"Haul out the Holly"

I have a friend--let's call him, oh, Warren--who seems to know every lyric and every line from every musical ever written.

Exaggeration? Perhaps. But ask him.

So, I have a quiz. Are you ready, Warren?

"Haul out the Holly" is the first line of what song in what musical that debuted on Broadway in 1966?

Need a hint?

The show opened with Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury.

Another hint:

this musical was an adaptation of a 1956 play (originally entitled My Best Girl), which adapted a 1955 novel (whose name I cannot yet divulge for it would give away the name of our mystery musical).

And our final hint:

the main character's motto is "Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death."

I am sure Warren took one look at the title and scoffed: how simple! Puh-lease! Have some respect.

That musical would be Mame, and the number for which "Haul out the Holly" opens  is "We Need a Little Christmas."

So that was a circuitous way to celebrate what has become one of my favorite garden personages: the Holly Fern (Cyrtomium falcatum).

Look at those erect fronds--2 to 3 feet in height, gently arching to give a cascading fountain effect!

 
Look at the leathery, holly-like leaves with a sheen that is the visual equivalent to the young Angela Lansbury belting out lyrics to "We Need a Little Christmas!" Both are there, both stage a presence.

"This"--"this" being finding meaning in things, and thus finding while losing ourselves in those "things"--is what we do, isn't it? Warren finds his joy in musicals, and I in gardening. Viet has many pleasures from which he derives meaning (he keeps a blog, My Criterion Life, that documents his own musings and discoveries coincident with the films of the celebrated Criterion Collection...a sort of Julie and Julia project even if he protests my comparison).

This is what we do. Otherwise, we look in the mirror one day and see but a shell of a Being that should be a self, the what-could-have-been-but-can-no-longer-be-because-our-time-is-running-out. That is what we have become, and that is what we shall be. It is a sobering thought.

The Druids found meaning in and thus celebrated the Holly tree, now the symbolic repository of "the season," because it remained vibrantly lush and kept the Earth beautiful while the sacred oaks (now English Oaks) were bereft of their leaves. One wonders if they transferred the idea of the sacred from the Oak to the Holly, or if they recognized different manifestations of the sacred, or if the Druids saw the sacred itself shift seasonal residence (a precursor to "Snow Birds" on the East Coast), or if the they merely shifted their attention from barren branches to bountiful boughs, much as we moderns do daily, hourly, by the minute, even if they did so much more slowly than we moderns.

So Cyrtomium falcatum, the Holly fern, which throughout the year strikes a presence owing to those glossy semi-serrated leaves (can you spot them?), assumes special presence and meaning at this time of year if only because of the barren landscape in which it finds itself. It is the ground-cover equivalent to its arboreal eponym, perhaps not resident or incarnation of the sacred, but an exuberant if unexpected evergreen presence in the garden.

And attribute meaning to it, we do, if only to appease our incessant, inner search for something more than ourselves.

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.

 

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.

Remains of the Day

Our lives, it seems, are mostly spent in the service of others, though the terms of our service both vary—educating youth or trading stock, fire fighting or serving food, nursing patients or manufacturing products—and are (for most of us, anyhow) much less repugnant than in times past.

We do not, I observe, often reflect on such service, or even think of what we do as serving others. So self-referential has become the I, that the presence of the Other, the You, recedes far into the background not as a subject but as an object to be controlled, manipulated, managed. Consequently, our conception of community becomes diluted.

Our preferred formulations of that which we do have lost a vocabulary and a certain sense of service: “I work at ____ [fill in the blank]” or “I am a _____” are statements in which the self or the singular "I" stand at the center of our individual universes. There is no necessary danger in that. Rather, the danger is in thinking this universe is the all of our lives. As one Wilmington, Delaware billboard facing the northbound lanes of I-95 tells me, “It Really is All About You.”

Students, patients, customers, consumers: these become not the subjects of our professions but, if we are not careful, the scourge of them.

To be fair, that billboard is the advertisement of a local bank, and thus the subject of it is the customer. Surely, we would all agree, our hard-earned money is ours, and we care that it is not recklessly invested, FDIC guarantees notwithstanding. We intuit the billboard’s message as ultimately acceptable not for what it says in the literal sense, but for what it communicates.

And so I wonder what we make of service: what remains at the end of the day?

Stevens, the imperturbable butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize masterpiece, The Remains of the Day, played ever so superlatively by Anthony Hopkins in the eponymous film adaptation, has, after a near-lifetime of service to others, finally the opportunity to reflect on the terms of his service to Lord Darlington--a staunch advocate, if not architect, of appeasement (an obviously not dangerous word in some British circles, 1938). To complicate matters, he must manage his feeling for Miss Kenton, the head housekeeper, played by the ever brilliant actress, Emma Thompson--which he manages the same way he manages the death of his father, the former chief butler of the Darlington estate. Stevens’ self-imposed repressive silence drips off the page, or off the screen. The reader/viewer feels the angst and the tension. {I feel it now while writing this.} Stevens does not question, for he has taken our condition to the opposite extreme: the terms of service to others dictate the annihilation of self outside of “private hours” (of which, in such a grand estate, there were few).  

In what may seem a tangential connection to the garden, I do reflect on the nature of my service to the 2010 garden and the nature of my garden’s service to me, especially as late autumn has settled into the Delaware Valley. The competition between seasons has intensified, and after an unseasonable bout of warm, humid weather several days ago, the temperatures suddenly plunged in the wake of a cold front. The long range forecast calls for evening lows in the 20s, and daytime high in the 30s or 40s. {Not cold for some of you, but the beginnings of a Delaware winter nevertheless.}

With the hard frosts last week, the garden has passed into memory. Le (2010) jardin c’est mort. Vive le jardin.

I scan the garden beds. The community--the garden itself, the myriad of specimens and the singular "I" which exists to create and tend to the garden--has lapsed into a virtual silence. Remains of the season surround me: the dried conical vestiges of Oak Leaf Hydrangea, brown and crisp, neatly contrast to the slender verticality of yellowed Shenandoah Switch Grass.  The verdancy of Nandina assumes a fervid character in this yellowed and browned autumnal palette, its own preternaturally radiant red berries contrasting with itself. {The clumps of berries are sparse this year owing to the virus that caused the astonishing decimation of the Honey Bee, the Colony Collapse Disorder, which is a stark reminder of our sheer dependence on the little Honey Bee for pollination and, consequently the fruits (and vegetables!) of their labor.} And the still rose-burgundy globes of the Nikko Blue Hydrangea begin to enter their final phase: brown.

And I have come to a new realization. We do not so much preside over the end of one season, witness the deaths of tender plants, and watch the herbaceous perennials rapidly retreat back into the soil, and the deciduous tress and shrubs self-denude--the sinuous architecture of this Climbing Hydrangea a visceral reminder to all those who prefer the orgiastic delight of the flesh that beauty runs much deeper. To be more philosophical about it, this may very well embody Kant's pithy notation that "out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." Sure, we did not make this Climbing Hydrangea--it unfolded not merely out of an internal teleology, but was shaped and prodded into development by the conditions in which it was situated. But in its imperfections, in its staunch resistance to the shapes we invariably impose on it, in its very naturalness, it nonetheless exudes an exceptionality and a beauty we cannot replicate.  


Rather, we prepare for the arrival of a new one. We collect our clay pots and scrub them with a bleach solution; we clean our tools; we decide which plants to overwinter and which to relegate to the grand garden in the sky; we cover beds with the compost we have let cook all season; we shred leaves and add to them the newly vacant compost heap; we plant our bulbs; and we begin our vigil for the next season, looking for hope in the space where Winter Aconite will appear in mild Januarys or to the winter blooming varietals of Witch Hazels…

Remains of the day are, yes, those remnants and residues of a life lived. Some do pass as the cycle of life dictates, but they are pause for reflection for the next stage. Our service to others, be they plants or animals or people, continues And so we beat on…encouraged by the verdant fortitude of the Holly Fern...borne  back ceaselessly into the past, but also, miraculously, deep into the future.