Bookish Gardener

First peony

The first peony to bloom in my garden this spring is the Paeonia lactiflora hybrid 'Monsieur Jules Elie' (Crousse 1888). This is only its second spring, so I expect even greater things of it in future years. It's a "bomb" flower type (and yes, it is the bomb [duck while tween daughter hurls object at mother for inappropriate use of no-longer-courant vernacular]). I recall from last year that it's nicely fragrant, although I'll have to get over this Memorial Day weekend cold before experiencing it again. The color is a pink that rings as clear as a bell. As you can see, the full flower is ravishingly voluptuous (...or is it voluptuously ravishing?), but I prefer the beauty of the bud (as seen in the background) just before it explodes into full bloom.

Orchid dysphoria

Here's a contrarian and extremely extertaining rant from James Agee on the orchid (on the occasion of having to do the rewrite of a piece titled "The U.S. Commercial Orchid" for Fortune magazine in 1935):

About the orchid. It is silly of me I know to dislike the flower as such: it is not responsible. I think probably I dislike it by transference: because I do much dislike the kinds of people who like it and their reasons for liking it: liking a thing because it is the Largest, the Loudest, the Most Expensive, the most supercharged with Eroticism, Glamor, Prestige—I don't like. Automatically thinking a thing is beautiful for such reasons I like even less. As a commodity, and that is the way I'm supposed to write of it, it is more completely endowed with snob-appeal and with nothing else, than any other commodity I know of. And then for that matter I just privately don't like the plain looks of the flower. Any flower is built of course for one special purpose: to propagate itself: of any flower, the private parts and the face are one & the same, and that seems more than all right to me: but it does seem to me that the orchid abuses the privilege. "The orchid gets its name from the Greek orchis, which means testicle; and there are those who condemn that title as understanding the case, since to them the flower resembles nothing printable so much as a psychopathic nightmare in technicolor. It has also been favorably compared in sexual extravagance to the south apse of an aroused mandrill, and it sports a lower lip that qualifies to send the Bourbon Dynasty into green visceral spasms of invidious love's labors lost." And so, "though not a single promotive gesture had been made over the orchid throughout all the centuries up to 1929, the orchid was already, in the minds of many select ladies and gentlemen who could afford to have the idea, a very definite if sort of Special last word, if it was a last word you wanted to touch off the establishment of a young woman as at liberty for marriage, or most gracefully and with most conspicuous expense to assert your opinion of her as something pretty nice to be seen with, or to set her off at her virginal sweetest as she was wedded in unsunderable wedlock, or indeed to lend Class to any occasion of social or sentimental stature such as the celebration, by snotting one's neighbor along Fifth Avenue, of the embarrassment and ultimate destruction of Death through the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ." That was written for but will probably not be included in the orchid ms.

I don't know. Even though I have never managed to keep one alive under my care, I like orchids very much. Their strangeness is very appealing, in a sci-fi sort of way. But I often find myself enjoying whatever Agee writes even as I find myself disagreeing with what he says, as in this bit on Ford Madox Ford: "...haven't seen the June Mercury: have read in it things of Huefferford Madoxford before [....] Ford can certainly at times write and does certainly at times have fine ideas & 'reactions' [....] Would add, on Ford: he is very fond of using what Englishmen think of as the American language, and has less ear on it than anyone since Galsworthy and, if you bar G., since The Venerable Bede." As a Fordie fan, I took great umbrage at this...right after I stopped laughing.

Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. Ballantine Books, 1971. SBN 345-02360-9-125.

Bunnies, bunnies, it must be...bunnies!

Yep, I'm in Vengeance Demon mode now. Lessons learned: Even a thus-far-reliable repellent will not deter a rabbit who is truly motivated. Rabbits love 'Silver King' artemisia. Rabbits really love wave petunias. Six 4" pots of them planted in the new white garden border yesterday, duly sprayed with "repellent", and this morning, the only signs left of five of the six are a few tattered leaf fragments. I suppose the varmint was leaving no. 6 for dessert. Since this has got my blood boiling, let's return the favor, shall we?

No matter how long I lived here, I would never make a true countryman. And, as long as I preferred to see a wild boar on the hoof instead of on the plate, I'd never make an adopted Frenchman. Let him worship his stomach; I would maintain a civilized detachment from the blood lust that surrounded me.

This noble smugness lasted until dinner. Henriette had given us a wild rabbit, which my wife had roasted with herbs and mustard. I had two helpings. The gravy, thickened with blood, was wonderful.

Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence. Vintage Books, 1991 (paperback reprint). ISBN 0679731148.

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.

50 things

I like this new blog meme from Gideon Strauss: list 50 things you love. For my list, I've deliberately excluded matters of the altar and the hearth (as I do, or at least strive to, love them with all my heart, all my soul and all my mind). I've also tried to name specific things rather than specific genres of things, but have left out a bunch of things for which I display my affection all too regularly on this blog. Finally, this should really be called "50 things I love today", as I'm sure the list would be different tomorrow. The list, then—off the top of my head, and in no particular order:
· Darkest, barely sweetened chocolate
· Pink, double, fragrant peonies
· Houses of Parliament: Monet as Turner
· Mikey and Nicky: Elaine May as Cassavetes
· Dave Lambert’s scatting on “Walkin’” at Newport ‘63
· Hank Jones and everything about him
· Chuck Jones’ “To Beep or Not to Beep”
· Chicken with string beans and black bean sauce at Hunan (I left my tastebuds in San Francisco)
· Sea bass dim sum at Yank Sing (ditto)
· The vanity plate on a VW beetle (same color as mine—blue) that I’ve seen twice in the last week: “BUGURU”
· The color blue, and the colors that sing when paired with it: orange and magenta
· Hearing Steely Dan’s “Lunch with Gina” in the grocery store
· Spiders
· Elephants
· Bratwurst
· Five-year-olds singing “Simple Gifts”
· A perfectly whacked long drive
· Raptors
· The final scene of “Baby Boom”
· Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 28
· Parliament’s “Flashlight”
· Endlessly refilled restaurant brewed unsweetened iced tea
· Plainsong
· Cello and acoustic bass
· Cooking Thanksgiving dinner
· The scene where Julia leaves Charles in Brideshead Revisited
· Holiday weekends’ Twilight Zone marathons
· Shaping kneaded bread dough after its first rise
· Floating face up in the pool while staring at blue skies with clouds
· Reading while eating/eating while reading
· Space shuttle on Tetris
· Spring fever
· Big brimmed garden hats
· Pulling the whole taproot
· The first sign of successful germination
· The first cup of coffee, when brewed by someone else
· Newly cut hair
· Used book and record shopping
· The first hour after childbirth
· Barehanded gardening
· The eagle pose asana
· Crunchy foods
· Rare-to-raw fish and beef
· The underdog
· A good stogie (don’t get excited…it’s been almost a decade)
· Bourbon (ditto)
· A clean house (when courtesy of someone else)
· My late father’s handwriting
· Playing the drum in your own school band…just kidding…Old falling down farmhouses
· The “click” of “Save this post”

Madtown Sights/Sounds: Olu Dara and the Natchezsippi Band

Fun Friday night hearing Olu Dara and his Natchezsippi Band play their jazz-blues-conga mélange like no one else, threaded with Dara's smooth freestyle vocals (and occasional cornet). Nice way to expand my horizons...I'm currently contentedly stuck in a 1950's Detroit jazz scene groove, and although I don't usually go for either jazz played with electrically amplified instruments (save the Hammond B3) or blues music in general, this was thoroughly enjoyable. (Embarrassing) highlight: running into Olu Dara in the hallway after the first set, and being barely able to manage a replied "Hi" through a circuits-jamming, neon HE IS SO FINE. (Ahem. Did I mention that my husband's a saint?)

Changeling

A lovely lagniappe: one of my "blue" columbines (Aquilegia caerulea) is blooming in an unexpected color this spring. The photo doesn't adequately depict the subtlety of the parchment coloring of the petals, with faint streaks of purplish-blue and green. I don't have any other columbines in my garden, so there's no logical explanation for this baby-that-looks-like-the-milkman. (Indeed, another bud from this same plant is blooming in the expected purple-blue.) It's a welcome—and needed—surprise; this smallish front bed has been mostly given over to my "any color, so long as it's blue" tendencies ('Bertram Anderson' lungwort—blue; comfrey—blue; corydalis flexuosa—blue), and this turns out to be just the thing to give the bed some rest and balance. (Now, what'll I do if it doesn't come back in this color next year?)

Words of a Feather

No time to digest Eats, Shoots & Leaves? Not even that little book by William Strunk and Mr. Katharine White? Then spend just a minute with Miss English. She appears to be a very close friend of Lorraine Feather, whose (w-h-o-s-e, not w-h-o-'-s) new CD, "Such Sweet Thunder," just can't get here soon enough. (I heard the track "The 101" for the first time today—with Feather-penned vocalese set to Sir Duke's "Suburbanite"—and I am hooked.)

Korea in Flower

When the summer rolled in, the white cabbage flowers were long gone. So was the white butterfly. All around us, the summer burst with colors and perfume. In our flower bed bloomed marvels-of-Peru, rose mosses, yellow ox eyes, cockscombs, touch-me-nots and roses. The steaming brown soil in the flower bed choked the air and earthworms turned constantly beneath the rotting balsam roots.

This passage, from Mia Yun's House of the Winds, is more than poetic to me. It feels like the Korea I knew for three years as a child. My maternal grandparents' house on the westside outskirts of Seoul had a plot in front farmed for food for the family, where we kids planted beans and corn, and the grownups planted rows and rows of cabbages for kimchi, leaf lettuces, squash, melons, and eggplant. No indoor plumbing, and I still remember the day that the hand-cranked rope-and-pail well was replaced with a manual pump. We took for granted that we'd be able to walk down any street and find red salvia growing, and figured out without being taught how to pluck the nectar-bearing buds from the salvia to sample the sweetness for ourselves. No lawns; just plants and flowers, everywhere.

The writing in this book is emotional and direct. The childhood memories woven into the novel are retold slow-motion, frame-by-frame. It looks like the author and I are roughly contemporaries in age (she's about three years older), and I'm sure that a lot of what I get out of this novel is the resonance of similar childhood experiences that I never thought I'd get to read about in English:

One evening, braving a heavy rain, sister went to a neighbor's fence to pick pumpkin leaves. (We used the leaves to wrap our fingers for balsam dye. Mother added crystal pieces of alum and tobacco to the crushed balsam petals and leaves. They gave our nails that deep red dye we coveted but they also made our fingers throb all night!)

Maybe we'll try this out with my girls this summer using Impatiens balsam 'Blackberry Trifle', if it works with alum powder (instead of crystals) and without the tobacco. (Their fingers won't throb if the leaves aren't tied on too tightly—I promise.)

But you don't have to have had the same memories of a childhood in Korea in order to appreciate a description like this:

Mother's favorite, though, was the moonflower. Moonflowers bloomed at the end of a long, heat-hushed afternoon, when dusk came softly and swiftly, steadily dripping persimmon red and azalea pink over the tiled rooftops. They were as big as Korean bronze gongs and lush as white satin. But later, when the sky turned into a huge dark blue dome, they became pale, blue-tinged porcelain. It was the loneliest flower in the world. Floating alone into the night mist.

In my garden, I'm already seeing the tiny seedlings of self-sown "rose mosses" (portulaca), and my harabeoji's (grandfather's) favorite, hollyhocks, will be overrepresented in the west side patio bed—alcea nigra, alcea ficifolia, and althaea (I like to think of it as the Castilian "alcea") rosea. And in the shrub border surrounding this bed, I've planted a new rose of sharon (Hibiscus syriacus), also known as the mugunghwa—the national flower of Korea.

Mia Yun, House of the Winds. Penguin Books, 1998. ISBN 0 14 02 9194 6 (paperback).

Madtown Sights/Sounds: Richard Davis and Willie Pickens

Last night, on campus, straight-ahead jazz: Richard Davis, bass, Willie Pickens, piano, Javon Jackson, tenor sax, Steve Wilson, alto & soprano sax, and Vinnie Sperrazza, drums. Highlights: a brass-less rendition of "So What" with Richard Davis's signature bass bowing, and Steve Wilson's composition, "The Epicurean". I could have tapped and clapped all night. When do I get to do this again?

Update (May 19, 2004): Most of the musicians on stage that night (Davis, Pickens and Jackson) have had the experience of playing alongside the great Elvin Jones. Sad news today of his passing yesterday. Requiescat in pace.