Lost in Translation

or As Cheap as Dirt

Find an old adobe home in New Mexico's pinyon-juniper country.  Junipers planted along the north side of the property might offer a windbreak.  An elm or so to the southwest, close to the house, will extend shading arms.  Otherwise not a single thing will be growing near the house—not a lilac bush, not a weed.  The house will be surrounded by bare earth, hard-packed by the tires of pickup trucks and booted feet and the paws of the lanky mutts who come running to greet you.  Walk on that bare ground, and you won't raise a cloud of dust.  Walk on it barefoot, and you'll feel the give of the land and its gently uneven texture.  It may not be soft like grass, but it's friendly underfoot, more yielding than concrete or flagstone or brick.

Once upon a time, not that many years ago, my garden had earthen paths. 

January, 2008, right before the sand cherries and their pals took over. 

I liked walking on them barefoot on a hot summer's day, but I didn't think living with them long-term was a good plan.  When I lived in Vermont or in western New York, where Precipitation Happens, dirt all too often turned into mud.  Luther was a great tracker of mud on clean floors.  He was good at escaping from towels, running through multiple rooms, and then leaping onto the sofa to give himself a zealous grooming on the upholstery.

Luther T. Dog, Champion Dirt Tracker

In damp kinds of places—the kinds of places where gardening books almost all seem to be written (perhaps because they're good places to garden?)—hard-surfaced garden paths are useful.  Gravel, brick, pavers, bluestone, flagstone:  they all keep mud from your door, and give you stable footing over soft, wet ground.

Deserts, if I may keep stating the obvious, don't often have damp conditions.  When I started my garden here in Albuquerque, Luther tracked wet dirt—you couldn't really call it mud—into the house a good three, four times a year.  Even after a rain, the ground just doesn't stay damp for long.  Now Luther's gone, and nobody has to track dirt in at all.  If my shoes are wet, I can just slip them off and take awestruck photos of them at the door.

August, 2012

So why did I want brick-style pavers?  Probably because I was still in Soggy Northeastern Mode.  But also because pavers, or flagstone slabs or travertine tiles or whatever, stand for a kind of polish.  Their usefulness may not translate well to this climate, but they still have a certain social cachet.  Gardens in magazine photos do not have packed-dirt paths. 

It's a pity that I don't actually like the paved paths as much as I liked the bare earth.  Why, I'm not quite sure.  Maybe they add hardness in an urban environment where hardness already abounds.  Maybe they make the circle shape of the path too strong and obvious.  Maybe they seem a little too highfalutin for my low-key lifestyle (let alone this mostly very lowfalutin state).  Maybe not every hard surface in the garden has to be terra cotta-colored.

The pavers get hot underfoot in summer and shelter waterbugs under their cozy, sun-baked warmth in winter.  They glare in sunlight. 

(A not particularly xeric section of) the Albuquerque Botanic Garden, April 2012.
Even the crusher fines used here—a great choice for constant foot traffic—glare in the light.

It's that last bit that's pushing me to rebellion.  They glare in sunlight. 

Social cachet is such a silly thing.  It may have its genesis in usefulness, but once that usefulness has been sloughed off (by scorching desert winds), cachet does not get to trump comfort in my book.  And when that cachet is an idea you've imported from abroad, with no basis in the culture where you now (happily) reside, it's time to eat a bowl of green chile (or red, if you prefer) and get your perspective on straight.  So I'm about to throw polish to the winds.

Dirt paths are cheap.  No goods have been conspicuously consumed to create them.  No one will be impressed by their elegance.  But they go well with New Mexico's rough-and-tumble landscape and informal lifestyle, its long history of old adobes and haphazard coyote fencing, the rough shagginess of native plantings.  Sometimes you just have to observe, and think, and realize that people in old adobe homes did know what they were doing, and let social cachet and garden magazines be hanged.

An Albuquerque garden featured in the Native Plant Society's garden tour, August 2012.
To me the randomly placed flagstone shows how soft and comfortable the dirt paths really are.

I won't do anything radical yet—those pavers took six weekends of precious physical energy to put down, and I'm not in a hurry to pick them up again.  But they'd make a good sized raised bed on the patio by the kitchen door, just right for a cold frame of winter veggies.

Now that would be useful here.

To the Hilt

or When More Is More

Sometimes restraint is a fine thing—in the use of cayenne pepper, say, or the wearing of day-glo paisley.  No doubt there is a time and place for going over the top with both, but the tricky part is knowing just when and where that might be.

I can't remember where I saw the advice to flower photographers not to "overdew it," but it has stuck in my mind as something to remember in case I ever see dew again.  (It doesn't feature much in desert life.)  With rain or dew, restraint is generally a photographer's friend.  Two or three drops of water to adorn a perfect bloom and evoke the freshness of morning, or perhaps one large, precariously balanced droplet to catch the sunlight, ting! and reflect the sky in a beautifully distorted, fish-eye lens kind of way—that usually says everything that needs saying, and says it eloquently.  In other words, less is more.

Water practically gushing from a canale during a thunderstorm

Yes, well, that advice went out the window when we had a second thunderstorm this week.*  The official measurement was "a trace," but my neighborhood had good, drenching rain for about half an hour and probably received at least a quarter of an inch.  As I was wandering around the garden afterward, camera in hand, looking at a world dripping with water, I thought, why on earth would I want to be restrained when we've just had rain?  Why capture one droplet when the whole excitement is that we've just been doused by hundreds and hundreds—no, thousands and thousands, or maybe (gasp) even more of them?  Why adorn a plant with restraint when it is glorying in saturation?

Admittedly, a quarter inch of rain isn't that much, but that's precisely why it deserves some over-the-top revelry.  It may not be a lot, but our alternative to "not much" isn't "plenty," it's none at all.  When an enjoyment—a necessity—is scarce, you live it to the hilt when it comes along and thumb your nose at good taste.  Restraint is for those with a better range of choices, who can minimize a pleasure and still have plenty left.

Right now, we in the southwest are delighting in all the raindrops we can, because there's no knowing when we'll see them again.  This is our day-glo paisley moment, our time to relish a hair-raising, eye-watering, smoke-coming-out-the-ears mouthful of hot pepper intensity.  "Overdew" it?  You'd better believe it.  We've done "less."  It wasn't all it's cracked up to be.

The tasteful, restrained flowers of 'Wild Thing' autumn sage

Right now, more is more.


________________________
* I promise to stop talking about the weather soon.

Cranking Up the Volume

or Wild Thing, I Think You Move Me

Weddings don't seem to be for the faint of heart.   Even simple weddings in one's own family home with a frighteningly competent mother in charge have truckloads of small details that can't be pulled together until the last minute, frazzling brides who are normally calm and ultra-together.   I attended a wedding like that many years ago now (and, if anyone knows where all those years have gone, by all means let me know).   One of my dearest friends, whom we shall call S, was marrying an easy-going sweetheart of a gentleman out of her parents' home in California.

S is such a sensible person that, if she weren't also warm and generous and impulsive and loving, she would drive you insane by being sane all the time.   As a mutual friend put it, "She is the kind of person who sees that something is bad for her and so doesn't want it."   She considers eating small amounts of dark chocolate to be a vice; she has no other.   She doesn't procrastinate; she accepts criticism well; she runs five miles a day.   Even with all those strikes against her, however, somehow she's still quite lovable, but like the rest of us, S has her moments of human frailty.  Everything on the day of her wedding was going well and under control, but there were enough extra thises and thats demanding her attention—just extra, extra, EXTRA—that she began to fray around the edges.

In the midst of all the activity, S's 4-year-old niece had gotten wound up to bursting point and was racing around making a world-class racket.   The noise set S's teeth on edge, but when she asked her niece to be quiet, the little girl plumped down on a bench in a swirl of flouncing skirts, and with the wickedest twinkle in her eye that it has ever been my privilege to see, began chanting, "BE LOUD!   BE LOUD!   BE LOUD!" at the top of her lungs.

A part of me understood my friend's irritation and was pretty irritated myself;  the rest of me was filled with awe and envy:   awe that a 4-year-old should have such fearless confidence, should be so certain of her right to make a noise in the world; envy that she should feel so gleeful about being herself in the face of disapproval from every adult in the room.   Yes, I concurred, she needed to be sent to her room and put on bread and water for—well, for years; but secretly I was cheering her on.   While I hope she's learned better timing and a little consideration for others since then (now that she's starting college and all), I hope she still has the capacity to live at the top of her bent.   I don't know that I've ever been loud like that in my life, and I think it's a mighty fine thing for a girl to be.   Especially when she lives thousands of miles away from me.

We wind up our celebration of botanical vulgarity this week with a look at the loudest plant in my garden, one that puts even orange marigolds to shame—Wild Thing autumn sage (Salvia greggii Wild Thing).

It really is that color.

The funny thing is that, since being saddled with CFS and fibromyalgia, I can't handle noise at all, whether aural, mental, or visual; whatever mechanism we have to sort through stimuli and prioritize them seems to have gone awry.   All the useful "how to cope" materials, which the better kinds of physicians give you, offer tips for dealing with a broad range of situations, but when it comes to noise, they just say, "AVOID THIS."   (Oops—but not in block caps, because that's the online equivalent of shouting, which is very noisy.   Sorry.)   I generally seek out peace, quiet, tranquility; cool watery blues, gentle forest greens, pale buttery yellows.   Calm colors.   Serene colors.   But there are always exceptions that I can't explain, like orange marigolds and Wild Thing autumn sage.

I fell in love with this plant the first time I saw it, and I don't even like pink.   Yet now I have an entire baby hedgelet of astonishingly noisy flowers blooming in the garden.   Even at noon in mid-summer, when paler colors look faded and washed out under the New Mexico sun, Wild Thing is gleefully shouting, "Pink!   Pink!   Pink!"   It is the equivalent of a noisy little girl who, yes, was way too loud, but by golly, was loud with a vengeance.

I wouldn't call its contrast with the garden walls a subtle one.

Is loudness vulgarity, or is it vividness?   Garishness or glee?   Misbehavior or joie de vivre?   None of those options is mutually exclusive; the admirable qualities live side by side with those we turn our noses up at.   (So sorry—with those at which we turn up our noses.)   Do you really want to forgo the glee to avoid the garish?   Lose vividness to whatever passes for today's good taste?   Stifle joie de vivre in the name of good behavior?   If everyone is equally loud, of course, you can't hear anyone over the clamor; I suspect Wild Thing makes me so happy because it takes all the solos, while the greens and buttery yellows croon a chorus of "oohs" and "aahs" in the background.   So by all means be smart in your timing, and definitely be considerate of others.

But go live loud today.   Make a noise in the world.

For what it's worth, I promise not to send you to your room.

When Onions Get Uppity

or Th-th-th-that's Allium, Folks!

Every year just as the February doldrums hit, the city of Burlington, Vermont, hosts a winter festival complete with snow sculpting and ice carving competitions.   Some of the entrants are quite serious, and the winner goes on to the national snow sculpting competition in Wisconsin.   Even without the lure of a championship trophy and the warm feeling inside of a job well done, however, the challenge of sculpting in a variable medium like snow could well be its own artistic reward.   (I'd sure love to see someone try it with Rocky Mountain powder.)   Perhaps knowing that your work will melt away when winter ends—which in Vermont is, what, late May, early June at the outside—adds a certain zest to the act of creation.   I can't believe that a snow sculptor wouldn't constantly be rejoicing in the irony of his or her chosen medium:   instead of immortalizing a moment in ageless marble or bronze or stone, the snow sculptor creates something for the moment only, something that is meant to be appreciated briefly before disappearing forever while conveniently also watering the lawn.

The spectator, standing in Waterfront Park under a featureless, white sky on a -10°F day while the winds blow at 25 mph straight down from the Arctic and across Lake Champlain, to watch people sculpt snow because gosh darn it, it's a winter festival and we may as well be festive, is liable to find her thoughts turning to the poignancy of a medium that foregrounds its own impermanence.   She might contemplate the awareness inherent in a "live for the moment" artwork that the moment is soon lost, and that the loss is eternal.   Her enjoyment of the sculptures before her may be tinged with a hint of bittersweetness, a reminder of the fleeting nature of time, of our own mortality, of the passing away of all things.   You know, festive thoughts.

Onions are like that, too.   Not thoughtful, that is, or particularly festive, but imbued with a sense of poignancy, bittersweetness, etc.   Surely you must have noticed it?   As we continue celebrating the vulgar plants this week, let's turn our attention to this culinary staple, which in the scale of fine cooking sits firmly earthed at the bottom, right down there with "all this garlic of low cuisine," as Verlaine put it.   If ever there was a plant that talked too loudly, smelled too much, and never knew when to quit, it would have to be an onion.

And if ever there was a plant with sculptural merit in the garden, whether of the delicate, sturdy, or whimsical variety, it would have to be an onion.   I'm not talking about the officially ornamental alliums here—the kinds with names like "Star of Persia," "Ambassador," or "Mount Everest."   No, I'm just thinking of your everyday, run of the mill, garden to table onion.

I’m currently growing two kinds that have sparked my artistic interest.   The first is He-shi-ko, a perennial bunching onion (Allium fistulosum), which blooms in the spring of its second year (and every year thereafter), with symmetrical, two-inch globes of delicate florets that dry to a papery ivory and produce jet black seeds.

Bunching onions - true "scallions" rather than simply young bulb onions

Egyptian walking onion bulbils

The second is Egyptian walking onion (Allium proliferum).   Rather than flowers, these plants produce bulbils—a head of edible, miniature onions—that eventually get heavy enough to bend their growing stalk to the ground, where the bulbils root and establish themselves.

Egyptian walking onion, caught in the very act of "walking"

And while we're at it, let's throw in a cousin of theirs, Allium tuberosum, or garlic chives, which send up flower heads in late summer that have the precise, branching symmetry of snowflakes (though they all look pretty much the same).   The flowers last for a few short days, after which you would be wise to deadhead them, unless you really, really like garlic chives.

Garlic chives

In each case the blossoms (or bulbils) are more sculptural than painterly;  their three-dimensional shape is more striking than the interplay of color and form.   Generally, however, when we talk about sculptural plants we mean the four-season ones—yucca, agave, ocotillos—the ones with a commanding presence all year.   A sculptural yucca is always sculptural, with or without blooms  (which are equally worthy of sculpting, by the way).   An onion—the rest of the time, it's an onion.   The beauty in these living sculptures is partly in their very evanescence, the necessity to appreciate them while they last.   For myself  (and I realize that I may need to get out more), they foreground their impermanence in ways that more flower-ly flowers do not, precisely because they are sculptural, and we do not generally look to sculpture for change.

By being sculptural, alliums also flirt shamelessly with the high art-low art divide.   An onion with striking blossoms—  Frankly, just writing the phrase “onion with striking blossoms” makes me want to laugh;  the juxtaposition of ideas is so absurd.   If an artichoke is sculptural (and it is), well, that is just right and proper.   It is a delicacy.   One expects it.   In an onion, however, sculptedness seems a bit over the top—a surprising burst of high spirits, of sheer, charming frivolity.   It's almost as if the onion does not know its place on the culinary scale, does not realize that it is low and vulgar and common and smelly and loud.   What is that onion thinking??   It ignores the categories of taste almost as if those categories were imposed arbitrarily from the outside and have no intrinsic merit...Oh, what a dangerous thought; the proletariat has marched in the streets because of thoughts like that (on a somewhat larger scale, of course).

As long as we're being pedantic, let us summarize:  in the onion we have a plant with sculptural beauty and culinary usefulness that is not only a helpful prompt to aesthetic philosophy, but that also contains the seeds of revolution  (N.B. another good reason to deadhead your garlic chives), all to be enjoyed from the comfort of your own garden on a pleasantly sunny September day without a lot of pesky snow sculptors around to disturb your peace.

If nothing else, it's an impressive multi-tasker.

That Color Is So U!

or On Second Thought, It Isn't U at All

When I met one of my dearest friends of all time at a summer science program many years ago, she presented me with this card:

Now, I don't remember feeling strongly about orange one way or the other at the time, but apparently, to some 16-year-olds, the fact of orange can be way beyond the pale (so to speak).  In a life where not much of consequence has happened—or perhaps where you don't yet have enough context to embrace the events of consequence—orange can seem important, and if you don't like it, you might feel compelled to take steps against it.

I haven't questioned this particular friend lately about the role of orangeness in her life (note to self:   call WB), but I'd be willing to bet that her attitude these days is more live-and-let-live.   She always did have a good head on her shoulders as well as a boundless capacity to see the humor in things, and if she does still have a problem with orangehood in general, she probably expresses it with her tongue even more firmly in cheek now than she did then.   Any confusion of taste and principle will be tempered with a strong dose of irony and a twinkle.

I've been thinking more since my last post about snobbery, reverse snobbery, social class, the teaching of Classical music history, and marigolds.   All this was prompted by a garden essay I read not too long ago that made a snarky comment on growers of orange marigolds.  The comment (as I remembered it) radiated class consciousness in ways that surprised me from this author, who has always struck me as being a pretty independent thinker.  So I returned to her work this week—an essay called "Blues," by Eleanor Perényi, anthologized in Green Thoughts:   A Writer in the Garden—and was pleased to discover that she had been rolling her eyes at others who considered orange marigolds to be vulgar, or, as she put it, "non-U."  I hadn't come across the "U/non-U" distinction before, but it resonated loudly; even though the parameters may have changed since the 1950's when the terms were coined, we still have plenty of ways of distinguishing between upper class (U) and middle class (non-U) values today.

Perényi was writing in the 1970's, so it's possible that orange marigolds have become U again in the last 40 years and I missed it; but trust me, if they have, something else has taken their place as being too, too tacky.   I think the real question, however, is not so much "Are they U?" or the reverse-snob version, "Aren't they wonderfully non-U?"   Instead, the real question is, "Are they you?"   Us and Them almost always have some hint of class about them, but You and Not You?   I think that's a gap that can be bridged.

This brings us back to the teaching of music history.   (Really.)   What an education in any of the arts does best, I think, is to teach people how to disagree.   So few objective standards exist that we are always coming up against the "barrier" of taste.   Crusading to have the works we don't like eliminated (The Society for the Prevention of Bruckner Symphonies, perhaps) isn't really an option (in a free society, at least); whitewashing all differences in a way that pretends to be respectful ("Everyone's entitled to their taste") but that really refuses to engage other opinions, doesn't satisfy.   The civilized arts—among which are music and pleasure gardening—are in part about civilized behavior, including the ability to explore taste and distaste with those who disagree.

So I won't reverse-snob our orange marigolds today.   Instead I'll point out what I love about them:   the delicately etched curves of the petals, like the whorls inside a seashell;

their luxuriant, flamenco skirt ruffles;

the way they stand their ground in the brightest sunshine instead of fading meekly before it, and sing out with full voice from shade; the vibrancy of a color as pure and unshadowed as stained glass, but with the softness of skin;

the scrollwork libraries of the buds, where the petals are not interleaved but rolled; the way they unfurl individually, so that each petal looks almost like a rosebud.

Those are some of the reasons that orange marigolds are me.

Are they also you?

I Got No Class

or  Us and Them

Until the last few years, I spent my professional life in the academic side of the arts, where the difference between "high" and "low" art is traditionally quite important for reasons that have a great deal to do with status and power and very little to do with honesty or generosity.   As a music historian at a well-endowed private liberal arts college in New England (which in American parlance shouts "Snobbery!" from the rooftops, even though the reality was much more down to earth), I often felt as if what I was primarily doing was teaching the music of previous oppressor classes to the future oppressor class in the hopes that at least they would be able to oppress people more tastefully.   (No one wants to be oppressed by someone who says "Mose-art"; it's almost as bad as being oppressed by someone who says "nucular"...)

Every field, perhaps every human endeavor, has its own set of signs that divide the in-crowd from the outsiders, those in the know from the Philistines.   In music the signs that you're an outsider might include tapping your feet to a symphony, enjoying Pachelbel's Canon, or calling a piano piece a "song."   These actions do no harm to anyone, but they distinguish between Us and Them, always elevating Us and diminishing Them.

It's a lot like high school.

What we call Classical music has always been the realm of the ruling classes, and, no matter what its genuine beauties and virtues, it retains that taint today.   Gardening, like Classical music, has its roots (ahaha) in the world of the European aristocracy.   Few are the gardening books that do not refer at least once to Sissinghurst and Villandry, possibly Chatsworth and Versailles, with a tip of the (top) hat somewhere along the line to Capability Brown, 18th-century landscape architect to the British gentry.   Most capital-G Gardeners, somewhere in their heart of hearts, have indelibly stamped as a Platonic ideal toward which they strive, The British Garden à la Capability Brown.   (A tip of my own hat, if I had one, to novelist Terry Pratchett for inventing Bloody Stupid Johnson, Brown's incompetent alter ego.)   Lower-case gardeners have their own snobberies, and the distinctions grow ever finer—those who preach The Organic Way vs. those who swear by Roundup; those who grow only native plants vs. those who must have the latest cultivars; those who adore hothouse annuals vs. those who decry them; those who lawn vs. those who ground-cover; those who ground-cover vs. those who gravel; those who like garden gnomes and those who Do Not.

It's not about gardening;  it's about Us and Them, even if we have to go out of our way to create a Them.   Gardening is (yet another) place where we stake our claim for self-hood; it is all too often a tool that allows us to elevate ourselves by diminishing others (who are, for the record, doing us no harm).

I sometimes wish that Edvard Munch, in addition to The Scream, had given us a painting called The Sneer.

A friend who had been employed for years in a more than ordinarily cutthroat music department once asked the dean of his institution why it was so vicious and judgmental.   The dean replied, "Because the stakes are so low."

Because the stakes are so low.   Yes.   I do believe that in some aspects of gardening the stakes are quite large.   Some methods foster biodiversity while others destroy it;  some build the soil while others strip it; some hoard water while others waste it.   But when it comes to the placement (or not) of garden gnomes, I hope we can all agree that the long-term consequences are few.   I recently read a garden essay—by an author whose work I enjoy—that sneered at people who grow orange marigolds.   Let's just pause for a moment to let that sink in and think about the stakes here...

Full disclosure:   I grow orange marigolds.  I love orange marigolds.   Apparently, people like me are a type—and rather a vulgar, déclassé type at that.   I'm not actually offended at the discovery, and please don't feel the need to reassure me that I'm still an OK Person.   The comment actually made me laugh out loud.   It also made me think about the degree to which our snobberies extend, and I'm afraid it set the reverse snob in me into high gear.   So the next couple of blog posts will celebrate the vulgar plants, the gauche plants—the ones that laugh a little too loudly, that wear a little too much makeup, that talk with a little too much twang, that belch a little too often in public.   (Well, not that.   That would be rude.)   And why not?

The stakes, after all, are so low.