tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13280218707936978762024-03-24T06:15:43.548-07:00Gardening with Bob DylanGardening. Written by a working gardener, with regular updates, easy ideas and thinking aloud. I have a garden of my own in Kent on clay soil and in a droughty area. I have recently acquired another, in Piemonte, Italy, higher and more continental in climate. I'm female and not very young.
Other enthusiasms are garden literature and Bob Dylan. He has something to say about everything, even gardening.Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.comBlogger69125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-35116850645102482432017-06-14T13:53:00.000-07:002017-06-22T06:11:50.854-07:00Ranking - Positively Fourth Street<br />
The wonderful thing about this song is not how vicious and heartfelt the words are, nor how compelling that is in itself. Nor is it the way those words are set against a friendly but ordinary melody. It's something to do with the hopelessness of a relationship gone utterly to the bad - unfolding and falling to bits before your very eyes.<br />
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As I hear it, the song is about how one artist responds, with dislike and arrogance, to the concealed jealousy of another. That is to say, it is about the unavoidable, but hurtful and diminishing, ranking of creations, and especially the disputatiousness and rancour rendered by that very act.<br />
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What a low point to begin a new series of posts. And yet, something has got my juices flowing once again. Venom stimulates I suppose.<br />
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Let's start with a visit to Le Jardin de Berchigranges in the Vosges. We slipped it in on our way down to Mondovi', driving - as we had a lot to bring. I have been wanting to visit since I read Noel Kingsbury's piece about it being the most beautiful garden in France, or Europe, or the world, something big anyway. So I went, primed with something alert in me- something like suspicion: maybe jealousy, maybe contrariness? <br />
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Well it's lovely. And special. Fairytale prettiness made palatable by wit and sophistication. On a blazingly sunny early April Sunday afternoon there was a full car park and a lot of activity in this distant mountainous outpost. Motor bikes roared round the curve of the road which embraces the garden and yet once you were inside the row faded away and it felt like a peaceful hub of busy enjoyment.<br />
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To add to the pleasure there was a daffodil festival in a nearby town and everyone there was out picking the flowers and bunching them up to sell to each other, despite being mired in the traffic. The little wild daffodils were everywhere, in all the damp meadows.<br />
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The garden was following the mood of the moment and running a daffodil election. Each variety, and there were hundreds, was displayed singly, on tables in the centre of the garden and visitors were able to vote for their three favourites, ranking them in order.<br />
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I became absurdly over-involved, agonising over the twist of a petal, the length and frilliness of a trumpet, elegant under-statement versus sumptuousness. It all seemed to really matter, for about quarter of an hour. Justice to the daffodil seemed to require full attention, wise perception and rigorous judgement.<br />
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I suppose that's the benefit of ranking things - that it makes you look hard at them and think about them. But it's like thinking it's reasonable to have a favourite colour - ultimately a childish activity. It's something we learn to lose interest in, preferring eventually to embrace complexity and difference. At least that's what I like to think, until I find myself caught in the wheels of the same old disorder, exclaiming at a judgement disagreed with or vying with others for my own preferences. Surely we're old enough now to compare and contrast without having to put things into orders? Finally I understand about comparisons being odious - it's taken me this long to really hear that phrase.<br />
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Anyway, Berchigranges. It's full of surprises and hangs together really well. Partly through being all arranged together in rising tiers on an ampitheatre-like slope, partly through having the same level of intensity thoughout. By intensity I mean, a smallish scale and high, absurdly high, amounts of care and attention. It could be fussy, but it's not, it's just intense.<br />
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The hedging and plant-sculpting is exquisitely trimmed and maintained. Like sheared lace at this time of the year before the leaves emerge on the hornbeam. Especially the boundary hedge, which you can see above. It must be fairly new as the trunks and main branches are slender and lacy too - just one of many bewildering achievements - do they keep replanting it to achieve that very effect?<br />
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Most shapes in the garden are curvy - whirling and interlocking curves on the ground, larger hanging curves, again made of hedging, some coloured. The drapery of an upside down arc of palest mint green sorbus gave me a shock, it was so clever and so original. Water flows through the garden, grass paths are luminous and scissor-edged - their curves unnaturally sharply-defined and the beds full to the brim with promising plantings.<br />
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In these poor photographs we see huge numbers of daffodils but masses of perennials were also emerging, including some terrifyingly invasive types - variegated petasites and knotweed, as well as a fancy equisetum. But nothing was out of control or escaping beyond its boundaries. There are hardly any shrubs to invade the middle height - edging and containment are a significant theme<br />
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As ever, nothing is truly natural in a garden. This one is as if every Alpine, gingerbread cottagey, backswoodsy element were maximised, brushed up and made over. The wooden constructions, which serve every possible garden purpose, amaze with their prettiness and ingenuity. A large body of completely clear water reflects the sky but it is narrow and, set high in the garden, not always in view.<br />
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I felt there was something strange about the atmosphere which might have been something to do with the uniform scattered intensity and the lack of dominant structures. A kind of calm came over me, unexpected amongst all the detail. It was to do with absorption in the closeness and complexity rather than a strong sense of push or pull, from one large feature to another.<br />
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It's a garden that plays with your sense of scale. I was mesmerised and confused, but also quietened - a strange combination.<br />
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Odd how restful the completed work of others can be. This is a garden where the minutes, the months, the years have all been put to their maximum use The owners must be driven by a perfectionist madness of creativity. One imagines them whittling, cutting and shaping deep into the wintry nights.<br />
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These are the things that are interesting a about a garden - what the makers have chosen to concentrate their efforts on, what they have felt worthwhile - that is the story the garden has to tell and just like any other story you want it to be something you have not heard quite like this before. Ideally, you want it told with wit, grace and clarity. A little ambiguity doesn't go amiss but it needs to hang together and make sense and Berchigranges succeeds on all those levels.<br />
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This garden reflects the owners' interests and their beliefs about what is beautiful and satisfying to see, but it has an added dimension - that of being a garden ready to receive the public, children and all, ready to entertain and engage, a show garden, singing and dancing, new features at every turn. It's quite clear that it demands everything the owners have to give - all their time, their energy, the very sap in their veins. We can see all it has cost written in the land.<br />
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So we've chosen our three best daffodils, we've viewed a delightful, unusual garden, and we've had a chat with one of the makers, Monique, who enquired how I had heard about it, When I mentioned Kingsbury's name, she looked rueful and gave me the impression that she was a bit worried that I might have come with excessive expectations. This sense of wobbly anxiety is the curse of scoring highly in ratings and brings us back to the song,<br />
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It's not a kind song, it's not generous, it's not gracious. But it is astonishingly complete as a picture of a relationship. The protagonist has won the competition of talent and achievement, the so-called friend has been surpassed and hates him for it. The protagonist claims to desire honesty from his friend - but that would amount to a declaration of that self-same jealous hatred. The protagonist does not want the hatred but knows it's there and hates his friend back.<br />
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And where can the listener stand in this sad and tortured tale? Reluctant sympathy for the dishonest friend, whose misery and loss of self-confidence can be deduced. Reluctant agreement with the unkind protagonist, who offers no way forward. The final, and famous couplet, where the tables are turned, and turned again, floors us all. The offer to stand in another's shoes is usually an invitation to understand and sympathise, but in this case the protagonist uses the expression to show exactly how remote understanding and sympathy are - for, stood in those shoes "you would know what a drag it is to see you". How clever to fool the listener, even for a second, into thinking something different might result. We too jump back, slightly scorched.<br />
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Well, it's an old sad story, this one of competitive wins and losses. And it's not one that can disappear. I like the song, because it tells a truth and it tells it well. The success of one person should not require the failure of others, but it might, and then the field is open to damage and rancour.<br />
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I was surprised at how strongly that simple, perhaps slightly off the cuff judgement of Mr Kingsbury affected my visit to Berchigranges. In the past the knowledge that, say a Denmans or a Ruston Old Vicarage rank highly in the world of gardens to visit has not seemed to matter particularly - in this case, something slightly different happened, which I found it hard to cast off. Perhaps it was the words "the most beautiful" lying there like a gauntlet. One sets out almost determined to prove that that isn't the case.<br />
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Ridiculous though, to want gardening to be a bed of roses. As Dylan shows us, creativity cannot help secreting a little toxicity sometimes - the venom of a distorted longing.<br />
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-65081429398066298062016-07-30T15:06:00.002-07:002016-07-30T15:06:08.107-07:00Learning To relinquish - If You See Her Say Hello<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The act of letting go, abandoning and relaxing the grip on something we thought we desired seems contrary to our modern world, where energy and achievement have greater purchase on our imaginations. And yet we all know we cannot have everything we want. We should perhaps learn to exercise the muscles of release at an early age, the better to let go of what we cannot really have. Or is that sadly defeatist? And how is gardening to help us learn to liberate ourselves from our more unreasonable desires?<br />
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Simple really, and everyone who gardens has experience to help them. You sow a packet of seeds, and admittedly sometimes only three spindly plantlets survive, two of which are chickweed. But sometimes hundreds emerge, falling over each other, masses of glassy white legs. As soon as you can, you must prick them out, and you must stop and destroy the remainder when you have enough. It's pointless to have dozens more than you need, yet it is hard to resist the wordless pleas of the dependent little seedlings. Buck up, pull yourself together and throw what you don't need away. <br />
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And gluts. How dreadful it is to have too many courgettes, too many plums or quantities of lettuce all ready at the same time. Everyone is trying to give the same things away, it's a nightmare of useless abundance.<br />
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This year in Italy the trees were bowed with cherries, both cultivated and wild, making good on the promise of the their tall snowy grace earlier in the year, when I marveled at the number and distribution of them throughout the woodlands. But the endless picking, the cleaning, the stoning, the cooking, the bagging, the freezing! And there were more, and still more, ripening and glowing seductively among the leaves. No end to them and the sticky entrapment of red fruit, Only one solution - extinguish the desire, turn away, turn them off, liberate yourself.<br />
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And then there are the plants I have longed for, and often acquired, only to fail with them. They now hover in my mind's eye, beautiful, incorruptible, too good for me. They are pearls beyond the price I can pay and I renounce them. The list is long, and the cost often includes moist acid soil, excellent drainage, endless precautions against slugs and fiddling with soil amendments.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">mertensia</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Watsonia</td></tr>
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Here are some of them - mertensia virginica, galax aphylla, cornus canadensis, veratrum, kalmia, corydalis flexuosa, ligularia, iris ensata, trillium, watsonia, enkianthus and delphiniums. Gentiana asclepiadea and lutea, most hostas, tender ferns, celmisias, some of the more complicated salvias. Monardas because of the mildew, the better kind of phlox, because of the watering required. Eremurus because they are inexplicable.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">ligularia dentata 'Desdemona'</td></tr>
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Perhaps this is a strange list, perhaps you might feel I have given up on plants I could succeed with. You might be right, but I will not try again, I have made my peace with that, and it is indeed a kind of peace, to choose to pass by. These are not plants I dislike or think little of. If I moved to another garden with completely different conditions I suppose I might try some of them once more, but there again hell might freeze over.<br />
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My most poignant relinquishment is geum rivale, Leonards variety - those nodding tangerine heads. They are a perfect combination of delicate form and colour, but they can never be mine again. And I can't even find a photo of them.<br />
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The word relinquish is beautiful, offering acceptance and grace along with loss. I have not succeeded with these plants, and the comfort is, I no longer want to. In truth I long to relinquish, I relinquish whenever I can, it gives me a small but thrilling sense of control. I doubt it would ever get out of hand - I'm unlikely to end up with peas in my boots, weighing six stone and a lunatic light in my eyes. But giving up gracefully, on what you must lose anyway, that seems to me a good skill, one that ought to help with some of the worst trials of life, as well as the smaller nuisances.<br />
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There are so many chances to hone your renunciation skills when you take up gardening. For example; as we all know, too many different plants wreck a scheme and subtract rather than adding to each other. Dead heading and cutting back involve sacrifice if they are to be effective, plants easily swamp each other, you need to choose and eliminate, or nature will do it for you. Practice, practice, sometimes with regret.<br />
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Currently I am struggling to hang on to something I decided would be best to deny myself when I first started making my garden in Italy. From the front of the house, where the main garden is, the view across to the town of Mondovi is something to which your eye is ineluctably drawn. I decided the garden's theme, on that side of the house anyway, must be exposure and openness, to that view, to the air, to the sun.<br />
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The house, the nameless metal structure in front of it and the covered agricultural area below provide shelter, shade and sense of enclosure and that has to be enough. Simple then, stop right there, you can't plant trees, large shrubs or even very big perennials on that side where all the current planting areas are. Renounce such ideas. Think twice and let go.<br />
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And yet you can imagine what is happening. I find myself drawn to the framing of views, through bending trunks or pillar like structures. I fantasize the dappling of the ground with shadows, the walking through, under and out, to clearings hemmed with trees, to hidden places, to kindly shelter. I want what I cannot have and I find that discontent a most uncomfortable, unreasonable sensation, one I must rid myself of, with effort and energy. A person as fortunate as I should try not to mourn the unlived life, not for long anyway.<br />
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I will admit, I have conducted a little sleight of hand, not quite paying attention to what I am pretending I am not doing. A small magnolia and a little hawthorn have crept into place on the far lower left of the planted area. A cherry, related to the newly planted concealed orchard directly under the house, has stolen outwards towards the pond area. These won't be obvious in the photographs, even I barely know they are there. I know in my heart that from the upper level, the most used, trees will look like lumpy blocky shrubs, for years and years. They will have no grace seen from there, they will obscure the view annoyingly, not enhance suggestively, or frame elegantly. I have given due consideration to planting trees at that highest level, but I have not convinced myself. Time to leave it alone.<br />
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A trip round Great Comp, in Kent. which is a mature garden created in the full heathery conifery pomp of the 60s and 70s, has helped stiffen my resolve, despite these lapses. I have known it for 30 years, not terribly well, for there was always too much heather and too many conifers, but I find it interesting to see how they are attempting to improve and update it.<br />
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It was a garden that depended upon a large number of brick and stone follies - twiddly towers and connected roofless walls, set among the dense evergreen cover. Now the follies are much diminished for many of the trees have become enormous and bosomy. They loom hugely against each other, begging to be thinned but the task of selecting and relinquishing such large healthy trees must surely daunt. if not overwhelm.<br />
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Now many of the heathers have gone and large areas of the woodland have a unifying cover of geranium endressii, which makes for a rather charming unshowy innocence.<br />
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It is the garden proper that struggles to find its purpose and meaning, though perennials and grasses have been inserted to lighten and decorate it. I rather loved this sort of thing.<br />
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But I found the hidden "rooms" exhausting and cluttered. They were imagined, constructed and planted with such obvious hard work and care, and yet somehow they speak only of that. I feel sorry and concerned - something is needed to give them fresh life, their ties to meaningful existence are loosening before are very eyes. Time passes, aspects of culture float into disuse and disrepair, eventually decisions must be made.<br />
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Great Comp reminds us that, even in gardens, such a delightfully healing part of life, we are presented with the endless human dilemma of when and how to relinquish, sometimes through destruction or abandonment, something we once thought essential. We spend 50 years acquiring convictions, stuff and connections, and the next 20 or 30 years hanging on, or letting go, bewildered by how things change and in what strange directions.<br />
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So the questions that arise are: how do you bring yourself to surrender something that you have grown used to, that forms part of the pattern of your life, something in which, like an old car, you have invested, something for which you are still able to feel flickers of appreciation mixed with a clammy nostalgia. Something that also arouses feelings of boredom and exhaustion, even entrapment. Gardening helps - you see the rise and fall of plants and the seasons, time and change embodied. You learn to step in and manage the situation, where you can, and in ways that you wish.<br />
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In this song, If You See Her, Say Hello, from the album Blood On The Tracks, Dylan offers us an almost perfect paradigm of a very difficult relinquishment, struggling through a psychodrama of letting go. <span style="text-align: center;">He works through all the stages of grief, putting words to each one, trying to reach release. Sometimes he seems to force the process beyond where he is ready to go - the words ring truer as efforts than realities.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">The first line, the title, is confident and casual, exactly what one would say if everything was fine at the end of a relationship, but the bright insouciance is a fraud and the song pulls it apart, showing the pain and loss it conceals, bit by bit. The melody goes round and round, the voice and the emotion spirals up as the spirits spiral simultaneously down. As listeners we hear it all, we understand it completely, we are complimented and included by the emotional complexity.</span><br />
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The protagonist seems most engaged in his struggle to withstand, maturely and coolly, his own distress and the power of memories of happiness and its dissolution. Reason is pitched against emotion, but neither comes off best. He's finding out how to give something up, something that hurts, something he cannot quite bear life without. He practices the words and the attitudes that might help but the loss is real.<br />
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Just at the end, as a kind of happy resolution, the door is propped minimally ajar. The future is not closed, though the renunciation is as complete as it can be. He suggests that his lost love could always look him up if she has the time. Such ordinary speech, such a banal idea, but it is another kind of surrendering and a difficult mixture of courage and despair.<br />
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In the end we have to practice for relinquishment simply because there is no other way to go. All those things that are dear to us, they will all go, as surely as the innocence of our early years, as certainly as our youth, as time itself. Letting go of others can be hard, even death does not guarantee it. This song solves nothing, it simply describes an emotional process, accurately and effortfully, and sometimes that has to be enough.<br />
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I'm quite keen on going gentle into that good night, choosing, where I can, the order of the necessary renunciations. I watch my father and see him moving through that process each and every day, That has to be the last joy and our final blessing, never to quite shut the door to more time, but stepping forward to meet what must be, managing the unmanageable.<br />
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-38866327941849091922016-02-23T17:44:00.000-08:002016-03-04T13:20:55.185-08:00Missing - Nettie Moore<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Cancer removed my sister from the world on the second day of the year. With this post I honour her, hoping not to be misled into a vulgar display, longing rather, to do her and the "distinguished thing" what justice I can. Still I must tell you that in the end when death came it was only dressed up as mercy, in reality a hypocrite, bearing unbearable gifts. <br />
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My sister's name was Barbara. I never remember my life without her and she was a pleasure and a joy to me. She was the sunniest person I ever knew, radiating energy. Only 61 years old, beautiful, talented and charismatic. Funny too, a driven, good-humoured, whole-hearted artist of life. She loved the sensual reality of things and was certain of her choices, always developing her practical competence. She was visually alert and penetrating - by that I mean that she looked carefully at the world and perceived the reality in appearances, making sense of what she could see in an unusually thorough way.<br />
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Here I show a tiny fraction of an art she practised and took for granted - the art of the living human body, speaking, breathing, moving, resting. She knew it through and through, more than I ever realised. These pictures and drawings were mostly executed quickly, with no fuss, and packed away, in heaps, exercises merely. To me, now, they speak of the mysterious glamour of the body and its weight and beauty - they fill my eyes with tears as they fill the flesh with the loving meaning of life.<br />
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I have been away from the anguish and the hurly burly of the hospital bed for well over six weeks now and my eyes are still blinking, my brow still furrowing, the days making little real sense. I'm waiting to come back, but I don't know if I will be able to. Certainly not as I was. Gardens and gardening wait for me, but I am not ready to find comfort there yet. It's the usual thing, one foot in front of the other, all things must pass, hard to believe, hard to bear.<br />
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The song that suits me best is Nettie Moore, from the album Modern Times. Here love and loss are perfectly attuned, seeming to embrace each other over the sadness of the grieving survivor, as the weather swirls around, pushing life along. The song beats like a heart, on and hopelessly on.<br />
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I have a vision of that march, that dark march, in which we must all engage. My sister is up ahead, gazing wildly back as she slips out of sight, overwhelmed by the press and push of moving humanity. She did not think this would happen, right to the end she was astonished and enraged. We told each other that it felt surreal, that she was there, having to die and it was the truest word we could find.<br />
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Barbara loved gardening, like many she was particularly in tune with vegetable growing, seeing the point of it all and mad to try new things every year. She was unable to eat most vegetables for the last year of her life, perhaps more. The losses grew and grew. Her ability to move reduced, gradually robbing her of every joy in life.<br />
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We struggled out to the garden, to smell and touch the apple blossom last spring and it seemed like a promise at that stage, when she was recovering from her second surgery. I wanted nature and gardening to help her, and stay with her through the terrible journey, but there was the awful flaunting paradox of attachment and loss to be dealt with. We made three wheelchair trips to see open gardens, and she loved them all. They inspired her to think about what she would do when she got better, but they could not help her bear what she had to.<br />
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About a fortnight before she died, I brought Barbara a beautiful and surprisingly large and healthy December rose. It was a hybrid tea, high-centred and a glorious shameless dark pink. A perfect specimen, seized from the bottom of an overgrown hedge surrounding a sadly neglected garden which I passed on my daily walk to and from the hospice. I knew it was meant as a gift for her and watched it greedily for a day or two, then captured it for her at the perfect moment.<br />
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That rose was a rapture, she drank its scent and stroked its petals, loved it for three days. It held together, exhaling perfume, though constantly handled, and she gave it her most considered attention, studying its velvety maroon and rosy interior as though it contained the whole world. But of course it shriveled and failed, though she loved it to the end. The word poignant is over-used, metaphors and similes crowd round the dying persons bed. Everything is loaded, nothing is just itself. <br />
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Her beautiful face, tilted to the sun. The loss, to me, of an essential sight, a particular irreplaceable feel to the air. A whole colour has gone from the world, a beloved voice and a particular, arresting point of view, She was simple, direct and clear in all her pronouncements, not muddy, or confusing. One was left in no doubt.<br />
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And yet, extraordinarily, I find myself confounded by her mystery, now she is gone from me. I cannot make her expression out, and I long to. I cannot make sense out of the space she leaves - what I knew and what I know don't add up any more. Funny that grief should feel so like confusion.<br />
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And that is why this is the right song. I know it's partly a clever puzzle, a gamer's paradise, where each line in the verses harks back to other songs and other singers, playing with the challenge of accusations of plagiarism. Some extract the guilt of the murderer from it. To me, the chaos in the verses and the confusion of inconsequential subjects and sudden attacks add up to a world that no longer fits or hangs together.<br />
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Against that background, the simple clarity of the repeated central theme, the chorus, shines out unmistakably - the sorrow of the loss of Nettie Moore and the world that has gone black before the protagonist's eyes. The song seems deeply felt and it deals not with the idle partings of love, but the incontrovertible break-up of death. The depth is partly is the singing - strong, soft, warm and heartfelt, partly it's in the gathering and rising of the chorus's melody which lifts and falls like something nearly airborne, carrying life away.<br />
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If you have lost someone vital to you, as we all must, listen to the song and the care in the voice. It brings a certain comfort to accept that grief can turn the world into such a difficult muddle for all of us. That phrase, "the river's on the rise" is perfect, implying so much - a coming spring that is almost a threat, a moving, continual flux and yet also a kind of hopeless hope. <br />
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Barbara and I used to imagine, with pleasure, that we would be very old ladies together, helping each other about and wearing microscopically varied but similar garments, fussing about what to eat. That's all gone. I am not alone, not at all, but it feels frighteningly like it sometimes. She was a familiar marvel and an everyday wonder. The missing will never stop.<br />
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Barbara 1955 - 2016</div>
Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-12115230484287609982015-05-01T16:12:00.002-07:002015-08-03T10:12:28.833-07:00Scylla and Charybdis - Idiot Wind<br />
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I arrived in Italy for a necessarily brief break and some fast weeding, only to be met by smashed trees and a series of landslips. I have been startled, first by the dazzling sunshine, then by the meaningless destruction, snagged branches like broken teeth, strange angular misshapes in the hedgerows, confusion and disorder in the woodlands. How did this happen? Has some annoying giant tramped across the land, trailing enormous hands and feet through the vegetation. How did it all get in such a mess?<br />
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A heavy fall of wettish snow in February seems to be the answer, not something that would make more sense, like a weak hurricane, or a strong wind. The weight broke the branches and then melted away, like a thief in the night. I'm left astonished that I ever thought I could plant interesting or beautiful trees here. The ones there were are dying anyway, poor drainage and alternating droughts and swamps leaving them vulnerable. Walnuts, elms and chestnuts suffer from blights, oaks seem to struggle and fruit trees drown. Only tall matchwood poplars of the cottonwood variety, silver willows, robinias and ailanthus seem to bounce back. And hazels of course. And ramshackle elders.<br />
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As a bit of a ramshackle elder myself, I turn to the song of the day with a sense of my own history overwhelming any chance of a fresh , untrammelled hearing. It's Idiot Wind, from the album Blood On The Tracks, or better, in my view, the version on Hard Rain, sung with controlled vim and relish.<br />
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It's one of the best of all songs ever, at least about this sort of thing: grief and loss in prospect and the final failure of love. And I remember the shifty eyes of the young man who introduced me to it, way back when. Poor boy, he thought a woman might feel obliged to take it personally. The meaningless hot air of the chattering beast and so on. To him, just cause for female offence. Such deep water, such endless layers of misunderstanding, how could we even begin to straighten it all out?<br />
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And so we never did. I cannot say that his view, which seemed to fit with that of many other men, did not affect me. It made me nervous of the song and afraid I hadn't understood the meaning of the anger. It felt like men were receiving it as a secret message about what they really knew about women, but were too evolved to mention. But I never thought there was any proper misogyny in the song itself, not really, just sadness and rage, the usual human stuff. Inevitable and thrillingly, economically, thoroughly expounded. Male or female, you identified with the feelings of the protagonist, not the object of his ire.<br />
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Here in Mondovi, in early April, the fierce light of spring shines without pity. It shows up every detail of what's gone wrong in the garden over the winter. Like the evidence of a crime, convincing and hopeless. Much has gone well, and there are things to be learnt from that. But how quickly I turn to what has failed, to everything that hasn't worked.<br />
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I'm a fearful pessimist: my fortunate and relatively pampered life sometimes resolves itself into a series of shocks and alarms, worries which I overestimate and concerns which shatter my equilibrium. This song reaches across the years with a reminder of misery and anger that one never imagined woud fade and yet has done so. While there's life, there's hope, they say: above all value life.<br />
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So I turn to the small stuff of horticultural hope and ambition. I am pleased with what has done well though admittedly the winter was never truly cold and I strive to be less disheartened by what hasn't worked. My transplanted celtis australis, grown from shrivelled scattered berries, found in the parks of Turin, seem to have survived their move, dying back only a little. I have great hopes they will prove tough and graceful trees. though they grow in a thanklessly droughty position at the top of a bank, still currently running with water making its way downhill. I plan a delicately shaded woodland area, cyclamen and bulbs at their feet.<br />
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A two year old gaura lindheimeri is dead as a doornail, but surrounded by seedlings, themselves stained with purplish red, like holy relics. I redistribute some, leaving the others in the places they have chosen, for they are likely to do better there and why look for trouble? Gaura works best as an active, moving annual, or biennial, rather than as a static perennial, just as long as it will seed for you. None of these things are as fixed as one might think.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwoFZk3liz47nX1oSK89chsweaACwwiFY4UCH6L2BuTKVCTBPCy_NsEdojoBUl7Tyf1M-bpXHlqRQ4x5tiwuRTTtvRhObEhJbTaafOWCvfEFGDVEAcYfmf821RpvRg4NItwqU5ZvEv2bKp/s1600/P7120140.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwoFZk3liz47nX1oSK89chsweaACwwiFY4UCH6L2BuTKVCTBPCy_NsEdojoBUl7Tyf1M-bpXHlqRQ4x5tiwuRTTtvRhObEhJbTaafOWCvfEFGDVEAcYfmf821RpvRg4NItwqU5ZvEv2bKp/s1600/P7120140.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gaura in July last year, with unknown blue erigeron in front</td></tr>
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Many low-growing small-leaved Mediterranean evergreens with small tough leaves have survived well in the sandy mulch I put down two years ago - there are tracts of micromeria and thyme, rich pickings amongst the oreganos, expansion in the hyssops and varied sages. Oenothera missouriensis and acualis are breaking through strongly and my slender pale yellow hemerocallis, variously named, are looking happy and much increased. Peonies, santolina, iris and echinacea have all survived, as of course they tend to do - I have not chosen difficult plants. <br />
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In this climate, and under these soil conditions, plants are required that can create an extensive root system, well underground, so that they search out any moisture in summer and recover from the effects of serious cold in winter. Thrifty growth is what's needed, an almost unimaginably old-fashioned virtue. I don't want height and overfed expansion, masses of rich leafage, followed by large flowers, then panting expiration and collapse. Summer-dormant perennials would be good, disappearing underground when the heat and drought strikes, but, of those, the oriental poppies hate the drainage problems and I have lost two out of every three. Dicentras, in the same group, are worth a try, though I have become unreasonably tired of the maudlin bleeding heart. Geranium tuberosum though, that's something I must get hold of, delicate flowers in May followed by complete disappearance till next spring.<br />
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In general, plants need a good deep root system to give them a degree of drought-resistance and stability. Plants that need a lot of dividing cannot be considered stable and have no time to develop deep roots. So I ought to practise a little resistance myself and avoid those daisies that need frequent division - many asters (now called symphotricums), erigerons and tanacetums. But I don't, and I can't, they simply give me too much pleasure.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oenothera missouriensis and Erigeron White Quakeress - both flower for months. Here they have just begun, in May.</td></tr>
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Years ago, I learnt to divide these daisy relatives in spring rather than autumn, finding they needed to move fast and keep on moving, that a morose winter after splitting spelt death to their simple hearts, but that leaving them alone year after could mean another sort of death by overcrowding of the new shoots. Not true of the real species asters or the old Michaelmas daisy, ramping around at the back of the border, but those with masses and masses of small bright daisies, those hybrids with complicated sap-lines like Little Carlow, like Esther, like Erlkonig - they don't have it in them to stay in the same spot and keep at it year after year without human intervention. They reappeared this spring, their shoots crammed together and exhausted-looking, old woody roots exerting a stranglehold, a relationship on the rocks for all to see.<br />
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So I have intervened, fearful only that the threat of hot dry early summers and spring division would be mutually incompatible. All my daisies did well last year, the pale yellow anthemis tinctoria became enormous; erigeron White Quakeress, solidaster Lemore flowered beautifully. This year they could do with rescuing from self-strangulation, and, not to be sniffed at, I need more plants to cover more ground, so it's time to turn to and do the dividing.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Solidaster Lemore - flowers for ages if dead-headed, from June onwards</td></tr>
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I started this in April of course, and since then have had to return to England. I ripped the plants apart, and replanted them, straight into my unpromising soil, watered them well and walked away. It felt precarious, balancing the one imperative against the other and steering between opposing forces. All I can hope is that there's enough moisture around for the next month so that the plants can start to grow independently and make it through to flower later in the year.<br />
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So my theme is rescuing a disaster in the making by risking another, trying to find a way between them. It leads us into the song, which starts completely off the point, with a complaint, followed by a complicated joke about being lucky. Already we're staggering about, trying to fit apparent contradictions together. Anger and sorrow at a dissolving relationship follow; the song can be seen as an attempt to reconcile snarling and crying, rising above the one on the back of the other. <br />
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I remember the same moment of shock as he expresses, when I too was breaking up, and was faced with what looked like a completely altered mouth and evasive eyes. We've all noticed that, probably, but I can't think of anyone else who pinpoints that detail, at least in a song. He has lost his love - lost his love in two ways for he now feels something close to hate, and she has completely changed, even her face looks different. The dreadful truths of a decomposing relationship are here: scenes of domestic life and an exhausting series of arguments and scenes, all culminating in frantic baroque imagery about holiness and howling wolves. Reconciliation cannot work, sorrow cannot temper rage, all is lost.<br />
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I love the song for the emotional precision of its striking imagery about the way the protagonist feels. The burning boxcar, the running boards, the cypress trees - that's destruction, flight and sorrow in a couple of phrases. The song is most marvellous for its lengthy elaborated insult, the one that worried the youths of my day, the one about the idiot wind blowing across the world, out between the teeth of the estranged partner, out of her empty corrupt mouth, saying and meaning nothing of worth and intelligence. I can't help it, I just love that level of accuracy and care with a metaphor, however corruscating. Such descriptive diligence should be rewarded with release from the grip of the emotion, but his anger damns him, perhaps even in his own eyes, out of his own mouth.<br />
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So finally I return to the damaged trees and landslips, the smashed road edges, the general destruction now disappearing under the rolling waves of green. To be honest, they are far more like the sentiment of Idiot Wind than any of my complicated notions about oppositional forces and clever steering between them. That final conciliatory "we're idiots" weighs too little against the devastation and blame described in earlier verses, the sentiment is too effortful, human but flawed. And that, of course turns out to be the whole point of the song. We're not talking about anybody getting anything right, it's not a song about things going well, it's a song about an uncontrollable veer in one direction, straight into disaster.<br />
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-62518732103229545222015-03-07T03:44:00.000-08:002015-03-07T03:44:16.727-08:00Jagged Edges - Tough Mama<br />
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Tough Mama is the first song on the album Planet Waves. I've never liked it, it seems objectionable to me and I object to it. But it puzzles me too, I don't have to think it's a great song, but the sense of actual objection ought to be unnecessary, once you've realised that low-level sexism is a simple fact of life. It's more a sense of resistance to physical discomfort. The song jerks me around - stop jerking me around! I may be tough, I'm not a sack of potatoes. Find a rhythm and try sticking to it for more than a phrase - that would be a start.<br />
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And another thing. This meat shaking on her bones. No one should have to put up with being spoken about like that, as if they were in an abattoir. It may have a long folky history, but I don't like it. I reject it.<br />
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Discomfort breeds irritability unless you're a very good person. And I'm uncomfortable and out of sorts, nothing seems easy, every day another jolt, every step another stumble.<br />
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And yet my garden here in England is tidy, and improving all the time. It's full of birds too, eating their heads off. Spring is on the horizon, this is usually a time of looking forward. Working in other peoples gardens in the mornings sometimes soothes me for a short time but I can't integrate that feeling into the general buffeting around me.<br />
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Dissatisfaction and discomfort are a problem for those of us who preach the therapeutic comfort of gardens, and garden work. Winter is always a challenge, no-one likes the way the cold, cold soil strikes through gloves to the fingers, and through the fingers to the bone. Who could enjoy working braced against the chilly wind and the occasional burst of sleet? Someone young and cheerful I suppose, someone unworried, with lots to look forward to. <br />
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I usually warm myself up by cheerfully complaining to other people about how hot it gets inside modern clothing. Bravado can be surprisingly effective as heating. And it does get warm, you end up with an overheated heart and cold cheeks and forearms. Chilly legs, uncertain lower back. Hope and enthusiasm might help too. I must get some. It won't be from this song though, which alienates me on nearly every level.<br />
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Is it that thing about the muse? I fear it partly is. Muses are horrible vapid creatures, balancing on their uneasy pedestals, being inspiring, even in their least febrile forms. When they're haughty, sultry or tempestuous my irritation at the falsity of their position knows few bounds. How did we women find ourselves here? Again?<br />
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I know people can inspire other people and I believe an artist who needs a muse will always find one. Like the child who cuddles a doll made out of a corn cob, or the addict fetishizing dependency, it's all part of the endless resourcefulness of the human brain.<br />
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The battle between artist and muse glories in details which quickly become tiresome to those outside of the relationship and here's a song celebrating the toughness of a failed figment of the imagination. Again I mislay my patience, along with the tools scattered amongst the chilly snowdrops, like my wintry wits, my confidence and my comfort.<br />
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A relevant digression here, even in a warm winter you can't avoid the fact that small scale ornamental gardening is compromised in all directions, not being natural enough to be real, not being arty enough to be exciting. And so we witter on hopefully about its vaunted therapeutic qualities, true, so true - a real truism. And sometimes we're just fooling ourselves, slamming about with heavy mulches, stabbing at the drenched and stony clay to drag up the yellow roots of nettles, longing for it to be finished. No therapeutic value there, only the slight self-congratulation that arises from having done enough to permit oneself to stop.<br />
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I have been wondering, as I jab irritably about, whether gardening could become part of mindfulness, and revitalise itself into a mass movement that way. Drifting, a sense of oneness, opening, healing - these sound like reasonable ways of calming down and reaching for a sort of peace. But as I scrub around in the dirt, hoicking out the weeds, breaking the roots of peonies as I move them from places that have become shady and overgrown, I have no sense of gentle acceptance. Struggle and judgements are the order of the day.<br />
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I understand you neither judge nor decide anything if you're being mindful, you observe, you permit, you let it all go, successively and continuously. People say it's hard work, this business of stopping the mind and liberating the self. I can see it might be. That kind of therapy is too difficult for me, gnawing at my problems and worries with jagged uneasiness. I prefer to rush outside and plant something, or rip something up. I banish plants, or I increase them against their own wills and desires. I rule, I govern. See how tough I am, a very tough mama, swiping about with my tough words.<br />
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Perhaps mindfulness never accompanies the attempt to make something, but only opens the gates, somewhere else, distantly. <br />
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If mindfulness won't work, gardeners have to fall back on some sort of inspiration to get them through the hard times. But we don't generally have muses, as far as I know, and if we did, they would not be human or female but elemental, though still difficult and capricious. No songwriter, railing against the unreliability of his own unhelpful muse, has any idea how tough a mama nature can be, along with her evil sisters, time and weather.<br />
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Gardeners find it hard to have subjects to be inspired about anyway, because gardens are their own subject matter. Any meaningfulness they hold arises from a mixture of contrasts and integration, harmoniously developed. The meat should not shake on their bones. There should be some sort of rightness.<br />
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But it's horribly hard to get it right, and trying harder can sometimes fail worse. Can you hear me whining? Try listening to the song, and take in the full range of slightly aggressive, slightly sexualised supplication. The singer's muse is both relentless and useless, she may have the long night's journey in her eyes, promising, promising, but she's not about to help, you can tell that from the music, which never quite catches up with itself and never finds a way to integrate a beat.<br />
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And now for some kind of testy resolution. Gardening does not always help with the travails of life. Sometimes you can hunt for peace and a feeling of success there and find only continued disharmony and new kinds of discomfort. The song reminds us that what we would like to rely on doesn't always work. And it does it, with bitter irony, by being a bit of a dud itself.<br />
<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-60583003447917227242015-01-07T15:22:00.001-08:002015-01-09T08:20:09.699-08:00Trickle Down - Mr Tambourine Man<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Oh the innocence of this song, the longing to live, to feel, to be. We all know it so well, indeed we can barely hear it any more. Familiarity kills our darlings, even if we don't. But humour me, give it another listen in the original Bringing It All Back Home version, where it sat like a glow worm, astonishing and charming us, opening our minds to the other worlds inside and around us, warming the very cockles of our souls.<br />
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Perhaps the inner paradox of the song (and a song without an inner paradox is an empty shell), is that of heat and light. The song warms us, offering the thrills of being alive and open to experience, but it chills us too, for the experience turns out to involve dancing alone on a deserted beach. The glow worm is cool and solitary, like the one I found two years running, just inside the garage doors of our house in Italy, wasting its sweetness on the concrete floor.<br />
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Not that this song wastes its sweetness. Every note, every word, is necessary to its other major effect, that of a nameless, implacable, pull. And this year, in the autumn rains of Piemonte, I heard that pull differently, not as freedom, not as creativity nor individuality nor art: I heard it as simple gravity, the pull down, down, down to the sea.<br />
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It's perfectly obvious isn't it, if you take the inexorable cool swirl of the song, and the dripping, trickling background music on this particular version: the man's clearly talking about drainage and the movement of water, falling, running, flowing, onwards and out, eventually to lose itself in the great mass of the ocean beneath the waves. I can't think why I didn't notice it before.<br />
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The force of gravity is impossibly serious, there's no messing with it, you cannot, as you survey your rain-soaked land, create it differently. Even as a streamlet wavers back and forth it is not embarking on a race to freedom, a journey or a pilgrimage to pastures new. Water flows where it must and that is always the nearest, lower place.<br />
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Goodness, what triteness. Obviously we all know this, it doesn't take someone like me to point it out. But that surveyor of the rain-soaked land - that was me, back in November. We had already had a lot of rain, and I did not know it, but there was very much more to come. I was surrounded by an enormous lesson in hydraulics, one I had thought I understood, but now I see I hadn't fully taken it in. It wasn't really part of me, not something I found as natural as breathing, but more like the repeated surprising realisation of the workings of the gut, a half-hidden phenomenon. Just as vital, just as inexorable.<br />
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Perhaps it's partly that concealed pumps confuse us. And other forms of pressure from beneath, forcing water up and against itself for short distances through tight outlets. Taps and faucets, like tsunamis and waves, whip up the illusion that water can rise of its own accord. At the other extreme, the bigger systems and directions of flow can be lost to the eye over distance. The final destination of huge delta-like formations are generally imperceptible to human view, only appearing obvious on maps and from aeroplanes.<br />
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So it's easy, if inexcusable, to forget about the way water really works. There are tides, and natural springs, and water tables that rise and fall, and caverns and streams running under the ground, and the absorption capacity of different soils creating differing levels where water appears and disappears. Sometimes you find ponds or lakes at high levels in hills or mountains, apparently static. Words like "rising" and "bursting" confuse us further. In general, they're simply talking about a great deal of water adding itself to ever more water, filling every cranny, and still flowing downwards. Waterfalls seem like natural wonders but the real wonder would be if water ever did anything other than fall.<br />
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Still, Holland seems to be possible, with waterways and canals at multiple levels, flowing sideways, and tidal estuaries managing upstream flows. Until we're flooded, we take such marvels for granted.<br />
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The true terrible simplicity of the natural law of water and gravity was brought home to me, again, as l reviewed our sloping land in Italy in November, wondering what to plant where. Our house sits on a slightly flatter piece of land, with steep falls above and below and a transverse slope falling towards it from the side. What an incomprehensible sentence. Does it make it better to say that the land slopes upwards from the house on two sides, south and west facing, downwards from the other two aspects? Not much I think. The soil is clayey and water runs over the surface when it rains, unable to penetrate quickly. Hard not to feel a slight panic as new torrents appear, hard not to worry about planting that seemed safe and happy, now sitting in the teeth of running water or settled in a vast puddle where a flatter area allows the water to collect.<br />
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Speeding it up so the water runs faster down the slope is drainage. But so is slowing it down, adding grit and absorbent materials to the surface so it enters the soil and drifts directly downwards. No one would ever sell you a plant these days without suggesting that it would like to be kept both constantly moist and well-drained, as though the combination were two a penny: the very least you could offer it seems, but in fact the horticultural equivalent of cheap and comfortable housing in central London or Manhattan. And some plants can only survive in luxury, whereas others make do with much less, like most people, waiting for the trickle down, but still having to get by, as best they can, in a deceitful world. <br />
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Despite the patches of unrelenting, pot-makers clay, despite the standing puddles, the soaked and streaming land, I know the true threat to plants here lies in drought and heat. And I have planted for that - trying for the tougher sort of Mediterranean plant above all. Phyla nodiflora, which may have many other common names but is a flat-growing, wide-spreading drought resister, with flowers like tiny lantanas, staying green in heat, has gone in on the flatter areas. Limonium or statice and an unknown golden aster, chrysopsis perhaps, which grows in near-deserts, have been added on the slopes. And many others I hesitate to mention, till I see how they do. All planted into the despondent clayey mud in November, for spring planting leaves them high and dry far too soon; it seems they need the winter rains to get their feet under the table.<br />
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Beneath my feet I'm aware of a world of wetness, moving down the slopes and through the strata, only still where full. You may recall that the water in our well is not static, the well itself is nothing more than access to a jostling underground stream, disappearing when you need it in the dog days.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New wellhead - July</td></tr>
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We have put in an overflow pipe from the well, so it no longer debouches when full across what is now our terrace, but runs underneath, to join the other pipes draining water from around the house into the deep hole that will be a pond beneath the house but hundreds of feet from the bottom of the wooded ravine which ends our land, where the stream runs and all the water really wants to be.<br />
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And here's the pond during the November rains - unlined, basically a useless, badly drained pit.<br />
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It is clear that there is no real freedom in the management of water - you can only speed, slow or prevent the flow downwards, and that only to some degree. We have achieved the most basic level of hurrying water away from the house, though I was alarmed to hear that our builder thought we should continue the work by flattening the transverse slope. That seems too much, reshaping the hillside is beyond my requirements, or desires. I felt my face pale and my hackles rise. And since then a chunk of our newly paved road has broken away where a mudslide occurred on the other side of the house, where the water courses down and away, a temporary riverbed. Frogs fall on my head, the builder chuckles.<br />
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And back in the summer, a large group of my family met on a sandy beach in Wales and created a huge whirling mermaid in the sand, a mermaid whose contours filled with water as the tide came in, as the children shouted and danced with watery joy. I didn't think of the song back then, but as I remember the occasion, I see again how well it fits, how art and creation, my sister's gift, released us all to happiness, though far from lonely, far from deranged. Surely we all seek it, what the song offers, perhaps it is the best of the stuff of life.<br />
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With no real beginning and no real end, and a pull within it that heaps phrase upon phrase, riding the waves, ineluctably, like a falling, a swirling, a continuous flow, the song tells of the joys of the imagination and the self-forgetfulness of creativity. The words still have the power to stimulate and amaze, the song has a kind of inspirational effect on its listeners, who can identify and enter that world of creation and the transcended self, just in the hearing. Perhaps a little piously, I wish this song, cast upon the waters so long ago, could trickle down and enrich us all, in the ways that matter. And that includes a bit of gardening, or at least a little digging in the sand and playing with the water.<br />
<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-75595604861347683822014-10-27T03:36:00.000-07:002014-11-03T01:25:45.736-08:00Losing The Will - Ain't talkin' <br />
"Better to strangle a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires". If we followed that idea to the letter we'd be slaughtering our nearest and dearest, and throwing ourselves from high ledges. We'd be snatching hot chips from other peoples' plates and roaring about at great speed in ridiculous cars.<br />
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That nursing though is familiar. Most of us come to some sort of accommodation with our own desires, ending up wanting to have those things we can easily get, or wanting to do what we ought anyway. All we need is to know what those things are.<br />
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I started writing this in late August. I've equivocated, turning round and round on myself, unable to commit. I've not quite known what I've wanted to do and I've not wanted it enough. Time has slipped away and it is now the beginning of October. And it's not just about committing myself to the page. It's also been two months of horticultural self-control, holding myself back, letting myself out little by little, when I can, when I can get away with it. The effort and the indecision have worn me out. I'm fit for nothing.<br />
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The issue is cutting back perennials, the new unspoken heresy. Where once we fiddled about, dead-heading and sprucing up throughout the summer, then tidied up in autumn, shamelessly, now such behaviour is airily dismissed. Cutting back is an unsound, immoral practice, cruel to wildlife, pointless hard work and foolishly unappreciative of the delicate filigree of frost on seedheads. Tidiness is neurotic, we should be cool and free-spirited, tossing our hair and living and letting live. I try, but it doesn't seem to be quite the way I want to garden.<br />
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And can it be true even? Surely most gardeners are secretly surgically enhancing their gardens? They just don't like to admit it. You exercise your exquisite choice in your planting and walk briskly away, making the least you can of the dreary job of maintenance. Simultaneous ease and beauty is offered by the so-called New Perennial Movement, where everything proclaims itself to flower "all summer", endlessly, blissfully, no human intervention needed. Cutting back is quite clearly both vicious and unnecessary.<br />
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Now, I don't like my own tone here, not one bit. I'm feeling defensive and sarcastic. Mad old bat ranting, perfect for today's song which is Ain't Talkin'. Without being too picky, the easily accessible version I really like is the so-called alternate one on Tell Tale Signs,Volume 8 of The Bootleg Series.<br />
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For once, we're in a genuinely horticultural setting, though the garden might be Gethsemane, which would somewhat reduce the actual gardening relevance, if relevance was what truly interested us. Anyway, there are wounded flowers dangling from the vine, it seems like there's mess and confusion everywhere. An unmistakeable fin de saison feeling. The exhausted, miserable protagonist, viewing this sad, gardened world at a propulsive walking pace, is unsure how to engage with it.<br />
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He decides to keep his own counsel, though obscurely attacked by an unknown assailant. He then breaks his own self-denying ordinance, chatting away through the song about what it feels like, what he sees, what he believes, what's happened to him and what he wishes to do about it. He runs through the options, getting nowhere. He cannot act on his decisions, even the one not to talk. Loving his neighbour, doing good to others, slaughtering his enemies and avenging his father all seem like possibilities, all remote, all floating out of his grasp. He has no sense of agency, floating mysterious and vague in a world he's not even sure is round.<br />
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I don't like that expression, "a sense of agency" but I can't think of another that summarises an active relationship to the world and doesn't press down too hard on the control pedal. As in life, so in gardening, balancing the control, managing the power, backing off at appropriate moments, easing forward to fiddle about with secateurs and shears at others. None of us should long for absurd amounts of power, there's no fun in suppression we hope. But equally what misery to be entirely without control, a recipe for a low mood if ever there was one.<br />
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I have a theory, flimsy but ineradicable, like purslane (with which my Italian garden is uncontrollably afflicted, and with which I shall have to learn how to live). My theory is that if you make selective, continuous dead-heading and cutting back your primary horticultural activity you will find gardening an easy, rewarding and pleasurable thing to do. If you insist on living with sad weedy remains falling about and making everything look a mess, you will wonder why you bother. Obviously I'm not promoting a manicured sterility, you do have to have lots of plants, intimately close, flowering at different times, to earn your natural rights of interference. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Can you detect where the cutting back and tidying have happened? </td></tr>
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Let aesthetic satisfaction dictate what you do: if it offends you (and you must be prepared to be attentive enough to be offended), cut it out. Sensitively of course; we're not talking about mindless hacking, go back to new leaf buds, even if they're at soil level. Remove the bedraggled and the gone over. 95 per cent of the time the plant will grow back better, perhaps flower again, produce fresh new leaves, all will be well. You should have something else ready to spring up, maybe to flower now. The whole garden will look more cared for, as if the gardener hadn't gone and without the sadness of complete abandonment. Not to overdo it though - we like the would be, could be, nearly natural look. Walking along the edge of that particular razor is the very heart of enjoyable gardening. The sort where you can hardly bear to go in at the end of the day, you so love what you have done, you feel so at home in your own world.<br />
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Not so in the song, where the impotent hard-pressed protagonist has been struck sharply on the back. Maybe someone's tried to stab him. He drifts about, noticing that everything's a hopeless mess.<br />
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He lacks persistence, his thoughts bend and buckle round him, holding him back from dealing with his sea of troubles. Hypotheses, provisos, threats, jokes, regrets - they're all distancing manoeuvres, he's avoiding and fleeing engagement, not speaking, but going on and on about it, walking fleetly into the distance. He's neither here nor there, skittering off and away. Even when the Queen of Love crosses his path, on a hot summer day, a hot summer lawn, and she so beguiling and magnificent, he accosts her only to explain that there's no-one around.<br />
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Like Hamlet, the protagonist shilly-shallies and plays around with words. But he walks away, accepting exile. He knows there is little point in damaging further a damaged world. "In the human heart, an evil spirit can dwell". Little point then in opposition, even against a sea of troubles. Convictions are wrapped round the seeds of violent destruction, better hold your tongue and make your escape. <br />
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Now this terrifically moody song, backed by a delicate musical figure, raises some ancient questions about beliefs and action. We're not looking at cowardice here, though we're all afraid these days. We're looking at something more ambiguous - the way certainty falters the more you think, the way scepticism amounts to an inability to act, or to know when it would be helpful and necessary to do so.<br />
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Fortunately we don't have to deal with all that and can make our own escape into a little gentle horticultural surgery, down the primrose path. Follow my prescription for continuous cutting back from springtime onwards and you'll start to love gardening, you'll find it a most charmingly active, but harmless, wielding of your own will. You learn to define plants, one against the other, you learn tricks to prolong and stagger their blooming, subtly differentiating your styles and moments of intervention, and you'll encourage second or even third bursts of bloom. You create space, order and an air of restful aplomb. Things rise and fall in their time and as they fall you graciously help them off the scene. You don't leave them lying over everyone else, choking the conversation like drunks at a party. You are the perfect host, bringing out the best in your guests, helping each to sparkle and contribute. Nudging, peace-making, grooming, introducing, scheming, containing and calming - these are your skills. Radical dead-heading that makes the whole garden better, week on week and year on year. It's as interesting and complicated as you like to make it. And of course you leave some seedheads. Your choice.<br />
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So, that's my theory. And I'm not about to abandon my faith in it, even though there is little enough in the gardening media these days to encourage or support such gentle perversity. Cutting back anything, especially in autumn is treated like a shameful, unnatural vice. You are encouraged to strim everything down in one great hit in spring, having left it untouched to overwinter. You are positively deterred from making a move amongst your plants from July onwards. And I do genuinely see that continual disturbance may disrupt insect life cycles. We both curtail and maximise nature in gardens, somehow we have to find our accommodations with that.<br />
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For autumn, I'm not advocating the complete reduction to flat mulched brown in October that you used to see in borders. A garden where you cut back the tall, leafy, collapsing plant, leaving only seedheads that you really want, letting the light in, will putter on attractively in the UK, right into December. It will then blend seamlessly into the bulbs, arums and hellebores of early spring. I highly value low evergreen perennials like tellima, bergenia, liriope, luzula and ajuga for keeping the soil clothed and cheered but they need the deciduous mess above and around them removed, incrementally, if they are to shine, in their time, as we would all wish to do. Give them a chance to step forward, a succession of individuals working together, not an unruly mob, followed by a great smiting.<br />
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Even in the small garden the advice is to postpone the smiting, simply averting your gaze, until the spring, when everything will be piercing through the rotting blanket of tall perennials (still the coolest plants) and you can quickly and casually whip off the remaining stiffened stems.<br />
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But those untouched, tall, damp, stemmy messes easily dominate small spaces. In large gardens you can stand back from the abandoned shambles and make it look gardened by surrounding it with smart low hedges or strips of mown grass. In the little garden however, murk and depression can hover over the overweening muddle, through the dark days. And for how many gardens will those months allow perennial weeds to flourish beyond bounds, when you could have seen and neatly eliminated them as they were born, as you tidied and cut. I see I'm going on and on. Time to start walking.<br />
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OK, I hope I've made my point, despite the ranting. That might be my favourite thing about the song, the way it engages with the ifs and buts of the recalcitrant, outpaced self. For more practical advice you can turn to Tracey Di Sabato Aust's book on cutting back perennials.<br />
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It's not an inspiringly attractive book, but if you need confident instruction to help you make decisions about how and what to cut back when, this is a comprehensive help. And she is based in Ohio, where the climate is truly continental. Sometimes I have wondered if my superseded ways relate only to temperate climates where we can glory in mixed evergreens along with herbaceous perennials. Perhaps a harsher, more extreme climate dictates greater smitings.<br />
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My new garden in Italy, which I planted a bit last autumn, a bit this spring, is presenting me with challenges above and beyond those I face in the UK because of the hotter summers and supposedly colder winters. Last winter was not that cold though, and this summer not that hot. Nor dry. So everything's out of joint and abnormal. I've learnt less than I'd hoped and am faced with a confusion of possible actions. We might get masses of snow, under which small animals will burrow about, eating anything they can, especially keen on stripping bark.<br />
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Alpine plants tend to get eaten back before the snows so is severe trimming in order? Or should old branchy bits be left for protection? I have a mixture of Mediterranean (herby types), steppe plants(peonies, oriental poppies, iris), prairie plants (echinacea, liatris, gaura, asters) and alpine plants (dianthus, erodiums, sedum, sempervivum). I have weeds that seed without let or mercy - erigeron anuus, portulaca oleracea, burdocks, fierce unknown grasses, oxalis and potentillas. So many have burrs and sharp hooks. I need to clean more ground and cover it with plants. Cutting back is no kind of answer to at this stage. Frantic planting is the only way to go, and I'm back to my old tricks of planting lots of different things, trying to find out what will do well in the long term.<br />
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So here I am, my old abandoned faith still burning, wondering how to make it work here, where the altars come thick and fast along the road, but offer me no help. I quite sympathise with the sad and desperate song where the poor protagonist, a strange mixture of Christ, Ovid and Hamlet, is out of options, out of joint, way out on a lonely limb, but I must admit that there's something rather sulky about the decision to stop talking. Not that it isn't a good idea, especially when you find yourself left behind as the relentless march of change overwhelms your most cherished affections. The future looms alarmingly. <br />
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Oh well. I have no solutions to offer, only a belief that another year or two will see me confident and committed again. Maybe I will be led forward and time will see me dancing about with a strimmer. A few easy swipes and the job will be done.<br />
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I see the honoured Piet Oudolf suggests that my methods of cutting back continuously constitute a pretence that it is always spring, trying to fool the plants, myself and everyone else. (See Dream Plants for the Natural Garden by Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen). This had not occurred to me, but fair enough, perhaps I'm clinging to what's left of my youth. My hand hesitates and falls to my side sometimes, when I think something may need the protection of its own dying remains, or will be weakened if it loses too much too soon, and has to make another effort, or when I think small creatures may like them to live in or eat: still, I'm not prepared to feel guilty for wanting a garden to look good and doing my best to make it so. I'm a gardener, that's what gardening is. I'm quite responsible you know, goodness, I don't want you to think I sling the pesticide about. Or prevent the easy movement of hedgehogs.<br />
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Admittedly I do like the comfort of green in winter, as my English garden so wrong-headedly shows. Oudolf suggests this preference is a psychologically unhealthy failure to accept death and decay. He should listen to Ain't Talkin' - then he would know there is not only bright easy life and dark falling death, there is also that mid-zone, the one where we often find ourselves. We're in a mystic ungardened garden, where the thrumming music pushes us along. The direction is unclear. We're all alone, considering and hesitating, the unsure victims of this weary world of woe, shot through with the flying wheels of heaven. Time will carry us, whether we like it or not. But who says we shouldn't tidy up a bit? Start with those dangling wounded flowers.<br />
<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-12082112834021009892014-06-27T03:20:00.001-07:002014-09-27T09:29:32.478-07:00Placing People - Brownsville Girl<br />
Here's a picture of Sido, mother of the French writer Colette. She was immortalised in the latter's books as the archetypal mother-gardener, coaxing blossoms from dead twigs, growth and abundance from all that lives.<br />
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I have a sharp image of her in my head - it could almost be a memory of my own - of her hurling a bunch of white violets over the wall to her neighbour, who yearns to be able to grow them equally well. She turns around her walled garden, a place of magic and drama. She heals a cat, caresses a child and wherever she walks, peonies open and lilies bloom. Regal but fecund - an improbable ideal of a woman. I scoff, but she's in my head, I will never be free of her.<br />
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I have a neighbour in Italy who bears a resemblance to Sido, for she is queenly but nurturing, always surrounded by dogs and children. Anna grows vegetables, loves her plants and views mine with genuine interest and enthusiasm. Her life has been hard and is not much improved now, she tells me stories of her own childhood and mourns her own mother, who used to call for her nine children and receive no answer, the older boys having prevailed upon the younger ones to be silent, for fun and badness. Now I'm confused - for the same story was told of Sido, calling for her young.<br />
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Anna is observant and precise. She might pee in the hedgerows as she makes her rounds, gathering snails, wild strawberries and mixed herbs, but she has natural dignity. If I appear to be making mistakes she points the matter out, firmly and coolly, reining in her usual warmth. I find myself keen to please her<br />
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I have another neighbour, I'll call her Carla, with the most intense, coal-black eyes. She can nail you to the wall with them as she tells her tales of excitement and outrage. Carla overlooks the back of our house, from the top of the hill. When I say "overlooks", what I really mean is "has cut a large hole in her previously completely enclosing conifer hedge in order to have a perfect sightline to our house at all times especially when she and her partner are seated on the terrace".<br />
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I don't mind this at all, in fact I might be tempted to do the same thing in her position, though I would probably aim for greater subtlety. And I would not have had that sort of hedge in the first place. And my first thoughts as a garden maker are all about eliminating disruption to the bucolic view so I would have been more likely to open it up to something I thought of as "beautiful" rather than just dramatically promising.<br />
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Sorry Carla, I think we are not animated enough to form a satisfactory visual attraction. We have visitors sometimes, but we don't do anything very exciting apart from eat on the balcony when it's warm enough and walk about on various minor domestic missions, bending to garden. A little building continues but it's not thrilling at this stage. Twice a day various people arrive to tend the donkeys, the sheep and the goats. Activity enlivens the landscape, I can see her point and we may, at first, have seemed a lot more unusual and exotic than we are. Perhaps we ought to try and put on a bit more of a show. We'll have to stage a fight or a tragedy, a little mayhem, maybe some naked dancing, we'll have to see what we can do.<br />
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Carla's strong voice floats down from the top of the hill and I find myself wondering what will ensue. You can never tell, she might be perfectly happy, or she might rush down urgently to tell us something dramatic or horrifying. She seems to find my activities, particularly my gardening, baffling and astonishing, especially my funny little collections of struggling near-wildflowers. She has her own garden, but it is not flowery. It's hardy palms, a swimming pool, so-called English lawn, and conifers. She is amazed at the amount of work I seem intent on creating for myself, especially to no edible purpose. Today, the light of dawning understanding crossed her face and she announced that what I actually had was a "hobby", a way of passing the time. Finally. The first step to making sense of my story, I suppose.<br />
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Now I've got a lot to fit in to today and I'll turn quickly to the song and the way it chimes in with the general theme of a populated landscape. A human being or two, and some outside space - those are the true raw materials of a garden.<br />
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So listen to Brownsville Girl, from the album Knocked Out Loaded. I hope you will enjoy it, as I always do, from the first note to the last, despite it being a bit of a novelty turn. But it has reach and size too. It's like a great camera zooming in and out, with changes in depth and space, sudden turns and longs shots. There's a brain chatting away to you from behind the camera, commenting on the action, wondering about the meaning, even wondering what else there could be to talk about. And perhaps most of all, wondering about the power of myth and story to invade and populate our minds, in this case in the form of film. A person in a landscape is nearly already a story. The camera circles round, lapping it up.<br />
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It's quite a long song, but you would not have imagined, till you count them, that there are at least seven stories in it. First the person who would see any film with Gregory Peck in it, but can't remember which one he is thinking about, then the one about the young gunfighter, who shoots the old and now has to live in perpetual fear that he too will be toppled, by old avengers, or new pretenders. Then there's the one about mad love and destiny, pulling two lovers together, hurtling them across the desert only to rip them apart. That slides into two stories, the fabulous platform heel wearer, who demands a rendez-vous in the desert and sweeps the singer along, into the heat, or another love, lost and barely to be mentioned.<br />
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Then there's Ruby, hanging out the washing, longing to be somewhere else, unable to leave. Stuck out on the edge of town finding nothing she really wants. There's another story about a man of mystery who leaves clues but the wrong name. None of these stories is about gardening but you can see each person in their place, the way the light falls, the colours, the way it's all disposed. The situations beget the stories.<br />
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In the background there's another story, that of a songwriter looking for things to write about and unable to escape from the settings and plots of old films. He succeeds with the song, we see the filmed worlds he evokes for ourselves, we feel the heat and dust. The seat covers fade and the water moccasin dies, before our very eyes.<br />
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Of his stories, the one about Ruby calls most directly to my theme. She seems beached in her setting, a mile out of town in a wrecking yard. She has not made it her own but suffers, longing get away. Her origin is Persephone perhaps, in Hades.<br />
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She could of course try a little gardening, for anyone who makes a garden is laying claim to where they are. They're taking it on, making what they can of it, accepting their fate and trying for some mastery. A person who makes a garden in a place of blight and neglect tells their own contagiously hopeful story. That's my advice to Ruby, wash fewer clothes. Plant something you like the look of instead. Unleash your inner Demeter, follow your heritage. Tell a different tale.<br />
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But my first theme comes from two directions. I'm not just saying people need gardens. I'm also saying gardens need people. We forget that sometimes, seeing photo after photo of pristine horticultural gorgeousness, beautifully captured from a step-ladder in a hedge at 5.30 in the morning. Easy to imagine that we're looking at a peaceful, personal paradise where the only eyes are our own, or a perfectly picked companion. But imagine that, truly. You might see something else slithering past.<br />
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I remember talking to a woman in England, the possessor of a huge, fairly grand and historic garden, to which she gladly gave most of her life. She told me that there would be no point in it at all if it weren't for the visitors - she didn't think she did it for them, but without them it would have no meaning. I applaud her, recognising that the other side of that honourable picture is herds of tourists, falling out of coaches, demanding cake and loos. Badly and brightly dressed, standing about with their cameras, asking the wrong questions, ruining the view. Their stories seem to be few, their connection to the place necessarily limited. But the whole concern, all the different contributors, running about, preparing and chatting, working and annoying each other - that's the real beating heart surely, those are the stars, the people with the meaning. A garden like that is a workplace too, with all that that signifies, even if it's only for a day or two a year.<br />
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A garden without people, with only the maker, can be a very lonely place, constantly demanding to know what its own point is. The obsession to create with plants can become a place to unravel, to retreat and as you retreat, to fall. I have always thought that British women have a rather worrying tendency in this direction although I expect that that's rather parochial of me. There are plenty of examples of lonely, angry old bats of all genders, rearing up from the shrubbery, barely capable of ordinary civility. I don't want that to be my own story, and when I have worked for people like that I have felt my soul shrivel, however gorgeous the garden. I like a bit of to and fro, some laughing and screeching, some proper talking, some life.<br />
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My first theme, about gardens, people and needs, was reflected in the song by the animating and involving figures in the landscape, giving it meaning and point. The second theme, also in the song, is about how hard it is to separate those people from the ideas about their stories, issuing from their settings, in our own heads.<br />
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It seems to me that all of us who love gardening have minds infested with echoing images of people in gardens, derived from films, paintings and stories. Like the singer in the song, we seem to be in a sort of soup of received ideas. Speak for yourself, might be the deserved response to that observation.<br />
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So, I'll admit: I see family groups taking tea in heavy Edwardian clothes under cedar trees, shirt-sleeved men trimming hedges, cottagers hurrying down paths to privies, mothers cuddling babies under fluttering shadowed leaves against trellises. I see old men pricking out seedlings with stubby fingers, young women drooping round swimming pools waiting for something to happen. I see tense meetings at the far end of darkly hedged walkways, children kicking footballs into borders, water spraying over others screaming with joy. I see crinkled faces clearing and smiling at flowers, I see people under rose arches, opening garden gates, sauntering across lawns to barbecues, beer in hand. I see old people in flats watering pots of sooty ivy. I see urns, steps, infinity pools, wheelbarrows, pergolas, whoops, the people have turned into the furniture.<br />
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What am I to do with all these images? They fill my head, it's hard sometimes to see anything new-minted and fresh. And there are so many.<br />
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So here's what I'm getting at, spurred by the song, which addresses this theme as it applies to people in desert landscapes. Texas? Mexico? Deserts anyway, some Painted.<br />
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Gardens are about people, much more so perhaps than deserts. But the people in them, even we ourselves, are trapped in stories we already seem to know, rolling through our heads like wrecking balls, shattering the possibilities of new and different stories. I think I want something new and original, but like the singer in the song, I'm stuck with the images I already have - the mother earth figure, the honourable old chap, the literary gossamer romantic with the sun-hat and the trug, the free child making pets of wood lice, the garden parties, the solitary walks, the showing and loving of plants, the shapes and colours.<br />
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Despite all that, every now and then something new happens, not always welcome. In my case, at the moment it's Carla, who has a fund of stories of her own, which she shouts at me, face quite close. There's the one about the brothers who went into a restaurant with a chainsaw and cut all the legs off the chairs and tables. Money owed, obviously. Another about a woman who took three lovers and can no longer think straight. Another woman, aged 46 , who found herself pregnant with triplets and now sits and wails, calling them the babies of her menopause.<br />
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Today we've had the story about how they're injecting strawberries with the blood of beetles, accounting for their wonderful modern red interiors. We've had others about people dying of terrible illnesses, one after the other, we've had ones about robbers who gas people in order to take what they want at their leisure. It's a wearing world, but it's not boring, or pretty. She's not truly interested in any stories I might tell, but I'm quite keen to hear hers. I feel myself to be like one of the backing singers in Brownsville Girl, their expressive responses a deep and endless joy to me - curious, disbelieving, astonished and encouraging - a Greek chorus of commentary.<br />
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I expect you're wondering about this Brownsville girl. Who is she? What does she have to do with anything? For all I know, precisely nothing. The chorus, which I enjoy, has always struck me as blaring and lyrically inane, sung with fervour by all involved but describing a person who is nothing but hair and teeth. The singer, thinking about myths and stories, makes a distinction between an imagined picture of a person and someone real, like Ruby. Ruby's no fool, she has her own myths, and she recognises those of others. She's like the people round here who think I'm a romantic Englishwoman, messing around with my beautiful view and my literary ideas. They don't realise how conscious I am of my own mythologies, my own dearly held tales of truth and meaning.<br />
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So I'll set myself up here - this song, sung just like this, including the beginning which sounds like a person who's lost half his wits, perhaps leaving out the bit where the chorus gets muddled, but like this, just like this, it's wavering near the very best of Dylan - and more than that, it addresses myth, consciousness and creativity. It seems to me to have an importance and a grandeur about it, but no shred of pomposity. And as is usual with the best, it makes me laugh with sheer pleasure.<br />
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And now to find a way of winding all this up. The song has so many other wonders, breaking all bounds of speech within song, telling other jokes and stimulating complex reactions, lifting you to a high point. Once again, I fear I do not do it justice, you can only listen for yourself.<br />
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It's true to say the cultural memes of gardens and deserts could be endless, if not eternal, and the whirling round inside them has no reason to stop. But some of the people are real, some of the stories have purchase and you can't, being human, just rip them out and start again from nothing. Especially when you find yourself in the middle of one, maybe a mythical beast for others. Heavens knows what tales Carla tells of me. I already know she considers me quite hilarious. I'd be worried if I minded.<br />
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-88177723840131266402014-05-22T05:11:00.001-07:002014-06-05T03:50:02.675-07:00 Attacking, Cheerfully - When The Ship Comes InAll the months of May of our lives, they must count as some kind of bonus. We should perhaps be parsimonious with them, carefully calculating how best and where best to spend them, for every place seems best in the vivid green of May. Our heads should barely touch the pillow.<br />
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May cannot be the best month in every part of the world - as a person who hasn't travelled much I can only generalise nervously. There must be places where it's nothing special but I don't know where they are. To me this month is almost too much; I have to turn away to recover myself from all the glorious leafiness, risen like the bread of heaven. I feel I cannot take it all in, I'm worried I'm wasting it. But I see that here in Northern Italy the scorching sun, when it appears, has already begun to darken and toughen the leaves that only a week ago were lime-coloured and transparent.<br />
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Now here's the song I have chosen to illustrate this theme of growth and ebullience. It's When The Ship Comes In, from the album The Times They Are A'Changing and it is perhaps mainly a song of revenge and the settling of accounts. It's Judgement Day. No god-like judge metes out the punishment however. Those piratical wreckers who run about on the shore, led by the singer, are the ones who've lured the ships in to their destruction.<br />
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This song bursts and bubbles with the joy of revolution. There's a tremendous sense of rush and movement, things are breaking and crashing open and apart, there's a setting free, a crossing of boundaries, a glorious mêlée. The proud rocks and the laughing fish, they're not vengeful, they're just happy, slipping out of the path of destruction. A carpet of gold is laid down. The final moments, held in full view, are not just of violence and consternation, but of cheerful triumph and joyous comradeship. You can see the faces on both sides. <br />
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Now, I like this song for its inappropriate conjunction of happy excitement and vicious revenge. If you can do it cheerfully, why be angry. But we have no idea who the enemy is, we could well find we're on the wrong side. This song has no apparent ambiguity, but there's something odd about how sure we are that the attack is deserved.<br />
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And I really like reliably cheerful people, I tend to trust them, thinking that at least they're making an effort. The more natural they seem, the more effort they're used to putting into it. May ought to be one of our most cheerful months, not too hot yet, so much still to come, and there's still time to make a difference.<br />
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I can usually find some sort of worm in the bud and here it is. If your garden is not exquisitely beautiful in May, you've not just missed a trick, you've lost track of the whole game. It ought to be so easy for nature seems to be on your side, trying her best. I don't wish to divide gardeners into the just and the unjust, the right and the wrong, but there can be something harsh about the fact that suddenly the whole world seems a garden, horticulture seems to have escaped and run amok, lovelier than ever could have been planned or striven for.<br />
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In May, other people's gardens, even those that are barely attended to, burgeon with vast blossoming shrubs, overhanging fences and walls, out into the streets. Huge viburnums, weigelas and lilacs, left to their own devices; they dwarf the choicer shrubs and perennials not yet come into their own, the mimsy colour co-ordinations, the whims and fancies of the careful gardener. If it's this easy, why even bother?<br />
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Here in Mondovi' there are great mounds of roses and philadelphus in the gardens, elder, dogwood and robinia frothing the countryside. In England its ceanothus, viburnums and crabapples in the gardens, hawthorn and cow parsley in heaving masses in the hedgerows. And more elder, there's no end to it.<br />
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In both places the fabulous green could knock your eye out. Here the meadows abound with blue salvia, pink scabious and dog-daisies. There, it's buttercup, campion, clover and more dog-daisies. You can't go wrong, everything looks so fresh.<br />
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May offers another kind of Judgement Day for the hopeful gardener. The important garden shows, the general floriferousnesss, the unusual level of gardening discussion, they all inspire a sense of aspiration and criticism. There is a longing to be iconoclastic and effect a small revolution, but it generally doesn't work that well, though everyone gets quite elated. Then you go home, where you find less exciting action is required and things subside back into proportion. I've been to Chelsea many times in the past but have rather given it up now, feeling I've got the picture. For a minute or two the one-up-manship lurking behind gardening turns it all into a bit of a battleground, internalised maybe, but slightly toxic. I don't like to waste the energy it takes.<br />
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However I did go to Masino, the Italian equivalent of the French Courson. There are no show gardens there yet and an endearing innocence. All people want to do is sell the plants they've grown and brought. You can still get a bit of a hit from the combinations of masses of plants in pots but so far I'm smugger than is good for me, none of it outfaces or diminishes my own efforts. There's no need to get abrasively critical or quench the repetitive inner iconoclast, as at Chelsea. I find that dismal iconoclast is only masquerading anyway, it's not that I've got any brilliant new ideas myself, it's often just resistance and annoyance.<br />
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A lot of gardening is about being both energetic and relaxed, you can't really relax and put your back into it for very long if your teeth are gritted. Far better to be shouting joyfully to each other across the ravaged landscape, hope and laughter in your eyes, schemes for beauty in your head.<br />
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Here's where I made my own cheerful attack, on my own ground. Last year, when I blithely instructed the digger-driver to move soil here, there and everywhere, placing it where it suited me. Now I discover that I've been attacked back. I've welcomed the Trojan horse in with open arms, throwing down the carpet, inviting it in to visit revenge on my dearest hopes.<br />
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The name of the invading troop is Equisetum arvense, or marestail. I had originally spotted it on the far side of the garage and thought to myself, cunningly, Achilles like, how careful we must be not to spread it about. And we have not shifted any soil from there. I didn't think it was in the soil which we <em>did</em> move. But now I see that it has got about. It is coming up in two major areas, where it was not before, where the soil has been moved to. It's on the land beyond the pond and it's on the wrong side of the new road. So let me lay it on the line, the rats are on the ship. There is to be no happy conclusion to this, hand-to-hand combat can only make matters worse for me. I had thought I was a joyous activist, changing the shape of the land, overturning stuff and breaking rules, now I see I'm not on the winning side.<br />
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And there is more soil-shifting to be done, we still have the levelling to do in front of the house. I see none of the horrible weed in the pile outside my door, but I have no confidence, indeed, why should I? My chickens are roosting, they squawk unkindly as they come home.<br />
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Now, is this a disaster? I've lived with marestail before, on an allotment, where it seemed to grow weakly, but in perpetuity. Here, it looks much stronger. I think it's a disaster. You can try glyphosate or salt, but they won't work. Cultivation spreads it. People say you can keep picking it out, though I don't quite know what they mean by that and anyway no one could pick this much out. And then you're supposed to dessicate it, grind it up and then scatter it for the minerals it contains. So I've been told, though it sounds like something people tell other people to do without ever really getting round to it themselves. I strongly believe that if I could find another use for it, it would magically diminish. You could scrub pans with it. How many pans does a person need to scrub? What I'm really afraid of is collecting it up for some of these ideas and then finding I've spread it further.<br />
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In the area where I knew it lurked originally this weed seems to have quadrupled, more than quadrupled. Was it the warm wet winter? Was it my arrogance and ignorance? See, that's gardening in May for you - ships as well as chickens coming in, a great mass of masts, sails and flying birds on the horizon. Punishment or pardon, that's what you get. It only looks all fresh and bright, you don't really get the chance to start anew.<br />
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Ok, time to regroup. There's another chemical I could use but I don't even want to think about it. Drought will help, and we're bound to get some of that. Every cloud, as they say. The marestail has not yet arrived in areas where I want to garden properly, not yet. It's green, it's ancient, it's not the end of the world, nothing's the end of the world. Only the end of the world, I suppose.<br />
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Oh, but the song's a great song about something like that and so cheerful. There, I swap places again. We're all on the right side, mowing down our enemies, with their silly sleepy faces. Chains are busting, sands are shaking and morning is breaking, like an egg. May really does seem to be the time to wake up and face the music. We might just as well be cheerful about it.<br />
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-47778170577557867352014-04-16T14:45:00.000-07:002014-04-20T10:48:17.280-07:00My Own Pet Lamb - Soon After MidnightI can barely speak for pride and happiness. I have achieved what I wished for: a garden that fits the space, my needs, some of my desires and the limits of my budget. It even incorporates some of the left over elements of the garden that was here before, also made by me. By all these measures it is a success, but I keep my voice down, a little bit worried about hubris. It is not art and it breaks no new ground, but I look at it with pleasure. I see that I have made it, and I see that it is good.<br />
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Here's part of it it is from the bedroom window.<br />
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Here we're looking back to the house from one side.<br />
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Here's the garden as you enter along the side of the house.<br />
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Here it is from the other.<br />
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So, you've got the idea, and you're probably less impressed than I feel you should be.<br />
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You see you may be thinking, well I wouldn't have done it like that, I don't understand why the levels drop at both sides, when there's no reason for them to do so. That box bush is a wreck and I would have used proper stone, I would have laid it better, I would have made the edges straighter and finished off the pond neatly and well. Something odd is happening with the whole orientation and why on earth did she make that odd cross shape at the end of the right hand brick path, which is anyway slightly too wide. As for the pointing on those steps - for goodness sake surely a little decent pointing is not beyond her.<br />
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The awful thing is, I can answer every one of your criticisms and I have good, no, <em>excellent </em>reasons for the absolute necessity of each element being exactly as it is. Apart from the pointing, which awaits amendment, most can be summed up as the inexorable constraints of physics and geometry. Others as the limits of will, time, energy and creativity. Those seem just as inexorable to me, for we all mostly do our best, we can only do our best, and I'm sorry to admit, that's what I did.<br />
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Never mind, there we are, we're not in a competition. For the time being I think I'll just go back to being pleased with it: that gives me the chance to show you a few more of the positive features that we can only hope will develop with time.<br />
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For a start, I've gone for a very gentle mix of formality and informality. I wanted a sense of order, but no hint of pernicketiness. So there are geometric shapes, but they're asymmetrical and all the edges are slightly wobbly and imperfect. You might think I'm making a virtue out of an insufficiency, and granted, you have me bang to rights.<br />
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I have indulged in soft lines of planting across the garden rather than mirrored plantings and sharp topiary. We have a line of variegated Osmanthus heterophyllus on one side of the longest brick path, a line of that soft, short hair-like grass Hakonechloa macra just at the top of the badly pointed steps, a line of three tall, thin, small-leaved hollies at the back and a line of liriope spicata to the left of the big acanthus, left over from the last garden. Finally there's a line of three dwarf sarcococca at the back right, behind the cross shaped paving, for which I find I have less of a coherent explanation than I thought.<br />
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This business of planting in lines - it's not supposed to hit you in the eye, it's just a gentle repetition of the horizontal, so good at calming things down. I like a lot of different plants, but I don't want it to be too much of a muddle. The lines are different lengths and unevenly placed, to furnish a sort of unemphatic balance.<br />
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I wanted a garden that could look after itself to some degree. This garden will need grooming, but that is both relaxing and rewarding. I shall like it - trimming, fiddling, encouraging, and removing what offends my magisterial whims.<br />
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There'll be a lot of low evergreens - I'm using geraniums, Fragaria Chaval, London Pride, or Saxifraga primuloides and Teucrium chamaedrys, also known as germander, a short dark shrubby perennial. It looks like a big, scentless thyme and flowers late and pink. Its nature is quiet and retiring. People have attempted to use it as a box substitute in knot gardens. No, not a good idea, it's far too floppy and unsure of itself. Rosemary Verey gave me a very sharp look when I pointed that out to her, about 30 years ago. We were like living embodiments of the plants in question. And I like to drop a name, let me drop a name, though she would not have known me from Adam.<br />
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So I will be using that Teucrium, and have scattered invisible little cuttings about, along with Baccharis halmifolia.<br />
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That's a very similar plant but with smaller, brighter leaves and puffs of tiny white flowers. It makes a much taller bush though, and I don't want too much height so I've kept it close to the fence. Pruning enough, and at the right time is going to be the trick with these two. I shall be delighted if I can get them to flower and stay smallish. Both will grow from old wood, so it should be possible to use them as I want.<br />
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There was another requirement of course, to use up some things I had no other home for. I had two deciduous azaleas: fortunately they are graceful shrubs and may contribute a lively, graceful and slightly see-through presence even in full leaf. I don't want big shrubs standing about like fridges so shall be busy with the secateurs. In winter they're nearly invisible, having very thin twigs.<br />
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Some things, like the Acanthus Rue Ledan, (that big dark heap near the tree), a large shiny leaved fennel, Selinum tenuifolium (an elegant late umbellifer), the two main trees, a big Fruhlingsgold rose and Buddleia Dartmoor have been gardened round. That is to say, they have stayed where they were, the garden has politely not requested them to move, hoovering under their feet. They've got themselves nicely settled, I don't want a lot of resentful invalids on my hands and I value their present size or shape.<br />
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Once I get going like his I can go on for ever, explaining and defending. I want beautiful, mainly non-tropical leaves, easy plants, sparse and quiet flowerings. Provision for birds and bees, complete ground cover and a cheerful, scented winter array, for that's when we will mostly be here to use the garden.<br />
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The garden is small, twelve metres wide by eight deep, with a big notch cut out. It has a rickety bench, which I will replace when I can afford to, on the original old path, which now looks like what we will call the shady terrace or patio.<br />
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The garden has new brick paths to draw the eye and pull you in amongst the plants and a main terrace with a pond running all along the back of the house. Under that are some simple drainage arrangements of stones and supports for the paving, which is not concreted in.<br />
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I did not want all the water from the roof running away into the mains - I believe we're now calling this concept a "rain garden" but it seems like age-old common sense to me. It doesn't just mean using water butts. It means keeping the run-off that won't fit in the water butts within the garden somewhere, not so that it creates a quagmire but so that it is slowly absorbed. Some permeable space near the house is essential and we have plenty of that. I would have liked to have piped surplus water into the pond but was up against inexorable constraints: gravity and the free passage of people across the paving.<br />
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Here's my theory of the song, Soon After Midnight from the album Tempest. It's all about creativity within constraints, it's about limitations managed with grace and wit, it's about what I and anyone who makes a garden has to do - applying desire to restriction and necessity.<br />
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Songwriting is always about this on some level, and often the glory of a song lies in the ability to transcend the restrictions of rhyme and melody, so that they appear as no restriction at all. This song does something different, it celebrates the very act of the search to fit the words with the music, trying them out, turning them over and around, never leaving the constraints until the end, when it lets it all go. The" you" of the last phrase has no shape or form, it's just to finish it in the right place, everything where it should be, a nice feeling, a bit of turning outwards.<br />
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One of the best things about the human voice is the way it can pull you into another persons world, so that you see through their eyes, because you feel the thrum in your own chest and comprehend the stratagems of vocalisation.<br />
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In this song, not only that, you also get a glance inside the late-night songwriter's head or somewhere that feels like it. Nothing much to say but, making do with what he has. So we get a snap of annoyance with something undefined but visceral, then a visual memory of a woman passing....by. You can almost see her walking along, looking back.<br />
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He's delighted to have another go at rhyming harlot with scarlet and adding in Charlotte and he has a little ultimate fantasy on the side - a date with a fairy queen. We'd all like one of those.<br />
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But the best bit for me, the bit that always makes me smile, is when he sings, "When I met you, I didn't think you'd do." What a world of self-knowledge in that slightly ruthless sound, that absolutely demotic swing to the voice. And it brings me back to the process of creation, the feeling around, trying to get it right, working out what will do, putting up with it, being thrilled with it, changing it round till it fits.<br />
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And the song is so pretty, so delightfully listenable with a beautiful swelling melody. I don't care if he's borrowed some of it: new ideas are unconscionably rare and this is a lovely piece of neat knitting, where everything fits so sweetly, even a bit of rage and horror. Dylan's wonderful, endless voice, his delicious phrasing and his wit will always have me on his side. The fun of harnessing chaos to form and the joy of hunting for harmony. The pleasure of preventing leakage and confusion. The deep satisfaction of putting what there is in its proper place and of keeping it there. It all helps to hold the sky up, to keep the world where it ought to be.<br />
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-30141456294552535742014-02-26T10:19:00.001-08:002014-05-27T11:43:48.777-07:00Pursuing The Pursuit - I Want You<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There are a few things in life where you can almost guarantee that getting what you're pursuing, what you yearn for, will result, not in disappointment, not in satisfaction, but in the simple ending of the pleasures of desire.<br />
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Perfume, in the natural world, not in a bottle, about which I am not qualified to speak, is often one of those. A good scent, drifting in the air, is a fugitive pleasure, creating the longing for more of itself. Were you to stop wanting more the delight would fall to the floor, like a shot bird.<br />
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It's the violet, viola odorata, which carries the dilemma one ironic step further, eliminating the chemical receptors in the nose as its scent is inhaled. It leaves you longing, powerless even to sense what you're longing for. If it were not so sweet it would be bitter.<br />
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"When violet nosegays were at the height of fashion around the turn of the century<br />
(the 19th), young ladies were carefully coached on violet-smelling techniques.<br />
Not only was a long, deep inhalation crude and vulgar, it also fatigued a young <br />
lady's scent receptors more rapidly than a series of short, dainty sniffs. At the <br />
same time, the medical profession worried that the stimulation from a violet nosegay<br />
might affect one's health."<br />
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So speaks Tovah Martin from her 1976 book about fragrant plants for indoor gardens - The Essence Of Paradise. The whole book could be bad for your health. It fills you with desire for conservatories, green-houses and porches swooning with scent. I recommend it, for intelligent writing, comprehensiveness and detailed hints and tips on growing techniques. She praises citrus plants for unfailingly pleasing everyone with their scents, but points out that they are very difficult to keep in good health for long periods inside. I like books that don't pretend everything is easy.<br />
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Back to those violets. I tried the sniffing instructions with an ordinary wild outdoor violet,. They grow and flower every year, down our stony shared urban track in England. They're hard up against a wall, regularly visited by dogs and fight against vinca and scrubby grasses.<br />
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You can hardly see them in this picture, though there are dozens of them, flowering their little hearts out, unlike their seedlings, found in every garden, which don't seem to bother, leafy and happy to increase with stranger methods of hidden reproduction.<br />
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It must be the sun, the stoniness, and the lack of all luxury which causes these particular violets to flower so. I sniff and sniff, daintily and youthfully, never quite getting enough, never quite getting none. I try again a few minutes later - nothing at all. My desire is anaesthetised by repetition, not quenched by achievement. For the moment it's gone, that enhanced perception, that delicious state.<br />
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As children we enjoyed the occasional packet of Parma Violets. They were very small and tasted very strong. More than three or four would sicken you rather than wear out your receptors. I hunted them down in a sweetshop the other day and they have blown up to a remarkable, charmless size. Same taste though. An elusive Elysian allure annihilated in sugar.<br />
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One of the excellent things about garden fragrances is that there is no real hierarchy of conossieurship. Not one that can be pinned down anyway. Some people really can't smell things that seem strong to others, some people delight in things that others find pretty vile.<br />
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I could have sworn that everyone would love sarcococca, a most reliable, deliciously-scented little evergreen that pours its essence across the garden just about now. But not so, I planted it for someone who could not bear what she perceived as a catty scent, and there's no point in arguing about that. Myself, I love to work in a garden full of the sarcococca's sweetness, like another presence, not at all feline, wafting round me.<br />
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On the other hand, I have found it impossible to linger long in too foxy a garden. I don't mind an exciting gust, such as fritillaries provide, but years ago Margery Fish's old garden at East Lambrook Manor was smothered in phuopsis stylosa, a harmless, sweetly wild looking pink flower. The stench was astonishing, like a pack of wolves on heat. But some people seemed not to notice.<br />
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Pretty though it is, I have no plans to grow the clary sage, salvia sclarea, again. I could not get its stale and sweaty aroma out of my nasal passages. And an elderly, rather patrician lady of my acquaintance, who I thought would love them, reacted with violence and disgust to what she saw as the reek of scented geranium leaves when I attempted to entertain her with a visit to the vast greenhouse of a local stately home.<br />
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Hunting for an interesting experience, I tried many different kinds on her, as her face grew ever more appalled. I think she thought I might be genuinely crazy, maddened by those admittedly strong scents, each with their pungent geranium version of something else - lemon, nutmeg, rose, cloves, mint. Her main desire was to get right away, back to the Cuir De Russie.<br />
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To be honest, the inedible scented leaves I love most are few and clean-smelling, not mixed or musty. Prostanthera cuneata, a small curly-leaved, grey and white flowered antipodean is one. Then there's southernwood, Artemisia abrotanum, grey-leaved and feathery, old-fashioned and humble. Both have cheering medicinal healthy smells - you could rub them on your chest and feel better and nicer. Mostly, I like them round my legs as I garden; ready for release as I pass.<br />
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I have yet to be thrilled by the scent of chimonanthus fragrans, the wintersweet. In many ways that lets me off the hook - it's a shockingly dreary-looking shrub in midsummer, like a regular lilac. Shapeless too though I'm sure it could be managed better. Here it is in Milan, rather high up, but I found others I thrust my face into, tasting only a sour little nothing.<br />
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My most delightfully scented garden moments, when I've been unable to think of anything else, have been from those fragrances that rise in the air, almost breathed out, like waves that break over you. And they've often come from evergreen shrubs, my favourites for so many reasons. Osmanthus, Pittosporum tobira, Daphnes and Eleagnus are obvious. But the other pittosporums too, so exquisite a perfume exhales from their tiny black flowers in late summer - you just have to have the right moisture in the air, at the right time of day. Enough stillness, the perfect temperature, a certain amount of enclosure: fragrance drifting like a gift, like a vagary. You can aim for it, but you can never be sure. And that makes for intermittent reinforcement, the most binding stimulus to desire.<br />
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So, to the song. I Want You, from the album Blonde on Blonde. A series of verses detailing some off-kilter transactions, personalities and situations - nothing making a lot of sense. The words and music are complicated and speedy, dancing around in the background. And then in comes the urgent, repeated refrain, cutting across with a clear and compelling voice, expressing a kind of tasteful lust, again and again, with the same intonation, as though slightly possessed or brainless and lost to reason.<br />
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Well, we all know the sensation, the sweetness and excitement of desire, which makes everything else fade away. The song celebrates the feeling, spinning it out and giving it weight, force and steadiness against the distracting chit-chat in the background.<br />
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But firmness and solidity are not attributes of desire. Like hunger or thirst, it's a changeable feeling you move through, hopefully to some sort of resolution. It's a state of transition, you cannot pin it down and make it stick. That would be a kind of ultimate fantasy, if not a kind of hell.<br />
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There is a version of the song on the At Budokan album where the yearning refrain is like an emotional howling at the moon. The song is slower. It feels less throw-away and more convincing. But I rather like the lighter focus on desire simply for its own sake in the Blonde on Blonde version and it suits my purposes, for it is the lustful, brain-free equivalent of the unassuageable longing inspired by some garden fragrances, floating around, floating away.<br />
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Here are some of my own favourite scent charms which held back the chaos in my old UK garden. All hardy here, they have seen me through the seasons of many years, coming round and round again, always welcome, ever retreating. Although I have no sentimentality about old gardens I have made, loved and lost these would be the perfumed elements I would yearn for, if such yearning seemed to have any point, or end.<br />
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I'll start with a cooking apple, I believe it to be Arthur Turner, famed for the size and beauty of its flowers. It smells of washed morning baby.<br />
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And here we have carnation-scented snowballs in April. It's viburnum burkwoodii, semi-evergreen, which is a messy category, but a tidy dark host for a viticella clematis later if that's the sort of combination you like to undertake. Anyway it's one of those wall leaning shrubs that mainly self-supports, meaning you shouldn't need to do any climbing and tying in yourself.<br />
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And here below are a couple of grandiflora magnolias. I would always have a few in the house throughout August and into September, taken from a pair of trees that outgrew their spaces and were eventually reduced to one. I would tell people the flowers smelt like lemons in a church, which they really do; cold, austere but perfectly ripe Sicilian lemons. See how unsentimental I am.<br />
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I would never plant this tree again, for the endless housework involved in clearing up its crackly eternal leaves. Magnolia watsonii is a much better bet and can fill a whole walled garden with the scent from one flower. But it's not a lemon in a church.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Magnolia grandiflora Gallissoniere</td></tr>
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I find it hard to believe I would ever have enough of some scents. For example, daphne bholua Jacqueline Postill, daphne odora aurea-variegata even more so and daphne bholua alba for flowering from January, right on till March. </div>
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Then there are zaluzianskya capensis, an exquisitely scented annual, pulsating with rhythmic bursts of perfume in the evening. Exacum affine, artless, delicious, a house-plant really; acidenthera murieliae; white freesias, smelling of black pepper; azara microphylla, smelling of white chocolate; mahonia japonica, smelling of lily-of -the-valley; some roses obviously; sweet peas certainly; eleagnus multiflora freely exhaling its essence - these are the scents I would possess if I could find a way to do so. </div>
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And I don't even know what possess means in that sentence. Some sort of imbibing, becoming one with, more than smelling, more like becoming part of. Scents that fire me with some sort of unanswerable desire despite their sweetly innocent floweriness. I want them. So bad.</div>
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-15964673733450813702014-01-06T23:57:00.000-08:002014-06-15T14:41:28.148-07:00Trepidation - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue<br />
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So the year tips, over into the next one. We're in transition, out of the winter tinsel, forging through the wasting months, then beyond, into the beyond. Shedding the past, lurching forward. I can hear a distant rattle. Something's coming down the track.<br />
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Despite the casting off of the old, I feel a bit badly about my last post, which hectored about tidying up. Here is my garden in England, where I have been doing some of that, as well as laying bricks and assisting with the laying of the recycled Council slabs.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In October last year, from one side</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Now, from the other</td></tr>
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I show this in a spirit of humility, this garden is still only a garden in prospect. Despite nearly a year having passed since I started thinking about the necessary changes , a great deal remains to be done. In any case, it's nothing more than an assemblage of the ends of old building materials gathered up from other gardens over a period of some years. The bricks are overbaked ones, from an old local kiln. They're uneven and twisted, without the soft glow of proper old bricks.<br />
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Add to them a motley collection of different sizes and colours of concrete slabs, a number of blue engineering bricks left over from elsewhere, some ends of sleepers which I collected up a few years ago to save them from the dump, and you see that this garden is neither slick nor fine. Unpretentious, that's what I wanted. How fortunate.<br />
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We have created a pond and I am pleased to report that the liner will never show, because we have lined it internally with these unattractive bits and pieces. The sleeper ends are to prevent small children and old people hurtling directly into it. as they exit the patio doors.<br />
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The song of the day is It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Anyone who knows Dylan will know that it certainly is all over, there is nothing new to be said about this song. I would not dream of trying, not in my current, diffident, mode.<br />
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But it captures where we are, caught here on the cusp. For a week or two the past year rears up for the final blast, a ghost of itself, inexorably fading. But the new year is not fully here yet, another wraith rambling towards us, through the mist. The days are still so short, the light still so far away.<br />
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There are strange warm storms, and water everywhere, all over Britain. What future we can see looks out of joint. Like all of us though, I push the worries away, clear my forehead and lift my eyes to the next hill. Looking forward, with trepidation.<br />
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I have a serious anxiety, related to a loved one's health, which I must carry carefully through the next months. I have global climate worries too, shared with most sensible people. There's little to be idiotically cheerful about and this song perfectly captures the tone, for it is deeply uneasy as it pushes on to the unknown, knowing the past is gone.<br />
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Here's a little plant to lighten the gloom, hunkered down against the soil. I have only really learnt to enjoy these in the last few years - before that, I only bothered with cyclamen hederifolium, the autumn flowering species with more rhombus shaped leaves. Now I see that this other kind have more to offer: they are cyclamen coum, the round leaved cyclamen that begins flowering in late December and carries on till nearly the end of March. I have the impression that their flowering fades and strengthens, according to the harshness of the cold weather. That's what we need, plants with flexibility. <br />
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Last year I planted these in a large round blue pot for someone else, along with blue anemone blanda. They were cheerful and popular, cleanly bright spots of colour for weeks, smart and harmonious with their interestingly varied leaves, neat, graceful, and just wild enough. <br />
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The autumn-flowering cyclamen, hederifolium is still full of leaf as I write, but its flowers pass nearly unnoticed in a busy garden. You would need masses of them to show up, in clear woodland areas under trees, where early bulbs have bloomed and died away, in the droughty shade of summer.<br />
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Here in our British gardens, autumns now seem to go on for ever. Herbaceous plants and deciduous shrubs don't know when to call it a day. These cyclamen, also known as ivy-leaved, are squeezed out, flowering unnoticed under everything else They long for more light and space just when there is no chance of that.<br />
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I plan to try cyclamen hederifolium under trees in my Italian garden. Remembering however that they may serve as a treat for the boars - presumably the name "sow-bread", under which they also labour, means something. Their huge tubers would make a nice solid sandwich for a porker.<br />
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Winter-flowering cyclamen coum are the ones I will go for here in the UK from now on, they more than satisfy me in these dark days. They'll be my emblem of a transition that means nothing and everything, the low point, the turning of the year. Those exquisitely formed upside down petals are where everything starts anew, even before the snowdrops.<br />
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I remember seeing a woodland near Rome completely carpeted with another cyclamen many years ago. I never saw anything like it, before or since, the scent was astounding, the flowers seemed so rare and precious, elegantly expensive but just everywhere. I think that was probably repandum, flowering in April or May and I imagine a little tenderer than coum. If I can find them, I'll try them too. Just the thought perks me up.<br />
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The version I choose of the song is found on the Bootleg Series vol 4 and is performed live. The singer's voice is terrifyingly fragile, wrung out and strung out, but precise as a stiletto. He captures an intense uneasiness about a necessary ending and a forced beginning, but he's inexorable. His cast of looming, havering characters drift in and out, the sky folds, the carpet moves and we are in the grip of motion sickness, as if the changes we are facing make us nauseous with their stomach-turning abruptness. <br />
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Everything collides but you cannot tell if the protagonist is the victim or the perpetrator of the flux of change. That's what it can feel like when something inside you changes, affecting all those around you. The switch-back you ride is the one you inflict, but you cannot choose to get off, it's beyond your control. I don't get those feelings very often any more, they seem to me the property of youth rather than timorous age. Nonetheless I recognise them and am grateful not to be at their mercy. That just leaves the stuff that can happen <em>to</em> you, when you're not looking for it, when, on the whole, you'd prefer the world to continue turning on its axis.<br />
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In this song I hear conflicted emotions, ones that echo my own sense of the year turning and the future looming. I hear the future already regretted and a simultaneous cleaving to and fleeing from the present.<br />
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Examine with me once more the little cyclamen, the match that is struck for the New Year, and let's take heart. Back to the tidying up, the planting, the sticking together of hard materials to create comfort and structure. What else is there to do? I'll have glinting evergreens in winter, early flowers and verdant upholstery. It's not over yet.Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-20366118770947325782013-12-17T16:42:00.000-08:002013-12-26T07:09:12.939-08:00Step Inside - If You Gotta Go, Go Now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So you've never felt middle-aged enough to try actual gardening. But recently, you've started thinking it might be nice to plant something between the bins and the car parking space . <br />
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Well, do your research, ask a qualified person. Find out what you're supposed to do first, otherwise you'll get it all wrong. And you must get it right, anything could happen if you don't get it right. It's complicated, really complicated.<br />
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Making plants grow is a rarified activity and the tricks of it are only known to a few. Find them out from someone who does it all right. It's difficult; plants are like weird pets. Dependent on you, but psychotically unreliable. Prone to illness and death however hard you try to tempt them to live.<br />
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Don't expect gardening to be easy, it's going to be a herculean struggle. It'll take hours and hours of really hard work every day, and far more knowledge and ability than you have. Don't expect any of it to make sense either. It's all different to anything you already know, it's got a special language and everything.<br />
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OK. I bet you feel more confident now. Especially as you weren't sure where to begin.<br />
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Wrenching my tongue from my cheek, I'll admit that helping other people with their gardening is not easy. I have been as guilty as anyone else of over-complicating the matter, trying to answer the question I'm given as honestly as I can, rather than hearing the need or the intention behind it. I can see that suspicious, thwarted look even now. Refusal and abandonment are not far behind.<br />
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Speaks the poor innocent~<br />
"I got this fabulous clematis. I can plant it now can't I?"<br />
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Me ~<br />
"Of course, you can plant it any time so long as you water it a lot if it's hot. Oh, it's a sieboldiana, oh you don't often see them lasting well in gardens. I've lost a few I think they're tenderer than people say, or maybe it's about drainage, most things are, anyway the pruning on that one is also rather unclear, some say group 2 some say 3. I don't think it survives long without pruning hard but you shouldn't just hack it back like the viticellas. No, really it's not a good one to start with, better to try something else, there are lots of easier ones."<br />
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Poor innocent ~<br />
"Oh."<br />
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The enquirer, a mere simple seeker after truth had not expected such confusion. Hesitating at the threshold, this must seem like the moment to turn back and shut the door on this only slightly tempting new hobby.<br />
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And yet the gardening world, including myself, is full of concern about persuading people to join in. New customers are needed for the industry, new ideas and new enthusiasts to pass it all on. We're anxious about our fractured relationship with nature. Gardening seems to offer a little reparative balm. Who doesn't want havens for wildlife and kindly, caring people making everything better and more beautiful.<br />
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I'm not as jaundiced as I could be, but my eyes have a yellowish glow. Some people like gardening, some don't, some come to like gardening. I'm not sure it can be forced or whipped up for long, though there are times when it seems more popular than others. <br />
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However there is no doubt that aligning it with a social activity works wonderfully well. All those community gardens with team work and a sense of purpose - they can be highly successful and productive. Ultimately though, for enthusiasts to continue, the flame needs to be lit and tended from within. I expect that's true of all real learning, it's the idea of drawing something out rather than ramming a foreign body home.<br />
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It's perfectly clear that most people are drawn to gardening in the later years, when they have the wit to choose the really nice things in life. Harassing children or young people to do it is absurd, though they should always be politely helped if they insist. It's the same as anything else, if young people see proper adults enjoying it they may eventually choose it too when they're ready.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0oJQinx92N2rqVMH9zsyRUrnsuvIrcacj9CrTIskdOzWjkkdDFd6n6K_Cgco0-ezUuzy1IMtH6rMyw9qDwTEEVn7pWHMHTIC2vq-jAN713zVJ2RFU6ufLqdreZ_8wlMhyDNLz1bi8nuAw/s1600/P1040474.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0oJQinx92N2rqVMH9zsyRUrnsuvIrcacj9CrTIskdOzWjkkdDFd6n6K_Cgco0-ezUuzy1IMtH6rMyw9qDwTEEVn7pWHMHTIC2vq-jAN713zVJ2RFU6ufLqdreZ_8wlMhyDNLz1bi8nuAw/s640/P1040474.JPG" width="640" /></a><br />
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The song of the day is "If You Gotta Go, Go Now". It's not perhaps much appreciated now, seeming a bit pat, perhaps rather arrogant or even unkind. But it is the first Dylan song that made an impact on me, and it may not even have been his version that I first heard - I loved it but I didn't know it was his. I'm convinced it was a cover by The Incredible String Band but I may be wrong about that, cannot track it down anyway. So perhaps it was Fairport Convention, who sang it in a sprightly and winning way but in French. I don't think that would have got through to me. A swirling fog descends. I can't believe it was the Manfred Mann version, which is rather smooth. Let's opt for the Bootleg Series volumes 1 - 3 version for the moment.<br />
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Here's what I heard in the song. And still hear, though much more dimly. I was young, utterly puzzled by the world and what it wanted from me, or me from it, ready to believe anything, however unlikely. My own good judgement seemed the most useless of tools, my femaleness seemed to distort and confuse every interaction. Waiting to see what happened was often my first and only recourse.<br />
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So this song was a revelation. One person tells a second person that although he or she would like to have sex with that person, he or she is not willing to spend a lot of time working their way round to it but would like a decision immediately. If the second person decides against it the first person would prefer them to leave straight away.<br />
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I didn't hear the put-down in the jokiness, though others told me it was there, coercive manipulation in another guise. Even the singer wonders if he might be misinterpreted as disrespectful. There is an undeniable element of cuteness, though it's aimed at the admiring listener rather than the "you" of the song.<br />
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For myself, I heard a sensible person, putting things in perspective and telling me that it was ok to think rationally, even in this fraught world of desire. The self-interested agenda, the sleeping timetable, the turning out of lights and the shutting of doors - all that made it quite clear, the protagonist wants what he wants, he doesn't want to be messed about, he's not willing to make too much effort. The cards are on the table, over to you. What do you want?<br />
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It's a wonderful thing when you can recognise and exercise freedom. Sometimes it's there in front of you and you can't see it, conjuring constraints out of nowhere. I was in that position, and this song opened up possibilities of choice and transaction in sexual relations that had been hidden from me, under some mysterious web of otherness. Good heavens, we were human, both male and female. My choices could be my own like his were his. I could relax and think about my own legitimate needs and wishes.<br />
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I'm not saying I suddenly became sensible, it took me years and I'm not sensible yet. I'm just pointing out that this was an inclusive view of the world and the value of autonomy and freedom. It was essentially helpful, warm and light. And not to be found in any other song that I had ever heard, most being smeared over with a thick romantic grease. <br />
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So now, brandishing this little jewel of personal agency and entitlement to choice, let's return to gardening and consider how it can work there.<br />
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My unpleasant homily at the top of this piece summarises much of the baggage that lies behind the passing on of knowledge about gardening. The learner looks like an incapable dim-wit faced with a world of impossibly complex knowledge and experience. Choosing anything from this position would not be possible. He or she is waiting to be told what's best. Confidence to take the steps forward, to step inside a new world, that's what's needed. Confidence in the self that is, not in the impressive knowledge of the teacher.<br />
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For the teacher feels equally outfaced, appalled by the distance there is to cover and the responsibility for covering it. There's so much to pass on and everything's built on a rickety pile of other stuff. Everywhere you look rules are being broken, or proven. So you try and simplify by selecting, hardening and passing on the ones that seem to you to work. You're imposing your own choices, you didn't mean to, but you've parasitized the will of the learner, and that's the only thing they ever had to guide them through, into the heart of the garden.<br />
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As for that clematis sieboldiana (sometimes florida sieboldii) of the earlier conversation with the poor innocent, here's a rather blurry picture of one that lasted two years when I planted it in someone's front garden.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzKu5qvFyZvJ1PuJVpQaDG2yMq1MnyEaps7EBtBKmOxP0b7_LUrsbb1Vh1gxb14pLbdpMtV2ftJ6Dgh4tVax7PEoUq7_cSUM95h4qhDD-Ws5xYZX5_dShtlLISnjC0bf1M7yFYPshyphenhyphenYZ9H/s1600/crop+DSCN6213.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzKu5qvFyZvJ1PuJVpQaDG2yMq1MnyEaps7EBtBKmOxP0b7_LUrsbb1Vh1gxb14pLbdpMtV2ftJ6Dgh4tVax7PEoUq7_cSUM95h4qhDD-Ws5xYZX5_dShtlLISnjC0bf1M7yFYPshyphenhyphenYZ9H/s640/crop+DSCN6213.jpg" width="620" /></a><br />
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It <em>is </em> beautiful but dwindled beneath the trachelospermum - the evergreen climber with little white flowers, and I don't know if the owner ever pruned it. Anyway, I think I should have answered the question posed about when to plant it and then held my tongue. If people want to know more, they ask. Until they ask they often cannot hear or make sense of the response. And, let's face it, I didn't really know the answers to the questions I made up for them to think about.<br />
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Here are some good rules for the interested new gardener:<br />
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There are lots of different ways of doing things in a garden. Be open-minded.<br />
Most plants are easy to grow and want to live but some will die. Don't reproach yourself.<br />
There's a lot of unnecessary activity which people do because they like it. Be sceptical.<br />
Take charge. Your own will, hands and brain are your essential tools and they're at your service.<br />
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I could have said be ruthless and persistent too. Those help. And you should indulge your innate love of pattern and order. Do not underestimate the value of tidying up. It's exactly like the inside of your house from that point of view. Your garden will look better if you pick up every bit of plastic and remove all the actual rubbish. Start just with the tidying, ideas and thoughts will come. You'll know how to find things out if you want to. You're perfectly capable of going to a garden centre, picking out some plants and planting them. Observe plants closely, the more you look, the more you'll see. If they die, take an interest. It's more information, not a cause to rend your garments.<br />
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Christopher Lloyd had a harsh little rule of his own. He would not satisfy the curiosity of garden visitors who requested plant names unless they had pen and paper and physically wrote them down in front of him. This was his way of conveying that they were responsible for their own learning and that they had to take ownership. I thought it a bit ungenerous at the time but, thinking about it now, I see his reasoning. A gardener who does not take responsibility for his or her own development will not develop. No-one else can do it for you.<br />
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I'm sorry when I hear people decrying their own efforts and getting disheartened about what they see as failures, sadly and hopelessly searching for solutions . For this we can blame an entire gardening industry which is invested in telling us that there's a proper way to do things and that if you do it right, it will work. If it doesn't work, it's your fault. Nonsense, there are all sorts of options, within certain basic requirements, and no-one can control everything. Unless, that is, you grow your plants under scientifically managed conditions - and that would not be a garden at all.<br />
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When an activity is a recipe for self-reproach, enthusiasm dies. It would be helpful if there was greater honesty about how many plants die for us all and less finicking about with prescriptive details. People need more frankness and neutrality about the range of choices and methods available. No gardener can do everything. Reducing effort and enjoying what you choose to do is as important as all those counsels of perfection. We garden for ourselves, not because we're forced to, so we have to choose the way we like best.<br />
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Working out what's worth your time, how much you're going to shell out in effort and money, what you want in terms of rewards all sounds so unromantic and mercenary, but it's the stuff of life. You need to find out what you need to know, amass your resources, direct your own learning and take charge of what you choose to do. That's our link with the song, which said the same thing about a very different subject.<br />
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Gardening should be seen as essentially a morally neutral activity, a choice taken in freedom. It should be embraced as a chance to impose your own will on whatever little bit of the world you're able to get your hands on. That's the point of it. Step inside, enter the arena and <em>be</em> the gardener.<br />
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Still and all, if you're going to do it, wear those nitrile gloves. Damaged hands will hurt and make you miserable. Like the activity in the song it's supposed to be fun you know.<br />
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-67275747012256312562013-11-01T03:38:00.000-07:002013-11-02T09:01:28.118-07:00The Moment - In The SummertimeWell it's been a tough couple of weeks, for reasons too difficult to explain, and I look back to a month ago with an aching wistfulness for when everything seemed more or less alright.<br />
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Wish I'd properly been there, properly seized the moment, not just drifted along, unappreciative and half-awake. Now I'm suffering the joint attacks of hope and apprehension. I'm hyper-alert, all my sleepy complacency gone. There's a piercing quality to everything I see, movement is tense and slow.<br />
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In the normal course of events, when things are roughly OK, it seems to me that there is something faintly amiss with the way our eyes link us to our surroundings. We look where we are not, we can never quite be where we see. An ineffable slight detachment follows. Always fussing, never really feeling our own happiness except when we forget ourselves, lurking back there behind the visual organs. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhV8OebG0iu8D9175bzrUwBzg2X1_ufCQGCK12Z0ifRThdHvNEpI-snlgfMlSttMS1DtKgFrZVtn9MwhSra4HPoidb7qvcURdJuIn6fLdqnb31F5vY-H3iz-vLf3UFzTvi4OBlmp4-7V_u/s1600/P1050804+(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhV8OebG0iu8D9175bzrUwBzg2X1_ufCQGCK12Z0ifRThdHvNEpI-snlgfMlSttMS1DtKgFrZVtn9MwhSra4HPoidb7qvcURdJuIn6fLdqnb31F5vY-H3iz-vLf3UFzTvi4OBlmp4-7V_u/s400/P1050804+(2).jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Any garden-lover, any nature-lover, reaches for moments of heightened awareness. Something strikes you, an arrangement of leaves and light perhaps, a grouping or a shape, a distance, a colour, a detail, a sense of enclosure, a feeling of mystery. These are good drugs for the heart and soul. We long to suck them in and possess them.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">sedum acre, bark, stone</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Somewhere or other</td></tr>
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Gardening, at its heart, is an exercise in the capture and domestication of such moments. But it is an exercise that is often foiled, often a let-down and a disappointment. Rarely a true sorrow though: loss, threats and destruction are where sorrow lies, and gardening usually feels more like hope and creation. Those illuminated moments are like fireflies, promises in the dark.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjE4wlif3fH8_Gk7MS8JB7Nte0QhmoZryi-t_NAC0fadzC8UmqtMIsu62QHD9qwWhhhEWOWbpT3rOTX-XO18R7jXxJWxerdAxFlwxT0mwZsCNxADiGFiQSIkFlM9wousHuvxvzl1VNvXxY/s1600/S6304788.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjE4wlif3fH8_Gk7MS8JB7Nte0QhmoZryi-t_NAC0fadzC8UmqtMIsu62QHD9qwWhhhEWOWbpT3rOTX-XO18R7jXxJWxerdAxFlwxT0mwZsCNxADiGFiQSIkFlM9wousHuvxvzl1VNvXxY/s640/S6304788.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Side view of the famous steps at Naumkeag, MA</td></tr>
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You don't have to pay much for those seconds of enraptured perception, only in longing and thwarted desire, even as they happen and pass. You clutch your camera, you swear you'll remember: how it is, the hereness, the nowness, the sublimity. I've plucked my harp on this subject before, believing in the transient sweetness and the way it links us to nature and causes us to garden.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jenkyns Arboretum, Wayne PA<br />
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Here's the song -In The Summertime, from the album Shot Of Love. A kindly harmonica, full of<br />
hope and goodwill, a gentle little song about the clouds parting and a big old face peering through. There's a lot of bitter, confused and coded detail in between but none of it matters much. The soft and shining sea has already, in the first few lines, put us somewhere in the realms of gold.<br />
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Time slows and stops, something is given, something is taken, never to be lost. Despite the code, the song is straight and simple. I think he means it.<br />
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I mean it too, though I must insist - no face appears. In my world, we're stuck, so sadly sometimes, with what we've got.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghyphenhyphennLnml2KpX5ZdhNTDsJF1duVYKzseX1TeSsviux3ELj8R0D_ZdjTtsHJ278YiMSsCVjYi3iaDzkeWSO0wqH1GOQYwRvYAMsgI0OsEVNdK8pfiP4J7zsQ0QcTW98p9e9FMZYPX04tVk5C/s1600/P1100547.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="427" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghyphenhyphennLnml2KpX5ZdhNTDsJF1duVYKzseX1TeSsviux3ELj8R0D_ZdjTtsHJ278YiMSsCVjYi3iaDzkeWSO0wqH1GOQYwRvYAMsgI0OsEVNdK8pfiP4J7zsQ0QcTW98p9e9FMZYPX04tVk5C/s640/P1100547.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jenkyns Arboretum, again</td></tr>
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-60749332388313696382013-09-28T06:36:00.001-07:002013-10-03T12:08:39.003-07:00Rigor Mortis - Tin Angel<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">I will
sadly admit that sometimes I need saving from myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought I knew what to do and how to do
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There I was, bravely intent upon
disaster,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>unstoppably heading down the
wrong route to the wrong destination,</span></span></span><a name='more'></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"> all flags flying and with a determined
look on my face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And look at me now –
faced with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a large slice of the pie of
humility.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">No, look,
I’m exaggerating, sometimes I do that. But I am deeply relieved, glad to have
been released from the prison of my own ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It all relates to my plan for our garden in Italy – a plan which you may
be able to follow if you look back at the post It's All So Puzzling - Tangled Up In Blue. Sorry to do that to you, I'm unable, for recondite reasons outside my control, to repost that plan.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">So there
were to be three dead straight walls, terracing the land and stretching out from
what looks like the side but is actually the front of the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You will see here, from an early photograph before rebuilding, that the house is built on
a slope, dropping several meters from one end to the other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>It’s miserable to step out of a house onto a
transverse slope, you’re at odds with the world before you even start, watching
your feet and leaning against the sideways fall like a biker on a bend in the
road.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can’t set a table out and you
can’t think straight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So the eternal
answer to this sort of problem is always, and will ever be, to terrace the land
and create flatter areas joined by steps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> That's what we've done</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now I admit that I was worried that that the three straight lines set amongst the curvy hills would
look like landing strips.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We just needed
arc lamps and a chap waving paddles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I assured myself, all would
be well, for the decreasing lengths of the walls<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>would indicate a kind of curve across their
ends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> That was not actually true.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">The idea was that you would
set off from the house, along the paths between the sun-drenched flowery
terraces<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and, because of the longer wall
on your left you would find yourself<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>drawn to exit right, down onto the grassy slopes, ready to explore the
lower areas and thence the farther reaches of our land.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which by then, would be gaily and
productively planted with humming, buzzing meadows and beautifully shaped
trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is to be a pond, just below
the terraces, glinting in the sunlight and bursting with wild-life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You would not resist, you would be at one
with nature, loving the garden, embracing the view, at ease in the space. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">So that was
the vision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could see no
alternative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To curve the terraces
naturally, around the slope of the hill, like contour lines, struck me as
impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would mean you were
directed back upwards, back into the top end of the garden where the garage is
and the tractor track is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who wants
that? Curving them down against the contours seemed the only other possibility
and that would look weird, neither right nor serviceable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you can’t curve up and you can’t curve
down you’d better decide not to curve at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Straight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Simple.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now all
this may seem a little picky, not to say downright dull.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I was in the grip and the thrall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have been determined that straight walls
are the answer for months: I’ve slept on it, I’ve brooded, I’ve chewed it
over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve set sticks out and measured
things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My resolve has hardened and I’ve
strangled all intrusive opposition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
have felt my wrong-headedness grow and I have merely strengthened my defences
whenever doubt and uncertainty muttered in my head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt the need to impose my will and deny the truth that was staring me in the face. It suited me to stick to my guns, like a bad ruler or a climate-change denier.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Before I
show you how this conflict was resolved, we should turn to the song of the day – Tin
Angel from the album Tempest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a song of
incredible fecundity, so multi-levelled that I fear I will not do it
justice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> The story</span> burgeons with
possibilities, opening and dividing, suggesting, expanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And witty physical details, sources of deep
continuing delight to the listener, for the voice and the phrasing put you
right there, feeling and seeing what you hear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And dialogue, back and forths that wind us to the conclusion of the
tale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With all that, a relatively simple
trotting melody, that allows full play to those marvellous pungent details, the
moral muddle and the resolved riddle at the centre of the song.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Enough with
the generalisations, the riddle is a backwards one, for we have been told how
the deaths of all three characters occurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Wife leaves husband for another man, Henry Lee.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Husband chases after the couple, finds them
tightly wound together in a sort of hellish room, bars the way out, challenges
and threatens, Henry Lee kills him, wife kills Henry Lee for killing her
husband then kills herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They all end
up together in a Shakespearean<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>muddle of
dead limbs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enter the populace, who
perform funeral rites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One supposes they
wonder how on earth all three could have died, in what order and why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We think we know, but all the reasoning is
questionable and everyone is to blame.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">The tragedy is pointless, but not meaningless, the characters enmeshed
and intertwined beyond untangling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
song is a mythic, fairytale puzzle seen from the other end.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">But here’s
my point, it’s also about a central wrong-headedness. If the husband had waited
he would have done better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His wife
might have got away, but she’s not a Sabine woman to be hauled off against her
will. Nor, as the song reveals, is she any sort of pushover.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Even as he sets off to leave his desolate home he’s filling the world
with wrong thinking, alienating his assistants and threatening
everyone on his path. By the time he gets to his destination he’s in a terrible
state of insomniac self-focused horror, in a trap of his own making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sees everything very clearly, but he’s got
it all wrong, for he thinks force and mastery will work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> I</span>mplacability breeds implacability,
everyone dies and his marriage, the village that he wanted to save, is burned
to the ground and irrelevant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">This violent
wrong-headedness starts small and turns terrible, my own would just have been a
terribly expensive flaw in the landscape. But they're both about the search for control and rigid thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here’s how it turned out in the end, when I'd found a way to loosen up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxNbB5JAxAwkoC_WQOl_cLkTJu6rIlk-u4TV8O-HIbV_tiWzFRmGccluBYCfCAwc2V98kTDj37_jv7z8s7nYf9YgLIxBxiDwS6vHipcj03n9DFBfu2o6_l8LVxIchjGkArW-Ivd9qVztDT/s1600/P9100196.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxNbB5JAxAwkoC_WQOl_cLkTJu6rIlk-u4TV8O-HIbV_tiWzFRmGccluBYCfCAwc2V98kTDj37_jv7z8s7nYf9YgLIxBxiDwS6vHipcj03n9DFBfu2o6_l8LVxIchjGkArW-Ivd9qVztDT/s640/P9100196.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The walls built and the flattening done</td></tr>
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</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiejhRK0Aslwca5nOBxG8ph6geNFfueO9TaPzG3a-w-mUmHYHpJK2K_vC-4VI9TAcoReBx2iSCPElLqafPpLQbkcGTf7_MKXq0uLtdnL-JClI17S8m3viWccrA4-IMwP6aySTZi1YBSltoJ/s1600/P9250269.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiejhRK0Aslwca5nOBxG8ph6geNFfueO9TaPzG3a-w-mUmHYHpJK2K_vC-4VI9TAcoReBx2iSCPElLqafPpLQbkcGTf7_MKXq0uLtdnL-JClI17S8m3viWccrA4-IMwP6aySTZi1YBSltoJ/s640/P9250269.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paths added. Top level still rough-edged and needing to be properly built</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Good sense and enlightenment values seem to have
prevailed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the influence of the
digger-driver, a man of great perceptiveness and landscaping experience,
combined with the intervention of my calm and sensible partner who kindly pointed out that my very first idea
for the land had been to create an incurving, not straight-edged, space around
and under the top level near the house.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Between the two of them helpful suggestions were made, and we drew it all out again
with sticks and string.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Diplomacy and
subtle pressure prevailed, along with support and encouragement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I finally stepped out of my dilemma like a
person slithering out of a straightjacket – clear-headed again, light and
free.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">I am quite
certain that we have done the best thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The walls curve with the land, very, very gently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes all the difference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You feel encircled and contained at the top
level and the view of the town is underlined and balanced, as I had hoped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The steps will link the wide flattened spaces
which will<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>become the planting
area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paths will take you through them
and it turns out simply not to matter that the paths do not lead you in the
same direction as the walls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The white
sticks sketch where the grassy ones will go eventually, with the help of a little
differential mowing and a bit more flattening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I am disgustingly pleased with myself, despite the humble pie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We govern better when we do what’s
right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brutalism has been vanquished. I'm not saying it wasn't completely obvious all along, which you may find yourself thinking. Banish that thought.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now, you
may have heard enough but I want to explain another bit of reasoning which
loomed unnecessarily large in my thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>See those lines of hazels in the distance in the photograph above?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those are straight lines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They look curved because the land undulates
beneath them and they are all the same height.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I had thought that my straight walls would reflect the hazel plantations
around here, and the fruit-growing – but it’s obvious now that they would have
had to be the same height all along their length, rising and falling with the
land, and they simply would not have been long enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And anyway I wanted them to lose themselves
gradually in the slope and I couldn’t have had them doing both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Madness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Loss of
perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freezing of brain through
anxiety at gross expenditure and permanency of construction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fear and confusion leading to dunder-headed
rationalising. </span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Here's the first path and the top steps. The second one on the second level, unbuilt in this photograph, curves the opposite way, taking you out onto the land, as I had hoped.</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibSXmhnxxqeS5lFJEWQTGLA3Ok_ne5TGJLtSQgD_TtjY8GFVFnFWl6zKvVkkCgbhXEqGmi4YHSwMI3I6ntld6nhAlpcE65YypZW25aEH_UvrbnM_o6LWzbc5O5lysQodLb3pFcEIsnmY6q/s1600/P9120207.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibSXmhnxxqeS5lFJEWQTGLA3Ok_ne5TGJLtSQgD_TtjY8GFVFnFWl6zKvVkkCgbhXEqGmi4YHSwMI3I6ntld6nhAlpcE65YypZW25aEH_UvrbnM_o6LWzbc5O5lysQodLb3pFcEIsnmY6q/s640/P9120207.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">I firmly
believe that engaging the brain and being truthful with oneself is the way to
manage the usual inner slippery pit of snaky emotions, pulsating with fights
and flights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I’m fumbling round the
idea that creativity, to be any good, requires a kind of heavenly conjunction
of the brain and the emotions, where neither one controls nor suppresses the
other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Russell Page wrote The Education Of A Gardener, a dense and delightful read. It's a joy to read in conjunction with a beautifully photographed, amplifying review of his achievements in The Gardens Of Russell Page by Marina Schinz and Gabrielle Van Zuylen. Some of his more complex descriptions of his own gardens fall into place - you see the reasoning, the problems and the solution more clearly.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Russell Page says many a
sensitive and interesting thing, despite his grandness. He talked of a sixth sense
which<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>can “see” the design solution in a
flash of intuition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But you must first open your mind and closely observe all the details of the situation. Let them seep into your
mind, which will sort them out as you relax.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The trick is to recognise the moment, when it comes, of that flash of intuition and hold onto it,
with awareness and recall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some people,
real designers, good designers, do that automatically. Equally some people lead
lives illuminated with grace, elan and a natural talent for the sure
touch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rest of us have to think hard
and sometimes take advice. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKgnrA371UMm8fHW_TXszChLuAmFVyrnCgxJVLevsT8jAXoiBZVeVoBR12bm4tD0yIIoQdIBKemOrzmiv1oYr5kvQ90gcpF9sS8cRKdQfTKnYBwlKp8Ahp2alszY0D0Z19jN9BgDqCYbi9/s1600/P9200267.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKgnrA371UMm8fHW_TXszChLuAmFVyrnCgxJVLevsT8jAXoiBZVeVoBR12bm4tD0yIIoQdIBKemOrzmiv1oYr5kvQ90gcpF9sS8cRKdQfTKnYBwlKp8Ahp2alszY0D0Z19jN9BgDqCYbi9/s640/P9200267.JPG" width="640" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">I have
followed my own last suggestion as far as this strange, whitish, wormless soil
is concerned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, I took advice and
attempted the application of thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then I didn’t follow the advice, which mainly centred on the idea that
the worms had gone deep underground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
could count on the fingers of one hand those worms I have met during hours and
hours of watching the digger, following the digger and actually digging.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">M</span>y usual practice of mulching on top of heavy
clay soil depends on worms for the mixing and incorporating part of the
operation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> But i</span>f they are not to be found
two to four feet under the surface I see no point in believing in them, or in their existence in adequate quantities here.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Bereft
of wormy workforce as I am,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have been
driven to the forking in of large quantities of sand and horse manure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> You can see piles of both things strewn about in the photograph above. </span>The alternative was the rotavating in of “
terricio”, which seems to be a heavily fertilised compost on which the so-called English
lawn is sown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now I didn’t want that,
indeed I set my face against it, although I realise, a little wanly, that there may not
be that much difference in the end result.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span> I wanted my gritty sand, and I didn’t want the lawn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve used less of the manure wherever high fertility would be counterproductive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The sand, and probably I myself, seem eccentric beyond imagining to the
digger people. And I see my plan to take advice is not working all that well.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;">The plants I have used are mainly flattish, alpiny, herby, hardy types. This garden is not supposed to hit you in the eye, it's more about not interfering with the view and surviving on this baking, broiling south-west exposure. All the obvious stuff - lavender, thymes, phlox subulata, gypsophila, hardy geraniums, sedums. Some other slightly more adventurous items, mostly on the beds under the walls. As people say when they really don't want to commit themselves, we'll see.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Just in
case you’re wondering about that vast hole, where I spent some of those
worm-searching hours, beneath the lowest wall or terrace – that will be the wildlife pond, a project for next spring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When it rains here we are awash with running water so the incredible
seeping drainage from all around the house is being piped into the pond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> M</span>ore than one of our problems are being solved this week.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">We will breed mosquitos on our pond,
we won’t be able to prevent ourselves, wanting wildlife as we do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have created many other new problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most people round here fill
standing water in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now there’s a riddle,
we can’t all be in our right minds and think opposite things. There are truths and there are ways to work with the truth, however bleak in prospect.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Working out
what matters and what really doesn’t – that ought to be a central part of any policy to avoid wrong-headedness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The solution to my terraces turned out to be that I had got the whole
thing out of perspective - I had decided that something mattered when it
didn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not that much anyway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other things mattered more. And I forgot what I first saw and meant. I froze and lost my mind.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">I don't</span> pretend that this process of
losing sight of what you really wish to achieve in a garden is comparable to
doing the same in domestic or international relations, but that sensation of
freezing, going rigid, knowing something’s wrong with what you are doing but
hardening into it anyway – I cannot believe that isn’t a true description of
many a disastrous decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
protagonist of Tin Angel needed to hear the truth, think it through and turn back
before he set off on his doomed and pointless mission.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he ploughed on, despite his own
discomfort and misery and ended up in a welter of corpses.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">I see now, now I've been released, that this garden is all about openness, the opposite of enclosure. I can't think why it was not clear to me before. There are no fences and everything is open-ended, we lie stretched out and open to the sky and the view. The huge rock I had placed as a seat near the pond works both ways, with land undulating steeply away below it. It's exhilarating, I had not expected to be so exhilarated. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">This is not a windy site, so we can enjoy the exposure and the expansion. A massive pergola will however provide shade at</span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;"> the currently unfinished and unlevelled top level. Then I can do the advertising pasta cliche - large table in dappled shade, bottles and gender roles all over the place. Imagine the pleasure.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: large;">Like so
much of Dylan’s work, the song is a very mysterious cause for joy – none of
these characters is sympathetic but as the listener you could not be closer,
observing gestures and expressions, seeing the faces, hearing the dialogue,
you’re right in the frame.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> T</span>he
wrong-headedness becomes ever clearer as you observe the details.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a strange and recondite new pleasure,
solving a puzzle even before you know its outlines, understanding something backwards. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll bet there’s a garden design simile
somewhere in that. </span></span></span></div>
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-53306431619260020442013-08-21T15:33:00.000-07:002013-09-04T23:20:50.689-07:00The Losing Garden - Cold Irons BoundWe've all had that nightmare vision of our own lonely deaths, our neglected corpses gnawed by domestic pets.<br />
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Part of that scenario would perhaps include the invasion of the garden into the house, ivy skittering across the ceiling, bindweed round the banisters, romneya coulteri heaving up the floorboards. Dirty green light wavering through the engulfed window-panes, great shrubs only feet from the house. There are smashed roof tiles on the grass, dislodged by giant wisteria and vast Russian vines. Of course the grass is only there because it's mown once a fortnight by a sulky teenager, the space is getting smaller at every visit.<a name='more'></a><br />
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The reality of the neglected or abandoned plot is very different from the lost, the secret or the forgotten gardens of our childhood imaginations, when we were the discoverer or the interloper. We imagined ourselves gazing around enchantedly. Ivy-draped statues romantically disposed here and there, lilacs and lilies blooming undeterred. We were undaunted then by fears of death or illness, or by the real ravages of time and neglect. We did not think of those who had gone from the garden, for we were the heroes, creeping round gates, under fallen branches and past the abandoned rooms of empty houses.<br />
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As a child I was quite good at slipping into other people's gardens and looking around, but if they were too far gone there was little pleasure, only mess and sadness. To find a treasure was the point; in one I remember an enormous, very leafy, magnolia soulangeana blooming with huge pinky white flowers. Vast scented cups, too magical to be anything other than fabulously rare.<br />
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I was easily pleased, a little structure, a dark concrete ornament, a dank empty pool, anything like that would give me a thrill. If all else failed, a flyblown rose or some golden rod seemed precious, surviving against the odds.<br />
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There was another magical moment, when I came across a box-edged parterre-like garden in the midst of ranks of large crowded trees. Somebody was still trimming and planting, despite the advancing woodland. The hedges seemed waist-high, but I was young and short. Sunlight fell on the opened space, leaves glittered. I remember flowers and colour too but cannot identify them in my minds-eye film. Something stopped - could have been time, could have been my heart. Those signs of human care were like a secret romance..<br />
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Back to the other end of this train of thought, the latter end, the one to come. When <em>we</em> become the people in the house, impotently gazing at the over-bearing growth. The garden we have so lovingly created is collapsing. We should have moved somewhere with a patio and a few pots long ago, it's all too much and there's no-one to help.<br />
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For me this is an everyday issue. I assist with several gardens where the owners love them dearly but are prevented by age or incapacity from working on them. It is a heartening task, to bring pleasure and order, but the conundrum remains and bullets must be bitten. My parents garden is the one I choose as a salutary example, the song to go with it is Cold Irons Bound from the album Time Out Of Mind. If you know the song you might be horrified by my cold-hearted gall. I am too, a bit.<br />
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The garden was created and planted by my mother. My father, her faithful companion, helped her then, just as he helps her now. They're chained old crocks, running down together. <br />
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Large apple trees and the rockery existed when they moved to this house and garden about 18 years ago.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">7 years ago</td></tr>
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My mother loved plants and quickly filled any spare spaces in the style of the British gardener, with many different varieties. It became ever more capacious and complex until she was struck with a stroke nine years ago. Since then she has not been able to speak or indeed move much, so gardening, which was her joy and mainstay, has simply floated away, out of reach, out of mind.<br />
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And the garden, which is not small, has become An Issue. Not one with an easy solution, and saddest of all, the heart has gone out of it. A left side brain stroke has a couple of strange effects, hitting language, musical appreciation and the right hand side of the body. I wouldn't have imagined the loss of music, but it turned out to be true, And the sad fact is that her interest in plants and gardening also seems to have died, gone like a dream. She humours me if I bring flowers in, or chat to her about what I'm doing out there but I see no real interest in her eyes. My father wants no real changes, and both are more interested in the birds than the plants. So it's hard to know what the garden is for any more.<br />
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Now I'm not moaning. Or am I moaning? On her behalf perhaps. I don't mean to, there is no point and some of the difficulty of the garden issue is, for me, self-inflicted. Several people work on it, the lawn is mown once a fortnight, the hedges cut twice a year. Sometimes the hedge cutters come and whack back the bigger shrubs and trees, spring and autumn. A sister or two trim the topiary, which is quite a commitment. The rest is more or less my responsibility and I manage 4 or 5 hours every fifth weekend, between Friday and Sunday.<br />
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It is interesting to see how the garden has survived under this regime - it is never watered, never fed or mulched: we aim at keeping it tidy, wildlife-friendly and most of all, back. Plants are never added, though I filled the vegetable garden with this and that at the beginning, just to cover the ground. A shrub or tree here and there has been removed, for different reasons, but there is a sense of stasis and resistance. Everything's going downhill as we try to keep it as it was. Very little is flowering in the photograph above and that is not how it was meant to be.<br />
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My mothers planting stood up very well for the first few years, though I was there a little more often then, once every 4 weeks, and perhaps more determined too. It was never planted as an easy-care, wipe-down garden and it has not loved the neglect. Whisper it, I never liked the conifers, the eucalyptus, the rockery, or the pond and patio, child of my time as I am. <br />
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Before I tell you more, here's a first - Cold Irons Bound on video. Give it a go. Sorry about the ad.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hO-83CIVKM">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hO-83CIVKM</a><br />
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Now what did you think? Setting aside the hat of course. I accept it's not an immediately appealing song though it rocks along well. But it's the strangeness, the dour marionette at the centre, the sense of post devastation mystery that you might find compelling. Or maybe not. But there's that feeling of being stuck, chained and shackled, yet being on your way somewhere, somewhere that promises nothing more. Loss and only loss. Surely you like that? Sorry again. I see this is not cheerful.<br />
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And I will admit, age-appropriateness slightly militates against the angst of unrequited love. Perhaps that's intentional - there is no warmth in this song, such as you might get from passion. This is the most chilling despair. Try the Time Out Of Mind version where he sings as if from the bottom of an ice-cold well. Frozen metal, rattling along in a cage. It might make you glad that things aren't as bad as all that. My mother may well beg to differ.<br />
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Anyway we can pick a couple of lines out of the song that fit our decaying garden case. Some things <em>do</em> last longer than you think they will. There <em>are </em>some things you can never kill. Even when the garden you made is disappearing into a dark and pointless muddle, some plants remain, rising above the doom and the wreckage to flower every year. I'm not talking about the shrubs - they'll carry on while there is enough light, although it is hard for me to swallow my irritation when other people come and helpfully prune them to blobs just when they've produced next year's flowering wood, just when it would be best to leave them. That's the self-inflicted bit of the Garden Issue, here I have to back off, not worry and let it go. So hard.<br />
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So, back to the plants that you can never kill and may continue to flower, despite neglect and weeds, at least in the centre of England on a kind of gritty, neutral clay. They need to be able to move, running gently to where there is still some light, so their roots are often deep and quite thick. That gives them a bit of storage capacity, which sees them through drought and difficulty. I don't know how they respond to serious cold and zoning has now ramified into new definitions, but we're talking about anything down to the American zone 6. <br />
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Here's elecampane or inula hookeri, gradually expanding, smothered in yellow flowers in July and August. Nice flowers too, like little suns. And though couch grass and that little barbed weed, geum urbanum have invaded everywhere else, I did not see them in the inula, which suckers and expands, with gentle determination. You can see it glowing away at the far top right in the big picture of the garden above.<br />
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There is another Inula, called magnifica, which I remember seeing as the main plant in a huge rock garden at Chatsworth of all places, used everywhere, like an under-gardener. That looks good even when only in leaf, magisterial almost. Interestingly coarse, especially as you don't see it everywhere.<br />
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Camassia leichtleinii, admittedly a mess after flowering, but holding its ground.<br />
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Here it is - almost the only thing left in a border apart from the sweet woodruff happily running about at its feet. I think there's still an eryngium and an oriental poppy too, neither doing very well. That escallonia is withering sadly. This photograph was taken with nice light in May, this border has already had its best moment. I try to prevent the red shooted, magenta-flowered geranium psilostemon from seeding here. I have seen an entire garden covered in those, with huge roots. Of course many geraniums are unnkillable and bent on expansion. This is not one I would choose to allow - it's irredeemably coarse, though I still don't quite know how I would define that characteristic.<br />
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I know I said I woudn't include shrubs, but here is one very like a perennial, built by suckering shoots from the base. It's the white Hydrangea arborescens Annabelle, and like a perennial, it can be chopped to the ground each spring. It gives little succour to wildlife, but bouffes up well. That's "bouffes". You can see it in the picture below.<br />
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I would like to like the regular tansy, tanacetum, as it has overrun a shady area, but cannot really love it with its petalless yellow daisies. It is self supporting and the ferny foliage is pretty. But come on, it's a weed. There is however a yellow-leafed version, called Isla Gold. It is lovely and provides colour for ages if you like that sort of thing from a leaf.<br />
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You will already know about Japanese anemones - I see my mother felt as I do about them and stayed her hand. Just too leafy and imperialist perhaps. I find them coarse too, though I still don't know what that means. I'd much rather have acanthus, the common old montbretia and hemerocallis fulva. All reliable semi-weeds in this climate. But none of these will look attractive if you don't cut them back once a year, like the everlasting alchemilla. And if you let the woodland of cornus, hazel, ash and sycamores return the garden will more or less disappear.<br />
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Here are a couple more reasonably attractive thugs, big plants, not easy to mix with shrubs. They are rampantly unmanageable from one point of view, great strong survivors from another. Macleaya, the plume poppy, and persicaria, or bistort. Add a front rank of pale pink saponaria (alba flore plena - see picture below this one) and you have a collection of bullies, bullying each other with a pinkish glow, even without much sun or water. Funny that a lot of this sort of invincible flowerer blooms in the dog days of August, when we think nothing will do. <br />
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And here is my most alarming bully, creeping everywhere, under paving, popping across lawns, inexorable, honey-scented, attracting no insects that I'm aware of. It's euphorbia cyparissias and acts like a firm of assassins, smothering every low grower in its path. It's all over the rockery, and beyond, now. My fault, I gave the first piece to my mother and she trustfully accepted it. It flowers in May, when I do my best to rip it out.<br />
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I sometimes wonder whether my mother's loss of interest is her solution to coping with her physical inability to do anything about the garden herself. She cannot engage physically with it and all the joy has fled. Pointless yearning for something lost is a hard way to do your time, but it's what the song is all about.<br />
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So, Cold Irons Bound, back to that. I'm less sure now that the longing for love is misplaced - perhaps that the whole point. It's not the right time for sexual passion - the old are supposed to be past it, it's undignified. But perhaps it will not let you go, it clings and grows, unwanted and excessive, though the body ages, the wrinkles ramify and the structure collapses. There's no good way out, the whole thing's a trap, taking you further into a bigger trap.<br />
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These not terribly beautiful plants I have been cataloguing are like the remnants of the idea of a garden. The song painfully confronts the remnants of love, doomed and out of time. It is indeed a sad thing to see beauty decay and sadder still to feel your heart torn away. Thank heavens there's a good song about it, presented with odd but absolute panache.<br />
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<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-13937324003169580632013-07-26T02:59:00.000-07:002013-07-26T02:59:19.472-07:00The Struggle - Working Man's Blues<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sometimes
I’m sickened by the idea of the ornamental garden.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially big lonely ones where no-one is
interested enough to go, apart from a man with a machine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Huge, immaculate lawns worry me. Glittering
unused swimming pools make me sad. Identical, showy, pointless plants in
countless small gardens;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>lack of
imagination, thought, interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All that
landscape fabric.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All that hard
surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Artificial lawns, for God’s
sake. Put it all down to wild-life sanctuaries or proper vegetable growing,
let’s stop messing around turning everything into suburbia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Love it, or live in a flat in a city with a
balcony barbecue (is that possible? Perhaps I just made it up, for sheer
rhetoric).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But I’m not
sickened when someone makes an effort, even if I don’t like it and think
they’ve got it wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And even if
they’ve taken on more than they can handle, so it’s all falling to bits. I
don’t want them to get discouraged and fall by the wayside, I want them to find
the pleasure again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
gardening out of choice, running your own little world, is also a huge luxury,
one that has flourished for ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
I’ve always thought of people who never get the chance<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>–<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a truly
terrible deprivation, though not<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>perhaps
Guantanomo Bay.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So today’s
themes are work, survival and whether hard work makes better gardens, or better
people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have a garden up my sleeve to
illustrate my points.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s Veddw House Garden,
whose gardener/owner, Anne Wareham, is irritable about the act of gardening, but loves a good result.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And my song is the mysterious
Workingman’s Blues, where the struggle makes a victim of a sinner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can find it on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> the album Modern Times. </span>I think it will attract you, it has
a lovely melody seemingly inappropriate to the theme, but all the better for
that,</span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> sweetly enticing you to look some hard truths in the face.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Let’s take
a look at the garden first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I visited it a
couple of years ago, so things may be different now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s in border country, between England and
Wales, in the Wye Valley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A hunkered
down cottage close to the bottom of a long slope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On one side, at the back of the house, the
slope forms a great bowl, heavily fringed with woods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anne has done a magnificent thing here, you
see it and it seems so easy and obvious, so meant, that you think you yourself
would have thought of it, or anyone would.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not so, not like this anyhow. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">From the
woods, through a series of banked enclosed garden rooms and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rhythmic hedges, the green seems to drain
down to an area of greater intensity, where close lines of yew form the pull
and the stop to the flow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Drain sounds
bad, but it’s not, it’s a force field and a holding pattern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s a formal pond at the base, reflecting
the sky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The green strength flows down,
but it does not drain away, it just intensifies and stills. You can sit<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>below this main event at the back of the
house, looking slightly up at it, across a semi-circle of grass and between two
exuberant, comfortable borders.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Being slightly outside lets you sense the pull, the flow and the stop
without being dominated by the hedges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To me it was one of those spots, not magic, not spiritual, just one of
those places where the design creates a special feeling, of being contained and
supported, of being fully <em>here</em>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tickling
the part of the brain that interprets place and surroundings.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But there’s
more to this place than a significant spot, a relatively humble house and
beautiful, complex and sophisticated grounds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Anne has investigated local history and threaded some of her findings
through the garden, including "gravestones" which give you names of locally
significant but lost places.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is
also a short hedged replica of the mapping of the fields around, where people
worked so hard against the odds, wresting potatoes from the land.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there is writing – quite a long
plaque<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with quotes about starvation and
difficulty in the 1850s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
beautifully calligraphed, in gold on black, paying full honour to those who lived around here in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it’s even better placed, by a fence with
the wild woodland beyond, looking intractable.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I will admit, I normally dislike writing in gardens. I don't like it on clothes, or food, or textiles either. Purist you see, I like stuff to speak for itself, if it can. But this plaque is both perfectly poignant and perfectly informative.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So you have a sense, from the humble, hunkered cottage, the complex weaving
of boundaries, the death in the gravestones, the details of the names and
shapes, you have a sense of the people who inhabited and worked this land in
the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then, from the higher
edges of the hollowed land, you look across to the hills, and you see again the
harshness of life for the working poor, before machinery, struggling up and
down those slopes, “rearing up their cottages, with great toil and
perseverance”, some drawn into petty frauds and thefts because of hunger, some
dehumanised by their poverty, apparently in need of the guiding hand of
religion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So all
these things add up, and you notice more that adds<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to the theme, like the interesting black
fences, neat and smart but also vaguely homespun and rackety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And the box
balls down the steps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re different
than most, more like a Sunday School on benches, spreading into the
aisles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have a homely, innocent
look here, but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fear age and grooming
will have smartened them up. </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The taller clipped yews amongst the gravestones
have the placing and height of adults wandering in a cemetery.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The
cotoneaster horizontalis here struck me as ramshackle and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>humble too, crowded together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would have preferred it without the
clematis. </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And the
empty-headed upper class blue hosta, luxuriating in a fancy over-attended
party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just not my thing perhaps, but
it should not be here, not so many, glaring bluely up at the sky.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"></span> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The
bergenia elsewhere is so much nicer, a decent green and a humbler
plant, shining like kindness, working away in the shadows, near the foundations of an old collapsed
cottage, now used as seating.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Most
planting is perfectly in balance with the structure and the theme - foamy,
grassy, gently wild-looking. Soft spray of smallish repeated flowers with
nothing too showy or exotic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tall mauve
campanulas (lactiflora), alchemilla mollis<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>and fireweed, or willow herb (epilobium angustifolia).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The plants are simple, the cover complete, forged from the wild, tipping
back to the wild.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It looks as though it
looks after itself but of course it doesn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A glance at the plan shows how huge, unexpectedly symmetrical, and complex the whole garden is, with
only two or three people working on it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can find it on the Veddw website.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So this is
a garden that gives you something to think about in two ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First a reluctant gardener, who dislikes the
activity but has the resolute energy to create a magnificent ornamental garden
for its own sake and for her love of beauty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Second, the creation is a garden which rejects the aristocratic paraphernalia
of the English heritage school in favour of a loving recognition of all those
who scratched a living, working themselves to death on these hills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some would have managed pretty well, and
occasionally lifted their heads and gloried in leaves, air and light, watching
the birds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some would have suffered from
the first to the last.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps they were
born out of their time and place, longing, without knowing it, for
centrally-heated offices, public transport and coffee shops.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And I am
not the person to say that that second group,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>struggling with hunger and illness on top of the work, are lesser people
than the first, struggling too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t
believe it , genuinely not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mainly
because of my own constitutional incapacities, which help me recognise the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>extraordinary, completely foreign, abilities
of others, in all sorts of indoor spheres.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But also because the Italian land where I partly live shows all the
evidence of the decline and difficulty of a family maladapted to their destiny
and time, shows it in land too damaged for hay to be cut, dying fruit trees,
and the mess and confusion of rubbish and wasted building materials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Some people just don’t like working
outside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some just do. I may be the latter but I will always seek the short cut and the easiest hand-based option - others, who want to, using the machines. </span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I have met
people who tell me that they finally feel able to admit that they don’t like
gardening, have no patience or interest with it and feel a lot better for
getting this criminal failure off their chest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I see one of my sisters has become one of those.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There it is.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So let us
leap freely to the song ,which doesn’t say any of that, but is rightly titled
and mostly about hardship and poverty, the battle to keep going being the main
thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The protagonist rattles about –
from the railways, to working on ships, to farming and finally a penned animal
slaughtered in a field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is always the
victim of something, from the great economic forces that make his work suddenly
worthless, to the fretters and fussers who don’t like the way he lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He nurses scattershot grudges as he struggles
and fails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Not the
easiest person to get along with,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>leaving his boots and shoes all over the place,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>dogmatic, insistent, slightly threatening,
nagging everyone to hurry up, this working man is not an attractive character
to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I don’t deny his suffering,
the gently sung song makes you feel tender towards his self-centred pain and his angry
resilience in the face of oppression of every kind. He’s exhausted, lost and
hungry: these are his blues.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It’s this
kind of tenderness towards the agricultural workers of the past that Veddw House Garden
seems to evoke, once you’ve read that plaque.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yes, you could say we who view the garden and enjoy the theme – which is
not the only one - are being sentimental, a little fanciful,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>feeling a sweet trickle of pity posing as
nostalgia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we’re always faced with
that dilemma of not being quite authentic when we contemplate those who suffer privation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We would not be them,
not if we can help it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The song
raises questions about economic changes that ravage livelihoods but it places
no real blame.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world goes round
again, the money getting shallower and weaker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s a wonderful anthropomorphic image in the song – surely no-one has
ever made economic depression so palpably enfeebling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The working man wants to damage his nameless,
ill-defined oppressors, but the song is not a call to arms, it’s a genuine
song, about the market economy, the way things are, and ever have been, for the
dispossessed are trapped into dependence on their exploiters. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"></span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Perhaps
hard lives do indeed make hard people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But I don’t think that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is always
true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Savio, the man who grazes his
animals on our Italian land rises at 5 and often works till 10 at night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never has a holiday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But equally he never raises his voice, to
daughter, son or animal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And despite the
heat he has never not smiled when we talk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are many such, everywhere, and of course he is his own boss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A degree of control makes most things
bearable.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiodFIt12murKIcBaTACvZxzfJVvc5i1tNh1F7lLBXtlauVR6aVTUUVT_DU5I88507qksT3pcLKZDZ2T8AQ7Tc0MvaCg7OEBn4yufFIDpHh__T8NUFHPaf1vi8YYjLm7A3l0nGxgPocMI4/s1600/DSC_5105.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiodFIt12murKIcBaTACvZxzfJVvc5i1tNh1F7lLBXtlauVR6aVTUUVT_DU5I88507qksT3pcLKZDZ2T8AQ7Tc0MvaCg7OEBn4yufFIDpHh__T8NUFHPaf1vi8YYjLm7A3l0nGxgPocMI4/s400/DSC_5105.JPG" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Let’s go
back to the exhausted gardener, arms savaged by rose-thorns, nails blackened,
filthy-footed, broken-backed, skin burnt and bitten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All through choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is this a good<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>way to carry on?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many people here in Italy are clear that it
is not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have been implored, by
complete strangers, not to create too much work for myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though I really don’t know how else to live,
so I anxiously defend my right to take on more than I can handle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I do see that the heat can be discouraging,
as can cold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, in the end, you don’t
have to love it all, no-one could, not about anything; you just have to love it
enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Veddw House Garden shows – and I have
not even begun on the beautiful, extensive plantings on the other side of the house – the end
result may be good enough<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to justify
whatever labour is required and may even scotch the blues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t expect much from my results, and
certainly nothing remotely comparable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But I do know that working at my garden, admittedly mainly when I want
to, will keep me cheerful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s the
absolute luxury of liking the work that you have to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like most people,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d rather have that than caviar with
cashmere and ambergris.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-75480557036678126542013-06-06T17:23:00.000-07:002013-06-07T15:26:49.324-07:00The Lie Of The Land - 'Cross The Green Mountain<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A rumour went round amongst our neighbours before we moved into our Italian house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were professional hot-air balloonists, set on running a hot-air ballooning school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lovely Italian word for these charming contraptions is mongolfieri, or mongolfiere in the singular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never had such a thing crossed my mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This sudden, mistaken vision of a possible alternative existence was, for a moment or two, quite disorientating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> I felt a bit of a heel disappointing everyone, almost as though I really ought to make more of an effort. And like all of us, I could see the attraction of rising aloft, floating above it all - viewing the world from a bigger perspective. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I implore you to listen to the wonderful ‘Cross The Green Mountain from the album Telltale Signs Vol<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> 8 of The Bootleg Series. It's not terribly well-known</span>, for it was attached to a little-seen epic film about the American Civil War. Though the song is too long, it captures the sweep of a landscape and the moved and moving human eye and brain, expressed in the intimate voice at its centre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> It seems sublimely relevant to my theme.</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The sound of the song is cinematic or panoramic, extended rising and falling, hovering over the hills, tethered by something that sounds like a heartbeat. Listen to how cleverly it<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> marries time and space, swirling you back and forth in contemplation of the past, the present, the near and the far. The vision sweeps from the ravaged lands and the dim Atlantic line to the blood-stained woods and the eyes of the merciful friend, ready to relieve you of your misery. Heaven moves in and out of focus. It's an ambitious song, and a real achievement, conjuring last moments, the fullness and the beauty, the sadness and the horror of life and war.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Could a garden ever reach that level of intensity? I think of gardens that have moved me, some nearly to tears, but few, apart from those designed as memorial gardens, have made me sorry for pain and distress. Maybe it's simply not within gardening's grasp, maybe I've just not looked for it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">What I have felt however, as a gardening experience, is the looking through and beyond, to a view that looks like paradise, a new world, a place of peace and beauty given that extra significance by the framing, or the management of the foreground. You need a degree of detail in the distance, where fields and trees bask in the light; you need to feel you want to go there, but that the vision of it is also a wonder and a delight.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">My own creative desires are more pedestrian</span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, my reach and my grasp as equal as I can make them. I hope to develop a liveable and convincing garden on a piece of land where the views are variously </span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">dominating, from three sides of the house. </span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this photograph taken f</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">rom above, from the very top of the hill, you can see how the house is set, half way down one side of a longish valley The valley is much steeper and deeper than it looks here, because of the flattening effects of height and photography.</span></div>
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Attractive views pose problems for the gardener. An effective garden succeeds by intensifying the absolute here and now of a place but a good view keeps taking you out and away. It's disorientating, looking into the distance. Everything close seems like an interruption; all the interest and colour of a regular garden seems to clamour at your legs, while your attention floats away and beyond. It's really a fight to the death between the near and the far, and you, the hapless gardener, must host and manage the battle. <br />
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I am unusually oppressed by interesting views from the house on this piece of land. To the West, we're forced to face the ancient hilltop town of Mondovi', or the section of it called Piazza, a place of palaces and monasteries, gazing back at us with a thousand eyes across that steep dark valley.<br />
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To the South, we can see right to the mountains on a good day, across to the old battlefield, at the far end of these graceful layered slopes.<br />
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And here is the view to the North, modern life in the distance but the lowest gentlest slopes and the most land which is actually under my control. <br />
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My theme today depends on an underlying but ordinary idea - that one purpose of an interesting garden might be to connect to history and landscape, boiling it down and intensifying it, or reflecting on it, or just reminding you of it. Always nice to have a big idea to work to, though I shall mainly be guided by what's quickest and easiest. Fatal.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A rather important Napoleonic battle happened here in 1796, just half a mile up the valley from us. Here's a picture of it. The painter, Bagetti, recorded all the battles on that particular campaign. The historical references I have found all focus on the military details, nothing on the social history, so you have to imagine what it was really like, for the real people involved.</span> </div>
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It seems quite obvious now, hindsight working as it does, that that road snaking up from bottom right of the above picture, between the trees through the smoke, turning sharply right again straight into Mondovi' Piazza, up and over the protective ramparts, it seems obvious now that that would be the road to guard if you wanted to prevent an invasion. There I've been drawn into tactics and strategy without even knowing it.</div>
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So that's where the battle took place. The French were in the defeated town by early evening of April 21st 1796, plundering and wreaking havoc, at least until the municipal stores of food were released to them. Hard to know how the townspeople felt about it, or how much havoc was wreaked. The ripples from the French Revolution had stirred the ambitions of ordinary people, all over Europe, whilst encouraging greater oppression and intransigence from the governing Savoy dynasty. Civilians were used to being pawns in the game; their feelings may have been very mixed.<br />
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So perhaps few were involved in the actual fighting - it was a matter of mainly conscripted foreign troops battling other foreign troops - the King of Sardinia (and of Piemonte) and the Austrian Empire versus Napoleon. Italian history is so riddled with competitive fiefdoms that I do not propose to expand upon it here (speaking as if I easily could, but just choose not to). I imagine that it was like the unnoticed fall of Icarus to the hard-working populace, until the French rushed through and took what they wanted. Then, it must have been terrifying, and apart from pride, pointless to resist. So the Governor surrendered, wisely as it turned out. The next day or so, the troops moved on out into the Piemontese plains. The Austrians were severely chastened, the house of Savoy shown up, and the future of Europe nudged along. Mondovi' was a theatre, not a prize. </div>
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Anyway the point is, the battle that occurred earlier that first day took place at the end of "our" valley where the ridge carrying the road to Vicoforte crosses it. The house we live in is situated further along the slope facing Mondovi' Piazza, behind those higher trees on the far right of the picture. It's all quite recogniseable, despite the smoke and the death. 2,200 people died horribly there, a strenuous throw of a stone from where I sit, wondering about connecting with the past. </div>
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The song makes me think about how there's a strange refuge from present anxieties in the contemplation of past suffering. How slippery and unreliable historical empathy is. The song both knows it, and uses it. The elegaic beauty of the circling melody softens the horrors of slaughter and violence, of cold and hunger. It's not just about an American Civil War battle, and a General shot in confusion by his own anxious men, it's a song about every inevitable apocalypse, arising from being human and alive.</div>
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Strangely it gives you a sense of peace and safety - for the main point of view is the calmly swooping eye. Fear and panic seem to have been transcended as if nothing worse than this could happen. That's the comfort I suppose, what's done is done; the past is another country and the suffering is over. Is that a kind of paradise, where misery is ended? </div>
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Now, in thinking about my garden and this battle I'm not imagining myself embarking on ambitious topiary representations of the cavalry. Or ranging mathematically ordered regiments of shaped hornbeams charging up the hill. Or planting ranks of bronze phormiums amongst rivers of scarlet salvia to express the bayonetting. It's enough to understand the topography, know a little history and recognise the closeness and the surprisingly easy accessibility of the town.</div>
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I have a plan to level the ground at the South-facing side of the house, which you see above, into three simple rising terraces at right angles to the house. They will face the town and follow its line. So you'll be able to turn your back on it when you want to look at my planned planting, dispersed along the terraces, relatively low and subtle. Or you can turn again and sit amongst those plants as you contemplate the town. Not complicated. Respectfully acknowledges what's been there for centuries. Nothing obscured, nothing restrained by enclosure. If you need to you can easily run down into the woods by the stream and hope no-one wants to hunt you down and fight you to the death.</div>
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Well that sounds good, whether it will add up to a nice place to be in remains to be seen. Low-growing plants which place no barriers as you look out will be at a premium, but anything tall will need a bank behind it if it's not to distract and annoy. We'll have to increase the number of accessible banks - there's a chance for that at the back of the house where you're automatically turned away from the views. Of course, once you have walked down to the lower levels of the garden there are plenty of banks behind you, some are so steep that even the donkeys tread delicately and look awkward.</div>
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Perhaps those upper terraces will be my chance to explore the world of alpines. Sometimes that definition seems to mean "Grows anywhere sunny. Short." Sometimes it means "Requires constant deep snow-cover from December to March. Must have perfect drainage and remain evenly moist whilst open to the wind and sun. Sulks and dies if thwarted." </div>
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I think I'll stick with the first category - the easy ones - alpine phloxes, saponarias, anemones, all those species bulbs, small geraniums - start there and expand into more interesting things as I get used to the conditions. </div>
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My main worry about the plan is that the terraces will look a bit brutalist extending straight out like landing strips from the building. But I have never planned a garden yet where I wasn't anxious about whether it would work. Sometimes you have to make it happen just to confirm that you were right to worry.</div>
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But of course, I must have a few trees and shrubs. On the North side of the house the view, part of which is in the photograph above, extends across our land as it opens out into a wider lower area, crossed by an occasional stream. It's a bit of a trudge down there, so first we have to create a path and a direction, which will help focus the eye. Just by the house there will be a steep, close slope, deeply shaded, where we can have some good leaves and cool flowers - hydrangea petiolaris, pale clematis, heuchera villosa, aster tradescantii, some shiny evergreens if I can find something to put up with the winters. That may mean the flatter laurels and lonicera pileata.</div>
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Just beyond that, is the chance for trees, partly to gain a little privacy from our neighbours, who will see their leafy tops, partly for those same leafy tops to obscure the distant industrial estate, glinting in the sun. I hope the trunks will bend elegantly about, creating a pattern and a frame against the closer views of our land. Something graceful and quick - I yearn for celtis australis, but no-one seems to have heard of it.</div>
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So that's it really, no point going on and on about it. The song is one or two verses too long, and I would happily dispense with the Walt Whitman one about a letter to the mother of a supposedly wounded soldier who's actually already dead. Cruel misinformation always flourishes in war and I'm sorry about it, but the verse is a bit maudlin, betraying the otherwise beautiful allusiveness. Nothing could destroy the way the music, the words and the voice work together in the rest of the song though. It lifts you away.</div>
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-87000106417897543652013-04-29T14:24:00.000-07:002013-04-29T23:05:51.324-07:00The Consequences of Wisteria - Lay Lady Lay<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
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I feel such a heel sometimes. Like a grumpy kill-joy, smashing illusions and fantasies. When people (sorry, I mean women) confide in me that they love wisteria I get this uncontrollable rictus of the face. My mouth stiffens and my eyes harden. Something ghastly comes out of my mouth.</div>
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Sometimes I say, "Well of course you do, everyone does." I try to bite back the comment about how it's like world-peace, or creme brulee, or spring. Sometimes I make a feeble start on the practical considerations discussion but that doesn't go anywhere - a pall settles on us both and backing away ensues. I have to admit that it all adds up to me looking like I don't love wisteria, and God knows what that makes me.<br />
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Now I don't know if people (women) feel the same affection for the song Lay Lady Lay, from Nashville Skyline. Mainly because I've only discussed it a couple of times in my whole life, unlike the wisteria, which seems to happen at least once a week. Still, you can all see the connection between the plant and the song can't you, beflowered stone towers, long hair from a high window, courtly love on the furniture.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0blkRszV-baIFNgkeQB3RjN2MortOkVbIZccJaHOuCwVwDEHoaBLC5rj-hwd1B4rVuzK_MVnlK8WtKsiHVAh3CkFt8y_zaU4tH2rJQp8k2dAEVpSkr8oKA0e9nu4KnbIYIaaNej149dh/s1600/DSCN2822.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" dua="true" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0blkRszV-baIFNgkeQB3RjN2MortOkVbIZccJaHOuCwVwDEHoaBLC5rj-hwd1B4rVuzK_MVnlK8WtKsiHVAh3CkFt8y_zaU4tH2rJQp8k2dAEVpSkr8oKA0e9nu4KnbIYIaaNej149dh/s400/DSCN2822.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Wisteria after flowering</td></tr>
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Wisteria, unlike courtly love, is marvellous for disease resistance. It's a vast limp and bendy tree, easily flattened against a wall (again, unlike courtly love) and very harmonious with its bright green leaves, gentle grey stems and lilac or white flowers. The hanging down of the flowers is the coup de grace and reflects the loveable pliability of the whole plant. That appearance, of loveable pliability, is the key to the song as well as the plant. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unmanaged wisteria.</td></tr>
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I read Petrarch and Dante's La Vita Nuova as a young woman and gulped their version of courtly love down, like a fish. I knew it was the other side of the coin of religion-fuelled fighting and war - but who cared? Apparently men could fall in love with you on the basis of a single glance, and then they would do whatever you wanted. Excellent idea! Incomprehensible, but excellent. Somehow, feverishly, almost in a panic, I hybridised that notion with Greer-influenced feminism and the possibility of righteous indignation. Result - to say the very least, confusion.<br />
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At the same time, I looked round and saw I was not alone in my knightly quest. Everyone had long hair, those sort of circlets round their heads, a misty, floaty look. We weren't "dressing up" like they do nowadays. We were thinking of resisting an unfair society, poor innocents that we were, not quite spotting how the freedom and the love fitted in together with it all.<br />
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I wonder if that odd pre-Raphaelite resurgence is explicable. We'd had Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot and Melanie in a long frock, the Rolling stones singing that Lady Jane song. Our mothers were often irritable domestic tyrants, freed after the war to reign in the private sphere. Many were annoyed at having been chased back to the home by the male domination of the public realm.<br />
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We new women didn't want the domestic rage, so we wanted to get out of the home-centred life. But for some of us, there was a glass ceiling round our brains. This "lady" notion seemed to refer to a private world of simultaneous leisure and influence. Much nicer, insidious and unreal, but much nicer.<br />
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My generation thought we could have real choices, we would be luckier and free of the worst of patriarchy. This song seemed to say we deserved this kind of flattering love as well, at no cost. We never noticed how little life or character this lady had, or that the song was all about the man, his insistence, his truth, his need and energy. He goes so far as to tell us that when we prostrate ourselves the world will begin.<br />
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And that word "lady". I remember my shock when I first heard it, from another woman, said in all seriousness to describe some man's girlfriend. "His lady". What? I thought we had been fighting for the right to be women, now we're allowed to use this word ourselves? I expect I sound a bit shrill. And? <br />
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So I'm giving at least some of the blame for my confusion to this song. I'm nothing if not fair. I was shocked that it came from the person who seemed to have sung, so excitingly, about sex as an honest negotiation between equals, rather than a manipulative game So that was all an illusion, perhaps a game itself. Here we were, stuck in a castle, sewing nettle shirts and being lovely. But it was OK! We could have our cake and eat it too!<br />
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The supplicant troubadour is not a friend, nor an equal companion in this joint enterprise of laying (I know) on his big brass bed. And the sound of the song - enticing foreplay but a bit schlocky really, admit it, you know exactly where it's going.<br />
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I don't mind the voice at all, indeed I rather like it but the whole thing makes me uncomfortable. As people have often said, the bed almost has a life of its own, certainly more presence and personality than the dim lady, who can't see the colours in her own mind. And the supplicant troubadour is terribly pleased with himself.<br />
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Right, now I've unkindly picked holes in a very pretty song let's turn to the equally pretty wisteria, and recognise its many assets. It's one of the mainstays of our gardening imagination: add delphiniums, a magnolia, lavender, roses and box - you've got a classy and desireable garden. Nothing wrong with it. Like another version of romantic love, it can look fresh and so right, to every new generation.<br />
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Wisteria is virtually indestructible once started; you might have to wait for it to balance itself out and you'll have to prune it, from the word go, and more than you ever imagined. But if it settles down, gets enough sunshine and water, and learns to flower, you will obviously be entirely happy.<br />
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You'll put it in the front garden and people will stop you in the street to express their appreciation and admiration. You'll feel proud and hold your head up high. You'll prune it again, and again. At first you'll follow the instructions, twice a year in July and February, back to five buds in the summer, then back to two or three in winter. You'll realise you're creating flowering spurs and you'll understand which are leaf buds and which contain flowers.<br />
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You'll become more slapdash, swearing as you reinforce the wiring or the trellis for it to hang on to, cursing as you haul its long feelers out of the drainpipes and from under the roof tiles. One day, as you get out the ladder, you'll look at it and wonder. You'll realise it's a long time since you just enjoyed it - the whole thing has become a relationship based on benefits conferred, you haven't had a good laugh with it for ages.<br />
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And you may well be male (clue - ladder) doing it for the woman in your life. See the horrible thing I'm doing with this? One of the consequences of wisteria, and the wistful, listless damsel in the song, may be increased, unbalanced dependence on the male, a dependence he may have neither the will nor the ability to meet, even if he thought it's what he wanted. And then he will annoy us. We don't mean it, but that's the way it can work out. And sometimes we bring it on ourselves. Do you want a living, growing symbol in your garden?<br />
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Of course wisteria can be managed, more easily and well, up a post, constantly tipped and checked, never extending itself, lapping up heat, light and water. It will still be more beautiful than anything else when it flowers. I don't deny this. Chinese varieties, sinensis, flower slightly before their leaves appear. Floribunda varieties, the Japanese, tend to be be later and leafier in flower.<br />
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If the word "macrobotrys " appears, that should indicate extremely long racemes of flower. Those varieties are at the far end of the exquisite demands of desire. That pale pink one above, so poorly photographed, and clearly visible from the Bridge of Sighs at St Johns College, Cambridge, UK, may not be one of those, but still quickens the pulse.<br />
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Sometimes I think wisteria is like an advertisement for gardening. It's a public plant, succeeding best on large walls and beautiful ancient facades. In a smaller garden, or on a regular fence, it doesn't always convince. But if you pass by a beautifully-pruned and managed wisteria outside someone's house, you'll feel its magnetic pull. Inspirational, ideal gardening, everyone can see the point. I hesitate to use the words trophy wife, but there it is, couldn't stop myself.<br />
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Gardening needs spectacular, legendary plants in a domestic setting if it is to fire the imagination of a generally not terribly interested populace. But there are a lot of wisteriae about - you're not obliged to have your own. If you're female you won't necessarily want to hear this, I know that.<br />
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In the part of Italy where I partly live, wisteria is used slightly differently, on pergolas and other supports, far less on walls. It is meant as much to create shade in summer as for its flowers. It's in lots of ordinary gardens but somehow less noticeable, the flowering lasts well into the leafing phase, blending into everything else.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Except for this one. Perhaps a double, lacks charm really.</td></tr>
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Here below, in this public-looking extravaganza of a property, wisteria is the principal decorative plant, running along the top of every piece of construction. Slightly out of this world but appropriate in this house, where you can't quite imagine ordinary people live. You can see the flowers on the right. It's not a special kind, but the way it has been used strikes me as rather effective, especially given that there is nothing in competition with it. Sometimes I feel that's the key: wisteria let loose is too gardenesque and overwhelming to go with other flowering plants. <br />
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Narcissi at its feet would not go amiss of course. The symbolic value never ends.<br />
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This next picture shows wisteria given its head, allowed to ramp up a tree until its vegetative growth reached enough light to trigger flower formation naturally. I think it comes from Magnolia Gardens in Charleston, South Carolina. I remember seeing plenty of escaped plants around there, covering acres of woodland, high in the trees, their blooms a bit pallid and scrawny. This one looks like a selected variety. But it's pretty big, my photograph does not do its reach justice.<br />
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Grafted and named varieties are obviously the thing to get if you are to enjoy the particular rare beauty of the wisteria you imagined. But be aware that your plant might also be a battleground. If an unnoticed shoot from under the graft develops it will vigorously overwhelm the demure, helpless beauty above it. Then you will have that sad and pointless object, a wisteria that refuses to flower. So you need to be on top of the baby wisteria from the word go, nipping it and checking it, constantly keeping its mind on the job of growing up and becoming the languid beauty we all desire.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Better, especially against the dark. They're fussier about background than you might think..</td></tr>
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Why is it women who buy all the wisteria? Why is it women who love this song most? I don't blame us, for who would have expected either fantastical symbol, plant or song, to turn out to matter? In the world of major machine-driven maintenance that gardening turns out to be, or in that other "real" gender-sensitive world of business, competition and finance, the occasional demanding climber or a little courtly love don't add much to the imbalance between men and women.<br />
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But I have solutions up my sleeve for both anyway. Not to solve the imbalances - my trust is in the the new breed of wideawake women for that - just to deal with the self-entrapping wisteria and the song itself.<br />
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For the song, hunt out and listen to the Hard Rain version. The whole album is supreme but this rendition of the song, which becomes bawdy and rampant, leaves no listener in any doubt. This is the uncourtliest of love, rewritten to yank a willing woman off the dance floor and quickly upstairs. Love is not the issue here, but a real choice is explicitly offered. It's another truth, just as real, one it's important for any woman to take account of and address, preferably before she makes that big brass bed and lies on it. And a much livelier song, with Rob Stoner (I think) helping belt it out, like a companion hoodlum. When I listen to this, I don't feel my bones and will weakening, that has to be a plus.<br />
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For the wisteria, well I assume we're talking about a wall or fence in a domestic garden here. I suggest being much more active and brutal with the pruning than you ever thought you could be. You can keep it as a single line even, at the right level, developing spurs all along. Cut everything away that doesn't conform to the shape you want. Train it hard. Never let it tell you how gentle, harmless and romantic it is.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just to prove how much control is possible.</td></tr>
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All this control seems like holding the wisteria back, perhaps you're preventing it from reaching its potential. But its mind is filled with nonsense so don't give it any quarter. There is no adored and helpless damsel, there is no creepy, minstrel saviour, nor any loving rescue. I'm telling my young self, not you of course<br />
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So let's be practical. Think of the two metre high boundary of your garden as the wall of a room. You're standing furniture against it as well as papering the wall and putting some lights and paintings up. So go for buttresses and clipped shapes, augmented with carefully managed decorative deciduous shrubs and perennials. Use pots and blocks to raise things up against the wall. Make a picture of it, with variety and balance.<br />
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Fit the wisteria in if the wall is sunny: make it live properly, with others, not drifting selfishly all over the place. Add appropriate trellis, mirrors, grilles, sculpted heads, whatever you like. Just make sure you use the whole height, starting from the base, rather than hanging, like hair, in a great bunch from the top. Gardening on the walls, it's all the go.<br />
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Those decorative deciduous shrubs won't leave you with great ropy stems tangling upwards. Once you've worked out whether flowers come on unflowered wood made last year (so cut out some flowered branches from the base and pin the new ones back) or on older wood like wisteria (so cut out the extension growth you don't need) you will find the pruning an interesting and rewarding exercise. Cut out all growth pointing away from the wall, whenever it catches your eye. Can be fun, even. Better than wiping surfaces and cleaning paintwork anyway. I rarely see it done as it could be, people are always in a rush to cover their fences with big climbers and I have been the same. <br />
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Once, many years ago I visited a garden where senecio greyii, hibiscus, deutzia and corokia had been used in this way. The elderly lady who cared for it said she had done it naturally, because she liked pruning. It was arty and interesting, with many seasons of interest. You might prefer to apply yourself to apples and pears, but philadelphus, dipelta, exochorda, berberis, chaenomeles obviously, virtually any small tree or shrub that accepts repeated pruning could be espaliered and used like this. All under your control, ladders only if you want them, the only price attention, care and a certain amount of self-belief to meet the challenge. I'm sorry I have no inspirational photographs, I hope you can see it in your mind's eye. <br />
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So let's drag that damsel out of the flower-clad turret to engage in her own fulfilment. May she recognise that what looks and feels like power over the susceptible male is nothing more than hopeful fantasy, its consequences utterly unsure. Let her be wary of the consequences of wisteria. May she enjoy that bed if she wants to, and may she claim the colour-vision for herself.<br />
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Let honesty and delight flourish. Clearly, I'm being subjunctive, heaven forbid I should be shrill or bossy, as you know, I'm much too loveable and pliable for that.<br />
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-25408350074550834332013-03-19T07:11:00.000-07:002013-03-23T15:55:22.696-07:00Stripped Bare - Long and Wasted Years<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've squandered the last two weeks of my life on a pointless, hopeless quest. My expectations and confidence were high. I truly believed a little effort, a little concentration, and I would be able to identify most familiar trees from a distance, simply by looking at their winter silhouetttes. An easy task; one I would enjoy, one I always, every winter, intend to make progress with. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now I remember why I give up, just as annually. Always with the same sense of baffled and regretful failure, but with a bit of relief too. It's just much more difficult than I ever imagined. The quicker spring comes the better.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So let's turn to the mystery of the wonderful Long and Wasted Years (from Tempest) where the protagonist measures the closeness and the distance in his relationships with others, lining them out for us. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each verse sketches an entire story, with rounded characters and some uncomfortable stripped moments of truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel I could listen to it forever</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">That crunchy voice speaks, so speakingly, fleshing out the bones, outlining<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>all the possibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s an absolute tour-de-force, in my view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The spacing, the economy, the effectiveness, the amplitude.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There I go, a true fan, with no pretences.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Winter pares trees down, to the essence of themselves. The spring limps towards us this year, but they're preparing to live again, thickening slightly in the bud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> I'm getting </span>ready for all the loveable greenness, but I did so want to attach names to shapes, at a glance, at a distance, like any of us could do with people we know, just from their stance, their form, and the way they turn and walk away.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve lived with these skeletons for months, just so many waving branches, but sometimes I feel they hold all the secrets of plant-life, hiding in plain sight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re so easy and obvious that our eyes slide over them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lines against the sky, telling us little, telling us everything.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Yes, they’re delicate calligraphy, elegant tracery, all that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they’re also damned irritating and hard to pin down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here in Piemonte, Italy these thin lines of slightly mixed trees are everywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I assume they mark boundaries, or possibly streams or banks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyway they’re charmingly characteristic and can outline a slope to its advantage or divide flat expanses with lace against the mist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps when people had less visual stimulation from all quarters, it would have been possible to enjoy a quiet game of Guess The Winter Tree, simply from the distant shape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> That's the game I would have loved to play</span>, Vegas or Pamplona being beyond my horizons</span>.</div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">But I need an expert on hand, or I need giant legs, so that I could bound forward, wrench a shoot off and then quickly back away to see the specimen from afar again. </span>Without helpful confirmations or corrections it’s hard to build a repertoire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too many trees fog into a confusion of fan-like, frondy similarity, startling in their likeness to coral, or other undersea forms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like ferns and grasses, or worse, mosses and lichens, the differences are both minutely insignificant and vast.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To be frank, it’s hopeless starting with an anonymous youthful mass like the mysterious line in my second photograph. You need mature trees, standing at a distance, trees that haven't been too interfered with. That's hard here in Mondovi', where the winter snows are deep and heavy. They break great limbs off, so in towns trees are rarely allowed to develop their wider characteristic forms. </span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Before I knew what a waste of time this tree-guessing game would be </span>I had imagined that careful observation from a distance would reveal subtly distinct angles of branching and twiggery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was going to excel on slight differences of angle of budding and length of limb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That showed me though. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found it impossible to collect enough examples of bare silhouettes that I could be absolutely sure of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was stuck with really obvious ones like weeping willow, Lombardy poplar, fastigiate hornbeam.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I’ve changed the rules now. You can use whatever helps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Either way I’ll win, playing here on my own.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So we'd better start here,</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> spying the outlined shape, attaching the name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can do the same in your own areas, where you may have entirely different, more magnificent and certain looking trees. Context is all, you need a rough idea of what might be there, rather than just starting with a blank slate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s begin with that fastigiate hornbeam, such a landscaper’s favourite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Great in-curved balloons.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Here below is the ordinary hornbeam, You can see how it relates to the ones above, masses of dark, spidery feelers, slightly cupped overall shape.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And here is its trained and tidied brother again, contrasting itself to a distant lime, which looks absurdly small. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I only think it’s a lime because it’s doing that thing of growing like a tower,with its oldest internal structural branches pushing up, its external slenderer branches sweeping downwards. That's what means a lime, tilia, to me. Close up, I look for the old flowers.</span></span><br />
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Below are two more limes. The one on the left may be a weeping version, like the one above, as the weeping seems integral, not just part of aging. But Tilia petiolaris, the most likely weeping lime, is always grafted, and I could not find a graft.<br />
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These are the things that drive a person to distraction and disillusion. You get stuck in these endless loops, you just want to get out, like a bee in the narcotic flowers, you fall to the ground, stunned and enraged.<br />
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Anyway, look at the two photographs below again. See the characteristic dome shape of the lime's fastest growing area at the very top of the tree on the right? Sometimes a hard thing to combine attractively with the down-sweeping older branches, which are just beginning to grow out and down. Tilia euchlora could be a suspect here, or it's the comon lime planning to be enormous. The one on the left is already considerably taller, and perhaps older. Perhaps that accounts for the difference in shape. Perhaps it doesn't. Now I'm screaming inside.<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You might think I'm overdoing the limes, I certainly do, just wishing to make this point about age, shape and type, trying to rub the sand from my eyes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So here's our last lime, an enormous one. Which one is it? Too big to be cordata, not as suckery as the common hybrid europea, but the right size. Might be platyphyllos but too wide really. Multiple upthrusters all sweeping and bending down, not a proper tower shape, but perhaps that's because it's had a good well-lit position and been left alone. There are others which it might be, or not. Possibly tomentosa, the silver lime. My reference book rushes to my rescue and kindly points out that even specialists are confused by limes and study the hairs on the backs of the leaves to be sure of which is which. Some of these hairs "contrive to be star-shaped". Now I think I've definitely gone mad. However, as a family they are "easy to spot, hard to tell apart". And that's definitely been my experience. Just to identify the family begins seem like an achievement.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And here below is another outline, representing a group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a wild pear tree, and it shows the short-jointed, untidy structure that often marks the vast rose family, including apples, hawthorns, cherries, all those fruits and flowers. Those are the words that help you spot them, confused old person or teenagers' bedroom words. Random branching, disorganised structure, cluttered. This one's a wild pear followed by a shapely hawthorn.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cherries are perhaps the least messily close-branched in this family and can stretch widely, sometimes even gracefully. You can tell those by the shiny circularly marked bark and the congested buds when you get close. I'm saying that because it's what I think, I haven't checked it yet. From a distance it's whenever you think a small tree looks interesting, sometimes a bit weird - get up close, it's often a cherry.</span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> </span></span></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Just to start with the biggest of families, even that’s a help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From there you can work forward, into finer distinctions and greater complexity. No-one could expect to tell all the different members of willows, or maples or poplars apart at speed, and from a distance. A great mess of hawks and handsaws.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Trees can seem to bring out the worst in gardening writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re either thumpingly dull and correct, or extraordinarily beautifully photographed and sentimental, with very little helpful information. Collins Guide is good though.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How fortunate that we have Hugh Johnson’s wonderful International Book of Trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was originally published in 1973, when “International”may have sounded less like a dreary, inaccessible concrete airport.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It packs an enormous amount of information and some beautiful photographs into an interesting illustrated format.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> I</span>t helps you understand trees in their families, and how they grow, their geography, ecology, history and importance to human beings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Another tour de force, this book gains in value and interest to me every year. Mr Johnson is a man capable of truly heroic feats of digestion and transmission of information. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But even his book is a little short on winter identification; my belief that it ought to be a popular hobby becomes ever more eccentric.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Here he is on alders, mainly the common and the grey - or alnus glutinosa and alnus incana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Occasionally you spot one that might be the Italian alnus cordata, though </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">apart from the large size of the black cones and the greener catkins it's shape is just as distinctively alder-like as the common - tall and slim with a strangely coniferous look. </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I first saw the Italian alder ( A. cordata) growing by the terrace of a mansion that had been burnt down…..the garden was rank and dispiriting, the ponds choked, the once-trim columns of yew toppling and coming apart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What were those gleaming dark green trees still formal and polished as butlers in the chaos?.....A tall and narrow tree, though with branches more horizontal than upright. Substantial heart-shaped leaves like a birch’s, but darker green and glossy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remarkable little cones: black eggs standing up on the branch-tips in trios.”</blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Such a complete introduction there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mutter “butlers in the chaos” every time I see one, for when they are in full shiny leaf they are clearly recogniseable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> But again, in winter, I'm not so sure of myself from a distance, confusion reigns, other alders masquerade. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And here he is on silver birch – “its beauty lies in its poise; the way it puts dense swarms of lacy twigs in the air with the flimsiest engineering”. There are the words - dense, swarm and flimsy. Do they apply to other birches? I leave it with you.</span></span><br />
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Try poplars – this anonymous hybrid that was planted for subsidies here opts for fragile long-limbed wafting.<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Lovely arms, but a tendency to fall over, a slightly sad and fin-de-siecle feeling to it. Planted in tight farmed lines it makes a brutal kind of sense. Sometimes it resembles branches stuck in the ground any old how. The spacing was regular when the plantation below was started, this hybrid has no name, just a number. It should be called Blanche Dubois. </span><br />
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I'll briefly turn to the pedunculate or English oak, which to me is a proper tree, one that seems to grow with a sense of purpose, homely but baroque at the same time. I hadn't quite captured the sense of purpose in my mind till I read Hugh Johnson quoting<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Oliver Wendell Holmes,</span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br />
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“Others (trees) shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak defies it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell, and then stretches them fifty or sixty feet…. to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organisation."</blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I love that sort of thing and I think that that is what I'm really looking for - a few words that sum up the way a tree looks and grows, to make me feel like I know it, to give it a face I might recognise again, especially stripped bare, for then I would feel I <em>really</em> know it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You can see I'm not a botanist, nor do I have a very orderly or precise mind. Words like chambered pith, and downy impressed stipules, they sound lovely, but I haven't the stamina to make them add up to a picture. I need a personality to connect to.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Alright, let’s try connecting this theme with Dylan’s song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s mainly to do with structure and engineering. The music starts like a single trunk rising up and suddenly bursting into a full canopy of branches, the voice snaking through.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The sound of the song and the sight of certain trees gives the same upward lift.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had thought the ash, whose branches turn up at the ends, whose buds are so beautifully sooty, whose strong, buoyant shape can carry you with it, I had thought the ash would stand for the song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> And it's a tree I can pick out, relatively comfortably, apart from when I'm confusing it with the grey sturdiness of a walnut. </span>But I cannot speak of the ash, for it is doomed and cursed in much of Europe now – a fungus advances and fear and worry accompany what was once a joyful if ordinary sight.</span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But then I saw this tree in Mondovi', and turned my back on the anxiety of the ash, choosing this instead as the tree of the song. This is one that will astonish Americans, for whom it is a suckering city weed, breaking concrete apart, overbearing and coarse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But look how graceful, with strength.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the tree of heaven, ailanthus altissima.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Far from a perfect specimen and carrying passengers, it's suffered an early pollarding perhaps, like the limes behind it. And it's been lopped since, and it's fought for space throughout its life. And no-one would now willingly plant a male, for it carries no reddish plumes of flower and tends to smell unpleasant. But look at it. What an unreasonable amount of joy it seems to express with its swooping branches, its passionate, rising curlicues. </span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Like the song, the tree is full of wintry joys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Rising, nearly parallel trunks, curling, falling extremities. The theme of the song might be the impossibility of changing your own nature and of resolving conflicts of intimacy and distance. Nothing to do with the tree perhaps, but an ailanthus must be an ailanthus and they're hard to live with in close and happy harmony.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The singer begins with a relationship where one moment was perfect and "we loved each other and our hearts were true”; to a sadder couple, connected but lonely, only comforted by the sense that they're both feeling the same thing.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In another verse, how hard it is to understand the loss of a family; then, how an apology might be required for secretiveness; and the song ends with a wrenching last verse of tears and torn souls. It seems to be a catalogue of negative, but balancing, emotional experiences set against the swelling rise of the whole structure and decorated with subtle invasions of resolution and joy – the equal of the lifts at the ends of the branches of an ash or the upward twists on the longer branches of an ailanthus.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Sometimes, indeed mostly, these thrilling lifts are contained in the very way the words are said or sung.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the singer apologises you can almost see his expression, placatory but humorous and conspiratorial.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What a sweetly intimate joke about sending his baby to jail. The double edge there is big enough to be the two sides of a great yawning gulf. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And on “Oh You don’t have to go”, he uses a clichéd seduction line which insincerely invites co-operation, which reaches out a hand to the listener – it's a kind of careless confident mastery of gathered bits and pieces of conversation, elements of things people say to each other when things have gone wrong, when intimacy and distance cannot co-exist. A few words, even stolen words, and you recognise something utterly familiar.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">As for the sun, burning some vapid dancing lover’s brains right out – it’s nothing to fear, it's a truth attack, scorching away at the shallow and the pointless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the crashed and broken dead enemy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That seems like someone very close, close enough to form part of the self even.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now I’m wading into unacceptable speculation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I still hear that mix – the sad and bad resolved. Always that redistancing.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Now, let me tell you something else about that bad but joyful tree, ailanthus altissima.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You won’t start to love it if you already hate it for the trouble it causes you, but something might soften.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apparently, it produces a kind of sweet substance from glands on the underside of the leaves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bees love this and rush to imbibe, according to some reports. They also certainly enjoy the flowers. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Ants love the leaf nectar too, but I won't focus on that. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So the tree of heaven reveals itself to be a source of sweetness and generosity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then you realise that it grows where literally nothing else could, in cities, on destroyed and poisoned ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It bears every climate, most droughts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a pioneer plant, with a relatively short life-span for individuals although new suckers appear, direct from the roots, in armies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Then eventually</span> it makes seriously damaged land fit for other trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it overwhelms, it overpowers and it displaces delicate natives from huge tracts of countryside, wherever gaps have appeared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> I cannot argue only, or indeed at all, on its behalf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> If I see it on my land, I'll have it out, quick as a knife.</span></span></div>
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Here's the female. Recognise the seed-heads?<br />
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Let's leave the ailanthus, it served as a shape, but it's not a tree to develop a close relationship with, though it's hard to keep at a distance if you've already got it. Unresolveable.</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This song is not sentimental.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a graceful string of words cataloguing some kinds of misery but concluding with a briskly heart-breaking “so much for tears”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We catch a glimpse of something stripped bare, we see the long and wasted years but we also see a sort of rebooting, the turning and lifting towards the light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What more can you do? What more can you want? You are what you are and you do what you can do.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">All I was hoping for was time and wit enough to learn to tell the trees apart in winter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> But I still can't do that - like the song, they won't simplify themselves. Shape-shifting, retreating and masquerading, the trees win in the end. I've enjoyed all the running about, up close one minute, far away the next but I don't think I've achieved much. Oh well.</span></span></div>
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-10996797825098296192013-02-16T16:23:00.000-08:002013-03-11T14:48:17.421-07:00Rose-diving - Beyond Here Lies Nothing<br />
Let's elbow our way through the folds and try to get to the heart of the matter. Try not to get lost or trapped. Get in, as they seem to say nowadays, in tones of marvelling enthusiasm.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.reproduction-gallery.com/oil_painting_reproduction_gallery/Georgia-O_Keeffe-Abstraction-White-Rose-1927-large-1129535572.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://www.reproduction-gallery.com/oil_painting_reproduction_gallery/Georgia-O_Keeffe-Abstraction-White-Rose-1927-large-1129535572.jpg" width="323" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Georgia O'Keefe - Abstraction White Rose</td></tr>
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Didn't someone say that in heaven we'll be eating caviar to the sound of trumpets? Not me, my own celestial choice today would be poached eggs on toast whilst listening to Beyond Here Lies Nothing from the album Together Through Life. At the same time, and, more to the point, I'd riffle through the pages of a really good rose catalogue, selecting future delights.</div>
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Peter Beales' catalogue is the one I turn to, helplessly seduced within about five minutes. I practise the art of choosing perfection: it's an exercise in painful pleasure, for decisions must be made. </div>
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Poppies, peonies and camellias can all drown us in their circling, centred, infinite depths. But the most powerful is the rose. Who could be immune? You'd have to be made of dust.</div>
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Today I'm thinking more about the perfect rose flower rather than the perfect rose plant, which is a taller order that I've considered elsewhere. Beyond this enfolding swirling flower lies nothing. Dive into the madness. Reason flees where roses reign. The brain collapses before those slippery, coloured coils.</div>
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Here's a picture of the loss of reason. I think it's David Austin's stand at one of those shows, Hampton Court, a few years ago. Point made surely.</div>
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But I'm not supposed to be dissing anything about the rose today. We're going to enjoy our transports, settle deeply in, fingering the alabastrine folds and just......wallow......</div>
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Here are a few of the roses I have loved, grown and sunk myself in. Here's Blue Moon, whose rapturous silvery mauve divides rose-lovers, but from whom I drink the rain, longing to be part of the rose, or for it to be part of me. It tastes of nothing, but the perfume and I become one for a moment. When full blown it opens wide and shows its heart.</div>
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Blossomtime, a pink climber. There are many. Have I had enough of pink? Even voluptuous pink?</div>
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This rose is gentle, but heavy with scent and petals. Try stumbling around in there. You have no chance. It's a slightly quartered flower, like an unruly head of hair it tries to spring from more than one vestigial centre.</div>
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And here's Leverkusen. Fewer petals, even a couple of stamens showing, pretty though muddled. But curvy, lemony, waxy. Another climbing plant or large shrub, flowering in early summer, sweetly and lightly scented. </div>
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And here's Clementina Carbonari, a shrub, with a little China blood perhaps - the thin stems suggest that. </div>
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And finally Gruss an Aachen, what they call a tidy shrub, no great gangling shoots, just a rounded shape and these puffballs, more quartering.<br />
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Now I'm getting to the point. Those roses are only a few of those that I have grown. And the only ones I'll be growing again from this selection are Leverkusen and possibly Blue Moon. As so often, Dylan has already explained it all so let's turn to the song.</div>
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Which begins contentedly enough, with a bit of a cha-cha-cha and a declaration of love and possession of the whole world. That's how it feels as you dive into the rose - everything else recedes, that's the mystery and the attraction. The first verse ends ominously enough with "nothing we can call our own". </div>
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And so it continues, only four verses but in each one the love reveals itself to be emptier. In the second verse the protagonist notes that the moon and stars lie in the beyond where nothing is supposed to be and tetchily refers to "this love that we call ours". And that's after a bit of midnight rambling. The nothing changes position, no longer in the beyond but drawing closer.</div>
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This second verse echoes the point at which the besotted rosarian tracks the curves and swerves of the petals of an old-fashioned or English rose - and notes there's nowhere to go. It's an Escher, not a proper flower. </div>
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Third verse. Here we've got every window made of glass. As if some windows could be made of something else, as if what seems solid reveals itself to be nothing but material about to be shattered. All we have left now is the mountains of the past. Nothing will come of this, it's all gone.</div>
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And how does the song leave the protagonist? Ready to leave too, on a ship. "Beyond here lies nothing, nothing done and nothing said". So everything is negative, nothing has even happened between them. The only positive thing left seems to be that ship with its sails spread. </div>
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And it's true of the rose too. If you were an insect, searching for the heart, the coronet of stamens, the golden pollen, you wouldn't stay here. There's nothing. Beyond the soft and scented colour there's nothing. And that's what I've been getting at, another little homily about the wildlife.</div>
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You see, it's all very well being unable to see or think sensibly, trapped by the mysterious satin pleats of a quartered rose, ancient or modern, but such gorgeousness is sterile, leading nowhere. The rose contains no possibility of a future, it's living outside the loop. And I'm not saying that everything has to reproduce, but it's not filling its niche, that rose is a parasite on the earth.</div>
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Now, see, I'm getting worked up. Partly because I find these roses so seductive myself, but also because, strangely enough, their old-fashioned looks, their aristocratic frenchified names, their high-powered PR - all these things combine to suggest that somehow they're <em>more</em> real, <em>more</em> ancient, <em>more</em> properly rosy than any other of their tribe. And the full-petalled David Austins seem to be sweeping the board, wherever roses are grown.</div>
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Not all David Austin roses lack exposed stamens. Indeed many have them. But the USP has been the ones with dense muddled centres, repeat blooming and gorgeous colours. The on-line catalogue sometimes proclaims the number of petals, in many cases well over 100. Think of it as so much coloured compost. </div>
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I've grown and loved some of the old French ones - Charles de Mills, Fantin Latour, President de Seze, quite a few others. I'm giving them up.</div>
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So how do they breed these roses, when they're basically great lolling self-centred vegetables, with no sexual characteristics? Well, the organs are in there somewhere. Sometimes a couple of stamened inadequates will appear amongst the blowsiness. But the reproductive parts have to be sought and isolated, all the petally debris must be cut away. If they want to reproduce they depend on human intervention.</div>
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But that really isn't the problem for me. Lots of things have reached that point of dependence. And wild roses are still everywhere producing away. No, it's purely the barrenness of this sort of rose as a food source for pollinators. Heavens, how annoyingly dull a point this reveals itself to be. And some people might want to suggest that roses don't provide much pollen or nectar for bees and other insects anyway. And that birds seem not to like big rose hips, though deer and squirrels will sometimes eat them.</div>
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It's all about access and the proportions of stamens to petals. Peter Beales' catalogue points out which roses will attract pollinators, offering three levels. A cursory investigation suggests the ones with beautiful great bosses of golden or dark stamens reveal themselves to be the best for this: it's logical, let's be logical.</div>
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Here's a picture of two roses lolling over a wall in Italy. The one on the left is clearly useless, the one on the right seems to have small etiolated stamens, despite its wide-open legs. But you've got to keep alert and use your brain, it's jolly hard to get good information about these things, most is way too general. If the plant produces hips, it must have accessible pollen so that's a good rule of thumb. Then eyes, unbutton those buttoned eyes.</div>
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I don't want to pick on David Austin, I'm all for exports, taking on the Dutch at their own game, filling peoples gardens with flowers, excitement about the beauty of flowers. But the thought of all those vast solid pouffes of flower covering acres of garden everywhere is uncomfortable. They'll be taking space where plants that offer sustenance: warp and weft in the greater projects of nature could and should be. <br />
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Let me be clear, David Austen offers roses with exposed centres, even amongst his so-called English collection, and Peter Beales sells lots that are buttoned and quartered, in the lovable parlance of the rosarian. But again, it's all about proportion, and in this case, sales and reach. And sadly too, direction. I see Kordes is going that way, Peter Beales' new ones are getting ever fuller-petalled. It's a fashion that has gripped the gardening world for years now.
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Back on my heavenly cloud, these are the roses I'm ordering for the Italian garden, which will be in shades of purple, lilac, lavender, yellow and white. Look at their lovely showy centres. Bury your head in those - you'll get covered in pollen. Admittedly fertilisation doesn't help with the longevity of the flowers, but I long for happy insect life, for my garden to be part of something bigger than itself.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">rosa alba semi-plena</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lilac Charm</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">rosa dupontii</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Faithful Friend</td></tr>
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And you don't have to forgo the swirling folding petals. Some roses, semi-doubles, or those with something around 20 petals, (which can include some gorgeous hybrid teas and many floribundas), hybrid musks, Portlands, many climbers and ramblers, others too probably, manage to combine extraordinary petallage with good stamens when they are full blown. Josephine Bruce is one, Blue Moon is a candidate, Leverkusen and other early beautiful yellows. </div>
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There are masses more, explore a little, following the rules</div>
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1. Do you love it? (colour, perfume, charm)</div>
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2. Will it work? (Size and shape of plant, disease resistance, amount and timing of flower)</div>
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3. Is it a solipsistic mop, going nowhere, offering nothing? (Away with it, put it behind thee.)</div>
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So let's tie it all up back with the song. What I love about that is how the nothingness shifts around. Its location is unstable, starting everywhere outside the couple on their throne, moving inside the protagonist, circling round the whole thing about love, ending up somewhere back very close to the "pretty baby", who must be left. There they are, those roses, so many pretty babies, sentimental, empty, pointless, just so many nothings. Quite clearly exactly what Dylan wished to tell us about. Boulevards of broken cars - pshaw! Or should it be, cha-cha-cha? </div>
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-65019176206829128932013-01-26T17:00:00.000-08:002013-03-27T16:29:43.008-07:00Banging About - Groom's Still Waiting At The AltarYou know how children like to fling themselves about? Bright-eyed toddler aliens running around, penned in for safety, banging about in a box.<br />
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Sometimes I can tap right into that bubble of energy, and feel the blood of agitation coursing through my veins. I can get that inner push, that need to feel my own edges. I want to bump and to be bumped back at. I'm alive and rushing about, not going anywhere, not getting anything done, just feeling the dash and the crash of it.<br />
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In illustration, I have the perfect song, a gardening theme, and even an appropriate gardening moment to throw us all together, rattling, into the square space. Shame about all the mess and the pots - they're going to stop our freedom of movement. They're just waiting for someone to come and tidy them up.<br />
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So here's the moment, and the beginning of the theme. We've had a bit of snow and we're waiting for more. I've not gardened anywhere for over a week.<br />
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Can't do much, stuck here, waiting for something to happen, all fired up, ready to go.<br />
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I thought I could get started here, on this new/old garden, which used to be mine when we lived in our old house. I thought I could, but I have to wait.<br />
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So I'm waiting.<br />
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Anyway.<br />
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So we moved into this new house at the bottom of our old garden.<br />
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The garden now requires nearly complete renewal, for the shape is different, it's approached differently and it's a completely different size.<br />
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More of a box really, a thoroughly fenced box with a corner cut out. <br />
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I thought I could have got started on it by now, but I have to wait.<br />
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Wait.<br />
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I know! I'll listen to the song! Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar. Sometimes it has a The at the beginning. It's the 4.05 minute version and can be found on Biograph and on the album Shot Of Love. Magnificent heavy blues about waiting whilst moving: running about while fenced in, explosions in a confined space. Play it loud, it'll shake in your seat and get you romping.<br />
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First of all, I'm going to get something off my chest. You will note that I have Michael Gray's Dylan Encyclopedia on my list of Books I Love. And that ought to be quite right too, I often have a quick read of it. He writes very well of this song and I may even have borrowed his "banging about in a box" metaphor, because it scored so high on the palpable hitting meter. <br />
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But I am, sadly, going to have to think about removing Mr Gray from my list. As this is really only relevant to the Dylan enthusiast, I will explain my reasoning on a separate page or Page as they're called in this format. I'm extremely picky about what I have on that loved books list and when my feelings get this mixed, well .......<br />
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Back to today's subject. Whenever I have to make a smallish, squarish or rectangular garden, walled or fenced to about six feet high all round, the problem feels similar. It's about balancing movement and stasis. You don't want it feeling airless and dead, your eye shooting over an empty centre and bouncing back again when it hits a wall. Nor do you want the suck and drain of a low central feature, pulling everything in. Straight borders following the lines of the walls will feel like the plants are desperately crowding to the edges. They'll look a bit fearful. Not relaxed, not relaxing.<br />
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Of course people make wild successes of all sorts of different things, wiggly organic shapes might work well for some, calm curves will be fine for others. Offset rectangles, spirals, horizontal lines - you can have what you want - but they'll have different effects. A bit of geometry can look right next to buildings. There are no rules though, and no answers.<br />
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Anyway, let's try for distraction and variety, but avoid clutter and confusion. The problem, and this particular solution, will feel cliche'd and old-hat to any garden designer, and I'm sorry about that. I could call it the dynamic diagonal and I might, if I didn't mind sounding quite that glib. Here it is in a garden I made quite a few years ago. Excuse the mess again, this is a proper, used garden, not for show.<br />
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And here it is in a Dutch demonstration garden, called Boomkamp. Thumping great scale, elegant hedgey architecture. But it's active and interesting. You want to follow the paths, you feel firmly held, but able to move. If gardens are enclosure and people like to feel free, this might be the way to do it. <br />
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Sometimes just a touch of a diagonal can alter the whole feel, sending the mind off in a different direction, making the air move, destroying the dullness. This garden, part of the gorgeous Cothay Manor, where I noticed the motif was used again and again, has very little of the imprisoning boxiness about it. The central diamond however, makes sense of the whole space, enlivening the straight loose hedges with contrasting angles. Simple, but effective and sharpening. <br />
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I'll show you a few more in a minute, after a wild swerve into the story of Claudette, the invisible, lost but forever demanding bride of the song. The protagonist couldn't have married her, they never even sorted out the most basic issue of any relationship, namely who owes what to the other, who's going to pay, and how willingly. It all seems to be summed up in "I'd a done anything for that woman if she'd only made me feel obligated" which is what he sings in this version.<br />
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The written lyrics say something else, namely "I'd have done anything for that woman, if she hadn't made me feel so obligated". That sounds like the opposite problem, but, as we all know in our hearts, both complaints are just ways to bang against opposite, or adjacent, walls in the same space. If your partner wants you to feel obliged, you won't like it, but if you don't feel some sort of obligation, perhaps you won't bother with any of it. What a ghastly mess it all is. Freedom within boundaries,- the human battle. Sometimes composed of careening, from one side to the other.<br />
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The singer, who's in another, different, ghastly mess, presumably stuck with waiting for the bride, running a high temperature, his face in the cement, fighting on the border, points out that as soon as you get what you want there's a risk you won't want it any more. His answer seems to be to leap out of the confining space, into a new age. But I'm not so interested in the leaping out: that theme won't help me with creating my new garden, which has to be done right here, inside the fences.<br />
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Do listen to the song if you don't know it. You might find the lumbering, familiar blues rhythms, pounding away in your head, rather dominating for a moment or two. It's what he does inside them that matters, exactly the conundrum that faces the owner of the small boxed garden.<br />
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I may have used a picture of the space above before - it's such an unusual, (and expensive) piece of modern garden architecture. From The Garden House in Devon. Hard to plant, hard to relate with anything else, it looks like a piece of sports equipment, but of course, isn't. The speed and number of the curves is right for the sound of the song, but they're not diagonal enough, sacrificing length for pace. The soundscape of the song is more like a series of offset angled lines, cranking at the turns and sometimes incredibly long. But still in that tightly enclosing blues box, and still banging back and forth, irregularly.<br />
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Try singing along with this song: I rarely do, but sometimes feel I could. Then I realise it's nearly impossible - the singer seems to have broken some sort of natural law about how many conversationally inflected words it's possible to fit against a strong beat whilst sounding like you're singing with it. And the rhymes are ridiculous but magnificent, at the same time. Here's a song where power is magnified by paradox, you can always find more of them. <br />
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And I have a gardening paradox here. One of the ways of creating diagonal dash and movement in a garden is simply to set your squares and rectangles plum to the sides. Face on, they might seem predictable and heavy-handed, but they instantly rearrange themselves into longer, more complex and dynamic diagonal lines as soon as you move to the side and look across them. Even a novice photographer like me does it automatically, knowing it will look more interesting. France is the place to find all the illustrations you want of this rather obvious discovery. This one's from the immaculate, exquisite Abbaye De Fontenay in Burgundy.<br />
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Below is the garden at Bury Court, a real designer's garden. Ranks of equal oblongs, set at right angles to each other, strict straight paths between. Planted as it is with massively tall grasses and herbaceous perennials, in the summer you can't see easily across it. To me it loses interest because of this repeated tight enclosing and the obvious geometry of the paths. Perhaps it gains a maze-like, hidden mystery because of the enormous concealing planting. In gardens that sort of mystery can be over-rated; we are not goldfish, we are cursed with memory, you can't spring that sort of surprise on us more than once or twice. Once you've understood it spatially, you're more or less done; and the plants are similar and repetitious.<br />
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It's my impression that over the years this garden has existed additions have been made to meet this problem and vary the lines - the massive gazebo has been added, the pond enlarged. So now you can do a bit of seeing across at the diagonal. Much better.<br />
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So, turn yourself to an angle, or turn the garden to an angle - that seems to be about the size of it. Here's another of mine: the photograph is taken from the kitchen door, just enough of an angle. The minimal curve of the hedge above the bricks is really a short diagonal. I like the formality slightly broken up like that, a little bit of movement, but you might think that the garden is wide enough not to need it.<br />
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You might like to have another look at the photos at the beginning, my current challenge. Another relatively wide garden. Once the snow has melted, my impatience can convert to action, I can start laying out my lines and clearing my spaces, hoping to set them in a dynamic, lively relationship to the heavy pushing back of the fences.<br />
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What can I say about the song, the theme and the snowy moment? I hope the connections have emerged and that you're not just shaking your head, thinking of all the interesting lines and rhymes in the song that I haven't mentioned.<br />
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Let's say that it's all about tension and its release. Regardless of the chaos and misery in some of the song, the blues here is just a box, just a basic shape. You're bouncing back and forth against the sides and you're either taut with waiting for something or just making the most of your confined space. Having pulled and pushed us about where we stand, confused us with paradoxes and shown us how to release a bit of pent-up excitement and impatience, the protagonist of course chooses to bound over the top, giving up entirely on Claudette. Typical.<br />
<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-81324411260094380842013-01-06T18:28:00.000-08:002013-01-12T23:45:41.386-08:00Moving On - Narrow Way<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Readers may recall an attempt I made to prepare a plan for the land around the Italian house, an area I laughingly and ambitiously describe as a garden. </span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Well, I can report no progress at all on that front.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The house begins to be liveable, the donkeys have gone to their winter quarters, friends have worked hard to reduce scrub on the far side of the house and you can see the shape of the land. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we are nowhere with a new cess-pit and reed bed, nowhere with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>creating somewhere flat to stand a table outside the kitchen, nowhere with steps, paths or beds. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And today I plan to discuss the paths issue, for it is right at the front of my mind. </span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To begin with, I don’t know how to move around a garden without some sort of pre-arranged route.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this my own failure, am I just being demanding and unadventurous?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many people don’t seem to bother with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>creating access to their gardens here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They plant trees at regular intervals, right to the edges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> A</span> house will have the necessary remotely-controlled gates, a few beds may be near the drive but the garden itself, sitting greenly and unreachably beyond, makes no suggestion that you might like to wander amongst it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fear this means you can’t get out, trapped princess-like, needing courage and a flail of some sort to venture in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worse, your chosen route will have no meaning or purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In England on the other hand country gardens are all about mown paths through meadows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I cannot personally think of a better solution: cheap, easy, inviting, not, on the whole damaging to the environment. And pretty, some are very, very pretty, whether or not you have meadows filled with flowers or just longer grass.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So that’s what I want, I’m not a princess, I just want what’s easy and sensible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve been saying that all my life, and look where it’s got me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p>The song today is Narrow Way from the recent album Tempest. Now this album is to me a glory. I don’t wish to be too affectedly literary but imagine a landscape of sharp ancient rocks, crusted with falling depths. We're bothered by someone we might mistake for a vengeful old satyr, reeling and croaking, whispering right in our ears. Fortunately his land is not one of silly dwarves and one-dimensional magicians – we’re in a real world where there is no proper quest and nothing quite works out. And we are mistaken about the bothering: the voice has everything it always had, the tales told are absorbing, the rage a bit redemptive and there is truth at play amongst the ruins.</o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Narrow Way </span>seems to be about the failures and vicissitudes of the path already taken. We have no choice but to follow a narrow road through life, we can’t live wider than the experience of our own selves <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>will permit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Even if there are</span> broad landscapes to the side the ways we take must fit our feet; we only have the minutes we have, in the places that we are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lay them end to end – they’re a path. </span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Without trying to force the issue <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>too much, I would love to find pre-forged paths around the land here and indeed have sought them. I wouldn’t even mind who or what had made them, whether boar, deer, donkeys or hunters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I see few signs, the land has not made particular sense to anyone, beasts and people have ranged over it in a widespread way, leaving no directional mark, only the unhelpful ruffles of agricultural terracing and the endless lumpy tussocks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That leaves me high and dry, having<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to work it all out myself, laying tracks with no past to guide me.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I have a strong belief that a path ought to be flattish from side to side if you are to walk along it gently and comfortably.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely no path will work where one foot lands inches below the other and the walker must lollop along, half-falling down the hill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The contours are intractable,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we are going to have to work with a small bulldozer, a competent driver, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and a cut and fill technique.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> I am a bit daunted, seeing no answering recognition of my intentions in the eyes of anyone I have spoken to who might be able to do the work. Here, you either smooth it all out, or you make proper terraces, which you plant properly with lines of fruit trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pointless strolling about on your own land, which I so weirdly desire, seems to be completely alien.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">And that is the thing with creating paths in a garden - they cannot just randomly lead you about - they have to take you somewhere you want to go; they have to take you there in an interesting and sensible way; they have to look as if use and history had a hand in their creation - it's an awful lot to ask, this compromise between what you wish you did and what you actually do. A path is behaviour written on the land.</span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The protagonist of today's song believes there might be a virtuous life, involving a degree of gentleness, but it is not the long and narrow road he has taken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Each new story, in each new verse, describes a different failure to be good or nice, or helpful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> He</span> tears around in his wrong mind, stands by while someone’s buried and dug up and traitorously kisses a cheek.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Someone dies begging for sustenance, while he fights, or runs: he loots and plunders, envies and insults people, cuts and scars them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He feels badly about all this, his habits, which have been part of who he is, have failed to reach up to his god, or ideal, or maybe even to what other people might want <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">or need from him.</span></span></span> </div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He bargains for a way forward,a way forward which requires the deity he seems to be addressing to "work down" towards him as he "works up" towards it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> He keeps coming back to it, like one of those labyrinths of paths that keep bringing you back to the same view. </span>I appreciate the drive and the conviction of the repetition in the song, indeed would like to adopt a little forcefulness as I try to make my own paths.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Anyway, it seems that angels must reach down to us as we stumble sinfully about, unable to change who we are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> That seems like a rather unusually backwards way of thinking about the redemption issue where all the power and the forgiveness stays on the same side. Being redeemed has always, to me anyway,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> seemed simultaneously over-elaborate and half-baked as an idea. </span> I admit I find this particular version of that doctrine rather appealing, in my flippant atheistical way, though I can't see that it will solve anything - it may even have some rather ghastly unlooked-for philosophical consequences, which I choose not to pursue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The protagonist seems to wonder about where it will get him too, for about halfway through the song he turns to the comfort that seems to work for him, the fleshy comfort of women, and makes do with that for a while as he struggles further along his path, further along the repetitions of his life.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We create paths in gardens, to show the best way to go, to manage the 3D experience: lines of desire to lead us on and bring us back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>paths we leave behind in life are the tracks of everything we’ve done, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>failures<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and mistakes standing out against the neglected overgrowth . <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I hear an almost nausea-inducing seesawing in the music of this song –there is no peace, no resolution, only the constant return to the refrain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like walking along a path where the camber affronts your equilibrium, like the paths that we could end up making here, blindly plunging about the contours, never flat, never comfortable, getting from place to place but badly and with difficulty, circling round the same problems.</span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So now the song has filled me with awareness of the downside of path-making let’s collapse onto the kind earth and try to work out how to get to grips with this land, land where I personally have no fear of meeting my past, although I’m surrounded by those who have that experience and feel badly about some aspects of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is a story that a house was gobbled up here, when the earth opened and the house fell in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The underground streams that sometimes emerge, creating small bogs or running swamps, create beds that become dry and eroded in summer.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Next thing you know a road has been developed, even marked on old maps as such, exactly where the water runs and tears everything up every year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> The road that flings itself down the hill towards our house is one such, nothing more than a stream-bed when it rains, posing as a reasonable, if steep, principle access track the rest of the time.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Other</span> roads run across the high ground, along the ridges, where ancient towns and villages cling. They’re high and narrow, the land falling away<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on either side, leaving you feeling slightly queasy as you plunge along them.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">At the edge of our land, next to which tractors roll on their way to the fields beyond, there is a tiny little chapel, built by a local man, shown below.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The second photo shows the chapel, now in a state of collapse, in the distance. The white block in the front is the new insulation which is being attached to the house, from which I took the photograph. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-PBtyKiAED91TCuUsn53Qg4Dc1VKQ20asawA0TrzLxBjFD6ZEIN6kvKNBgu9OqASNz-cTT5BeA_q-mtTWgRlriohmUFr54ha22UZK0urkIXUnCKcs1fUsc2HAzODebW1Rqzsx9D2yN0BF/s1600/P1040546.JPGcomp.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" eea="true" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-PBtyKiAED91TCuUsn53Qg4Dc1VKQ20asawA0TrzLxBjFD6ZEIN6kvKNBgu9OqASNz-cTT5BeA_q-mtTWgRlriohmUFr54ha22UZK0urkIXUnCKcs1fUsc2HAzODebW1Rqzsx9D2yN0BF/s200/P1040546.JPGcomp.JPG" width="150" /></a><img border="0" eea="true" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXGoRxU1CrdFeB3N9lwtK7nf1cf2IhudKbKDBWoBsg9nQPmOtCZM1inVBcmJYierQ43IBaatbk6qAl3iVtx5mZeFRffxjZ7ItGG2ccXT1rhxvWMwLT7rEu9G8QnY3FLosp9KhjLu4Fezcr/s320/P1040433.JPGcomp.JPG" width="320" /><br />
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<span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; mso-spacerun: yes;"><img border="0" eea="true" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZztKmZPiCXouo1umr923aiTjRd3vyBZbr4wuUj37xz8XpBYvsZP1DNrvksoG5KxPimGSUPOiwuw0zvByTI8Q5LKV6zSnncC6yKFegaTUX76wthmMeuKG6eqavnHIDT_CPGtFoc_qSPLKK/s320/P1040547.JPGcomp.JPG" width="240" /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our neighbour became tearful and angry as she talked about the chapel, recalling how her uncle had filled it with potatoes, who knows when, years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She relived the sorrow and the insult as she spoke, unable to reconcile herself to the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel unutterably foreign at this point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we have been visited by church dignitaries and have heard that the chapel is to be rebuilt and reconsecrated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The track up to the town will be reinstated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re glad to hear this though we have quite happily forced our way up and down the hill, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>nearly along the stream-bed, where the ancient path had been obliterated. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Path-making, the past, a confusion of losses and desires, all these themes are making tracks through my mind.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thin Paths, a book by Julia Blackburn, draws these threads together, telling memories of the elderly around a now deserted village in the mountains of Liguria, not far from here. Those memories are of lives lived in restriction and repetition, only the occasional flash of joy, the lost paths that linked activities, settlements and habits now mostly obliterated. War and poverty have left their sad and frightening traces. The author draws close to the past and the people around her and notes their tendency to relive all the experience, all the trauma as they recount their stories, following their familiar inner paths. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And there we have it about habitual paths, they draw human lives across the landscape and also in the mind, moving fingers writing and moving on, just as the song reminds us. Not moving on, not being able to move on, can seem like a blessing or a curse - for most things have two sides, an up and a down, working one way, working the other.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We seem to be far from gardens, but we're not. The sort of paths I plan to make here</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> are really nothing more than elaborated tracks, of the sort created by regular movement of people and animals. They need a few markers, the occasional tree or steeper slope to wind around. Making that convincing, not too gardenesque, that'll be the trick.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It dawns on me that, in making my remarkably flimsy, cheap gardens for other people I have very often skirted round the need for a path, when perhaps I should have been using a path to do the skirting. Direction and flow have been defined by gaps and negative spaces between blocks of planting. Sometimes I've turned a couple of steps into a pull between areas, making the most of very little. I've done a similar thing in life too, following where there is least resistance. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So neglecting to forge a path has been my sad failure, not being too forceful and focused, but being too gentle and rambly. I have not worked my way up or down, but looking back I've created a rut behind me, nearly closing over as I move forward. Conviction and a certain thrusting sense of necessity would have made a different way forward - one I need to think hard about in this new landscape. Perhaps there'll be forgiveness for a more forceful sense of where to go and how to get there, though I'll only be making temporary marks on the ground.</span></div>
<br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-57866948107955817312012-12-05T04:50:00.000-08:002012-12-12T12:16:04.404-08:00 Rue The Day - I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here's a rather December picture. It's a plant of rue, ruta graveolens, not the tighter, brighter kind called Jackman's Blue - it's the rarely seen species, glimmering away in a wilder part of the Bagatelle gardens, Paris.<br />
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How useful is rue then? We used to think it belonged in herb gardens - those unsuccessful institutions for meek, ramshackle, tasty-leaved plants. Herbs can be roots, seeds, stems. Really they're just very strongly flavoured vegetables, of which you only want a little bit. Or, to put it another way, they're wetter, greener, spices. In our innocence we used to try to corral small tasty leaves of this type, plus a few unlikely roots and selected seed heads, in old cartwheels, or divided and segmented prisons, out of which the mint, lovage and lemon balm would burst, frightened by the horseradish.<br />
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I love the way I sound in that last paragraph, so worldly-wise, like a real gardening sophisticate, who never made an error or followed the crowd down a foolish cul-de-sac. Nonsense really. Best course to take is learn the lesson and be a bit rueful about it.<br />
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Here's that sort of herb garden. It carries less of the herby baggage now, leaning more towards its own topiarised divisions; indeed, it's heavy sculpture now, frilled with wispy fluff. From York Gate in Yorkshire,UK. Significant changes have been made, but no rue is evident.<br />
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Rue may be an interesting and useful emotional response, leavening regret or disappointment but it's not a very useable herb. I cannot imagine wishing to eat it; a sandwich of rue would sear my mouth with bitterness. <br />
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For years however I have used rue in my English gardens as a strong rounded clump of glaucous blue. There are three little ones in the picture above, in heavy soil and dry shade. Though it will look good in a gentle climate right through until the spring, it's particularly telling in August, exactly when one is full of rueful reflections about gardening, feeling the game is not worth the candle and wondering where it all went wrong. Excitement is at a low ebb, but if in early spring you managed to trim your rue down to a nearly cabbagey stump your reward is here, tight blue filigree in informal globes, brightening dry shade and lifting small maroon, magenta or pale sad pink flowers like allium senescens.<br />
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Not one to put with lush prairie planting and big flowers, rue seems best to me against low, fairly delicate planting. So-called alpines (another elastic category) that are past their own moments of bright flower can work well. It's slightly artificial colour can also stand well in town gardens where evergreens and architecture predominate. In old-fashioned non-naturalistic planting in other words, so uninteresting and passe', now that we're all straining to make our gardens look as though they just happen to be be beautiful and full of flowers, not as though we've spent forever trying to achieve that effect. Smart hedges and topiary of yew, box or hornbeam are fine of course. They are for the straight-lined containment and shaping of the abounding naturalness. I will remind you at this point that I'm not at all bitter, I'm rueful.<br />
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Here are two relatively recent kinds of herb gardens, neither of them claiming to be a herb garden as such. The first could easily have rue in it, but doesn't. It's part of Beth Chatto's exquisite informal Mediterranean dry river bed planting, perfect for many of our tastiest herbs. This garden is underpinned by the truths of naturalistic planting but the grouping and placing is that of the conscious gardener making pictures. I love it, but it's not very Now.<br />
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The second one, below, from Morville Hall, on the other hand, is very current. It looks like a runaway herby potager or cutting garden. Soft and misty, haphazard, pretty by accident -it looks "natural" and adorable. Note the sweet peas: is there a plant that requires more human attention? Rue might fit in, especially if running to flower or seed.<br />
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But rue won't go everywhere, blue filigree foliage makes it altogether a rather demanding little madame or possibly monsieur. So there's the thing - you have to keep a tight check on your rue - it's not a plant or a sentiment of which very frequent or repeated use can be made. Here and there however, at well-chosen moments it can strike just the right note, refreshing the regrets of late summer or a relationship that ended untimely and against your will.<br />
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And so we turn to the song - I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met). It's a song from the early album Another Side of Bob Dylan. The theme is of innocence versus artifice, apparent straightforwardness versus incontrovertible game-playing - it's more or less there in the title.<br />
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I'm circling round a plant-based connection to the singer and his story. He could be bitter, coldly ignored by the female conquest of the night before, but he's not - he prefers to finesse disappointment by learning something, ruefully. He learns that it is easy enough to deal with rejecting someone else- all you have to do is act like you have never met, you don't have to explain or argue. As a person on the receiving end of such treatment he is full of youthful bravado, wondering what he did wrong. As a person looking for ways to manage life, people, and their many demands he decides, exchanging disappointment for amusement, that this is a useful idea, and you can use it with anyone you like. It's a shift from one world to another, from innocence to cynicism, the brandishing of a little rue leading to the acquisition of a useful skill.<br />
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The song has an interesting modernist feel. The music is dissonant, even rudimentary. He uses half-speech, plunging you into the middle of a conversation. As the listener you fill in your own half as the song goes on. He sounds like a friend trying not to spill his guts but needing to confide and think through his rejection, so there's a feeling of intimacy. He uses every trick in the book to distance himself from any possible sorrow, only the harmonica betrays him. And that too convinces us of how hard he is working to cover up his true feelings, and therefore of the depth of those feelings. Or is that too Machiavellian an interpretation? Maybe the laughter is genuinely because he sang the verses in the wrong order, not rueful about being ignored at all.<br />
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He laughs anyway, he remembers how her skirt swung, how watery and wet her mouth was. Who would ever imagine you could say that, it sounds so naive, so accurately and almost childishly visceral. But there's more to it than that, we all know what he really means. Anyway it serves to prove that she's lying about <em>something, </em>even though she doesn't want any more of him now. Its another very crafted, clever song, rhetoric in action. I completely believe him, but the whole thing's a set-up, like the modern naturalistic garden.<br />
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In my youth it dawned on gardeners that plants, like people, should aim to have something interesting to offer even when the raging glory of reproduction is past. It's a rather dated realisation about how to plant a garden now, one that can result in a rash of tawdry and attention seeking leaf-forms.<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Still, a little intelligent
restraint ought to be possible, as in all things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See the picture below, again from Beth
Chatto, gentle contrasts of shape and colour, all clearly guided by a
gardener’s hand.</span><br />
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Let me remind you of what we loved - plants that filled our gardens, covering every inch of soil, end to end and depth over depth. One thing would arrive as another finished, bulbs pierced through; foliage, where possible evergreen, made complementary contrast at every level. Beds faced a certain way. Ornamental gardening was like flower-arrangement on the ground. The plants used were expected to offer maximum bang for minimal buck - especially in terms of space. Thence hebes, hostas, acers, photinias, euonymus. Characterful leaves of many colours, impact of shape, structure and hue.<br />
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The effects die hard. New coloured-leaved forms of nearly every sort of plant, preferably shorter, tighter and easier, are still sought and introduced. On the one hand, they're terribly tempting, so neat and bright: on the other, they look synthetic and clumpy, the dead hand of a forgotten fancy.<br />
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span lang="EN-GB">I’m sorry to use this next picture, but not sorry enough to stop myself. The garden was one I simply passed,
not open to the public, not asking for my opinion, but it illustrates my point
as well as anything could.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An explosion
has occurred in a garden centre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or an
enthusiastic<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>innocent has simply fallen for
everything, when coolness and hauteur might would have worked better.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIMWGjZ0LkBOF-97zumLuod0zSuFpcvfovlZJo3adFwLLfeW2zmIkuNDaAhdHr9YU183m5Pb18sYIP00x2wDVvHg3kyPSMcUlE21kL-HumRwveqeg2x9ofUfAy2mFTGnC4mpXoFakD-3wA/s1600/DSCN2516.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIMWGjZ0LkBOF-97zumLuod0zSuFpcvfovlZJo3adFwLLfeW2zmIkuNDaAhdHr9YU183m5Pb18sYIP00x2wDVvHg3kyPSMcUlE21kL-HumRwveqeg2x9ofUfAy2mFTGnC4mpXoFakD-3wA/s400/DSCN2516.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">So now I hope you can see how these things are true for both gardener and lover. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hip and distant, I’m sad to
say, scores higher than frank and keen. Naturalistic is both simpler and more difficult in gardens. And the song too turns everything on its head, several times over. We end up wondering exactly where artifice lies.</span></span><br />
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Back to the plants. Can we retrieve something from those out-dated ideas? I still cling to some of what I learnt, to what made so much sense - I still like plants that offer interesting shapes, stems and leaves, plants that cover the ground but are more than formless matt mid-green. I do not like to place all my eggs in the basket set only for flowers. Especially in darker Kent, where we're used to a bit of murk. Light levels can postpone and limit summer flowering but winters are often warmish and dankish, making a mess of dying foliage and seed-heads.<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: IT;">I have tried experimenting with freer, taller, gently coloured plants, both
shrubs and perennials, that can offer that extra bonus of softly coloured
leaves over a longer period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here I’ve
used a taller glaucous blue plant, thalictrum flavum sbsp glaucum or, as it
also seems to be known, thalictrum speciosissimum, or Illuminator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s also called Dusty or Yellow meadow-rue
and that is in fact what it is like, a huge open rue, blue-leaved and
fluffy-flowered. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1aZkS8vA04eb2trbHHO7IbkmUmU617R86A4Emrrw51znx4cnKE5BNDK0nC5A4PwyCM72DEhqQr6q8helhSHoVHM3RTEm15uExSfD5LUAtH3rRx47XZOuIHff8VlLqRn0ryecEtNF_4PwJ/s1600/compressedP1110015.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" rea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1aZkS8vA04eb2trbHHO7IbkmUmU617R86A4Emrrw51znx4cnKE5BNDK0nC5A4PwyCM72DEhqQr6q8helhSHoVHM3RTEm15uExSfD5LUAtH3rRx47XZOuIHff8VlLqRn0ryecEtNF_4PwJ/s400/compressedP1110015.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: IT;"><o:p></o:p></span> </div>
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<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: IT;">Alongside it is a tiny-crimson-flowered, late-blooming fuschia with ashy pink
leaves, (fuschia magellanica versicolor), and a yellowish-leaved abelia (abelia grandiflora Francis Mason) with eventual pale pink flowers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The thalictrum can be cut to the ground after
it turns messy in July and will speedily refurnish itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The abelia is nearly evergreen with me, just
remove old wood from the base when it gets congested.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fuschia needs cutting to the ground in
spring and any plain green shoots should be removed from the base as it
restarts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plant it all once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weeds and slugs barely get a chance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Flowers from June to October, even November,
no resowing, or dividing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But maybe it’s
just a mess and a bore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
It is at the boundaries of our desire for colour, order and complexity, against our love of looseness, naturalness and wildness, that we fight our gardening battles. Quick, plant some grasses - relieve the heaviness and stage-management of the old style of planting. Drag the casualties, shrubs and bright evergreens off the field. No-one seems to want or even comprehend low ground-cover. I'm left puzzled and lost sometimes, longing to use my old weapons.<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">As the song reminds me
though,you need to be able to recognise a little artifice and be able to use it
yourself. Preferably with a light touch. No point acting like you've never met
when a simple cool acknowledgement will do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>No point pretending that flowering is endless and gardening unnecessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or that what seemed good once is the same
now. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A little rueful discrimination might help as
the tide turns. We’ll still not get it quite right, let’s hope we get it wrong
differently. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1328021870793697876.post-39848228029991093592012-10-21T08:18:00.000-07:002013-10-06T15:30:12.871-07:00A Brutal Elegance - Every Grain of Sand<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">I don't really mean the song is brutal, far from it. But death and evolution are infinitely brutal and infinitely elegant, endlessly turning and resolving. The individual seems to be everything and the universe nothing. Precisely and equally, the exact opposite is also true.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">A dear friend and I discuss, and attempt to apply, the William Morris test when deciding what to chuck out of our houses and what to keep. Only the truly beautiful or the truly useful. Everything else must go. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">But a reasonably loving observation of nature suggests something further, namely that true utility eventually tends to some sort of wild and strange beauty.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">The Komodo dragon may give us pause in the consideration of this theory but I'll stick with it. A perfect equilibrium and fitness to the task is all; from efficiency arises beauty and the unfit falls away. </span></span></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXDek1FvAWtvsv3vaKwbB5A-vM3WXadVUHQfmn9xil1eFi3z3g146ALZH9TmYAkOI4D3HYERwuGM_kdmjc-6cqmw4hd3lQGRwoSPZPkwg7NkYGxt_zu-x_E7rh0rS1T4_AWzkL-_W09sf7/s1600/P1040198.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXDek1FvAWtvsv3vaKwbB5A-vM3WXadVUHQfmn9xil1eFi3z3g146ALZH9TmYAkOI4D3HYERwuGM_kdmjc-6cqmw4hd3lQGRwoSPZPkwg7NkYGxt_zu-x_E7rh0rS1T4_AWzkL-_W09sf7/s400/P1040198.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The persimmon or diospyrum kaki. A remarkable fit with human needs in a continental climate - no care other than planting required, produces delicious fruits late in autumn, ready for the dark days of winter. How did I ever deserve such a lovely thing?</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">I <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">sit here today with six scaffolders - presumably similar to scaffolders all over the world, loud, rambunctious, determined, not beautiful yet, utilitarian and proud of it. They're a bit upset however. We have an enormous hornets nest under the roof in the pigsty/stall/hutch section of our Italian house and they are worried that taking down the scaffolding will cause some sort of war for survival between man and hornet - the latter on their home territory, the former keen to get on and off the job with no problems. One of the scaffolders, perhaps with a slightly more philosophical streak, completely useless in his chosen profession, has pointed out the magnificence of the hornet construction and admires the fact that it was created without obvious scaffolding of any kind. I suppose that's not quite true though; in some ways a hornets nest is probably nothing but internal, integrated scaffolding.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEhZ3ghiMU2iQ0kmcw5OPLet6EdH1x6SUdtiVX-KdnEdWr5K6kZ3jVw1rd7pBWuowZi9h_Zb3r8_iVtaFWK0TAi-uZpQRccQPNYnT4eqsXuBuFRYl_zdZSF3gxbwt6xuJilSkE-iYgwIdx/s1600/nestP1040194.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEhZ3ghiMU2iQ0kmcw5OPLet6EdH1x6SUdtiVX-KdnEdWr5K6kZ3jVw1rd7pBWuowZi9h_Zb3r8_iVtaFWK0TAi-uZpQRccQPNYnT4eqsXuBuFRYl_zdZSF3gxbwt6xuJilSkE-iYgwIdx/s320/nestP1040194.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">Anyway we've phoned the firemen, who seem only slightly interested, to discuss them coming to remove the nest. I don't know, I'd hoped that as the autumn advances, the nest could be knocked down after the hornets left it to do whatever it is that they do. I understand smoke could be involved. As I cook a bit of fish for my lunch, I'd rather not be responsible for the death of thousands of hard-working hornets, their loves, their hopes, their belief in a future for their children.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">I see the chief scaffolders are not interested in discussion with me, the pathetic householder. They've had a pee here and there, so something important has been achieved. They're rushing about now, swearing about the inconvenience of the location - the wheels of their trucks having ground out pits of slippery mud on what passes for an access point. I await my friendly, authoritative chief builder, Ottavio, with concern. I know there have been previous discussions about the access issues. Blame has been cast, at driving abilities, topography, weather. But in the end there's little to be done but find a solution, abandonment of the job being the only other alternative.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">Utility, on its journey to eventual beauty, if we are to believe my initial assertion, is all about fitting in with the reality of how things are. Stuff works, or it doesn't. Time moves on and sorts it all out. What succeeds dies, what fails dies out. Simple. Painful. You may have what you want in the face of that. We have filled the world with abandoned workings, we will fill it more, all will be abandoned, knocked down. A planet of toxic rubble will breathe deep and start again.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">My tasks today are to view, with mixed horror and enthusiasm, the arrival of the donkeys which are going to clear our land. Electric fencing and anxiety are all in place. Then to review matters with Ottavio, the builder. To decide with the plasterers on whether to leave exposed the iron ribs that hold the thin curved <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">ceiling vaults in place, or whether to plaster them over, thus creating a wavy but uniform effect. </span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqCBAAuvRH0Z2xHYL-7URXfdUp9H7mvyKSZ3Z5XQN4MEKpV0XIBpTvdkqNwk8Rzpj335Zwry4-APr6dGcRnI15Vl6Xy2DfAwrfSRnvljG_M5rTHWvaBDAt8Rgc4Wcb0w-lSx5hJynjL6PR/s1600/P1030503.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqCBAAuvRH0Z2xHYL-7URXfdUp9H7mvyKSZ3Z5XQN4MEKpV0XIBpTvdkqNwk8Rzpj335Zwry4-APr6dGcRnI15Vl6Xy2DfAwrfSRnvljG_M5rTHWvaBDAt8Rgc4Wcb0w-lSx5hJynjL6PR/s400/P1030503.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Exposed, the ribs would look a bit stripy. You would see the nature of the construction - would this be useful? I'm not sure it would be beautiful. Neither Darwin nor Morris can help me here. No-one is prepared to admit that any other consequences follow, in time, labour, complexity or maintenance. I find this hard to believe but have to adapt to circumstances. Ottavio is a sphinx on the subject. OK, let's have them concealed under the plaster.</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinUYfiE93TUaKZ5pRAvWMtQCeUZYi7rEyg2jw23b4EKS4knoSrngqV85hhNHgAu2PsAjpXLK07AsggF9jVbTsaH_b2P1h8fBOv_x_rrZBS7FfyzqjO_-V_8Zd5YBJavjTVdO6D4Fx3wwZF/s1600/P1040188.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinUYfiE93TUaKZ5pRAvWMtQCeUZYi7rEyg2jw23b4EKS4knoSrngqV85hhNHgAu2PsAjpXLK07AsggF9jVbTsaH_b2P1h8fBOv_x_rrZBS7FfyzqjO_-V_8Zd5YBJavjTVdO6D4Fx3wwZF/s400/P1040188.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Oh let's get back to plants - so much easier, and even if they die because of bad planning or lack of knowledge - at least no suffering is involved. I'm always astonished to discover that some people find this hard to accept and go in for the rescue of plants they see as abandoned or neglected. This way lies madness I'm afraid, although I suppose the essential sweet naturedness of human anthropomorphism is also exposed.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">I said no suffering was involved in the death of plants. Someone will tell me that there is evidence that plants produce stress hormones, screaming away beyond our hearing. So maybe we have to devise a world where plants must be killed humanely - what could that look like? I feel deeply, self-centredly bored at the idea. </span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Dead plants create every form of life - there's no question of managing without them, though those who live in cities in the desert may sometimes wonder about that.</span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Death is life. We're all in this together. Wanton cruelty confuses us, for we know that death is supremely utilitarian and therefore must be beautiful. But cruelty is a final sort of ugliness and cannot tend to beauty. The equations seem unlikely to work, but I believe they do. I just believe it.</span></span></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"></span></span></span> </div>
<div>
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">I see one of the scaffolders is sitting down to eat his lunch on a bank where I may have planted some pieces of this or that, anxious to learn what will live through the winter. Now I will gain knowledge about another aspect of my planting's resilience, I only have to run out later and see what is or was there. </span></span></span></div>
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<div style="border: currentColor;">
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<br /></div>
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Oh this is rather more exciting than I'm sure about. Apparently one of the scaffolders gave the hornets nest a hit with what must have been a very long pole.</span></span></span></div>
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<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"></span></span></span> </div>
<div>
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">He did this deliberately, but completely insanely. The others carried on with their work, less obviously bothered about the hornets since they were told to pull themselves together by their head honchos. So we rush, from one extreme to another.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"></span></span></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtP0fTy0dtSPw1o1_4b0GXLnMNWmWfCX0H0hq0itioKqipsJffxHNjgDSQ2cRvXQty579VIDUdnRWcHxobAXN1kQshyphenhyphenq3SVVNcu0oxwfVv7l_XSJSVbvsOYvpFCMeTkpgMVN6Dj5Kx-noF/s1600/P1040190.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtP0fTy0dtSPw1o1_4b0GXLnMNWmWfCX0H0hq0itioKqipsJffxHNjgDSQ2cRvXQty579VIDUdnRWcHxobAXN1kQshyphenhyphenq3SVVNcu0oxwfVv7l_XSJSVbvsOYvpFCMeTkpgMVN6Dj5Kx-noF/s400/P1040190.JPG" width="400" /></a></span></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="border: currentColor;">
<br /></div>
</span></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Since the terrible event the hornets are just clambering about over the nest, and flying back and forth. It's like a bomb's gone off for them I suppose. But rescue and recuperation is clearly their primary purpose, not retaliation. Good, wise hornets, we might think, but they wouldn't do better if they'd stung us all into toxic shock, gaining only a day and all-out war against all their kind in the entire area.</span></span></span></div>
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<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"></span></span></span> </div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">The odds are, as usual, stacked, immensely stacked, apparently in our favour. Eventually they will climb so high that they collapse on top of us. We will go to hell in our own way, taking down everything we can.</span></span></span></div>
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<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"></span></span></span> </div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Here's Dylan with a song I cannot hope to do justice to, one whose beauty and truth fills me with tears I need not shed because of the control and the cleverness. I choose, with nothing but pleasure, the version from the album Shot of Love. Listen to it, it's the beating heart of a hymn to an absent but not dead watchmaker. Whether that watchmaker can see what he's doing or not is somehow not the issue here. The singer expresses a dearly won but honest doubt against the forces of belief and manages to remain, with a brilliance of neutrality for which he is rarely lauded, a little outside the absolute finalities in the idea of intelligent design, or not, in the universe. Nothing is resolved, we hang, we balance.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"></span></span></span> </div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">The song is depth-charged with ancient literary voices. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"> The plaintive Alice in Wonderland opening, Blake, Bunyan, Dante, Epicurus, the Bible and Lucretius, ringing through the mind. Epicurus I only know through Lucretius, but I know they both believed that human fear of death is the worst and saddest sin. They hold the line against the panicked excesses of human superstition: I'm with them, hunting the calm of acceptance. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt is a great read, all about the Renaissance rediscovery of Lucretius, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">though I'm sorry to sound like a person with a showy and extensive reading list, when I can barely get through a newspaper.</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4fOfwcxMOxqanBA1z3GLaPcj_tteg3tAsvjxRA2ArosID9jan5ik2Q6qsiUClAmeXuVwr8KlshKd2iNM2XRDZHMK5rZdMICr7U0uas3m8xHz-ejko6PX7rYs_05et-6vhFlr0HRgtjgOt/s1600/P1030663.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4fOfwcxMOxqanBA1z3GLaPcj_tteg3tAsvjxRA2ArosID9jan5ik2Q6qsiUClAmeXuVwr8KlshKd2iNM2XRDZHMK5rZdMICr7U0uas3m8xHz-ejko6PX7rYs_05et-6vhFlr0HRgtjgOt/s400/P1030663.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">The story of the song is a moment of reckoning in the difficult stony passage through life, where past mistakes and failures are rejected in recognition that one can only move forward, exercising the best one can of free will and accepting the inevitability of death. I've put that portentously and turgidly; the opposite of this delicate stepping through the song, listening and seeing as we pass, thoughts embodied in the images, washed by the waves of the sea.</span></span></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">The donkeys have arrived, only eight or nine, one pretty close to unacceptably male. They're a happy little band, eating with gusto. Jessica is keeping an eye on them, stick in hand, until the fence is turned on. Donkeys, hornets, try a stick.</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMFw-Z6epctPPRIiNm3hGAOAUXHEK3gD7EI-xfeMJD1pBA9sL9FFWw6F9MVyceg7Be94jEGPhdGYPxThWsnKlMiTUNbom2mzpSGB-11EWvJQhnaAZO0P9gHVJoFUL78wWOYPKVPMbHQwRZ/s1600/cropP1030937.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="348" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMFw-Z6epctPPRIiNm3hGAOAUXHEK3gD7EI-xfeMJD1pBA9sL9FFWw6F9MVyceg7Be94jEGPhdGYPxThWsnKlMiTUNbom2mzpSGB-11EWvJQhnaAZO0P9gHVJoFUL78wWOYPKVPMbHQwRZ/s640/cropP1030937.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<div style="border: currentColor;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">The day is nearly over - it's been something, perhaps not quite fun. My clothes are full of burrs from the burdocks and I've parked a few plants brought from England. Proper planting will follow building. Anna, who lived in this house many years ago and now lives at the top of the hill, has popped down for a chat and told me of the wonders of tagetes and oleanders. My sanguisorbas and thalictrums are unlikely to impress, or even register. But the pale mauve allium pulchellum carinatum, a late flowering bulb like a larger, slenderer, more disorganised chive, with the same tendency to seed about, brightened her eyes.</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQelNaaCvp0VBs9xs3pKAlq6oCSv9_awGsHgN8qI1k1xsGVcWohZARkwcue-nItgqjvuQGB0uc4lRbrR37vIe7S2lvCAJ40liWDpBjWXBsWgxzjs1m_YcZXMYAeV5CsB3DDa9lNxugMXE7/s1600/P1120088.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQelNaaCvp0VBs9xs3pKAlq6oCSv9_awGsHgN8qI1k1xsGVcWohZARkwcue-nItgqjvuQGB0uc4lRbrR37vIe7S2lvCAJ40liWDpBjWXBsWgxzjs1m_YcZXMYAeV5CsB3DDa9lNxugMXE7/s400/P1120088.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="webkit-fake-url://BD3D93CD-8C44-4157-ABC3-BFA633B177A2/imagejpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">My motley collection of agaves and aeoniums interested and enthused her. They're destined to winter, imprisoned like criminals, in the cantina, neither beautiful nor useful to me, but so far surviving against the odds. In my mood of evolutionary austerity against the endless wastes of time evoked by the song, they represent nothing more than the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear; great question-marks of fitness and responsibility hang over their meekly vegetable, spiky heads.</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaxju5GEQJGkQAJc3tvlHb7yCStzKtQs0QgQFyzTdglS2tHc0oqKN6Rqr41_vMw3UaLFG5XhCyhY8qXtbU7_uH6qH5Ru_NTDTmrpm_fVboxdC3640i-IuKsw-KL3FWKxtN8i1Iiw1uOCcG/s1600/P1040205.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaxju5GEQJGkQAJc3tvlHb7yCStzKtQs0QgQFyzTdglS2tHc0oqKN6Rqr41_vMw3UaLFG5XhCyhY8qXtbU7_uH6qH5Ru_NTDTmrpm_fVboxdC3640i-IuKsw-KL3FWKxtN8i1Iiw1uOCcG/s640/P1040205.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">I listen once more to this miraculous song, so beautiful it must be useful, my heart lifts again. The harmonica breaks, where Pan slips into the scene, are full of the agonising sweetness of life. I'm right with the singer, here on this earth, where sparrows must fall. For me, no master counts them as they fall. Even so, while we live, everything counts, just everything. Despite the stony path, and our own errors and failures, we're already in Wonderland.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0898438); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><span id="goog_1916487841"></span><span id="goog_1916487842"></span></span><br />Janehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02791751421698536323noreply@blogger.com0