Bookish Gardener

I am...tagged

I am [see above].  Thanks, OGIC!
I want spring to be like this year's, always.
I wish there were 48 hours to each day.
I hate having to shoot the look of the death ray at people who talk during performances.
I love these 50 things.
I miss holding a sleeping infant snuggled against the crook of my neck.
I fear heights and speed, especially when combined.
I hear the hard drive of this laptop revving up for no apparent reason. Uh-oh.
I wonder when, oh when, Audrey will meet her overdue end on 24.
I regret letting the lisianthus seedlings dry out (Mistah Eustoma, he dead).
I am not voluble.
I dance whenever asked, and sometimes even when not.
I sing in the pews at church, and otherwise only in my head (why, you're most welcome).
I cry so seldom that my children ask me, "Mom, have you ever cried?" Until they saw me turn into a soggy mess watching the Doctor Who episode "Father's Day". Cried at the show, cried at the rerun, cried at the recap.
I am not always as punctual as I mean to be.
I make with my hands (or, made with my hands) fingerless shiny red gloves for my first-grader to wear while she dances to "Supergirl" .
I write slowly and with undue anxiety.
I confuse David Anthony Higgins on Malcolm in the Middle with Michael Badalucco on The Practice.
I need black coffee, dark chocolate, chili peppers and garlic.
I should fold the laundry.
I start Beethoven's Op. 27 No. 1 (piano sonata no. 13) this week.
I finish dessert, always.
I tag anyone who wants to play...

Ah, buddy.

Another opportunity missed: the American Players Theatre in Spring Green has been performing The Playboy of the Western World this summer, with the final performances coming this week. I haven't read the play and don't know much about it except for it being the play in which Franny Glass played Pegeen, according to Franny and Zooey, one of my ten books. Unfortunately, I never got around to getting tickets, and now it doesn't work for my schedule. Oh, well. But with Franny and Zooey on my mind, I couldn't resist taking this quiz from Amy Loves Books:

Which member of J.D. Salinger's dysfunctional Glass family are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

You are Buddy. You don't like people very much.
You are brilliant, eccentric and reclusive.
Critics say that you are the author's
alter-ego. Maybe you are. You'll never let
anyone close enough to find out.

And which Glass are you?

Profile

Your Bookish Gardener is the subject of this Friday's profile over at normblog.

Ten books (updated)

What are your ten "personal 'great books'"? Thanks to normblog for the idea and the criteria for selection ["these are not necessarily what I judge to be the 10 most important of the works that I've read in my life (on whatever criterion, or set of criteria, or scale). But they're all ones which have had a marked and lasting influence on the way I think about the world."]. Here are the books on my list, ordered chronologically by when they came into my reading life:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley).
The Diary of A Young Girl, Anne Frank.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig.
Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings, Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger.
Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis.
Protagoras, Plato.
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor.
Henry Mitchell On Gardening, Henry Mitchell.

Update, August 3, 2004: I've edited the Malcolm X entry to credit Alex Haley, who actually wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X after Malcolm X's death, based on his extensive interviews with Malcolm X. I briefly toyed with the idea of adding explanations to this list, but I didn't get very far before nodding off in utter tedium. Instead, I'll try featuring quotes from these books from time to time on my reading blog.

Chan's garden

My sweet-pies got cleaned up and (relatively speaking) dressed up for their annual department-store portraits yesterday, so I took the opportunity to take some snapshots when we got home. (This is scanned from a print taken with my late father's camera.) The alternate title for this post was "Herding Cats". My oldest, Jessamyn, is making her younger brother James and sister Petey laugh here by singing "The Legend of the Rent" from School of Rock.

Gardeners with taste (updated)

Thanks to everyone who gave us a taste of their tastes in the garden by taking the taste test (aka the "Chan S. Gardener's Index"—thanks, Robert!). Special thanks go to Kathy Purdy for spreading the word and encouraging her many friends in the garden blog world to join in the fun. The good sports who played along are listed below, alphabetically by blog name:

bashasgarden
Cheep Sentiment
Cold Climate Gardening: Kathy Purdy and Judy Miller (updated July 18, 2004)
The Garden's Gift
Hands In the Dirt
Ilona's Garden Journal (updated July 20, 2004)
The Llama Butchers
Mixolydian Mode
prairie point
Rant-O-Mat (updated July 23, 2004)
Tectorum
Zanthan Gardens

Since I enjoyed the annotations and explanations in these posts so much, here are mine:

1. Lilies: oriental or asiatic? The asiatics flower at an indispensable transition time and are less loved by the [dastardly creatures whose name I refuse to utter anymore today]...but the orientals are fragrant (sometimes excessively so, I admit), and a dozen rubrums were my wedding bouquet.
2. No-till or till? I've managed to do okay without having to till, just using generous amendments in a generous hole and lots of mulch. As a friend of the worm, the arguments against tilling ring true to me.
3. Bare hands or garden gloves? Gardening gloved doesn't feel right to me, although I don't quite feel that way on the one or two occasions each year that I grab hold of a stinging nettle plant while weeding.
4. Garden tchotchkes, no or yes? I'm not large with the tchotchkes, either inside the house or outside, but there will be one exception (to be revealed in a future post sometime in the next few weeks...how's that for a teaser!).
5. Clay or sand? The brief format of the test made this question more ambiguous than I'd intended. I'd meant to ask: if you had to choose between clay or sand for a hypothetical garden, which would you choose? I choose clay, as being more nutritive and water-retaining. Lauren Springer makes a pretty compelling case for clay (I believe it's in Passionate Gardening), pointing out that the hated crust on clay serves the same purpose as mulch, and that plants grow tougher and sturdier in clay than even in much-sought loam. I'll buy that!
6. Shrub roses or hybrid teas? Shrubs all the way for me. I love my rugosas (which I've had for a year), and am being led down the garden path (so to speak) by the new David Austins I've started growing this year. Hybrid teas don't work well in this climate, and I've always thought they look awkward as plants in the garden.
7. Hollyhocks: single or double? I've got a very strong preference for single hollyhocks. I saw some peach-colored doubles at the Rotary Gardens in Janesville last week, and while lots of folks oohed and aahed over them, I thought the blooms looked like the Kleenex flowers we used to make for our moms for Mother's Day.
8. Foliage: gray or glaucous? I like glaucous foliage well enough, but I've got a thing for gray right now, which is in heavy, heavy use in my new white garden.
9. Hemerocallis: flava or fulva? I like both these species daylilies for their stateliness and stature, but out in the roadside, not in my garden. Flava has a slight edge over fulva, but maybe that's because the hip-hoppy name makes me chuckle.
10. Impatiens: double or single? I don't like single impatiens unless they are New Guinea. I like double impatiens well enough, but they aren't in my garden this year. I am a big fan of the impatiens not on this list: the "touch-me-not" Impatiens balsam.
11. Calendula or tagetes? None of the calendula I grew last year self-seeded! So I'm trying again, but they're coming up slowly. I think they blend with other garden plants better than tagetes, and survive light frosts nicely. But I'm growing some tagetes too (the heirloom "Pinwheel", which has just started blooming).
12. Arborvitae or juniper? We inherited an arborvitae from the previous owners of our home, which has been cloud-pruned to nice effect. I see no redeeming aspects to juniper whatsoever.
13. Spaded edge or "edging"? I have to boast that I converted my better half to the aesthetic advantages of spaded edging after a diligent campaign to get him to agree to rip out the old black plastic edging that came with the house. It'll mean more work (but then again, I like weeding quackgrass. Yes, I'm seeking help.).
14. Asters or mums? I like asters, but the only ones I have are recovering in the raised bed "sick bay" after being mauled for the second year straight by the unmentionables. I am lukewarm at best about mums...I only like the very decorative, hothouse Korean mums, which needless to say are not growable under normal garden circumstances.
15. Reflecting pool or coursing waterfall? My garden can't afford to give up the space for a proper reflecting pool, but reflecting pools are often my favorite feature in botanical gardens that I visit. I have a sump pump discharge that sounds like a coursing waterfall several times a day (very glamorous!).
16. Morning glory blue or forget-me-not blue? There's not a blue that I don't like, but morning glory blue (particularly Brazilian morning glory blue, which is a tad richer than the annual morning glory) just grabs me and won't let go.
17. Lettuce: leaf or cos? Cos has its uses (tuna niçoise, yum), but the salad I like to sit down to every night is made from leaf lettuce.
18. Hyacinth bean or red runner bean? (Yes, I meant to say "scarlet" instead of "red"...sorry for the brain blurp.) Hyacinth bean is pleasing at every stage...from the black bean to the burgundy veined foliage to the pink flowers to the purple bean pods...it was a great success last year when the sweet peas gave up the ghost without really trying. This year, with the sweet peas doing so well (they are now taller than I am!), I'm trying the hyacinth beans as a ground cover in the new shrub border. So far, so good.
19. Orange or pink? In the garden, I use pink as an accessory, but I use orange to light my fire.
20. Garden bed shapes: formal or informal? Inspired by Dean Riddle: formal.
21. Garden bed planting schemes: informal or formal? Inspired by Dean Riddle: informal.
22. Hydrangeas: lace-cap or mophead? I thought I liked mophead (and I still do), but I'm a convert to lace-cap. They need winter protection here, but it's worth it to me. During the dog days of August last year, my lace-cap's graceful pink flowerheads had the same effect on me as a cool breeze.
23. Spirea japonica: dried flowerheads standing over the winter or in bloom? This is the only plant that I like only as a dried plant in winter. I dislike it in bloom as much as I like it the other way. (Hence, you will be unlikely to ever see it in my garden.)
24. Japanese beetle drowning medium: kerosene or dishsoap solution? Japanese beetle flambé! That's what I'm talking about! In reality, I have only used dishsoap solution in the past. This year, I'm more impatient and less squeamish: squish, crunch, toss.
25. Garden stroll time: dusk or dawn? Until I saw it for myself, I could not believe what happens to colors one-half hour before sunset: they glow while everything else is hushed. It's now my very favorite time of day to be with the garden.

Taste test (Updated by request)

Here are the results of my whirl through the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. My preferences are bolded and italicized; some were strong preferences, some were hard choices, and some were the lesser of two dislikes. For those of you who are saying "Uh, Chan, planning on posting anything gardening-related any time soon?", have no fear...I've come up with my very own taste test for gardeners (but only 25 questions, not 100), also after the jump.

Dearly loved, dearly missed

Ten Father's Days have come and gone since my father's death. "Daddy" to us until the day he died and ever after, he was an old-fashioned gentleman, and the most charming man you would have ever met...but when his charm shined on you, it was not to sell you anything other than a reason to smile. Oddments of objects that once lived with him and have come to live with me since his passing: a reel-to-reel tape deck with reels and reels of jazz recordings; an out-of-my-league single-lens reflex camera, well-used and well-loved by the man who was trained as a photographer in the Air Force; and a well-read copy of Hardy's Return of the Native. He grew up in Detroit during the Depression, and never wanted to return to life in a city. His last years were spent in happy retirement in a house in the country, with day upon day of gardening. The fall before he died, he planted hundreds of bulbs that he would not live to see bloom. At his funeral, his sons-in-law cried as hard as his children.

Musical moments & mementos

This evocative post at Reflections in d minor on "musical epiphanies", inspired by Alex Ross's inaugural entry in his "catalogue of life-altering musical moments", inspired me too. Some musical memories, sharp and sweet:

—Seeing Dame Gwyneth Jones in Richard Strauss's Elektra, at the San Francisco Opera in the late '90s. I've mentioned before that I seem to lack the receptors needed to appreciate opera with a full-on passion, but this performance got through to me. Her bone-chilling "Agamemnon!", something between a shriek and a bellow, made me sit up straight, where I remained transfixed for the rest of the opera. I look back on this and still think: wow wow wow.

—Hearing a high school classmate play Schubert's Impromptu in A-flat minor (Opus 90, no. 4). She was so talented; I was blind with envy of a magnitude that I hadn't experienced ever before and, thankfully, not ever since. I never sought out a recording of the piece, but some three decades later, happened upon a live broadcast of a performance of it on the local classical station, and found that the piece was burned in my brain. The next day, I got the sheet music for it, and now I play it as often as I can.

—Getting a book of rudimentary-level transcriptions of jazz standards for the piano from my father, and trying to play Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's Anthropology. Sight-reading it is no problem, but my attempt to play it is like reading an unfamiliar language aloud phonetically. My father says, No...here's how it goes:

da da dadada da dada da
da dada dadada dadadada dadadada
da dada dweeda deet da dau
da dada dayadadadada dadada da dada da

I still haven't the touch whatsoever for playing be-bop, but I get it, and I love it.

—Sitting on the lawn at Ravinia on a typically hot, muggy, and buggy summer evening. It's the late '70s, and James Levine is conducting the Chicago Symphony in Beethoven's Seventh. The second movement (the Allegretto) could be glibly termed 'heartstrings over a heartbeat', but it's magnetic and overpowering. No sign of restlessness or chattering from the lawn crowd. We're all spellbound. I've obsessively acquired different recordings of the Seventh over the years, but this performance is the one I always hear in my head.

Audblogged!

Alicia at TwilightCafé has audblogged my "50 things" post. (Props to Tvindy for the audio blogging meme, which you can learn more about here.) After frequenting each other's comments sections for so long, it is very cool to get to hear Alicia's voice...and an honor that she chose this post and gave it such a lovely reading. Thank you, Alicia.