Successions

Being mortal and possessed of the ability to think of life well beyond our own existence, we humans have the potential of becoming obsessed with that which succeeds our presence on earth.

And so we constitute elaborate rules for the selection of successors. Primogeniture ensures passage of your worldly possessions and estates to your first born: in the Norman and English traditions, males only, or, in the French, the first born no matter the sex. British monarchs can't be Roman Catholic. The ulema in Saudi Arabia must approve all royal successions. North Korean leaders must be sons of the current leader. And so on and so forth.

And we invent indicators to publicize preliminary results (or non-results) along the decision making process. Black smoke from the Vatican signals failure to reach agreement on a papal successor, while white smoke signifies confirmation that the Council of Cardinals need not be fed a diet of water and bread to induce agreement, as happened in 1268. For nearly three years, willful cardinals apparently considered too many fallible potential successors to occupy the ostensibly infallible position of Pope. It wasn't until the roof was removed from the room in which they were sequestered that they came to agreement.

Lest that high political body charged with maintaining international peace and security be trumped by the cardinals' monochromatic scheme, the UN Security Council in 1991 introduced color-coded ballots (red for permanent members and white for the non-permanent) as indicators of the succession, er, I mean election process of that other most famous singular position in world consciousness, the UN Secretary-General, that takes place in the Council's New York chambers every 5 years 

And we constitute rituals to see us through succession: recitations of solemn oaths, consecrations, marches, processionals, coronations, speeches, interments, and all the pomp and circumstance we can muster. So ingrained is the ritual that even the creators of Star Trek felt inclined to include a Rite of Succession, a Klingon ritual, to govern the succession of leadership of the Empire.

And of course, when we can't agree or when the rules don't quite fit the circumstances, we revert to the next best thing: violence, as in wars of succession.

And many there have been: "The Anarchy" (a civil war in England and Normandy that erupted after the 1135 death of Henry I's only legitimate son and his attempt to install his only daughter; the conflict finally ended in 1153); those of Champagne (1216-1222) and of Flanders and Hainault (1244-1257); the first (1383-1385), the second (1580-1583), and the third (1828-1834) Wars of the Portuguese Successions; of Breton (1341-1364), Lithuania (1431-1435), and Stettin (1464-1472); the Incan (1529-1532) and the Mantuan (1628-1631); and the Spanish (1701-1713), the Polish (1733-1738), the Austrian (1740-1748), and the Bavarian (1778-1779).

Goodness.

Our battles over succession are, thankfully, now, usually, less violent.

And so now we come to treat succession as entertainment (so indicative of our psychology, no?): who shall succeed the current president, or become the next Politburo chief (a major question amongst Kremlinologists when there was a Soviet Union)? Who shall marry the prince? Do Will and Kate have sex? Will they produce an heir? Can we see her rounding belly just yet? Likewise, the media used to make a big deal over the Miss America and Miss Universe succession pageants, but now commentators (and fans) are content to squabble over the NCAA or World Series championships or some other such succession games, and games they are.

In the literary world, the issue is not without notice. Robert Silvers, 82, stands as the longest serving editor in chief of any major publication. He is the Kim Il Sung of the publishing world, though, thankfully, sans official lies, purges, and nuclear crises.

Yesterday, The New York Times speculated about a potential succession crisis in the halls of the famed  New York Review of Books. There are currently no identified successors, albeit rumored ones. Even after the death of his co-editor, Barbara Epstein, in 2006, no plans were made to insure the editorial succession of one of the great learned publications.

That article reminded me of my own looming succession battle: The War of the Scotch Broom Succession.

You see, the Lena Scotch Broom in my sun garden has reached the end of its 10-15 year life-span. It looks dead. Compared to the one in my backyard garden  (which at this time of year receives a full day of sun, but once the maple leafs out only gets morning to very early afternoon sun as is looking very fit), the front garden Broom appears brown and dessicated.

Of course, Lena grew too tall and thus overshadowed what was supposed to be her Boxwood backdrop. But I could not move her; no. She was too delicate (appearances are deceiving! She is one tough gal!), and too gorgeous to fiddle with. So I left her, ignoring the aesthetic blight she created.  Love really is blind.
 
But now that she is, I am convinced, dead, I see the shortcomings of her placement.  Yet until I decide something, I cannot remove her browned bones. Gone will be the sound of her maracas--unexpected musical instruments given her Scottish ancestry. But that's why I loved her so: she seduced by surprising.

Gone will be her citrus melon and yellow flowers.  Gone will be her smart accompaniment to the electric blues of Siberian Iris.


Perhaps indecision really is the insulator against violence: why battle, over what is there to battle, if one cannot make up one's mind?


All I know is that the succession will not be bloody, though it may be not pretty. Brown in the garden?  Not a color one really takes to celebrating. But celebrate I must--or prepare the ground for battle--until I decide something, anything.

UPDATE: Yes, battle lines are being drawn.  Might Provence Lavender, which actually is doing splendidly well in her current space, take over the seat once occupied by Lena?  (She has outgrown her location and thus may need to be resituated.) Might Kalmia latifolia Minuet (Mountain Laurel) make a lateral move: s/he (?) needs more sun. Or might a new interloper be introduced?

Stay tuned.

Lena Concertante in D Minor

Okay, that title was all embellishment, but the effect is the same.

Quite unexpectedly, as I watered the parched front garden, I reached between the Dwarf Fountain Grass and the Lena Scotch Broom to wet the Northern Sea Oats Grass (Chasmanthium latifolium) and heard a distinctive maraca-like rattle: the black, pea-like pods of Lena emitted an unexpected Latina sound, a counterpoint to the Blues performance of Verbena and the Euphorbias on the other side of the garden. A veritable international music festival—right here in my garden—could now be added to Wilmington’s rather impressive (and surprising, for a small “city”) list of summer festivals!

My purist critic, of course, will no doubt remind that the maraca hardly constitutes a concertante (I know that, but I rather like the aural and visual juxtaposition of “Lena” and “Concertante”), and most likely its musical emission is not in the key of D minor. So why propagate such falsities?

In her afterword to Katharine White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden, Jamaica Kinkaid mused that “a real gardener knows nothing at all of garden design; the design of the garden comes about through love. Things have been chosen, not with any regard for theory, but from love of a particular plant, an obsession with a particular plant, a particular feeling for a particular plant.” Real gardening actualizes the “meandering spirit, deliberate and haphazard, carefree and yet not, around and in a space large or small, with the world in mind, and also nothing at all in mind.”

Put differently, real gardening is an exercise in unplanned delight!

Thus my Scottish Lena, instead of donning the bagpipe, plays her Latin American maracas, which mimic the haphazardly placed Northern Sea Oats Grass’s panicles of flat, green flowerheads that shimmer and undulate and rustle in the breeze in a sort of North American rubato.  

And as for D Minor, well…How fitting! Beethoven composed his inimitable 9th—officially, “Op. 125 Choral,” but perhaps more colloquially known as the “Ode to Joy” in honor of the symphony’s fourth and final movement which is set to Schiller’s eponymous poem and is belted out by 4 soloists and a chorus)—in the key of D Minor, a move than made Bruckner apprehensive about writing his own 9th in the same key (though he did it anyway). If inimitable, it nevertheless inspires, as it did Dag Hammarskjöld, the 2nd Secretary-General of the United Nations.

The Philadelphia Orchestra performed Beethoven’s Ninth—the SG’s favorite—on UN Day following  Hammarskjöld’s tragic death in a plane crash. He devoted his poetic 24 October 1960 UN Day address to analogizing the Charter to the symphony. “Beethoven,” he asserted, “has given us a confession and a credo, which we, who work within and for [the UN], may well make our own. We take part in the continuous fight between conflicting interests and ideologies which so far has marked the history of mankind, but we may never lose our faith that the first movements one day will be followed by the fourth movement. In that faith we strive to bring order and purity into chaos and anarchy. Inspired by that faith we try to impose the laws of the human mind and of the integrity of the human will on the dramatic evolution in which we are all engaged and in which we all carry our responsibility.”

So perhaps it inspires because it is inimitable.

D Minor is the scale of counterpoint and chromaticism, and therefore an appropriate key for the garden sinfonia concertante. The flatness of the rattle and unexpected sounds, the juxtaposition of hues of green and a myriad of textures, combine to produce an elegance of spirit that few designs, if any, can rival. Kinkaid captures the point well: “[I]n the beginning was the Word; and then the Eden, the garden, among the last things to be created. After that, the whole drama began.”

Color in the Garden: Orange

In my estimation, orange is an other-worldly color, which may explain its sparse, fleeting appearance in my gardens. Growing up, unlike so many other young boys I presume, I was cognizant that things could have ended up quite differently (and indeed I wanted them to be). We could be speaking Dutch.

But, like many imaginations, it could not have been that way. The Dutch, led by the House of Orange-Nassau, faced more pressing realities, being at first embroiled in an eight decade revolt against Spanish rule. The English, feeling threatened by Dutch domination of the seas and its respectable, far-flung collection of colonial and trading outposts, challenged the United Provinces in a series of wars, and took New Amsterdam in 1664, christening it New York. Having briefly retaken New York (1673-1674) and renamed in New Orange, the Dutch were obviously seduced more by nutmeg than by beaver, and decided Suriname represented that orgiastic future it so imagined and thus relinquished, by the Treaty of Westminster, New Orange to the English. The rest, as they say, is history.

One might muse, then, that orange is paradoxically the color of victory and the color of defeat, the color of imagination and the color of reality. Orange bedecks, indeed cloaks itself in an aura of unexpected juxtaposition; orange challenges us to reconcile the vision with the fact, the ought with the is, just as the color itself reconciles the vibrancy and intensity of red with the seductiveness and cheeriness of yellow.

My youthful imaginations, however, were of no match for reality (or perhaps reality was no match for my imaginations) and into those imaginations I increasingly retreated until living there became quite untenable.

And so I find vestiges of a life once lived in orange and with its associations. I do not wish to return to that imaginary life, yet I welcome reminders of parts of it (I refer not to ancestral callings but, for the reader, more obliquely to a peculiar lived history, which each of us has, and some of us wish were not so). Thus I retain my Dutch language tapes, disused and tucked away as they are in a dusty corner of a closet. I reacted with impassioned levity as I read Russell Shorto’s riveting The Island at the Center of the World, for it transported me back in time to the place in which I wanted to Be, free of my factual burdens and liberated from my fictions, and actualized the imaginary world I desperately tried to create in my own New Netherland. Lena Scotch Broom makes her dramatic spring appearance—her orange deeply rooted in this world—and the orange day lilies, now in full bloom, follow several weeks later, pairing nicely in an echo of the former Dutch flag with my fireworks-quality Verbena.

And Orange Marmalade hosta: there it is, not quite orange, but nominally connecting me throughout the gardening season to the brighter shades of that haunting color that constituted my past.

Public Confession #1

I am, well, “easy.” You know, to put it indelicately, a whore (or, more technically I suppose, a giggolo). There. I admitted it—publicly, no less. Gardeners all over the world know exactly to what I refer.

You begin with a plan, a design as the experts call it. For me, it was blue: a blue themed garden that would complement the stately, semi-detached brick city row-house that my partner and I own: three stories, formal features including dentil moldings, bay windows with hexagonal hand-cut slate siding, pillars once adorned with Corinthian flourishes but now barren, yet elegant in their simplicity. Blue, I concluded, would accentuate the steel blue grey of the slate and the accompanying woodwork. And so I began my quest for blue flowers and blue and silver-hued leafed plants. Twice, the ghosts of gardens past rewarded me: one day a blue columbine emerged from the soil, the tiny seedling developing into a boisterous plant. Another day, I spied a tiny leaf that I immediately identified as hearty blue geranium. My plan, my design, was coming to fruition—both by rational design and, improbably, by divine gift.

But then my promiscuity reared its ugly head: there, in the corner of the garden shop, spring 2009, the new love of my life appeared. A dizzying array of delicious, melon and lemon diminutive flowers covering the wispy, grass-like outstretched arms of Lena Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparius) beckoned me (I bought two), and she found her way into my blue garden. And this year, the lithe masculinity of Kerria japonica pleniflora seduced me with his almost chartreuse stems, promising me an abundance of bright yellow flowers for my backyard shade garden in late spring and early summer. I desire him, think of him every day, and once this early spring cold snap ends, I shall go and claim him as all mine (unless some other whore got to him first).

So the best laid (um…that wasn’t intended) plans of men are, well, un-laid. Gardening is a process, never a final destination. It is properly speaking an act, a performance, a performative. Designs work, true; formal and semi-formal gardens are, necessarily, wholly reliant on them. Yet even in the most cultivated of gardens—I refer not to the elegant and staid English and French formal affairs, but yes, to the uber-austerity of the Zen-inspired Japanese garden—there remains the element of chance, the element of passion, that permits the unexpected to occur: the single cobalt Japanese iris that, perhaps by dint of squirrel, became separated from its kin and randomly appeared in an outcropping of carefully arranged rock. With all due respect to the English and French (save for those ever popular English cottage style gardens), that iris would be plucked for the cacophony and discordance that it introduces in its indiscriminateness. But the monk, the Zen, the Buddhist, and the garden whores amongst us would look upon this haphazard occurrence and smile…and most likely wonder: “is there more where this came from?”