My letter to Santa

 I gave myself an early Christmas present this week. I had been good about weeding and organizing, and the long warm fall has allowed us to get a good start on all the winter tasks. So I made arrangements to go visit several of my gardening buddies' gardens. The weather synched perfectly with my calendar- rain the two days before, followed by brilliant sun and warm breezes. The itinerary looked very comfortable, and all involved were willing.

I think there aren't enough tours of gardens in the "off" season. This is a time to find the bones of the garden- the strength that underlies all the splash in spring and summer. If there's nothing to look at in your garden now, you need to stop now and figure out how you will fix that. If you're putting your energies into more bang for your spring buck, you're wasting your money. Without the proper frame and foundation on which to build, the effort falls flat. So go look now; look everywhere; and take your gardening friends along for the fun of it all.

Three of the four gardens I visited had water views. Yet all three were completely different in focus, terrain, and mood. First, there was Jerry and Lance's magical "Avalon". This is not a new garden, but not an old one, either. These two "energizer bunnies" have cleared, cut, dragged, dug, heaved, hoed, sowed, excavated, renovated, innovated, planted, replanted, pruned, and prayed over every bit of the ground here in Avalon. As Jerry describes her sleeping hostas and bulbs and woodland wildflowers, we take note of the evergreen ferns bordered by species and special Rohdea japonica, boxwood (all rooted by Lance), hellebores, hollies, azaleas, and other treasures. Throughout the beds, there are hints of themes...King Arthur's burial ground, magic Dragons, whiffs of the Orient, virgin forests, and ancient ruins. So much to see and feel as we walk thru!! But it's not all green and utilitarian. Jerry walks us by each and every one of her magnificent conifer collection, and we note color, shape, progress, form, culture, source. And that brings us to reminisce about some of the garden tours and trips we've shared and enjoyed. What a lovely way to spend a warm December afternoon!

The next day I headed to Milledgeville to make the rounds of Cathy, Lynn and Barbie's gardens. I had ignored all the lame protests from the first two, because I knew that they'd been buying oodles of plants to put somewhere! And I was right.
 Both of these gardens are on a large lake, but the orientation of both garden and gardener is entirely different. "Gardening is a mirror of the heart", said Elizabeth Lawrence.  
 Truly we could see their hearts and styles.

 Cathy has a grand, wide view of the lake and has built her garden to be a companion. Her lake life is casual, soothing, and also playful. So she has woven some of her favorite and most fun conifers into beds of color, shapes, and sizes that will add to the lake atmosphere instead of separating herself from it visually. Many of her conifers are small, while some have a high if narrow space in which to shine. But no plant goes ignored. And a few are just there for fun.

Moving on to Lynn's- just down on the same lake, I found an entirely different atmosphere, but an equally charming garden. Tiny little Lynn has also cleared "the woods" of many trees, weeds, unwanted and overgrown inherited plants with her bare hands and the stubbornness and balance of a mountain goat. She has, instead, lit what's left with amazing conifers, callicarpas, ferns and other companions. From her house, she has a straight on view of the lake, but on each side, she has surrounded herself  by beacons of yellows, blues, textures and hues on both the "up" and "down" hillsides. Absolutely amazing in sun and shadow.

And to round it all out, we return to Barbie's. She's an old hand at gardening, garden touring, working until every muscle aches and every branch bends in the right direction. But it is always so much fun to see what's new since last time.....No water view, but many others are here. Succulents and conifers, grasses, and such a wide array of evergreens- trees, shrubs, and perennials. More color and texture than you see in most spring gardens, and roses to boot! Her conifer collection is growing...in quality and quality, and there's always some new little such and such tucked in here or there.

 Yesterday's find was definitely the Tetrapanax papyriferus in full bloom. What a luxurious, tropical looking hardy plant that is usually a textural accent, but took center stage with it's very late flower clusters.

There are lots of reasons to visit other peoples' gardens. There's always something new to learn, something new to notice, some new idea to steal......But the very best reason is to share stories and experiences and visions with good friends. In troubled times like these, we could all use a little more shared enjoyment and less, well, you know.....

I can give you a long list of quotes that reflect this idea of the value of gardening and gardeners:

"Though an old man, I am but a young gardener." - Thomas Jefferson

  "Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are".-  Alfred Austin 

 Maybe the best is one another from Elizabeth Lawrence:

 "No one can garden alone".  


Santa, please put that one under the tree. 

Travel is So Broadening- Part II

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.  ~
May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968


I don't go anywhere without looking for gardens. Of course I have a list of too many to possibly see in the time I have. Of course I push to see as many as possible. Sometimes the very best experiences are in gardens that aren't even on the lists. But I have never visited a garden without learning something. And even as I learn more and more, I realize how much more there to absorb, in both heart and mind.

I was so fortunate to have the chance to tour with it's owner the very best conifer garden I will ever see . This is a private garden outside of Leeds that is the labor of love for David Ward. You'll see pictures of his garden in Adrian Bloom's book Gardening with Conifers, and in other gardening publications. You can see photos here that will give you some idea of the scope of plant material there is to absorb and to process. But let me tell you, as amazing as this garden is, the best lessons are in the heart of the gardener, not in the plans or plants.

David Ward is an unassuming, even modest, man. His goal in gardening is not to impress, but to explore and enjoy. He reads all he can find about conifers, and imagines ways to procure those selections that strike his fancy. Or, as he describes with a twinkle in his eye:  "I've got to have that one". Part of the adventure is actually getting his hands on the plant itself. Next is to find the perfect spot for his new baby. From then on, it's a matter of lovingly cultivating to settle his new selection in, while carefully watching it's progress, and waiting for the next "gotta have". In a garden that is an acre absolutely packed with specimen conifers and companions, this is a dizzying task that he accomplishes with great relish and humility. Clearly, he has achieved a "sense of proportion" about his garden and about himself. I feel honored to have visited the garden and the man with such balanced perspective.

No two gardens are the same.  No two days are the same in one garden.  ~Hugh Johnson

I also like to visit the same gardens over and over. It is hard for me to pile on one new garden after another without getting overloaded and almost numbed by the experience. One of my favorite gardens is at Scampston Hall Walled Garden in Yorkshire near Malton. http://www.scampston.co.uk/ This is an old walled garden that was restored and redesigned by Piet Oudolf in 2000. This is the only Oudolf garden I have ever seen, but in visiting in 2007 and revisiting this year, I have confirmed the skills of the designer, and also filtered through some of the  intricacies of the concepts as the garden grows and matures.

Waves of flowers, waves of grasses, waves of yew hedges, perennials, fruits and berries spill out onto the formal paths and into my memory. Contrasts of color, shape, texture, formality and mood are reflected in every facet of the garden. Although I certainly relish the opportunity to have visited twice, I selfishly wish I could watch its evolution every day of the year.

Maybe then I could begin to appreciate the genius of the designer, and actually see his imagination grow into the true proportions of the garden. Or maybe it's just an excuse to come back.

Travel is So Broadening...Part I

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is 

to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, 

to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” –

 Bill Bryson

It's good to get away. I mean really away. Away from phones and email; away from laundry and grass cutting; away from television, radio, the mail, the bank, the bills.

It takes a while to really get away. You can fly 3000 miles from home, but it takes the accumulation of seconds and minutes and hours to knock all those attention grabbers out from the front of your brain. 

This September we flew to Manchester, England to visit the Yorkshire Dales. We've been there many times. I can't seem to get enough. Am I just an unadventurous traveler afraid of a foreign language, or is there something that draws me back there over and over?

 I've been thinking about what lures me back to Swaledale 
time after time.....

or maybe I am just a reincarnated ewe with a pretty good biological memory.

It's not enough to just turn all that regular stuff off. The deprivation is almost painful, and certainly distracting in itself. What I need is scenery that wipes all the dusty corners of my brain clean.  The views there are warm, lush, green, inviting, stark, wild, primitive, huge, ancient. This land is bigger than everything I know. It takes hold and pulls all the insignificant clutter out my life, and 

leaves me fresh, raw, and hypersensitive.

 
Here it is all about light, color, shape and substance. Wind, sun, and rain add to the sensuality of the experience. Suddenly, we are quiet, full, almost exploding. So much to take in and nowhere for our shuttered brains to put it. But staying in that landscape, walking, driving, staring out the window slowly opens it all up-like a shot of  inhaler for asthma- constricted lungs.
The longer I can be there, the more I see, the easier I breathe, the more in touch I feel. That touch is, of course, with the natural world around me. 

But it carries over to the touch of my husband's hand on my back, or a first frothy sip of an English cask ale on my upper lip, the lilt and plod of a Dales accent in my ears while eavesdropping on tall tales at the pub, 

and the crisp delicate flesh of a fresh caught haddock and chips on my tongue. 

Even mushy peas can taste good at times like these.  

The aim is always to see and do, 

to rest and relax, to let go.

But it is not a given. It is that opening up that is the "away", 
and makes the rest of the reward of travel possible. 

 

Letting go...Holding on...

 In Blackwater Woods- Mary Oliver

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

I lost my cat this month. She had been a constant companion at the nursery for the past ten years. She was a great hunter, and fiercely territorial. She was a pitiful throw away who turned into a beautiful animal. She was sweet, and tough, and loyal. She found us, and decided to stay. We used to say that she was the best dog we ever had.

I am still a little sad. I still look for her when I go to work. I am trying to let it go.  But as I struggle a little missing my beloved cat, I am also trying to remind myself how rich and full my life is. And as I march quickly toward the mortality of my 60th birthday, I find myself paying more and more attention to counting each and every one of those blessings.

I guess that's pretty much a constant theme here. But it is still hard to remember. It is strange to me how many little bits of interaction with a cat I must have taken for granted in a simple day at work. I now see every one of them as tiny holes in my day. If that could be true with a pet, I am almost afraid to imagine how many opportunities I have missed with those activities and people and places I love. Here are some of the plugs for those holes, inspired by Norah Ephron....:

- Do more reading. I just finished a witty, funny, remarkably down to earth book by Nora Ephron- I Feel Bad About my Neck. Please, if you want to touch base with what really matters in life, read this book. I laughed, I cried, I took her perspective and wrote her imaginary letters about how she wrote the chapter on death.....and how she felt about it now that she was dead.

- Take a vacation. Sometimes we work too hard. Sometimes we haven't enough money. Sometimes we think we'll just wait for a better time, when things settle down. Hogwash. So I am using that 60th birthday as the excuse we need to make it happen. We'll visit our favorite spots in the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District in England, and then we'll visit a new area of England- Devon- that is loaded with coastline, gardens, hiking trails and all new scenery and roundabouts to conquer. Oh, and new beer to sample!

- Spend more time in my own garden- I spend lots of time producing plants for other people's gardens. I love what I do. But, like the feet of the cobbler's children, my garden is somewhat bare. So, in this horribly hot, dry, unpleasant summer, I am having a wonderful time putting plants in the ground, laying out paths, and daring the deer to eat that much.

- Make an effort.  Since we moved out of Atlanta, we have lost that close daily relationship with some really good friends. Some friends are even farther away. We can all weather the distance, and still remain good friends. But sometimes it just takes some effort to make the connection stick from time to time. Can't do it all at once, but I am trying to make the time and organize the occasions. Doesn't matter what we do. It matters that we do something.

- Get rid of the negative. This is not an idea that is original with me, but a sentiment that I embraced as soon as I heard it, and one I am reaffirming now. I am a passionate player, and not necessarily a team player, when the team not competitively one for all. I am also not a fan of the "southern way" of obfuscating reality to make it more palatable. There are negative influences in our lives that we bear instead of changing. Make the change now, and get rid of that negative time and energy drain.

- Say "Thank You" more . Just because.

- Hold hands more with my husband.  Nothing could be more important, or more comforting than holding hands with my best and dearest friend.

- from the Bucket List - "find the joy in your life"

So as I plug those holes, and let go, I am taking a little time to recommit to taking note of my very special world and it's momentary gems. I know my own life depends on it.

Lessons of the Labyrinth

It's the last week of spring, but I am still wondering where winter went. We've been crazy busy on a long list of duties and obligations, but I am hard pressed to tell you what was accomplished without my calendar. I've lived one event reminder to the next, and I have narrowed my scope to just the next thing or two in order to keep from feeling overwhelmed. Finally here I am at the end of the season, and I have returned to Saultopaul, almost desperate to breathe, to walk, to think, to get some perspective back.

Without really thinking about it, I go to the labyrinth to walk. This is what we do. The first steps head me straight toward the goal: the center stones. But the path abruptly turns me to woods. As I walk around the circular paths, first in towards the center, then back out to the perimeter, the "goal" is always in sight. Yet the more progress I make, the farther out the path from the center leads, and the slower my pace.

 "Oh yeah......".

So now progress begins to be breathing, stepping, accounting for each rock along the edge of the path. Step by step, thought by thought, I am meant to process the vast woods before me, and at the same time, each stone and pebble so carefully laid out. Before long, I can feel the tug of the forest and each of the trees; the "wild" natural beauty so exposed by this cultivated, manicured showcase. I reach the center stones, only to turn and continue that luxurious swing of near and far on the path that will eventually let me go.

This is the release I come to find at Saultopaul. I want to think a million thoughts that don't make a story. I want to hold images of opposites in my head without a mirror. I want to read to remember how to put myself in someone else's head and completely forget what's in my own.

To that end, I brought Michael Pollan's book Second Nature with me to finish, since it didn't seem very interesting at a pace of 2 pages per week. This book is absolutely loaded with vision, logic, common sense, and the elegance of verbal mathematics. It's subtitle is A Gardener's Education, but as so defined, it is a thoughtful inquiry into "(a gardener's) proper place in nature";.... "peculiar attitudes towards the land that an American is born with; ....about "troubled borders between nature and culture".... and finally, "a single argument that the idea of a garden- as a place....where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that can be beneficial to both..."

 I haven't wrapped my head around the full implications yet, but that's part of the fun. Here are few turns he makes in his path thru this labyrinth of his gardening experiences:

In the chapter on "Compost and it's Moral Imperatives", he sets out the history of horticulture in America, and marks the turns of that path's dangerous edges into the almost religious fervor of the "natural" as opposed to "the cultivated". That curve is one headed straight for the center "goal" of redeeming the soil as a virtue, but abruptly turns to the idea that nature is a "cure" for culture, and aesthetics and man made design must be inherently "bad".

The chapter on "Green Thumb" mulls over the theoretically gifted gardener, vs the very real one who uses practical experience and pays attention to "what the plants want". This is a contradictory look- steps towards the core motives and away- at the person who tries to bend the will of nature to improve his garden by trying to be more and more a part of the natural process....."Nature creates without an end in view; fitness is but an after thought. The gardener in his own little world, like the artist in his, performs both functions, hatching the trials and then culling the errors . But as much as he seems like a god in his garden, practicing his own brand of natural selection, the green thumb entertains no illusion of omniscience or omnipotence." My artist/ gardener friend Susan has mastered her own "natural selection" in the most detailed and intricate patterns in her moss garden. Witness the exquisite design:

There are perspectives and arguments on the true definition of plant nativity, the vestiges of a belief in spirits of trees, genetic diversity as a boon and a bane, plant snobbery, marketing to plant snobs, the environmental ethic of "wilderness" and a new ethic that we could develop when the old one is not helpful. From my spring of restricted, linear thinking, from a job exploding with passionate experience, from a year bombarded by a world full of polarizing political correctness, it has been exhilarating to follow him thru the maze to the edge and back.

In the end, "form (as a definition for garden) is a kind of rhythm in which expectations are aroused and then somehow paid off or fulfilled.....Once begun the garden path must take us somewhere, and then it had better bring us home again." It's been just a short couple of days here at Saultopaul. I've embraced the blurred vision and the focused, the manicured and the wild. I've been to the center and back. I'm ready to go home again.

Pocket Full of Miracles

 I spent a gracious long weekend walking and talking and breathing the air of the NW Georgia mountains. It had been over a year since I had been to Saultopaul to be blinded by the beauty of those ancients and to return home a different person.

Walking is the beginning of the process.

 "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."  ~John Muir  

It works slowly, easily, step by step.

Close conversation, thoughts and feelings, science and nature woven with words into art......  With each step, I am losing sight of the worries and details of my working world. I watch instead the leaves underfoot, the diagonal shadows of vertical tree trunks, the rich green waterfalls of moss tumbling over silent stones.

After a day, I can't wait to get back out into the woods. Even though the calendar said it was still midwinter, I started thinking about the sleeping blanket of wildflowers at the Shirley Miller Wildflower Trail in a nearby "pocket" of Pigeon Mountain. http://journal.uswildflowers.com/?page_id=901.Would they be early because of the rains and relative warmth of this winter?

Susan joined me in enthusiastic curiosity, so we took a short ride over to The Pocket to see for ourselves. It wasn't the explosion of colors I have seen in the past, but rather, a quiet bubbling up of  the most subtle, sweet, delicate early ephemerals- Dentaria, Sanguinaria, Hepatica, Lindera, and the luscious rich foliage emerging for Erythronium, Trillium, Mertensia, Polystichum, Geranium. It was the moment before the moment. Anticipation, wonder, the eternal, inevitable push towards the light......nestled at the foot of an ancient mountain, bathed by the cool clear solvent in the chemistry of life.

I came home again, changed again.
 And in quietly processing the weekend blessing,

I turned again to Mary Oliver, and found this poem from her latest book- The Swan.
It says it all.

The Poet Dreams of the Mountain


Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all the fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking
the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
under the pines, or above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
that we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.