Bookish Gardener

Eminence verdigris

Statue of Linnaeus, The University of Chicago, early fall 2005.
Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

When they named any thing, they turned toward it, and as they spoke, I saw and remembered that they called the thing they would point out by the name they uttered.

        Saint Augustine, Confessions

Linnaeus was born about 300 years ago. (His birthday is officially commemorated as May 23, 1707, but given the fits and starts of Sweden's Julian-to-Gregorian calendar transition between 1700 and 1753, I believe I'm within the grace period of not having to turn to the "Belated Birthday" rack at Hallmark just yet.) His father, Nils, created the surname "Linnaeus" after the littleleaf linden tree (Tilia cordata) on the family homestead.

His love of flowers developed an an early age, and it is recorded that when only eight years old he was nicknamed "the little botanist."

        Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1958 edition).

The Prince of Naturalists, Barton called Linnaeus. The Great Architect. The Swedish Sage. God's Registrar.

        [Narration of the imagined Meriwether Lewis]

        Brian Hall, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark.

I love those botanical names, even when I'm bamboozled by pronunciations (Cotinus coggyggria, anyone?) and frustrated by the it's-Mahonia-no-it's-Berberis types that keep rearranging the sock drawer. Forest for the trees, folks, forest for the trees:

The first word in his scheme of Latin binomials tells the genus, grouping diverse plants which nevertheless share a commonality; the second word names the species, plants alike enough to regularly interbreed and produce offspring like themselves. It is a framework for understanding, a way to show how pieces of the world fit together.

        Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions.

"It is a marvelous creation, isn't it? Linnaeus's system? The most valuable contribution to natural history since Noah put saw to gopher wood. His binomial standard reminds me of terrestrial coordinates, the genus, say, representing latitude, and the species longitude, so that the two of them in conjunction enable you to pinpoint the one precise location or the one recognized scintilla of Creation, that is here, this one, and no other."

       Dialogue of the imagined Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, from I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company.

This statue and I arrived on campus the same year, 1976, but it wasn't until one spring morning last year that I spent more than a passing moment in its company. I was at the medical center to accompany a family member (with an ailment favorably resolved for now), for a procedure that would take most of the morning. I was reading King Dork, and figured that my steady stream of low chuckles occasionally punctuated by the poorly suppressed outburst of laughter would be inappropriate comportment for the waiting room of the PET scan department, so I walked down the Midway and visited Linnaeus. The statue's surrounded by beautiful gardens (which wasn't always the case), and I sat down on one of the garden benches. Across me was a crabapple tree, every limb full and drooping with blossoms, and behind me another, which pelted me with petals like ticker tape with every musky sweet breeze.

This statue of Linnaeus is uncommonly expressive. He's on the go, with one foot stepping off his pedestal. A book is tucked under his arm, and he's clutching a bunch of flowers—could they be of his beloved tea plant (Camellia sinensis)? The visage is intelligent, engaged, and even a little bemused:

I read in one of my handbooks, written before it was considered necessary to be dull to be taken seriously:

"Delightful Linnaeus, who dearly loved his little joke, himself confesses to have named the day-flowers after three brothers Commelyn, Dutch botanists, because two of them—commemorated in the showy blue petals of the blossom—published their works; the third, lacking application and ambition, amounted to nothing, like the third inconspicuous whitish third petal."

    From A Country Year: Living The Questions.

To the man, our latter-day Adam, who named living things: Happy three-hundredth birthday.

Back to bookish

My review of Tom Turner's Garden History is posted at Human Flower Project. I'm very grateful to the delightful, generous and patient Julie Ardery for the chance to read and write about this very cool book.

Essential

Your garden will reveal yourself. Do not be terrified of that.

        Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

(Herewith my very tardy contribution to the Henry Mitchell Festschrift at May Dreams Gardens.)

The Essential Earthman was my introduction to the art of garden writing and to the wonders of Henry Mitchell. It's a book that I reread often, each time with familiar comfort and deepened appreciation: let me count the ways.

(But first: Earth-MAYON? or EARTH-mun? I think I'd always thought of it as the former, but now I'm tending toward the latter. Prospective next year's resolution: find a setting where this usage controversy can actually rear its pretty head in real, live, audible conversation.)

And now, let us praise Henry Mitchell's paronomasia—that is, his hearty embrace of the pun ("The Wrongs of Winter, the Rites of Spring"). And his rimshot jokes, almost always at the expense of cats. And his metaphors, weirdly apt ("The flowers suggest a Santa Barbara girl who gave up tennis for macrame, that is, they look a bit odd, as if they had tried drugs and lived in Tangiers awhile"), and gleefully mishmoshed ("We begin, often enough, by hoping to knock the neighbors' eyes out with the largest mass of color since the lions ate the Christians"). And his allusions that remain just beyond my ken ("The first [Anemone blanda] out with me this year was the somewhat startling raw rich red 'Radar,' like a dandelion that fought at Shiloh, so to speak." ...that one I kind of get; "Once they saw we were not going to catch them for a Brunswick stew, and once they comprehended that the hounds were actually awake only on the rarest occasions, then the squirrels arrived like the guests at Andrew Jackson's cheese board." ...that one was beyond me until I looked here [—see "Anyone could come to Andrew Jackson's public parties..."]). And his sly riffing satire (fictional named varieties of Japanese irises "Moon over the Tortoise Cat's Ear', "Shimmering Brocade of July Charcoal Pit', and 'Glory of Titmouse Nest').

You don't have to agree with Henry Mitchell about everything to enjoy him. (I for one go for cats over dogs.) He's mad about bearded irises, I'm meh about them. He rues the rudbeckia, which I regard as the savior of my summer-slumping perennial border. And what's this? He dislikes the rose 'Charlotte Armstrong' because: "It's very like Beethoven, a towering composer, no doubt of that, and yet you may dislike most of his music, though the late quartets sound much like Mozart." (But But But!...I sputter, affectionately.)

There are no photographs in The Essential Earthman, because they would be beside the point, and would only detract from descriptions like this: "The flowers [of the moonflower] are strongly scented, a trifle sickly in character. They are like thin strong silk, so white they appear to be illuminated, even on a fairly dark night." How confidently he strides in each of his pieces from wisecrack, to erudition, to self-deprecating admission, to the moral of the story, without missing a beat.

When Henry Mitchell writes of the gardener's nearly universal love of the color blue, he theorizes that "there is some numinous aspect to blue and that other gardeners sense it as much as I do." That's what I seek and find whenever I read Henry Mitchell. If his writing were a color, it would be the color blue.

Midnight, mitternacht, mezzanotte Monk

We were at the music store before Thanksgiving to get the busted A-string on my daughter's cello replaced. While waiting, I leafed through a book of Thelonious Monk piano pieces. As one of the pages opened to that song, the plume of its tune filled my head. We got back to the car, and when I turned the key, WORT's afternoon jazz show was mid-song with "Autuor de Minuit" by Les Nubians, a hypnotic rendering of "'Round Midnight" with two singers, gently syncopated percussion, and acoustic bass.

The week before, I'd heard UW professor Catherine Kautsky perform George Crumb's "Eine Kleine Mitternacht Musik (A Little Midnight Music): Ruminations on 'Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk", a nine-piece suite for piano. The theme is quoted faithfully as the work opens and closes, and the travels in between take you through sensations of what you might hear from afar, half-awake or dreaming in the dead of night: the sound of a mallet striking in a percussive burst; the delicate reverberations of harp sounds from plucked piano strings; a technicolor epiphany mid-work as Crumb quotes Debussy ("Golliwog Revisited"), making vivid, absurd sense (well, at least to me...I only began to appreciate Debussy after coming to it after being immersed in Monk); a ritual intonation of the hours of the clock in Italian, from "one" to mezzanotte. (There's much more than I could absorb on a first take, and I was just about to say that I was dying to hear this again, when the welcome news arrived via email that it'll be performed again on campus next week, hurray.)

I've got the obsessive enthusiast's fancy for the variation (Gotta catch 'em all!), whether in works that announce themselves as such, or when old standards are given new performances. It's satisfying to recognize the family resemblance in the disguised retelling of a work in a displaced genre, or to discover a new aspect of its essence as it's turned on its head (which is not to say that we shouldn't recognize and recoil from a wrongheaded adaptation as a wolf in grandma's bedclothes).

I came upon another variation on the 'Round Midnight theme in a roundabout way when I read Bart Schneider's Beautiful Inez this summer, thanks to this recommendation. I feasted on the book's, uh, enthusiastic obsession with language, food and music, but also was taken by finding the book's family home set in San Francisco's Richmond district, evoking by idiosyncratic happenstance my own fond memories of a summer in a sublet apartment on 36th Avenue:  being lulled into deep REM sleep by the lowing of foghorns in the misty night; dimly hearing the faraway barks of the sea lions on the Seal Rocks in the quiet predawn; spending Sunday afternoons in solitary bliss walking down Geary Boulevard all the way through the numbered Avenues, with Russian and Cantonese voices mixing in the air, or finding a deserted spot along the hills of the coastline from which to listen to Ella singing Gershwin on my mini-boom box while looking out at the ruins of the Sutro Baths.

But back to the book, which heads toward its conclusion with the beautiful, and despairing, Inez hearing her husband arrive home from work. He's whistling "'Round Midnight", a tune new to her (he's a jazz aficionado, she's a concert violinist), but she's drawn to it immediately. We hear the song whistled again as Inez's husband teaches the melody to her, and as she plays and replays it on her violin, we start hearing the song ourselves, as it goes into perpetual-motion rotation as the soundtrack for the wordless, beautifully wrought, awful end to Inez's story.

Although the melody of the song can be shaded in with any number of chord progressions, versions that simply take the dead man's walk all the way down the E-flat minor scale in the song's final measures miss the point; what needs to echo as the song ends is harmony in E-flat major.

The Thelonious Monk Quartet plays "'Round Midnight" here (scroll down to the link).

Once he called me into his room. The variations from the Opus 111 sonata were open on the piano. "Look," he said, ponting to the music (he had also lost the ability to play the piano), "look." Then, after a prolonged effort, he managed to add, "Now I know!" He kept trying to explain something important to me, but the words he used were completely unintelligible, and seeing that I didn't understand him, he looked at me in amazement and said, "That's strange."

I knew what he wanted to talk about, of course. He had been involved with the topic a long time. Beethoven had felt a sudden attachment to the variation form toward the end of his life. At first glance it might seem the most superficial of forms, a showcase for technique, the type of work better suited to a lacemaker than to Beethoven. But Beethoven made it one of the most distinguished forms (for the first time in the history of music) and imbued it with some of his finest meditations.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

...we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. [....] I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. [....] And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe).

Fallen, fallen

Another autumnal equinox, another Rilke poem. As it did last year, Rilke's poetry came back into visible orbit for me via this summer's Token Creek Chamber Music Festival. The final program of the music series featured a performance of Peter Lieberson's "Rilke Songs", composed to five poems from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (I:4, "O ihr Zärlichen"; II:1, "Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!; II:12, "Wolle die Wandlung"; II,5, "Blumenmuskel"; and II:29, "Stiller Freund"). Wanting to familiarize myself with the poems before the program, I found myself in the poetry stacks of the B&N, four different translations propped open to the first of the poems, and relied on instinctive reaction to choose Edward Snow's translation, which, after more hours in its company, still reads just right to me.

I moved onto reading Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William Gass, which sends me into a little orbit of my own. The academic stilt of its title is misleading; this is a very personal and personable book. Rilke emerges as a three-dimensional human from the strokes of Gass's biographical sketch in the opening chapter. Somehow I'm unexpectedly relieved that the revered Rilke is flawed and real, not out of indulgence (I don't believe that it's okay to be a jerk so long as you produce great art) or sympathy (...nor that it's okay to be a jerk if you are oh so sensitive), but because unflattering truth is always better than hagiographical spin. Rilke, the poet of the Big Idea, believed in and worshiped passion...but mostly in his head. The existential losses of youth, love and life are celebrated in his poetry, but unsung, and perhaps unknown to the poet, are what he's lost by having passed up the chance to be a good father, and having never experienced an honest day's hard work. Why is it that Rilke's poetry is now even more appealing to me even after the unveiling of these hairy warts? Gass gets at this mystery in describing Rilke's poems as "lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself...lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength."

As advertised, the meat of Gass's book is the philosophy and practice of poetry translation. Gass lays out and examines selected stanzas in multiple iterations by several different translators (including himself), parsing them with time-honored methods of literary criticism, his own poetic sensibility, and sometimes just a little bit of Simon Cowell ("Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid", he says about their translations of the first stanza of II:12 of the Sonnets). After reading Gass, I'm grateful for the bounty of English translations available on bookstore shelves, and hopeful that I can get closer to the essence of the elephant by putting all the blind men in a room and listening to each of their stories.

But where were we? Oh, yes. It's the first day of fall. Rilke's poem "Herbst" ("Autumn"):

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Gass translates the first stanza: "The leaves are falling, falling from far away, / as though a distant garden died above us; / they fall, fall with denial in their wave."

"Herbst" is recited and sung in German, set to acoustic guitar accompaniment, here.

The way I want to hear this poem today is in the Edward Snow translation, set to music for voices by Joshua Shank (scroll down the post for the translation), which was brought to us earlier this year through the good offices of The Fredösphere. (Links to a sound file of its performance and its score can be found in the first paragraph of this post.)

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

See and say

I got your picture hangin' on the wall
It can't see or come to me when I call your name
I realize it's just a picture in a frame
          - Ashford/Simpson (via Gaye/Terrell)

But all I've got is a photograph
And I realize you're not coming back anymore
          - Starr/Harrison

The camera can never go as far as the eye can see. How many times have I been thwarted from capturing a vision? The jeweled green glint of a hummingbird in blurred darting flight. Plumed ornamental grasses standing sentry in a hundred-foot formation. The sun of high noon so bright that everything is seen in an illuminated haze through a squinty gaze. The big sky in summer so cloudless and clear that you feel like you're standing at the bottom of a deep blue sea. The serendipitous glimpse of three clumps of three different agastaches in three different beds yards apart, echoing hullo-ullo-ullo in an unplanned but perfectly spaced diagonal. But even shots that adhere to the limits of light and dimension and yield pleasing results are, ultimately, no more than pretty pictures. Their beauty can be enjoyed, they may even evoke a memory or two, but they cannot send you into a time machine where you get to relive the experience you were trying to record. I certainly should know better; every parent learns this lesson a couple of hundred rolls of film or so into their first baby's first year; but the urge to catch and to keep that which cannot be possessed is one that I can overcome only with intense conscious effort, accompanied by much ersatz zen-talk.

I was sitting in the "sunroom" the other day, the name given to a room built onto the back of our garage, with its south-facing front and ceiling all in glass. It's a wreck, really, isolated from the house's heating and ventilation, prone to roof leaks, and subject to temperature extremes that make it unsuitable for growing any plant known to me. Except: the door, when open, frames one of the most beautiful views there is of the garden as a festive and orderly jungle, with magenta petunias and chartreuse and black sweet potato vines billowing out of the window boxes, flowering and done-flowering spikes of agastache and penstemons in their most attractive profile view, and mounds of multicolored snapdragons and petunias, sown from seasons past, filling in the blanks. Sitting in the sunroom, I was rereading Henry Mitchell's The Essential Earthman, and he (as is his wont) set me right straight:

Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.

Levantesque

Humoresque has been showing up a lot on the classic movie channel this summer, coinciding with the release of a new DVD set of Joan Crawford films. This movie's one of those that I'd always had a vague impression about but had never really watched all the way through until a few months ago.

The movie's title (and not too much else) comes from the short story by Fannie Hurst, about a child prodigy whose gift is nurtured by his immigrant mother. After achieving fantastic success as a world-renowned concert violinist, he enlists to fight in the Great War. The story ends with his brief visit home on leave. He plays "Humoresque" for his mother ("It's like life, son, that piece. Crying to hide its laughing and laughing to hide its crying."), and then a piece he's composed to accompany Alan Seeger's "I Have A Rendezvous with Death." He asks his childhood sweetheart to marry him, then leaves for Europe.

The movie attempts melodrama of its own (boy from the slums meets violin, boy with violin meets rich girl, rich girl wins boy [mama has a fit], boy loses girl, boy keeps violin and mama), not quite as successfully. The violinist in the movie needs to be more of a wunderkind with a streak of mama's boy, but there isn't a grain of innocence in the world-weary John Garfield (whose character as a boy is played by Robert Blake). He's merely penniless and defiant, and completely unbelievable as he mouths platitudes about How Much His Music Means To Him and How Much Joan Crawford Means To Him. (However, although John Garfield is somewhat short for a leading man, and not at all handsome in my book, he is inexplicably, um, hot.) The movie is, of course, famed for its music (even inspiring this tribute album from Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg), but the violin solos in the movie (although played ably by Isaac Stern's fingers and John Garfield's furrowed brow), are mostly of the histrionic diva genre, not so much my thing.

But I find this film worth returning to, for a couple of reasons. I'm not a particular fan of Joan Crawford, but she is so pretty (not haughty, not brittle) that it makes you want to stare at the screen here, even (or maybe even especially) in the scene when she's drunkenly warbling along to "Embraceable You". Her classic line, of course, is: "I'm tired of playing second fiddle to the ghost of Beethoven!" (Funny...I think I had that said to me too, around Day Three or so of The Beethoven Experience.)

And then there's Oscar Levant, who does double duty as a concert pianist and the movie's comic relief. I had one of those "You know you're getting old when..." moments when I first saw him in this movie: Oscar Levant looks like a kid to me here. They give his piano playing a fair amount of screen time (considering), and it is thrilling to watch his outsized hands on the keys. Not to be missed are his inspired non sequiturs, which seem to be his own way of turning to the fourth wall and saying "What am I doing in this movie?":

Did I ever tell you I was in love once? It took me two weeks to get over her. I played all the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas. It took exactly two weeks.

Are you sure there's nothing else I can do for you? Maybe you'd like to hear me play the Hammerklavier sonata—it only takes an hour, if I leave out the repeats.

I realized at some point that I've felt a presumptuous familiarity with Oscar Levant for years, although I've only seen him in one other movie (The Band Wagon), have never seen any vintage reruns of his television appearances, and, aside from my copy of Levant Plays Gershwin and the various versions of "Blame It On My Youth" dotted here and there in my jazz library, don't know all that much about him as a performer or composer. I was curious to see what he was like as a writer, so I tracked down his first book, A Smattering of Ignorance, written several years before he appeared in Humoresque. It's a collection of musings and anecdotes delivered with deadpan hilarity, based on his life to that point, as a concert pianist, conductor and composer in New York City, as a composition student of Schoenberg and Hollywood studio "cog in the wheel" in L.A., and as a grieving friend of the then recently deceased George Gershwin. The book is as meaty as it is entertaining, and its best chapters are those in which Levant gets serious about the future of American music: "The progress that had been made toward insinuating new American works into the program of symphony orchestras was arrested because the support of the orchestras was dwindling, and the conductors did not wish to alienate their audiences further by forcing difficult works on them. [....] A new generation of composers was emerging which inevitably would be subject to the same cycle of mild patronizing interest and essential indifference as that which preceded them." (Plus ça change...?) But I'm also happy to indulge in the guilty pleasure of laughing at this tale of a particular studio boor:

The level of musical perception among Holywood producers is, if anything, slightly lower than their perception of values associated with the other arts. [....] I recall the plight of one, whose social prestige decreed his presence at a certain Hollywood Bowl concert. It chanced that the important work of the evening was the C minor symphony of Beethoven, which he suffered in silence until the coda of the final movement. This has, as you will recall, what could be desribed as an 1805 Roxy finish, with the tonic and dominant chords repeated a dozen times, with flourishes. At each insistent recurrence of the tonic he half rose from his chair to facilitate his exit . . . also because he was bored. When the third series of tonic and dominant chords still left him short of the actual end of the movement he turned and muttered, "The rat fooled me again."

[....]

Perhaps his most searching bit of musical criticism was propounded when he said to me dictatorially, "In my opinion"—marking the words carefully to allow the full weight of his thought to rest on me—"the greatest piece of music ever written is 'Humoreske.'"

It was after such a characteristic demonstration that S. N. Behrman said of this producer, "Now I know why he can make those instantaneous decisions—he is never deflected by thought."

Oscar Levant, A Smattering of Ignorance. Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1942 (reissue ISBN 0848821521).

 

Cichorium emporium

If the chicory of our roadsides is divided in the spring, it blooms in August rather than early July, and its sky-blue daisy flowers are to my mind quite beautiful.

Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman.

Chicory one: I'm not sure whether this is Cichorium intybus or Cichorium endivia. It has dandelion-like, medium-green leaves, not quite as curly as escarole, but suitable (in small doses) for including in a salad green mix. The flowers are the classic ice-blue of the roadside chicories.

Chicory two: This is Cichorium intybus of the type that can be forced into Belgian endive heads. The foliage of this plant is thicker and a deeper green than that of "Chicory one", and although the blue of the flower is only a notch darker, it's almost periwinkle against the deep green leaves (this photo doesn't quite get the color right, alas).

Passengers in my car were getting impatient with my habit of craning for a closer look at flowering chicory along the highway, and I really wanted the chance to be able to look at chicory flowers up close without convoys of semis whizzing by, so I introduced these into my vegetable gardens last year, starting from seed. Cichorium intybus is perennial, and Cichorium endivia is annual or biennial, so these grew like leafy salad greens last year, then overwintered and put up tall stalks this spring that began to flower a few weeks ago. The flowers open by the dozens along knobby-kneed stems first thing in the morning, and close up by early or mid-afternoon, followed by masses of new flowers the next day.

Chicory is known as a weed just about everywhere, but is also called "blue sailor weed" in some parts, a nod to botanical folklore that claims that the flower is the avatar of a lovelorn lass whose heart was broken by a sailor who returned to his true love, the sea. I think her name was Brandy.

He came on a summer's day
Bringin' gifts from far away
But he made it clear he couldn't stay
No harbor was his home.

Perception colored

Dog days already. The peonies went from lush to louche in less than a fortnight. These days, all I need for my impression of Albert Brooks in Broadcast News is to step outside and stand stockstill.

Just before the sun sets, the duskglow of the garden takes on a sepia-toned cast from the sodden, humid air, like a historical flashback in an artsy movie, or a fugue state. Pinks, yellows, reds, grays and blues buzz through the haze like old neon light fixtures.

The other night, my husband was out in a stretch of the back border sequenced in jewel-toned 'Caradonna' salvia, yellow coreopsis, purple-bronze sedum, red-to-yellow blanketflower, magenta petunia, lemon yellow 'Happy Returns' daylily, pale blue catmint, this meadow buttercup, sunshine orange calendula, and blue-purple 'May Night' salvia. He was stopped at one spot, looking at the buttercup, and then the salvia, and then back and forth again. Look, he said. See how the blue looks after you stare at the yellow. He was right. In daylight, 'May Night' is pretty much a plain blue salvia, without the pizzazz of 'Caradonna' or the subtlety of 'Blue Hill', but it turned electric in that light with our little gaze-shifting exercise.

Which all brings to mind this from Gertrude Jekyll, the first and last word on color in the garden:

Each portion now becomes a picture in itself, and every one is of such a colouring that it best prepares the eye, in accordance with natural law, for what is to follow. Standing for a few moments before the end-most region of grey and blue, and saturating the eye to its utmost capacity with these colours, it passes with extraordinary avidity to the succeeding yellows. These intermingle in a pleasant harmony with the reds and scarlets, blood-reds and clarets, and then lead again to yellows. Now the eye has again become saturated, this time with the rich colouring, and has therefore, by the law of complementary colour, acquired a strong appetite for the greys and purples. These therefore assume an appearance of brilliancy that they would not have had without the preparation provided by their recently received complementary colour.

Gertrude Jekyll, The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll (selected and with an introduction by Elizabeth Lawrence). David R. Godine, 2000. ISBN 0-87923-599-3.

Newly blooming: Ratibida columnaris (Mexican hat), Alcea rosea (pastel hollyhocks), David Austin rose 'Bibi Maizoon', Monarda didyma 'Jacob Kline', Hemerocallis 'Happy Returns' (daylily), Clarkia unguiculata (mountain garland), Linum grandiflorum (red flax, self-sown), Zinnia tenuifolia 'Red Spider' (self-sown), Nicotiana langsdorfii (green flowering tobacco, self-sown), Phlox paniculata (pink and 'Bright Eyes'), Asclepias tuberosa (white butterfly milkweed), Cichorium intybus (chicory), Aconitum (white monkshood), Heliopsis helanthiodes (false sunflower), Echinacea purpurea (white coneflower), Prunella grandiflora (selfheal).

Literary gardens

Looks like Prairie Tide and I have a book in common in our garden libraries: The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens in Your Own Backyard. This book combines garden-related excerpts from classic literary works with illustrations, history and how-to information for the plants, flowers and garden creatures featured in the works. I picked up this book about a year ago (in the bargain section of the very same bookstore chain mentioned in Laurie's post) and have enjoyed it too. You can open this book to almost any page and be fascinated by the words of Proust, Fitzgerald, Cather, or Turgenev, just to name a few...but I have a quirky fancy for L. Frank Baum, whose The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is excerpted for the scene where Dorothy, Toto and the Lion are felled by the sweet scent of a vast field of scarlet poppies.

There's another literary garden on the web these days at ever so humble, where you'll find photos, quotes and impressions artfully spotlighting some of our favorite garden friends. Enjoy a leisurely stroll and pick yourself a bouquet of honeysuckle, blue flag iris, daisies, chives, and phlox.

The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens In Your Own Backyard. Duncan Brine (introduction), Lea Richardson and Jesse Kaplan (illustrations). Berkley Books, 2001. ISBN 0-425-18341-6.

Newly blooming: David Austin English rose 'Graham Thomas'; Anagallis arvensis (pimpernel—Baroness Emmuska Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel is featured in The Literary Garden, although what I'm growing is a blue-flowered variety); Papaver somniferum (breadseed poppy—Surrender Dorothy!).