How is it with the reed? All the winds come and blow against it, and it sways to and fro with them. When the winds have been lulled, the reed resumes its normal position. Wherefore the reed has been deemed worthy to provide a pen for the writing of a scroll. The cedar, however, does not remain in its place. As soon as the south wind blows, it uproots it and overturns it; and what is the end of the cedar? The cutters come and chisel and carve it, they use it for covering the houses and the remainder they throw into the fire. Hence it was said: “Let a person be as soft as a reed and not as hard as a cedar.”
—AVOT DE-RABBI NATHAN, CHAP. 41, A MINOR TRACTATE OF THE TALMUD
THE WEATHER CAN’T DECIDE what it wants to do any more than I can at the moment. We fuss and pace and ponder the possibilities, or pretend to when perhaps we are simply both procrastinating, with spurts of this and that but no sustained anything of consequence. Positive spin: In my ineffectiveness and indecision, I am one with nature. I am—we are—stalled. Only certain among the birds are decisive, and starting to move along, to catch a current, capitalize, and take it to the next step.
On these neither-summer-nor-fall days when bouts of swirling energy intersect just so with the declining angle of the sun, I watch the typically shapeless, transparent air take shape—as if it were suddenly liquid, and not gaseous at all. Aeroplankton, a bubbling, luminescent soup of tiny living things, ride the lowest slice of the atmosphere, showing up, and off, against its dramatically backlit currents. Like its better-known undersea counterpart called plankton, it’s a congregation of creatures, not some exclusive community of sameness. Small insects and spiders and seeds consort with spores and (although I cannot see them) bacteria and pollen, too—or definitely ragweed’s, at least, if not the wholesale pollen assault of the earlier end of this wet, wet growing season. Back then on the most prolific days, the air showed itself in thick billows of yellow instead from nearby sugar maples, oaks, birches, beeches, pines, and black walnuts.
The element of air is having its way with all these little life-forms, who surrender any pretense of volition or self-propulsion and just go with the literal flow. Bigger creatures rock and roll in the 3-D, HD, DNA-loaded plasma screen in front of me, too, enjoying the ride but strong enough at these relatively tame wind speeds to be able to determine their own courses still, to dive-bomb and argue over the deed to the best flower or watering hole—or maybe they’re just showing off, who knows? Dragonflies and damselflies and a band of ruby-throated hummingbirds surrender to the rhythm suddenly, too, and all manner of bees and wasps—everyone appears to be wanting to eke out another meal or two as if they know summer’s picnic is in a precarious state, about to pack itself up into the hamper of fall and disappear.
Except when seasonal peaches or blueberries became a bubbly dessert, the word “crisp” hasn’t been in the local vocabulary for what seems like forever now, but if the wind manages to kick up and sustain itself, perhaps we will feel that, and not exhaustingly heavy and limp, again some day.
Like young surfers riding the waves, bobbing around at once competitive and playful, the hummingbirds come in a few at a time, as if each swell of air is washing them ashore here. I know it’s all about them being hungry travelers, though, and that their numbers will increase for a spell now as early migrants from farther north stop by to fatten up for the next leg of the journey, before continuing onward. None of the newcomers, presumably from just slightly up the airy pike and that much farther from the species’ wintering grounds, will stay long, but I enjoy my fleeting visit with them, as I do each bird who flashes into view on any day of any season (how to make a bird-friendly garden begins on here). Each fair afternoon, time is set aside to go stand in the self-sown stand of oversized Nicotiana to the west of the house and let the birds swoop around me at will in the process of sipping madly—zzzzzt, zzzzzzzt, zzzzzzzzzt—each one- or two-tenths of an ounce of hyperkinetic motor power barely missing my ears.
On the best days this time of year, there are six or even nine of them going at it right by the patio, more than at any other moment. None has a red throat, though they are all Archilochus colubris, the ruby-throateds. The showy adult males left for Central America or thereabouts in August—the advance guard, as they will be again on the trip back across the Gulf and up the nation come spring, arriving here as a big, inherited bleeding heart someone left all those years ago in the front-yard soil for me—for us—does its thing.
Is the males’ ahead-of-the-pack timing some kind of evolutionary or divine ornithological FIFO algorithm: First In, First Out, as if programmed that way, but by a higher power than a computer-science graduate? I suppose so. That means the ones who are here are all—or at least they look like—females, though some are actually juvenile males whose ruby-ness hasn’t blossomed yet, female impersonators. Whatever their chromosomal arrangement, I simply think of them all as “the girls” each encroaching autumn—the little women, whose men have all gone off to war. So much energy, these little girls.
The winding down has begun, but rather than being a slower time yet, the approach of fall is a quickening of the pulse, a hurry, hurry stage. Beat the Clock—whether to the tropics, or just to get your tender plants into the cellar before it’s too late. Hurry.
“When do you think the lawn will dry so I can mow again?” I say to a friend who stops by, looking out together at what looks something like a wet hayfield in certain spots despite the sun and breeze right now and my dogged attempts to mow some section or other any time conditions allowed it the last weeks and months. Mostly I just knocked it down and pushed it around a lot, the worst thing I could do from a lawn-health perspective, but the way we often behave when we can do nothing but simply must do something; irrational, insistent, domineering. “Maybe next spring,” she replies, not evidencing even a hint of a smile. I suspect she may be not just serious but also correct. Even with the teases and wisps of wind, the wettest of summers is not going to be sopped up easily, or anytime soon. It’s hard to steer around heaven’s schedule—and especially to steer a mower around it.
Some plants have just said screw this, I can’t go at it any longer, and begun to drop their leaves. I wish the lawn would do just that: drop every last blade down to a close self-crop, military-style. Self-mowing turfgrass? I could make millions on it. A few leaves from someone—a birch, I think, but they are spinning and floating too far above my head to be sure—catch a current and join the air-force aerobatics; the flying scenery is warming up for another show.
THOUGH I HAVE NO EASTERN sycamore trees in my yard, I know I will soon be raking up the distinctive-looking Platanus occidentalis leaves, as I do each fall, along with the maples and oaks and magnolias and dogwoods I do grow. Of course the not-so-mysterious reason why is the power of the wind, which helped dry and then carry the giant, multilobed brown leaves from the woods and delivered them at my doorstep down the road.
Wind, which most simply described is the motion of air molecules—the air in motion horizontally—brings us more than just extra leaves to contend with. It is a powerful pollinator, through a process called anemophily. Why is it that all the good words—this one literally translates as “love of wind,” from the Greek anemos for “wind” and philos for “love”—are held in secret in the scientific realms, such as museums’ “study collection” areas that nobody but the occasional academic sees? The United States Forest Service says that about 12 percent of the world’s flowering plants are pollinated by wind, along with most conifers and many other trees (some estimates put the total of all types of plants that are wind-pollinated near 20 percent).
Grasses (including corn) and cereal crops are the most common wind-pollinated types among the flowering plants, and since they don’t need to attract animal pollinators, those flowers have no need to come in flashy colors or to smell good or to provide nectar or even to have petals for anyone to land on. Imagine beets and chard and spinach—also wind-pollinated—when they come into flower. Not much to look at, are they? Think about it. This is just another example of the ancient, secret deals brokered between plants and animals that draw me to gardening in a deeper way than just the mere aesthetic. Perfect fits; no energy or pretense wasted on frilly lingerie or even party dresses.
The wind can move not just pollen but also seeds around to some extent, and more significantly, it moves birds. Its force (or lack of it) at a given time helps them chart courses and attain their destinations (or not), impacting not just everyday flight but also their migratory efficiency. The birds, of course, in turn move seeds, replanting elsewhere as they digest and disperse (to put it nicely), and the grand plan has seen to it that sprouting doesn’t take place inside the inhospitable darkness of their guts. Sometimes the mechanics of bird digestion—such as the gizzard’s action, and various digestive acids—are actually critical in the scarifying, or abrading, of tough seed coats (such as native blackberries and raspberries) that allow germination to happen at all. Quid pro quo, nature’s master plan.
Its generality probably renders this next statement grossly imprecise, but I’ll say it anyway: Without wind, we would not have weather change. It is my understanding, rudimentary though it is, that when the pressure gradient (the difference in pressure over a given distance) between adjacent high- and low-pressure areas is greater, the wind speed is greater, too—and whoosh, in comes different weather, moving from the high-pressure area toward the low. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration or weather.gov, which I respectfully prefer to call the Almighty NOAA because I look to it so heavily to steer my days on earth, explains it far more scientifically, and with charts and maps, but what I just said is as far as I can manage to go mentally in grasping the sternest of the elements, and that’s enough. Even though I usually cannot see it—except on days like today when there are all these madcap floaters out there on parade—it’s the element I fear the most.
Among its other powers, wind is also responsible, in some environments, for serious soil erosion. Another potential impact is evidenced when wind meets up with water, such as the dramatic weather they create in concert near the coasts. Where I live, I’d have to count wind—not cold, despite my Zone 5Bish climate, where theoretically the temperature can get to minus-15ish degrees Fahrenheit, but doesn’t seem to any longer—as the most destructive force in the garden, bringing down or splitting apart woody plants when it roars; desiccating evergreens in winter; generally making plants thirstier faster, in a world where water is in ever-shorter supply. Particularly when it combines with or follows drought, as it did all last growing season and does most years in dry stretches in late spring and summer here, it’s the force majeure. Sometimes, all that means is a few stray sycamore leaves, but normally it has nastier tricks in mind. I am not the wind’s lover, no anemophiliac, if that’s even a word; not me. It isn’t time to batten down the hatches quite yet—but soon. I am watching, and listening.
CHUGGING UP THE STEEP PATH from the car with too many bags of groceries (including more white vinegar for another batch of refrigerator pickles, below), I see botanical Swiss cheese over the corner of one sack. I am not even home and unpacked yet, but someone is already eating, and the delicacy this time is my favorite canna, the one I know as ‘Grande’ but that is a lookalike or maybe the same as Canna ‘Musafolia’. Its very tall, thick stems are tinged purple-red, and its extra-large, banana-like foliage is edged to match. Apparently the flowers would be reddish and somewhat small, but I have never seen them in all the years we’ve spent together—and besides, I only grow cannas for their leaves. My regular practice is to disbud those that do show the inclination to bloom before they go all garish and gaudy on me. Call me a contrarian, but hold the flowers, please.
A furry, black-and-white-patterned creature is systematically erasing the foliage I favor, but he has timed his actions well. It is September, and I am feeling less protective than I might in May, when the first real heat of the year coaxes the rock-hard but frost-tender, beet-pink-tinted rhizomes that slept naked all winter in the cellar to push up their first energetic shoots. I put the shopping bags inside the kitchen door, get my camera, and go outside to sit and watch, an exercise in restraint.
The enemy. All too often gardeners—including myself—are revolted by the sight of a caterpillar. The immediate instinct is to kill, kill, kill these seemingly voracious eaters who are the larval stages of various moths or butterflies, members of the order Lepidoptera. Everything unknown or misunderstood that we cannot see as beautiful according to our filters, everything we don’t see as serving us is a potential victim. But how many besides the tomato and tobacco hornworms (the latter love my Nicotiana) or gypsy moth (hardwood trees) or eastern tent caterpillar (apples, crabapples, and other Rose-family relatives), do I—supposedly an “expert” gardener—really know by name? How many can I identify by their favored diet, I ask myself as I watch the inch-and-a-half-long beast continue his enthusiastic chewing. He seems to like what I have cooked up for his supper.
There is something to be said for allowing pure fascination to take hold, for suspending judgment and just being, not doing (which in this scenario translates to observing, not squishing). The story of the caterpillar’s workday is a parable in itself: Is he really a thief and a scoundrel, or simply a devoted worker who knows that his intended higher purpose lies just ahead if he stays on his unpopular course, against all odds? The negative space of the leaf he’s working on enlarges quickly, and I realize that I am grateful to this moth-in-the-making, happy to share a portion of the fading summer garden with some hairy little beast in the name of awareness and tolerance. Rather than a rush to crush, it’s a time that I asked who’s who—and also, again: why?
I don’t learn until I am inside and have put away the groceries and started searching on the computer—how can I not have a caterpillar guidebook, but I do not, at least not yet—that I have been passing time with the larval form of a hickory tussock moth, whose usual diet is ash, elm, oak, hickory, maple, willow, and other trees.
Though he looks velvety, I’m glad our budding relationship has stopped short of heavy petting. It’s a case of look but don’t touch, apparently: The long “lashes” of Lophocampa caryae are hollow tubes connected to poison glands, and can give susceptible people a stinging-nettle-like rash or other reaction. The rest of the bristles, or setae, on his body may also be irritating. Apparently this hardy visitor will spend the winter in a mere silk cocoon under tree bark or on the ground—how can he survive that way?—then work his way gradually next year to moth-hood.
He’s the cousin of two other recent arrivals, I realize after sitting still long enough to allow things that had been only semiconsciously noticed prior to really register themselves. A small yellowish-tan caterpillar I saw the other afternoon might be the Virginian tiger moth (Spilosoma virginica), which apparently feeds on both herbaceous and woody plants. I found that one in my house, actually, on a piece of garden gear I’d brought inside, and relocated him, I recall, now that I am slowing down, and concentrating, and able to connect the dots. How long have I been oblivious, playing at master of the universe instead of fellow traveler with this guy? He had apparently been parasitized by some wasp or other—a cluster of white eggs, such as braconid wasps, lay jutted from the larvae’s chenille body, and some had fallen off when I moved him back outdoors.
Both of my recent finds are cousins of the familiar woolly bear or woolly worm (Pyrrharctia isabella); all three are in the taxonomic tribe Arctiini (the tiger moths). Since they’re not deforesting the entire region or anything, I’m just letting them be—and eat—and frankly, it is pretty entertaining. Cheap thrills, I know, but we just don’t understand enough about all of nature’s tiniest creatures to go blindly rampaging against them, do we? That’s the E. O. Wilson-esque question I keep asking myself. What do caterpillars even do? When I shift perspective and let go of the arrogant, ignorant, and egocentric view that they are simply pests and eating my garden, as if all has been assembled to do either service or harm to me—the weather, the animal and insect visitors, all of it—this is when it gets really interesting.
Caterpillars do some semi-obvious things I have witnessed in the garden or in books: They are a favored food of birds, especially good for feeding to hatchlings; when they become moths and butterflies (many of whom have roles in plant pollination in certain habitats), they feed another range of birds (including flycatchers and martins, for instance) and also bats. Some caterpillars make silk; other species work to break down the litter of fallen foliage and fruit and even woody plant parts. (Digression: I have come lately to treasure my yard’s impressive population of size-XL millipedes for this reason, too, after being repulsed for years by the six-inch-long taupe and orange beasts with all those crazy legs. Narceus americanus, sometimes called the worm millipede, does a similar job as its common namesake, digesting leaf litter and such debris, meaning that, like earthworms, they are detritivores—eating detritus. Nature’s composters. Like the Lepidoptera, millipedes are arthropods, with a hard exoskeleton, a segmented body, and many pairs of legs, the way a scorpion or a lobster is armored and armed.) And then—back on point again, please, Margaret; public service announcement on behalf of millipedes complete—there is this:
Caterpillars force plants to take measures against being eaten alive, says Dr. David L. Wagner of the University of Connecticut, author of the Caterpillars of Eastern North America field guide that finally filled the gap in my bookcase, once I’d met my fourth member of the Arctiini in little more than a month along that same path from parking spot to kitchen door. (I figured all these caterpillars were trying to tell me something: Go buy a book. I also figure Dr. Wagner must have sent them, in a clever and sophisticated biological marketing ploy, but so far that’s merely an unproven theory.) With their incessant chewing, Wagner explains, the hungry and plentiful larvae have long put pressure on plants to develop built-in chemical controls against predation by herbivores—substances such as latex and alkaloids and tannins. Caterpillars are masters at inventing noxious and just plain crafty tactics for thwarting their own predators, so it makes sense that they are good mentors in tactics of self-defense for the plants. Besides the poison setae, there are caterpillar species who outsmart foes with crypsis (camouflaging themselves to look like anything from a twig to part of a flower or leaf to the leaf litter itself), and others boldly marked in a defensive warning coloration who just go along calmly eating what they please right out in the open, as if to say: You’d have to be nuts to take a bite out of someone wearing this outfit.
At this time of year, we usually start to notice the woolly bear, or Isabella tiger moth—looking to see how much black versus rusty banding circles its fat, fuzzy body to try to predict the coming winter. The idea goes that more brown means milder and more black fiercer, but this bit of folklore-cum-superstition doesn’t hold up to science as a forecasting tool by any means—though it probably makes this caterpillar the one species we don’t go squashing reflexively as if it is a known enemy. Me? I’m forecasting an early onset to winter based on equally sketchy notions, such as the fact that several species of feeder birds who usually don’t bother with me again until serious fall properly sets in are already hanging around the hopper looking for a handout during the last week. All efforts to ask them what’s up were met with the usual chatter, but nothing I could decode. Perhaps the next time I really sit still, it should be with an audio guide to birdsong connected to a set of earphones.
HEADPHONES WOULD BE GOOD right now, actually. Wheeze, rattle, and roll. With each ragged breath, I try to make my peace with the wind inside, and with the more forceful one making itself heard this late day beyond the house walls, too. I am talking silently to my own weak, asthmatic airflow—calm down now; in and out, in and out; there you go; quieter now, that’s right—but I can still hear every wisp of air passing through angry bronchi and bronchioles on its way to those all-important alveoli and the needed gas exchange meant to keep everything firing over here.
But my breath, my damn breath, with which I have fought for control since my twenties, usually losing, can be so loud sometimes—such as right now, on this increasingly windy afternoon. Even with the strengthening force of the inspirations and expirations kicking up outside—with the kousa dogwood beginning to rub and slap the corner of the building like an improvised drum set paced by wire brushes and a hi-hat, and other early warning signs that it will be one of those nights—all I can hear is the sound of high-pitched wheezing of my own tight spaces and sibilant rhonchi, as the doctor would say, though thankfully not rales, or crackles, the distinct noises when fluid, and not just inflammation, is giving the passages a test.
We are in for a wild ride. It’s really one of those “Houston, we have liftoff” weather days (though NASA, in its wisdom, wouldn’t launch anything into this dervish of a sky). Looking for something crispy and delicious, titmice manage to fly in the face of it, darting in and out of fluffy big Hydrangea paniculata heads, now dried to match the cornfield full of cow food that stands withered and awaiting harvest across the way. Our collective hunger mounts as fresh stockpiles dwindle. Suggestion box: Weather should come in metered doses like the puffs of my inhalers—never more than you need, or less. Perhaps I’ll write that wish list item in a letter to Santa Claus (or maybe NOAA?); I have been good, or at least I have tried my level best, despite various provocateurs, meteorological and otherwise.
May the wind take your troubles away. Jay Farrar of the alt country band Son Volt wrote and sang that, but for me the wind is the trouble: finding a place of equanimity with a bigger breath that knows no confinement to its territory, a free-form force that has no tight passageways to reckon with or be restrained by. The wind knows how to breathe deep—and oh my, can it ever exhale.
SO THAT’S WHAT THE RECENT WIND IS ABOUT. We had our double tropical storms, and now the way-too-early forecast is for frost or thereabouts. The phrase “adding insult to injury” is one every gardener quickly becomes accustomed to, but this year it is simply insult after insult after insult, the resulting fractures all proving to be of the compound type. I’m not ready, and neither are the soggy nonhardy plants—the big Brugmansia I bought on half-price closeout a few falls ago; the tuberous begonias such as ‘Bonfire’ and other boliviensis types; the fancy-leaf begonias and clivias and various forms of bromeliads and other “houseplants” that winter inside with me (tactics for storing many kinds of tender plants are covered in the sidebar on here). And so begins the first fall fire drill: calculating where I can offer things enough cover to face whatever comes, all the while knowing that with this short notice, somebody won’t get there in time. Russian roulette.
I am looking at the updated forecast and doing mental dress rehearsals for next year’s garden without the big tropical things—pretending this one or that one is gone, that it didn’t make it into the lifeboat, asking myself: Is it really a big deal? This is how I practice for dramas that promise to cull the herd, my herd. Usually it’s a gradual, orchestrated march toward winter quarters: first to somewhere such as the porch overhang or the garage, where things can dry off enough so that whatever strong helper I am able to recruit and I can even think of being able to lower them down the staircase into the basement, or carry them into the house and up the narrow, steep stairs—somewhere, anywhere, into protective custody. This is no terrain for wheeling things around easily, but we must get out the handcart and genuflect a few times for good measure and go at the task.
I will certainly meet my death on the downhill side of the two-wheeled, screaming yellow carrier, flattened by one of the various giant pots that slips off its not-big-enough step. The thigh- and nearly hip-high containers far outweigh me, and the operation each spring and fall has long put the laws of physics to the test, not to mention pushed my luck, and that of my sorry left arm this time around. That will be it one day: RIP Margaret Roach, who died trying to ensure that her potted plants lived to see another spring.
BIRCH LEAVES, some early abandoners gone yellow and crisp enough already to drift downward, skitter across the lawn that will not dry today nor any day in what remains of this year, no matter how much patience is exercised. As I mow, I send the nearly triangular leaves spitting out the chute and then aloft again, one more joy ride per customer. Hi, ho.
Frost is coming—this time for real, and of more than a few hours’ duration, I think. At each hard turn or reverse of gear, the tractor tires tattoo the soft soil with an imprint that will not fade, a dark scar that we both regret, but I push on.
Frost is coming.
Eastern chipmunks perch on every promontory—every gate finial or post or bit of ornament—reducing magnolia pods to mere husks, holding them ever so delicately like corn on the cob in those tiny, slender toes (just four on each front foot, not five as on the back ones). I have cursed these cutest of rodents all season long, wished them dead, for all the tunneling they have undertaken and crops they have undermined, absconded with, destroyed. Compared with the recent and approaching storms, their mischief now seems so trivial, I almost wonder why I was upset.
Jack, who until the high-summer halfmunk episode would typically knock the occasional one off for sport and lay it before me whole—not good eating—has lately regarded them as sushi, with the head a particular delicacy over and again. Maybe he has heard, or worse watched, as I knelt like a madwoman and screamed into the crevices in the stone wall, or into all those little holes in the ground, about the vegetables they upended: “I’m warning you, chippies!” (Cue sound of chorus of rodent and feline laughter.) Maybe he is trying to settle the grudge, or maybe it is simple feast or famine because he seems to have knocked back the population of his favored prey, the weasels and flying squirrels, to the very slimmest of pickings. Maybe like I do, he eats whatever the garden serves up, a locavore in his own right.
A falsely optimistic last row of bush green beans, and another of peas, planted in late July and just starting to bear, have escaped animal predation so far. As I roll on by on my orange machine, I can see them, tucked beneath a white drape of insulating fabric that I hope will not prove to be their shroud. Hurry up; tuck in and tidy now. Or else.
TODAY, just for a day or two, I live in Oz, where the road—I’d expect the darkest slick brown dirt on such a dew-soaked morning—is golden, paved in kernels of dent corn. The fat little tiles join with leaves whose job is also done into a gleaming, if ephemeral, mosaic.
Across the way, a slit in the clouds bathes just a clean-cut slice of earth in a startling shaft of gold light. Nearer to me, along the road bank, and again farther beyond in the distant woods, another color of light altogether stains things an intense slate blue, so from where I stand, it is as if the one spotlighted sliver of just-harvested cornfield, now a luminous khaki stubble, is where the Yellow Brick Road will lead: into the welcoming, warming glow. Follow, follow? Things are changing fast now, moment to moment; by the time I get there, across the street and halfway through the field, will the shining spot still be what it seems to promise?
Both the kernels and the leaves of birch and maple have lost the connections to their mother ships, but neither was a sorrowful parting; it was time. Two days of a farmer’s combining have felled the giant grassy cornstalks, grinding them to bits while separating the grain. For nights and days before the massive machine pulled in and laid claim, the local raccoons and squirrels had been doing their best to get there first—to plunder the field, one ear at a time. The squirrels would run across the road to my side, over and again, to stuff the cartoonishly big prizes they carried inside a hollow old apple trunk, an improvised silo. Now the source has been erased, with only spillage to pick over. Bargain-basement sale; get your corncob seconds here.
Looking around, it’s hard to know whether to focus on the full grain wagon or the empty field; the light spot or the dark zones; the trees that are already naked or those that are dressed to the nines and showing off. This is the toughest cusp of the year, the one when riotous displays of color presage months of monochrome, a lurid but irresistible peep show before the vice squad shuts the bawdy operation down. Overall, in both the spectacle and the abundance—just-harvested crops in full barns, full root cellars, full freezers—this is the richest time. Yet it’s challenging not to seize upon the losses instead, to grab at what’s slipping by. Caught up in the distraction of such poignancy, I’m barely noticing that from spent plants everywhere, crops of a great diversity of seeds are bursting forth from pods and seedheads of all descriptions, and staking a future claim. The plants play dead, but don’t be fooled: There is life in them, so much life. En ma fin gît mon commencement. In my end is my beginning.
The corn needed a nudge to reduce itself to a format my neighbor can easily store, and use to feed his herd, but it took no machinery, nor even any manual tool or bare hand or paw to convince the trees’ leaves to set out on their own. Environmental triggers are part of the equation, but not even the wind typically persuades a tree to part with its foliage all on its own. It can carry the leaves off, but under normal circumstances only if there’s a readiness on the part of the plants—a willingness to surrender. As with Homo sapiens, external prodding and pleading for change go only so far, until we are ready to make the move, though here among the plants, the resistance is chemical. The point of the bond is small, but strong: the abscission zone, at the base of the leaf petiole, or stalk, is controlled primarily by the hormone auxin in active growth months, but as the leaves start to undergo senescence in fall, the cell walls on this tiny sticking point start to weaken, too. A shift in the balance of hormones, particularly the increasing influence of ethylene, makes it all come unglued.
Plants act more intelligently than we do, I often think (and so of course do birds, who know when it is time to go—migrate!—and do not overstay their welcome when a situation has played itself out). “What’s the difference between humans and other animals,” I heard a scientist ask the other day on a radio interview—“what’s the difference in the way we think compared with them?” I expected him to reply that it must be sentimentality, for though animals certainly have intricate social networks and connections, they seem to put practicality—survival—ahead of anything unhelpful or even cumbersome, such as nostalgia. When push comes to shove, we do, too—mostly—but oh, the indecision, the lingering to reach that point. How many of our short hours do we spend at that hem-and-haw threshold, the one Sylvia Plath imagined in the poem “The Tree of Life,” watching her life go “absolutely bare” while she pondered her course: mother, poet, academic, wife?
Flowers abscise, too, starting to dry and often drop off after they have served their purpose of attracting pollinators or otherwise achieving fertilization. And leaves—well, leaves fall. Why carry the leaf into winter if it is no longer feeding you? Unnecessary bits are let go—even when humans call them our “baggage,” we typically keep lugging them around, anyhow. Plants systematically cull the weak, damaged, or unneeded, for the greater good, like my dwarf white pines and other conifers do. My apples, knowing they cannot ripen every fruit that sets in a year that favors thorough pollination, self-thin by dropping some tiny fruit in June (a practice apple growers have mimicked, and taken further than the tree itself would go, with chemicals such as carbaryl, often known as Sevin, to limit the number of fruits in favor of premium-sized ones). Sometimes, such as when an infestation of gall insects or leaf miners takes hold, a plant can send out the chemical signal to its component parts to defoliate early, forcing an early separation, yes, but one strategically planned to save itself and foil the foe. A sacrifice, and also self-preservation. If there is drought or other perceived danger—even when you move a houseplant indoors after a summer outside, for instance, and it defoliates in protest at its changed environment—the plant takes measures to ensure survival.
Leaves fall. If we learn nothing else from gardening, let that be the single lesson.
Sometimes they don’t fall in autumn, as is the case with some of the big oaks in view right now, which are called marcescent for this holding-on trait. I have a Japanese-maple lookalike from Korea, Acer pseudosieboldianum, a small tree with particularly vivid fall color, that I can fearlessly grow in the ground because it’s much less prone to injury here than are the Japanese species such as Acer palmatum or japonicum or shirasawanum (the ones I prefer to protect all winter in the pots wheeled into my barn). The first year the new maple refused to drop its leaves, and I called the nursery I bought it from to ask why—as if there must be something I was doing wrong. No, it’s just that way, was the answer (one of gardening’s most honest explanations, since so often all we know is what we see—unless we run a plant-pathology lab). I have come to accept, and love, this plant for its at first odd-seeming characteristic of withholding.
Marcescence is not well understood: Is it that certain leaves on plants thus inclined (perhaps those at the top of the tree that got the most sunlight) hang on longest? Is it that some species, or populations within species, don’t form a proper abscission layer at all for some other elusive reason? Another stash of questions for my ever-growing heap. I simply must come back next time as a librarian, or research assistant, preferably with a large and renewable multiyear grant in place.
Meantime, I can make my peace with a Seneca Indian legend that explains it this way: The oaks defy the winter gods by holding on to their leaves, and the pine trees join them—but not the tamaracks, which shed theirs as if resigned to defeat at the hand of what lies ahead. In fact the foliage of tamarack (Larix laricina, also called eastern larch, a deciduous conifer) would gild the roadbed here about now—adding its inch-long needlelike leaves to the ranks of the fallen—if only I had planted one as I have for years intended to. No matter; by the end of a day’s worth of farm vehicles and other traffic, the Yellow Brick Road will be turned to cornmeal—but for now, it shimmers. Robert Frost knew: “Nothing gold can stay.”
I WAIT FOR THE WIND TO STIR, as I know it will, as NOAA’s radar maps show it has south of here already, tossing snow-covered branches, and trunks following right after them, to the blanketed ground. “Don’t leave me,” the latter parts seem to say. “We are one; I have separation anxiety!” Even with the still air of the last three or four hours, the freakish storm has dumped eight inches on the October garden, still clothed in its fall foliage, and the destruction has begun. Two pieces of the magnolia by the door—the one the sapsucker has been playing hit man on; the one with all the character that a friend propagated when he began his nursery decades ago, one of his first progeny—have broken off and fallen under the load of piled-up feather-sized flakes.
“What weighs more,” my father liked to ask us when we were girls, always the big tease, looking over the tops of his half-glasses at us professorially, “a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?”
These crystalline feathers are plenty heavy, and might as well be metal.
“Nature, the gentlest mother is,” wrote Emily Dickinson. I’m not so sure. I think she runs a pretty tough household; we’re all calloused and bruised here, that much I can attest to.
During the siege, I suit up again and again, round after round, big rubber-and-neoprene boots and a hat and a hoodie and a hooded waterproof jacket over that for good measure. I venture out to take the snow off every thirty minutes or so, since it is falling so fast—two to three inches an hour—targeting the most vulnerable and the most precious things out there that are within my merely human-sized reach. Unlike the well-practiced drill in winter, when only conifers and broadleaf evergreens have their foliage and appreciate my attention, this unseasonal routine extends to not just the usual suspects but to multiple dogwoods, mature lilacs, willows, magnolias, maples, and even the vast apple trees.
At first, as if they are exhaling and expressing gratitude—thank you, thank you—the lightened limbs levitate at my touch, or the extended touch that is mine thanks to my crazy tools: the twelve-foot-long piece of molding that’s lain idle in the shed for months now, a couple of brooms, various lengths of bamboo. By the third or fourth round of rescue attempts out to the magnolia ‘Ballerina’, the Japanese maples, the big dogwood by the front walk, some of the patients are nonresponsive. The branches no longer spring back in a generally upward direction; they grow weary of the load, and of my ministrations. The temperature is too cold now as night overtakes the day, and the limbs are growing stiff and brittle; I risk doing more harm than good, even using the gentlest of practiced upward strokes.
I must simply go inside and watch as they vanish with the last slip of light, as they are erased from view, at least until sunrise—knowing that it may be permanently. On the way in, the old copper beech on the hill catches my eye; I can see the load it is carrying, but I can offer no help to someone of its stature. “Please be there in the morning,” I say, before I know that I am speaking out loud into the near darkness. “Please try to hang on.” I know that I am too old to grow another beech from its childhood to this size; beeches make you wait. I do not want to be without the others, either—but by comparison with dear Fagus sylvatica, their replacements would shape up fast.
I FEEL LIKE I’M BACK IN GIRL SCOUTS, earning merit badges for proficiency in new tasks—tasks I never wanted to learn, but that are apparently mandatory to this year’s bruising curriculum. This morning—the morning after—working in my high boots and warmest gloves, I have mastered Generator 101. It was no picnic, but I did manage to make a tea party, with my electric kettle operating alfresco on a big cutting board balanced on top of the loud machine—or at least I made a cup of hot tea or two to fuel me on into rounds of resumed snow removal of various kinds that will shape my day.
Up and down the road, from nearby town to town, all Friday had been spent getting ready, the spirit of the day expressed in anxious e-mails and calls as if we all feared a levee breach and were filling sandbags, or battening down before the overnight air raids began in another country, another era. There was no optimism, just a sense of “together against the odds”—and I heard no expectation that we’d really be prepared—but you can’t just sit there doing nothing, can you? Hope against hope, and mostly blind hope at that. In one silent entreaty after another, I reminded the forces that be that I had already given at the office; remember? My common prayer: I’d culled the herd; I’d offered up the bodies of more than a dozen shrubs and trees in earliest spring—that was me, you know that, right? Have mercy. I don’t need a double order of smote, you know; one per customer. I am all smoted out over here.
A few innocent-sounding inches of snow had fallen the night before last, on Thursday, October 27—before Halloween and even before the clock change and other avowed markers that winter’s coming on—and rendered the fifteen-foot kousa dogwood closest to the house into a flattened octopus of splayed arms. I have never seen a field of soybeans standing in snow, but now I have, at the same neighbors’ whose lowest-lying adjacent cornfield had been swamped in August’s particular havoc. What would a foot or more of additional wet snow, as was forecast for the weekend, do to a landscape with many of its leaves still intact?
Actually, I had an idea. I’d seen this before, and worse, but only once in all the years here, when an October 4, 1987, storm surprised parts of the Northeast. I’d just bought my place and had enough time here on weekends, working ceaselessly to clean it up from its overgrown state in the hopes of making a garden. One weekend night I was awakened from my sleep by the sound of shotguns—dozens of them, all at once—or so I thought. It was my first experience with the sound, in a time when everything nature did was new to me. That night, the trees were not just stretching and objecting to the cold, as I now understand that they do on the harshest of nights, having listened to them groan so many times; those were no mere utterances or mild protestations in 1987. It was the sound of the forest around me collapsing, a tree at a time, plenty of which (including an eighty-foot maple) fell into my “cleaned-up” yard.
And so on Friday I had done what I wish I’d had advance warning to do that long-ago October weekend before the power went off for a week: I cooked up food that could be eaten at room-temperature; filled water bottles (and also buckets for toilet flushing, since the well pump requires power). I filled the portable generator, too—there must be an easier, safer way, some siphon device maybe, to transfer gasoline from the five-gallon can into this beast?—and found the snow shovel again, and my big boots, my secret-weapon molding, the cans of salt and grit; all of it. And when it came, I’d gone out to work—or at least to try to alleviate any sense in the already dreaded and visualized aftermath of what else could I have done.
By the time more than a foot and a half of new snow was piled up on top of Thursday’s, and on top of giant sections of many garden plants—by the time it was time for tea on the generator, shoveling walkways, and carefully digging out a select few pinned-down limbs with my gloved hands—I wondered why all the fallen had not called out in the way that the trees so often do. It had been such a silent night. They had gone without complaint, as if stoic, or simply resigned to where they were headed, or perhaps wanting to rejoin the friends I’d sacrificed just as the garden year began.
AND NOW THE GRASS NEEDS CUTTING. I find my safety glasses, ear protectors, and gloves, and I head for the barn, grabbing the snow shovel from beside the kitchen door where I left it after clearing the path less than a week ago. Don’t need that today. The white landscape has gone green again, and in its new ensemble it calls out for another form of attention. The garden is my fickle dominatrix; I am enslaved: Mow me. Shovel me. No—mow me again. I long for your rough, noisy touch, Margaret.
Vroom.
Or maybe this is just another test of the emergency broadcast system:
“We interrupt this program for a special bulletin: It’s not winter yet. Keep mowing, Margaret. We’ll let you know if and when to stop.”
But shit, no gas in the tank, and none in the gas can, either. I’ll have to go out and get more. It is hard to remember to set aside some fuel for mowing when you are standing boots-deep in snow. Survivalist instincts must have taken over when I dumped it all into the generator, as if readying for a long siege, and now I am siegeless—my siege has up and melted. No wonder: Today we are featuring early September (or June?) in November. Try that on for size, garden and gardener. Take that.
Vroom, vroom.
AS I BUZZ-CUT THE BACKYARD, I see them backlit and glinting on high: various species of social wasps—bald-faced hornets and paper wasps in this case, I suppose, not ground-nesting eastern yellow jackets. They hover in short flight patterns up and down, up and down the surface of the highest strips of clapboard, as if on some invisible track that holds them just inches above the siding’s surface. They appear to be scoping out a crack they might slip into, looking, as we all are now, for cover. Can they all be inseminated females—the future queens of the colonies of the coming year? Only the young females, holding in their beings the germ of the next generation, overwinter, I know, with every other current member of the intricate caste system, Class of 2011, perishing at the coming cold.
Looking up to near the ridgeline on the sunny sides of the house, I am mentally calculating how many nests that means next year if things go according to each of these heat-seeking girls’ plans. Good thing I am not allergic to their venom; next year may be even more violent on that score than this angry one was, when I seemed to bump into someone at every pass of the mower (or on the trail of every slippery woodchuck), quickly suffering the consequences.
More geese than I can count in time pass overhead in single-file formation, honking. The cat, just now rolling in the warm gravel of the driveway as if it were an exfoliating spa treatment or maybe hot-stone massage, looks up, and wishes he could fly. As if to get with the program, entire flocks of leaves take flight in unison, riding the air currents before alighting in the branch of a tree that is not theirs—or on the ground, of which they will become a part in time. Swing your partner; do-si-do.
“Your e-mail said you were going to be outside meowing,” says a friend who catches me on the phone just as I go inside to get a fast drink of water. “No,” I say, “I said mowing,” off by just a vowel, and an entire season. “Mowing snow?” Nobody understands me, and right now I realize I understand so little.
Vroom, vroom.
AFTER THE FALL, a body count. The tally is complete, though I avoided facing it for weeks. Herb, with the same small chainsaw that sliced through spring’s sacrificial lambs, did the deed: took down the disfigured or otherwise devastated woody plants that the freakish storm had savaged. We walked around the other day, once the initial shock felt less sharp and stabbing, and I’d pointed: Take the left side of this, and This one goes completely. And then I went out for the afternoon to nowhere in particular, just out, returning only after all evidence of those who could not bend with the wind or bear the latest of life’s burdens, all that wet snow, was erased.
Apparently my pleas for mercy—the request that the shrubs and trees I’d offered up onto the pyre as the season began be taken into consideration—went unheard. Parts of big native maples and oaks, now suspended as hangers along the property’s edge where the worst damage had been in 1987, were the least of it: This time the garden proper was the target of the vengeance. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
The lilacs were the hardest hit, and at least three are gone, with that number likely to grow (the word here should be “dwindle,” no?) to six mature shrubs next spring, when the temporarily spared, half-standing ones will likely be erased the rest of the way. A ‘Gold Rush’ metasequoia, one of a group of three up on the hillside where they call to me from way down below with their bright yellow-green foliage, was made to vanish, too, as was half of a big viburnum (unlikely to recover) and one-third of the delightfully gnarly old rosemary willow. Hopefully, it will rebound, but its once-striking massiveness has been starkly reduced. Severed arms of magnolias, dwarf white pine, and the giant rhododendron that has been here longer than I were clean-cut and dragged away; so was one side of an ancient apple. The sassafras is too far gone to save, missing its head and an arm both, a beheaded amputee. Just a few weeks earlier when he was visiting, Marco had said, “Your sassafras is really shaping up into a great tree.”
Now he is instead reminding me by phone what he always says about garden losses: “Bury your dead, and fast.”
The idea, he’s been reteaching over and again the last two weeks in an emergency refresher course: Erase the evidence of disaster, and start imagining what you will put in the gaping places. That is of course a much better and saner view of all living landscapes, including our interior ones, than to hold on to the empty ache of disappointment and have to stare it in the face.
AKIMBO, ASKEW, AWRY, AMISS. That is how it still looks out the window today, even though the cleanup has been done for days and the bodies dragged out of my sight line. Nevertheless, the view is now a wreck, a ruin—a total mess. Was this violence a reminder of our perpetual state of vulnerability really necessary, I ask you, both kind and brutal sir or madam? I promise, that fact was already quite squarely in mind; middle age and an adulthood spent gardening and also, thank you very much, your ceaseless meteorological antics this season will do that to a body.
Is this some “sinners in the hands of an angry God” moment we’ve been having, because if it is, I don’t take too well to such fire and brimstone (despite the fact that the latter, sulfur, does make a good agent against fungal issues, admittedly, and ericaceous plants may also appreciate its pH-lowering effect on soil). Stop with the havoc already.
Yes, yes I know the point: You were just trying to remind me that everything is always falling apart—as everyone from the Buddha to Alan Watts will admonish and enlighten me, too, if I let them, but right now all their wisdom on the subject sounds like small comfort, really. I am pouting again; I want my two big islands of ornamental grasses back, the ones you flattened, forcing me to cut them to the ground in their prime, the ones who have always stuck with me as kind companions across the threshold into another spare winter. I have never been without the gracefully faded wheat-colored stands before, or at least not in twentyish years since I placed the young plants they were then into the soil. Disorienting; after so long, I expect them to be there for me.
So does the cat. These days and weeks since, Jack sits by the big Miscanthus islands uphill, now down to near stubble, knowing these were his most productive stalking grounds for all his years here, listening as he always has patiently for a rustling; waiting, sphinxlike, for some sign of motion, but with none to be discerned. He, too, finds the garden less than what he’d come to expect. Party pooper, this weather. Really.
I want the berries put back on the hollies, not scattered about the way you left them like so many miniature red marbles. Is this too much to ask? Sorry to shout, to rant and repeat myself, but I swear I get it—I’ve already admitted it, haven’t I?—that gardening is a contrivance, an imposition on your bigger plans. That nothing lasts; that we are all (plants and animals alike) “poor insects of a few short hours,” as Coleridge described. Which puts me in the oddest place, at once praying to surrender to inevitability and also fighting back, both believer and heretic. Here I am, trying to find my way to the on-ramp toward just going along with it all, but simultaneously resisting, for isn’t the very fact of making a garden an act of trying to impose some sense of fixity, that “all set” thing again—that fresh-made bed or fresh-laid dinner table—and trying to put everything in its place?
Forget it, the forces—you, big guy—are forever reminding me, or so it seems when you mess up the picture I have painted in the dirt. You will never beat us at this game, Margaret. Is that what pissed you off—that I keep trying, cultivating my row of beans, taking a hard hand to the very unnatural but handsome espalier a few times each season when it tries to express itself beyond the bounds of my expectation or desire? Was that the message behind your latest meteorological homily?
“All things with which we deal, preach to us,” Emerson wrote in Nature. “What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.”
What is a garden but a mute gospel, then? Voiceless, but, for better or worse, also the only voice I seem to be able to really hear and pay any mind to.
WELL, EXCEPT FOR MARCO’S. Besides regularly reminding me that I am now in my shrub season (with free Tuesday matinee movie tickets and other senior perks not far behind), his voice keeps hinting at mounting evidence that one gets more particular and less flexible as one ages. We grow more controlling, he says, even if of a smaller, simpler realm that’s manageable despite an achy, creaky touch of this or that.
There’s that word again—“control”: It’s the foundation principle of horticulture. I want to say first, in self-defense, that compared with many other gardener types, I always thought that I exerted relatively little of it, eschewing chemicals, clipped hedging, or anything much in the way of formality. I managed to piss off some power greater than myself anyhow, though, and my opponent—or is it my partner?—keeps moving pieces off the game board. I wonder how the match went when the contestant was Marco’s mother, a true master of the art of control?
“I hated going home because I didn’t like what she had done with the place,” he says, smiling at the turn of phrase and recalling a time before the exceptional horticultural career he is now retired from was only starting to come into focus.
Before he went into the army, the aspiring young gardener had changed his late father’s vegetable plot over to shrubs, including some Ilex crenata ‘Hetzii’, an evergreen littleleaf Japanese holly variety he’d imagined would sprawl in the nicest way, showing off its glossy leaves without expecting much work—good bulk, good filler.
Maybe not. To Mom, it was a piece of marble, a lump of clay.
“I was gone in the service in Germany for a year, and when I came back, lo and behold, she had transformed it into a four-foot-tall handled basket—ovoid, with a concave section and all.” Isabella Scissorhands.
A drift of Sempervivum he’d looked forward to seeing all grown in? It, too, had been reinvented, subdued into a perfect succulent heart.
The lesson, in his words:
“To the Italianate mind, nature is to be conquered.”
Isabella’s sense of empowerment was not limited to mere embellishments and flourishes; she even dabbled in daring acts of creation. Son had given Mom a Viburnum to plant in the yard, and on one of the visits, her guided tour paused at the former gift, all grown. She said she liked the shrub so much that she now planned to propagate it.
“You can’t right now,” the good son explained, trying to be patient and also helpful, saying how you have to wait until summertime and take cuttings, when the wood is just right and ideal for rooting, but no, she said, “I’m just going to put a piece of it in the ground.”
“No, Mom, you can’t.” But she did, taking off “a branch the size of a chair leg and shoving it in the soil,” he remembers. “And of course: Mother knows best.”
When I visit the grown boy’s garden lately, there is always some exceptionally well-clipped creature commanding center stage—if not as “out there” as an Easter basket fashioned in living holly, then at least a perfect set of boxwood cubes. Nature? Nurture? Nurturing nature? Or just the way that we must get—more assertive, because we need something, anything, to be manageable—in the face of the inexorable fact of our diminishing days?
I CALL THE COMPLAINT LINE. Hello, Doctor? I have questions, so many questions. “The nature of life is to be overwhelmed,” the shrink I call Dr. Eric V. Goudard is telling me in the latest of our phone assignations while Jack gnaws, jealously, on my knee for attention. I use that code name for my old go-to reality checker not because I am maintaining my own privacy over here—memoir writing rips that shutter off its hinges—but medical ethics say he must remain incognito and not get proper credit for his wisdom.
You only have to read Ernest Becker, Dr. Goudard the alter ego is saying now, as Jack’s irritation at my distraction from his needs grows toothier and more insistent. I learn that Becker, whose work is an interdisciplinary fusion of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and beyond, won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death just months after he died in 1974 at age forty-nine from colon cancer. He sought to understand what makes people act the way they do (good or bad, or even very, very bad)—asserting, nail-on-the-head-style I’d say, among other things that an unconscious denial of our mortality is the ticker inside us, but that it’s even trickier than the mere awareness: It’s also the knowledge that “when, where, and how?” are “anytime, anywhere, any way,” and that there is absolutely no anticipating it, and no control.
And then, as I am taking in that synopsis—shiver—the doctor spouts a Becker one-liner:
“Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.”
Note: This means you—or, um, me. Nothing lasts. Leaves fall. Gardeners and their gardens? Compost starter.
Watching the aging garden—my life partner—collapse and fade around me these violent days, it’s hard not to take it personally, too, as in: to sense how perilously close to utter ruination and erasure I am myself (as I have been since the day I was conceived; yes, I know). And yes, I anthropomorphize the garden and give it my own life’s seasons—Conception, Birth, Youth, Adulthood, Senescence, and Death and Afterlife—but it works in the other direction, too; I also botanimorphize. Am I looking out the window, I sometimes wonder, or looking in a mirror? Hard to really tell. Advaita.
As Dr. Goudard speaks, I glance across the room at my bookshelves and think: I should be a member of the Ernest Becker Foundation (do they take college dropouts? I must inquire). Sure, there are the garden titles, whole walls of them, but also a heavy dose of wake up, Maggie, I think I’ve got something to say to you. Listen to a few stiff spines:
Full Catastrophe Living
When Things Fall Apart
What Doesn’t Kill Us
No Time to Lose
Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart
No Becker here, not yet, except a cappella through the phone line, from the good doctor. Here comes another killer (ha-ha) Beckerism:
“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.” Is that another crack of thunder I hear coming my way just now?
SO MANY ROBINS: It looks like my turf is Robins’ ’Hood out there at the moment. Flocks of these partial migrants are madly robbing the crabapples, shades of a designer-lingerie sale at the old Filene’s, everyone grabbing at the same much-picked-over items in the bin with do-or-die energy. Save some for later, I say, listening to their late-season voices—like the collective lilt of rising-and-falling laughter—that stands out on this subdued, padded day of light rain. Pace yourselves, you big birds. Or else. They’ll only save the jumbo, shiny red crabapples of ‘Ralph Shay’ and that is simply because they are confounded by the fruits’ scale, about as big as a crabapple can be without being classified as an apple. Good thing they can’t master how to fit them into their mouths just yet; it leaves me something to stare at, one trace of the mostly stolen show I usually associate with right here, right now. By the end of months of freezes and thaws, though, ‘Ralph Shay’ will soften and yield to the pressure of the first flocks of February, relenting to be had at last.
A winter wren is bouncing around out back, too, blunter in shape and darker in color than the wrens that chatter their admonishments at me all spring and summer; maybe he’s checking out the off-season accommodations. I suspect he’s always around here somewhere—in the adjacent woods?—but I never catch a glimpse except as the season shifts, when he comes to the back water garden as if we’d made a Same Time Next Year vow, or who knows why. Besides this propensity for the annual reunion, another point of great affection for this aeronautical third-of-an-ounce soul is its Latin name: Troglodytes troglodytes.
If a troglodyte is a hermit, or cave dweller, this one’s clothed in feathers, not in a fur wrap or carrying a club. He’s some wild monkey of a bird, hard to sight but easy to hear while trilling sixteen big notes per second, but even with such antics he’s no chimpanzee, despite the fact that the chimp’s Latin name of Pan troglodytes shares half the bird’s. Welcome, friend; perfect timing, this arrival of yours, for we are all heading into our respective caves here soon, whether actual or mental. And then I also love this: My troglodyte friend is the only wren species found outside the Americas, and one proposed explanation for how that’s possible bumps right into the reason that the native flora of eastern Asia and the eastern United States have so many same-but-different counterparts, too. The theory in each case, bird’s and plants’, centers on the former land bridge across the Bering Strait, and possible migrations during an interglacial period, so I like to think the wren has a vestigial affection and appreciation for my garden that gathers together plants from both places. Perhaps in some ancient way my lifetime’s putterings make him feel at home.
I am making vegetable stock (the recipe is below); the windows are steaming up, tucking me in a cloud that smells of the garden harvest. What’s that now? It’s another of the helicopters that have been buzzing overhead lately, as the forest canopy drops a bit at a time, baring more and more of the land beneath. They’re looking for pot, I tell a friend, and then in today’s local paper: six hundred plants seized, seven arrests, myself not among them. My definition of “homegrown” lies firmly within the letter of the law; no worries there—but I do wonder what my garden looked like from above. What the hell is all that stuff down there? the pilot must have wondered. What a crazy lot of work.
More auspicious signs that this will be an auspicious day: Four of six mousetraps in the cellar are missing when I go down to check in the morning. Gone. What does it mean when they walk away, trap and all? (It means they win—because you get to have nightmares about where the traps could be and under what conditions they disappeared in the night.) Researchers at the Mayo Clinic revealed recently that purging senescent cells in mice—cells that are over the hill, no longer dividing and growing vibrantly—could postpone many effects of aging. I have a body full of aging cells and a basement full of mice. Maybe we can set up a research substation down there? I could use a fountain of youth, instead of just the occasional flood, in that primitive hole in the ground on which the lopsided building and an increasingly one-armed Margaret teeter.
Back on the first floor, I hear it: There is either a dying smoke alarm battery or a cricket in the house that I cannot locate. Shit. Underfoot outdoors, more beechnuts than I have ever seen, triggered by the stresses of a dry summer the year before, and more maple samaras—snap, crackle, pop—and so many hard little wild pears from the mystery tree I inherited with the place, lichen-covered trunk included. The plenitude—excess?—combines to make the right shoe choice seem to be whatever the footwear equivalent of all-terrain vehicle would be. Must I strap on my winter crampons to walk even now?
Bertolt Brecht asked what happens to the hole when the cheese is gone, but at the moment I am busy pondering what happens to the tree when the leaves are gone. (And, as always I’m asking myself this: What happens to the garden when the gardener is gone?)
GRANDMA SOLD HER GARDEN to try to buy a sense of security. Five years into her widowhood, my mother’s mother moved to an apartment from the false Tudor house on a big corner lot that she and her husband had built early in their marriage—the place where every plant that grew there by the time she signed the last paper and said good-bye was one she had delivered into the ground. All “the girls,” as she called not just me and my sister but also the gaggle of wives-no-longer who burgeoned as lifelong bridge-club and garden-club friends, likewise outlived their mates, were doing the same—downsizing. One after another, they gradually took up residence in the same new brick high-rise on the main boulevard leading into Douglaston, a late-life sorority house of sorts.
Every Sunday afternoon she’d come to the crazy-looking pink house she’d picked out for us and have dinner. Though it was just us—just our tiny but entire extended family at the table, six of us when she and my father’s father were still alive, and then five, four, three, two, in uncomfortably short order—her jewelry always matched the dress she wore, and at regular intervals, she’d get up to “powder [her] nose.”
Sitting on a vinyl-upholstered stool in the corner of the kitchen sipping a Bloody Mary as her son-in-law or daughter prepared the meal, she’d always say the same thing, as if it was from some script we were reenacting. In between snippets of local gossip about the odd little town she’d spent two-thirds of her life in, on whose geographic fringe she now resided several stories aloft because she’d sold her house and garden presumably to feel financially safe, there was always:
“I may be going to the old-folks’ home soon.”
The sentiment was echoed at least once in each edition of the weekly family miniseries by Grandpa Roach, who lived with us in the little bedroom off the kitchen. His version of the refrain: “I’m going to the poorhouse.” (If not for his son’s hospitality, maybe he was right: Grandpa was favorably inclined toward the two-dollar window at Belmont and Aqueduct, but it was not so favorably inclined in return.)
Grandma had sold off her most precious possession, but she still didn’t feel secure, or so it sounded Sunday after Sunday. In my early fifties I sold off my security—a career that on paper appeared to sustain me—for the chance to live here in the garden, where I hope to drop, facedown, one day while weeding and be done with it all at that.
Grandma died one night in her apartment, falling forward onto one of the twin beds, stricken while changing into her ladylike nightgown. When picking out the dress her mother would be buried in, Mommy saw the old safe hidden in the back corner of the deep hall closet—a safe that had been in the mercantile that Grandma’s people had operated back in Wisconsin a generation before. Inside were various bankbooks that did not qualify her as rich, exactly, but would have kept her from the old-folks’ home for certain. Sitting there in the dark lockbox, though, all that these sequestered, invisible proceeds of the house sale kept her from were ten more springtimes in her beloved garden.
WHEN MOMMY WAS BORN TO HAROLD AND MARION, both in their thirties at the time their first and only child arrived, it was early November, and the next month they shopped together at the local nursery for baby’s first Christmas tree. It was a live, balled-and-burlapped spruce, not unlike the nastily aging ones I must soon relinquish here, the ones I planted when I first arrived as a weekend gardener. After enjoying the young Picea inside, all decorated and glittering, the new parents packed the ornaments away and gave it a prominent place in the yard, probably sheltering it in the garage until the ground was willing to accept the newcomer into the evolving landscape. I suspect the family’s very jealous and snappish fox terrier pissed on baby’s tree with regularity, besides its many attempts to grab directly onto baby. Before long a little playhouse, filled with child-sized furniture and scaled-down dishes and even a tea set, was built for the newest member of the family in the spruce’s increasing shadow.
I don’t know who planted the two big conifers that may be nearly as old as the house I live in, one a triple-trunk white cedar of some kind, the other the eastern red cedar I see from my big bed. The former has acquired such a girth that to accommodate the growing trunk over the years, an increasingly widening half-circle has been cut with a Sawzall into the roof overhang of the shed it stands beside. Only two inches’ more wiggle room remains before the shed will have to be moved—or perhaps the tree will move it for me. When the wind goes mad the little building does, too, creaking and almost wobbling with the currents as if it’s flapping some unsteady, untested wings, but not quite ready to fledge, or fly.
I don’t expect that anybody living within its view now knows who planted my mother’s first Christmas tree, either, but there it stands to this day, as does her playhouse more than eighty years later. Had Grandma Marion not moved on, I wonder if she would have taken down the spruce eventually, in favor of making room for more exciting things—any keen gardener would have, in spite of the considerable sentiment. I won’t cut out the unknown former owner’s conifers here, but those nasty quarter-century-old spruces that were my doing: They will be erased before another planting season here begins, that much I know.
I guess I place much higher valuations on other people’s treasures than I do on my own, but in the bigger picture of my grandma story, I am still having trouble with the final tabulations, which simply don’t add up: She sold her garden so that some bankbooks could sit for a decade in a closet. A not-so-special tree lived longer than expected in the deal.
LATE-NOVEMBER DAYS PRESENT THEMSELVES with peace and violence, often all at once—a peach-melba dawn sky is the backdrop for breakfast tartare. Whose organ meat is that left on the sisal mat out back, Jack? Can you not even wait a moment and watch the daybreak? But no, you are still on the raw diet, the vole-a-day health regimen you set for yourself in spring, and haven’t wavered from yet. Impressive; so few dieters stick with it.
Me? (You didn’t even bother to ask, oh cat of my heart.) I slept with a cracker last night. No, not some redneck type—I mean no offense to anyone in announcing this latest assignation, or strange bedfellow—but specifically a black-sesame rice crisp, one that had escaped when I devoured its companions in bed before slumping into slumber, salty-sweet black bits between my teeth. Sometimes we all need a little comfort, and some encouragement. Too many garden losses lately; too much very undelicious, indigestible global bad news. And then, as if the brightening sky heard that I could use a hug that the cat won’t offer, just as dawn breaks into fullness and Jack finishes off his last spoils, at least sparing me the cleanup, a giant rainbow frames the west view from right here in my reliable and most-loved chair. Is it actually a double? Yes. Yes.
IN SOME THINGS LONERISM BACKFIRES, like when the ladder needs steadying to get at the top of an errantly sprouting espalier, or a truckload of eight cubic yards of mulch is dumped by the far gate. A fresh year of catalogs are starting to arrive, and though ordering seeds is not heavy work, it is best not done alone, either; I have always had a companion for the task. My latest one, of considerable years’ duration, got it in his head to move to Oregon recently, for greener garden pastures, taking with him not just the in-person dimension of our friendship, but also access to the nearby greenhouse that was, of course, a perfect complement to the shopping we did together all that time.
“I’ll buy the tomato seeds if you’ll grow them,” the conversation with Andrew would always begin, as if he needed my ten- or fifteen-dollar annual enticement, when of course we never really paid careful mind to who bought what or really kept a running tab of our years-long botanical barter. It hardly mattered; what counted was the chance to look together, to compare notes, to react collaboratively to the possibilities—ooh! aah! ugh!—and eventually to relish the harvest (or to commiserate when something was a flop and there was no harvest, or to split the yield if only one of us got lucky). It was like one of those dinners out where you share two entrées. Delicious, and far more stimulating to the palate than supper alone at the bar.
I don’t get out much. But when I do, it’s usually because someone has been persistent, demonstrating more “pro” energy than I can muster “con,” typically over a prolonged period. Tod was like this, relentlessly and delightfully so. Thank heaven for the world’s Tods; may all sentient beings be visited by one when they are despairing, stuck, or overwhelmed—or when their seed-ordering companion has flown the coop.
He had arrived in my garden a few springs back, as many strangers do, on an open visiting day, with enthusiasm so contagious that I’d offered plants if he’d come back for them, since it was revealed he’s a close-by neighbor. He e-mailed, returned, and he went away again with garbage bags of Geranium macrorrhizum rhizomes and who knows what else—one woman’s trash bag holding another man’s treasure. I was even invited some time later to see my outcasts’ new adopted home, where they looked very happy but more than that: where I had a sighting of that precious but lately-for-me-elusive state of beginner’s mind. It was not because the garden looked beginner-ish at all—it was the spirit of the place, and of the gardener. As we walked around, I remembered the young woman who’d worked each weekend tirelessly, filled with eagerness and free of preconceptions, happy just to toil and try things—everything—and see what came of it.
In the visits since, he has told me of his own rites of garden passage: how weeds were the first reality check (especially for a weekend gardener, as he is now), and how the stage that followed was one of exploration—tentative, perhaps—before the letting go began with moving stuff around, suddenly unafraid whether it will die or not, releasing that presumed rather-safe-than-sorry form of exerting influence. Yesterday, we sat at his kitchen table surrounded by laptops and our two piles of paper catalogs and his big, orderly box of leftover seed packets.
“I’m going to get tomato seeds from that heirloom-tomato guy in Carmel, California—or whichever place has ‘Pink Accordion’,” he said across the heaps in my direction, and I was startled that both halves of that out-loud equation were unknown to me.
“What guy in Carmel?” I said, “and what is ‘Pink Accordion’?” Unwittingly by either party at the table, another session of horticultural therapy was being performed on this tired old soul. Apparently at my grown-up age it is not just safe, but also terribly sane, to talk to strangers.
Never stop wanting more plants. With the occasional glimpse of the garden through eyes that are fresh to possibilities, perhaps there is a chance I won’t.
WHY DO I GARDEN? I find myself stuck on that question, especially in the vulnerable hours when darkness grabs the day, and before another one shakes loose from its clutches. But is it really “Why do I garden?” or, stripping away down to the real question: Why did I pick gardening as my way of coping with my own “denial of death,” or whatever existential expression I label it with, my finitude-infinitude issues—the conversation between a body that won’t last as long as the mind attached to it imagines there are things to do-taste-smell-touch and places to be?
I am so happy here and now, and intend no darkness with this subject at all. But I notice that I am not the youngest person in the room anymore (a condition that seems to be becoming more chronic than acute!) and it gets me pondering. In And I Shall Have Some Peace There, the book I wrote when I first came to live full-time in the garden almost five years ago, I answered the “Why do I garden?” question thus: I garden because I cannot help myself.
The garden is my Temple of Fancy, to steal a name from a nineteenth-century department store in Albany, New York, not far from where I live and grow things today, a place I suppose stole it from the one at 34 Rathbone Place in London, which made a specialty of “genteel products for ladies”: prints and cards and such ephemera. (“Ephemera”—there’s that word again.) But as I dig, I am not looking for just pretty, fleeting pictures; I am no outdoor decorator; no. I am just another creature looking for the way through.
I find comfort here in my temple, in its reassuring monotony (think: “watching grass grow,” or the way that a spring follows each winter, and a summer surfaces after that). I find exhilaration—a reminder I am alive, but in that “waiting for another shoe to drop” way—in its times of total madness, in the unexpected and often unwanted dramas that it lays at my doorstep. I have been privileged to attend many births here, of new seasons, new crops, new creatures, and also many deaths.
I relish and even cultivate the moments of equanimity, of course, but sometimes—tilt—I get a little lost, or at least pensive, like the other afternoon, when I said it all out loud as best I could and a voice replied, bringing me back to earth:
“It’s why we do Savasana, the Corpse Pose, in yoga,” my writer friend Katrina was saying now over Skype (the contemporary incarnation of the fifth element, or ether) as I floated back into focus, “to practice the attitude of death, of our final surrender.”
Of course—and bam!—that’s it, that really is why I garden, too: to stare it in the face and fall to my knees, over and again. To keep chewing at the leaf, or burrowing, taking sustenance and refuge, and hopefully offering all the others around me some of it in return.