Drought!

 

Is it too early to start worrying about drought?  Probably.  It rained two days ago and it's currently coming down in a nice drenching drizzle.  Still, the summer looms.  Even the thought of predicted rain not materializing can set me off.  I feel a bit like Jean de Florette, from the 1986 movie of the same title.  You may remember that Jean, played by Gerard Depardieu, is a 19th-century bourgeois romantic who takes his family from Paris to Provence to pursue his poorly-thought-out dream of raising carnations in the country.  Alas, two rustic Provencal scoundrels in the neighborhood decide to foil him by blocking up his only water source.  (spoiler alert) Jean's carnations dry up, he goes slightly mad, and he dies in a vain attempt to dynamite a new well.

I saw this film some 28 years ago, before I knew the difference between a carnation and carne asada, and even then it made a big impression on me.  Now, whenever we go two summer weeks without rain I get a little antsy, and within a month I start looking haggard.  Surely there must be a reliable water source somewhere in this blighted half-acre!  I start wondering whether to contact a dowser, though few have been seen in these parts since early in the last century. 

Granted, I have two 55-gallon rain barrels.  And since the Great Drought of 2012 I have put in as much drought-tolerant plant material as I can.  Zoyzia grass, which luckily I kind of like, is now spreading nicely across the yard, stopping wherever the direct sun doesn't reach it.  Heavy mulching with wood chips from my tree-cutting friend Andy holds back the dessication for awhile.  But ultimately, if the rain gods (and the vicissitudes of the new global climate) decide to make trouble, there's little remedy for it.  I'll either have to adjust my attitude, or start dynamiting.

Probably the former, though the latter might be easier.  I hate to see plants suffer and die.  More to the point, the loss of control we must face when dealing with nature is quite hard for me.  Gardening is indeed a salve to the soul, but it can also be crazy-making (see blogs on deer).  So many variables conspire to foil our best-laid plans, even without malicious French rustics (there's a great Simpsons episode based on Jean de Florette, by the way.  Bart is an exchange student in Provence and somehow ends up in the employ of these very same scoundrels.  Naturally, justice triumphs, and Bart learns French.)  So gardening, if we go the path of sanity, can be a great school for learning equanimity.  Enjoy the play, but let the universe (nature, God) be in charge.             

I'm still far from it, still too attached to my creations.  I try to keep in mind the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of the mandala, in which monks spend weeks creating a sand painting of astonishing complexity (itself highly symbolic of the inner and outer realms), and then dump it in the river to teach non-attachment and impermanence.  All is flux, all is flux.

                             

Interestingly, I don't fret nearly as much about excessive rain, which can be as bad for the plants as drought, and worse for some.  Somehow it doesn't capture my apocalyptic imagination the way drought does.  I imagine the future, this man-made future we are forcing upon a nature that left alone would keep us well, as more Mad Max than The Postman.  Mad Max, now there's another film that strikes a little too close to home...

Frozen

On this, the first official day of Spring, I stick my shovel tentatively into the ground, here and there, and find that, indeed, much of my yard is still frozen.  I talked to a construction worker a few days ago who told me that in places they were finding it frozen to a depth of two feet. That's practically permafrost.  This explains the agonizing delay in the appearance of spring bulbs.  Either they were killed outright by the cold, or they just can't get through the soil yet.  (Though nobody reading this blog needs to hear it, it bears repeating that globally this has been the fourth warmest winter on record, so the climate-denying know-nothings yet again have nothing to work with).

All this provides me a much-needed opportunity to learn patience and humility.  We gardeners, despite our pretensions to work with nature, really work against nature, if by nature we mean the wild.  Michael Pollan, in his indispensable early book, Second Nature, reminds us quite bluntly that a garden is a civilizational artifice, something we do over-and-against nature's singular imperative, which is to over-run everything and establish climax forest (or prairie, or desert, etc.).  We are less Thoreau Romantics than Voltaire Rationalists, even when we prefer the tangled English garden to the order and symmetry of the French (see last posting).

Left alone, nature would quickly swallow up our proudest achievements, as the recent book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, demonstrates quite devastatingly.  Using that paragon of the human will-to-build, NYC, as a model, Weisman makes it clear just where we fit in the scheme of things.  You don't have to read his book though; just take a look at an abandoned lot in your own city, or at the yard of your neighbor who imagines himself a naturalist because he's too lazy to tend to his property.  His "natural landscape" turns out to be all opportunistic weeds and trash trees, a far cry from the old growth forest he foolishly imagines growing in his yard.  And that's to say nothing of his role as a distributor of weed seeds for the neighborhood, making the rest of us work that much harder to undo his thoughtlessness.   

 

But I digress.  We gardeners hold back that natural super-abundance.  We tame nature, at least in the short run.  By choosing what grows and what doesn't grow, by creating artificial micro-environments for the cultivation of what WE want, we shut out nature's drive to plant a succession forest in our back yard.  And that's fine.  Indeed, that's absolutely necessary if we're to live in a city or town, and not an oak-beech forest.  There's a certain power in that, perhaps even a bit of prideful self-importance.  After all, we are the ones who beautify and feed the world, and what could be more important than that?  So to remind us not to get too full of ourselves, Mother Nature sends us drought, flood, and, most recently, the Deep Freeze.  She reminds us quite plainly that we are not in charge; at best we get to play on her sandlot.

We gardeners need to find that middle ground between arrogance ("I control my yard") and helplessness ("there's nothing I can do with my yard").  We need both boldness and humility.  Mother Nature giveth and she taketh away.  The sooner we understand that, the sooner we develop that perfect Taoist relationship to nature, neither master nor victim. The sooner we learn, river-like, to flow around the boulder rather than smack right into it, the greater, paradoxically, is our power.  We then garden in gratitude to nature for allowing us to play on her sandlot, and in response to that gratitude, she blesses us with what we need, no more and no less.

I may be getting too theological here.  Really, I just want to learn the humility and patience that teaches us that we don't get to decide when to put in that flame azalea or start our beet seeds.  Nature decides, on her own schedule, not the Farmer's Almanac's.  It's different every year.  Our job is to watch and wait for the opportune moment.  And then plant something that will make Mother Nature proud.

My Inspiration

Okay, so that was a flop.  I guess gardening and great literature don't mix.  I've been racking my brain for literary works in which gardens and gardening figure prominently, but apart from the early chapters of Genesis, I got bupkis.  Please let me know if you can think of any.  But before I let go of the literary impulse, allow me to wax enthusiastic over a book I'm reading about Jefferson's Monticello gardens, A Rich Spot of Earth. 



Often I wonder at the things people read.  Gun magazines, Madeleine Albright's autobiography, Paolo Coelho.  Why?  Yet it occurs to me that others might wonder the same about me.  Perhaps not everyone would consider a book about Jefferson's gardens a must-read.  Here's why it is.

After writing the Declaration of Independence, serving as governor, secretary of state, and president, founding and designing the University of Virginia, and living in Paris as minister to France, all Jefferson really wanted to do was retire to Monticello and tend his gardens.  This gives one pause, does it not?  Is Voltaire right that our main concern in this life, no matter how brilliant we are, should be to "cultiver nos jardins"? I do think a case can be made that the careful, loving stewardship of this once-paradise is about the highest calling available to us. Plus, as a good Catholic, I like the penitential aspect to healing humanity's cardinal sin, the wanton destruction of God's creation.  Tikkun olam, as the Jewish mandate has it:  repair the world. 

Jefferson understood that there are few salves to the soul more healing than tending the earth.  Gardening summons in us the deepest of satisfactions.  The gardener is at once visionary, dreamer, pragmatist, artist, healer, steward, provider. Here's Jefferson on his calling as a gardener:

I have often though that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden.  No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.  Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another...But tho' an old man, I am but a young gardener.

Of course (and here comes the elephant in the room), the hard work was all done by slaves.  J's record on slavery is a terrible blight on his name.  A benign slaveholder, but a slaveholder nonetheless, and one who is particularly blameworthy, given the inexcusable gap between his mighty human rights rhetoric and his persistent refusal to manumit, even after death.   As one of the most enlightened and briliant Americans before or since, he certainly knew better.  And no use excusing his behavior as a product of his times.  Plenty others of his class, Washington, for instance, were much better on this score.

And yet.  Here's how I square his slaveholding with my tremendous admiration for the man.  Jefferson's greatness was so boundless, so capacious, that even when we subtract the slaveholding debit from his reputation, he remains one of our greatest Americans.  I do realize that this form of moral reckoning is risky, but that's where I am on this question.  Jefferson was one of those for whom Whitman's words truly do apply:  "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."  I use this line all the time on myself, but for me it always rings kind of phony.  Not for Jefferson.

What I really love about Monticello and the other Revolutionary-era estates of Virginia is the restraint these founding fathers showed in their design plans.  Just as their seminal writings eschewed the bombastic and the self-aggrandizing, their estates too demonstrate a certain modesty.  The Palladian impulse toward balance and harmony is very pleasingly blended with a healthy and humble appreciation for the vast, untamed wilderness they found themselves in.  They easily could have modeled their grounds on the prissy, hyper-symmetric Enlightenment gardens of Versailles and Schonbrunn.  Instead, they chose to embrace their English heritage, with its quaint love of the slightly unruly and the particular.  Spend some time in piedmont Virginia, as I did for two years when I taught in Charlottesville, and you will be struck by how perfectly the human imprint complements the land.  I have seen that nowhere else but in the mountains of Lebanon. 

The Great Novel Project

 








I know, I know.  This is entirely outside the mandate of my blog charter.  But it's my blog and I figure I can do with it as I like.  And believe me, nothing is happening out there except snow, slowly melting (David Guterson's next novel?) Et voila, my segue.  Recently I stumbled upon a book titled The Top Ten:  Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.  125 writers, to be exact.  I don't know how redeeming an activity this was, either to compile or to read.  Certainly I'm aware of all the objections to ranking works of art.  But it did get me thinking about my own reading history, what has moved and shaken me the most, and why.  So I made my own list, not a ranking really so much as a naming, a lifting up of those novels I most cherish.  It was indeed rewarding.  And you can do the same, without fear of betraying your literary principles.  You can even include some dead white men in your list if you so choose:  we're very tolerant and multicultural around here.


Besides, it's cold and dark and Lent has begun.  What else do you have to do?  So here's my list, in no particular order.  But first...there's that sticky question of the difference between "great" and "favorite."  Some of my favorite novels are by no means great--guilty pleasures you might call them (Peter DeVries comes to mind)--while many truly great novels, Faulkner for instance, are not favorites of mine.  So how to navigate between these treacherous shoals?  I don't know-you figure it out for yourself.

• The Pickwick Papers, Dickens
• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry (in truth, I could fill this entire list with Wendell Berry novels, but that wouldn't be fair to the others, now, would it?)
• Man's Fate, Andre Malraux
• A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway
• The Secret Agent, Conrad
• My Antonia, Willa Cather
• The Deptford Trilogy, Robertson Davies
• The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
• A Thread of Grace, Mary Doria Russell
• Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
• At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Peter Matthiessen

Okay, that's more than 10.  I couldn't whittle it down any further.

So what are yours?  Please share.

Other Marauders

This time of year most of the action in the yard centers on the birdfeeders.  I have four up, with several more in mothballs.  Just as the thankless task of deerproofing requires endless trial-and-error and fine-tuning, so does squirrel-proofing the birdstations.  I don't really begrudge the squirrels their winnings--it's just birdseed, after all, not a $60 dogwood--and their antics are the most entertaining spectacle a yard has to offer.  But occasionally,  in a weak moment, I'll get locked into a deadly battle of wits with the squirrels, and as I inevitably lose each round, I get kind of resentful.

It's not a fair fight, after all.  True, squirrels have a brain the size of a walnut (I looked it up--oh brave new world in which we need only type "size of squirrel brain" to answer our every question!).  But here's the thing:  that entire walnut is devoted to figuring out ways to get my birdseed.  I, on the other hand, with an ostensibly much larger brain, have no dedicated brain space for squirrel-thwarting.  So I tell myself I'm really the underdog here.  But it's a hard sell, even for me.

Lately, through the use of many expensive devices and retooled deer caging, I've arrived at some modicum of success.  The squirrels munch on the plentiful seed dropped to the ground by sloppy birds (jays, I suspect), but though they try all the usual avenues (the tree leap, the ground leap, the birdbath leap), they are thus far stymied.  Words cannot express how gratifying this is to me, though I'm well award that even as I write they are regrouping and working on a nuclear option.  It's a modest life I lead; all the more important are the small victories.