Bookish Gardener

Shaken and stirred

For those of us who would prefer to aestheticize nature instead of remembering that it is fearsome, and powerful (I don't know anyone like that; do you? Ahem.): Last Wednesday night, my daughters and I returned home to our boys after grabbing a bite to eat, just as it started to rain hard. The sky was strange, dark to the north and blue to the south. Within thirty minutes, the sky turned entirely dark (as seen in this picture), the wind whipped up, and the tornado siren a block from our house began to blare. My husband and I joked around as we led the kids to the basement and its windowless interior room, but they were quiet and serious. The power and cable stayed on as we watched the local stations, waiting out the tornado warning. The newscasters on the channel we were watching (broadcasting from a television studio located about two miles away from our house, and about a quarter-mile away from the restaurant where we had decided not to eat that night because of the thirty-minute wait) suddenly vacated their seats; a funnel cloud had been seen outside the station's windows and they needed to head to their basement. We watched the Doppler. It showed that the storm was moving away from our side of town. After less than a hour the tornado warning turned into a thunderstorm watch. We came upstairs and picked up where we had left off. The kids were still jittery. My husband and I were still trying to be jocular, telling them it was okay to be scared but, really, at least we didn't live where there were earthquakes anymore. In the morning, there were several areas within a two-mile radius of our neighborhood where rows of old, old trees were snapped like twigs, as they say, but our house didn't even have a planter pot overturned. The news reported that a string of "weak" tornadoes was responsible for the mischief. Four nights later, I was tossing and turning through my nightly 1 A.M.-restlessness-phasing-into-insomnia routine, when I felt the house move with a quick but solid jolt, followed by the continuous rattling of the drawer pulls on the bedroom dresser for an entire minute afterward. Half-asleep, I thought: Where am I? The bed's facing the wrong way! Then: No...I don't live in San Francisco anymore. Where do I live? That's right. Madison. This is Madison. And that was an earthquake! In the morning, we found out that we'd felt a baby quake, Richter scale 4.5, with its epicenter near Ottawa, Illinois, about a hundred miles away.

Dragonfly rescue

Three twelve-spotted skimmer dragonflies found their way into our sunroom yesterday afternoon, and could not manage to find their way out. They were frantic, hurling themselves against the windows, wings beating with an alarming ruckus. I'm sentimentally fond of dragonflies, and when I came upon their predicament I almost panicked too. How would I get these tiny, fragile, hysterical creatures back out safely? I hadn't caught a dragonfly by hand since I was a child. And, as it turns out, the "dragonflies" we would capture (and free) in the course of each summer day's entertainment were not dragonflies, but damselflies. The damselfly, when at rest, holds its wings up together; the dragonfly rests with its wings down. I was confident that I could have reenacted a one-hand capture (chopsticked forefinger and middle finger, closing in on the upheld damselfly wings) if these had been damselflies, but what to do for these? "They'll bite you," my husband warned. "No they won't. I used to catch these by hand all the time," I lied. Well, then, I had to pony up. I got closer to one of them. Its abdomen was the color of a silver zeppelin, and bulged in and out with a frightening, hyperventilating rhythm. I caught each side's wings between fingers of each hand. I carried the dragonfly out with both hands, and set it free with a swooping skyward motion (hokey, yes. But I couldn't resist.), as if I were releasing a bird (or dispersing fairy dust), and watched it zoom up into blue and away.

...but I digress...

My interest (sometime healthy, sometimes unhealthy) in English-language style and usage got another little jolt from the new Louis Menand piece in The New Yorker, which starts out with a smackdown of Eats, Shoots & Leaves reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's gentle encounter with the pedantic moviegoer in Annie Hall. That bit is entertaining enough, but here's where the real shooting starts: "Truss has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic. [....] What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible."

How sweet it is.

These sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus 'Old Spice' blend) began to flower a few days ago. They're heavenly. The scent starts out distinctly sweet before taking a hard, unexpected left turn into a citrusy finish. And I've fallen hard for the color combination on the current blooms, although I expect to see future blooms in other colors. The stems are long enough to keep a perpetually fresh, tiny bouquet in my favorite bud vase: a green glass bottle, née capers jar.

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.

Comtesse and catchfly

The plant with a title, Clematis 'Comtesse du Bouchard' (also known as 'Comtesse du Bouchaud') is fraternizing with Silene armeria, the wildflower known as "catchfly". The paler pinks don't really ring my bell, so they tend to be few and far between in my garden. The Comtesse is quite elegant, however, and the catchfly, in a more intense hue of pink, harmonizes perfectly with the Comtesse. Is the Comtesse slumming? No more so than when I picked her up at the getting-rid-of-perennials-for-the-season sale last fall, for one dollar. The catchfly is courtesy of a wildflower mix (after rebate: fifty cents) that I threw down two summers ago, pre-"garden", just to get something growing in this bed, which is a small strip (four feet by eight feet) next to the concrete patio, formerly "landscaped" by the former owners with a dying arborvitae, and red gravel permanently worked into the (pretty crummy) soil. This bed is now doing quite well as a self-sowing annual bed, with California poppies, sweet alyssum, catchfly, California bluebells, calliopsis, and Chinese forget-me-not returning reliably and more exuberantly each year. More proof, as if one needed any, that the nicest garden effects are those achieved without planning.

Lettuce Harvest

Old hat for long-time veggie gardeners, but a big deal for me: the first harvest from the raised beds...Grand Rapids, Black-Seeded Simpson, Salad Bowl, Merveille des Quatre Saisons, Red Oak Leaf, and Red Salad Bowl lettuces. Pesticide-free, except for the vapors from my Deep Woods Off!ed forearms (the mosquitos are 24/7 these days after the May rains). We enjoyed these at dinner tonight with a sprinkle of walnuts, fresh ground pepper, and a vinaigrette dressing.

My slip's been showing

Well. Today's the day that I've lost all faith in my disordered compulsive obsessiveness. How can it be that I did not notice that cultivar names take single, not double, quotes? I'm wired to notice these things, ever since cutting my teeth on the requirements of military correspondence as a clerk-typist (back when Custer was a corporal), and (if we are living in a material world, then) I am a Turabian girl. So, hundreds of gardening books and articles read and re-read, with thousands of cultivar names to boot, and it's only today, reading Tony Avent's latest column in Horticulture, that the light bulb is forcibly flicked on for me: "As horticulturists began to make selections of species and hybrids between species, taxonomists was the need for a third name called a cultivar (short for cultivated variety), which is always capitalized and written within single quotes" (emphasis added). Time to clean up this particular errant usage all over this blog...and time to up my dosage of perfectionist pills. Sigh.

Update, June 13, 2004: Kathy gently points out that the quote above should read "taxonomists saw", not "taxonomists was". I'm relieved to say that I find the idea of a typo in this post absolutely hilarious...first step toward mental health, no?

Update, June 23, 2004: And it seems there's a name for the aforementioned phenomenon: "Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation": "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror" [sic]. (Hmm, should the "[sic]" have gone inside the quotation marks? Girlfriend, get a life.)

Richard Carvel

I usually deadhead my peonies before they form seedheads, but procrastination paid off here. Look at 'Richard Carvel'. The peony itself is a marvel—just the right shade of a jewel-toned raspberry-wine red, and with a spicy fragrance. The deep color carries over into the seedhead and makes it something to see.

I got to wondering about the origins of this peony's name. It was bred in 1913 by Archie Mack Brand, a Minnesotan "lawyer, horticulturalist and peony breeder" (I like the sound of that! Wait...what color is my parachute again?), at a time when the historical romance Richard Carvel (available online at Project Gutenberg), a bestseller when it was first published in 1899, is said to have been still popular and widely read. (Maybe I'll take a look, at least at Chapter XXII: "How the Gardener’s Son fought the Serapis".) The author of Richard Carvel was Winston Churchill. Not that Winston Churchill; rather, "the American" Winston Churchill. But back in the day, according to the web site of The Churchill Centre, it seems that the likelihood of confusion went the other way around:

Prior to the campaign Churchill had written to his namesake, the popular American novelist Winston Churchill, proposing a solution to the possible confusion engendered by the American's forthcoming publication of Richard Carvel and Churchill's own Savrola, then being serialized in Macmillan's Magazine, and his forthcoming The River War:

"Mr. Winston Churchill presents his compliments to Mr. Winston Churchill, and begs to draw his attention to a matter which concerns them both...Mr. Winston Churchill has decided to sign all published articles, stories, or other works, 'Winston Spencer Churchill' and not 'Winston Churchill' as formerly. He trusts that this arrangement will commend itself to Mr. Winston Churchill...He takes this occasion of complimenting Mr. Winston Churchill upon the style and success of his works, which are always brought to his notice..."

The American responded in kind: "Mr. Winston Churchill is extremely grateful to Mr. Winston Churchill for bringing forward a subject which has given Mr. Winston Churchill much anxiety. Mr. Winston Churchill appreciates the courtesy of Mr. Winston Churchill in adopting the name of "Winston Spencer Churchill" in his books, articles, etc. Mr. Winston Churchill makes haste to add that, had he possessed any other names, he would certainly have adopted one of them...Mr. Winston Churchill will take the liberty of sending Mr. Winston Churchill copies of the two novels he has written. He has a high admiration for the works for of Mr. Winston Spencer Churchill and is looking forward with pleasure to reading Savrola."

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.