Bookish Gardener

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.

Madtown Sounds: Madison Early Music Festival

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending four concerts at this year's Madison Early Music Festival. It's a program that's put together by the University of Wisconsin School of Music, combining aspects of an academic conference (including classes and lectures) and a concert series with performers from all over. This year's festival (the fifth annual) featured Renaissance-era Italian music. I didn't go to all of the concerts offered, and I missed all of the public lectures, but here's what I did get to enjoy. The first concert was an evening of Monteverdi madrigals performed by La Venexiana, with unaccompanied voices in complex harmonies, perfectly blended and spine-tingling. The next night's program featured historical harps: who knew there were so many? Baroque harp; Renaissance harp; double harp; bray harp; medieval harp; and gothic harp. The music produced by these instruments (expertly played, of course) was unbelievably evocative. It sent me into romanticized imaginings of life way back when (redacting the nasty-, brutish- and short-ness of it all, naturally). The program that night was nicely varied, including a (too-)short interlude of "improvisations on traditional Sephardic melodies" on harp, and a series of songs accompanied by storyteller narration and dance, based on a Venetian folk tale (which, it turned out, was the same fidelity-testing folk tale that's the central plot device in Cymbeline). The next concert was devoted to Italian dramatic laments, performed by The Catacoustic Consort. The period instruments in this performance included the lirone, the viola da gamba, the theorbo and the baroque triple harp. The soprano featured with the consort, Catherine Webster, was incredible. More than just a pretty voice, she had a wonderful ability to tone the vibrato way down to enhance her expressiveness, yet able to bust out with full operatic chops at just the right moments. The highlight of the evening was Monteverdi's famed Lamento d'Arianna, but I also enjoyed the three Jacopo Peri pieces included in the program. Given that I don't warm up to a lot of operatic music, I was surprised at how much I loved these pieces (realizing only moments after my own enthusiastic clapping: "Wait a minute...these are arias!"), as both Peri and Monteverdi are credited with creating the first works in the opera form (Monteverdi with L'Orfeo, and Peri with Dafne and Euridice). I can't say my ambivalence about opera is as vehement (or as well-expressed) as Mencken's, but there is something to be said for experiencing this kind of music without extravagant trappings, in pure and clear voices serving the integrity of the song's emotion. The last of the concerts I attended featured sets by two early music groups, The Newberry Consort and Piffaro, including more exotic historic instruments: shawms; sackbuts; bagpipes and dulcians. Don't be fooled by the names of the groups (a little staid? a little twee?)—these performers jammed with the verve and spontaneity of a band. The program ended with Monteverdi's Beatus Vir performed by the music festival faculty, full chorus, all hands on deck. I cannot imagine a better way to have ended the evening. After the program, I walked out into the quiet, warm summer night, with "Beatus vir/beatus vir..." ringing in my head.

Bats entertainment

Someone didn't get the memo on global warming—today was the latest in a series of unseasonably pleasant temperatures: 60's at dawn; 70's in the morning; low 80's through the afternoon; then a pleasant dip back to the 70's around suppertime. I spent the evening in the garden tucking in a last few things here and there, and weeding, watering and deadheading, then retired to the sunroom to watch the night fall. As the light dimmed, the greens in the garden disappeared, and then the reds and oranges, until only the whites and chartreuses in the distant back border (phlox 'David', cleome 'White Queen', moonflowers, nicotiana) and the whites and grays in the white garden remained, lighted by an emerging slightly-more-than-half moon. The slow streaking fireflies showed up, and then a pair of bats swooped into view. They came back and back again across and through the garden with their irregular improvisational trajectory. I was happy to see them in the garden; with the bumper crop of mosquitoes this summer, I hope they had a feast.

Bookish golfer

It's almost August, but I finally made it out to the golf course today for the first time this year. I played nine holes on my favorite public course—it's a slice of heaven, surrounded on three sides by farmland, with midsummer wildflower weeds in grand display: yarrow, thistle, daisy fleabane, and the beginnings of goldenrod, and whiff upon whiff of fresh country air. I even saw a bluebird. Despite golf being an icon of clubbishness, I consider it an ideal activity for the (ahem) pathologically introverted, and I prefer solitary play. While playing alone, I don't seek the company of headphones hooked to a portable music player; I prefer listening to the wind rustling through the trees and the birds chirping, interrupted only by the golfer's inner demon (or is it the inner vampire), singing "She ain't got that swing". (Thanks for noticing.) I'm a walking golfer, and nine holes of par 4's and 5's can really work up your appetite for a succulent shank of osso buco, or, on the lighter side, an open-face club sandwich. I haven't been a golfer for very long, but the influence of the great players can already be seen in my play, as I come ever closer to attaining the short game of Michelle Wie and the last-round-last-hole nerves and judgment of Phil Mickelson. I never keep score, because, well, I can't count that high, so instead I track my progress by the number of golf balls lost in a round. By all accounts, then, today was a grand success: one over for the day.

D'oh!...er, Doh!

Language Log says that the OED's orthographic preference is for the form without the apostrophe. (Doh!)

My husband got me a bowling ball.

Not to worry—it's not my birthday, and he doesn't bowl. (But he wields a mean etching pen!) So here it is: the official gazing ball of Willoughby.

De gustibus disputandum est

...the orange marigolds that offend the eye when they're planted right next to annual salvias of fire-engine red...

Allen Lacy, from the Introduction to Henry Mitchell On Gardening.

It's funny. I'd been one of those who'd pooh-pooh'd the lowly orange (tagetes) marigold...so much so, in fact, that I'd sought out the creamy-white 'Snowball' marigold for seed-starting because I wanted nothing to do with any marigold that was yellow. Or orange. And red salvias? I thought of them as weeds, because that's how they grew in Korea when I was a child, and I was no more impressed with them as an adult, seeing them vomited out of whiskey barrels laid sideward in fast-food parking lot landscaping. But one of the most beautiful plant combinations that I remember from last summer turned out to be a simple orange marigold and a red salvia, together at the base of a dwarf crabapple tree. That marigold's orange happened to be in perfect harmony with that salvia's red, and the two colors hummed together, the whole transcending the sum of the parts. I've seen marigold-salvia combinations before and since that have been more junk than jewel, but I hope that I'm now able to encounter more beauty by learning not to prejudge where I think I'll find it. For, as Henry Mitchell says in his essay on the daffodil 'Cantatrice', found in the very volume that Allen Lacy introduces:

What happened with the flower is that the road gets wider, to such an expansion that the gardener is led far past a mere flower, however beautiful, to the outer courtyard, almost, of divine things.

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.

Brass bliss

I came home on the Friday evening before the Fourth of July to find this thrilling sight—yes, in my back yard. (Or, strictly observing the metes and bounds of our property's legal description, just in back of our back yard.) The high school stadium down the street was the site that night of a drum and bugle corps competition. The groups participating staked out practice areas here and there amidst the soccer and baseball fields behind our house, and worked on their drum routines and their brass band scales and chord progressions, each group's routines randomly overlapping with another's to marvelous effect. One of the brass bands worked on a snippet of the music that it was preparing to perform, which for all the world could just as well have been the theme song to any Quinn Martin Production from the '70s. It made me smile. I asked my husband, "Isn't anyone going to do 'Crazy Train'?"

I couldn't help gawking at the band pictured above throughout their entire practice. I loved how they looked—their parabolic formation in sleeveless black uniforms, juxtaposed against the silver brass of their instruments—and loved hearing the sounds of brass, en masse, so close. Finally, it was their turn to head to the stadium, and so the players attached their sleeves (one black, one white) to their uniforms, donned their hats, and moved on. Some time afterward, only one band remained, practicing on a baseball field in the distance—a group in dark-sleeved cream-colored uniforms reminiscent of an old-fashioned baseball team. As dusk approached, they played the opening strains of "Ol' Man River".

After an experience like that, it's not hard to suss out what you do want—which is, to watch your new DVD of "The Music Man." And so we did.

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.