fat chance the first thing I’m going to tell a client of mine is that they must rip up their driveway and move their garage!”   But then a space opened inside my head and I heard myself say, “I love my garage.”

My garage fails to meet the criteria our instructor defined as essential. I cannot back out, turn around and drive head-first into the street. Nor can I hide my car when it is not inside the garage. It sits in the driveway, the first thing one sees upon arriving at my home. Most of my neighbors made a different choice when they built their home. They chose to site their garage so that its windowed side faces the street, not its overhead front doors. This way, the garage looks like part of the house; it hides the fact of the car as well as the car itself.

I could have chosen to site my garage this way as well, but I thought a house should look like a house and a garage should look like a garage. Instructing the builder, I remarked, “You can’t start a landscape with a lie,” being more than a bit pretentious.

When I think of my garage, though, I don’t think “car.” I think “garden.”  Because the doors of my garage face the street, its windows are at the back. Because there are doors in the front and windows in the back, I have light and air, good circulation, and sunlight pouring into my garage any day there is sun. I had to put the worktable at the back of the garage to get it out of the way of the car. So it sits under the windows, making it the perfect place to set out plants in the spring.

I keep my wheelbarrow, my mulch monster, my lawnmower in the garage. Bags of fertilizer, bone meal, potting soil, manure are stored on the floor. On one side there are shelves for Biotone, Root Start Up, Miracle-Gro, wasp spray, ant spray, fungicide, Lysol for disinfecting pruners, and large containers of Deer Off. On the other side are racks with nails for hanging up tools. Underneath the tools, I stack old pots and the garbage cans for collecting garden trash. An old hall tree, discovered in the basement of an apartment I once lived in and warped from a flood, serves as a hanger for my garden clothes. There is a rubber mat for my garden shoes, and a new broom for sweeping out.

When my Honda Accord reached the 200,000 mileage mark, my mechanic delivered the bad news. I had to get a new car. He also delivered the news that I would have to switch to a smaller car if I wanted to get another manual transmission. I did not want to give up my old Honda Accord. Over the years it had become my “truck.”  Would I be able to stack five shrubs in the back seat of a Civic, load the front seat with perennials, and shove a small tree in the trunk?  A friend suggested I keep the old Honda for my business. “After all,” she said, “you have a two-car garage.”  Two cars in my garden shed?   I didn’t think so. I begrudge even one the space.

That one space is now Sara’s. Her car is newer, and besides, as she is quick to point out, she does all the shopping. When I complain, as I do on occasion, that my car is older and needs some protection, Sara points out that my garage can house two cars. But you know what I say to that suggestion.

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

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.

March 2, 2021

Master Class

I do not know how I learned to write. I can remember the thrill of learning cursive, writing over and over again the letters C, F, G and L, my favorites, in a lined third grade notebook. I think it was in third grade that I also wrote my first book, “Diary of a Blue Jay.” In it I tried to imagine what the world might look like from the point of view of the blue jay that lived in our backyard cherry tree and once picked a hole in the head of our cat. I suspect the cat had destroyed the jay’s nest and maybe eaten the eggs or the fledglings, but still I wondered if the punishment fit the crime.  Still more I wondered why the cat did not find a way to hide from the dive-bombing bird.  But that would be another story.

I have taught writing since my first semester in graduate school. My success as a teacher depended in great part on my ability to help others articulate their thoughts in writing. My success as a critic depended in great part on my ability to write. And yet I never took a class in writing and neither in college nor graduate school did I receive comments directed toward improving my writing.

My first writing instructor turned out to be Susan Fernandez, the editor at Indiana University Press who published The Resisting Reader. From Susan, I learned the importance of choosing the right title, and the necessity of condensing. I also learned the value of tone as she helped me convert some rants into effective prose.  A forthcoming issue of the journal Reception is dedicated to the impact of The Resisting Reader. I have dedicated my own remarks on the subject to Susan.

A colleague once commented that The Resisting Reader was better written than it needed to be. I know what she meant. Like others at the time I saw the book as seed material, important in stimulating the work of others but not of lasting value itself. Ironically, I now believe the writing is part of what has saved the book from the oblivion that is the usual fate of much of literary criticism. It was, in fact, well-written.

These days I have a writing group, an outgrowth of a seminar in memoir writing sponsored by the U/Albany Writers Institute, for now I do take classes. And I read – books about how to write a memoir and memoirs, memoirs, memoirs.  Occasionally I find one that is a teacher. Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations is my latest teacher.

Sara led me to the book. She was listening to it on disc in the car, and she offered to share it with me while we travelled to Oscar’s Smokehouse in Warrensburg to get smoked porkchops and a special ham. The book consists of short pieces that, while connected, can be read, or heard, in any sequence. After two “chapters,” I cried, “Stop. I can learn something about writing from Renkl.”  My mind was churning, and I knew it would take the rest of the trip just to absorb what had been stirred up by those two chapters. Sara graciously complied and for the rest of the trip I bored her with thoughts about writing.

Here are just a few of the things I have learned from reading and studying Renkl.

It is o.k. to use long sentences, indeed an entire paragraph can be made of one sentence.
It is o.k. to use sentence fragments, if you are a writer who can show that you have mastered the sentence.
Cut the fat.
It is o.k. to use words that you either make up or that are likely to be unfamiliar to your readers.

Adjectives are wonderful. Don’t strike them. “When we were halfway across the endless Midwest, moving fifty-five miles an hour through towering forest of corn and sunflowers, the car’s anemic air-conditioning went out entirely . . .”  A feast of adjectives, but “anemic” is the touch of genius.

Exposition can be accomplished by juxtaposition. This is the high point of the art of economy. Place one story fragment next to another and let the reader do the work of connecting. “The English daisies, which normally bloom in spring, come back for a second more subdued round of greetings. My mother carried daisies in her bridal bouquet .  . .”

If you know what you are doing, you can use the strategies of the sentimental without being sentimental. You have to be really good to start a sentence with “And, oh,” but she can bring it off. “And, oh, the stars were like the stars in a fairy tale, a profligate pouring of stars . . . .”

Good writing depends on specificity. “The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.”

Embed the epiphany. End with something more manageable for reader. In “Prairie Lights,” she does not end with “I understood that I understood nothing at all.” She ends with the little boy afraid to get out of the car because the sky is so big and he is so little.

“Terminal illness was perched on the house like a vulture. We walked beneath its hunched presence as though it weren’t there . . .”  Be careful with similes, as they are an open invitation to the cliche. This one is saved by “hunched,” another triumph of the adjective.

Avail yourself of everything that has worked in the past. Go ahead and use the forms of rhetoric identified by the Greeks.  For example, paralepsis, “She will not think of the unworried man, the rebuke of his tranquil sleeping . .

The short form is her metier, as it is mine, but it can get tedious. It needs to be larded with a few longer pieces.

Cut the fat.

Reading Late Migrations, I took a Master Class in writing.  Much of what Renkl has to teach me I can incorporate into my own writing.  I will cherish the adjective and allow myself the long sentence and watch where I place the epiphany and how I end a piece. Still, I am not going to cut all the fat. I like some fat.

Finally, though, I am left with a question for which I have no answer and which is the key to her achievement. I did not have to stop hearing Sara’s disc simply because Renkl made my mind spin with ideas about writing. I had to stop because I could not take so much feeling in such rapid sequence. Reading, I could take breaks. For it is finally the depth and authenticity of her emotions that make Renkl’s Late Migrations, in the words of Ann Patchett, have “the makings of an American classic.”

But here’s my question: does Margaret Renkl feel things more deeply than I do or is it just (as if this ability were just a “just”) that she can convey these emotions more effectively?  Does the strength and brilliance of her writing derive from her feeling or from her ability to share these feelings in words? Perhaps the success of The Resisting Reader came also from the fact that I wrote it from rage.  Renkl subtitles her book “a natural history of love and loss,” but we mostly know of the love through the loss. Perhaps it is harder to write well when one is happy.

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

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.

February 16,2021

My Mother’s Voice

This fall Sara and I agreed to face the question of whether or not we can continue to age in place if the place is 29 Columbine Drive, a large house with large gardens. Come spring, we’ll consult a real estate agent and begin to think about options, but we pledged to begin a bit of tossing this winter. If we do move, the less stuff the better.

I have thinned out my file cabinets over the years, but my office closet contains several repositories that are loaded with “treasures”:

my tin animal collection from my years in Canada, neatly preserved in tissue paper and claiming its own box, in which resides as well the wooden fort my brother and I made for the soldiers to fight in;

my gold medals for winning the Indiana state-wide Spanish proficiency contest, twice, which rattle around in my former vanity case, a piece of a luggage set given to me at my high school graduation;

my mother’s favorite ink pen, the one she used to write all her correspondence, the one she didn’t buy but found abandoned in a bank, beige bottomed and silver topped, which sits in its own box on top of a substantial cardboard carton labelled “Earl’s Pear Tomatoes.”

Faithful to my pledge, one day in January I reached into this carton and pulled out a handful of paper. In truth, I did not know what I was going to find. I found my mother’s letters, written in her perfect and lovely hand. I have no memory of having saved her letters.

The plan was this: I would read a letter, enjoy it, and then toss. This would accomplish the stated goal of reducing the “stuff” Sara and I will have to deal with if we move.

The first group of letters I retrieved were written during my two years in Boston, after I graduated from college, when I took a job with the Harvard Business School and then with the American Friends Service Committee. There I could trace my own evolution from a terrified undergraduate to a fairly mature decision-maker, ready to embark on a career.

The second pile, some in envelopes, some loose, were written twenty years later, at another turbulent time in my personal and professional life.

I began bravely, prepared to read a letter and then toss it. I couldn’t. Many were full of important facts about my life, facts that help me to understand now my own behavior then, but it was not information that kept me from tossing. It was hearing my mother’s voice. She could have been sitting on the couch across from my rocker, eating her favorite scone – pecan and maple sugar. And sharing her thoughts.

In a different generation, my mother would have been a professor and a scholar. She attended the University of Chicago, unusual for a woman of her generation, and received a diploma printed on parchment paper and written in Latin, her named rendered Mariam Elisabetham Wilsdon. She chose instead to get married and raise a family, her own birth family having been something of a disaster in her eyes. She would have chosen religion and philosophy, and she would have been a stellar teacher.

The letters bathe me in her love. They let me believe I was a good-enough daughter. This helps to dispel those moments, more frequent with age, when the avenging furies seize me by the throat and scream, “How could you not have . . . “

The evidence of my mother’s love for me is a great comfort. But this is not what stays my hand. It is my mother’s voice, thinking, that I cannot bear to toss.

She took classes and shared her thoughts on what she was reading for “school.” She reflected on everyday events, on the matters of her own life and those of other lives. She read everything I wrote and gave me good criticism. She read books that I just needed a second opinion on before I broached my thoughts to colleagues, she read books that I just wanted to talk about with someone off record.

My mother was tough-minded. She had to make difficult decisions as my father’s dementia slowly began and slowly grew, first to move to Milwaukee to be close to my brother and his family, then to move into a senior residence facility. My father owed the relative comfort of his later life to her keen management of resources and choices.

My mother could be unreasonable, though. I can still hear her striking her cane on the floor for emphasis as she tells me about my father’s refusal to leave their apartment.
“He has the best pair of legs in Laurel Oaks,” she cries, “but will he use them? No!”
“But Mom,” I counter, “he’s scared to death he won’t know how to get back to the apartment if he leaves it. His short-term memory is gone.”
“Nonsense,” says my mother, “he is just being lazy.”

I trace my love of gardening to my mother. In Canada she planted red salvia and orange marigolds along the path to our front door to soften the northern exposure. In Indiana, when she realized – from the change of light, a drop in the temperature, a peculiar greenish-yellow cast to the sky – that a storm was about to descend, she would tear off her apron and race out to tie up the peonies and stake the delphiniums. From my mother I learned that gardening can be difficult, frustrating, full of grief and things you can’t control, but also a way of being in the world so deeply rooted that you would not, indeed could not, give it up. Her letters are filled with stories from the garden.

In my office, on top of a bookcase I can see as I write, I have two photos of my mother that I treasure. One is taken from the time before she was married and a mother, when she was Mary and a camp counselor. She is wearing a dowdy swimming suit and her hair is wild, but she is laughing. I feel sure we would have been friends if I had been at that camp.

The second was taken in the last year of her life, at 93. She is standing outside on the porch of her apartment in Laurel Oaks. She is turned toward the camera and smiling. With one hand she draws down out of its hanging basket a long stem of plant; in the other she holds a pair of tiny clippers that I gave her several years ago so that she could better tend her “garden.” I realize now that her smile is triumphant; she is saying to the world, “Look, I am still gardening.”

I am conversing now, pretty much every day, with my mother. From the size of the carton in my office, it looks like this conversation will continue for some time.

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

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.

February 2, 2021

February Light

This year I am not sorry to see the end of January. Typically, January is one of my favorite months. It is a month of new beginnings, of getting a fresh start. It is a long month, offering plenty of time for those long-deferred projects – re-reading my mother’s letters, clearing out file-cabinets, developing a talk on “winter interest.”

This year, however, its end brings me one month closer to being able to visit with friends outside or in our garage clubhouse. It brings me one month closer to the vaccine and the possibility of visiting inside, with care, with also-vaccinated friends. It brings me one month closer to the magic of spring and the first white snowdrops, the first blue Chionodoxa. And though weather records say otherwise, February feel warmer to me. It must be because of the light.

In February the light changes. February light is clear, clean, sparkling, magical. It is the kind of light artists seek when they plant their easels in front of a north facing window. The Celtic festival of Imbolc, celebrating the lengthening light and the promise of returning spring, falls on February 1 for a reason- it marks the midpoint between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. Christos and Jeanne-Claude, the architects of “The Gates,” planned their installation in New York City’s Central Park in February for a reason and that reason was in part the quality of light.

With the arrival of February light, the winter garden’s basic brown, so dominant and drab, disperses into subtlety and difference. In February I can see the difference between the intense dark brown of the dried flower heads on the Sedum ‘Autumn Joy,’ and the light brown straw-color of the Miscanthus grasses, still standing and waving, that surround the Sedums. The brown of the Rhamnus tall-hedge in the back by the arbor shows almost black, the brown of the doublefile Viburnum almost gray, the brown of the Siberian cypress almost purple.

The bigroot geraniums sport a reddish brown and the iron hedgehog forms a rusty brown mound in the patio garden. The brown of the dried seed heads of the Hydrangea paniculata suddenly stand out as true brown while the bark of the paperbark maple (Acer griseum) curls off a chocolate-colored trunk to reveal inner bark the color of cinnamon.  When the February light shines through the curls of cinnamon, I stand at the living room window, transfixed, and give thanks for February light.

Sara and I once celebrated Valentine’s Day and longer light by making a trip to Cape Cod, renting an apartment in Provincetown with a view of the water, and enjoying the cafes and restaurants that remain open in winter. Sitting one February afternoon in the Purple Feather, enjoying a hot bowl of split pea soup and chatting with our waiter, we noticed a photograph on the wall of a red fox lying down and resting in a garden. face and front paws forward, nose and paws tipped with black, tail fluffed out to one side. We inquired of the waiter, a Southerner like Sara and enchanted with her Alabama accent, if the photos were for sale. He said they were not, but he joined us for another drawling chat. Later that afternoon we came back for a coffee and a pastry and were waited on by the owner. “Is that photo of the fox for sale,” I asked, figuring I had nothing to lose by trying again. “Why, certainly,” she responded. “Let me call the artist and get you a price.”  She did and we bought.

I trace my love of red foxes to my mother’s reading aloud to my brother and me from Red Ben, the Fox of Oak Ridge, written by Joseph Wharton Lippincott and first published in 1919. It is my earliest memory of my mother and reading, the first book I can remember knowing. It became a reference point for my mother and brother and me as we bonded over the adventures of this wily fox and created our own version of “what would Red Ben do.”

Though I still have many books from my childhood reading adventures, I do not have this one. A quick trip to Google, however, tells me that “this work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it,” and so has been recently reprinted. I can buy a paperback copy of the 2016 reprint for as little as $14.95. Or I can buy a copy of the original on ebay for a mere $129.99. I could get it for my brother for his birthday this year, but I think I will pass.

Sometimes Sara and I are graced by the presence of a fox in our backyard. Most often it is a vixen, whom I delight in calling “Fantastic Ms. Fox.” She comes in the summer seeking food for her kits, I suspect. But once, on a February day, landscape snowy and frozen, we suddenly sensed motion outside. We went to the window. Could it be?  Yes,yes,look at that tail, look at that color, look at that trot. It was a fox, jumping up and down in the snow, then trotting around in circles, then jumping up and down again, a miracle of motion and color. Was he hunting or just having fun?

Every so often my brother sends me a wooden fox, painted a gaudy red with black markings, and possessed of white paws that move when the wind hits them. The four paws whip around in the wind, whirring, whirring, making the fox look like it is running. Dan buys this kitschy lawn ornament that I adore from a store in Door County, Wisconsin, where he used to have a home. It only lasts two years in our harsh climate and so must be regularly replaced. I haven’t had one in a while. Perhaps I should ask for  a replacement. Perhaps I should get Dan that original copy of Red Ben.

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.

“Out of True”

Sara gave me several books for Christmas.  Among them was a collection of posts from the blog that Ursula Le Guin began in 2010, at the age of 81, and continued until 2017.  The collection is titled No Time to Spare. It appeared in 2017, just a year before LeGuin’s death.

My father, as he aged, was fond of repeating, “Old age is not for sissies.”  I got his point, as he struggled with losing his teeth and his short term memory, though I had to remind him each time of the sexism embedded in this, as in so many other, commonplace sentiments. In her post from November 2010, “The Sissy Strikes Back” LeGuin writes the perfect retort to this jock-infused announcement: “Old age is for anybody who gets there.”

In her post LeGuin snarls at the punitive pap dished out to the elderly to make them think that the troubles of aging are their fault and if they only walked more, lifted barbells, engaged in positive thinking, lost weight, ate healthier food –the list is endless but it all boils down to not being a sissy – they would be, feel, and think they were younger.  “If I am ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I am headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub,” says LeGuin.

In her introduction to No Time to Spare Joy Fowler calls Le Guin “one of the most noticing people I’ve ever met, always paying attention to the birdsong in the background, the leaf on the tree.”  Here’s what LeGuin noticed that got my attention: “Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?”

Quakers do not have a creed but we do have testimonies, values we try to live by and to which we try to make our lives bear witness. In Being a Quaker, Geoffrey Durham writes that the testimonies “cover large numbers of interconnected actions and detailed concerns. . . . So the testimony to peace, for example, speaks about the minutiae of our everyday behaviour just as much as it touches the war-like ambitions of national governments.”   Of course it does, because our everyday behavior is what produces the war-like ambitions of nations. The big picture is always made up of hundreds of little pictures. If you leave out the details, you are likely to lie.

The testimony of integrity has gotten my attention since I first encountered it at the Quaker college I attended. For me, it is the basis for all the others. Nothing is more dishonest than oppression for in whatever form it appears oppression is made operational entirely by lies. Oppression creates inequality, and lack of equality makes peace and community and simplicity impossible.

LeGuin’s words, however, bring me back to integrity as a principle of writing as well as living. I have copied her words –“it’s so hard to be honest when you generalize” – onto one of the 3 x5  lined index cards I keep on my desk and refer to as I work. It reminds me why I find it so important to be as specific and detailed as possible when writing about the garden and about my life as a gardener.

And it reminds me to avoid generalities. Which is hard. I love generalities, but in my own defense I like to think I love them as an invitation to particulars. If I write, for instance, that gardening is good for you, I can produce a long list of particulars that support this claim. I can start with the the research on the soil microbe that stimulates the production of serotonin in the brain and so makes you happy when you dig in the dirt. I can point you to The Well-Gardened Mind, a recent 300 page book by a British psychotherapist, that is filled with additional particulars – statistics, case studies, controlled trials– to support this claim. I can show you photographs of hospitals with healing gardens and invoke data on patient recovery in the presence of plants.

But, still,I wonder, is my writing is sufficiently grounded in details. I am good at the particular when it comes to describing plants. Indeed, some readers have gone so far as to say, “Enough already.” But perhaps not so good elsewhere in my writing.  And so I find that  LeGuin’s observation is pushing me in a different direction. I have come to wonder if only story– that wonderful seedbed of particulars — is truly honest, ironically perhaps, counterintuitively perhaps, because story allows for multiple meanings, multiple interpretations as we revel in the details.

As a garden designer and coach, I took pleasure in convincing clients that, while there are better and worse gardening practices, there are not better and worse gardens. A garden can be a geranium in a pot or a 10 acre native plant habitat. It can be a formal knot garden composed of clipped boxwoods, or a messy border composed of Echinacea and Baptisia and catmint. It can be woodland or meadow, swamp or cactus, Astilbe and Hosta or sunflower and beebalm. Judgment takes a rest when considering what makes a garden. After 40 years in academia, I was glad to take a rest from judgment. I was glad to enter a world of multiple goods.

As I wrestle with my writing, I am drawn more and more to the openness of story and to the conviction that I can be most honest in telling stories. This may prove just a phase, because of course I have big generalities to articulate my purpose in writing about the garden. But even the intent to tell stories may guide me to those details that form the bedrock of integrity.

Struggling to find words to convey how a testimony differs from a creed, Geoffrey Durham writes further, “Each is a pinch on the individual conscience, a response to what they consider, as a woodworker might say, to be ‘out of true.’”

As a new year begins, I have asked myself to consider the question, “What in my life is ‘out of true’?”  Meanwhile, I am having fun telling stories.

The “honesty” plant (Lunaria annua), so-called because of the transparency of its seed pods.  

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

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.

Solstice

Yesterday I celebrated the winter Solstice. The winter Solstice is my high holy day. I mark it by rising well before there is any light and walking until official sunrise has occurred. Of course, I could not see any sun rising yesterday, but just being outside, walking, waiting, knowing that light would arrive was magical.

I celebrate the return of light because it promises March and the return of gardening season. It promises that once again I will be able to be outside all day, every day, nose in dirt, hands on plants, wind in hair, sun on face.

Last week an early storm dropped over 20” of snow on our roads and pathways and plants. Drifts piled up in front of our doors to window height, making it impossible for us to open them and get out. We were house-bound until our snow blowing service could get to us. There has not been such a snow since I have lived in this house. It triggered panic. My mother often told me that one of my first words was “out,” and that my very first sentence was, “I go out.”

I could not get out Thursday morning for my usual walk. No snowblower appeared in afternoon or evening. Looking out the porch door, I searched for rabbit tracks. “Sara,” I cried, “what if the rabbit is trapped under the deck and can’t get out?  How will we get out to let her out?”  No snowblower came Thursday during the night, though I rose frequently to check.

By Friday morning I was a mess of melt down. Rising in the still-dark, I switched on the lights that illuminate our back deck and saw rabbit tracks across the porch. “She’s out,” I shouted to Sara who was still upstairs, “but what if she can’t find any food?”  My voice cracking into the range of hysteria, I insisted, “We’ve got to put out some food for her. I’m opening Tanner’s kibble.”

Sara did a quick check on the internet and came downstairs with the news that one should never give a rabbit cat kibble. Cats are carnivores, rabbits are herbivores. Why didn’t I think of that? I could have hurt her in my effort to help her. Redirecting my panic, I grabbed a shovel, opened the garage door, and began digging a tunnel from driveway to road.

When I came in some hours later, Sara pointed out a patch in the garden we could see from the kitchen window where the snow had been pawed away and plant material exposed. The rabbit had found some food, and all worries about rabbit damage to plants got lost in my relief that she was not starving. I was out and she was out and my panic receded.

On the Solstice, the sun did come up, the light did arrive, my belief was confirmed, my faith rewarded. I know that each day from now forward will bring me a little more light. The darkness that scared me on December 20 became my friend on December 21. On the Solstice I could celebrate darkness too, wrapping it around me like a blanket, as I watched the sunset.

Sara has just begun to brush Tanner’s teeth. We are hoping to avoid a future expensive and potentially dangerous procedure. Sharing this development with our beloved Dr. G., who gives Tanner acupuncture treatments, I learned about “kitty burrito.” Wrap your cat in an old towel, be sure to get the tail and all four feet contained, leave only the head exposed, and the cat becomes calm. No more scratches or bites at teeth cleaning time.

On Solstice eve, I felt like a version of “kitty burrito,” wrapped in darkness, grateful for the chance to slow down, become calm, take stock, and rest.

After our early morning Solstice walk, Sara and I took coffee to the living room, lighted the fire and the Christmas tree, and shared our Solstice wishes. Recently, a friend sent me a quote from Abraham Lincoln that she thought was very Quakerly. It has stayed with me and become my Solstice thought for this coming year: “I am not bound to succeed,” said Lincoln, “but I am bound to live up to what light I have.” I think if I could live up to the light I have it would be a major success.

Quakers say that if one lives up to the light one has, one will be given more. Perhaps if I did succeed, I might get more light. Perhaps I might make some progress if I thought of modelling my life on the return of light.

The solstice is a gift I receive from the universe. It gives me light, it gives me outside, it gives me the promise of another season in my garden, it relieves my panic. In turn, I like to give gifts on the solstice. “More than anything I must have flowers, always, always.” Monet, who believed his garden to be his greatest painting, needed flowers. Would you accept the flowers in the photos below as a Solstice gift and perhaps consider sharing just one of them with someone else?  They are in order: Columbine, poppy, tree peony, hibiscus.

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

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.

November

This November has been gray, gray, gray. But gray days tend to be warmer days this time of year and so I have been able to be outside, tending to the final chores of the season, getting the garden ready for winter, getting the last bit of joy from being out in the garden.Gray days area also wet days, and that is a gift as well because, unlike children, plants want to go to bed wet.

The pleasures of my November garden are small but the delight they give me is large. How can the Geum, one of the earlier of spring bloomers, still be at it this late in the year, and yet I find orange blooms, and more than one. On the ‘Summer Snowflake’ Viburnum a few white blossoms linger, standing out against the brown of dying leaves and bare branches. While raking the leaves away from a favorite Chamaecyparis, I discover a strawberry plant with a single white flower. No chance of that flower becoming a berry, and yet there it is. Dare I say “nevertheless she persisted”?

The leaves of the Heptacodium have mostly fallen. They create a pattern of large golden ovals that carpets the garden beneath the tree. I see this as I take down the last of the Brunnera, still a crisp green and white despite the early frosts. I also see this from my kitchen window, where the pattern emerges even more clearly. With the Heptacodium unleaved, I can now see the little red apples hanging on my distant crab tree, ready to feed the birds for another winter. Closer up, the leaves of the little cherry standard have, astonishingly, turned to a golden orange. Who buys a cherry tree for fall foliage, but there it is.

The small tasks of the November garden delight me as well. There are bulbs to plant, Chionodoxa and snowdrops this year, I first encountered Chionodoxa one wet March day when Sara and I visited Kew Gardens in England. I fell for the haze of blue they create in early spring and coveted that pleasure for my own garden. I can plant daffodils – the deer won’t eat them — but not tulips because the deer will eat them if they should come up which is unlikely given the squirrel preference for these bulbs. I appreciate the spring ephemerals, however, for their early rising and their willingness to clean up after themselves and every year I add more.

There are leaves to rake, but not that many after October’s exertions. A late mow mulches most of the ones that have fallen on the lawn. Where the gardens are concerned, I waver. Leave the leaves where they have fallen to add cover for the plants from the cold, protect the ground bees and other insects as they hibernate, and add nourishment to the soil as they decompose?  Or rake them out to get a jump on spring chores and to keep the voles from having a place to hide and chew?

In November I must finally take down the annuals and perennials left up to the last possible moment for their beauty and variety. The annual blue Salvia, tiny seedlings in May, now require a spade to dislodge them despite their frost-bedraggled state. The last of the Rudbeckia nitida, still sporting the occasional yellow bloom, comes down and so does Joe Pyeweed. The blackberry lily with its straw-colored leaves and sharply black berries could be cut down or could be left. I waver and land on the side of leaving up.

I take my final walk through the garden just before Thanksgiving, making sure that all the water sprouts have been pruned off the shrubs and trees, and all the big leaves have been raked off the grass. I give all the evergreen shrubs a final fluff to remove the leaves that have fallen on them from neighboring trees. It is getting cold, it is getting dark, early frosts have taken their toll. It is time to say goodbye and go inside.

November can bring sadness, of course, for the light is going and the cold is starting and I have just said goodbye to another season of gardening. Sometimes, even now, on a hike in the country, say, I catch a whiff of burning leaves, and I am struck by waves of longing. I want to be a child again, walking home from school or play in twilight, smelling the leaves my Dad has piled high against the curb and set on fire. I want to see the lights in our Main Street home, turned on early against the earlier darkness of the season, and to find, once again, my mother at the stove, cooking, and my father about to come in and start reading.

Tristis est anima mea, usque ad mortem. “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.”  These words, the opening line of a 16^th century motet by Orlando Lassus, assigned in my History of Music class, imprinted themselves on my heart that first November after I left home for college. I was desperately lonely and depressed. I knew nothing then of Seasonal Affective Disorder, only that, bereft of friends and family, the ever earlier darkness made me weep, and I was as sad, I believed, as Jesus had been during his last night on earth in the garden of Gethsemane. (At Swarthmore, I should note, our analogies were never modest.)

As a gardener, I now wonder if Jesus, bereft of human companionship as one after another his disciples fell asleep, found comfort for his sorrow from the plants in the garden of Gethsemane. I look back through the New Testament to see if there is any hint to this effect and find that only in the Gospel of John is Gethsemane specifically called a garden. Was John, I wonder, a plantsman who knew about the comfort plants can provide to one whose soul is sad?  It was the elms that gave me hope in my own dark days at college.

Sara laughs as every November Sunday when daylight savings ends I ritually turn on all the lights in the house at 4:30. Then we share a good meal and a glass of wine and I tell her that I bet Persephone misses her mother in the winter just as I miss my garden. I tell her that sometimes I think of the garden as my mother because it comforts me and feeds me, because I can be myself when I am out in my garden, and because I am never alone when I garden. Sara takes advantage of a pause in my confession to suggest that perhaps comparing myself to Persephone is a bit of a stretch, even if I too have a seasonal cycle, even if I did graduate from Swarthmore.

Still, she understands my November blues. In a different winter she might propose that we take a trip to Alabama to visit her sister-in-law who lives on a mountain in the northwest corner of the state. It is lighter and warmer there and besides we both love Louise. This year we just get out the L.L. Bean catalogue and start looking for ski pants. If we want company this November and winter, the visits will have to be in the garage or out on the deck.

Let’s hope those ski pants work.

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

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.