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The Artist’s
Almanac
May 2008
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All gardening is landscape painting
- Alexander Pope
The rolling thunder and rain wake me
in the night. In the morning the pasture is ragged with new growth
and the laden boughs bow to sweep its green resplendence.
Overnight, spring morphs to summer lushness and the mockingbird
emerges to celebrate it with new songs.
Gone are cool days and walks in the
woods, replaced by heat and by the obligation to stir ourselves to
sweat for those green children we have adopted. Yesterday we dug,
planted, and watered-in seven new roses. Those writers who say
gardening is not aerobic garden in winter greenhouses.
The year is starting with good
moisture and we hope it will continue. But the rain falls, as the
Book tells us, on the just and the unjust. Privet is one of the
latter, the native equivalent of Kudzu. While in tighter spaces it
may be used as a privacy shield, it soon turns on its master,
gradually tightening the noose around his space, like a boa
constrictor.
Privet does not quite lose its
leaves here in winter, turning a bronze green and surviving even
in the midst of dense thickets. The Indians used it as cover to
ambush pioneers and take their scalps. When the spring rains comes
it breaks forth from its winter holding pattern to ramp over its
neighbors, smothering and starving them for lack of light, as its
roots strangle theirs below ground.
Stitched photo of privet
stalking my barn
Yesterday in a burst of resolution I
took loppers to the orchard to save the fig bush and apple tree,
each going under for the third time. Like all else in the garden,
this took far more time and sweat than ever I imagined.
The best fruits and vegetables are
not to be found in supermarkets. These include vine ripened
Tennessee tomatoes, Portland strawberries, fresh turnip greens,
Moonglow pears, tart red cherries and green pie apples, especially
the Lodi. My little apple tree was raised from a cutting from my
Father’s tree that once grew in his yard, furnishing a lofty
climbing gallery for children and bountiful harvests for forty
years. I’ve not done right by its scion.
Moonglow pears ripening
Horace said a garden and a library
were all any man needed to live content. Hope is the gardener’s
constant companion, cheering his darkest winter. In a garden
decay, is covered by growth. Daffodils are replaced by tulips, to
be succeeded by stately irises, followed by lusty azaleas and
blushing, bosomy peonies. The fragrance of cherry blossoms
succeeds to fruit which furnishes the cook who has the patience to
pick and pit a basketful the makings for the finest of pies, hot
and bubbly from the oven, fretted by sugary crust, the highest of
culinary delicacies – a cherry pie.
Gardening makes philosophers of us
all. We begin with faith and hope, and, at harvest time, charity
comes into play. Between them comes resolution, sweat, suffering,
and, at intervals, beauty.
Yesterday, as I sweated away
beheading the aggressive privet smothering my tender little shoot
of an apple tree I thought of how sin and sickness are best rooted
out at first appearance, not after they engulf us with their
aggressive lushness.
Since our ancestors left Eden,
apples no longer grow for free, but by our labor and by the sweat
of our brow.
The best fertilizer for an
orchard is the owner’s footprints.
- Country proverb
Freshly picked pie cherries
Events
-
Art In The Garden - A Garden Party to
Benefit Cragfont – Castalian Springs, Tennessee, 5-8 PM,
June 14th 2008, see below
-
Fall Into Art – Hendersonville High
School, October 3-5
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