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Edited on Fri Apr-29-11 12:07 PM by bigtree
"All the wars of the world, all the Caesars, have not the staying power of a lily in a cottage garden."-- Reginald Farrer
It's been quite awhile since I've been in the thick of discussions here because my faltering finances haven't afforded me the opportunity to connect to the internet (and to DU) at home. I'm blogging from the library today because this is where I come to pay my mortgage and other bills online. I want to put aside the politics today and talk about my garden yard. That's the place which has received the benefit of my obsessive mind and my restless energy since I lost my home internet connection with the DU community in December.
It's been a nearly perfect Spring here in central Maryland and the garden yard where I've obsessed for some 12 years now has been the perfect vision of Easter with it's shocks of bright yellow sweet flag set against the stark white border of the variegated hostas and contrasted with the emerging greenery. The sunny, ever-yellow grass leads the eye up the slope to the house, settling on the rivaling yellow glow radiating from the massive kerria bushes blooming from the front to the back yard.
We've finally gotten a decent bloom out of our yard's first (deliberate) planting of tulips that we bought on sale late in the season last year and hurried them into the ground at the first thaw. We planted daffodils that we bought late last year in the same fashion and they've also managed to put on a modest show. I've done less trampling and fiddling with the perennials this year and have restricted myself to transplanting and moving some of the invasive bullies around the yard to maximize my inventory and fill out some bare spots.
The theme this year is color. I've put white, variegated hosta divisions beside the red-leafed loosestrife called 'firecracker'. Variegated lambium and yellow bleeding heart planted together with the firecracker are carrying on the golden glow as the kerria bushes fade. The firecracker will get a sprinkling profusion of little yellow flowers in July. The majority of the front yard is full of assorted daylillies and other perennials. The back yard if full of flowering bushes.
I want my garden to look like the ones in the hundreds of garden magazines I've saved over the years -- the magazines that I've been pouring over since the start of the new year to assuage my obsessive pining to plant something. You could find me most days after work sitting in the sun at the back door, medicinally pacified and inspired, staring at a photo of some garden somewhere and envisioning my own instead. I was smart enough to make a few videos of the garden in summer bloom and store them on my computer, so I could also be found kicking back to the sights and sounds of those early garden days. I'd round all of that obsession out with a handful of garden shows I collected on videotape over the years -- shows like The Victory Garden (old version), Karen Strobeam, Penelope Hobhouse, or Jeff's Garden. My favorite is the Victory Garden episode where Adrian Bloom interviews his father Alan who is responsible for introducing hundreds of perennials and practically founding the perennial movement. Alan is positively devastating with his full head of long, flowing white hair and his large hoop earrings. He's also a great inspiration for an obsessive, dedicated gardener like myself.
We bought our home in 1998 and immediately set out to transform the few plants that were lovingly established by the previous owners into a woodland paradise of our own. It's just an ordinary suburban plot of land, but it came with a dozen or so 30yr-plus trees which make growing anything an adventure. Of course, we've lost almost as many plants as we have growing now. We practically lived at the garden centers for a time and could regularly be seen arriving with seemingly endless truckloads of the latest crop of candidates for naturalizing around our woodland home. We held our first plant giveaway after our first major reorganization which left us with bulbs, bare roots and young sprouts to spare. We had saved almost every pot that our plants came in so we gathered up hostas, phlox, liriope, and every other plant that we couldn't find room for and produced a couple hundred starter plants to share with the community. It was a blast to see folks pull up and load up with a collection of plants to start or add to their own home landscape (more fun, still, to see folks grabbing plants like they were getting away with something). We held another similar, successful giveaway two years later and look forward to the next one.
It's probably a bit of a stretch to equate gardening with the politics here, but I can't help getting a little Chauncey (Chauncey Gardener - 'Being There' (1979), with Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine) about it all. Tending a garden is very much like tending to our own lives, as Sellers' character asserted in the film. We create this little ecosystem that we become responsible for, for better or worse. We devise the scheme and we do what it takes to see it through to completion and to sustain it into the future. Of course, there would be little for us to account for if we settled for a mostly barren lawn. That's the look of many of the homes surrounding my neighborhood, with their huge front lawns and their tiny back yards. Most of the chemicals used to preserve and maintain those green carpets end up in the lakes and streams which are within hiking distance along the network of paths that grace my beautiful town. Still, nothing ventured from those folks, garden-wise, nothing risked neglecting or mismanaging.
Once you've created your plant filled environment, however, you are bound to their success or demise. There's no questioning the beneficial effect of careful tending and nurturing of a yard full of plants. The wildlife which adopts the environment you've created becomes dependent on your beneficence -- as do the succeeding generations of fauna which are conceived and delivered into your garden home. Bees and other insects find spots nearby to winter over. Hummingbirds and other fowl will make your garden a regular stop on their essential feeding tours. For some unfortunate gardeners, deer and rabbits make their garden paradises their own personal feeding stations and devastatingly devour the bounty to the ground. There are consequences to the decision to establish a garden. Once adopted by our living counterparts, the future condition of that garden becomes almost essential.
That's a bit like the way I view our community at Democratic Underground. We gather here, either deliberately compelled or bidden, and become reliant on the nourishment from the wellspring of activism, action, and advocacy that's been established here. I daresay that the community outside of DU can also become dependent on the diligence and effective management of the politics we intend to influence from our community of concerns.
Most important to these 'gardens' we establish are our volunteers. I mentioned my love for the invasive plants, if only because of a lack or scarcity of plants which can weather my shady yard and flourish. Volunteers (both here and in my yard) are a gift. Sure, they always have the potential to become unruly or to overwhelm other additions to the landscape. But, they also are best positioned to develop and grow into stalwart contributors to our environment. I came to DU in 2003 as a volunteer; my writing and advocacy fed by Bush's hubris. I found some sunlight and encouragement from folks here and produced a few books and a couple hundred articles before all but disappearing from the landscape in December.
However, like the lamium and bleeding hearts which appear and disappear in my garden every growing season wherever they are advantaged and able, I have strong roots here which should allow me to reemerge again here one day as a more visible force, fighting for the changes we are struggling to effect in our nation and our own lives. In the meantime, keep the sunlight streaming in for me. I'll be poking through, from time to time, to advantage myself of some of DU's nourishing activity until I can reestablish myself here and provide a little sustaining light of my own. For now, it's back to obsessing on my garden yard.
Cheers and best regards to everyone.
Some Trees
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though
Speech were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I (and others)
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness,
we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles,
a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light,
and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents
seem their own defense.
- John Ashbery
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