Out west II: a garden for the heart

Events conspire.  There may be people obtuse enough to believe that it is their own impulses,  motivations, or plans (God help them) that direct their lives, but I know of few of them.

We plod along from day to day, our minds on the duties and ordinary pleasure or pain of living, but, then, some force greater than our minds will hold comes to rescue, and pulls us back into the universal design.

So appeared one of those moments.  But the steps leading to it began long before...in fact, in Part I of this blog with Frederick Law Olmstead.  And who knows?  Perhaps before that, while I was not paying attention.  That photo of the gazebo above, for example, was just a photo I copied to give me an idea for my patio which, in fact, bears no resemblance at all to the culture, largesse, or shade of this one.  But an idea, however small.  And the one below, which I had taken months earlier, of a fence I thought to build along the back border.

Neither have yet been executed.  Things come in their own time for me.

Anyway, along came Olmstead last week at the Arboretum in Asheville to bring universe and consciousness together.  Philosophy comes first:  the garden as freedom...freedom particularly (and this didn't occur to me until this morning) of the mind.

Our third day out with Jim last week took us to Brevard, a town I usually like to visit for its thrift stores, especially the hospice and the women's shelter shops.  My first visit years ago to the latter brought me instant luck...face to face with the one thing I'd been searching, a wide copper tray ($15) to use as a birdbath.  There it is, in place.

This time, though no Brevard thrifting, we walked the streets to give Mary Ellen a look at the town.  

As we wandered, I found Number 7 Arts, a co-op of local artists, some of whose work I was taken with.  A woodworker, Jim Brandon; a collagist, Marcia Brennan; Nancy Richards, an artist who paints in alcohol ink on barely opaque paper; and Carol Clay, an acrylic painter on helpful duty.  Ordinary art-interest visits, sure.  Still.

collage, Marcia Brennan (by permission)

What, you ask now (as I did, at first), has this to do with Olmstead and garden designs?  It is, after all, a marker on the trail...subtle, appealing enough to stop and consider for its own sake.  Likewise our lunch stop, the Quotations Cafe, the wall of which gave me another pause.

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

On our long way out of town, we stopped at Mud Dawbers, a pottery studio where I found outside on the shelves of "mistakes" a lovely ocean-on-a-churning-day blue cup.

Inside, the potter who had made it, Kathleen Hannigan, became helpful identifying the who's-whos, oddly difficult otherwise, among their makers, for their work is displayed by color and sometimes form rather than name...as if, I thought then, art came before the artist. 

With its kiln and workspaces, alone on the road for some miles, these potters made art...daily-useful art, most often...from the thick, rudimentary element of earth...clay.  How near and far to and from the ground, I thought, artists need to be to work among us.  And maybe how near and far from our ground are we, artists or not.  Is there a space, not only of ground, but of mind or spirit where art lives and works among nature and us, a space that invents as it grows?

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Home from the west, the other night we took a walk around our circle, where ahead of us Artie Dixon was walking her tiny Zoe.  We stopped to talk.  She and Dail were disappointed at not getting in to a sold-out documentary that night; there was one more showing the next afternoon at the Chelsea Theatre...maybe I'd like to go with her?

photo from Floating Stone Productions

The subject, "The Uncommon Garden", by Chapel Hill filmmaker Olympia Stone (www.floatingstone.com) about the artistry behind Dan Krebill's home, appealed to me...it seemed one more stone on a path now appearing to lead somewhere.  Why not?

Why tempt fate? nudged the universe.

We went, we saw. I sat mesmerized...not simply at the fantasy of garden Krebill had had built, one he could wheel himself through to bring art and nature into an alignment hardly conceived by anyone except the crew of artisans and designers he gathered to the task, but by the evolving collation of all those other gardens and pieces of gardens, freeing mind (and body, too), along this way of mine.

photo from Southern Documentary Fund

As the film recorded his story (he was in the theatre audience that afternoon, a genial, charming man), the narrative to his garden became clear:  from his life in the military, to his children, to his bizarre accident that stunted life, and beyond to the continuing of his life...for his life did continue, yes, if not in the way previously supposed.  

photo from Rotary Botanical Gardens

On the screen he and the camera rolled around the peculiar, very particularly chosen icons...not the usual garden of plants and small implements, but creations of light, air, metal, stone, glass...even a dragon with fire!  Plants lived both green and iconic.

Every scene dug deeper into the reason I was there.  A painful reason, a breathtaking one, a hopeful one, a path beginning in its ending.   I knew, then, what the point of all this was.  

I needed a garden with heart.

It so happens that a few weeks ago, my sister's search for a house of her own here was increasingly frustrating her, and I had offered to build her an apartment on the back of my house.  She looked at me warily, acknowledging the awkardness, not sure what I was about...would she even want an apartment here? how would that work?...but I plowed ahead trying to see how it could be done.

As The Uncommon Garden neared its end, that project swept itself off the table and broke into the ash of sheer distraction. (My sister looked relieved.) I felt torn away by this wave, very much like tumbling in an ocean swell that suddenly overtakes you.

My child, I thought, my child whose life did not go on after.  Where is the place that child lives?  And where....for I did not, either, ever make space for the treachery so deep-rooted, so entrenched, that I have swum for years above it, carrying on, with no space for freedom of memory and heart?

I could hardly breathe for the shock of it.  But all through the second film shown, a longer one, which would have on any other day been of great interest to me, I kept pulling out my notebook and scribbling what Krebill's life's garden grew in me...what to make of all this?  what do I make of this?  

Sea-change, I wrote, and scribbled on.

The awkwardly shaped space of yard behind my house is a difficult landscape where new trees die, paths grow over, and plantings have so far come to nothing.  Beneath the surface, clay, root, and stone clog its heart; the surface itself is cluttered with the sort of climbing weeds the mind collects, unkempt and unexplored, so long needing clarity.  

It took Joseph to see and build my front slope...a garden I tend as best I can, seeing to water, weeds (there aren't many) and new life.  It was work that he thought redemptive; his gift was so to me, as well.  We are both proud of it.

But this back piece...over the years,  I've neglected it, sometimes making jabs at potential, but in insignificant, fruitless, and unseen ways.  Now, despite all my failed attempts, this moment with Krebill's garden had created a vision for me.  Are not the elements of its life already there?  The hard nature that grounds a ground?

And all this time, have I not been collecting pieces to form it and live there? Here and there in the yard, they live separate.

Heart, 2000, rvm

For whom would this garden, I wrote, be more than grounding...be a space to open the missing heart? 

The second film shown, longer (Aldwynth, also by Olympia Stone), I watched, appreciated, learned from, but the sliver of mind it took to do so had little to do with the rest of my being as my pen inked ground, root, stone, arbor, art, icon, on the pages in the darkened theatre.  My chest hurt for hours after, the impulse so strong.

I paint, yes, making art a space to store pieces of life without words.  But only what on media I call my #smallart, really.  I write, have written all my legible life.  Words are my thinking.  I have a high degree in literature, poetry particularly, and taught such for 40 years.  All those "epiphanies" that writers claim to have, part of the curriculum of their fame...they seemed so abstract, so poetically an artifice.  

Now, I don't know what to call yesterday's culmination of experience (if indeed it has reached culmination...a garden is never finished).  "Epiphany" is the only word that comes to mind and yet it cannot hold enough of that sea-change of mind-body I can still feel now, two days later.

I wonder if I dare even write all this to you; it seems so precious, so deeply interior a need struggling to get out of darkness (there, I know, I am on the verge of bending to cliche').  But what other words are there for this certainty of silence and vision and hope offered me now in a garden?

Out west, part I

Dear readers, I began this a good five mornings ago, and am just now sitting down 

to try to bring it to a close.  I already think it will be a two-part junket.

Wish me luck!

The other day [as in, a week ago now], my sister and I drove the four hours west to Hendersonville, just south of Asheville, to visit my brother-in-law, Jim, solo-ing for two months as our sister Eileen has been in attendance to their son, slowly recovering from his bad skiing accident in February.  My nephew cannot get about yet (luckily, he finds distraction in his remote work), so she will be in Oregon for another month yet. At least.

Our pioneering Jim welcomes company and treated us to a few days of touring while we fed his freezer meals and kept him in conversation.  The Arboretum, one of the loveliest campuses of the University in Asheville, was our first stop (after the grocery, of course).  

It's early yet for spring in these hills, so though there were banks of planted tulips, small brave ground blooms, and trees valiantly trying to blossom, the park called to us in its open welcoming way.  

The current exhibit/theme, though, was the real fascination:  Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed the Biltmore estate here and, more famously (and more significantly for him) Central Park in New York City.  

We spent a long time viewing the placards and film about his life, work, the blossoming of parks in cities across the nation and beyond.  For me, his genius began with his idea that all cities need public spaces that all people can share.  Parks make people equal. Reminded of my young years living in New York City, where Central Park was a univeral playground, retreat, open invitation to wander out of the tall buildings and old neighborhood of brownstowns where I lived (though not a stone's throw from Riverside Park), I thought with gratitude that someone like him designed relief from the otherwise busyness of, if often entertaining, city life.  Then with gratitude for anyone who makes our lives more human, open to friendliness, even kindness, and surely a sense of (those pickup baseball, softball and frisby games, those theatricals, that music and picnics to share, sometimes with people who five minutes before were strangers) humanness. 

Here in my town, I thought then, my gratitude for green and open landscape feeds that same sense of humanness, though it takes this visit to show me that. 

Just now, writing this at my worktable with the breeze outside shuffling newly leafed branches, some still their lime tint, I also imagine the cities I have been, and have missed visiting...New York, certainly, but also (and perhaps a tad moreso) San Francisco, Havana, London, Paris.  There, especially, the spaces of green among old stone and new glass, lush landscapes, some planned, some not, speak of Olmstead's work toward universality among people.  Parks and other natural landscapes are common ground, no matter how fancified.

It set me thinking anew about the Arboretum landscape itself.   So most of my photos there were set-pieces, so to speak, around the grounds, rather than the floral views I am usually drawn to.  In this garden, this time, each corner or juxtaposition seemed its own story.

The bonsai were still in their winter greenhouse, but we took in both the trees there and their empty shelves in the garden, where the rock formations, dry unless there is rain, reminded us how inspiration works.  It's not only grass, trees and flower beds that enliven the parks but other natural elements, some raw, some reformed by human hands.  The latter provide foci and point out the beauty of terrain and air.  

Art in a park, as in a garden, is more in synthesis than in juxtaposition, it seems to me.  Even the sign below, while it informs a fact, also makes its philosophical statement in the stone it is carved from.

 "This stream bed is intended to be dry; the only time it carries water is when it rains...."

After the Arboretum, Jim rode us back through the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Pisgah Inn, the view from which is vast, contemplative in its spring silence, its nature both different and same in the world of parks.

There was, however, no room at the Inn for lunch for us, so we took a snack to one of the Parkway's overlooks, then stopped at another, Eileen's favorite.

The road down the mountains curled between tiny-budding rhododendren and still dark mountain laurel, opening enough to follow the distant blues as we went.

The next afternoon, too beautiful to waste, Jim took Mary Ellen to Biltmore while I poked around here, weeding and cutting a bit in Eileen's garden, taking a spin to the Council on Aging thrift shop where Eileen volunteers (she's much missed there these days) and coming back with a good pile of treasures, doing an errand for Eileen while I was at it.  I spent the rest of the afternoon on their front porch, starting a new scarf to send her (it's damp in Portland still) and watching their overly quiet neighborhood for signs of life.

The visit, the longest trip in more than a year, excepting my aunt's 99th birthday in September, opened me to longer travel again, to thinking about venturing abroad once more.  And, indeed, a few days ago, an afternoon's birthday celebration out in the country brought me back to another of my favorite landscapes...Jim and Angie's view from their house on the farm, a space of inspiration always to me...to make drawings, paintings, even a novel written in the cabin, and this photograph to remind me...

Now, dear readers, look for part II of this post in a few days,

 where Art, natural and nurtured,  plays its part in bringing us breathing room.

As I close this up, there has come about yet another adventure to add there, this time in the nature of (I do not, I assure you, exaggerate in the tiniest bit) an epiphany.

 

Good morning, April

 

I meant to write an April Fools blog to you all, inventing some fantastic life I had (not really) been living...maybe April in Paris in an apartment overlooking the Jardin Luxembourg and train tickets for life around the world, etc.  

photo by The Real Emily in Paris

But the day slipped by with only Alexander fooling us early in the morning, and besides, there is plenty of not-so-foolish fantastic life happening here for real.

Ten days ago, my sister Mary Ellen finally made her way down south with a truck and car full of her belongings, moved into my upstairs suite, which she has been since busy making her own, and gone with me on walks to meet the neighbors.  It's lovely having her company here...a real spring reincarnation, along with the brilliant blooms and bright sprouts the season brings out.

This morning, after some welcome April showers last night, the morning bloomed with that Carolina sky we know and love, so we are on the porch having our morning coffee and water.

Yesterday, expecting those late showers, Joseph got up early to take me for my annual load of mulch.  It was a perfect morning for getting the garden into shape; the ground had long been seeping clay, and I was, as it was, particularly anxious this year to be protected from the long rainless siege of the past year.

Here's the thing about having Mary Ellen here...she's a Helper bred to the bone.  There isn't a dish unwashed around here, or a grocery list unlisted, and batches of red lentil soup simmer on the stove (and, shhh, a pan of her rich brownies...she's a superb baker...for Alexander and Joseph).  All this while she's still unpacking and sorting and putting away and arranging car license and insurance.  She's a whirlwind of energy.

Anyway, this morning we had hardly returned from the landscape yard when she rushed out the door, not even having had her morning coffee yet.  Somehow, she'd gotten it into her head that this was a "heavy" job, too heavy for me alone.  I'd already twice heavily discouraged Joseph from unloading piles of it for what he called my "convenience" (are you, like me, seeing a pattern here?).  Because I have my methods, which include leaving the mulch in the truck and getting right to work, so that in barely a couple of hours, I have it unloaded, wheelbarrow full by wheelbarrow full, and spread out wherever needs filling.

Over the years, I've looked forward to mulching the garden because 1) it's Spring and I'm springier; 2) I feel the energy rush of getting the groundwork in; 3) I know the growing newcomers are grateful for my intervention; and besides, 4) I need to protect all that work that Joseph did sculpting that difficult slope.  It really doesn't matter how many Springs have gone by in my lifetime; I wake up ready for the job.

But now I had a partner trying to save me from myself, apparently.  Thanks to her help, we finished about a half-hour sooner...she raking and gathering while I unloaded, wheeled and scattered, and finally, when there was no more raking to do, she swept the truckbed out so thoroughly you'd never know it ever had a load of mulch, or indeed  anything else.   I used the extra time to plant some green-and-gold I had been rooting and a few more herbs, though the basil will sit on the porch for another week or so, just in case.  I planned to put a pink dogwood where next spring it can come to life (I hope...I haven't had much luck with dogwoods, frankly).  

This morning I got up early and walked proudly down the slope drinking in the work we and last night's rain had done.  I have a small bed to mulch yet, around the newly leafing hydrangea I cut back earlier in the year.

But because it's too beautiful a day to do anything else, we'll take a ride out to Durham to walk the gardens of our rival institution, giving Mary Ellen a little break from her tasks and showing her another part of the area.  That's been fun, too, riding out to various parts of the area, a few new to me, too.

I wish I could record for you the birds singing to accompany us into spring, because:  

spring in the Japanese garden

Later:   they followed us on our afternoon walk through Sarah P. Duke Gardens

sky overhead 

gazebo, Blomquist native plants

beginning at the bridge

tulips, about a day past prime