Bookish Gardener

Winter day

It's ten degrees Fahrenheit right now, as the first pink and blue illuminations of a gorgeous clear-skied dawn begin to peer over the east horizon. That would be at least twenty-five degrees warmer than three mornings ago, when the arrow on the outdoor thermometer went as low as it could go, to minus fifteen.

It is too easy for me to forget that there are days in winter worth experiencing, and remembering, and looking forward to. In the intense cold, you feel the progress of every breath through every alveolus of your lungs, and each blink of an eye happens in slow motion, eyelashes sticking as they mesh.

Outside, the foot-deep snowfall, just a couple of days old, sparkles like a blanket of stars under blinding sunshine, onto which the bare trees cast their shadows in brush calligraphy. The colors of the garden are from a muted palette: cinnamon-brushed evergreen of the bayberry, charcoal leaves and pods of baptisia, tin-roof rusted rugosa rose. As the sun sets, the miscanthus, golden-fronded 'Silberfeder', glows as warmly as Impressionist haystacks.

Hollyhocks anomalous

This Alcea ficifolia (fig or "Antwerp" hollyhock) began blooming around the autumnal equinox, from seed sown directly into the ground in late spring. The promise of the unopened buds at the top will go unfulfilled; temperatures are set to plunge into single digit range tonight. Biennial or perennial? Hortus Third says: "Described by Linnaeus as having palmately compound lvs., but the identity of the sp. has not been established with any certainty. Plants offered under this name may be forms of A. rosea with yellowish fls. and deeply lobed lvs., or A. rugosa." Rosea's biennial, rugosa's perennial; who knows? I'll anxiously await the return of its deep pink and garnet red blooms.

Autumn's crocus

The season's first hard frost arrived last night without much warning  other than the fact that it's been weeks overdue (no thanks to inaccuweather.com and my daily, if not hourly, checking thereof). Everything green was covered in shimmering hoarfrost this morning, but as for the tender annuals—I believe they just got the goodbye look.

The Crocus speciosus that I planted last month in the hundreds (yay, online bulb specials) are rising out of the ground this week like the will-o'-the-wisp. It seems an improbable feat of engineering for their long and delicate stems to have pushed their way out of clay soil crusted solid after months of drought. Some of the blue-purple blooms have been open for a few days already in the sunnier spots in the garden. One of them lies on the ground in front of its neatly broken stem, yet continues to close as the sun goes down and opens in full bloom as the sun shines on it, a botanical Lavoisier.

Forest for the trees

The weather outside is...delightful. First frost hasn't hit yet, so I'm enjoying fresh blooms on all the zinnias and cosmos that I didn't get around to sowing until late July (hmm, better not make that a habit), and the fat-faced fluorescent orange rose begonia that greets visitors at the front door is flowering as if it were July. It's nippy in the mornings, but warms to high 60's and low 70's under clear bright skies most days. Yes, I realize that we won't see the likes of this run of weather this time of year anytime again soon. And yes, this weather should have me doing grandes jetés across the yard, strewing petals about, but...I find myself examining the molars on this gift horse with deep suspicion. Eh, probably nothing more than the effects of the descending cone of seasonal affective disorientation as daylight wanes ever shorter.

But I am enjoying the trees without ambivalence. Foliage changes have been slow and gradual this fall. Some burning bushes are already dancing in full regalia at the ball, while others are still working on getting their cheeks rouged as they rush out the door. The trees seem to be holding onto their leaves longer, leading to extended juxtaposed foliage contrasts. The red maples are justly flaunting their jewels, and I'm especially enamored of the maples that turn the same yellow-orange-red as the spot on the just-right ripe peach which you mark for your first bite. But it's not just the flamers that draw notice. Under the soft-lit spotlight of the autumn sun, there's a presentational aspect to all the trees now, the evergreen next to deciduous khaki-green, the beech's russet next to the willow's still-green hula skirt, and, best of all, rich yellow next to nothing but blue skies. 

Fall.

Fallen, fallen

Another autumnal equinox, another Rilke poem. As it did last year, Rilke's poetry came back into visible orbit for me via this summer's Token Creek Chamber Music Festival. The final program of the music series featured a performance of Peter Lieberson's "Rilke Songs", composed to five poems from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (I:4, "O ihr Zärlichen"; II:1, "Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!; II:12, "Wolle die Wandlung"; II,5, "Blumenmuskel"; and II:29, "Stiller Freund"). Wanting to familiarize myself with the poems before the program, I found myself in the poetry stacks of the B&N, four different translations propped open to the first of the poems, and relied on instinctive reaction to choose Edward Snow's translation, which, after more hours in its company, still reads just right to me.

I moved onto reading Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William Gass, which sends me into a little orbit of my own. The academic stilt of its title is misleading; this is a very personal and personable book. Rilke emerges as a three-dimensional human from the strokes of Gass's biographical sketch in the opening chapter. Somehow I'm unexpectedly relieved that the revered Rilke is flawed and real, not out of indulgence (I don't believe that it's okay to be a jerk so long as you produce great art) or sympathy (...nor that it's okay to be a jerk if you are oh so sensitive), but because unflattering truth is always better than hagiographical spin. Rilke, the poet of the Big Idea, believed in and worshiped passion...but mostly in his head. The existential losses of youth, love and life are celebrated in his poetry, but unsung, and perhaps unknown to the poet, are what he's lost by having passed up the chance to be a good father, and having never experienced an honest day's hard work. Why is it that Rilke's poetry is now even more appealing to me even after the unveiling of these hairy warts? Gass gets at this mystery in describing Rilke's poems as "lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself...lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength."

As advertised, the meat of Gass's book is the philosophy and practice of poetry translation. Gass lays out and examines selected stanzas in multiple iterations by several different translators (including himself), parsing them with time-honored methods of literary criticism, his own poetic sensibility, and sometimes just a little bit of Simon Cowell ("Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid", he says about their translations of the first stanza of II:12 of the Sonnets). After reading Gass, I'm grateful for the bounty of English translations available on bookstore shelves, and hopeful that I can get closer to the essence of the elephant by putting all the blind men in a room and listening to each of their stories.

But where were we? Oh, yes. It's the first day of fall. Rilke's poem "Herbst" ("Autumn"):

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Gass translates the first stanza: "The leaves are falling, falling from far away, / as though a distant garden died above us; / they fall, fall with denial in their wave."

"Herbst" is recited and sung in German, set to acoustic guitar accompaniment, here.

The way I want to hear this poem today is in the Edward Snow translation, set to music for voices by Joshua Shank (scroll down the post for the translation), which was brought to us earlier this year through the good offices of The Fredösphere. (Links to a sound file of its performance and its score can be found in the first paragraph of this post.)

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Day's end

The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them, resilient and alive. They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they squinted at the sun until tears ran down their faces, they put their hands up to that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion. They looked at everything and savored everything. Then, wildly, like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles. They ran for an hour and did not stop running.

Ray Bradbury, "All Summer in a Day," A Medicine for Melancholy.

The maples and euonymus are disclosing their first ruddy and golden leaves.

Last week, we packed new backpacks for our newly minted seventh grader, third grader and first grader.

In the language of flowers, summer's gone:

Spring.

Newly blooming: Muscari armeniacum and Muscari botryoides album (grape hyacinths--the bunnies didn't get them all after all), Geranium maculatum (wild geranium), Lobularia maritima (sweet alyssum, self-sown), and Akebia quinata (chocolate vine).  

You rock, John Roll.

The Mahler was awesome.

(Backstory: Madison Symphony's final concert of the season was Mahler's Eighth Symphony, long sold out. I didn't even entertain the thought of trying to beg, borrow, cadge or steal a ticket in order to be able to go. But then a phone call, Friday morning: "Wanna go see Mahler?" A colleague of my husband had a ticket and an unexpected schedule conflict, and remembered that my husband had a music nut in the household. As he handed the ticket to me, my husband asked, hopefully, "Are you going to blog this?" "Get your own blog!" I answered, disdainfully.

The concert was this afternoon. "Das Unbeschreibliche hier ist's getan.")

In other news, another May snow in Madison:

Newly blooming: Viburnum x juddii and Primula juliae 'Wanda'.

Update, May 2: And more snow.

               Photo credit: John Roll

Winter's Riddle

Phototropism, a cottage-meets-Zen garden, and the Chihuahuan desert: all in a column by Dean Riddle in this month's Upstate House. (And, yeah, he's sick of winter too: "I've had it with winter and I'm hungry for spring. I'm dying to open the windows and let in some fresh air. Winter is fine for a while. More than fine. I have plenty of time in winter to read and to write and to think about the world. But I'm through with introspection and solitude and the world can take care of itself. I want to be a slave to my garden. I long to have lots of plants to plant and too many seeds to sow. I want to smell the earth and clean out the shed and cook on the grill and sit on the porch till dark. I want to be warm.")

I stumbled across the link to Riddle's column in the "related pages" sidebar of a Gmail-email conversation on gardening. Reading the column, I'm reminded of all the things that make Riddle's Out in the Garden one of my favorite garden books. He writes about the garden—and about life—from the heart, with charm, wit, intelligence and a distinct point of view. In working my way backwards through the Upstate House archives, here's news from Riddle's column from last month that's music to my ears: "This winter I'm writing a second book." Yayyy!