Extravagance

Today I want to praise extravagance. Since the go-go years on Wall Street that brought about our current economic woes, and since more of us have become aware of our ecological footprints, extravagance has gotten a bad name, but there are multiple extravagances, and it is some of those that I wish to praise, in no particular order.


• This morning, the deep green of the dogwood leaves was broken by the arrival of a male cardinal, extravagantly red, noisy, and exuberantly checking out the state of the dogwood berries, or whatever else in the tree might have been edible. Other birds manage to attract mates without being quite so eye-catching (and as Julie Zickefoose has noted, being eye-catching is often dangerous for cardinals), but such colorful perfection was this morning’s blessing.

• Berries themselves. The next time someone complains about the seeds of blackberries, raspberries, or strawberries, remind them that the fruits we and the birds crave are really seed dispersal mechanisms. Those luscious berries lure us in so that seeds can be spread more widely than the parent plants can spread them, and aren’t we lucky that the universe opted for this extravagant method of plant reproduction?

• Seeds in general. Those of us who aren’t faithful deadheaders of spent blossoms find that birds help themselves to our coneflowers and coreopsis, and in the process, scatter seed and make new plants. If we don’t immediately sweep up all the purchased seed spilled under our birdfeeders, we are rewarded by free sunflowers and millet. Let’s hear it for the extravagant generosity of free plants.

• The extravagant laziness of house cats. Is there anything more totally relaxed than a fat middle-aged cat sacked out on the sofa? (Or more generally graceful than cats, anyway?)

• The energy and generosity of certain young humans. This afternoon, I was privileged to attend a benefit for a cancer patient, organized by her young adult children and their friends. They had acquired donations of goods and services ranging from massages to meals to football weekends, and people who knew the woman in question packed the town hall and opened their hearts and their wallets. Love is always a good kind of extravagance.

Taking nothing for granted

Having planned to do a lot of writing this summer, I find that life (along with my general lack of organization) got in the way, as it tends to do. But I’m in good company: Eric T. Freyfogle, editor of The New Agrarianism, a collection of essays I’m currently enjoying, notes that “agrarians have typically been happier to live their lives than to write about them” (xviii). And while I’m hesitant to describe myself as agrarian, having been contentedly ensconced in one town or another for the last thirty-five years, the low-key pleasures of a localized and semi-outdoorsy life have become increasingly important as I move toward old age.


This has been an unexpectedly rough summer, emotionally. An old friend, a highly competent Renaissance man active in educational, environmental, and artistic circles, is fading away from Alzheimer’s; a longtime acquaintance, a woman about my age, is experiencing serious unspecified neurological problems; a troubled relative in her early fifties, after decades of erratic behavior, has recently been diagnosed with a progressive neurological disease, always fatal and always hideous. Part of my next few years will involve helping this individual die as peacefully as possible. My own good luck—being reasonably healthy, gainfully employed, and happily enmeshed in a web of relationships—seems more and more a kind of amazing grace.  All I can do in response, it seems, is to pay attention as much as possible.

In our immediate corner of the world, this has been a good week: the yard drainage project has been completed, creating not one but three new planting beds in the process (though the heat and dry weather have not yet revealed whether or not the basement will remain dry). Friends and acquaintances have offered plants to fill in some of the new spaces, so a friendship garden is being created. (Not that there aren’t already plants with stories in the existing beds—these daylilies                            

were acquired by my Bulgarian friend Milena in 2007, from a nursery owner who gave her far larger clumps than those offered to other purchasers that day. We suspect an infatuation with her accent.)

Other joys of the week include these:

•  Meals in which nearly all the food was locally raised.  Sitting down to a meal in which the chicken, the potatoes, the green beans, the tomatoes, the blueberries, and the wheat for the cookies all originated within a twenty-minute drive of our dining room is a reminder of what a rich area the Mid-Ohio Valley truly is.  Now if only chocolate, coffee, and grapes for Chardonnay could be grown somewhere nearby, I could truly be a locavore. . .

• The serendipitous combination of rose "Lady Elsie May" blooming with a nameless bicolor daylily that has accompanied me to three houses 

• •Sightings of two of the Black Squirrels of North Parkersburg

•  Chipmunks becoming regular visitors to our feeders, and (drum roll, please)

• •The return of the goldfinches!  The ratibida, sunflowers, and silphium are blooming just in time.

(Some of) the joys of summer

Yesterday I saw a hummingbird for the first time this year. It was not at the red honeysuckle, or the penstemon, or the lantana, or at any of the other hummingbird- attracting plants dotted around the yard. No, it was two blocks from here, in a front yard, on a manicured street, darting between a pink saucer magnolia of some kind and a shrub with no discernible flowers. Birds have minds of their own.


This is proving to be a good year for fireflies. Our laxness in mowing the back yard has allowed some of the grasses to start going to seed, and the yard at twilight is filled with tiny blinking lights. Visitors from Florida last week had to stand at the window and comment on the sheer number of the little insects.

And the daylilies are blooming.  Life is good.

From a different window

This week I am viewing the world from a different window, this one in Oneonta, New York, at a conference in honor of John Burroughs. This part of New York is superficially similar to the mid-Ohio Valley—Victorian towns, rolling hills, small farms, lot of trees—but it’s the differences that have stood out for me. The air has a crispness that we lack (perhaps because the air here is cleaner), and the light is different; Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School painters had it right, or maybe Washington Irving in the opening of “Rip Van Winkle,” when he wrote of the “fairy mountains” with their ever-changing appearance.

Vegetation differences are striking. The most apparent roadside tree is birch, rare in southern Ohio and west central West Virginia. The white birch bark shines when seen from the interstate, but up close the bark of the gray birches (or whatever birch has smooth gray bark) is perhaps more beautiful. It’s so much like skin that I had to touch the tree on the parking lot trail around the campus pond; it’s easy to forget that bark is alive. The evergreens are different as well: spruce and fir that don’t do well in our hot, humid summers are common here, and the white pines are different somehow, perhaps fewer low branches.

The season is less advanced here. Enormous lilacs are still blooming in a few places, and peonies and poppies are still in full bloom, while at home they’ve been finished for weeks. But there are anachronisms—roses are everywhere here, though they’re rugosas and old shrub roses.

I stumbled across a magic garden today, Brookwood outside of Cooperstown, that was full of just such anachronisms. It was part of an historic estate, now in ruins, but a group of volunteers is attempting to maintain and restore the garden. Things that shouldn’t be blooming at the same time were, and the experience came close to bringing a sensory overload. Entering through a stone gate with a medieval-looking wooden door, the traveler finds a lawn flanked by weedy but spectacular perennial borders. Peonies of all types dominated on three sides, interspersed with pale foxgloves, amsonia, and purple alliums, with daisies interspersed and ragged orange poppies for spice. At the end of the lawn was a hedge of rosa alba and a tall pink rose that may have been Maiden’s Blush (or as the French called it, “Thigh of a Passionate Nymph”). Protected as the garden was by walls, the scents of the flowers stayed close and mingled—almost intoxicating. Passing beyond the rose hedge requires stepping down into a small garden with a pool surrounded by lady’s mantle and billowing catmint. Hidden behind ostrich ferns in a secret garden next to an old fountain, tiny pink primroses were blooming. But the real surprise was on the stone porch of the old school building that houses the group responsible for the garden today—nicotiana in full, heady, tropical-scented bloom. Pure magic.

I have a meeting to go to, so I won’t get started on the wild swamp walk to which the garden path leads.

Gifts of the garden

Weather that enables the spending of several hours a day outside is one of life's great gifts, taking my mind off things like oil spills and a house in need of a serious cleaning. A half-acre yard with lots of trees ensures that there's always shade somewhere, so the gardener can migrate in search of a (reasonably) cool and pleasant place to work. Since the work seems never to be done, life can be lived outside much of the time.

This spring has brought delights.  A weedy little plant that popped up in the yard has a tiny, nondescript bloom but is a favored nectaring spot of an exquisite little butterfly with red spots.  Woodpeckers have taken up residence in one of the oaks.  Geranium sanguinem, a lovely flower that has the unfortunate common name of  Bloody Cranesbill, has volunteered by the back fence. A salmon-pink miniature rose has shown up in the midst of a tangle of Oriental poppy and jimson weed.  (That area is going to be dug out when the yard is regraded, but the rose will be rescued.) The newest furry thief is a chipmunk that has learned how to climb the feeder pole and drape itself across the top of the birdfeeder to access the seed, to the great amusement of all occupants of our house.

I'm even glad that we didn't take out the yew hedge (yet).  A flurry in the bush revealed a young grackle that probably should not have been out of the nest yet, but like most adolescents, this one had evidently attempted a task beyond its skill--flying, in this case.  There it sat, in all its tufted glory, with wild "eyebrows" giving it the look of a mad scientist.  (No camera around when one wants such a thing, of course.)  My fear was that one of the neighborhood cats would get it or that it would starve, but the parents quickly found the errant offspring and brought food, and it was still in its evergreen hideaway the next day.  By evening, it was gone, so I'm hoping it learned to fly.

It was a good week in the garden.  

Garden update

 
Where does the time go? It's been over three weeks since the last blog entry, and school is not even in session.

The days have been full, though, with more activities than will be reported today, some of them of an emotional variety. (I'm still processing my reaction to a Mountaintop Removal site, viewed in the company of the engineer leading the work.)  Most days, however, have featured at least a little yard time, so here follows the state of the garden.

"Muddy mess" is still an apt description, though the mud is in different places as new beds come into being.  This week's project was the creation of a butterfly garden along the street in front of the house.  To our surprise, the front yard is not all sand, as we had thought: an extensive portion of the area used for the new garden proved to be heavy clay--the joys of old fill dirt.  Some of the plants chosen may well struggle in clay, but we shall see.  The strong will survive.

At the moment, our hedge of burgundy-leafed physocarpus and one panicle hydrangea backs a more-or-less organized mix of the following plants, only a couple of which are in bloom so far.  Visit in July for what should be a riot of color.
white valerian
lavender
butterfly bush
cardoon (not sure why I opted to try this, but the thought of a giant, edible, thornless thistle that's actually cousin to an artichoke amused me)
lantana
daylilies
"Cherry Brandy" rudbeckia
purple perennial salvia
"Hummingbird Coral" annual salvia
"Terra Cotta" snapdragons
mixed nasturtiums
creeping sedum

Empty spaces will be filled in with whatever's left over--and I have three wild lupines to find homes for.  Too bad West Virginia doesn't host the Karner blue butterfly.

A mixed bag of emotions

This week I have been unable to keep my eyes off the reports from the Gulf of Mexico.  I have never been to coastal Louisiana, but the marshes of coastal Georgia are one of my favorite landscapes, and the mangrove swamps of my Florida girlhood were magical places, full of birds that hardly looked real.  I mean, how could something as outrageous-looking as a roseate spoonbill manage to exist?  The thought of the numbers of deaths that are probably occurring as I write this--and that are due to a cultural addiction in which I participate--leaves me feeling sick and saddened.

But going into the garden-to-be always brings healing.  This week brought the sight of the first tiger swallowtails of the season, and the amusing spectacle of courting grackles.  For a few moments it seemed as if wild grackle sex would take place in broad daylight in full view of the neighborhood grandmothers as we chatted over the fence, but discretion prevailed, and the birds moved on.  The places where we haven't mowed yet are dotted with tiny seedling trees, at least some of them white oaks, offspring of the two giants whose pollen gave serious grief to my sinuses a few days ago.  What does it say that the sight of the babies brought delight, and a reminder to self to get the little things in pots for for an upcoming plant sale?  If they find homes, those two-inch trees may live for 500 years, more time than separates us from Shakespeare.  Such a thought is a true comfort.