Caged Beauty

 

 Inquiring minds want to know--or at least they should--what's going on in the Harik Gardens, so here's my mid-spring report.  Spring came all in a rush this year, eager to get on with it after the long, unrelenting winter.  All the trees are in bloom at once, so once again, as is often the case in this global weirding climate, spring is abbreviated but spectacular.  The early daffodils, two weeks ago lone sentinels of spring, are now looking blowsy and unnecessary.  The grass has taken on that lush, fresh green that makes one think of Ireland, even if one hasn't been there.

First, the damage report.  The winter took its toll on the yard's more vulnerable citizens.  A mature dogwood, always a bit of an oddball loner, bit the dust, as did several azaleas, particularly those brutalized by the deer thugs.  Spirea and weigelia, iffy every spring, are looking spotty, but I'll give them time a bit more time to prove themselves before replacing them with my latest crush, the new lime-green barberry.  Not like me to fall for lime green, but spring does funny things to a guy.  Two more boxwoods bit it, these ones especially dear to me as I grew them from cuttings taken in Charlottesville 18 years ago (!).  A slow grower, obviously, but a fine variety, at least for the C-ville climate.  Too cold here, apparently. 

Now for the Enemies List.  The deer are at bay, it seems, thanks to a rather ingenious little device I came up with in the depths of winter, as my mind churned angrily and impatiently.  I can't reveal the details, as I might move to patent it if it's really as good as it seems, but suffice to say that it involves coyote urine.  In any case, damage is very minimal thus far this spring, and this is prime grazing time as the winter-hungry deer are quick to swarm emerging day lillies, rudbeckia, and anemones.  So I'm grateful for that.  Also for the wise actions of the Bloomington City Council with regard to protecting our beloved Griffy Woods from deer overpopulation, but that's another blog.  Enemy #2:  the rabbits.  It's difficult to determine whether my deer device is effective on the rabbits.  They're sneakier and well, smaller, so they're harder to spot at work, but so far they haven't done much damage.  I see little bark damage, and apart from some gnawed-upon coral bells, little plant damage.  So again, cautious optimism.  As for Enemy #3, the ground ivy, the yard is supporting a bumper crop this spring.  This is a truly troubling prospect, as ground ivy, at least the Harik variety, will quickly take over if allowed to establish a foothold.  I've been battling it mano-a-mano for decades, but am on the verge of calling our friends at Green Dragon to do an herbicide treatment.  This cuts against my deeply held organic and environmental principles, but the heartbreak of ground ivy can test the mightiest man's resolve.  Plus, they're offering a 50% discount.

A fourth potential enemy, the Eastern tent worm, is having a banner year in neighboring fruit trees, but so far nothing here.  I'm keeping a close watch on things, though.  Tent worm infestation can turn your stomach, as victim and long-time chum Andrew Miller well knows.  

What's happening that I like?  Strong growth on the lilacs and surviving boxwoods.  The grass I seeded ages ago is finally up; this is a new variety that spreads epiphytically.  I have great hopes for it.  Forsythia seems to be filling in the maddening gaps created by the deer.  Lots of Virginia bluebells this spring.  It has taken me a long time to get them established.  Good crabapple and dogwood blooms.  And nice lettuce growth in various well-protected secret locations.  Potatoes and leeks growing up together in large barrels:  I have a long-cherished wish to return to that wondrous summer of '04, when garlic and potatoes grown cheek-by-jowl in the same plot took on each other's flavor.  It was magnificent.  Everybody I have told about this scoffs, but I know what I know.

So there it is.  Much more going on, of course, in this most busy of gardening seasons, but those are the highlights.  Onward and upward. 

Contradictions

I have just finished Geraldine Brooks' latest novel, Caleb's Crossing.  Based on the true story of Harvard College's first Native American graduate, circa 1660's (so early:  just forty years after they first set foot on Plymouth Rock and they already had a university esteemed by Oxford and Cambridge back home!), it is a beautiful meditation on what is lost and what is gained when we forsake the familiar and chase after strange knowledge.

   

Caleb makes a kind of Faustian bargain when he leaves the rather idyllic Martha's Vineyard for Cambridge, and the price is high.  Yet Brooks is a writer sympathetic to all her creations:  she lets us see clearly the nobility of Caleb's desire for the white man's learning.  

It is also about the terrible clash of cultures (and here is where I begin to bring this around to my garden).  The inevitable tragic decline of the Wampanoag is heartbreaking, for tentative early attempts at coexistence were showing promise before all hell broke loose in King Philip's War.  It was ever thus:  the sensitive and the thoughtful reach out to the Other in curiosity and mutuality, while the fearful, the hateful, the violent seek out the Other to destroy.  I think of that other English--Indian encounter, halfway across the globe on the subcontinent, so fruitful and so ill-fated.  Or the Golden Age of Spain, a time of relative peace and incredibly generative cooperation between Arab, Jew, and Christian, until the Inquisition and Ferdinand and Isabella put an abrupt end to all of that.  The seeds of those scorched Iberian orchards remain, however, and they continue to put forth shoots at unexpected times and in unexpected places.

                                           

I, too, am at odds with the native population of this land.  Any gardener is.  Not the Native Americans for whom this state is named, but the flora and fauna that want to swallow up my artifice and return it to the forest and prairie that was here before.  It's more complicated than that, really:  it's the invasives that really want to swallow up the place.  So I am engaged both in the morally dubious enterprise of "turning back the wilderness" and the more righteous battle against the invasives.

Compromise and contradiction, this is the way of the gardener.  I am of necessity a conquerer, intent on imposing my own will on what is, and yet pained by the damage I do.  As an American, as a gardener, I am a sensitive soul in a conquerer's state, forever contradictory, forever guilty.


  

Apres le Deluge

Endless rain here in Bloomington, Indiana.  The yard is waterlogged, puddles everywhere.  New plantings will be sitting in water-filled holes, I fear, and the grass seed is doomed.  Is this the weather gods' cheeky punishment for my last blog on drought?  Is it a tad solipsistic to imagine that the weather hinges on what I write in my blog?

To escape these gloomy thoughts, I went to see "Noah." Also to perhaps get a few tips in case the rains don't let up.  It turns out to be pretty good.  Plenty of Hollywood kitsch, of course (Vidal Sassoon hair, costumes via Flashdance, too much reliance on CGI), but still pretty good.  Only a few clunkers ("Shem, you will bury your mother and I." What, a cast and crew of hundreds and not a one knows the difference between I and me?).  

It's certainly not your father's Noah.  Aronofsky has a keen biblical imagination.  He fills in the gaps in the original (so many gaps...) both creatively and compellingly, given a certain suspension of disbelief that comes with the territory.  How did they get that ark built, after all, and who really were those "giants in the earth"?  Aronofsky comes up with some great answers, and thus the story holds together somehow.  Too many films today forget to hire a screenwriter, with terrible consequences for coherence and plausibility.  Aronofsky at least makes the effort, and usually it works.

Most importantly, it is a theologically rich film.  He doesn't let us off easy, and there is little of the trite "just-believe" schlock that seems to be headed our way this year on a raft of "inspirational" films and TV series.  No Orson Welles (or even James Earle Jones) voice of God to make us roll our eyes. Instead, there is some relatively sophisticated engagement with the theological challenges of the text:  the long-term implications of original sin, the perennial tension between justice and mercy, the fallibility of Noah.  Regarding that last, the film nicely explores the deadly stupidity of certain religious ideas that certain people (usually men) get stuck in their heads.  Noah's morbid obsession with humanity's sinfulness almost scotches it for all generations to come (us); only thanks to the maternal instinct of the film's heroines do we survive his foolishness.

And so it is a Noah for the 21st century, a Noah that gives women their due, and that just as importantly carries a strong ecological message.  This latter is in the text, of course, but it is buried, and it gets buried much deeper by traditional Christian exegesis that misconstrues man's "dominion" over nature.  The dominion model is rightfully demolished in this film, both by its placement in the mouth of the villain, and by the evidence all around of what happens when man's arrogance uses the world selfishly.  Of the deadly sins besetting humanity, the film clearly understands that the cardinal sin of modern man is greed.  The others are there in good supply, but greed it is that drives the collective ills of the modern age:  global warming, territorial aggression, corporate and Wall Street depredations, Citizens United.

None of this will make it past the towering mental firewalls of the biblical literalists, of course, but I like to think that the film's message will make an impact on the rest of us.  I entered the movie house in a downpour, and when I emerged two and half hours later, the sun was peeking through the clouds, and the sky was just the color of the sky above Ararat.  God was in His heaven again, and the world, if not exactly all right, was looking less gloomy.  It's a good film.  Even the New Yorker says so.  Go see it.