Color in the Garden: White

I am often struck by the infusion of color in the high drama that is international relations: white papers, green parties, orange revolutions, and purple slates reside next to less attractive invocations of color such as red scares, blue ants, black lists, and yellow peril. To wit, in my previous entry, I may have identified an entirely new kind of “yellow peril”—the kind that compels us to do naughty things (like steal a tulip or, argue that “really, officer, the light was yellow when I entered the intersection,” which prompts the response, “So, would you rather have me write you up for speeding through the intersection, which you did, or running a red light, which it was when you left the intersection?”). Yeah, yellow is the color of contradiction: caution, slow down; or speed up and hope you don’t get caught.

I also mused that divinity itself must be responsible for reintroducing every spring the loveliness of yellow. Yet yellow is not the color of the divine; it is but a product of the divine. We just need to learn how to negotiate our uses of and responses to yellow. If yellow is the color of contradiction, the color of human frailty, then white is the uber-color, the untouchable (guys: wear a white suit to a fancy soiree and you’ll understand what I mean). White symbolizes not royalty, whose color is purple, but, by cultural association, divinity itself (whether white represents purity, or serves as the color of mourning, the divine and the afterlife are neatly, crisply, encapsulated into the breathtaking magnitude of this color and, by extension, even the most limited appearance of white in the garden).

Immediately, we conjure images, perhaps even blankets, of white flowers: snowdrops, crocuses, paper whites, alyssum, phlox, lilies, and sundry other lovely flowers. This white Siberian iris stands alone in my garden, a valiant beacon in a luxurious sea of green, a peace offering, a lone beauty, a stunning reminder that above all human frailty, beyond all the reach of all impropriety, stands perfection. Whether perfection is divine, or divinity is perfection I’ll leave to the reader; suffice to note that the triangulations of my iris (“my iris;” how haughty! How human!) could not have been produced by anything less than the divine exaltations of nature herself.

And then there is the brief spell of the white feather hosta, whose white gradually turns to a soft cream and then a diluted pale green. We often associate color with flowers—a natural association to be sure, but a somewhat narrow one given the various hues of leaves, not to mention their diverse textures and shapes. Perhaps more a function of my indecision rather than my intellectual predispositions or aesthetic principles, some of my garden beds are more experimental: working hypotheses of aesthetic design and the consequence of impulsive seductions and random flirtations in the garden shop. This white feather hosta has thus far served me well; she glows. All visitors to my gardens immediately look at her; not even the serenity of the Buddha elicits a first glance, for her fluorescence immediately arrests the eyes.

I accept that commandment: start with me, the white feather hosta demands, then look around. For divinity makes only brief appearances in my garden: the paper-whites (which somehow, for some reason, do not to me speak in the vernacular of the divine); the white Siberian iris (thank you, Aunt Annie); the white feather hosta; and, much later in the season, a few white chrysanthemums. I opt not to infuse my garden with white, but rather with brief experiences with it, and with anticipations of the divine in the form of foliage: White Christmas hosta (in front of the garden Buddha) and Liberty hostas, among some others. The lemon scented white flowers of the Sum-and-Substance hosta evoke divinity in mid-summer, and positively glow at dusk and dawn.

But I have opted to keep the divine at bay. Perhaps this is a function of my aborted blue theme and subsequent inability to fully embrace a mix of colors in my garden. Or, perhaps more philosophically, my decision reflects my imperfectability, my inability to imitate, to approach, divinity. As I write this, I feel a sense a wabi, and I am sadly happy, comforted by my perfect imperfectability.

Color in the Garden: Yellow

Yesterday at dusk I took a break from life and sat at the intersection of Allen and Stanton Streets in the Lower East Side of New York and began to read Vita Sackville-West’s A Joy of Gardening. On cue, as I turned the page to the opening essay, “The beginnings of revival,” I witnessed a curious incident so full of irony.

In an effort to beautify the city, tremendously large planters have been situated in the Allen Street median along with some rather comfortable deep red benches and seats. Most of the planters contained generous amounts of yellow tulips, their blooms perfectly synchronized. The vibrant yellow complemented the green paint of the bicycle lanes on either side of the median, as well as the attractive red seating (yes, city gardening involves so much more than plants). A middle aged man walked across the street and suddenly stopped at the planter nearest me and quite self-consciously and methodically snatched a yellow tulip from the planter, even being so careful as to break the stem off at its base just above dirt line. As he turned, an elderly woman who was rushing to catch the bus across the street, bumped into him. She apologized, and he replied, “control yourself.”

Ah, what yellow compels us to do!

If divinity itself is responsible for the appearance of yellow in the early spring garden, then humankind is responsible for muddling the certitude of its cheer. “Nature’s first green is gold” (a variance of yellow, no?) so Frost mused, though many a gardener friend will be quick to point out that purple crocuses and white snowdrops appear well before the cheery daffodil. (Side note: most often in Delaware I see purple and white crocuses, but there are yellow crocuses: Crocus ancyrensis, C. chrysanthus, and C. falvus…which reminds me I never did plant those crocus bulbs I received spring 2009).

If blue anchors the sky in the garden, yellow anchors the sun. Spring yellows—crocuses, tulips, daffodils, narcissus, forsythia—greet and presage the abundance that awaits us. Summer yellows—yarrow, Coreopsis (pictured), Golden Ray Ligularia--both mellow us from heat-induced agitation and simultaneously refresh. Autumn yellows—the more ochre, deeper hued flowers such as rudbeckia, Helianthus (perennial sunflower), and various chrysanthemums, all suffused as it were with doses of with gold and orange—evoke the memories of spring and summer, and prepare us for the solemnity and austerity of the winter garden.

And so yellow may very well be the key to our revival—of the city, of the self, of the garden, of the mind. Yellow invites us to dig in the still cool spring soil. Yellow encourages us to take a break in the summer heat and enjoy the results of our labors. Yellow signals caution, yet yellow stimulates. Yes, yellow excites—and may even incite us to commit crimes (snatching flowers unaware of our criminality, all the while casting stones at others). Yellow, I am increasingly convinced, is the color of contradiction.

Yellow reminds us that though we may aspire to divinity, we are in the end only human, all too human.

Color in the Garden: Blue

I’ve made an important breakthrough, I think: a bit of inadvertent genealogical sleuthing may have unearthed the origins of my botanical promiscuity, about which I wrote in my “Public Confessions #1” entry.

My initial garden schematic sought to play upon the buoyancy of blue in the front sun gardens in such a way as to carry the blue of the slate siding on 410’s bay windows, evanescing away from the house into the garden, while blue in the rear shade gardens would showcase that same color’s fluorescence and its tranquilizing, meditative properties. But then Lena Scotch Broom seduced me, opening my gardens to an array of seasonally-hued yellows and golds, reds and rusts, greens and purples…

Of all colors, blue, I self-assuredly and quite incorrectly believed, was simply the most versatile aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually. Blue, long my “favorite” color, reflected my melancholy and my meditations, my liveliness and my listlessness. The icy blue of “Purple Leaf Corydalis” (Corydalis flexuosa), for instance, positively glows throughout the day, but especially at dusk and dawn. (I’ve photographed it every day since planting it, but no photograph captures its ethereality.) Stare into a single tubular flower, or at the whole of the plant, and you feel roused and soothed, centered and renewed.

Yet all colors have their particular associations and antonymic pairings. True, in their particularity each color remains unique and special. But versatility as a universal property, however, is not owned by a specific color.

But blue in the chakra system—a nearly 3,500 year-old Vedic understanding of the “wheel” of energy in the body contained within seven centers—obtains a special status. Associated with the fifth, or Vishuddhi, chakra located at the neck, the 16-petalled blue Vishuddha serves as the communication center for the body. This blue Vishuddha, the voice of the whole, of the self, symbolizes pure consciousness and creativity, and governs our expressions, inspirations, and communications both internally and externally. And, according to the Vedic/Tantric tradition, once this Vishuddha is closed and all communication ceases, we deteriorate, die, and decay.

Some may dismiss this notion and the chakra system as mystical nonsense, but I urge more restraint. Tony Judt, esteemed historian, intellectual, and professor, conveys the essence of the fifth chakra best. Recently, Terry Gross (of famed NPR program Fresh Air) interviewed Judt about his new book and his moving series in The New York Review of Books that chronicles his life and, now, his struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease--or what he describes as his “progressive imprisonment without parole.” He has lost all motor ability, and breathes with the assistance of a respirator. His only voluntary movement consists of verbalization. Soon, the disease will paralyze his vocal chords, and this is his response to that impending event:

“Well, I'm pretty clear in my own mind that when I can no longer talk I will have no interest in living, because if you can't communicate then you don’t have a world outside of your head. While I use my head all the time, it's in order to communicate ideas, jokes, support, criticism, whatever it might be to friends, and colleagues and strangers, so no voice, no life.”

On this Vedic reading, blue opens the dialogue. Blue grounds and opens the self to the world, and the world to the self. Blue stimulates the vital meditative impulse—the impulse necessary to communicate with the world beyond. Without it, we simply talk past one another.

Wabi

I exist in the past and in a future yet to come—but rarely in the present.

Such has been the affliction of my life: the clearest, most succinct expression of my condition. This is wabi. Now I possess vocabulary for “it.”

Wabi is the Japanese for that feeling of refined melancholy, of solitude, that relates fundamentally to the transience of life. To experience wabi is to find beauty in imperfection, to accept—and, importantly, appreciate—the asymmetries and dissonances, the disjunctures and impurities embedded in that cycle of birth, growth, maturation, decline, death, and decay.

Wabi has come to accompany the Japanese sabi to work together as a conceptual whole. If wabi connects us to the florescence of the past and the pregnancy of the future in a kind of teetering balance that may at any time unexpectedly hurtle us towards one over the other, sabi roots us in the experience of passing time itself by bearing (and displaying) the weight of time in cracks and tarnishes, rusts and decays.

Nature giveth, and nature taketh away. Mortality is both the cost of and the gift to precious life.

Gardeners know all too well that transience ranks as one of the key, if not the primary, feature of (controlling, er, I mean gardening) endeavors. Forty-two inches of snow in northern Delaware less than two months ago caused profound damage throughout the garden. My rosemary bush, which thrived for over two years, is now a mere fraction of its previous glory, its remainder visibly struggling for life. Blue star lithodora, a lovely carpet of deep, rich evergreen punctuated by ethereal, nearly glow-in-the-dark florets, was reduced to twigs, barely producing bits of green here and there. The boxwoods lining my front stairwell were split down the middle. Lena’s Scotch Broom needed to be tied together to stand upright again, its branches never recovered from the weight of nearly four feet of snow pinning her down for over a month. Two Sum-and-Substance Hostas have thus far failed to poke above the soil, though all of their brethren and cousins have.

Such recurring seasonal experiences with destruction, decay, and mortality fail to compel comfort or familiarity with this biological fact of life. We teeter backwards toward the past. We recall. We access memories. We process. We take a moment—but not a moment in the present (time inexorably marches onwards), but a moment stuck in multiple pasts. We mourn the loss of our beloveds. Mortality proves a cost to life—sometimes and in some situations an unfathomable cost.

Yet mortality proves a Janus-faced gift: for at one almost inappreciable, unexpected moment somewhere in the depths of confronting the transience and fickleness of life, when sabi infuses our very Being, we apprehend both the magnitude of life and death, able to look ahead to the pregnant future, armed with the knowledge and the memories born from the past. This is wabi.

Written in loving memory of Viet’s aunt, Tata Loan, who died on 7 April 2010.

On Perfection

How utterly perfect is this Diamond Tiara Hosta? Fresh from the soil (last week’s hefty rain followed by our unseasonable Delaware warmth—90˚ (30.5̊ C) in early April?!—have made for increasingly and rapidly lush beds), Diamond Tiara’s tight clumping habit and pristine leaves (still unaffected by my arch enemy, the slug; celebrated survivor of Gramsci-style moisturizing and fertilizing) invites smiles and admiration.

And the early spring performance of this White Feather Hosta—new offshoots lining up in perfect sentinel formation in front of Pennsylvania red shale (this picture doesn’t quite capture the deep reddish hue of the stone), first pale green, then turning a bright white, and, as the season progresses, returning to delicate shades of green—strike me as a delightful coincidence of “plant agency” (thank you, Bob, for the terminology) with garden order and structure. By the way, I only planted two bare roots last spring, and now have 4 distinct plants; their linear arrangement perplexes, yet pleases. Perfection. Telos. Aristotle lives in my garden; surely these photos are proof.

But perfection is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we avidly consume images of perfection, perhaps to assuage our fears that our struggles for perfection are not in vain and that yes, perfection is attainable (sure, my garden can look exactly like that magazine, picture-perfect flower bed). We thus labor and nurture and tend, all in that quest to mimic, whether our ideal assumes the form of the cacophony that is English cottage gardening, rich in its diverse tapestry, appealing to every sense; or relates to the more austere, manicured geometry of French and English aristocratic gardens, or evokes the serenity of the raked stones and meticulously situated plants and rocks of Zen gardening.

On the other hand, not achieving those picture-perfect flower beds and the pristine, weed-free lawn (for those so inclined) can be a frustrating affair. Blame, guilt, and perhaps even anger rear their ugly little heads, even as we confront the cheerful daffodil, clad in her bright, welcoming yellows. And then come the accusations and the litanies of verbal assaults on our gardens, nay, on our very Being: we do not devote enough time to the project; we lack skills or knowledge or money; we lack vision; we lack energy and verve. Or we improperly direct blame elsewhere: do-it-your-selfers scoff at those who hire others to do their dirty work. Of course if I had the money or desire to hire a professional, or if I had staff to work my gardens and fluff my pillows, my X, Y, or Z would like just like theirs. Dirty thoughts indeed!

And so my image of perfection was assaulted yet again this morning, as I caught Gramsci watering, then fertilizing, a poor innocent Japanese Painted fern that had JUST emerged from the soil. In the act of covering his naughtiness, he destroyed most of the tendrils. I was furious. I fumed. I called him names. I made a spectacle of myself (no wonder my neighbors stood by the window, staring down upon this pitiful soul—um, me, not Gramsci—getting upset over something ever so trivial).

Perfection is indeed dirty business, in part because interruptions of our obsessive toils may compel us to do or say dirty things. But perfection ultimately motivates. It offers us a goal, even if unattainable by some measure, a destination, even if unreachable at certain times and in certain respects.

Perfection becomes especially dirty business when we equate it primarily or solely with control—a common equation, I think. I cannot control where Gramsci urinates or defecates any more than I can control the weather. But I can control my reaction, and recognize that perfection relates more to my efforts and less to externalities.

In that vein, plants for the gardener are not trivial (nor, apparently, are they trivial for those who seek to make a political statement; see this article on planting trees as an act of Palestinian non-violent resistance). Plants offer a spectacle of perfection, a retreat from an imperfect world. To be sure, gardening is about some degree of control. But the element of chance remains despite our best efforts and intentions. In the end, what we find perfect, others will not, for perfection resides in many respects in the eye of the beholder. Thus our efforts should be directed not at necessarily pleasing others, but pleasing ourselves. Whether we put forth our best efforts, whether we made a serious, concerted attempt to do our best, ought to be the measure of perfection. All the rest is secondary, and perhaps even eye-candy. My Diamond Tiara and White Feather Hostas prove that (to me at least).

Garden Threats and Pests

Threats to the garden—to the integrity of plants, to the architectural elements, to the design itself—come in many forms. Plants confront mold, mildew, blights, fungus, insects, slugs, snails, hail, snow, heavy rain, clay soil, sandy soil, and lack of nutrients, among others. The garden’s architecture suffers from hail, snow, ice, heavy rain, roots, heaving clay soil, and rot (if wood is the preferred medium for trellises and the like), among others. And the design itself is under constant threat by omnipresent weeds, pesky neighbors and neighborhood residents who may walk by and pick flowers at will (as happened to my tulips and paper whites early last spring) or rip out a plant in anger or love (as happened to one of my white chrysanthemums last autumn), and by the gardener him or herself. How many times have you gardeners out there (yes, I assume someone is reading this) decided your design isn’t working, or you no longer like it, and thus assume the personality of the Intrepid Realist gardener (about which I wrote in an earlier blog entry) and begin destroying all that hard work?

Animals, too, pose threats to gardeners. One particular species, the rare, regal, and exceptionally handsome Gramsci-cat, poses “Severe, Red level,” Homeland Security type threats to my beloved hosta collection and my (rather expensive) Japanese Hakone grass. Notice the contraption I had to build to protect what remained of it after his initial intake.

Gramsci loves to sun his belly. In the spring, as I caught him doing this morning, he likes to catch the sun in the seemingly-bare beds. This might be no cause for concern; but for all those hostas spikes, his rather hefty body acts like a drum-roller, crushing innocent young sprouts as he repeatedly rolls over and over, purring as he does, perhaps thinking his actions are one damn good massage.

Gramsci also has a different idea of watering and fertilizing than me. Many times while cleaning the detritus of winter from the beds did I inadvertently grab a rather wet and mushy pile of Gramsci-fertilizer (always deposited, it seems, on top of the hostas). I will refrain from posting photos, which is easy to do as most of Gramsci fertilizer ended up on my hands.

And then there is the issue of Hakone grass. Gramsci thinks he is a dog, and very much acts like one, but I am also convinced he is one third sheep for he grazes all day long on grass (this is a good thing since I have failed to purchase a lawnmower and am forced to cut my small patch of grass with scissors—ahem, yes, scissors—or shrub sheers if the grass is particularly high). But Gramsci, like his daddies, has expensive taste; hence my beloved Japanese Hakone grass may not be long for this world.

But Gramsci is my gardening-buddy. He’s with me every step of the way, purring me on, helping me identify delicious grasses or decide where not to place plants. Like his namesake, Gramsci subverts dominant paradigms. More importantly, he permits me the opportunity to see through, and slowly dispose of, my hegemonic ways.

Anchor Plants Come in Unexpected Forms

Anchor plants in the gardening world are what large department stores are to the shopping mall: rather large, impressive endpoints, things on which or places in which to spend copious amounts of money even after your bank account diminishes and your arms fill with lots of little purchases. Gardens need large structural plants that provide convenient boundaries for beds and offer some architectural form during the winter months after the annuals have died and the perennials have retracted deep into the soil for a well-deserved rejuvenating rest. In my various shade and partial shade garden beds, I have multiple hydrangeas (climbing, Lady in Red, Nikko Blue, and oak leaf varietals); Liriope muscari (not generally considered an anchor plant, but in the smaller beds this grass-like plant provides winter interest and form); Lena’s Scotch Broom; Pieris japonica (both "Mountain Fire" and "Red Mill"); and Nandina (False or Heavenly Bamboo, though it is technically not a bamboo).

But two plants in particular serve as my unexpected anchors: two Heuchera micrantha plants (Purple Palace or Obsidian) given to me on separate occasions by two swell ladies. How that came to be deserves a story.

My gardens are relatively young: nearly two years old to be exact. My partner and I bought our house in summer 2007; thus we did nothing during that summer when money was scarce, and time was devoted both to painting interior rooms (for seven years, I, in my infinite neuroses, carried with me two paint colors, “Bombay Gold,” a deep harvest yellow/gold, and “Chanticleer,” a deep Russian imperial red, until I had rooms of my own to submerge into my preferred palette) and settle into a new, presumably more grounded life. The following spring and summer were my gardening debuts, and fortunately for me, I had both a full sun front yard terraced garden, and a rear, mostly shade garden so I could experiment with two distinct climates and multiple micro-climates, as well as with flowers and leaf types, shapes and textures.

One sultry summer day in 2008, as I made my way, dripping with perspiration, to my car with my new purchases of ferns (East India Holly; Autumn; and Japanese Painted), two elderly women asked me on separate occasions to help them load their cars with their purchases. The second woman, Phyllis, who did not see my cart, pointedly stated as I loaded a few large and fairly weighty pots into her car, “You like ferns.” Given that I had already placed my plants into my car, I wondered how she knew. My quizzical look compelled her to follow-up: “I saw that you purchased several ferns. If you really like them, come to my house and you can take whatever you’d like. Really. My gardens need to be thinned out. After all, that is what gardeners do.” Then she muttered something about trusting me, scribbled down her number, asked for mine, and then implored me to call her.

Honestly, I felt odd about calling her, and so did not. Within two days she called me and reminded me that she had indeed beseeched the “nice young man” who helped her to come and take some ferns. And so I went; her woodland style garden was splendid. She and her husband immediately went to work and loaded—LOADED—my car with ferns, a Japanese maple, ground covers (no vincas, thank you), sedums, hostas, Lily-of-the-Valley, a few others that have passed since their arrival in my gardens, and Heuchera micrantha. Days later, Viet, his cousin, and I were off to Eastern Europe (I, for a conference; all of us for a vacation). Plants that needed extra water to “get settled” died; most survived, thankfully. And I lost her number.

I think of Phyllis often. I wonder if she knows how deeply I appreciate her generosity—not measured simply in terms of plants, but in terms of her spirit. One entire bed in my backyard shade garden is devoted to her (in part because at the time that was the only space I was able to clear and amend the heavy clay-laden soil), and so I think of her each day. And Heuchera micrantha thrives right there at the beginning of that bed, surrounded by ostrich ferns and Lily-of-the-Valley, and soon to be nestled again Corydalis flexuosa (Blue Panda Corydalis) if I can manage to purchase one from the garden center.

My friends Jim and Patricia, too, bestowed upon me the gift of hostas of various sorts, all of which were thinned from their magnificent beds. And my Aunt Annie, herself a “master gardener” in New York, arrived late last spring after Viet and I completed the hard-scaping (the stone walls and stone patio) in the rear garden with American and European ginger; a few unusual hostas; several varietals of fern; my secret lover, Petasites japonicus (Giant Butterbur); and another Obsidian heuchera. It resides on the west side of the property, in the center of the bed, its stunning deep maroon color contrasting sharply with the rich and vibrant chartreuses of early spring greens.

Each looks across the property, the patio, and the beds at the other, providing a nice visual axis to link the deep shade bed with the partial shade bed, and, more importantly, connecting me to the innate generosity of gardeners near and far.