Bookish Gardener

October bouquet

A few things from the garden, from the autumn that was warmer than the summer: calendula (the best fall annual ever), salvia, lavender, agastache, ivy geranium (in both the expected bright pink and a claret-colored sport that just appeared this month), a budded stem of Red Fairy rose, lime nicotiana (the self-sown plant that was the MVP of the back border this year), a few sprigs of purpleosier willow, variegated obedient plant (pretty while in bloom, and even prettier after blooming), gray Centaurea gymnocarpa (I've no clue what the common name is), a stem of smokebush, a ruddy branch of viburnum (berries all gone, thanks to the crows), and a little branch of red-berried barberry (ow ow ow).

Vietnamese cleome

While the kids were at the neighborhood Halloween bonfire party tonight, my husband and I snuck away for a quick bite of Vietnamese food just a few minutes away. While we savored our marinated beef vermicelli bowl (him) and charcoal grilled marinated chicken over rice (me), Vietnamese music videos were running on the restaurant's big screen TV. The music was completely inaudible, but the setting for one of the videos really caught my attention. The singer was walking through a formal garden, laid out in quadrants typical for, say, a rose garden, but the whole thing was planted in nothing but gloriously blooming cleomes in pinks, salmons and white. Sure, they're not the type of flower you sink your face into, given their musky (or skunky, some would say) odor, but the smell never bothered me. I like how a single plant can get six feet tall and three feet wide, if it's not crowded too much, and bloom incessantly from midsummer to frost. I would fail any pop quiz calling on me to name the elements of this plant's complicated and fascinating anatomy, but perhaps one day I'll use the elegant complexity of the spider flower as a starting point for teaching myself a little elementary botany. Cleome is reported to be native to South America, but it sure looked happy there in Southeast Asia too. I don't have a bed to give over to nothing but cleome (although if I don't vigorously "edit" the self-sown seedlings from the very successful clump in my back perennial border, I may be proved wrong), but I gotta tell you—this Vietnamese cleome garden looked extraordinarily beautiful.

All I need is Alison Moyet...

All right. This weekend's final encore showing of The Office Special is in progress, so anyone who would care about the spoilers ought to have watched it already or is watching it now. I saw the special last night, after much worry about whether the show would succumb to the thing that I fear and loathe, The Dishonest Happy Ending. My husband only stayed up long enough to catch the hilarious music video of David Brent's cover of Simply Red's cover of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now". When I tried to describe the denouement of the Tim-and-Dawn storyline to him this morning, I couldn't do it without it coming out totally hokey. But it wasn't hokey; it was brilliant. I won't try to describe it here either, except to say that I loved that there were no swelling anthems of Love Lifting Them Up Where They Belonged or They Had The Time of Their Lives and They Never Felt This Way Before. Instead, the scene is set in the office after hours, temporarily converted to a dismal venue for the office Christmas party, and as Dawn comes back to Tim, after he's thought he'd seen the last of her, the song that's playing at the party is the all-alone, 2 a.m., cry-in-your-beer song, "Only You", sung by Alison Moyet from her days with Yaz. I did not expect that I would be happy at this happy ending, and I am so happy that I was so wrong.

Madtown Sights & Sounds: Madison Opera's Turandot

The Madison Opera launched its new season at Overture Hall last night with Turandot. For once, I was ahead of the game and ordered tickets early enough this summer to get front row mezz seats, positioned just right of centerstage. My husband was primed for this performance of his favorite opera, but I needed to do a little work to inoculate myself from my usual reaction to Puccini heroines ('oh, get over yourself'), so I spent some time this past week listening to my husband's vinyls of Turandot in its Nilsson I and Nilsson II incarnations. (As it turns out, I prefer the orchestra under Leinsdorf [Nilsson I] over Molinari-Pradelli [Nilsson II], but Franco Corelli's Calaf [Nilsson II] is the one that softens my frosty heart.)

The best word for the performance: wow. The David Hockney sets were brilliant, a cartoony hallucination of bright colors and exaggerated shadows. The Madison Symphony played gorgeously from the sunken orchestra pit (which fronts the entire stage, rather than being sited off to one side of the hall, and was nicely visible from our seats), with the discipline needed to give meaningful form and shape to the music (which is sometimes a challenge with Puccini, I think). And the singing was universally superb. Ted Lee (the tenor from Korea...paisan! sort of) sang a wonderful Calaf with powerful yet subtly calibrated emotions, and, yes, his "Nessum dorma" actually sent shivers down my spine. Barbara Quintiliani's Liù really stood out (which was no small feat given the array of exceptional performers) with a voice that tenderly drew the listener in. And the ministers Ping, Pang, Pong (Frank Hernandez, Joel Burcham, Matthew Lord) moved nimbly from comic relief to the brief yet beautiful (and my favorite) interlude of "Ho una casa nell'Honan":

I have a house in Honan
with a little pond so blue,
all surrounded by bamboo,
And here I am, wasting my life,
racking my brains over sacred books...

It was wonderful to experience Overture Hall for the first time with such a thrilling performance. But I have a bone to pick with Signore Puccini (or shall we blame Franco Albano, who completed the opera after Puccini's death): I hate this story. Turandot, the cruel, murderous, man-hating ice princess (a combo of the goddess Diana and Andrea Dworkin, if you get the picture), gets to ride off into a happily-ever-after sunset with Calaf, who suffers permanent terminal brain suction from the second he's in her presence. Feh. I'm not saying that Liù, the faithful, humble, loving slave girl who worships and sacrifices herself for Calaf, should have ended up with him, because that would have been bogus too. But Turandot's false and unjust transformation just...bugs me, and as for Calaf, I guess he never gets to learn that ugly is as ugly does.

Lapinicide

The writer at the new garden blog Tender Dirt tells it like it is when it comes to those blasted bunnies. There are too many good lines in her post to choose from, but for now my favorite is: "Last night in the midst of a gothic labyrinth of a dream, I encountered a man who looked very much like Jack White. He offered me a selection of dehydrated rabbit pelts, the ears and tails still on. This alone kept the dream from being classified a nightmare." And so it is that we join Robert the Llama Butcher in declaiming: "Mr. MacGregor Was Right!"

Fennel harvest

The title of this post is misleading, because this fennel (the bronze form of common fennel, Foeniculum vulgare) was grown ornamentally. Its dramatic feathery fronds kept their bronze color all summer, and started turning green as the weather got colder. When I pulled this out of the veggie bed, it had a foot-long slender taproot and additional trailing roots almost two feet long. This species of fennel does not form a bulb, and its stalks are as fibrous as sugar cane. The fronds were strongly anise-scented, so I thought I would try to do something with them in the kitchen.

This recipe caught my eye, but it mutated into something quite different by the time I got done with it. First, no fennel bulb, so no braised fennel. Next, sea bass for a family weeknight supper? Nope. My kids need to turn up their noses at something just a little less pricey. So catfish fillets instead. Then, anchovy paste, but no capers? That's strangely deficient. So I substituted a tin of anchovies in olive oil, rolled around capers. Likewise, onions, but no garlic? Hmm, I don't think so. So I turned this into a full puttanesca by starting with onions in olive oil, adding diced tomatoes (canned worked just fine), mashing the anchovies and capers into them, and cooking the sauce down for about ten minutes. Then slivers of a couple of fat cloves of garlic were added, along with a generous sprinkle of red pepper flakes and salt, with the sauce left to cook down some more. The catfish fillets were dredged in salt-and-peppered flour, and placed in the skillet, with the sauce scooched aside, to cook for four minutes on each side with the skillet covered. A couple of fronds of the fennel were placed on top of the fish, and turned a rich dark green after cooking, but didn't contribute any detectable flavor or aroma to the dish.

My husband, who doesn't like cooked fish (for the most part, I'm with him, my ideal fish dish being a sashimi-grade catch, passed quickly over a candle flame, but I grant special dispensation for catfish and, on special occasions, sea bass), opted out in favor of frozen pizza, and my son, who doesn't like anything other than p.b. sandwiches and pizza, joined him. My eleven-year-old had a bit of both, and my five-year-old had seconds, then thirds, of Mom's new favorite fish dish.

Cyber-room

Lynn at Reflections in d minor puts out the call: if your blog were a room, what would it look like? The painting that Lynn's chosen to depict her cyber-room, courtesy of Childe Hassam, fits my image of her blogspace, which is that of a warm and colorful salon. I think of my blog as a small table in a cafeteria like this one, much like the table in the lower right corner of the picture which faces a pillar. I think of myself sitting there, reading and writing, or pretending to read and write while I listen with intense interest to other conversations happening in the lunchroom. And it's a treat when another quiet type comes by to visit for a bit, before letting me get back to my book.

Possession

I ended the previous post with a gratuitous dig against the color yellow. What did it ever do to me, anyway? It wasn't that I was in a "bad mood", really. I'm not wired to get bad-moody; when I'm bluish, I tend just to contract and withdraw. But I could feel myself slipping down a scary slope, and after writing, revising and erasing a paragraph or two of mawkish blather, I just had to jump off that bobsled.

I wanted to write about what it's been like this fall. How, at the tree farm, I kept turning around, and around, and around, to take in the vistas, barely remembering to breathe. How I was imagining the surrounding forested hills sitting quietly in their spring and summer green, then stepping forward in their fall bronze, gold and copper. How I stopped myself from even trying to snap a picture, because I knew that the photographic image would have been so far removed from what I was experiencing that it would have been just this side of blasphemous. (I think I finally understand that whole "stealing your soul" thing.) How, a few weeks ago, I got to see a giant "tree" at the Arboretum which, up close, turned out to be three closely spaced maples (the tallest in the middle), with the three sets of foliage each maturing at a different pace to give the effect of a clown's psychedelic wig. How, walking to the elementary school these mornings, the sidewalk is thronged with Norway maples on the right, which have taken weeks to turn color in a languid slo-mo, so that you see green, and yellow, and orange, all on the same tree, all at the same time. (Norway maple, did I say I hated you? I take it all back.)...and on the left in the school's yards, a pageant of a maple in maroon, a birch in lacy lime green, a crabapple denuded of all but its ruby jewels, more of the fabulous multicolored Norway maples (strike me dumb; I've used "fabulous" and "Norway maple" in the same sentence), and an Amur maple in fluorescent tangerine and yellow.

I want to hoard these memories like treasure, knowing they can't be collected in that way. Although I've gotten better at setting a dry-eyed stone-faced gaze at keepsakes that pass briefly through experience before falling away into fallible and evaporating memory, that doesn't mean that I've gotten any better at letting go. I know that that's the most important lesson of the garden, for Henry Mitchell tells me so, but all the while I know exactly how Elizabeth Lawrence feels when she writes here, of miniature daffodils:

Of all the little bulbs, the flowers of these miniatures are the most endearingly diminutive, the most daintily perfect in proportion, and the most delicate in color. When they are in bloom I feel as if I could not stop looking at them for a moment, and when they are gone I am almost ashamed of the sharpness of my regret.

Elizabeth Lawrence, The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens. (Criterion Books, Inc., 1957; reissue ISBN 0822307391.)

Fall farm field trip

I tagged along on my kindergartener's field trip to The Tree Farm to collect pumpkins, popcorn and gourds. The Tree Farm's in Cross Plains, about a twenty-minute drive northwest of Madison into beautiful terrain. I am not yet qualified to pass the Wisconsin citizenship test, because I haven't achieved fluency in the geologic terms moraine, esker, drumlin, kettle, or kame, but the effects of glaciation are dramatically apparent, even to me, as you drive toward Cross Plains. All at once, densely forested hills appear. They're not mountainous enough to make you feel hemmed in, but have the effect of drawing a broad horizontal line that underscores the big sky. There's mostly farmland at the foot of the hills, which this time of year shines green with cover crop clover. And on the way to the farm, there's Indian Lake, which glistens in the sun like a soft-focus fantasy.

The Tree Farm is a working farm where visitors can pick their own produce. It's set on a ridge with stunning views of the lake below, wooded hills in the distance, and acres of farmland in between. The cutting garden was still alive with color from bachelor's buttons in several different hues:

And one of the farm's vegetable beds had rows of cabbages coming into their own, planted in a gentle arc:

The whole family returned to The Tree Farm today to load up on more pumpkins (90 lbs. worth, as it turned out), and more popcorn (I wanted more of the ruby-colored maize), and more gourds (although I won't be waxing and polishing them while watching the World Series, as Katharine White used to).

It was a stunning fall day today, the sky so cloudless and blue that colors seen against the sky punch out as if you were wearing 3-D glasses that actually worked. Red and orange leaves are the crowd-pleasers, of course, but the real wonder on a day like this is when you see yellow foliage high up against the fall sky...it's not just the color of jaundice and chlorosis anymore.

No wower

I pulled off the plastic name badge as I stepped out into the night air. Long day; time to crawl back home. Short day; already dark before dinner. I'd just left a meet and greet with a hundred other suits. We'd all stepped around the four kids in tails sawing at strings off to the side. No mike for the brunch music. My ears were still ringing from the the boom boom room, pulling out of the Kohl Center lot. I took the Bug putt-putting down University. I thought I was heading home. But the Bug steered right, into the parking lot of the big box bookstore, by post-hypnotic suggestion. I checked it out. No big book at the big box. But I spied a diversion. Ellroy of El Lay would be reading. Haven't read him. Why not see him. I joined the crowd. The chairs were filled. I stood at the back next to a big fellow. Canary yellow sweatshirt. Faded jeans. An introduction was being read. Tall guy watched and laughed. I tuned it out, waiting for the main attraction. I picked up and flipped through a book from the shelf next to me. The Quotable Slayer. Willow says she's tasted evil. She's asked what it was like. She says, kinda chalky. Good for a low-grade heh. Loses points with Kennedy in the scene. I looked up. Intro was over. Phil Jackson next to me loped up to the podium. Oops. That was Ellroy. Good reading. A little bit beat poet. A little bit Dr. Johnny Fever. I don't know from noir, but I'll give The Cold Six Thousand a whirl. My new copy's inscribed: "To Chan: Historical slash-out!" Someone tell me what that means. The Q&A was cool. Ellroy hates jazz. Ellroy loves classical. Ellroy gives a list. It begins with Beethoven. Ellroy goes for Hammett over Chandler. Ellroy says, Chandler wrote the kind of man he wanted to be. Ellroy says, Hammett wrote the man he was afraid he was. Me, when I read Chandler, I get stuck on him. I read Chandler:

The man called Costello shrugged his shoulders briefly. The red-haired man at the table turned a little in his chair and looked at Mallory with the impersonal air of a collector studying an impaled beetle. Then he took a cigarette out of a neat black case and lit it carefully with a gold lighter.

Oooh, I say. Do that again. An hour later, I'm still on the same page. And I haven't read any Hammett—hell, Hellman's man. But look what I find in the next Fortune Cookie.