Tag: Gardens

Tuesday June 1, 2021

We buy varieties of veggies and herbs plus a blackberry bush and a fig tree from a local nursery. Seedlings, mostly, though also some packets of seed. With a bit of digging, we plant these. With a bit more, I unearth several classic Blue Note jazz LPs on CD in the bins at Goodwill: Sonny Rollins’s A Night at the Village Vanguard, Freddie Hubbard’s Hub-Tones, and John Coltrane and the Thelonious Monk Quartet’s Live at the Five Spot: Discovery! Welcome additions, all.

Monday May 31, 2021

“Planning” rather than “policy.” Planning is people power. All of us can plan. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw this distinction in their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Planning means learning about vegetables that grow in heat, as we’re planting late here at the start of June. Sweet potatoes, peppers, sunflowers. Zucchini and summer squash. Okra, green beans, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, mustard greens, spinach, corn, and Swiss chard. Other vegetables will fare best if we plant them later, at summer’s end. Radishes, for instance. Carrots.

Sunday May 30, 2021

I wake to an announcement from a “witch of Instagram” whose readings have proven insightful in the past: we’ve entered “Mercury Retrograde.” Her advice for the next three weeks is basically “stay calm, go with the flow, despite feelings of postponement.” And the day is a good one: a friend invites us to her new home, with its beautiful porch and garden. I stroll around admiring the latter’s rocks and stones and many varieties of plants. The place seems magical: an apt terrain for psychedelic psychogeography, with its porch swing and its side porch overlooking the garden, and its meditative loft and its stained-glass window. It reminds me of a house from my past: a house that before my time belonged to a gay wizard. Someone from the home’s past — the wizard or one of his successors — had mounted on the wall above its side porch a cattle skull. Let the home’s stories and images be brought back into awareness. Write it, I tell myself, as if it were a weird tale: flotation tanks, rock boy. A spooky tale, certainly — but not a work of horror. The narrator is a bit like the Edward Jessop character from the movie Altered States: a professor who embarks on a psychedelic journey. The journey occurs during the period of the professor’s tenancy in the home of the gay wizard. Imagine him here recalling it now in retrospect. His spiel is, “It never occurred to me at the time that the place might have been haunted.” This, despite the fact that he grew up only a few towns away from the infamous ‘Amityville Horror’ house, raised by a mother who herself was raised down the street from one of the houses upon which the story of Poltergeist is based. Let our soundtrack be as follows:

Wednesday May 26, 2021

“For my next act” I think as I stare at trees, their upper branches bathed in the orange light of the setting sun. I feel like a magician having built boxes, four wooden raised beds, conjured them in the midst of a field of clover here in the yard behind our home. In these beds, we’ll plant our garden. Yet the utopian in me (or the Faust in me? the Gnostic in me? the “slow sick sucking part of me”? same difference?) is already restless, ready to set sail (as per Wilde), ready to walk away (as per Le Guin), wishing for something other than what is here, wanting in its stead some other bower of bliss (this not that): a vertical garden, say, in the midst of a food forest.

Sunday May 16, 2021

With end of semester nearing (another day or so of grading and that’ll be that), I acquire tools and prepare for summer. Gardeners needn’t be “tool freaks” like the Whole Earthers — but they do need tools. Garden tools: “objects of both practicality and great beauty,” as Derek Jarman notes. Shovels, rakes, wheelbarrows: these are all “means of production.” Tools both for planting flowers and vegetables and for removing grasses and weeds. Frankie digs beside us as we work. With help from Sarah’s parents, we replant beds around the base of the house. The work we do now opens new avenues of thought, new spaces of possibility featuring rocks and stones. Before I know it, I find myself in the know again about Sakuteiki, the oldest published Japanese text on garden-making, written in the mid-to-late 11th century, when the placing of stones was gardening’s essence.

Monday April 12, 2021

I begin to craft and draft a spell called “TO BUILD A FENCE.” I watch videos, I weigh methods, I note down a list of required tools and materials. Even as I do this, though, I remain on the fence: “To fence or not to fence?” Must we commit to enclosure? The garden also needs an irrigation system, I tell myself: some combination, perhaps, of water harvester and drip. With drip, I can attach a timer, allowing us to water the garden when out of town. As for what to plant, I refer myself to Eric Toensmeier’s Perennial Vegetables. Part of me, though, still wants to pay attention to Silicon Valley and is easily distracted. “Attention being,” as a friend notes, “the one hero that might take us through the web, the webs, and leave us semi-intact at the end of the day” (Forms of Poetic Attention, p. 2).

Sunday February 28, 2021

A neighbor with a chainsaw helps me remove a fallen tree. He relays the yard’s history, helps us decipher the boundaries of a garden, one he tended in years past. He’s a contractor. A worker who works with him brought music and, with a wheelbarrow, lent a hand removing the tree. To both the worker and the neighbor, I am thankful. Yellow daffodils sprout around the house and in the yard. I imagine plucking a sprout of onion grass and eating it as seasoning atop a baked potato. This I do.

Monday February 22, 2021

The remains of a stone retaining wall run like a spine through the yard. “Think of how we might relate to it when we plant our garden,” I tell myself as I admire the wall’s mosses and walk its length. I picture suddenly an amphitheater, and with it, some fantasy of community that would use it. Perhaps it’s time again for some Movement. Tomorrow we join Frankie on her first trip to the zoo.

Friday December 18, 2020

As I wander again through the woods, the ground now covered in an inch or more of snow, I reflect upon the brief history of gardens recounted by Federico Campagna in his book Technic and Magic. The root of “paradise” arrives into Greek and Roman thought by way of ancient Persian gardens. “A Persian garden,” writes Campagna, “was a Paradeisos, to follow Xenophon’s first Greek transliteration of the original Persian term Pairidaeza” (175). For ancients, gardens functioned as living pictures of the cosmos. “This same structure surfaced again in Italy at the time of the Renaissance,” he adds, “when gardens were designed as miniature cosmoi (plural of cosmos, the universe)” (176). Let this history be a guide for our garden-making in the year ahead.