Bookish Gardener

Promenade in green

"53º Cloudy." It's a falling mist that only aspires to rain. The garden is a quiet monochrome of green after the weekend's first fresh lawn mow and a lively thunder-and-lightning show last night. It's the stage of the season when everything is up but the blooms are accents only to the expanse of green foliage, the promenade in green.

Lapin farci aux Tommies

Love: Bugs Bunny, Watership Down. Hate: Cottontail rabbits, not least the one that sat itself down, figuratively tucked in its fine dining napkin under its chin, and methodically and leisurely chomped through the Crocus tommasinianus that were just beginning to show their promise. (Nope, Tommies are not rabbit-resistant.)

The pelt of this rascal might be regarded Cruella DeVillishly, with its splotch of ginger and streaks of black and cloud-cover gray. And certain other ideas might come to mind as one leafs through Joe Beef's Surviving the Apocalypse or Fergus Henderson's The Complete Nose to Tail. Yes, fine sir, I've got a recipe for rabbit leg confit with your name on it.

"pom-pomming bushes / all along the beach town streets."

These lines are from the poem "High Dangerous," by Catherine Pierce, yesterday's gift from the Academy of American Poets' "Poem-a-Day" series. This poem is lovely and poignant—it captures the once-and-future sensation of watching your children and experiencing, in that moment, the prospective sensation of reminiscence, and loss, that you know will fill your memories after they've grown up and moved on.

I'm too impatient to endure "reading" books by means of audiobook, but poetry must be read aloud. Hearing the poet read this poem is a bonus-upon-bonus—

—since it's the best way to appreciate the beautiful pun that this poem is built around. And not just any pun, but one about my botanical-name-pronunciation bête noire, the hydrangea. "Dran" or "Drain"? Dictionaries differ. The garden club ladies in The Manchurian Candidate "drain." I was stuck in the "Dran" camp, muttering "how strange to say 'hy-drange...'"—oh. Got it. (One small case of hypercorrection cured.)

These pom-poms...I'm thinking 'Annabelle,' yes?

Happy first day of (metereological) spring!

{(Blows dust off.) Do I still know how to work this thing?}

Happy spring, one and all. It's 16°F at the moment, and it won't get above freezing today, and there's a single-digit high and a below-zero low in the forecast for three days from now, but...

I love the light this time of the year. In the hour or so before sunset, it quiets everything down and slowly turns the seasonal affect dial toward..."hope."

Spring joy, or as Clifford Brown and Max Roach would play:

 

Awakened from my phlegmatic slumber

...upon learning that the botanical name of the blackberry lily has been changed from the luscious, toothsome Belamcanda chinensis to...Iris domestica? I hereby protest.

Bye, bye, Beetle

A small commemoration, two years on, of the day my trusty Volkswagen Beetle, slug bug blue, was T-boned and totalled. The week or so after impact was mercifully lost to Morpheus, then followed by a crazy quilt of memories distinguishable from hallucinations only in retrospective, logical cross-examination (hallucination: reading a magazine, whose staples leap out to implant themselves as stapled sutures bisecting my abdomen; hallucination: my hospital bed transported to a Chicago El platform; not a hallucination: the young doctor on morning rounds a dead ringer for Zach Braff in Scrubs). Good and kind nurses and doctors (and, perhaps, the second-hand effects of cultivating lots of Eupatorium/boneset in my garden) healed all things broken quicker and better than I could have ever hoped.

The Beetle's in an auto graveyard somewhere, too smashed-up in the collision to allow retrieval of its CD cartridge, which held: Joni Mitchell, Hejira, Tobias Werner, Bach Cello Suites, The Kinks, The Kink Kronikles, John O'Conor, Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Vol. 7, and Alison Moyet, Voice. I don't think it was playing at the time of the crash, but I remember playing Voice pretty much incessantly in the days and weeks beforehand. So much to love in Alison Moyet's articulate and heartfelt Purcell ("Dido's Lament"), Jacques Brel ("La Chanson des Vieux Amants"), Michel Legrand ("What are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?"), and an utterly perfect "Cry Me a River" (first pass, mocking; second pass, wistful). The penultimate cut on Voice is "Bye Bye Blackbird," a song (in its Miles Davis rendition) played at my father's funeral. Maybe it will be played someday at mine, too, but not just yet.

Evonymus, to Linnae(v)s

Euonymus alata 'Rudy Haag'. (Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll)

Our little* burning bush bloomed for the first time this spring, with barely noticeable yellow blooms, the size of a pinky nail. This fall's first berries are sprinkled delicately throughout the denuded branches. Its fall color was rich this year, thanks (I think) to rain and more rain. The berries and the leaves were persimmon and pomegranate juxtaposed, colors that shouldn't go together, but they did, and they do.

*'Rudy Haag' is actually compact, smaller than 'Compactus', and way smaller than the species, which is alatus? or alata? or just apparently the topic of another taxonomical food fight: "This is because botanists disagree as to whether the genus name Euonymus should be treated as feminine ("alata") or masculine ("alatus")". 

Nifty

"Where's my coffee?" (This MadMom incarnation comes courtesy of my 12-year-old.)

The Twilight Zone turned 50 this month, too...but it never gets old. Much has been said about the suayve and deboyner "Don Draper", but I like to think that his ineffable coolth was modeled on Rod Serling's smoke-gets-in-your-eyes squint and clenched-jaw baritone delivery of existentialist aphorisms. Let's raise an old-fashioned glass to the ad men of The Twilight Zone: the free-falling (with a hard landing) Accounts Guy from (my favorite) "A Stop at Willoughby"; Gig Young's Media Guy from "Walking Distance" (an inferior fraternal twin of "Willoughby", in my estimation—but prominently featuring a carousel); and honorary ad man Dick York's fine comic and dramatic turns in "A Penny for Your Thoughts" and "The Purple Testament" (but was Darrin Stephens Accounts, or Creative?).

It's its own Grandpa

Since the climbing hydrangea here has (a) decided it's never going to bloom, at least not this decade, and (b) become favored fodder for this summer's roaming swarms of Japanese beetles, it's just as well that 'Grandpa Ott' morning glory has shown up to take up the slack. I planted Grandpa Ott seeds a couple of summers ago, in a sunny planter way around the corner from the chimney pictured here. Grandpa Ott has reliably reseeded around the garden without being weedy, and it's a welcome sight wherever it newly appears.  My husband's of the view that ironweed (Vernonia) is the plant world's best purple, but I think Grandpa gives it a run for the money, no?

I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my

message in a moblog. (Especially since the airwaves have eaten this post once already, ahem.) Came for Elvis, stayed for The Police. His Stingness was ON all night, Andy Summers even cracked a smile by the last encore, and Stewart Copeland has clearly discovered the Fountain of Youth in a drumkit. Tried to sing along with the few fragments of songs that I knew ("just like the / old man from / the book by Nabokov"). I learned that, even after all these years, I will never be able to not smirk at hearing the lyrics to "King of Pain". But a great show ! Now if we can only make our way through the tangled skein of ramp closures and detour signs to get onto the freeway home...