Adult Pleasures XIV: Strategizing

Call it what you will: arranging, calculating, conspiring, contriving, designing, framing, manipulating, mapping, planning, plotting, scheming, strategizing. Sure, these are variations on a theme, each distinguished from the other by etymological and practical dint, but they get at what we do in our personal and professional lives, and what we witness on reality television shows and soap operas (really, is there a difference?!). We often think out how we might most efficiently and effectively secure our preferred outcome.

Put basely, we want to get our own way, and we work to ensure that we do.

Recently, a colleague offered an unexpected retort to a position I took involving some matter: "you really hate to make this political, but..."

One can interpret that statement, taken out of context as it were, in a variety of ways, no doubt "you are naive" being one of them. That thought crossed my mind for a fleeting moment. I was at first slightly taken aback, but only slightly. I have the utmost respect for this particular colleague, and so quickly dismissed my negative mind and focused on the broader issue. (I do not think that was the underlying meaning intended by my colleague...but who knows? Perhaps it was and I really am naive! Ha! Self-deprecation is such an effective analgesic, a salve to let slide ever so much.). The statement is true.

Aside from the fact that I find some academic politics distasteful, petty, ridiculous, and even trivial (I suppose I can never be department chair), I approach these issues and battles to be with the (admittedly) pollyannish view, "why would we want to muddy what has got to be the best job in the world?"  (Sorry Madeleine Albright, who once quipped that being Secretary of State is the best job in the world. True, she has served as our country's top diplomat and has taught, and thus may possess inside information I do not. But I can only speak to what I have known and experienced.)

And so I work to build consensus and avoid the squabbles, as another colleague recently mentioned. Hmmm...might that be my strategy?!

In any case, I approached the arrival of winter at the gardens of 410 this morning with a strategy. I could simply throw will-nilly the somewhat wet and heavy snow onto the plants that peered through the snow, crushing them or breaking their perhaps now brittle branches, or I could neatly arrange it around the bases of plants, to capitalize on moisture as it were.

Nearly an hour later, I achieved my goal:

snow placed strategically around Blue Fescue

and Kerria japonica and the Holly ferns;

between the Burning Bush, which still sports a few red berries (the birds have been feasting) and Hypericum (St. John's Wort),

and atop Creeping Phlox.

Yes. I was proud of myself. Strategic placement of disposable snow, a nod to environmentalism and plant appreciation and preservation. Sure it took a bit more time than usual, but I got what I wanted.

Taking off my winter wear, I smiled, and then heard the tell-tale sign of the brash strategic plan of the neighbor: throw the snow wherever. I peered out just in time to see him dump a heap of wet heavy snow onto the Rosemary I rooted from the parent plant in the main garden late this summer.


Sigh. Conflicting strategies. This is how battles really get started.

 

Subduction

Subduction is an odd word.

It sounds like the bastard child of abduction and seduction.
 
But it is not. In fact, it is the opposite of what my dirty thoughts suggest: that is, not reproduction and thus the addition of something else, but rather a subtraction, a withdrawal, a removal.

Subducere, from which subduction derives, conjoins the prefix sub- (under, below, beneath, secondary, less than) with the root ducere, meaning to lead. Ducere makes me think immediately, of course, of Il Duce himself, with his corpse hanging upside down and all that that implies: secondary leadership, attempted escape, execution, withdrawal.


Yet the term has lost its ordinary meaning, having been adopted by geologists who will, no doubt, be puzzled by my application of a technical term of science to gardening. In plate tectonics, subduction refers to the process by which the edge of one crustal plate descends below another. Nine of the ten most powerful earthquakes to occur in the last century were subduction zone events, including the 2004 Indian Ocean and the 2011 Tohoku (Japan) earthquakes, both of which produced devastating tsunamis.

My autumnal world, it seems, is undergoing a process of subduction. A withdrawal. Sure, that is the cycle of seasons, yet there is something else going on: a subduction of color.

If subduction in the rear garden assumes various shades of yellow--a veritable pot of gold into which all colors are absorbed, made more spectacular by the golden canopy of the maple tree, then the front garden experiences a subduction dominated by hues of red and purple.

The Orange Marmalade hosta, having turned a brilliant shade of gold, begins the East Side Shade bed's autumnal glory,

and is joined by the Big Blue Angel hosta, which has turned  this brilliant shade of amber, accented by the leathery greens of East India Holly Fern.

Gramsci looks veritably pleased that the world has capitulated to his omnipotent handsomeness by turning his golden-boy shade of glory, though I surmise he may also feel a tad bit overwhelmed by the ubiquity of  "the color of him."

In the front garden, the burning bush takes center stage, and is complemented by the single petaled daisy-like chrysanthemum and the now denuded burgundy stems of Rose Mallow, and offset by the creamy variegation of the Siberian Iris.

Rudolph Waleuphrud Euphorbia begins to come into his own, his tips deepening their ruddy display in preparation for his Christmas pageantry. He's a one man show at that time of year, and he simply must shine.

 

In the meantime, Gramsci searches for the fresh green grass on which he likes to graze--grass that will no doubt in a few weeks experience its own subduction by winter white.

 

The Fire that Was, but also Wasn’t

Every color in the garden speaks, and if one listens closely enough, one hears dramatic stories.

Some colors, of course, announce themselves with reckless abandon (Rose Mallow tends toward this extreme when in full bloom, though her stylish couture belies the fervency of her speech; but somehow we need and welcome her in the torpid height of summer). 

Others prefer to converse in whisper (lavender, so ethereal, prefers, I think, her understated elegance; she converses not primarily through vocalization but through scent).

Reds tend to be associated with the former category, for obvious reasons. But remarkably red, if used in particular sorts of ways, can actually mollify.

The fire that was, but also wasn't: fortunately I write of a metaphoric fire, to the blazing Burning Bush which, for the first time in residence at 410, has offered the fieriness its name promises. In a mere 4 days, Burning Bush shed its green-burgundy hue and bled a hellacious red.

Burning Bush usually conquers the autumn landscape. When situated in grand spaces, in groups and without attendant competition, Burning Bush makes a majestic statement. Along the Interstate 95 corridor in Delaware, one sees clumps of Burning Bush in the median between northbound and southbound lanes: and the effect is sublimely wondrous (no doubt placement was planned: for as with the the masses of forsythia in the spring, drivers slow down to absorb the display).  

  

Perhaps surprisingly, then, Burning Bush, when set against a tapestry of greens, purples, violets, and other reds, is subdued. Depending on its hue, and depending on the garden scape within which it is set, Burning Bush’s repertoire changes. 

It may perform the magisterial bass in the autumn garden opera, the weighty authority figure lamenting the declining kingdom or the high priest issuing last rites for those over whom it once presided.

Or it may become the baritonal villain: dominating the somber autumn garden opera since the gardener has, wittingly or unwittingly, not written into script the myriad of others who make the opera the dialogue it is supposed to be.

Or it may perform the tenor, the illustrious romantic lead who sings a dramatic climax in the company of his lover(s), or seeps into emotive, gut-wrenching soliloquy when the love object passes. I use Burning Bush in singular, dramatic dose. He is the tenor in my opera; but I temper his effects by filtering out his color throughout the garden. The Tall Purpletop Verbena exposes his purple undertones, while Euphorbia echoes his blushing burgundy, and the dahlias, my many sopranos, mirror the richness of his love.

This interplay and diffusion of red is best captured, I think, by Henri Matisse: his

The Red Studio (1911), on display at MoMa in New York and The Red Room (1908), on view at The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, in particular portray red as the complex character it is. Red becomes but a background, establishes itself as a stage, and fades into itself: at once the necessary focal point, at once subdued, for other colors perform the work we usually attribute to red. But absent red, those other colors would fail to excite, and the paintings would be dull representations of themselves. Matisse intuited this, and gave us placated drama instead. The red in The Red Studio is a burnt, muted color, a one-dimensional caricature that, instead of instigating passion and artistry, simply feeds into itself, permitting the art and the objects within the studio to lift off the page and float in a mysterious space we want to be a room but may simply reflect the cerebral space of Matisse himself.

The Red Room (one of my favorite paintings) offers a study in contrast and complement. The green garden space, framed so beautifully by the window (or, we are compelled to ask, is it a painting of a garden?) soothes the eye, just as the flowers and vines on the walls and table cloth pull out the blue undertones of the red, thus subduing its harsher and titillating effects.  

 

Such is how I read red in the gardens at 410. Burning Bush commands this last act: he is the tenor belting out his principal aria in the moments before death. Yet Burning Bush also retreats back into itself and into the garden. And in the rear shade garden, the Oak Leaf Hydrangea, now a stunning shade of burgundy, somehow only becomes itself in the company of others.