Bookish Gardener

They might be Giants...

I made my first foray into the world of colchicums a couple of weeks ago, encouraged and inspired by
Kathy Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening, the guru of all things colchicum. I planted a sampler of colchicum bulbs hardy to this region, of which the first to bloom was Colchicum 'The Giant'. Or at least that's how it was labeled. But it looks like 'The Giant' may have a few "identical cousins". Whatever its name, and wherever it came from, I'm glad to have it, and all its close and distant relatives, in my garden.

See anemone.

Anemone tomentosa 'Robustissima' is the pink-flowered, grape-leaved Japanese anemone that flowers in late summer and fall. In the early days of this blog last year, I lamented the premature passing of the bloom, cut down by an early hard frost just before the buds were set to open. Given a full year to settle in, the anemones began to flower late last month. I've enjoyed their vigorous and graceful blooms, with a wistful eye toward the weather forecast for tonight, which may bring this season's first frost.

Madtown Sights/Sounds: Overture Center for the Arts

Our city's just wrapped up a fortnight of celebrating the opening of Madison's new Overture Center for the Arts. It's a justifiably big deal—an architecturally significant building (as you can see in these great photos from Althouse), covering an entire city block, which will be the permanent home for the city's symphony, opera, ballet, chamber orchestra and repertory theatre, and venue for big-name cultural events. The extended festivities included several opening galas, but also days and evenings of free performances.

Since I'm allergic to crowd scenes, I stayed away from the weekend events, but managed to hit a couple of the free concerts one late afternoon last week. The Madison Early Music Festival Consort gave a 45-minute performance at Overture's Promenade Hall, a smaller venue whose seats were packed. (I got to bask briefly in my 15 seconds of blog fame—the concert's promotional flyer included a few snippets from my post on this past summer's Early Music Festival.) I had half expected some repeat selections from the summer's Italian fare, but instead we were treated to a fresh selection of early English music and songs (Purcell, Byrd, Nicholson) with period instruments (viola da gamba, lute, harpsichord). I enjoyed it all, but I was enraptured by the performance of "Sweeter than Roses," one of my favorite Purcell songs, by Cheryl Bensman Rowe, accompanied on harpsichord. I guess I'd better clear my calendar now for next year's festival, which will be featuring early music of England, Scotland and Ireland.

I moved on to the next performance at the Rotunda stage, an informal-feeling venue where Jazz Jam for the Arts was starting its set. I did a double-take as the band filed onto the stage—am I 800 years old, or are these young kids? Well, it turns out that Jazz Jam is a band of high school and not-too-far-out-of-high-school musicians who, as their bandleader Ryan Meisel explained, play together to raise funds for public school music programs. Once I got over my ageist prejudices, I sat back and took in what they could do. They started out with a rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In" which was perfectly respectable, not too stodgy, not too caricatured; moved onto "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" which swang like it should; then Charlie Parker's "Confirmation" (now we're talking), with particularly thoughtful piano improvisations; and a two saxophone blowfest on Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" that left me shaking my head in admiration.

The big megilla venue at Overture is Overture Hall, which got its first public tryout with the symphony's season opener: Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto and the Saint-Saëns "Organ" Symphony. I didn't go to see the concert, but I listened to it on public radio simulcast while folding the week's laundry. I'll get to experience the hall for myself in a few weeks when I accompany my husband to see "Turandot", his favorite opera, and he'll return the favor when he comes along next spring to see the eagerly-awaited (well, by me, at least) "The End of the Affair".

Eggplant harvest

O me of little faith. I didn't expect the garden to yield any eggplants this year, what with the skimpy hot weather and all. But "Diamond" came through. It's an heirloom variety from the Ukraine which matures earlier than other eggplant varieties and is similar in size to Japanese eggplant. It cooks up nicely, with firm flesh, thin skin, and almost imperceptible seeds. Naturally, I had to make ratatouille from this bounty. I started with a James Beard recipe, from his 1965 book Menus for Entertaining. (This is a most entertaining cookbook, indeed, complete with several full-color photographs of the author looking much like Uncle Fester, to very endearing effect, if you ask me.) You start with lotsa onion and lotsa garlic in lotsa olive oil, to which you add the eggplant in cubes and green pepper rings, and then chopped tomatoes and a fistful of fresh basil. Beard's recipe goes on to incorporate a pound of mushrooms, but I went my own way here and added sliced zucchini and chopped Swiss chard (most definitely including the stems) instead. It was good topped with grated Parmesan, and even better reheated the next day.

If the season had been longer and the yield greater, I would have had big plans for the eggplants. I think "Diamond" would have been perfect for Szechwan-style eggplant and green beans in red pepper black bean sauce (Fortex string beans being, if anything, a superior substitute for traditional Asian long beans). And although I originally envisioned my vegetable garden as a "ratatouille garden", that was before I stumbled upon Imam Bayeldi, the eggplant appetizer which I have anointed The Best Thing In a Jar (made in Bulgaria, sold under the brand name ZerGüt, with its linguist-tantalizing diaresis). Simply put, imam bayeldi is what ratatouille wants to be when it grows up. So, resolved for next year: more eggplant, early and often, in the Imam Bayeldi garden.

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?

Kamsa hamnida...

...that is, "thank you," to Mixolydian Mode for the Weeping Willow Tree Taryong (to play the midi, click the post title at the link). I think we're going to have to make this the theme song for Willoughby.

Fall into poetry (updated)

The Brahms Quintet in B minor for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 115, was the final work performed at the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival earlier this month. John Harbison introduced the piece by sharing a story about trying to teach the piece to an ensemble of high school musicians. (When worlds collide! Bright-eyed, uncalloused souls and late Brahms.) To help his students "get it", he read the Rilke poem "Herbsttag [Autumn Day]" to them, and he read it to us that evening, translating from the German on the spot.

Here's the poem in four English translations, with Rilke's original at the end. (John Roll: tell Scott that there's a William Gass translation included here too.) And here's the thing: even if you have only a smattering of German, it's worth reading the original poem aloud—even without a contemporaneous understanding of the German—the better to appreciate the poem's "music". I've taken that term from Jared Carter, who talks about the "musical qualities of the spoken word" in poetry in this interview (scroll to just above the photograph of the blackberries to get to that part, but really, read the whole thing). While nothing can wholly make up for the imperfection of reading in translation, it may be that hearing the sound of the original poem is a step that shouldn't be skipped, especially when reading poetry in translation. Try it with this Basho haiku: natsugusa ya / tsuwamonodomo no / yume no ato. It's about summer grass, but is autumnal in feeling, as you'll see from its fourteen-plus translations at Bemsha Swing and Language Log.

Today's the first day of autumn, but summer's still playing catch-up for now. The tomatoes are still ripening, the tender annuals are still going strong, and the roses are in torrid re-bloom, all while the neighborhood's burning bushes have already turned on their matte crimson blush. Right now, the garden is in maximum overlap, with two seasons of bloom converging for a brief moment before the inevitable. It doesn't feel like fall yet, but it will soon, and then maybe it will feel like this poem from Awake at Dawn. Read it aloud.

Update, September 23, 2004: Language Log contributes an interlinear reading of the first stanza of "Herbsttag", (update, September 24, 2004:) plus a link to an mp3 of a full reading of the poem in the original German. And don't miss Robert the Llama Butcher's poetic thoughts on fall, accompanied by Keats's "To Autumn". "To Autumn" received this textual "reading" by Sven Birkerts and audio readings by Birkerts, Emily Hiestand, Stanley Plumly, and C. K. Williams, as part of the Atlantic Monthly Online's "Soundings" series (subscriber-only links, alas).

Zucchini harvest

I've been growing grey zucchini this season, which has a mellow, almost buttery flavor. I've been pretty good about harvesting the zucchini at the right size, but my attention lapsed for a couple of busy workdays last week, and Whomp! There it was. The foot-long zucchini. Would its overmaturity make it tough and bitter? It turned out just fine in a quick chicken breast sauté (in olive oil with onions, garlic and a pinch of red pepper flakes), with the half left over being more than enough for tonight's ratatouille.

Late night at The Office

My intermittent insomnia seems to have returned of late. I can blame a multilayered to-do list (I visualize it as a combination of Möbius strip and infinity symbol) which, of course, is so much more efficient to tackle while lying awake in the middle of the night. And I suppose that it doesn't help that I love the java jive, and it loves me. But I'll be fighting fire with fire (or coffee bean with herb), and plucking off a pound or two of hops blossoms from my Humulus lupulus 'Bianca' to stuff into a pillow for soporific effect...let's hope the herbalists are right about this one.

So there I was, watching a rerun of the series finale of The Office at zero-dark-thirty hours the other night. I'm a big fan of this show, but it's not one you can leave innocently on in the living room with children wandering in and out, so I hadn't yet seen this episode. Now, this quiz claims that I'm Jennifer Taylor Clarke, but I believe my gender skews the result; really, Tim Canterbury, c'est moi. (As an aside, although I'm just a bit nervous about the planned screen adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I'm more than comfortable with the casting of Martin Freeman, who plays Tim, as Arthur Dent. I like Sam "Rudimentary Lathe" Rockwell, but I'm not sure I'm feeling him as Zaphod Beeblebrox. And I'm really torn about Malkovich—great, great actor (and the one true Ripley), but signed on to play a new character not in the book? As I said, I'm a little nervous.) But back to The Office. [Readers note: spoilers follow.]

Malva marvelous, malva malevolent

One day I was walking through the glasshouse area of Kew Gardens when I came upon the most beautiful hollyhock I had ever seen. Hollyhocks are among my favorite flowers, and why, I wondered, is this particular form no longer cultivated and offered? It had that large flared petal of the hollyhock and it was a most beautiful yellow, a clear yellow, as if it, the color yellow, were just born, delicate, at the very beginning of its history as "yellow," but when I looked at the label on which its identification was written my whole being was sent a-whir. It was not a hollyhock at all but Gossypium, and its common name is cotton. Cotton all by itself exists in perfection, with malice toward none; in the sharp, swift, even brutal dismissive words of the botanist Oakes Ames, it is reduced to an economic annual, but the tormented, malevolent role it has played in my ancestral history is not forgotten by me.

Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book): (pub. info here).

The flower above isn't a hollyhock, or cotton; it's okra (Abelmoschus esculentus or Hibiscus esculenta). I'm growing it in the raised vegetable beds, in both a regular green-leaved variety and an ornamental variety with red-speckled foliage and red stems. The flowers are beautiful, but elusive. I hardly ever seem to catch them open; the buds always seem to be either just on the verge of opening, or already done and forming fruit. When you see the flower, there's no mistaking the Malvaceae family resemblance. Malvas, I love them all, and they are all over my garden: hollyhocks, annual hibiscus, tender hibiscus, hardy hibiscus, rose-of-sharon, sidalcea, lavatera, and even a Hibiscus trionum (upon which I have conferred the title of Most Beauteous Weed) that hitchhiked in, via the pot of a purchased butterfly weed plant.

The Malvaceae family brings its own complicated freight to my family history. I'm told that my maternal grandfather especially loved hollyhocks (along with amaryllis...and dahlias...and cosmos...and so on...well, at least I can say I come by it honestly), and my mother's native country's national flower is the rose-of-sharon, symbol of perseverance and tenacity (*cough*stubborn hardheadedness*cough*, and I suppose I come by that honestly, too). On my father's side, I'm but five generations removed from enslaved forebears, in plantations in the Mississippi delta on my paternal grandmother's side, and in South Carolina on my paternal grandfather's side, for whom the yellow bloom of cotton would have been anything but benign. And yet they would have grown and eaten okra, indigenous to tropical Africa and cotton's cousin. So Jamaica Kincaid's words above strike a chord with me, as do these:

I had never seen the cotton plant in bloom before. The hollyhock, to which it is related—they are in the same family, Malvaceae—is among my favorite perennials; perhaps the fact that the hollyhock looks like cotton when it is in flower is an explanation; on the other hand, the hollyhock could have been my least favorite perennial for the very same reason. I wait for the unknown expanse called time to let me know.