Bring in a little spring with these visual, musical and poetic riffs on John James Audubon's The Birds of America, courtesy of the Musée de la civilisation. (Caveat: I'm guessing that the site might be difficult to appreciate fully without a high-speed internet connection.) I'm ever so grateful to ever so humble (who has more on Audubon) for this link.
Jane Freilicher's paintings of flowers and cityscapes in the gallery show "Jane Freilicher: Recent Work" at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in NYC are getting great buzz, including this review in the New York Observer by Hilton Kramer (link courtesy of About Last Night, where this show is currently one of Teachout's Top Five):
In some of the paintings—Nasturtiums Before a Red Cloth, for example, and Nasturtiums and Petunias I—the spirited patterns traced by the blossoms, leaves and stems of the flowers do seem to be performing a kind of dance on the canvas, in which every element is not so much composed as choreographed. In other paintings, however—Light Blue Above and Flowers on a Wicker Tray—the flowers in their vases seem to be sitting for their portraits. Under the magic of Ms. Freilicher’s fluent brush, they acquire a 'personality' that places them beyond the category of still-life.The gallery's site includes thumbnails of some of the pieces, among them this one, "Mallows and Trumpetvine", which has sent me into a lather of covetousness just a tad inappropriate for heading into the Triduum. Wish I were there, but since I can't be, maybe I'll settle for a copy of the show's catalog, which includes this delicious quote (via Hilton Kramer's review): "Notice how the city pulls apart to give these stalks and stems room to perform their Matissean shimmy."
The monochromatic still of winter has its own beauty, of course. But if it's hard to shake off that fog of s.a.d.-ness this time of year, it's because it seems impossible that tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, will be any different. Think Groundhog Day without the happy (or any) ending...and with the clock radio perpetually playing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" at the alarm.
I couldn't have asked for a better antidote (well, other than maybe getting that imaginary winter home in New Zealand--peonies in December!) than spending a day at the Garden Expo yesterday. The displays of real, live, flowering plants--daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, lilacs, crabapples, fothergillas--cast a spell (or broke the spell?), making the hope of spring seem more than just a hope.
The best thing about the Expo is the programming--seminars all day long on great garden topics by great speakers. It feels as though you're attending a fantasy version of college, where every minute of every course is interesting, you only enroll in classes that you want, and all without any papers due, exams to take, or grades given. (A bit of intruding reality: too many presentations of compelling interest scheduled for the same time slot. Guess I should have taken Human Cloning as a prerequisite.) So here's what (after a painful process of triage) I went to see, and just two (of the many) things I took away from each presentation:
"Diversify Your Garden with Ornamental Grasses" (speaker: Nancy Nedveck of The Flower Factory). #1: Karl Foerster (of the eponymous Calamagrostis cultivar) spearheaded breeding of North American grasses in Europe, during a period when they were virtually ignored here. #2: Consider planting daylilies and Miscanthus silver feather grass in combination; the plumes of miscanthus will emerge in September after daylily flowering has ended. (I like this idea--the chance to extend into fall the span of my daffodil-to-daylily strip in the back border.)
"Integrating Spectacular Roses in Your Garden Landscape" (speaker: Jeff Epping, Horticulture Director of Olbrich Botanical Gardens). #1: Olbrich's new rose garden will feature landscape uses of roses integrated into borders (the garden design work at Olbrich is always so fresh and imaginative that I cannot wait to see this); #2: crushed gravel can raise the pH of surrounding soil, which may cause alkaline-induced chlorosis for rugosas (good to know when considering hardscape and path design alternatives). (Gratuitous #3: It's "cle-MAT-is" for the very winning Mr. Epping.)
"Home Composting How-To" (speaker: John Reindl, Recycling Manager, Dane County Public Works Department). #1: Compost benefits plants by helping the plants' ability to absorb nutrients by improving their "cation exchange capacity" (Whoa--whoa--I'm a liberal arts major!); #2: Grass clippings compact too much, limiting aeration, and don't decompose well in compost piles, hence are better left on the lawn (good...we already do that).
"What's Wrong with This Photo: How to Make the Best of Your Garden Shots" (speaker: Pat Behling, photographer, Trillium Woods). #1: A tripod or monopod will make a big difference in getting a crisp image; #2: a chameleon background reflector is a good accessory, and can be homemade with clotheshanger wire and store-bought fabric.
"Vermicomposting: Indoor Composting with Worms" (speaker: George Dreckman, City of Madison recycling coordinator). Preface: I was primed for this one, having just finished Amy Stewart's new book, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. Post on The Earth Moved to come; in the meantime, get the book, read her blog, and hope with me that her book tour will include a stop in Madison. #1: Try shredded corrugated cardboard for worm bin bedding (the worms like the glue); #2: (From an audience member) Sprinkle lime on top of the bedding to control fruit flies.
"Trying WOW! Annuals in the Garden" (speaker: Mark Dwyer, Rotary Gardens). The title may have sounded a little corny, but let me tell you...by the end of this program, the audience was near nigh ready to salute the speaker with flickering lighters. #1: I must visit Rotary Gardens at least monthly during the growing season, to see how they integrate their 100,000 annuals into their border plantings; #2: You can't overuse sweet potato vine, and while 'Ace of Spades' is a nice leaf shape, 'Blackie' holds its color better.
"Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Container Gardening" (speakers: Jan Wos of Mayflower Greenhouse and Glenn Spevacek of Paine Art Center & Gardens). Another tremendous audience-pleaser; you should have heard the collective groan of disappointment when time ran out just as the speakers were beginning to get into their examples of season-extending fall container plantings. #1: On the importance of foliage: "With fronds like you, who needs anemones?" (I know. Only for certified pun-lovers, like me.) #2: Two words: Centaurea gymnocarpa. Best border and container combiner ever.
I managed to resist most of the garden decoration and accessories booths, until I came across an exhibit featuring works from "Jessy's Originals" in Black River Falls, Wisconsin -- the dried-flowers-in-frames thing, but done in more artful a way than I've ever seen before. I had to pick up a small frame featuring a bloom of Hydrangea macrophylla, dried with just the right mix of denim-blue and khaki-green coloring retained in the florets.
I wish I'd taken my camera for the exhibit at the Expo put together by University of Wisconsin students for the Allen Centennial Gardens display, on garden themes in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. An intriguing idea, which I hope they're planning to expand upon in the gardens' displays this coming season.
All cheered up now: let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
Today's imperative: stop surfing and start strolling through the collection of lovely botanical prints posted at the University of Delaware's The Art of Botanical Illustration site (link courtesy of iconomy, via Reflections in d minor). The categories in this curated collection include Herbals, Travel & Exploration, Scientific Botany, Women Artists, Modern Botanicals, and...of special interest to those of us who are, not to put too fine a point on it, seed-heads at this time of year...Seed Catalogs.
Botanical art is irresistible to me, whether in an elegantly framed-and-matted limited edition lithograph or a mass-produced poster on the walls of a fast-food burger place. Good news: secondhand stores, rummage sales, import stores and discount stores all seem to have an abundance of botanical prints these days at prices that don't seem to be more than what you'd pay for the frame. Interestingly, the increasing popularity (and ensuing mass availability) of botanical styles in the market doesn't diminish their aesthetic appeal to me one bit. In fact, I'm hopeful for the day that everybody else gets so sick of botanical stuff that I can finally afford to add to my Portmeirion collection (currently consisting of a single serving bowl, decorated with Helleborus niger, received as a wedding present almost thirteen years ago).
To my mind (or to my eye), botanical drawings seem to capture the identity and essence of a plant better than photographs. (Alas, I have no art-historiographical linguistic tools to explain why I think that is, so please bear with me.) Interesting case: Margery Fish's Carefree Gardening. It includes both line drawings (mysteriously uncredited) and black-and-white photos (credited to Pat Brindley). The line drawings are terrific; the photographs show the plants, but fall flat. I do think that it's very hard to convey proportion in the "right" way (I don't want to say "accurately", since photographs are almost always "accurate"), and somehow hand illustrations tend to do better justice to the dimensions of what you see when you look at a plant than many photographs. I also find that drawings (particularly line drawings) seem to do a better job of capturing the texture of foliage, with the effect of elevating the visual impact of foliage to a level deservedly on par with the otherwise diva-like blossom.
I've enjoyed the botanical cover art on Cook's Illustrated for so long that it's clearly time to start a rotating display of the covers in the kitchen. The back cover of the latest issue is titled "Stalks and Shoots," featuring delicately colored illustrations of harvested celery, rhubarb, artichoke, asparagus, cardoon, fiddlehead fern, fennel, and lemon grass. No, it's not too early to start dreaming about summer.
Carefree Gardening. Margery Fish. Faber and Faber Limited, 1989 reissue. ISBN 0-571-115325-9.
While thumbing through Katharine White for this post, I came across this helpful thumbnail history and commentary on Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the botanical illustrator previously mentioned in posts here and here:
The best portraits ever painted of the old French roses about which Graham Thomas writes are by Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the great botanical artist of the Napoleonic era. Redoute was born in Belgium; the Empress Josephine was his patron, and he worked at Malmaison for years, painting the roses in her garden. The Ariel Press, in London, published, in 1954 and 1956, a pair of folio-size volumes that reproduce four dozen of the Redoute plants .... I have seen only Volume 2, which has an over-ecstatic and none too accurate English introduction by Eva Mannering. The Redoute plates are what matter; every one of them makes a modern rose look clumsy.
Josephine retired to and died at Chateau de Malmaison, which she called her favorite house (no kidding: lose Napoleon and get great gardens and Redoute. I'd take that deal.). More Napoleon: The unseen presence of "Boney" looms large in the two latest installments of the Horatio Hornblower TV-movie series (only to be quickly and happily overshadowed by Ioan Gruffudd's scenes in long, flowing, curly locks and open nightshirt. /Homer Simpson 'mmm...burger' drool). And yesterday's Beethoven day brought a drive-time performance of the "Emperor" concerto (composed after Napoleon's invasion of Vienna), which, it's been suggested, would be more aptly titled "Anti-Emperor". Funny to have Napoleon (or the shade of his twisted, shrunken spirit) buzz-buzz-buzzing around here like his emblematic imperial bee.
[Technical note: The final e in Redoute should have an accent aigu, but my attempts to reproduce it look like this: RedoutJ. I've read the "Help" file in Typepad on adjusting my browser settings to fix this, but haven't been able to effect the recommended fix...I'll leave it for another day when I have more time, patience and brain cells. All apologies.]
Elisabeth Sheldon is a gardener and writer now in her eighties. Her new book, Time and the Gardener: writings on a lifelong passion, confronts (in text as well as in title) the bittersweet backdrop in which gardens and their gardeners come and go, which is that the nature of this enterprise is, after all, only ephemeral.
I was moved to pick up this book by the title, the gorgeous Pierre Joseph Redoute illustration of nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) on the cover, the fact that the author once studied at my alma mater, and (let's face it) because I had a gift card given to me on the occasion of my recent birthday which could subsidize the new-book, hardcover price.
It's a delightful read, and is going immediately into my "re-read" stack. Delightful, none the less for the author's matter-of-fact discussion of facing time as it both ravages and dwindles. I myself go back and forth on the question of whether it's better for the body to "go" before the mind, or the mind before the body. What we all probably hope for--a natural leaving that takes one from health to death in an instant--is mostly a matter of luck, although both my grandmothers were so lucky. Elisabeth Sheldon's thoughts on this topic:
What I object to is the steady process of gradual dilapidation: now it's the knees, then the back, and in my case the eyes. In the new system I would propose we would all go vigorously full speed ahead until our time was up, then fall suddenly on our faces, finished. Montaigne, the essayist, said he hoped Death would find him planting cabbages. I myself would like to meet Death in the flower garden--falling facedown onto a cushion of Dianthus gratianopolitanus, if it's not too much to ask.
Like the best gardening writing, this book teaches with the tone of "I'm still learning too", giving great comfort to those who couldn't keep their Caryopteris clandonensis alive either (ahem). She discusses extensively, and helpfully, the adventure of raising plants from seed (gathered and exchanged, as well as purchased), and makes this arena of gardening experience (which can be daunting and intimidating) accessible and hopeful. As for the rest of the book, I could go on and on about the beauty of her writing, which is clear while infused with character, and the wealth of knowledge she generously passes on in stories about her failures as well as successes...but this would only be a feeble echo of the chorus of praises found on the dust jacket, sung by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, and Diane Ackerman, among other luminaries.
I've had the good fortune to meet, and be inspired by, a number of gardeners who are women in their seventies and eighties, and have come to the conclusion that (don't give away this secret!) gardening is some sort of fountain of youth. Like these women, Elisabeth Sheldon exemplifies the vigor and the vision that I aspire to achieve for however long it is that I'm graced to be around.
Time and the Gardener: writings on a lifelong passion. Elisabeth Sheldon. Beacon Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8070-8556-1.
