10/05/2024
Friday I wrote: Though a garden can be read as a metaphor, I do my best to see mine for what it is. I spent time outside yesterday in one of those fall days that are as precious and fleeting in their way as when the forsythia opens in spring, though on the other end of the year’s spectrum. These days don’t last, when it’s still warm enough to enjoy lunch with a friend in the pretty garden of the vegan restaurant in town; hot in the sun after cool mornings. Right now, the trees are holding their leaves as they turn color, the sugar maples showing apricot and honey in the late afternoon light that at this time of year strikes low through the trees rising wit the land in tiers up these lower slopes of Ohayo mountain. It won’t last. In a week or so it’ll all be gone.
I spent my time outside beginning the fall clean up, and planting the last of the three spireas I bought in a place that might turn out to be as good as where the birds planted a wilding version. Each spring it erupts into an ever-expanding clump of foam above the house at the edge of the woods. Right now it’s smothered in late goldenrod blooming entwined in scarlet bittersweet. I’ll cut it free later, when the leaves are all gone and branches are bare, cut down all the scrub that’s grown up around the trees so that on winter afternoons, vistas will open into the woods cleared of what grew up over summer.
Yesterday in the garden, at the end of the day, as the light softened into a haze, all the coppery leaves were echoed by the grasses that I leave to grow long, trampled into patterns by the small herd of deer that stops by, the youngsters playing zoomies in the long grass, as happy to run in it as the dogs used to be. This year they ate all the leaves from the daylilies that grow along the stone path to the porch, the leaves I’d been planning to cut back, for which I’m grateful—though I wish they might have spared the little hydrangea I just planted instead of eating it down to the twigs. I hadn’t protected it because I used to know that deer don’t eat them. Now I know different. I did protect the shrub roses I planted nearby in a moment of weakness, knowing full well that roses don’t grow here. Still I buy them from time to time, remembering when once a bush got established and was beautiful for four or five years before calling it quits.
I’ve come to accept that my garden isn’t pretty and that I don’t mean it to be. If that sounds like a boast, it isn’t. In the five years since I stopped mowing it’s returned to an almost semi-wild state. As I come to trust it more, I’m more inclined to let it be, to let it show me what’s suitable and what belongs instead of imposing ideas from outside.
I’m planning a trip away, the first time I’ll be traveling alone in I don’t know how long. A sort-of fantasy that can only be disappointing, though perhaps if I’m lucky and manage to keep my expectations in check, it will show me instead what I don’t, what I can’t expect. Since 2018, when I properly re-read the Iliad, I’ve been reading the Greeks—in translation, but even so that poem is drenched in light, bright and hard. I saw something like it in Iceland but I’m hoping to see the real thing, full force, in Greece. Perhaps what I’m expecting is impossible now. I hope to be driving—I’ll go to Marathon, I’ve read that a highway cuts through it, and Delphi—and I’ll be looking to see what grows by the side of the road, just as I look to see what shows itself here in my garden. I’m not so interested planting exotic varieties of this and that as I used to be. These days I’m content with Queen Anne’s Lace; goldenrod and loosestrife blooming together, purple with gold; the tender violet blue of New England Asters against coppery ferns; enough to gladden the heart of Gertrude Jeckyl, credited with devising the British ‘country house’ style, relaxing the geometric gardens of victorian houses into romantic drifts of color.
I cut down what remained of a pear tree pulled apart by bears, and a dead plum tree that I didn’t cut completely, instead shaping its branches into a support for an autumn clematis that I exempted from my ban on fancy varieties. Once established it’ll be tough and greedy enough for space to expand up the trunk to cover the dead branches with sweet spicy blooms. I have also been contemplating the folly of planting six apple trees, old varieties that seem too tempting to pass up: a King David that, according to the catalogue, was a seedling first grown in 1893 Arkansas, offered for mail order in 1904, ‘… an intensely flavored apple. The first bite is an explosion of flavors—pineapple, tangerine, lemon, sweet, sour, tart, sharp, aromatic and spicy.’ Well, all right, settle down. Or a couple of Calville Blanc d’Hiver, that the catalogue describes as ‘… famous as a desert and cooking apple for more than four hundred years’. Okay, count me in, and maybe another variety to round things out? You need more than one variety of apple tree to get them to set fruit. I see I can get them on semi-dwarfing stock so they’ll start producing sooner, in five years or so…
Whoever comes to live here after me might enjoy them. If not, the bears will. Perhaps they might even be grateful—not the bears, they’re never grateful—as I’m grateful to whoever planted the seven Norway Spruce that line one side of the drive, magnificent now in their maturity. Were I given to flights of fancy I might imagine them as seven sisters guarding the house. If the Greeks liked to imagine dryads to personify trees, filling the woods with unseen tangible presences, I’m happy simply to stand among the trees in the wood above the house in these rich days of autumn. Sooner or later a day will come, bringing with it sharp gusts of wind to blow down the leaves, the whole shining panoply of apricot and gold, down into the litter that will smother the ground till it’s made sodden by the first obliterating rains of winter.
This morning I wrote: Enjoy the light while it remains. Go outside and see what’s there. Look closely while you can. While I live in this house and can handle a shovel and a planting spike that’s five feet of iron, necessary to winkle out rocks from the soil. Understanding comes late. It’s still dark out. I woke too early. I’ll wait for first light and go outside to see what I need to do. There’s never enough time to finish the clean up. I still have some daffodils to put in. And I suppose I might look to see where I might plant six apple trees.
