On Vocabulary

I pulled back the curtains in the study this morning (our "This Old House" exudes its charms this time of year in the form of drafts, and curtains are a handy way to block the more egregious of them) to discover a rear shade garden awash in shades of yellow--the populist color, as Christopher Lloyd dubbed it.

At this time of year, I can't imagine the eye NOT attuned to lighting and coloration which change daily. Yet our modern, busy lives increasingly orient us away from the spectacle of the world and towards the entrapped, elusive light of the screen.

But there it was: an overnight metamorphosis providing the bookend to the 2013 gardening season. If we began with spring yellows, we end with autumnal ochres.

The Solomon's Seal--comparatively, the least exuberant of the garden yellows at the moment--caught my attention, for its transfiguration has only just begun, its flavescent leaves suspended just for today in a curious interregnum as viridity yields to heraldic gold.

In less than a minute the following happened.

I wanted to jot a haiku in its honor, but Polygonatum just seemed, visually, too bulky a word, even if, syllabically, it conveniently satisfied first line requirements.

I then began to think of (or rather look up) the diversity of words we have to capture one color and its multiple hues and shades:

aurulent, chartruese, citreous, citrine, flavescent, gamboge, goldenrod, icteritious, isabelline (like graying-yellow hair we hope to avoid), jessamy, luteolous, luteous, lutescent, melichrous (like honey), meline, ochre, ochroleucous, or, primrose, sulphureous, tawny, tilleul, topaz, vittelary, and xanthic.

What language!

I spied a fulvous aging white port  in the lower leaves of Carolina Allspice, which reminded me of a nearly-forgotten bottle and my time in Porto in 2011.

There was a wheaten sunset supplied by a potted Sum and Substance Hosta at the base of Mount (Sawtooth) Aucuba, while on the other side, was a rising icterine sun in the form of Kerria japonica 'Golden Guinea'. A most pleasing microcosm of our world.

And then there was the white.

No: not the white from the errant flowers of the leatherleaf viburnum (Viburnun rhytidophyllum) or the few remaining chrysanthemums or even the Camellia sassanqua.

No.

This was the white of falling snow: one bookend overlapping with another.

This is our world: a panoply, a diversity, a richness, a mutability that we dismiss by calling it cyclical (as if to say, "if you miss it this year, it will happen again next"). How much of it goes increasingly unnoticed? 

Wearing of the Green?

Kermit the Frog's initial lamentations eventually morph into an acceptance and celebration of the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane. He teaches us how to look, not simply see, just as we should learn how to listen and not merely hear.

So it is not without a bit of irony that on this day of celebration of all things chlorochrous (perhaps the same irony that green robbed from blue, the color traditionally associated with St. Patrick) that I look to other colors that begin to permeate the landscape--colors that not just punctuate the monotony of omnipresent green, but really highlight its variations in ways that we can more appreciate its distinctiveness and peculiarities.

An early morning walk in the garden revealed an astonishing juxtaposition of the amaranthine ajuga against a field of prasinous moss.

Last year's struggle with the placement of Citronelle Heuchera, if I may, ended with the right decision:  the perfect accompaniment to the grey-green blades of Indigo Bearded Iris.

My Sexless, er, I mean Sawtooth Aucuba japonica Serratifolia displays its own sense of humor: a playful protrusion of chartreuse leaf encased florets against its leathery gray leaves that will soon open to reveal Imperial (Tyrian) Purple.

The flaming reds of the Japanese maple leaf buds herald a new season, a true vanguard of the revolution,

and the color is reflected elsewhere in the garden, closer to the ground, in the guise of the Britt Marie Crawford Ligularia

and, nearby, the (albeit differently colored) candy-cane like spikes of a Diamond Tiara Hosta.

Not to be outdone, blue must, too, make an appearance: a forced appearance, if you ask me. The Heart-Leaf Brunnera, which usually does not sport flowers until it is 5 times the size it is now (at least 6 inches tall), was compelled to bring the sky down, treated as it were with week-long temperatures in the 70s. Who can lament a cerulean blue in the garden, even if it is premature?

Sexlessness: Sawtooth Aucuba and My Lack of Babies

The Huffington Post featured an unusual article this morning on the sexless lives of the Japanese. Yes, sexless. Or virtually sexless. Or becoming sexless.

Concerned about its long declining birthrate, its aging population, and its subsequent population imbalance, the Japanese Government commissioned a study and found that a startling 36.1% of teenage boys (more than twice the 2008 figure of 17.5%) and 59% of teenage girls (up from 47%) had little to no interest in sex, and even, in some cases, despised fornication! (How could you despise fornication without having done it?!) Astonishing!

The cause or causes? It appears Japan's nearly 20 year long recession (and more pertinently, its "Lost Decade"--yes, they even named the period...that should give an indication of either how bad the situation has been or how deeply the Japanese have been psycho-sexually disturbed by their declining global potence or their rising impotence...sorry, I couldn't resist) has had its effect. Teenage boys and young men over 20 cited  the perceived financial burden of raising a family in "difficult" economic times. (Wow: isn't that what condoms are for? I think manga; Pachinko--those Tokyo Pachinko parlors were always full, no matter the time of day; and video games might deserve some of the blame.) Difficult economic times, we may deduce, have burdened the already married: 40.8% of married couples reported a lack of sex in the last month due to "work fatigue," a "reluctance to have sex after childbirth," and an attitude of "we can't be bothered."

Sex is so utterly political--and economic.


So what, pray tell, does sex have to do with the garden?

Well, dear reader, hold onto your hats.

An acquaintance and his partner recently adopted a baby girl, and while it is true that I am happy-to-my-core for them, my self-absorbed demon began to lament a lack of children in my own life. I've been thinking about this for several years, and Viet and I have occasionally discussed the issue. But now, my biological clock ticks more loudly than I could have imagined.

And as a diversion I look to Sawtooth Aucuba. Sexless? Babyless? No wonder, with a name like Sawtooth, who would want to have sex with it?! Can you imagine?! OUCH!

Once again, I think in tangents... Once again, I think dirty thoughts...

But, the truth is, my Sawtooth Aucuba is sans offspring. Read any gardening guide and it will tell you that Sawtooth Aucuba will "produce scarlet berries from fall to spring." A wondrous addition to my shade garden, with winter interest to boot!

Yet, I have no berries. Barren.

Of course, to produce babies (not adopting babies, mind you, but making them, which is, well, sexier than adoption, and though messy in its own right, making babies probably isn't as messy as adopting them...goodness, the paperwork!), we need a male and a female, and I confess that I do not know what I have. It's not as simple as looking under the hood, if you know what I mean. And flowers in the spring will not be of any assistance. Androecious plants produce (male) flowers (pollen but no seeds); and Gynoecious plants produce (female) flowers (seeds but no pollen). You'd think nature would have color coded these things by now...

But, my Sawtooth Aucuba is, technically, Aucuba japonica Serratifolia. Japonica, as in, "from Japan." As in, sexless. Now I understand.

Perhaps my lack of babies has little to do with me (though with my luck, I'd end up buying all female or all male plants, and still, no berries, though we might have quite the orgy!).

Perhaps it has everything to do with the Japanese.

** Written with the knowledge that I'll never be Secretary of State, and so can risk offending entire countries, even if the offense is unintentional.** 

Lamentations

In Judaism, Eikhah, or the Book of Lamentations, is recited on Tisha B’Av (the 9^th of the month of Av, which usually falls in mid-to late July), the solemn holiday that marks the destruction of not one, but the two great temples in Jerusalem. Talk about bad luck.

Bad luck is not usually a theme one wants to entertain at the beginning of a new year, but, be relieved, bad luck is not what is at stake here. Lamentations is at issue: my lamenting over the temporary loss—even the intangibility—of the garden.

During these times I find I most need the space of the garden, the outlet, the alternative activity that provides a room to contemplate undisturbed while working the soil with my bare fingers, or to feel nothing but the presence of a nature that is only marginally under my influence, or to recognize that I do something—something else that provides rewards of a different sort.

Snow for a time covered the moribund brown that has descended upon this mid-Atlantic earth and provided a more appealing ubiquity, even as it reminded us of being entrapped (always temporarily) in winter’s snare. But several warm days and a period of rain removed all but two minor mounds of snow in my garden, and we look out again at blanched greens and at brown, the color we usually love, but the one color that, during winter, mocks itself.

Now, we may lament, and we may feel sorrow, and we may feel the longing. And, to stave off the sadness, we may sift through the plant and seed catalogues and be seduced by the sale prices and the proliferation of color. (Yes, dear reader, I have my Spring Hill sale catalogue and a packet of “desires” sitting to my right: Hosta Tokudama and Voodoo Lily, White Christmas Rose Hellebore for my late winter garden and Toad Lily for autumn color, and Wintergreen groundcover with its edible red berries, among so many others.)

But we must also recall, like the Book of Lamentations, that even in our sorrows we must recognize and nurture the seeds of hope. The Book, it is presumed, was written by survivors of the respective destructions and attempted annihilations of peoples. Of course the book reflects their sorrows and their angers, their hatreds and their traumas. But the book was written by survivors.

So I take heed and apply the lesson to the garden in winter. We survive, and to take the pain out of the months in which the garden is nearly intangible, we must plan accordingly. For all of us small space gardeners, we haven’t the luxury of planting large winter-interest bushes or blooming witch-hazels, and so we must be more inventive, more creative, in our approach.

Wintergreen is a lovely ground cover for the shade that provides year-round interest. Its pinkish flowers in the spring give way to delightfully red berries in the autumn which, apparently, songbirds love. I haven’t Wintergreen in my garden but it is surely on my must-have list.

What I do have provides a modicum of hope for the upcoming garden season.

Sawtooth Aucuba japonica Serratifolia (Serrated Japanese Laurel), offering springtime promise in the guise of lime green new growth tips,

  

and Holly Fern which, though a bit trampled by the snow-pack (and the workmen at my house), offers robust and lovely contrast against the browned landscape, 

and the Autumn Fern, which is fetching against a backdrop of the dried remnants of the Nikko Blue Hydrangea,

and Firepower Nandina which, in contrast to its Nandina domestica cousin, does not offer bright red berries, but bright red (or scarlet) foliage throughout the winter,

and Pieris japonica, whose tendrils of flower buds cannot help but elicit a smile, and an upwelling of hope and heightened anticipation,

and, finally, in the front sun garden, Euphorbia x martini Rudolph Waleuphrud which, honestly, sported very red tips yesterday but today must have donned a more sullen posture in the midst of an impending snowstorm.

So, fellow gardeners, this is our quest: to find more winter-interest plants which move beyond the conifers, and to situate them in the garden in all of the right places--which is to say in our line of vision through windows. Why? Because when we begin to lament and wail, we simply move our fattening bodies to the window and witness that life does continue, hope remains, and soon we shall be as dirty as some of my thoughts as expressed in this blog.

At One with the Garden in Winter

For nearly three-quarters of the year, we commune with the garden. Those are blissful times: times of activity and growth, experimentation and familiarity, rejuvenation and repose.

Late autumn to early spring bring quieter times: times of lamentation, times of a different sort of repose, and times of planning (with all those garden and seed catalogues coming our way, how could one resist the urge to chart and plan the spring and summer garden?).

But winter brings with it a different kind of opportunity—an opportunity that all gardeners must heed. It is the opportunity to study the architecture of space.

 

Winter lays bare the beds, the garden rooms, the hedges, the walkways, and the walls. But so exposed are the parts that makeup each. Take this walkway, for instance. This dusting of snow accentuates the shapes of the stones. Here I see a shrunken Egypt and an elongated Sinai. Two stones below or toward the foreground we see undulations caused by millennia of successive waves—a reminder of a past so alien and almost unimaginable.

I see the stone walls that outline my beds have sunk into the ground by at least 4 inches. Height recedes. Verticality morphs into an unwelcome horizontality.

Frost-induced reduction of the ajuga makes stark the sinuous walls. My fetishistic collection of rocks once again appear, their herbaceous screens having retreated in the wake of winter’s onset. And the redesign of the east side shade garden bed becomes more apparent as only the anchor specimen plants—the Sawtooth Aucuba japonica Serratifolia (Serrated Japanese Laurel), Kerria japonica (which I moved from the heavily shaded southwest corner), and the Nikko Blue Hydrangea—are left to inhabit the winter garden, accented only by the improbable, preternatural greens of the Autumn, Christmas, and Holly ferns.

And today, indoors, despite the cold and the frozen ground, I live in the garden and commune with it. The window wells are being insulated, and the windows reinstalled (which means I shall live for the next few days sans windows in particular parts of the house). Nothing separates me from the garden, and I feel the same cold the plants feel. Even for me, this is too close for comfort in the winter garden. 

On Strange Coincidences

Are coincidences anything but strange?

Intuitively, yes. Even Lord Byron in Don Juan said so. But according to statistical analysis, the answer to that question is “no.”

To illustrate, the birthday paradox refers to the 50% probability that 2 people in a randomly assembled group of 23 people share the same birthday; that probability jumps to 99% in a group of 57 people. Interesting on one level to be sure, but leave it to the quantitatively inclined to rob life of its intuitive attractions and seeming mysteries. Kill joys. Sorry, dear colleagues.  

In my world, I experienced three pleasant coincidences this week (I now hesitate to call them “strange” as did Lord Byron). On Tuesday, my wallet was stolen. After replacing several of the IDs, I mused to Viet that it would be wonderful if someone contacted me to tell me s/he found it. “Wishful thinking” was his response. Well, after waiting in line for hours at DMV and running around (albeit in the same building) to secure a new University of Delaware ID and pay the insulting replacement fee (150% more than DMV!), we returned home to learn that, lo and behold, someone did indeed find the wallet, intact and all items present!

On Thursday, my friend D wrote on her Facebook page that she found a 1929 Buffalo Nickel amongst her pocket change. This is an incident worthy of publicizing in an of itself, but was made all the more incredible by the coincidental find of a 1929 Wheat Penny in the backseat of my car--a backseat that no one had sat in for well over 6 weeks.

Finding the penny and learning soon thereafter about D's numismatic discovery was actually the 3rd coincidence of the week, and was a result of the 2nd, I am convinced. On Wednesday I wrote of the need and desire to renovate my east side shade bed, and identified 3 architectural plants that could tolerate dry shade and provide year-round interest. But, alas, my local garden centers did not carry those plants.

Yesterday, I visited my preferred Wilmington garden center, Old Country Gardens, to treat myself to “a little happy” as Viet is out of town for the next week and a half. And there I came upon pleasant coincidence #2: Sawtooth Aucuba japonica Serratifolia (Serrated Japanese Laurel). Granted, it is not Aucuba japonica crassifolia, the very plant I mentioned, but it is close enough! (For the record, I also purchased a Solange peony cultivar, which is a Chinese double type white, for the front sun bed.) Perhaps the penny was stuck to the bottom of the Sawtooth Aucuba.

I knew exactly where to put my perfect new find: right in the center of the bed. But now I prevaricate. My friend Melinda commented that the bed needs something vertical—why, with New York constantly on my mind, did I not think of verticality as the spatial solution? (Hypothesis: because I was thinking aesthetically, not spatially.)

So dear readers, have you any ideas for a vertical dry shade loving plant that can, once it reaches a certain height, tolerate approximately 2 hours of non-consecutive sunlight in the springtime before the trees leaf out? I do not want evergreens, as the neighbor’s towering evergreen hedgerow provides the shade for the bed, and it just seems so…well…boring. I could plant Oak Leaf Hydrangea or Nandina, thus replicating themes in the back yard garden spaces and hence unifying them, but I’d like to do something different. I could move my beloved Kerria japonica Golden Guinea from its current location, which it does not seem to like and which apparently served as a smorgasbord while I was away to a few million insects (the plant is so pathetic looking I shall not even photograph it). That would offer verticality in addition to year round color thanks to its chartreuse stems, and import lovely springtime yellow flowers to the space—that is, if it survives.

The possibilities are endless.

And so too are the probabilities of endless possibilities.

At least that’s what statistics tell me.