a sentimental child

thalassa cruso, 1971

Divine Providence and The Carol Burnett Show introduced me to Thalassa Cruso, as now seems fitting.

Early in December I was watching an old Carol Burnett skit that involved an eccentric plant shop owner and a man-eating plant. The old skit was shown with more recent commentary by the show’s cast and I heard it mentioned offhandedly that the character of the plant shop owner was inspired by a woman named Thalassa Cruso, who had a gardening show on TV at the time the skit originally ran. Why this offhanded remark caught my attention is, I suppose, where Divine Providence stepped in and took the ball from Carol Burnett. Out of a kind of detached curiosity, I tracked down and ordered a used copy of Cruso’s 1973 book To Everything There is a Season. The book cost me $4.00, $3.99 of which was for the shipping.

Although the book arrived just before Christmas, I didn’t get around to reading it until sometime in the second week of January. I’m not sure at that point whether it was Providence or Carol Burnett guiding my fate, but there I was in January reading  the chapter January. The book, subtitled The Gardening Year, is quite sensibly divided into twelve chapters, each corresponding to a month. The first essay in January, called The Muddled Seasons, begins with Cruso’s telling of her childhood fantasy of being awakened from a long slumber by a prince and knowing what season it was “from the fresh flowers that loving hands –I was a sentimental child–had kept constantly around my sleeping form.”

How had I not known of this woman before?

As I read through January and into February, I would occasionally put down the book and research the author, who was more literary and clever than Burnett’s plant shop owner had ever suggested. When I found Cruso’s birth date I knew it must have been Carol Burnett’s guiding hand at work, as Providence doesn’t seem to have a very keen sense of humor — January 9, 1909  was exactly one-hundred years ago to the day I began reading To Everything There is a Season.

The coincidence of the dates, of course, doesn’t really mean much–only that it was my first tangible connection to Cruso as a writer. The relationship between the reader and the writer is always a complex one — a connection Cruso herself makes in the preface of Season:

The reader discovers the writer’s likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. The announcement of a success brings pleasure; a failure is a disappointment shared–all because of the continuing association that builds up a sense of friendship between the writer and reader.

Cruso goes on to write about her own relationship with the garden writing of Vita Sackville-West, whom I knew of chiefly as a lover of Virginia Woolf and then only secondarily as a very witty garden writer. That I do know and like Sackville-West’s writing means that Cruso and I have just shared our first common experience — and the friendship between reader and writer begins.

I write this blog as a writing exercise for myself, because until I can “write out” my thoughts they are burdens to me. Gardening is the physical expression of that process the same way writing is. When I garden, like when I write, my thoughts are shaped and made meaningful. Cruso, I think, writes for the same reason. Throughout Seasons, as in all her writing, Cruso’s style remains first and foremost a personal narrative. An essay about the proper care of lawn turf begins with a young Thalassa at  prayer in her clergyman grandfather’s dining room. A column on gloxinias concludes with a sly rebuke to “our modern outlook.” For Cruso, writing about her garden means writing about herself.

Cruso writes openly and expressively, inviting me to like her. She is witty and literary and sensitive and observant. Following Cruso through the seasons for the rest of this year, she and I will continue to share experiences and our friendship will grow.  Our converstaion–that ongoing conversation between reader and writer– will be in the writing I do here. Articles written about  Cruso inevitably refer to her as “the Julia Child of Gardening.” As much as I admire Child and know that Cruso based her own television career on Child’s success, Cruso’s talent as an essayist sets her apart from Child. That she has been nearly forgotten is of great detriment to garden writing.

After a lengthy struggle with Alzheimer’s — which no doubt took away the very personal qualities that made her such a powerful writer — Cruso died at age 88. It is too poetically tragic that a woman so vital with life would robbed of it long before her body finally died. It is doubly tragic that she–whose own memories were stolen–should herself be forgotten.

What writing she left behind when she passed from this world is all that I will ever know of her. And yet reading her work, I am not struck by the sense of any ending but of always continuing. Through her writing, Cruso continues to engage herself fully in her experience and in her curiosity of the natural world. A gardener, she knows the pleasure of success and the disappointment of failure–but never loses the wonder of the sentimental child.

Legends and fairy stories tell of men out walking who are bewitched and find themselves suddenly in strange places of sound, light, and enchantment. I now feel that I know how those stories arose, for on that gray cold morning I too had the experience of passing from winter into what could have been an enchanted world.

although i do not hope

an 1866 plan of darwin's garden

That Man descended from Adam the same time Man ascended from Apes are two beliefs that I hold at the same time, much in the same way that I understand this year is both 2009 and 4707.

As I am not Chinese, however, I generally rely more on the Gregorian calendar as a means with which to try and understand the idea of time. If it wasn’t so extremely unfashionable, I might be quite content to stay naked with Adam in the Garden.

But, of course, we were expelled from there long ago. We became shamed for our own nakedness and so invented Science.

Science, in its broadest sense, is a means by which we understand and explore the nature of nature. Many scientists believe that everything is nature –  that is, existing with physical properties that can be measured. Man is separate enough from nature, it is proposed, that he can objectively understand it. But, the scientists continue, he is also subject to its laws. The laws of nature, of course, are made by Man. Nothing else that exists has been bothered enough to legislate one way or the other.

The story of Man’s Fall From the Garden is also the story of Man Becoming the Objective Observer. Eating from The Tree of Knowledge,  the eyes of Adam and and his wife were opened. Like children, they were suddenly aware of themselves as separate from their surroundings, seeing themselves as naked. With their new capacity for Reason they could no longer be of nature like cattle, the fowl of the air, and every beast of the field. With clever, open eyes, Adam and Eve were exiled from Paradise to feel wholly new feelings of desire and sorrow. Now that he felt so acutely  separate from Creation, Man was going to have to try and make sense of it all.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one descendant of Adam who felt the separation with particular acuteness, proposed “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” And Adam, as he remembered how in the Garden he had once named every living creation, felt a pang of homesickness.

from blake's "paradise lost"

Recently, with the passing of Mr. Darwin’s 200th birthday, Science has triumphantly declared its role as The Supreme Strategy for Coping with the Human Condition. With exasperation, Science declares myths are just stories and stories are only metaphor. Reality, these scientists insist, is Truth. The scientists are themselves divided over how they define these metaphors of reality and truth, with the Positivists and the Constructivists and a host of other philosophical schools debating the matter endlessly.

Darwin was a naturalist — that is, he believed that nature is all there is. All basic truths are truths of nature and thus exploring the processes of nature is the best way to explore the processes of the universe. One way the naturalist argument goes is something like Douglas Adams’, “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

And yet isn’t the story of nature just another kind of fairy story? An attempt to make meaning where, by the logic of objectivity, there is none? If there is any “point” to science, it is to try and make sense of the human condition, because surely no one besides humans is interested in the data. Science relates us to that, relying on cultural and philosophical assumptions. If I can imagine fairies at the bottom of the garden, they do exist there. If the scientist can’t find them, then maybe he’s using the wrong tools.

Many people do not make distinctions between kinds of truth, understanding only that there is true and false. Some of them try and reconcile the creation story to naturalist philosophy. Others, convinced that for something to exist it must have physical qualities, try to prove or disprove the physicality of absoluteness itself. This search for truth is an imaginative act, fueled by curiosity. It thrives on the possibility of the impossible — I have never seen one of the fairies at the bottom of my garden, but someday I might.

Art is truth. Literature is truth. Religion is truth. Science is truth.

New discoveries are made and new revelations revealed, as they have been throughout the millennia. And the ascending ape, exiled from the Garden, finds ways to make sense of his experience — before returning unto dust.

least of these

Some of the rarest living things are those least likely to attract attention… The tiny communities lives in the twilight zone at the back of the cave’s mouth.

It’s not often that the free monthly publication put out by our state’s Conservation Department waxes poetic, but endangered cave lichen (Coenogonium missouriense) is enough to make anyone a little misty-eyed.

It surprises some people, I think, to find that a big, lusty lad like myself should be so completely devoted to smallness and fragility. The fact is that I’m haunted by impermanence — the vulnerable, the dead, the decaying, the forgotten. Many people are depressed when confronted with these realities, while I am elated — the strong,  the living, the vital, and the loud are drawn into crystalline focus, appreciated more fully for what they are.

A garden is a cycle of life, repeated in microcosm.  More pointedly, a garden is the human expression of the cycle — the vastness of infinity pulled down by us to our scale. To garden is catharsis, a ritualized playing out of the human experience of space and time.

Whenever I walk through the field opposite my parent’s house, I grieve. The ancient looking burr oak (Quercus macrocarpa) that stood alone, huge and indestructible throughout my childhood, was felled a couple of years ago by lightening. Its trunk lies there, partially scavenged for firewood, amid several saplings. And I rejoice.

And yet, things will continue to change. The highway bypass will be going through here soon, and I will lose my Eden. In the autumn, my time here among all the memories of my childhood will end, again, as I move back to San Francisco. In my casual Episcopalianess, I recall the Morning Prayer:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

It’s a confession of sin — the sin of not living life to it’s fullest. James Deetz wrote a remarkable book about the archeology of the colonial United States with the remarkable title In Small Things Forgotten. In it, Deetz argues that life is in the details and writes at the end:

It is terribly important that the “small things forgotten” be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essense of our exsistence is captured. We must remember these bits and pieces, and we must use them in new and imaginative ways so that a different appreciation for what life is today, and was in the past, can be achieved.

Life is so fleeting and to believe many people, one would think life is only an inconsequential blip in cosmic time. And yet, for now, it hangs on at the back of the cave’s mouth.

archery & muzzleloader

In the midst of all this bitter cold, yesterday was sunny and nearly 60°. Kota insisted on a jog through Big Creek and naturally I obliged.

This time, instead of going into the woods (muddy and miserable this time of year) we went to the left, towards the shooting range and along the treeless ridges. We walked down the hill into a boggy bottom, came back up and went towards a small pond. In the middle of the pond, what I had thought was some kind of pump begin waving at me. In stupid surprise, I turned to get away. The waving water pump began whistling to get my attention — an ice fisher, naturally.

Embarrassed, I waved and yelled a hearty “Hey there!” and ran back to the truck.

*living and growing in gardens

This blog begins on a bright January morning, just one day after the Obama inauguration (though my garden, like its gardener, is too busy indulging in anarchy to be much bothered).

I sit now in my little garret bedroom overlooking the hay field to the north of my parent’s house. On the middle horizon a fencerow grows on the field’s ridge, blocking (for the most part) the highway and houses beyond. The rolling gold/brown of the winter grass that extends from the gravel road to that fence row has always reminded me of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World.

Mr. Wyeth died last week, but as I had assumed he was already dead my grief has not been overwhelming.

The desk I’ve brought into my bedroom is an old table salvaged from the barn. While suitably ruralrustic, the table’s too tall for my chair, forcing me to rest my laptop on (of all places) my lap. In the end, this ends up being just as well, as there are five potted plants taking up most of the table’s surface area anyway. The Nephrolepis exaltata ‘Green Fantasy’ (apparently some kind of Boston fern, though it’s spiky leafs make it seem more like a Begonia rex) was impulsively added to my Wal-Mart cart and has thanked me for its liberation ever since with huge amounts of growth. The velvety Plectranthus purpuratus (also a Wal-Mart native) was brought in from its summer home on the patio and has outlived its less hardy Swedish Ivy cousin (whose eviscerated Viking corpse still lies in state on the bathroom counter).  Exotic Pogostemon cablin (at Drop City they called her ‘Patchouli,’ man) was scored on eBay during a particularly economic phase whereby I was convinced all plants should serve duel functions of both looking and smelling and/or tasting good. Nearest this thrifty darling is a dying little moss from GRDN in Brooklyn I spent entirely too much money on and don’t know how to save. Finally, there’s a spindly variegated geranium I did save — in fact, I rescued it dramatically from the dumpster of a hardware store just as the first frost threatened to deliver a final death blow.

Just outside the frosted window hangs a large cedar window box. This autumn, I filled it with Juniperus horizaontalis ‘Blue Chip,’ which seem to be holding on through the frozen months –and various dead sedges and carex, of which I’m curious to see if any will rise like Lazarus in the springtime.

Time keeps passing, now winter then spring — each season bringing with it the memories of its precedents. Birth, life, and death all roll like the grass in Wyeth painting.

Horticolous loosely translates to ‘that which is living and growing in gardens.’

And so that is what this blog is then – one man, living and growing in gardens.