Nobel Prize in Garden Blogging Nominations Now Being Accepted

My alphabetized list of suggested categories.

1. Chacun a Son Gout Award – for blogging about your personal taste in gardens that, until you explained, would have been likely to strike others as bizarre, or even disturbing. Also known as the “strawberries grown in tires painted white award.”

2. First Degree Plantslaughter Award – for a post about the most inadvertently cruel murder of nursery starts. Simple neglect doesn’t count – go for creativity.

3. Freestyle Pruning Award – for blogging pictures of topiary that might have been trimmed by a striking longshoreman with delirium tremens. No gum-drop shrubs EVER.

4. Gilding the Lily Award – for blogging about not leaving well enough alone in the garden. You know who you are.

5. I’m Just Saying Award – for a garden post that seemed to make sense at the time, but in retrospect manifests at best the blogger’s twisted sense of humor, and at worst his/her clinical insanity.

6. I’m Special and You’re Banal Award – for a post about the most pretentious groin-grabingly transcendent garden design ever. Extra points for smugness and passive aggression.

7. Moral of the Story Award – for a post that succeeds in refreshing a garden cliché, thereby teaching the rest of us lessons about wildlife survival, beauty school drop-outs, grave robbing, or other obscure topics whose connection to gardens and blogging would have otherwise seemed tenuous or contrived.

8. My Grass Is Greener Award – for blogging about executing a garden idea plagiarized from someone else. Extra points awarded for cloaking your envy with sophisticated disdain.

9. Not My Fault Award – for a garden-related blog post that incorporates a self-deprecating critique of the gardener’s failures, but without including self-pity or homicidal rage.

10. Pride Goeth Before a Fall Award – for a post about a garden ambitiously planted in Spring that turns out by Summer to be more than the gardener could possibly maintain.

11. Squint and It’s Lovely Award – for a post describing a garden that incorporates otherwise offensive elements which, at a proper distance, acquire a degree of sublime beauty.

12. Swing and A Miss Award – for blogging about a boldly attempted, but poorly executed garden vision.

13. That’s Not What I Meant Award – For blogging about the unintended consequences of a specific garden design idea, preferably positive, but consideration given to results that created a mutant strain of Japanese Beetles impervious to any pesticide including napalm.

14. What Were You Thinking Award – for blogging about the gardener’s worst implementation of what seemed like a good idea at the time, but which turned out to be as inviting as cupcakes topped with grease that congealed in the frying pan after Sunday breakfast.

15. Zone Maps Be Dammed Award – for blogging about successfully cultivating an unsustainable garden or plant that has no business trying to survive in your climate zone. (Note this is a high bar to pass because I’ve tried for >20 years to cultivate lilacs (syringa) in Zone 22, and my current attempt still has a few leaves on it’s stunted branches.)

Sanity and Handbrake Turning Points

"O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!"
Shakespeare, King Lear

We saw Laurence Olivier's King Lear last night. Simply the best performance ever. Thanks, Netflix. But, how to describe the play?

Permit me to digress. According to Wikipedia: “When Lisa and Homer discuss the language to use in his first review Homer attempts to augment nouns with 'groin-grabbingly'. Lisa offers the word 'transcendent' to which Homer replies, 'What about groin-grabbingly transcendent?'”

Sir Laurence's portrayal of a powerful king losing his mind, of navigating dysfunctional family relations and betrayal is best described using Homer's timeless phrase. And to those who say The Simpson's is low-brow, I say 'Good day sir!'

Which got me thinking about other experiences where the term is apt. Upon serious consideration, between loads of wash yesterday, I sat outside, warmed by the late winter sunshine, cleaning herbs for soup. I came up with this idea.

That expression also perfectly describes certain instances in one's life where great change is afoot. Such turns along the Road of Life are typically approached way too fast, making it feel like one is a passenger in a sports car careening down a steep mountain road, driven by a suicidal madman, and pursued by screaming daemons of age.

At such times, we struggle to retain compos mentis while navigating handbrake turns: dangerous, dramatic and, life-changing. Once such turns are in the rear-view mirror and the death-defying theatrics are over, the moments are recalled as “groin-grabbingly transcendent”. Surviving handbreak turns provide us with moments of such clarity, albeit tinged with a kind of life-flashing-before-your-eyes panic, that ordinary life becomes once more relatively peaceful and bearable.

At such times, I think it helps to think of what King Lear said. I would like not to become mad. Handbreak turns are sometimes required to keep on the right road, and I think they can sometimes help us to stay sane and temperate.