Shopping Mall Gardening

“A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: He is making a vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as a traffic impediment, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration. And his sense of humanity’s dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful.” Wallace Berry, essay “Think Little” from collection “A Continuous Harmony”

One of Berry’s biggest complaints is how Americans expect “abundance without thrift”. One of his gardening commandments is to put back more than you take. Gardeners eventually learn that secret ecological rule. If you just put more ammonium sulfate on the flowers each Spring, your yard eventually may take on the Disneyland appearance of fakeness with swaths of colors God never intended, banks of bright disposable flowers. And they’ll last long enough for you to take a picture to post on your blog, demonstrating your gardening expertise. Good on you.

But this isn’t seasonal gardening so much as it’s what I call Shopping Mall Gardening: replacing hundreds of 4” plants at least four times a year on those tiny patches between the parking lot and the stores. Amid post-Xmas white sales last month, the mall gardeners were tossing out the bloomed-out poinsettias for begonias who always look embarrassed to be following the bright red pointsettias with their meager faded reddish and white flowers. Soon, when the begonias have done their gelatinous best, they’ll be rewarded by being tossed into a dumpster, and replaced with geraniums in shades of Pepto-pink, just in time for the Spring Sales.

The hundreds of 4” plastic pots the geraniums came in will be tossed on top of the corpses of the begonias, as will, presumably, the empty plastic bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizers. Instead of being returned to replenish the soil, I imagine that the begonia garbage will be barged to Indonesia along with mountains plastic drink containers and dead computers and cell phones with their poison and radioactive parts.

I am far from a careful expert farmer, nurturing the soil generation after generation. But I am a novice composter – putting kitchen waste and shredded junk mail in a small tumbler, and forking it into bottomless plastic garbage cans when it’s halfway ripe. A Master Composter would point out that my compost often smells like rotting garbage, and we all know that’s not right. But compost forgives all sins, eventually turning into my homemade version of “black gold” shot through with shiney short ribbons of non-degradable plastic windows that are all that’s left of the junk mail envelopes.

My garden doesn’t care about that, or about the frequent volunteer tomato and pepper seeds that I sow along with lovely wormy compost. I don’t waste, and I don’t consume mass-produced “color-packs” of short-lived flowers, or potted mums that have been forced within an inch of their life to bloom profusely and to collapse and die in exhaustion. A professional horticulturist I know once told me that Miracle Grow stuff, apart from poisoning the soil with salt, acts like, and I quote, crack for plants. That’s a temptation I – and my garden – can resist.

Rainy Day Thoughts

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
As if my Brain had split--
I tried to match it--Seam by Seam--
But could not make them fit.

“The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before--
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls--upon a Floor.”

Emily Dickinson, The Lost Thought

I’ve heard of balls to the wall, but I’ve never heard of anybody feeling like balls upon a floor. Well, maybe close – I sometimes feel more like those loose balls of dust that gather themselves into corners neglected by the mop – almost, but not quite, coherently ball-like. Would balloid describe that in-between state? Is that what Emily meant?

It’s rained heavily the past few days. The other night, when warning about the coming storm, the weather dude explained we’d have over 8 inches of rain so far (for the year that begins 7/1/08, but wherein the rain doesn’t fall until January), and that the average by this date is only six inches. He reminds us, as we sit before a toasty fire, we’re still in a drought.

If there was a webcam in my yard, it would be obscured by the green shade-cloth that has come unhooked and is flapping in the strong gusty wind. It’s also cold outside – in the 50F range. I know, that’s not something most people would consider cold, but to those of us who have acclimated to So Cal, it’s winter if it’s necessary to actually wear a coat when you go outside.

Days like these are good days to get lost in thought - as opposed to lost from thought.

Mood Swing Threat Level Scale

"In winter, I’m trying to get this Earth Mother vibe going, trying to find my way back to The Garden. Instead of fearing the oncoming darkness of age, I’m trying to go with the flow and wiggle out of some of those anger straitjackets, Try and stop being so pissed, for Crissakes! Embrace your mortality. Here too short and gone too long. So what?"
The Gardener

Here is it:
Red: ThelmaAndLouise Manuver, aka holding hands and jumping off a cliff
Orange: Hair on Fire
Yellow: Pants on Fire
Green: Get out the lawn chairs and watch the pretty lights hurling through the winter night sky.
Blue: Say ‘goodnight to Mr. Pillow…’

If that was the Threat Level Scale for Mood Swings, that’d be mine. And yes, I know. it’s not calibrated correctly. One week ago today, I went off the scale into threat level "Indigo".

Here's what happened. I thought it was today’s date. Since turning the page to February, I’d read the calendar wrong This day last week, I dragged Tech Support Guy up to Pasadena to the Huntington Gardens/Library for a lecture on the language of flowers. K skipped teaching his class so he and J could join us. Turns out, the lecture was next week, i.e. today. Worse: turns out we came on the first Thursday which is free day, and the place was mobbed. Did I mention it rained a lot? A Crap Trifecta.

So, we drove 2.5 hours to get there, grabbed a coffee and a bag of potato chips out of the pouring rain at the courtyard snack cart, and then drove back home, timing it just right to hit rush hour – in the rainstorm. In case you don’t know, rain is to people in Southern Cal, like ice is to Washington DC. It either terrifies drivers into slowing down to single digits on the freeway, or it makes drivers impatient with such slowpokes, causing them to drive too fast. The picture is heading south on Rt 15 between Riverside and San Diego, about 4 pm. Most of the traffic is heading north. I was peeking above the windshield trying to figure out what that wet stuff was that was coming down from the sky. The darker it got, the more drivers we encountered who were as befuddled as I.

So that happened.

Then later, we went to the home brew store and bought a bunch of fresh whole grains. I picked mostly hard winter white and chocolate malt. Then, I saw some lovely mysterious grains: long-rice shaped pale green rye, Dingman’s Special Red; and Vienna Blend - a lovely golden. The aromas alone from the grinding was a delight to the senses.

I use the small-quantity exotic grains to make pungent starters and levains. For example, I use it to add rustic color and crumb to dark spicy Eastern European loaves. Since I buy types and quantities that no sane home brewer would ever conceive of, the clerk (a twentysomething of non-specific gender with lots of tats) was confounded by my choices. Instead of providing reassurance by explaining I bake bread, I smiled, cocked my old gray head, and explained that I brew beer in nano-craft quantities. Wow, I just blew your mind, you young wipersnapper!


So, that happened later, and that made the calendar error ok. Maybe I am hitting the breaks better these days. Note to self, why do we keep using metaphors filled with suicidal precipices, small cars out of control, and no metaphorical driver at the wheel? Then again, who cares? At least I’ve got better airbags these days.

Crazy Salad

"It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone."

William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter

At the most primal level, a garden is a refuge from the world. It’s the place where Man meets Nature, and where all the first and endlessly variable and complex relations between the two begin. The Garden of Eden however, was not such a place. In Eden, everything was perfect and unchanging. Since the fall, in earthly gardens, man contends with the endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth. Perfection, if it’s ever reached, lasts mere moments in a garden. A flower at the moment of it’s most lovely bloom, is lovely precisely because we recognize that like all that lives, it will die.

Anyway, I’m not so sure I like the idea of a heaven in the hereafter being a perfect and unchanging garden. Immortal gardens would, I think, lose something vital if they didn’t embody the energy of what we call the Cycle of Frickin’ Life. Winter rain is as much-appreciated part of this cycle. We actually had some hail during a particularly hard rain the other day. - you can see it on the ground in the top picture. In the second picture, Lily is checking out this view from the safety and warmth of the love seat in the living room.

In front of the stone lantern, are the two thin stalks of the red-trunked, green-leaf Japanese maple. In the background, to the right of the old olive tree, you can see the bare branches of the red-leaved Japanese maple, silhouetted in the wet driveway beyond. These trees, including a third out of the picture, were moved from the tsukubai garden in the back yard where the two older trees had staggered through harsh dry summers for about ten years, and were on the point of giving up. Japanese maples are one of the inappropriate plants I insist on keeping alive in my yard against all odds. I’ve given up on lilacs, lilies of the valley and most violets. But I insist that these trees occupy a position of respect in the crazy salad of my garden.


The horn of plenty Yeats is talking about is the myth of the cornucopia, that overflowed with whatever the holder wanted. For example, imagine if you will, an endless abundance of cheesy-poofs as you sat by the fire watching old movies on TV. Then, if you wished for linoleum in a green and white pattern, the cornucopia would presumably provide enough to replace the stained living room carpet, including extra to allow for measuring and cutting mistakes. Is Yeats saying that wishing for such a crazy salad would cause the horn to malfunction? Would it perhaps spit out some malformed green and white cheesey poofs, or cheese-flavored floor tiles? Is he saying women in particular are inclined to prefer such a crazy salad in their lives? Is he saying it’s ok for me to try to cultivate Japanese maples in the harsh Zone 9 climate?

Even if he thinks this would be crazy, he refers to such ladies as “fine women” and that is how I chose to interpret his letter to his daughter. He’s saying, be sure to eat your meat, but also to enjoy your own personal crazy salad, and accept the imperfection and mortality of your garden. Good advice.

The Tree of Lights

“She carried a basket
full of flames, but whether fire or flowers
with crimson petals shading toward a central gold,
was hard to say—though certainly, it burned,
and the light within it had nowhere else
to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red
and burning glow, the only color in the scene.”
Eleanor Wilner , The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

A long time ago, Annie Dillard (In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I think) wrote an essay about a person, blind from birth, whose sight was restored when they were an adult. The problem was, their brain didn’t know how to interpret what their eyes were seeing. Upon seeing a tree, back-lit from a low sun, in the brilliant colors of autumn, the newly sighted person called it a tree of lights.

Wouldn’t it be fun to see something in your garden so new and fresh that your brain didn’t know what to make of it? I wouldn’t want to go blind first, but I would like to be able to see things with new eyes. Especially in this black & white month when there’s nothing much happening outside.

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.

Lucky Seven and Cleaning House

“’Cleanliness is next to godliness’ was one slogan to which it was difficult to subscribe. If by the last quarter of the twentieth century, godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.” Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

Our cable went dark midway through the Inauguration yesterday, but at least I got to hear Aretha. She’s still got it. I sorta missed seeing the door hitting Dubya on his way out, but at least he’s gone. Whew!

So, because the only other alternative to TV was to talk to each other, Tech Support Guy and I watched Disney’s anniversary edition CD of Snow White last night. There are lots of features besides the movie. There’s an interactive game where you see the seven guys in silhouette as they return from work and march single file across a log bridge. In the game, you have to name the Dwarves in order. Sure, Doc is first and Dopey is last, but who’s in the middle? Let’s just say I nailed it. (Mom would be so proud!)

Meanwhile, until the cable guy can fix the box, our living room is littered with books from the bookcase we had to move to get behind the TV. And talk about dust! Not a pretty picture, albeit a mute testimony to my housekeeping skills; or more precisely, a testimony to the lack of exercise of my housekeeping skills. Because the cable box is always warm, the cat likes to sleep on top of it. There was cat hair embedded in dust, and even a desiccated hairball. You’ll understand why I didn’t want to accompany this post with pictures.

The seven dwarves aren’t the only thing that comes in sevens (isomers of heptane come to mind). The cable guy came while I was writing the above, and installed a new cable box which promptly registered 11:07 AM. Coincidence? Luckily, I now have a brand new cat warming machine on top of my TV, and a shiny new remote to learn how to use. Even better, the first thing I saw on headline news when the TV woke up was Michelle Obama’s white gown for the Inaugural Ball last night. This was probably the most important piece of news I was deprived of yesterday.

Now, it’s back to dusting and replacing the books on the bookcase in an effort to be more godly. At least I have CNN to keep me company.

Encounter on The Road of Life

"One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it." Albert Camus

Tech Support Guy and I were out in redneck country the other evening, on our weekly trek to get fresh eggs from a lady who raises chickens in her suburban back yard. Tech Support Guy was driving, and I was riding shotgun. While we were stopped at a red light, a red pickup truck pulled up in the lane to our left. From my seat, looking out the driver’s side window, all I could see was a ginormous right front tire: large, bumpy, and - because the truck was jacked up so high - an obscene amount of muddy undercarriage, looking a little like dirty underpants glimpsed beneath a bright red dress.

Flashback: Years ago, when out with our then teenage daughter, we parked at a restaurant in Pasadena. The same type of vehicle parked next to us: a pickup truck painted in a bright primary color, oversize tires, heavy-duty suspension and whatnot, and raised so high off the ground that you would risk a nosebleed getting into the cab. As we passed this monstrosity on our way to the restaurant, the driver climbed down. Our daughter said, as we passed him, sort of under her breath, but actually loud enough for him to hear, “Dude! Sorry about your penis.”

Since that day, it has been a sort of family sign language/shorthand, upon encountering obvious manifestations of monumental overcompensation, to gesture with thumb and forefinger spaced an inch apart and to say “TLP” which stands, of course, for tiny little boy parts.

Back to our red-light. Tech Support Guy glanced over at the pickup truck, turned slowly to me and gave the TLP sign.

Me: “I’d love you so much more if only you were more of a real man. Like TLP there.”

TSG’s reply was interrupted as the light turned green, and TLP gunned his truck through the intersection and up the hill, probably consuming a half gallon of gas. Nobody saw that coming.

TSG: (choking on TLP’s exhaust and easing our politically correct Prius through the intersection) “Yeah, baby, I hear you. And if only you wore your clothes two sizes too small, dyed your hair with Clorox, and chewed sugarless bubblegum, we’d both be much more satisfied with life in general.”

Me: (Hopeless, wordless, shoulder shrug, conveying my world-weary acceptance of the crushingly dull lives our vehicle bespeaks, as well as the failure of so many of my own dreams and ambitions, like never learning how to crush a beer can on my forehead.)

TSG: “But, we each play the hand we draw, you know?”

Me: “Boy, howdy.”

Memoirs of a Docent

"We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing."
Henry Kissinger
Winner of the coveted "World's Most Ironic Come Back to Bite your Ass 2009 Award", in great part because he said it years ago, and I just rediscovered it.

I’ve been a docent at a Southern California Water Smart Garden since I retired about 5 years ago. In my professional life, I was an attorney writing and negotiating business contracts to buy and sell professional services and subcontracts. Managed to get out before my ethics were compromised, that is, before work began to feel like a Mission Impossible scene where the hero escapes the last closing door by sliding beneath it like a slider heading into home plate. Despite the lack of professional respect or commensurate pay, I actually liked what I was doing, and believed I was doing good. Now that retirement has overtaken who I was then, I have shed that mask like a retiring superhero who simply becomes his once secret identity.

The up side of getting no respect was that, never being suicidally inclined, I didn’t define my identity by what I did. I always peed sitting down, but that didn’t threaten my grip on my own value. Once I retired, I had to become acquainted with the person beneath that conservative dress suit. Get back into my own skin and my old t shirts.

I gave some thought to what I’d do to keep busy, and in how I valued such activities. I decided to get out of the lawyer ‘business’ and into the gardening ‘pleasure’.

To keep my mind from slowing down, I sought something to keep my body from freezing up and becoming brittle. Gardening, when done right, can be a sort of purification ritual, an improvisational tai chi and moving meditation, and a simple stretching and slow moving in all physical gardening actions. I may have only successfully grown cabbage once, but there are other measures of success in my current career.

I haven’t had to stretch my brain to learn new lessons since I was trying with mixed results to memorize the 8 times table a while back. My experiences as a docent have been in realm where I have never been before. I have some residual interpersonal skills and expertise in kissing management ass that served me well those first touchy months.

People I worked with for most of my professional career are strangers to me now. But they knew I was a smart-ass, but tempered by being on the losing/weak/defensive side in contractual transactions. I once knew how to smear Vaseline on the lens of my actual thoughts to make them presentable to mixed company. With other docents, I have had to learn a whole new set of interpersonal skills. Trouble is, as my Daddy used to say, it’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. I’ve got to remind these new friends what a cynic I am. Must work on my profanity, dammit!


This is not to say that I’m surrounded by boors and morons. This is more like and advance apology. Should I offend even those of my fellow-docents who I’m slightly fonder of than I am of poison ivy, I offer these, the “least of my brethren” my sincere apology. I may occasionally remember my experiences with docents in this blog, and if that offends, then I'm sorry you can't quit your moralizing, and doubly sorry you're a hypocrite, and that you identified something I said with your own character. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I couldn’t be sorrier. Seriously.

In addition to my gardening activities, I now hereby decree that this blog will be about my growth in every respect, notes of lessons I’ve learned, skills I’ve mastered, and my attempts to chronicle lessons lavishly failed. I’m the center of this tiny universe and make no apologies for speaking my biases here. Notwithstanding the foregoing however, to the best of my knowledge, no actual persons or events was/will ever be discussed here. Should anybody in real life disagree with that, I hereby stipulate that my autobiography often misquotes me. Immoral as hell.

Caring, Hoping, and Cease Fires

"He thought he saw a Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
'A fact so dread,' he faintly said,
'Extinguishes all hope!'"
Lewis Carroll, A Strange Wild Song

The term “caregiver” has been on my mind lately. When does love fade from complex devotion into simple need? Don’t think of the myriad awful interminable little assaults to caregivers. Don’t think of the burdensome begrudged undignified duties involved in caring. I’ve been thinking of what the lover gives to the loved one. Can the loved one tell the difference between love and need? How do we need care and give care except through love?

Today, I’m wondering why can I devote lavish care to cultivating my garden (in the way Voltaire spoke of Candide, in my blog, and in my yard) while I resent demands to care for the people I live with? One could argue it means I care for the garden more than the people. I protest it’s not that simple. I think it’s a more complicated mixture of resentment at having to provide certain chores, putting up with the passive aggression and ingratitude, my growing desire to stop pretending to play nice, and needing care desperately myself.

I do know however, that I’m finding it harder and harder to muster the resources for caring. My body aches with new and strange pains, and they come more frequently and go more slowly. My spirit is exhausted by trying to steal moments alone to meditate and try to find my way back to the neighborhood of good moods. To good days and pain-free nights. To be myself again.

I think there is a cycle, or perhaps spiral, playing itself out. Good days and bad days. Honest attempts and resentful failures to connect. I’m less able to extend the good days; less able to hurry past the bad days. Our lives are spinning past, and daily we are reminded what we lose despite our best efforts to stay limber, inventive, inquisitive, interested, alive and together.

On good days I replenish reservoir of love for coming droughts, remember the promises we made each other, and do the simple math: there’s more good than bad. Way more. We’re not going anywhere, and we’ve managed to keep each other entertained pretty well over the years. It’s been a blast.

On bad days, I see old age as an unavoidable descent into indignity and dependence. Those days, I just try to remember it’s not a defeat to stop shooting first, no matter who started it. It’s the way we care for the ones we love. It’s also, incidentally, how we all care for each other. So stop shooting.

Make haste slowly

"We are ordered to hurry
and to take our time.
Let the arrow with a snail on it
make this clear.
The snail is slow
and the arrow swift."
Andreas Alciat, “Liber Emblemata”, Emblem 53 “Ripening”

My resolution for 2009 is to learn to make haste slowly. I’m going to be the snail, balancing precariously on top of the arrow sailing above the mountains.

Or, is that a pie balanced on the flying arrow? In which case this emblem could mean to always send chicken pot pie via airmail, just like your mamma advised you. Either way, I’m cool.

Interview with a Terrible Gardener

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
- William Wordsworth

At what level of garden kitsch would you draw the line?
Just before I got a bunch of old tires from a junkyard; painted them white; lined both sides of the driveway with said recumbent tires, and planted strawberries in each wheel well.

How many times do you re-dial a number when you get a busy signal?
Once, each time.

What garden plant or decoration do you consider the most unfortunately and sadly overused?
Ceramic fairies crouching beneath cement toadstools.

What’s the punch line to the funniest joke you know?
It’s elephants all the way down, my friend.

What is the worst invasive pest you can imagine threatening your garden?
The dog that craps on my garden path. It’s not my imagination that makes me think I’ve stepped in a pile of shit. It’s quite real. As for imaginary pests, I suppose the most awful would have to be the ghost of the world’s worst Elvis Presley impersonator (the old, fat Elvis), haunting my garden and singing Midnight Train to Georgia.

If you ran for public office, what would your campaign poster slogan be?
Vote for me. What’s the worst that could happen?

How do you see yourself as a gardener?
By looking into a mirror.

What’s your ten-year garden plan?
For me to survive ten years, and keep on gardening the whole time.

Joyous Winter Solstice

We finde it common (but not comely thou)
That, when a good Endeavour is begot,
Unless, at very first, it equall grow
With our Expectance, we regard it not.

Nor Wit, nor Patience, have we to conceive,
That ev’ry thing, which by Man be wrought,
Proportionable Time, and Means must have;
Before it can be to Perfection, brought.

Yet, ev’ry day, in things of ev’ry kinde,
Experience has informed us, herein;
And, that in many things, a change we finde,
Which at first, would scarce believ’d have bin,

For, though a Gosling will not prove a Swan,
Unruly Colts become well-tamed Steeds.
A Silly Childe growes up a Mighty-Man,
And, Lofty Trees doe Spring from Little Seeds.

Learne, therefore hence, that, nothing you despise,
Because it may, at first, imperfect seeme:
And, know, how all things (in some sort) to prise,
Although, you give them not the best esteeme.

From hence, moreover, learne not to despaire,
When you have just occasion, to pursue
A toylesome worke, or any great affaire:
Since, all things, at the first, from nothing, grew.

And, I myself will, also, learne, from hence,
(Of all my Paines, though little fruits I see)
Nor to repine, nor to receive Offence:
But, rather joy in what befalleth mee,
For, though my Hopes Appear but meanely growne,
They will be Great, when some shall think them none.

Emblem 46 from: George Wither: A collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne, Quickened witheh metricall illustrations, both Morall and divine: And Disposed into lotteries, that instruction, and good counsell, may bee furthered by an honest and pleasant recreation.

Slang or Secret Code?

“He that likes to plant and set
Makes after-ages in his debt.”

This post has almost nothing to do with gardens. Apparently, as the season outside my door becomes cold and wet and precludes me from working in the yard, the spirals of my always fragile grasp on reality start to wobble into paranoia. Accordingly, this post is about my latest conspiracy theory, involving the word verification choices when you leave a comment in Blogger.

Is it just me, or does the word-verification text seem to be veering closer and closer to selecting real words? It seems to be evolving organically. I’m wondering if the server where all our blog posts live is developing conscious intelligence. (I hesitate to call it “artificial intelligence” because I often claim that word to describe my own pretentious attempts as scholarly blogging.)

So, back to the conspiracy, I’m sure Blogger retains the capability to block certain words, e.g. profanity, from showing up in the verification. If so, then they should tighten their algorithms up to also block words like this wordoid from a few days ago: mossesse.

Think of playing the game balderdash – think of the word verification letters as spelling real but obscure words. Take “mossesse”. It could mean a hip hop gansta who raps in Latin, “esse” being the Latin root of the verb “to be”... On the other hand, it could be a proper noun, let’s say, the Greek God of motivational speaking. Or the name of the guy in this emblem, planting a tree for the ages. You can call him Mo.

Another theory: what if the letters spelled out hip new slang and you’re the only one not in on the joke? Know what a “kittenhead” is? Or what a prostitute means when she refers to a John as a thirty-three? Well then. Check out Caleb Crain’s article “Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait: Modern Slang”(This article appeared in the December 29, 2008 edition of The Nation)

Now, while you might be an obsolete old fogey when it comes to hip slang, there’s nothing to panic about wrt/word verification. You don’t have to put on your aluminum foil cap just yet. But please humor me and keep an eye out for a word verification that says “iniatelaunchsequence.”

See, this is what happens when I have to play inside out of the sun. Instead of planting for the after-ages, this is the time of year that I delight in finding monsters under beds and ghosts in the closets, and learning fun facts like garbage-man-speak for maggots is “disco rice”. And now you and every other Joe Sixpack knows too. Try to get that picture out of your head!

'Tis the Season

"From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory:
One thing then learnt remains to me -
The woodspurge has a cup of three."
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The Woodspurge"

The scientific name for this plant is Euphorbia pulcherrima (in the Spurge family, "very beautiful"). Imperialistically controlling the discourse, the common name we use today for this six-foot tall native Mexican plant with bright red bracts is Poinsettia. The name is taken from early US Ambassador to Mexico, Joel Robert Poinsett who “discovered” the plant in Mexican churches circa 1825, and first brought it back to the US.

Famously amnesiac about our historical misbehavior in this hemisphere if not on this globe, Americans simply ignored the Aztec name for these plants (Cuetlaxochitl) and so do you. Further south, in Chile and Peru, the plant was called the “Crown of the Andes”. Later, Mexicans called this plant Buena Noche because it flowers at Christmas.

By whatever name they’re called, they grow locally. Except for this picture of the Ecke Ranch, the other poinsettia pictures were taken in my neighborhood of El Cajon, CA. Eighty to ninety percent of all poinsettias in the world were born on the Paul Ecke Ranch, in Encinitas, CA, a relative stone's throw from where I live.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how plants can communicate – more specifically – how, like any form of communication, plants are apt to be misunderstood.

Let’s try to translate what Poinsettias are telling us. First, let’s take the Victorian conceit of the Language of Flowers (LOF). Because this New World native wasn’t known to your everyday Victorian, those fluent in the LOF were probably clueless about this plant’s meaning. (Remember that - should you travel back in time with some potted poinsettias to distribute, and OBTW, don’t shoot your grandfather while you're back there.)

Then, take the Doctrine of Signatures which holds that God isn't much of a kidder - especially after that other plant misunderstanding; the one about where not to eat apples. Knowing man would be subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, early European practitioners of Christian metaphysics posited that God would tell us how a particular plant could help us based on its “signature” or sign of nature. I’m not sure what point of a poinsettia would mean under this interpretation, and neither is Google.

So here’s my guess. How about red relating to the pulsing heart, and pointy red leaves that encircle the diminutive flowers in the middle representing a bloody crown of thorns, or knife blades dipped in blood, neither of which is your typical cheerful seasonal message of peace and love. But my favorite fun fact about this plant is that by any other name, it can still kill you, which is a pretty hard message to misunderstand.

As a gardener, I tend to go for the Peace on Earth seasonal message. Whatever it means to you, I greet you seasonally.

Say What?

"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said _______”
Sir Walter Scott, "My Native Land"

It’s final exam week. In recognition of all the students who were up early to cram for today’s exam, I offer the following easy multiple choice question. Fill in the missing phrase from Walt's poem above:

a. I’m lost
b. That’s not mine, I was just holding it for a friend.
c. This is my own, my native land
d. I’m not bad, just misunderstood
e. Hey you kids, quit playing on my grass
f. As God is my witness, I’ll never plant lettuce again.
g. Wait! I can change!
h. I’m sorry, what?
i. ______ (fill in the blank)

Disclaimer: While Walt probably intended “man” in the first line of the poem, in the universal sense (i.e. as all persons), my suggested answers apply mostly to men in the gendered sense.

If I was trying to balance things out, I should have added some girly choices, like, for instance, “You call me that again, I’ll cut you,” or “We have to talk,” or “I’m going outside to play in the backyard.”

My garden beckons, so I'm going out to play. BTW, this is a pass/fail exam.

The Gardener Reads and Cooks

“Far away, down by the police station, a dog was howling at a moon no one could see, perhaps imagining that, summoned repeatedly enough, it would appear with food of some kind.”
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

I’ve been reading Pynchon’s book, Against the Day, and it has been challenging. There are about a million characters – some real, many legendary; some ghosts, many disturbing; some parodies, many composites. Many characters have memorable Pynchon names - like arch-villain industrialist and robber baron Scarsdale Vibe; or Lake Traverse, daughter of legendary martyred bomb-making anarchist Webb Traverse. There’s a guy named “Sloat.” You know what a loser he is the minute you meet him.

I got some “white wheat malt” at the home brew store last week. I ground about a half cup in my Kitchenaid mixer’s mill attachment. It’s not as adjustable as using my coffee burr grinder, but I was going for rustic: some of the grain ended up like delicate flour, some stayed in relatively large chunks. The night before baking, I took a little sourdough starter from the fridge, and refreshed it by adding about ¼ cup of the milled grain and ¼ cup of water. The next morning I had a puffy, bubbly, sour-smelling levain.

The trans continental stories unfold on top of each other, giving a philo-thin concurrency to some of the layered threads. Characters move in and out of place and plot, connecting and disconnecting over time. As if that wasn’t enough to confuse a Mensa Lit Crit with Tenure, there’s this thing about time travel and parallel worlds, and people who can do either or both. A couple of the major plots occur not on the reader’s world, but in a parallel universe, perhaps where WWI didn’t happen.

The book begins with a story of the five Chums of Chance, a Hardy Boys precursor from the Antebellum age, at the White Palace at the World Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and their exceptionally advanced faithful canine companion, Pugnax. The Chums of Chance is apparently a world-wide fraternal organization operating as a sort of Thunderbirds of the Victorian Age. The writing style is a delightfully fluffy confection (even down to repeated references to other “episodes” and adventures of the Chums). For example, consider the almost magical high-tech way the Chums travel: on an airship powered by steam.

Just when I’m settling in for a delightful period piece written in the most fluent “thrilling days of yesteryear” prose – weirdness starts to creep in. Wait. Did I just read that the Chums, another successful mission accomplished, took a shortcut home through a hole in the earth’s crust, encountered an entire civilization at war, and oh by the way, intervened decisively on the side of the “good guys”?

I almost started writing down names and the pages first encountered, to be able to pick up the thread pages/years/parallel universes away. I’ve doubtless dropped several stitches, but I think I’m getting the general idea.

Here it is. Pynchon clearly prefers the company of anarchists, magicians, charlatans, Marxists, Commies, con-men, crooks, grad students, theosophists, coal and silver miners, mathematicians and drug dealers/smugglers, to that of the tycoons, privileged children of nouveau riche posers, industrial giants, and dozens of other versions of The Man appearing before/after WWI as capitalist swine wearing clean clothes, miscellaneous “uncleansably rich,” dilettantes, hired guns, war profiteers, weapons dealers/smugglers. For example, one classic pair of adversaries are Edison and Tesla. Edison: bad. Tesla: good

Before you sit down to crack this book open, have a dictionary handy. For me, some new words were encountered, learned, and used before absquatulating. Some expressions with cosmic and/or microcosmic meaning are discovered (like the flashlight brand: Apotheosis Sparkless Torch). There’s a quest for Shambala, perhaps a map that leads there, perhaps not. Also, I think there may, or may not be, a weapon of mass destruction, and it may or may not be in my own world. I could be wrong.

I know I’m missing a lot of the jokes, but my favorite part about this book is that I often encounter such brilliant phrases, and such elegantly crafted sentences that they delight, without the need to understand whether they advance one of the zillion plots. Pynchon puts words together like flowers in a bouquet. There’s a group in London called T.W.I.T, or True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys, made up of various “devotees of the nut cutlet.” He often over-stuffs sentences frequently with conflicting metaphorical meanings. He is the master of the run-on sentence that stands on its own as a delightful complete sub-plot.*

His sentences drip with meaning like bloody limbs on a battlefield, painting more and more shades in the sinister shadows, and throwing in the occasional actual vengeful ghost flickering at the edge of the picture. For example, one man’s rage is described as “a fluorescence of vindictiveness.” Elsewhere, he paints the sky in “almost familiar” shades of yellow:

“It was the light kept reminding him, yellow darkening to red to bitter blackness of the whirlwind brought among the sunlit, wildflowered meadows, thunder that began like the rumbling of sash-weights locked with old death-secrets of some ancient house back behind the sky’s nearly carpentered casementing and soon rocking like artillery.”

He carefully catches dialog that adds a layered richness to conversations: “Hope you ain’t having too many of those second thoughts that stop a fellow just as dead is if it was him down in the sawdust.”

When I baked the bread, I used the starter in place of yeast, and added the rest of the ground white wheat malt (about ¼ cup) in place of some of the flour. The bread has a gorgeous texture, and thanks to the white wheat malt, a tangy sourdough flavor. Now, if I could just persuade it to rise a bit more…

Pynchon’s book rewards careful study and contemplation of the rich pageant of life that he has either created, or discovered by traveling there himself and simply returned to report on. I have a feeling I’ll be re-visiting it again over the years – if I can just get through Moby Dick for the first time.

*Here’s one of those run-on sentences that condense an entire un-written novel:

“Because for all her winters got through and returns to valley and creekside in the spring, for all the day-and-night hard riding through the artemisia setting off sage grouse like thunderclaps to right and left, with the once-perfect rhythms of the horse beneath her gone faltering and mortal, yet she couldn’t see her luck as other than purchased in the worn, unlucky coin of all those girls who hadn’t kept coming back, who’d gone down before their time, Dixies and Fans and Mignonettes, too fair to be alone, too crazy for town, ending their days too soon in barrelhouses, in shelters dug not quite deep enough into the unyielding freeze of the hillside, for the sake of boys too stupefied with their own love of exploding in the dark, with girl-sized hands clasped, too tight to pry loose, around a locket, holding a picture of a mother, of a child, left back the other side of a watershed, birth names lost as well behind aliases taken for reasons of commerce or plain safety, out in some blighted corner too far from God’s notice to matter much what she had done or would have to do to outride those onto whose list of chores the right to judge had found its way seemed…Stray was here, and they were gone, and Reef was God knew where – Franks’ wishful family look-alike, Jesse’s father and Webb’s uncertain avenger and her own sad story, her dream, recurring, bad, broken, never come true.”

Massive Dependence

“The Garden exemplifies the massive, but often unrecognized dependence of human creative activity upon the co-operation of the natural world.”
David E. Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens

Several months ago, I salvaged some cheap bookcase wood from J&Ks housecleaning frenzy. Yesterday, I made a shelf for my bonsai/dish gardens to over-winter.

I used slices of the old pine tree that fell over this very spot about a year ago to make the uprights, and I used three long former bookcase boards for the two shelves. This shelf will probably self-destruct within a year, not only because the lumber is flimsy, but also because the slices of pine tree are riddled with termites. Meanwhile however, I now have a nice sunny southern exposure where the rock will provide a heat reservoir during the day to protect my babies from any cold snaps lurking in the dark nights of the next few months.

Some time back, I got Tech Support Guy to drill a drainage hole in an old fire pit. I wrestled it on top of the big rock behind the shelves, where it has survived for several years. It contains mother plants of several succulents I’ve propagated and used to populate other hot sunny locations. This is all part of my “Ten Year Plan” to make my backyard garden more “sustainable” in our increasingly hot and dry climate.

This spot would be way too hot during the summer for most of these guys, and it receives no irrigation except what I deliver by hand. Should the shelves survive this season, they’ll be a nice home for potted succulents next summer.

I readily concede my massive dependence on Mother Nature in this endeavor. These rickety uneven shelves aren’t meant to last more than about a year. Perhaps, with some cooperation from the natural world, they’ll last a bit longer.

Guest Entry from SE Michigan

Last Saturday you wrote: "One week ago, the Veggie Garden was filled with butterflies – big fat orange and black ones." I'm assuming the monarchs have finally reached your area. The interactive migration map at The Journey North says they were expected in San Diego after Oct. 24.

These were the only butterflies I knew by name as a child in Maryland, back when I could still recognize the milkweed they prize. The photo of them roosting en route is from the TJN site.

When I lived on the Florida Panhandle 30 years (!) ago, and despite the lack of data points on the referenced map today, they arrived en masse in the fall, as if they headed south until reaching the Gulf of Mexico and then turned right. I could not drive along the coastal highway without feeling like a murderer, as they got stuck in my front grill and windshield wipers and crunched under my tires. Honestly, the numbers put one in mind of a biblical plague — although an extraordinarily beautiful and harmless one. That was when I first learned of their epic migration and over-wintering in Mexico.

You, too, can help map their journey, either at the Journey North site above or at Monarch Watch. TJN says, "Large numbers of monarchs have now reached Mexico's overwintering region. By November 2nd, the tops of fifteen trees at the El Rosario sanctuary were covered with monarchs."

Truth vs. Faith

“Truth for him is faith, since he has faith in the truth; he sincerely believes in the credibility of all significations… The most diverse forms of expression – from mimicry to the “language of flowers” – are related to meanings – verbal or nonverbal – which are true, that is, believable simply because they are expressed… Thus the child, replacing truth with ordered belief, from the beginning confuses error and truth, bondage and liberty.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot (page 128)

In his biography of Gustave Flaubert (quoted above) Sartre equated faith with truth. Or rather, Sartre said Gustave confused the two. Or rather, not so much confused them as considered them synonymous – with an unresisting, un-present, unfounded (hence, “idiotic”) belief in their individual legitimacy. For Jean-Paul, Gustave’s faith in what he was told made as much sense as if I believed everything I found on the internet because, well, they wouldn’t put it on the internet unless it was true, right?

But I like the part about the language of flowers as a form of expression. At first, I was thinking that the language plants and flowers spoke to people was non-verbal, that it was without words.

But the language of flowers is not non-verbal. Flowers mean things. Flowers can communicate things. Even J-P, when he says Gustave “pronounces sentences,” that “he repeats words or puts them together like flowers in a bouquet.” The trouble with bouquets of words is that they’re slippery. What you take unproven – on faith – depends on which flavor of “ordered belief” you subscribe to.

Like spoken words, the language of flowers could be tricky too, and just as subject to being misunderstood – faith taken as belief. For example, suppose someone sent you a bouquet which contained a pretty mushroom pictured here, a spring of white chestnut, and some lovely pink cyclamens?

Let’s start with the ‘shroom pictured here. (Image: Franck Richard). Even the Encyclopedia of Life admits it looks comfortingly like several edible species, “most notably the straw mushroom.” In fact, it is Amanita phalloides, aka “Death Cap”. According to in the ordered belief we call Modern Science, Death Cap is the most poisonous of all known toadstools, and because of its unfortunate resemblance to several species of edible mushroom, thus increasing the risk of “accidental poisoning.” Oh, dear.

Is the white chestnut sending a mixed message? According to the Doctrine of Signatures whereby signs of nature are assigned meaning based on the resemblance of a plant or a part of plant to a part of the body, White chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) helps people “who feel resentful and bitter about the way their lives have gone.” Perhaps, bitterness and resentment are symptoms of homicidal accidents. In which case, the mushroom and cyclamen communicate a perfectly consistent message.

According to the Victorian Language of Flowers, sentiments were communicated by flowers. Cyclamen (Cyclamen persicum), for example, signifies resignation and good-bye. Regardless of who's resentful, bitter, or exiting, the sender of cyclamen is saying goodbye.

So, employing at least three different systems of expression - or ordered belief systems - the message of the bouquet would differ depending on whether the recipient liked to eat fresh mushrooms and/or white chestnuts; or on which system of communication sender and/or recipient favored; or whether either or both simply loved cyclamen and/or chestnuts.

Whether or not I have refuted Sartre’s criticism of Flaubert’s “credulity” in apparently believing everything he was told, I hope I have established that there are virtually infinite things to believe in and ways of ordering one’s beliefs. Whether we try to communicate verbally, through symbolism, one or more obscure and occult means, or other non-verbal methods, the one constant seems to be that misunderstanding is always likely, or at least possible. Unprovable truth ends up being as slippery as unfounded faith. Seems to me Satre didn’t know that some unprovable things are better taken on faith.