Two Masters - Perennial Wisdom with Judith Fetterley

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Two Masters
JUDITH FETTERLEY

MAY 9

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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