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? 

Arendt in my Garden

Faced with adversity, we may flee or we may battle—“flight or fight,” so the adage goes—but we may do something else that the adage neglects: we may retreat into ourselves.

True, the category of “flight” may be construed as including anything that does not constitute fighting. But here, as with most clichés, we encounter definitional imprecision and categorical difficulty. Does retreat to strategize, to formulate a method of attack—an ode to that human capacity for reasoning/thinking, I suppose—constitute fight or flight? The problem is that the adage confines us to animalistic predisposition; possibilities are superficially reduced; categories are broadened beyond reasonable interpretation.

Thus it may seem odd, given the human – animal antimony I pose above to look to the plant kingdom for answers. But we find that the Rhododendron and the evergreen Viburnums, among others, teach us something not just about themselves, but about ourselves.

As winter increasingly grips the region with its icy clutches, the Rhododendrons and the Viburnums retreat back into themselves. To protect their leathlike leaves, they bring them closer to their bodies, curling their sides and reducing their aerial spread—as if their stems exude an imperceptible but salvational warmth that delivers those leaves from winter’s harsh desiccating winds and bouts of frigidity.

This is a strategy, a method that our adage would relegate to flight, but which really is both and neither. It is a time-tested coping mechanism, simultaneously a form of flight from winter (though deciduous and herbaceous they are not!) and a form of fight against winter (an intrepid resilience in the face of adversity that cannot change reality, but adapts to it).

Likewise, we humans use our bodies to indicate to others our modes of response to adversity around us. I watched a colleague in a meeting yesterday. She rested her elbows on the table, brought her arms close together against her body, her hands either clasped under her chin or her hands resting against the sides of her face—as if she withdrew into herself, looking ardently at the table and papers in front of her, listening intently as we discussed sensitive issues. I spoke not to my colleagues, but to the table, carefully and deliberately avoiding eye contact thinking that if I did I would not provoke an angry response or any unfavorable reaction. Others spoke more forcefully and directly at and to others. In the end, issues were resolved—but not primarily through fight or flight, but through what I think of as retreat. Each of us, in our own peculiar ways, withdrew back into the recesses of ourselves, guided and constrained by an initial decision that essentially and strategically clipped the wings of all present—a brilliant strategy precisely because it emphasized, whether intentionally or not, that the options at stake were really not objectionable. Preferences could and did harden when countered with other preferences, but really those preferences were more innocuous than not. “Clipping our wings” or curling our leaves and reducing their aerial spread underscored that in the end we adapt to the realities before us even as we try to shape those realities. Clichés simply cannot capture such nuance.

The eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) warned us of the dangers of a life lived as thoughtless adherence to cliché in her reports of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, which she reworked and published as the (at the time) controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. And so I think of her as I think of that meeting and look to the winterizing landscape, foretold by the rhododendrons and viburnum, and feel a particular warmth exuded by the knowledge that Arendt lives on in so many ways—the garden perhaps being the most unexpected.  

Confusion is Nothing New...

I dare admit I have been the witness to such perverse high drama of late--and I nearly squeal with delight at the thought of sharing with my readers!  If the drama were not so public, I would surely be labeled a gossip (though who doesn't enjoy a bit of gossip now and then?! Hence: there must be gossips!).

Autumn--one of the two remarkable bookends of the "growing season"--is dominated, if not "owned" in a figurative sense of the word, by the venerable (if deceptive) House of Asteraceae, just as spring is "owned" by the crocuses, narcissus, tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths, among others.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw these flowering trees yesterday morning on the University of Delaware campus. Cherry blossoms IN LATE NOVEMBER! Shocking!

And, bordering my backyard garden, this spring blooming Viburnum!

The Asteraceaes are in turmoil: upstaged by their spring antecedents.

True, there are autumn blooming cherry trees and viburnum, but these specimens belong to the spring. Odd weather we've had: an elongated, miserable summer of extremes, cold followed by a spell of moderate temperatures that confused these trees (and my narcissus which began to poke through the soil last week).

Confusion is certainly nothing new when it surrounds us in so many forms.