Oh, the things we say...

We bought paper towels at Costco many weeks ago--you know, the gigantic "500 saver pack" that requires a McMansion to store them--and in the throes of frustration cleaning up cat vomit (do cats ever NOT vomit?! And why do they ALWAYS vomit on my expensive Herats or Kashmiris, or my Bijar or favorite Suzani?) I paused long enough to spy that which I did not--or refused--to earlier see: nasty little depictions of potted flowers accompanied by kitschy garden sayings designed for the "country kitchen."


"Friends are flowers in a life's garden."

Puh-lease.

"No two days are the same in one garden."

This one is palatable, as is this one: "No two gardens are the same." Both are very true, empirically speaking.

"You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt" resonates, while "the flowers of tomorrow are the seeds of today"  nauseates.

And "gardening is a way of showing you believe in tomorrow" just makes me want to hurl.

Separately, one can overlook (er, ignore) them (as I have done), but together, they constitute a veritable menagerie of the most unattractive cutesy kitsch. 

But then I began to think of other garden- or agricultural-inspired aphorisms.

"We make our own beds, and we must lie in them."

"We reap what we sow."

"Even the most beautiful roses have thorns."

We populate our lives with adages, "old wives' tales," aphorisms, and proverbs. Their veracity is reified and magnified by an economy of words; their effects are seemingly more damning if we neglect their wisdom.

Pithiness in the world of adages is empowerment; wisdom trickles, then oozes, from the spoken word.

A parallel phenomenon happens in the garden at this time of year. Amidst the clutter of fallen leaves stand poignant reminders of the mix of seasons and the dominance of an emerging chill that lays to rest all that has lived.

The camellia blooms while the mums retreat, and the berries of Nandina sharpen in fiery intensity, signalling a  transition to barren fulfillment.

{Please note: I have exceeded the photo storage capacity of Blogger and therefore cannot post additional photos.}

Head in the Clouds

How many dear readers spent lazy summer days as children watching billowing clouds pass by, and identifying animals and objects in their morphing presence?

How many dear readers continue this practice?

I occasionally spy a bird or a plane or elephant or, much more rarely, a country or continent (ahem, yes, I am a geek). Spotting those are always treats: veritable pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's as if the gods are paying fleeting homage to earthly constructs.


Summer surely invites fantasy, for our minds are about the only thing active when the body is oppressed by heat and humidity. Hence we adults find refuge in our juvenile antics.

Something about the "game" is suspect in my mind, however. What does it signify?  Is it really an exercise in imagination and fantasy? Or does it simply compel us to impose upon the world available, existing constructs?  Are we hence locked into the same patterns of behavior, confined by the same constructs, inhibited by the same shapes, wed to the same styles? Are our language, our thought, our conceptual categories preconditioned and arrested?  In the clouds do we not see alternative universes and modes of being--or are we enjoined (and condemned) to recreate ad infinitum that which have come to know?

Our course, the "rules of the game" dictate that we "see" existing categories and concepts and shapes and things into those clouds, and so the act of reading them onto those amorphous, ever-mutable entities is by definition one tethered to our human experience: not possible experience, but existing experience.

Yet the game teaches us how to see; it teaches us to see. How many times did we need to explain to our friends as we lay on our backs staring into the sky how we saw what we saw, and how many times did they need to reciprocate? The "a-ha!"  or "lightbulb" moment was always a thrilling one, and remains so.  Perhaps it is that latent creativity of sight, of interpretation, and the sharing of those multiple interpretations that fragment, however minutely so, all those available, existing constructs and modes and patterns in ways that inevitably help emancipate us from them.

Sometimes we just need to be less beholden to that which we have come to know in order to imagine alternative futures--all the while keeping in mind that those alternative futures are always borne from existing orders. There is continuity, and must be, between the various orders of our existence. (Could it be that I channel less Karl Marx and more Edmund Burke?!) I sometimes see morphing configurations of land in the clouds, millennia passing by in a matter of seconds, as inner lakes disappear when land masses collide, and continents are violently ripped apart. I see things I cannot identify--precisely because our conceptual languages do not yet contain their possible existence.


When I look at the clumps of flowers on Nandina, a.k.a. Heavenly Bamboo, or Oak Leaf Hydrangea, I can't help but think of ice cream cones and my summer ice cream parlor job about which I wrote a long while ago. I strain to find any other shape or concept or language in them. Perhaps grapes.

Yet I photographically traced their morphing shapes, their growth, for this is what biological life dictates: seasonally, it is a linear process.

Yet perennially, it is a cycle.

See?  It's all about how we see, and the frames and optics through which we see.

We simply need to learn how to so.

"Jolly Good"

Desiccated gardens,
blackened silhouettes stark 'gainst icy skies,
forlorn leaves that litter the landscape:

confronted by the raw nakedness of these somber sights of late autumn, we yearn for greater assurance of our own existence. We yearn for the certitude of comfort, for a protective warmth from real or imagined chill.

And find it--if not create it--we do.

Green and red are jolly good colours, eliciting from us Pavlovian creatures a spirited response, an uplifting of moods wrapped up in (and suppressed under) layers of wool and, for the more fashionable perhaps, cashmere as well.

We invariably take our cues from nature--Holly with its bright green and cheery red berries is no doubt the quintessential cue for holiday attire.

But so too are there other riches to be found in the garden:

the Burning Bush offers an abundance of tiny red berries this year,

though admittedly its barren branches offer little relief for seasonal disaffect,

while the Nandina offers but a few, meager clumps of red this year.

The Hypericum, too, joins the festivities, festooning itself with winter red before the inevitable snow falls.

Surely, the donning of holiday apparel bedecking our halls (and lampposts and store fronts and roof lines and trees and shrubs and walkways) provides a welcome antidote to an increasingly dour exterior, that dash of red the consummate color of jolly.

Even the summer geranium sports a fine show deep into December, its ruddiness a merry accoutrement to (porch-painted) winter white.

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.