Creating Interest

Watching Perlman's "Messiah"

2012-01-13T08:44:00.000-06:00

(I published this piece in The Missouri Humanities Council's Passages, January 5, 2003)

Last month I had a wonderful experience singing Handel's Messiah with the St. Louis Symphony under the direction of Itzhak Perlman. I want to tell you about what made that experience so special, but to do so, I've got to tell you a little of my musical history.

I don't know how many times I've sung Messiah; probably fewer than a dozen, but it has been a part of my life for over forty years. The first time I heard it I was in the 8th grade. It was performed by the county choral society, and Mr. Fegly, the husband of my English teacher was the baritone soloist. All I remember about that evening was the pleasure of hearing a chorus and orchestra in an auditorium. Live music was absolute magic to me. That same year, Itzhak Perlman, who was my age, appeared on the Ed Sullivan TV show as a teen prodigy. He was already on his way to becoming an international superstar.
I didn't know about Perlman back then. I was more interested in Elvis, who had also been on the Ed Sullivan Show some years earlier. I spent most evenings in my room with my guitar and my sheet music. In school, we all took a music appreciation class from a teacher who was considered a freak because he'd graduated college with the skills and interests of a concert pianist. He made sure that we all knew about the American sensation, Van Cliburn.

As far as I knew, only one person in my school was studying singing, and I didn't know about this until one memorable assembly. Out walked Bill, age 15, and delivered the blustery recitative, "Thus Saith the Lord," from Messiah. His performance was quite Martian in the general context of student life. I still remember the impressions of it: the most prominent larynx of anyone I knew; nerdy glasses; a particularly bland tone the color of mushroom mousse; and extraordinary guts to get up there and be "laughed to scorn." His performance did reveal, though, that people our age were aspiring to become artists as adults, and this was no small revelation.

When my dad installed a modern stereo system in our home that year, Messiah became one of the staples of our family repertoire. This was the Philadelphia Orchestra recording, Ormandy conducting. I gave it a lot of play.

During the 60s something of a revolution was going on in musicology. The manner of performing Baroque music was reconsidered in ever-widening circles, and the "fat sound" of that Philadelphia Orchestra recording was supplanted by a completely different tonal palette. Several schools of interpretation developed in the ensuing years, but I remember the shock and surprise of hearing for the first time that "new" Baroque sound on the Messiah recording of Charles Mackeras. I was in grad school studying voice and choral conducting when it was released and I nearly wore it out! One of the main differences in the sound was accomplished by using oboes to double violin parts and reducing the number of violins, so that the sonority was quite reedy. That recording also featured phenomenal ornamentation of the solo voice parts, in the manner of a real Baroque performance. The Mackeras recording, and another by Nikolaus Harnoncourt that same year, redefined how Messiah should sound. I couldn't wait to become part of that world!

I got to sing those Messiah bass solos for the first time in a Christmas concert of the Symphonic Choir at the State University College in Oswego, New York. I was there in my first job after grad school, working as a sabbatical replacement, which meant full-time for half-pay! The faculty trumpter developed a cold sore on his lip the day before the performance, so I had the rare experience of singing "The Trumpet Shall Sound" with the trumpet part played an octave lower, in the range of a trombone. This novelty, I hope, distracted the listeners from my unsuitability to sing that repertoire! I had not yet understood that one's voice is not defined solely by its range, but also by its size and tonal quality. I was, unknown to me, a light lyric baritone.

In 1972 I conducted a full Messiah with the Durango Choral Society at Fort Lewis College. We used a new edition by Watkins Shaw that featured the results of the latest scholarship. Good people were in that ensemble, and I think we did a creditable job. I conducted for five more years at the College of Santa Fe before moving to Vermont to work for the state humanities council. For the next few years I performed the bass solos in several Messiah concerts, some of them conducted by my wife at Johnson State College. No, my voice had not grown larger and richer, but I was plausibly musical and very available. When she quit that job to concentrate on her performing career my singing took a ten-year break.

Messiah was the second St. Louis Symphony concert I attended when I moved to St. Louis in 1995. The chorus was prepared by its new director, Amy Kaiser, who had moved from New York, where she was highly regarded as an orchestral and choral conductor. I joined the Symphony Chorus in 1998 and have performed three or four Messiahs since then. They have all been different. When it was announced last spring that Itzhak Perlman would conduct Messiah this year, we were filled with anticipation, for this would be a unique opportunity.

Perlman has been a violinist of international renown since his early teens. Born in 1945, he made an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on TV in 1958 and was a super-star by the age of 20. He recently branched out into conducting (see his bio at Sony Classical), so we singers knew that we would be a part of the formation of a major talent in a relatively new role. In our four chorus rehearsals before we met Perlman, Amy Kaiser prepared us to be, above all, flexible. We had no idea how Perlman would approach the work, so we rehearsed within the range of the likely.

Our first meeting with any conductor is always a "piano rehearsal" with no orchestra. This is where the conductor gets to know what sort of "choral instrument" is available for the concert. It's where he or she teaches the chorus how a piece is supposed to sound. The first impression of Perlman is his warmth. He took the stage in the unassuming manner of a person still learning a new job but confident of his aptitude. We in the ensemble were in a position to watch a towering musical intelligence at work in a new role. That personal warmth established instant trust in the labor that would follow.

At one point he told a story about a chamber music rehearsal in which one of his colleagues kept insisting that they go back over and "correct" a movement that seemed perfectly fine. He realized after a while that his colleague was simply indulging his own pleasure in that movement, but couldn't say so directly. So Perlman told us, "you'll understand now why I must find a lot of fault with the way you sing The Lord Gave the Word." For him, the busy hubbub Handel writes for the chorus on the words "great was the company of the preachers" is one of the most delightful strokes of genius in the whole work. What a surprise when he demonstrated in his own rich baritone voice how he wanted the passage sung! We came to anticipate his pleasure in those passages and to make that pleasure our own.

The next night we got together with the orchestra, and of course we couldn't wait to see how he would work with the violin section. He immediately addressed three fundamentals that would color the entire performance. First, he wanted sectional agreement on the amount of vibrato to use. In some Baroque performances the strings use very little vibrato. Perlman wanted enough to "warm up" the sound without getting into the Romantic sound of fifty years ago.

Second, he paid careful attention to tempo. It was obvious from the start that he had a clear idea of the tempo of each piece, and he was remarkably consistent in establishing the right speed in a work lasting three hours. He actually changed several of his tempo ideas when he realized that the chorus would sound more effective at a slightly slower or slightly quicker pace.

Third, he paid attention to degrees of energy. A lifetime of solo experience at the highest level had taught him that a player's inputs of energy are sensed by a listener as transmitting interpretive meaning. He singled out for attention the orchestral introduction to the bass aria, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?" This is a brisk aria with a lot of flash in the violins before the singer enters. In the five seconds before that entrance the violins play a repeated pattern of very fast notes, and it was in that pattern that Perlman crystalized how he wanted a total commitment to "bow energy." What he heard was an energetic beginning to the passage, and then a sense of "coasting." What he asked for was an input of equal energy on every single note from the beginning of the passage until the entrance of the singer. What he got was the most exciting moment in the concert!

When a world-class violin soloist works with a world-class violin section, you see and hear the sort of suggestions and responses that are well outside the usual scope of rehearsal talk. This is what we all were hoping to observe. On the night of that first orchestra rehearsal, during our break, a number of the violinists approached Perlman and asked if he would try out their violins. He cordially took each instrument in turn and demonstrated some bravura passage or other to show what the instrument sounded like in his impressively large hands. What a wonderful moment!

On each succeeding rehearsal and performance I watched our conductor make adjustments based on what had happened the previous night. A different baton gesture here, a different form of encouragement there. In one performance it seemed that one of his gestures had brought out a bit more violin sound than he wanted. In the next performance I saw him make the same gesture half as big, and he got about half the response as the night before. Seeing this kind of responsiveness has been a veritable banquet of experience during my tenure in the ensemble.

There on the stage it struck me as never before that we're being "played." I felt as if I was a part of a great musical intelligence, to the degree to which I could be an instrument worthy of his mind. I think that's the essence of being in a conducted ensemble. You're in the service of the great mind who wrote the piece, and you're also in the service of the great mind who's trying to bring the piece to life. For me, these experiences on the stage of Powell Hall, five or six times a year, have woven together all the threads of my life as a musician.

Lines from Ulysses: "In sleep the wet sign calls her hour"

2011-12-26T09:11:00.000-06:00

She was born for water, I for tides;
To make a seed, you first must grow a flower
She became the second of my brides.
In sleep the wet sign calls her hour.

And now I have a third, I call her Keb;
To make a seed, you first must grow a flower
A Saggitarius to a Cancer wed...
In sleep the wet sign calls her hour.

Lines from Ulysses: "There all the time without you"

2011-12-19T17:25:00.000-06:00

Today I begin what I think will be a series of short poems inspired by lines or phrases that catch my attention as I read James Joyce's Ulysses for the first time.

Can it be? Were you
There all the time without you?
And are you? Am I?

Sunday Morning at Lago Segretto

2011-12-04T10:28:00.000-06:00

I'm having a slow start, listening to "All Night Long" by Lionel Ritchie, feeling some, but not a lot of, nostalgia for the seventies.

There....had enough nostalgia? Kathy and I are still watching episodes of The Rockford Files with James Garner. Remember them, the files, I mean? I've got them all on DVD. A few minutes ago I looked up a version of "Little Drummer Boy" that I remember seeing on TV in the seventies, a Bing Crosby Christmas Special. He sang a version that had a duet part written for David Bowie. That rendition was far from the worst of Bing Crosby. I suspect that distinction goes to his recording of "Hey Jude."

But I'm not dissing the seventies, truly I'm not. When I was roughing my way through them, they were so very "here and now." They were as up to date as anything could be at the time, and I only felt mildly ridiculous (and clammy) in a polyester double-knit shirt. I did not own a Leisure Suit.

Now the seventies are so far away, blessedly stored away with the eighties. Today feels "here and now" more than yesterday, although memory is here and now, too, isn't it. So in a manner of speaking, yesterday is no more unreal than the memory of five minutes ago.

I will close with a Haiku.

Dreamed I was holy,

Ghost-ridin' a papal bull

Way up in the sky.

-- Cowboy Rodeo Haiku (Fusilli Press, 1997)

Gradus Ad Parnassum

2011-11-16T11:53:00.000-06:00

How-To books in the Olden Dayes had the elevated title, "Gradus ad Parnassum," meaning steps to Parnassus. In 1970s slang lingo, that would mean "Be all that you can be!" I use it to express the state of incompletion of our expertly-built deck and paver patio beneath it.

We are so close, but yet so far! Here's a picture of the crew leader, Steve Brandt, attaching a header for the second set of stairs yesterday before lunch.

When they quit the previous afternoon, I stained the three "stringers," the header boards, and as many step boards as Steve thought he'd need (all of them in the garage). As Steve and Tim Yanko got to building the steps in the afternoon, Steve realized he hadn't bought enough cedar for the steps and would come up three steps short.

Steve's father, Carl Brandt, came in the afternoon to take over what Steve had been doing and got the job to this point by quitting time.

Construction is held up while the lumber yard awaits delivery of some new, non-warped, cedar railings for both sets of stairs. Steve will bring those on Friday, I hope, with the extra boards for the steps, and they will complete the deck in another two or three days' work.

The new sod on the right of the picture was laid down two weeks ago today, before a series of good soaking rains. The sod crew was all over themselves complimenting me on Steve's 5-star job of laying the patio pavers. We'll have to put a bit of furniture down there, as the area is no longer "just a simple walk-out."

If you look through the stairs, you can make out the big set of wind chimes I hung up to celebrate the completion of that area. The chimes were a retirement present to myself in 2010 and had hung on the old deck here until Steve tore it down in August. Now we can enjoy them again. I enjoyed them last night as I drifted off to sleep. They weren't loud enough to keep me awake, nor so silent as to have no presence.

Songs, Plain and Simple

2011-10-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

A little over two years ago while surfing iTunes for singer-songwriters, I discovered the Canadian, David Francey, and downloaded his song, Midway, for a playlist I was creating for Kathy.

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David's music reminds me a lot of Lyle Lovett, not so much in subject matter as a propensity for making the fifth of the major scale the center of gravity. He doesn't have much of a vocal range, nor does he have any affectations or pretensions or any distracting mannerisms to take you out of the richness of his natural gift with words. It doesn't hurt, either, that he is blessed with a rich baritone voice and the expert collaborator, Craig Werth, on guitar and back-up vocals.

David Francey sounds like your average Joe with a decent voice and an easy-going manner. Listening to him sing, you wish he was in your neighborhood, maybe next door, a guy to invite over with his wife for a pot luck supper on the deck at the end of a beautiful weekend.

Well, he's not in my neighborhood, and I know him only by his recordings, which I can listen to for hours on end. I told Kathy last night that there is something totally comforting in the sound of most of his recordings. The acoustical space reminds me of the Ian and Sylvan records of the mid-60s. Their recording engineers set up equipment in old hotels with big rooms to reflect the sound if the guitar and autoharp. They worked for a sound that didn't sound "engineered." Craig Werth's guitar work is right out of the 60s, too, the same finger-style patterns we all learned for coffee house work. It is simple, clean, immaculate, and right for David Francey's manner of singing.

Last night I thought of Gordon Lightfoot, the "dean" of Canadian songwriters when David Francey was growing up. Lightfoot's recordings in the 70s seem over-engineered when I enjoy them now. There is more interest in the instrumental backup than in the vocal delivery. Lightfoot had a problem of vocal tension above middle C that became a liability as he aged. The "sweet spot" of his voice was in the middle of the bass clef, and what a beautiful baritone sound he had when singing there.

Here's Gordon Lightfoot in 1979 singing his 1971 hit, "If You Could Read My Mind." The melody begins in his sweet spot and rises to the range where he adds vocal tension -- clenched jaw, tightening throat. For the next thirty years the sound was still recognizably his, but it was less and less listenable.

Francey's singing has a different technical flaw, the "Dylan haze" that comes from a general self-strangulation. Bruce Springsteen and many others picked up this affectation from early Bob Dylan records. If you've ever heard Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," you know the hazy sound I'm talking about.

I can't listen to Bob Dylan hour after hour. These days, we put on the David Francey CDs an hour before dinner and turn the sound back when we sit down to our meal, and just enjoy the feeling that a friend came over with his guitar and swapped songs with us around the fire place.

Here's David again with Craig Werth in a radio studio in London, singing "Broken Glass."

If you come over here for dinner some time, chances are we'll still have David's CDs in the player. And if you play "Midway" again, I suspect you'll remember this haunting image: "And the girls in the house of mirrors/combing their hair."

A Student of Light

2011-10-22T09:42:00.000-05:00

Since I was twelve years old, I have loved to see the world through a camera lens. Several decades ago, when my father gave me his much-used SLR camera, I subscribed to Modern Photography magazine. Of the many tips I filed away from the columns of Bert Kepler, this one tip became my "golden rule." He said something like, "remember when you are taking pictures, that your subject is always light." I began to see the world differently.

I always carried my camera in the car with me back then. I was playing at being a pro photographer, which means I wasn't really making more than small change at it and it wasn't my real occupation. It was my passion, though, and I wanted to be as good as the pros who regularly sold their scenic pictures to Vermont Life magazine. I became attuned to the intricate play of light on the scenes I drove through as I traveled the length and breadth of Vermont.

The scene above, Main Street in Johnson, Vermont, was one I had seen hundreds of times, as I lived in the neighboring village and drove through Johnson a great deal. One evening in May I was on my way to an appointment on the other side of Johnson, and as I rounded the bend and came onto Main Street, I saw a quality of light on the faces of the buildings that made me pull over then and there. I got out of the car, snapped two frames of the same composition, and later sold the image to Vermont Life. It was light that made me pull over, but Lady Luck who kept distractions out of the scene. There are no moving cars in the image, no dog pooping at the curb, just the classic look of a small town with two white towers lined up on the same side of the street in the light of a waning day.

For the next decade, Vermont Life used my pictures here and there pretty regularly, and I realized that I had made it into the same ballpark as the "real" pros, but that I differed from them only in the ability to allocate full-time attention to the hunt. At some point I became more interested in growing and hybridizing daylilies. My love of photography followed that interest.

I gave a talk to my daylily club last night and showed them this image in a section titled, "Color and Light." To me, light is the true subject of this image, because without the slanted rays of morning sun turning the red petals into "transparencies," the picture would be cluttered and confusing. Backlighting converts the picture into an advertisement for the pleasures of growing "spider" daylilies with narrow segments and lots of open space in each blossom. You can also see this particular cultivar, "Red Ribbons," from all angles here.

I said I was the only person on the bus tour who stopped to enjoy the sight of these flowers before the sun rose to a height that took away the magic of this moment. Everyone else walked right past this vision in search of "the latest and greatest" cultivars or the breakfast snacks.

My advice to people last night was, "when you step off the bus at the first garden on the tour, look for the light."

Deck Weather at the Duckworthy Estate

2011-09-22T17:40:00.000-05:00

This afternoon I looked out over our deck to the gardens below and spied this daylily in bloom. It's BELLA SERA! I presented it to Kathy, who is polishing up a plan for the patio that will go below the deck. We're using "Bella" stone, too.

A couple of days ago, the Branco crew laid the deck boards in front of the dining room and kitchen. Here's Steve Brandt, President of the company, checking a spacing tool. It has guides for narrow screws on either end. The screws go into the deck boards at an angle, on their sides, so that there are no visible screws or screw holes on the surface of the deck.

You might notice in this picture that the deck boards are not at a 45 degree angle, while the corner of the frame is 45 degrees. The reason the boards are not at 45 degrees is that Steve determined that he could use standard 18-foot boards at this angle. At 45 degrees, he would need longer boards that are fabulously more expensive, and there would be a lot of wasted wood. Knowing the level of talent and skill in the Brandt family, we told Steve to do whatever worked best.

This situation would make me freak out if I were building it, but to Steve, it's just a saw cut.

Voila! I love the odd look of that corner. It's what a custom deck should look like. Here's Carl Brandt, Steve's father, working on the longer boards. What a team they make!

And here's Tim Yanko using the "fine tool" to cut the ends off the siding boards so that the deck boards can have a snug connection to the side of the house.

Looking to the right from the deck that evening, I took a picture of my "Nebraska" keeper bed and my seedling beds below it.

I named it "Nebraska" because it feels like I'm weeding a large state when the weeds get the upper hand. I've resolved never to let them get the upper hand again. The little yellow flags along the lower edge of the seedling beds are there to mark a boundary so that I can sprinkle grass seed on the correct amount of path between the beds.

Here's deck weather at the Duckworthy Estate. The only thing missing are the ducks.

One builds a deck for this time of year, not for the smoldering furnace afternoons of July and August. The season from Labor Day to Thanksgiving provides many good times for sitting outside with a glass of sparkling water over ice with a wedge of lime.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of our move here. A squadron of ducks were sunning themselves on the dock, "Boone's Dock," when we arrived. Hence, Duckworthy Estate.

Quack!

For the Love of Landscape

2011-09-10T09:56:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the Branco work crew was rained out at noon while fine-tuning the deck frame. We had a gentle soaker rain all afternoon. It's exactly what the ground needed, but it's only a beginning of nature's restoration of all the life-giving moisture she sucked out of the ground in the past ten weeks. Today is one of the happy times to celebrate the renewal of growth in the gardens with members of our daylily club. We're having a picnic at the finest and largest Victorian-era walking park outside of England. I mean, of course, Tower Grove Park, near the Missouri Botanical Garden.

We're playing a "take-away" game at the picnic. It's like musical chairs, but it involves taking away a prize donated by a member, either from the prize table or from another member who already claimed a prize you wanted. Kathy and I are donating two of my hybrid daylily creations.

This one is named MOM'S MIRTH for the brightness and bigness of my mother's capacity for enjoying a joke. I knew the moment I first saw it in 2000 that it was likely to be registered. I had crossed Bill Munson's very fine COLLECTOR'S CHOICE with my favorite Whatley, ROSE IMPACT. This 7-inch whopper is bigger and brighter than either parent. It expresses the form of Collector's Choice and the rich color and veining of Rose Impact, picking up a good scape from both parents and hardiness from Rose Impact. It has four branches and 27 buds. It starts early and usually reblooms in the first week of July. I call the color "popsicle cherry." I introduced it in 2010.

The one below is DAVID AND ALAN, my first registration in 2005, also selected in 2000 after I was revived from the shock of first seeing it in a crowded section I was clearing out. Having heard that CATHERINE NEAL was a superb parent, I took its pollen to every red, purple, and rose daylily in my collection in 1997. One of the pod parents was Bryant Millikan's CARLOTTA, and that cross gave me this winner.

The color of this is a super-saturated cherry-violet blend, quite distinctive in intensity and hue. It's a vigorous grower, a sun-lover for best performance, and a fine parent to boot! It has four branches and 25 buds. It survives, but does not really thrive, in the zone 5a garden of its namesakes, David and Alan, north of Burlington, Vermont in a micro-climate near the shore of Lake Champlain. It perished in a Zone 4 garden about five miles inland from there. In some other Zone 4 gardens it can live. It does best in zones 6 and 7. I've sent a few plants to warmer zones, but have no information on how they have done.

Plants like these two will be grown into 5-foot masses in our huge back yard, where the view from the house or the deck will require large graphic effects to create satisfaction or pleasure. Any patterns on the flowers will not be visible from our vantage points.

Here is the view looking left from the sliding glass door of our kitchen/dining room.

The darker boards show the "Sierra" deck stain I brushed on last weekend. If the wood dries out by tomorrow afternoon, I'll stain at least the top of the new boards. I can get the sides done if time permits, or later, but certainly not in one afternoon. Staining the tops will give some protection when they lay down the flooring boards.

Now, making a quarter turn to the right and looking straight out to Hidden Lake, this is the view:

There are too many small clumps of daylilies in the gardens below. Over time, we'll reduce the size of the collection and have larger clumps with better spacing and a variety of other perennials. In those "empty" beds to the right, I'm going to plant some peonies and some Japanese, Siberian, and Louisiana irises.

Turning another quarter turn to the right, this is the view of the seedling production and evaluation area:

To the far right is an evaluation bed so large I have named it "Nebraska." Kathy's almost finished applying leaf mulch between the rows of selected seedlings. Just below that bed is the first of two beds to receive transplanted seedlings I hybridized in 2010 and germinated in a dense planting in one of the lower beds. The little transplants are mostly of good size for moving now. They will bloom in 2012 and 2013, when I'll make final selections from this crop.

The heavy clay soil was impossible to till, having baked into brick hardness all summer. I let the lawn sprinkler run for a three hour session on those beds and the Troy-bilt "horse" tiller made quick work of the task. Once I broke up the soil, I tilled in two thick layers of leaf mulch to lighten it up.

As I raked the beds smooth for planting, I also made new measurements to assure no more than five feet of width for these garden strips. The ground-breaking process had encroached by at least a foot into the grassy paths, so I marked the restored boundary with small yellow construction flags. Once I finish planting the two beds (I am halfway through the crop now), I'll rake a light layer of topsoil over the grassy path and reseed with a fescue mix.

Then I'll till and form the other beds so that side of the property will look neat, and I'll weed the two seedling strips closest to the lake shore. They are choked with weeds right now. Kathy plans to get some fall vegetable crops into those extra beds if I'm able to get them prepared soon.

It's work that couldn't be done if we weren't retired and if we didn't love to develop gardens and landscaping.

The Deck at the Duckworthy Estate

2011-08-31T22:22:00.000-05:00

These past couple of weeks have passed so quickly, and I'm glad for that. It feels as if my life has lately been one continuous weeding session with Kathy. We've put in three or four hours every morning to get control of runaway encroachers of every kind, from varieties of prairie grass to some kind of woody scourge that spreads like a mat, to seedlings of several kinds of trees.

This drama has been an accompaniment to the construction crew's work on our new deck. Getting the bandboard mounted, with proper flashing, took several days. Then came the moment of building part of the frame and supporting it with two-by-fours. Here's a happy moment on August 22 when Carl Brandt and his helper, Tim, started to mount the diagonal corner pieces.

As quitting time approached, the three-man crew finished the other corner. That's Steve Brandt, Carl's son and the President of Branco, with his back to the camera. He is applying pressure to get the boards into perfect alignment. That attention to "better than good" is the signature of Branco work. These guys were in our house doing interior remodeling for six months, and we never worried about them overlooking a serious flaw in the original construction or the subsequent remodels of this place.

They came back to dig the holes for the concrete piers. Last week the city inspector approved their work and they returned this week to pour concrete.

I was up early yesterday to prepare for the final assault on a garden bed I've named "Nebraska" to remind me of how big it seems when I've let the weeds take over. I went out to get the newspaper and saw this amazing dawn picture a few minutes before the sun came up behind the line of trees across Hidden Lake.

This sight took me back about forty years to a morning in Durango, Colorado. I was a young professor then, living in a small ranch house that we'd bought (yes, bought) through some combination of miracle and fluke while I was staying over in town after accepting the job offer at Fort Lewis College. I'd been unable to find anything to rent or buy in two days of looking with a realtor, when a future colleague called me at the hotel to say he'd learned of house that a man wanted to unload fast for the $500 equity he had in the house. I was able to assume his mortgage and become a homeowner, thanks to a small nest egg my wife had saved before our marriage. One winter morning I saw such a sky and took a picture much like this one.

Kathy and I finished "Nebraska" in the mid morning, leaving me time to drive over to University City and dig the last forty selected seedlings at the Green Center, where I have been a "resident hybridizer" for eleven years. Now that lovely chapter is closed, and all my daylilies are in one accessible spot for the first time since I began to hybridize in 1993.

This morning I planted those forty while the crew began to work on measuring and cutting notches in the first two support posts. By the end of the afternoon, they had the support beam in place for the eight-foot wide walk-out section from the dining room. Here's the view of the scene from the sliding door there.

We've had regular visits from a family of Canada geese all summer. They like the seeds of weed grass and the tender shoots of things sprouting in the drainage swale and on the edge of the lake. They have two teenage children.

Either Dad or Mom are guarding the rear of the procession.

I was so happy to see the main support for the deck take shape that I rushed to Westlake Hardware and bought three gallons of stain, color "Sierra," because of the California connection to Kathy. Of the three Haas girls, I am convinced that I got the one who is perfect for me, as I am for her, so she says.

Tonight at dinner I played a CD that just arrived, a reissue of a Paul Desmond jazz LP that I discovered in a New York record shop about fifty years ago. That is a span of time I find difficult to talk about, though it seems like just last week. It was Desmond's first recording session with the guitarist, Jim Hall. The CD is titled "First Place Again." I just about wore out the LP.

That's a nice image on the CD cover, but the car looks mid-50s to me. I wish they'd used a picture of a '58 Chevy Impala or a '59 T-bird.

Another memory from almost fifty years ago is seeing Paul Desmond and the Dave Brubeck Quartet play at the Lambertville Music Circus across the Delaware River from New Hope, PA. I sometimes went with a date, sometimes with my family. I remember seeing Ahmad Jamal, the Count Basie Orchestra, the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, and Pete Seeger there. These musical excursions were the highlight of my summers at that time of my life.

Tonight as we enjoyed grilled salmon with sauteed spinach and some rice, all these memories came into our Now.

Sodder But Wiser, She Says

2011-07-24T18:07:00.001-05:00

My Kathy can be a goofy girl, and she is also sometimes a mime. The expressive faces are a reflection of her good-natured father, Al, who I wish I had known. I suspect she gets her superb knack for taking pictures from him, too. Oh, Al, I think I got the best of the Haas girls!

Kathy took these pictures the last couple of days to document the continuing saga of sod here at the Duckworthy Estate at Hidden Lake. I've never laid sod before, so before two weeks ago I'd never made a sod pun. Today the pun is Kathy's. She named the picture folder "sodder but wiser." Har har har!

Here's the work site behind our house. Steve Brandt had graded it to assure good drainage away from the house. In fact, he was still doing tractor work when the big rains of June came our way and spoiled the back yard by washing the loose dirt off the slope. Today's the one month anniversary of the worst rain in living memory and it was to have been the completion date of sodding in the right side of the graded area.

This is the view of two ruined planting beds taken from "Boone's Dock" on the lake. The piles of dirt came from my digging of the swale. The big chunks of Highway 94 came from the swale, too. The whole lower back yard is an asphalt and concrete mine from a time, years ago, when the previous owner requested the highway crew to drop truckloads of "fill" in his back yard to improve the slope. He forgot to say "Clean fill," of course, and the rest is History.

I'll wheelbarrow the chunks up to the driveway and have Steve haul them away with the debris from the deck when he tears it down in two weeks.

Here's a better view of the graded area waiting for sod.

Carl Brandt told me I could lay sod up to the chimney and not be in the way of the builders when they construct a new deck. (Carl is Steve's dad, the founder of Branco Construction, and he is somewhat retired, though still active in the business.) In the foreground of this picture is the recently-laid sod covering the new swale and its sides.

First thing to do in an area like this is establish a straight line and rake the area smooth. Don't want any rocks or bumps. Then lay a first course and stagger the ends of the pieces in subsequent courses. You try to make the edges meet tightly and invisibly, but my reasonable amounts of effort, pictured above, did not make the seams invisible, though the pieces are snug.

It is a wet and dirty business no matter what the temperature. The sod is anywhere from damp to sopping wet, due to devoted watering at the nursery. When I pick up a wet load of 12 pieces, there is water in the spare tire well of my trunk that has to be removed promptly lest the car stink. I use my garden cart to bring four pieces at a time down to the back yard. Any more than that and I'd risk the wheels and axle. A sopping wet piece weighs about 40 pounds, I'd say, maybe a bit less, and I hold each piece close to me so as not to put a strain on my lower back.

I got this much done yesterday morning -- 36 pieces -- and when I took the last load, Daniel, my nurseryman, told me to feel free to come as early as 6:30 am, before they open to customers, and take what I need, paying later. So this morning I was there at seven, and it made all the difference. I laid 36 pieces yesterday before the heat drained me. This morning I laid 46 pieces and heat was not what made me quit. Tiredness was.

When Kathy took this picture at 10 am, I had a few more pieces in the car and I was ready to call it a morning. Tomorrow I'll finish this section with about 10 more pieces cut to fit in snugly.

Upstairs at the sliding door to the deck, Lola the Poodle was wishing she could watch me better. She feels anxiety when I leave the house, or when we both leave the house. Where's Daddy??? Kathy takes her out onto the deck to confirm that I'm there, but then it's indoors for a black, heat-absorbing dog.

iPhone Wallpaper

2011-07-19T15:38:00.000-05:00

When my iPhone Classic fell out of my shirt pocket and into the water at the lake shore last week, I shared a few choice words with the local turtles and with my walking companion, Lola the Poodle. The speaker and microphone were ruined, making the phone obscenely expensive to repair, so I bought a new one for a quarter of the repair cost.

I have minimal needs of my phone and didn't need all the razzmatazz of the iPhone 4, so I bought the 3Gs, which sounds like some kind of sports car. The new iPhone software comes with new wallpaper choices and none of the old that I liked so well. Thus, I searched the web for wallpaper options and found so many that I decided to jump in and make some of my own.

The water lily with cloud reflection and water ripples is my current favorite. The Missouri Botanical Garden offered many photo inspirations last week, so here are a few more.

This is an inverted reflection of a window in a lily pool. I turned it upside down to enhance the strangeness.

This is Rudbeckia "Indian Summer," I think. I thought it would be much too busy for a background, but it has a certain charm when used as phone wallpaper.

It's really hard to make a landscape picture work as wallpaper. Lake water helps, because you can place the water under the bottom row of icons so that the focal point is not obscured by them.

This closeup of foliage on a Smoke Tree becomes little more than interesting texture behind the icons. I think it, too, works.

Several of these landscapes are keepers because the photo without the icons is so beautiful. Can't let go of them.

Here I've placed grass at the bottom where the main icons rest, with lots of "reflection water" to occupy most of the screen and a beautiful bridge at the top.

I did a version of that one with no grass, more water, and a larger bridge.

This shot of a concrete shrine is more about the textures of trees.

Finally, this shot with two lily blossoms probably could have been made more effective if I had zoomed out when I framed the picture. I didn't take alternate shots of this subject, so I'm left with an also-ran.

Completing the Landscape Picture

2011-07-17T21:28:00.001-05:00

On May 25 I was happy with the way the landscaping was shaping up in the back yard. We had a heavy rain, and I saw how the water wanted to flow across the garden. I thought we could live with this. I would just raise the bed a little to catch the water, and I'd plant Japanese and Siberian Irises there to enjoy the wet soil.

But then we had some grading done to ease the slope, and some soil was smoothed onto the slope to reduce the angle of descent. The plan was to stabilize it with straw and then seed it. However, some big rains changed our plans. This is what the same area looked like on June 18.

Intense rains brought sheets of water down the right side of our property, washing the loose soil across the near flower bed and leaving a 2-inch thick layer on the grass and the circular bed beyond.

I sent this drainage plan for a swale to our contractor that day.

Even heavier rains came the next weekend, making any work with a tractor out of the question. And so I began to dig the swale by hand. Yesterday I completed the task of laying sod into the swale and began to fill in the picture on the sides. This morning I prepared the area next to the swale in the two flower beds and laid sod to create a good mowing and walking path on either side. Here's a photo I took before dinner tonight.

I've drawn the outline on the area I covered today and yesterday. I'll lay sod on the bare rectangle on the far side of the swale and the small bare spot on the near side tomorrow morning. There's more to do on the upper part of the swale, but there's an inconvenient growth of real grass and weed grass in that zone, so I'm going to spray that with Roundup and let the heat wave eliminate what would otherwise require an hour or so of brute force with a straight-edged shovel.

Here's the view of the upper part from the deck.

The swale extends another twenty feet up the side of the house, and there's another twelve feet of ground needing sod beyond the beginning of the depression. That's part of the Roundup zone. For the next few days, while the Roundup does its work, I'll try tilling the broken dirt of the seedling beds beyond the swale. The heat should be drying it out so that I can use a tiller. If things are favorable, I'll till in leaf compost and rake it smooth to eliminate the rough look.

It has been hard to feel any passion for daylily hybridizing when so few plants have set seed pods even on favorable days. I think their energy is diverted to surviving a late move to this property. I doubt that I'll have more than a few dozen pods for almost two thousand attempts. But that is the way it goes with living plants. Sometimes you have to be grateful that they survive the torments of heat and lousy soil to build themselves up for beauty next year.

It's not a water slide for the ducks

2011-07-13T16:10:00.000-05:00

Today I laid the 110th piece of sod on the top half of the swale I dug to give the neighborhood storm runoff a direct route to the lake, rather than the "natural" route over our gardens in the back yard.

On the far side of the swale, I'm extending the sod to the existing grass, covering some bare spots that our contractor created while grading to assure drainage away from the house. He got things pretty well smoothed out and contoured when the worst rains in decades hit our area and washed most of the loose soil on the slope down over the gardens.

On the near side of the swale, we're leaving the ground bare until the deck is replaced in three weeks. Kathy's going to cover that bare spot with straw to help deal with the slipperiness of the clay when even a little water gets onto it.

I was driving home about a month ago when one of those epic rains hit around lunch time, and I got to our street just as the worst had passed by, so I saw the water run off the higher properties in sheets, across the street, and onto my front lawn. On the right side, the sheets of water ran over my two curved daylily beds and on down the hill, carving a scale model of some lovely canyon into the bare soil that covered a recently-buried extension of the rain gutter system.

Another big storm at the end of June readjusted my landscaping priorities. I was going to try to get the sea of mud off the grass in the back yard until that rain showed me the folly of attempting any cleanup before taking care of the source of all the mess.

So I spent three or four work sessions with my spade and carved out a curved depression about 33 inches wide. We had a palette of sod -- 100 pieces -- delivered last Thursday morning, moved it to the big bare spot behind the house and watered it well as I fussed over fine-tuning the contours where the swale would make a slight S-curve. We started to lay in the pieces on Saturday and Sunday, took Monday off because of killer heat, and finished the 100 pieces yesterday afternoon when the temperature and humidity both dropped in the afternoon.

This morning I drove the two miles to the nursery and bought 10 more pieces. That's about the capacity of the trunk of my car, and I wouldn't want to put much more weight in there anyway, because they were dripping wet from irrigation. Before I went there, I used my straight-edged shovel to scrape off enough dirt in my work area so the sod pieces would have their outer edges nestled into the existing lawn without sticking above the soil level and thereby drying out. I dug and scraped for an hour, cooled off inside for a while, put on a dry tee shirt, and picked up the sod. Because of the need to cut various pieces to fit, it took another hour to set in the ten pieces and then more time to set up a sprinkler for maximum coverage. In short, it was a morning's work to finish the far edge of the swale with ten pieces of sod.

I can lay down about 20 pieces in an hour if there is not much cutting to do, but only 10 pieces if I have to make every piece fit into the "puzzle" of the previous work session.

The top part will require an extension of about twelve feet after I lay sod onto the lower half of the swale, but for now I've got the top even with the bare spot beyond it, so water will run onto and not around the grassy beginning of the "water slide" for ducks.

Tonight before sunset I'll go out and improve the slope and contour of the lower part so that I'll be ready to lay more sod in the morning if it doesn't rain.

At the moment I'm running a slow drip hose on my new Redbud trees on a berm on the right side. The berm holds moisture pretty well, but the trees are looking stressed. I should have done the drip line whether they seemed to need it or not. That's my self-indictment of the day and I'm sticking to it.

There are Limits

2011-07-02T15:46:00.000-05:00

There are limits to what you can imagine. I never imagined this daylily when I crossed SERENGETI SUMMER with QUEST FOR ATLANTIS. I didn't know what would happen, but wanted to find out. Serengeti Summer is a radiant orange and yellow blend, standing tall, full-formed, ruffled, something Van Sellers shouted about, and so I up and bought it from him.

Quest for Atlantis came as a bonus plant from Bonnie Holley. It's a unique orange daylily by Jeff Corbett, who lives in the vicinity of the Holleys in northern California. It bloomed well here, grew as if born here, so I thought I'd see what would happen if I crossed orange on orange, fine on fine.

If fate should decree that this plant will only make four or five flowers in a season, I will take them all!

There are limits to what you can imagine. Here is what made me think of this theme. Kathy and I just had lunch at Chimi's, our current favorite Mexican restaurant nearby. I ordered Burritos Verde. I wanted to recall my favorite lunch from 35 years ago in Santa Fe. I'd drive down Cerillos Road from the College of Santa Fe, where I worked, to Flora's Mexican Cafe, and I'd invariably order a beef burito with green chile sauce. In Santa Fe, the green sauce is a light green chile stew, with little bits of pork, potatoes, and diced green chiles.

I asked our waiter if their green sauce had diced chiles. He said no, it was a concoction involving tomatillos, which is a world away from green chiles. He asked if I would like to try an off-menu hot relish they make for themselves back in the kitchen, invested with jalapenos and habaneros. I opted for that and used it sparingly as a topping on my burritos.

The basic burrito flavor at Chimi's was a dead ringer for the burritos I remembered at Flora's, but the tomatillo sauce was tasteless and the habanero relish overpowered everything with burn.

But then, I think the truth is, you can't imagine what I'm talking about if you have not savored an authentic Northern New Mexico beef burrito with green chile sauce at Flora's Cafe in the same era I did, and perhaps at the same age and in the same frame of mind about flavor, location, air, and sky.

There is a limit to what you can imagine.

Enjoy this seedling of mine while I spin a tale that came to me some years ago and gained an embellishment or two over dinner with friends the other night. The seedling is BRIDGETON FINESSE x TOWARD THE BLUE. Bridgeton Finesse went to charm school, while Toward the Blue is a painter trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, dressed in worn bluejeans and a black tee shirt, smoking a cigarette while riding a Harley on the Interstate.

So imagine this:

The woods around you are eerily quiet, as quiet at the feathers on the owl that is watching you. You don't see the owl, and you don't know what you're doing in the woods. You just woke up there, standing up, with a weak flashlight in your right hand, and you are moving down a sandy dirt path wide enough for an old car, toward what you don't know, but you can tell you're descending, and it's a little chilly and damp. The flashlight is hardly any good to you. The battery is about shot; the weak light flickers, and you're spooked by the absence of any sound. In fact, you realize you cannot hear your feet and can't tell whether you are wearing shoes, sandals, or bedroom slippers, and you can't see your feet because the flashlight just quit. You can't see the sky, and you don't know what time it is or how you got here.

The owl that is watching you specializes in patience. His meditative state infuses the creatures of the woods with blissful, if instinctive, purpose, but tonight they make no sound, and neither do you. It is as if all of creation is holding its breath in a moment charged with "next." You stop short of the thing in the path that will trip you because you can't see well enough to continue. It's not exactly pitch black...there is some smidgeon of light from the firmament above, which you can't see because of dense overgrowth, but you have a vague sense of being not just in a woods, but in a space through which you can move without walking into spider webs or thorny things. There may or may not be horse droppings, bear dung, or cow pies on the path ahead; you can't see ahead, and I simply don't know. It's possible, though, that squishy, smelly things of some kind are on the path.

What sort of squishy, smelly things, I wonder. Corpses? Old burritos tossed away by urgent high school lovers earlier in the day when the summer sun streamed through the pines overhead and warmed first her bare skin and then his? Although I have suggested it's summer, it may not be. Maybe it's a warm time in April, or maybe it's Indian Summer. You don't know, because in addition to not knowing how you got there or what time it is, you don't know what season of the year it is or, even, where it is. For all you know, you could be in the piney woods outside of New Egypt, New Jersey as easily as you could be on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in western Illinois outside of Edwardsville or in the woods on either side of the Current River in Southern Missouri near Doniphan. If you haven't been in any of those places, how in the world can you imagine what scene I've set for you here, or her?

Who was she? I mean the urgent high school girl who felt the warmth of the sun on her bosom as her boyfriend lifted her tricot top off her, having lowered the top of his convertible. You may be or have been her classmate now or decades ago. The odd thing about this night is that you don't know the time, the place, or even how old your memories are. They could be, all of them, only minutes old, and you could, possibly, be the urgent boy who hastened to get half-naked with the winsome high school girl hours or decades earlier. All you really know is that it's dark and quiet, and what I know, but won't tell you, is that it's exactly as quiet as the feathers on the owl that is watching you decide whether to take another step down the path.

For the life of you, you don't know why the thought of a bare-breasted girl and shirtless boy in the front seat of a convertible flitted through the confusion that is your present moment. Wondering if her eyes are hazel or brown, and if the boy is her first love or one of many, you make the fateful choice of continuing down the path, and you trip and fall. I'm sorry I can't imagine what happens next. I have been distracted by the idea of the convertible. Is it his father's or hers? Is it nearly out of gas, and will they have to walk out of the woods rather than drive? Was the owl asleep during their half-hour in the dappled shade (of pine or of oak I can't say)? Was that a question or a statement, or both?

You have fallen, and your wrist hurts bad. You're not in shock, but you're confused. The entire area is as quiet as a feather, and you didn't even hear the sound of your own self-pitying groan when you sprained or broke your wrist. Now, as you rise, you realize the path is flat and you don't know which way you came or went. For all you know, something will make you stumble and fall in the dark if you move on, and yet you feel an urgent need to move out of this situation to something you can grasp with your mind, as your sprained or broken hand won't be grasping anything at all for the next four to seven weeks, depending. The owl that has been watching you is smiling as he, or she, remembers the song he or she heard from the convertible's radio earlier in the day or century, when the boy and girl enjoyed the feeling of skin on skin, something about "every breath you take, every move you make, I'll be watching you."

A Song Triumphant - The Hybrid Daylily

2011-06-18T21:09:00.000-05:00

The past two weeks, I've been paying close attention to daylilies that were transplanted from an unfavorable situation to a favorable situation, but in very unfavorable conditions! Oi! I have hoped that the daylilies that I seemed to have stressed to the point of death would, in fact, revive. And, lo, to use a biblical expression, most of them have this week.

This is a daylily named SONG TRIUMPHANT, living up to its name after playing dead for two weeks. It had arrived at the wrong address and sat in moist conditions in its box for two weeks before I planted it in a perfect spot. It sat there, just a tube of dead plant tissue for two weeks. A few days ago, I broke open the tube of dead tissue and saw some living tissue within. Today this is what it looks like.

There are two dozen or so daylilies in the same fix, and all but a few are showing regrowth now.

I have known that daylilies are tough plants. In 1996 I shipped my Vermont daylily collection to my temporary address in St. Louis in the month of May. When I dug them in Vermont, a snow flurry was discouraging my work. When they arrived a few days later, St. Louis was in a rainy season, and the clay soil where I lived was unworkable. So I arrayed all the plants bare-root on the concrete floor of the garage and let them sit there for more than a week. The garage wasn't super hot, so they didn't cook, but they dehydrated over time. I thought about a story I heard about an international shipment that was in the box for six weeks because of a problem.

When I finally got my plants into the clay, they took a long while to revive, but revive they all did, except for one, which died after its brief revival. It was just played out, I guess.

This month the problems of moving plants were more serious. The heat was in the 90s. I was digging them by the dozens and leaving them on the ground inside plastic grocery bags, exposed to the heat. Occasionally I'd move a batch to the trunk of my car, which sat in the shade. Within a day, I'd plant them here, also in high heat, but in moist soil, and I watered them in and kept them in wet conditions.

The plants in the most serious trouble were the ones that lay in plastic bags on the ground too long, both at the digging end and at the planting end. Several still look quite lifeless and hopeless, though all of them felt viable when I planted them.

The unfavorable conditions at the digging end began with the ultra-close planting last August when I moved them into temporary quarters. At the time, I thought I'd get them all out in April, but April was a rainy month here, and I didn't get to them until the end of May. By that time, the "early risers" in that bed had put up enough foliage to completely shade the late risers.

Many daylilies can't tolerate dense shade, so a lot of my plants regressed to pitiful shadows of their former selves. Some of them were so meager that I put them into an "intensive care" area of the garden where there was no chance of competition for light or nutrients. Most are reviving now. Some are probably lost.

I lament the losses, but they are so few in number that I celebrate the general toughness of the daylily. It's hard to kill them. Better not push your luck, though.

The Nurture and the Battle

2011-06-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

This is a tale of two crops in the back yard. The seedling sprouts look like they are growing with a lust for life after the big rain in the early morning.

A couple of days ago I got this little patch weeded in about ten minutes.

The other crop is going to be the bane of my existence here. It's nutsedge.

I've been over and over this bed with Roundup's generic equivalent. It's quite effective on whatever it touches. These little guys emerged from the zillions of sedge "nuts" under the surface. I'll have to spray again....and again later.

Over at the seedling bed in University City this morning I saw several more patterns.

This is Blue-Eyed Butterfly X Rock Solid. The form is more like BEB, and the fancy pattern is, too, but the colors are from Rock Solid. Next step is to see if I can set seed pods on this or use its pollen wisely.

This 7" flower is from Bridgeton Finesse x Toward the Blue. In form, this gets its neat appearance from Bridgeton Finesse, but it gets its eye and somewhat toothy edge from Toward the Blue. The next picture is of its sister down the row.

The genetics are fascinating. This flower's eye traded the blue quality from both parents and took on purple. The form is Bridgeton Finesse, but the main color is a brightened Toward the Blue, and the edge is much more like Toward the Blue.

Here are the two parents I've been talking about. First Bridgeton Finesse by Darrel Apps.

Now Toward the Blue by my friend, Paul Aucoin:

New Bridges in the Seedling Patch

2011-06-14T09:17:00.000-05:00

My curiosity keeps driving me to save seedlings that don't look suitable for naming and registration, but that carry what I suppose to be "promise" in their genetic profile. I intend to start crossing some of these right away, as soon as the weather will cooperate with dry mornings under 93 degrees.

Let me show you a few.

The first two are siblings from (Clarification x Maltese Falcon) x Meet Joe Black. Neither parent carries a bubbly edge, but Maltese Falcon does, so here we have a genetic mix that favors the expression of the edge that went recessive in all the kids from Clarification x Maltese Falcon. I thought I ought to try the pollen from Mort Morss's GOD SAVE THE QUEEN on these, but the convenient thing to try is a sibling cross, since they are right next to each other in the row. More interesting would be to cross them with the INTELLIGENT DESIGN offspring pictured below.

This is a surprise result from CLARIFICATION X MYSTERIOUS EYES. It's all about raspberry colors and that big washed and webbed band. It compels attention, as it is tall. I have to try some crosses with it to see if it will set seed pods.

This is BRIDGETON FINESSE X COSMIC ODYSSEY. Cos Od is pretty tender here, and I'm always surprised to see it survive. It's a good breeder for complex blue eyes, so I took it to a hardy plant with great growing habits, Bridgeton Finesse, which has a blue eye on a white background. I have to try a cross on this with a seedling that shows a patterned eye.

This is CLARIFICATION X COSMIC ODYSSEY. Once in a while Clarification throws white kids with very dark eyes. I don't think you would guess that Cos Od is one of the parents from the look of this. I'll try crossing this with other patterned blue eyes to see what pops out in the next generation.

This is a break from the normal look of the offspring from INTELLIGENT DESIGN X MEET JOE BLACK. Every other kid looks like a take on ID. Because of the extreme recurve, the flower only measures 5 inches across. This is a first-year bloom, so there's no way to tell what a mature version will do.

Here's a surprise from INTELLIGENT DESIGN X COSMIC ODYSSEY, the only white one in the row and only hinting at a potential for patterned eyezone. It's ugly sister (below) has the best scape in the cross.

The blossom is some kind of disaster. Maybe on subsequent days it will look more presentable. The scape, however, is fine.

This is JUST LIKE CANDY X POINT OF DIVERGENCE. The flowers don't open flat, which is a must, but the eye pattern is what I hoped for in POD crosses. This might be one to take to the other seedlings pictured here.

This is MYSTERIOUS EYES X THIBODAUX TANTALIZER. The eye is an expression of ME, while the form is TT all the way. Color is pastel charcoal pink, if you can imagine such a cadaverous color. I'll try crossing this with the others just to see what happens.

Here's one that will be de-selected. The photo I took yesterday matches a photo I took a year ago.

No amount of wishing for a better day will make this into something it is not.

It's rainy all day today, but I can't wait to get over to University City, where this seedling patch is in its final season, to see what's open today!

Good Times, Bad Times in the Garden

2011-06-08T18:01:00.000-05:00

This was a good time, seeing Kathy serenely trimming the foliage on potted daylilies that I'm about to get into the ground. Here's Kathy's photo of her work-in-progress as she finished off a batch of about two hundred plants, the last of them!

While she was doing this, I was using the earth auger to open up holes about three or four inches deep and eight inches wide in my evaluation bed. I had the bagged plants from our Sunday dig in the shade of the house to reduce heat stress, and I dug only six holes at a time to prevent the dirt from becoming thoroughly dry. Kathy grabbed her camera and took a lot of pictures of "man on the landscape!"

She took a position on the outside of the two display gardens on the right corner of our property. The strange little off-white columns in the lower right corner are not white aparagus; no, they are the daylilies that languished in a moist box for two weeks at the wrong address. I'm getting replacement plants except for the one that is no longer available at my seller's garden. He's refunding my money for that one.

This is not as easy at it looks. The top inch of soil has baked for several days, so it takes work to resist the auger's circular motion until it gets down into soil that has a bit of moisture. My hands would tire if I attempted more than six holes at a time in this soil. Down in the back yard, where the moisture never seems to leave, I could dig more than a dozen holes before needing a break, but I'd still have to consider the drying effect of the sun if I can't plant into those holes pretty quickly.

Done! Well, done for the time being, anyway. I love this part of the work. I love setting the plants I've bred and cared-for, photographed, described, and dreamed about. So, when I goof up in transplanting them, I feel sad, not because I lost property, but because some living thing in my stewardship came to an untimely end.

Here is an untimely end. I have never done this to a plant before, and this time I've done it to maybe a dozen of them.

This plant was healthy when I dug it and put it into a plastic grocery sack and laid it on the ground while I dug others. Then it was on the ground in the sun again as I planted twenty or more sacks of them. I suppose that the plastic sack magnified the heat. The plant was firm when I set it into the ground, but that fan bent over (it didn't break) soon after.

After I took this picture this morning I pulled the fan out of the ground. No roots came with it; the plant tissue at that bend was just white mush. It had cooked. I suspect the other fan will also succumb, but I'll leave it in place and see what develops.

I screwed up, though not Big-time. I hope I never see the likes of this again.

Filling in the Design

2011-06-07T17:08:00.000-05:00

I didn't plan to fill these beds with daylilies, but I'm in a race to get hundreds of them in the ground by the end of this week. This morning I filled the bed on the right and started in on the bed beyond. I took these pictures after breakfast, so there's a reddish cast to the light because of the low angle of the sun.

This angle of view gives you a better idea of how I'm using circles and curves in the back yard. The lot is shaped like a quarter of a pie, and the house is a long box, so I'm using curves wherever possible.

In the bed on the right I started to introduce perennials other than daylilies. I liked the effect, so after lunch I went out and bought a carload of more perennials for the next areas I plant. Some of the plants in the near beds were "cooked" on Friday or Saturday when I dug and planted them. I may have laid them out in the sun too long. I think four to six of them are looking so bad that I'll be amazed if they recover. I corrected my methods in case what I did was the cause of the plants' distress.

This is my "keeper" bed for further evaluation of selected seedlings. At the moment it's about half-full. I expect I'll fill it and overflow it by the weekend as I work through all the pots in the driveway.

Meanwhile, my contractor, Steve Brandt, who has been working out rain drainage away from the basement and grading the top of the back yard, got the idea of breaking up the soil of my seedling beds with his backhoe. This was a godsend, because there are big chunks of stone and Highway 94 asphalt in the ground. The rubble dates back to a request by the former owner for some "fill" from the highway crew. He should have said "clean fill." Instead, he got something that must have caused no end of tale-telling at MODOT. Some joke, huh?

This is my seedling crop now. Only a few crosses haven't germinated.

These will be transplanted in August to the beds that Steve broke up yesterday and today. I'll go through them with my tiller and amend the soil with compost as I go.

Blooming in the display bed in front this morning was a breathtaking large flower by Gerda Brooker, AUTUMN REFLECTION. It is registered as a "tangerine self." If you factor out the red shift from morning sunlight, what I have is a creamy yellow that wouldn't ever pass for tangerine color.

It's a stunning flower out of J.T. Davis x Tet. Siloam Ralph Henry. Maybe it will show a tangerine side to its personality when established in the garden.

High Heat Gardeners

2011-06-04T17:18:00.000-05:00

Kathy and I worked outside for about five hours today as the temperature went from quite warm to pizza oven! She's working out a planting scheme for the big window boxes in front of the house, and I'm still racing to get my daylilies fully moved from University City and planted here.

Some won't bloom this year. Some will. Probably none will die because of the heat stress of moving this month, but if they do, they don't belong in a collection of champions. That's all I want to have here, champions. That's the only sort of movie I want to watch, the only sort of book I want to read, the only sort of concert I want to attend. Life is cluttered with pretense, incompetence, mediocrity, and failure. There is no reason to infuse a life with more of it than one produces on one's own, is there?

I planted 115 daylilies today. Here's my evaluation bed, partially full.

I killed the grass with glyphosate. Rather than till the whole area and watch it erode, I'm drilling into the clay with a gasoline-powered earth auger. I go down about three inches and drill six to eight holes at a time. Then before the sun hardens the dirt into brick shards, I mix several handfuls of compost with the soil and set the plants. Then I water with a wand. I water every plant in every bed every other day for more than a week to assure that the roots have a chance to get going.

I've filled the two display beds and have begun to plant the beds in the back yard. Down there the soil has not dried out much because of all the leaf mold on top. The auger works easily and quickly there except for the moments when it encounters chunks of old Highway 94 about 5 inches down. Here's the back yard today.

The bed on the far right is fully planted. It's dominated by shades of lavender and pewter lavender with some accents of gold and dark purple. The inner circle in the distance is ten feet across. There's a crimson pygmy barberry in the middle. Planted around it are soft pastels -- TAXCO (a white that seems a platinum silver lavender), BARBARA MITCHELL (a pink with a lavender veil), ROSE EMILY (a gorgeous rose pink), SUBTLE BEAUTY (a near white by my mentor, Oscie Whatley, from Tet. TANI, [which is from the same breeder as BARBARA MITCHELL and ROSE EMILY]), EARLY SNOW (a white by Patrick Stamile), and RIME ICE (a white by Oscie Whatley from Stamile's ARCTIC SNOW.) You see, I create relationships in my garden.

The four beds around that circular bed all have a curved edge along the circular path. I've planted the gorgeous pink JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS on that edge. I believe I indulged in a stroke of political balance over there when I put PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN near "Jackie O." Both flowers were named by Frank Smith, though Larry Grace was the breeder of "Jackie O."

The near four beds also have a circular bed in the middle. The shrub there is spirea "golden mound" or some such phrase. I'm encircling that with bright orange daylilies. When I have enough of ELIJAH I'll use that for the full circle, but today I don't have enough, so it's a medley of bright orange ones.

The curved edge of the four big beds is planted in Oscie Whatley's GREEK EFFECT, one of his overall best daylilies. A clump in bloom is spectacular, so twenty-some clumps will be paradise!

Here's one more odd feature of the garden.

Those white things are daylilies that were shipped to the wrong address two weeks ago. They went to my house-for-sale in University City and probably arrived the day after I cut the grass and checked the house last week. A real estate agent put the box inside the house but didn't notify anyone that there was a package there for me. When I told my auction seller that the box didn't arrive here, he checked his records and admitted his goof. He had my old address on file and didn't compare it with the correct address on my auction paper trail.

Mistakes do happen. They happen all the time. My seller is sending another box next week to the correct address. In the general scheme of things, this is not a big deal. I hope in another month to have "after" pictures to complement this "before" shot.

The Race to Get Them Planted

2011-05-29T15:28:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a perfect day for several hours of digging. The morning temperature was in the sixties and the drizzle I drove through on the way to University City wasn't falling when I got there. I dug sixty-one plants, many of them pretty good clumps, and packed every available space in the car with them, save for the space I allowed Lola the Poodle in the back seat.

After lunch I planted about forty-five that were left over from the previous day's dig.

It's clear to me now that I have more interesting plants than I have space in my two hybridizing beds to display them, so I'm going to have to plant the whole collection without much planning, use the ample space in the back yard, and figure out a proper planting scheme for next year.

Today was the beginning of a substantial warming trend, with a high of near ninety predicted. Kathy and I both got outside right after breakfast. Here she is several hours later, planting the line-out bed, where we are growing various things in blocks.

I took the earth auger out to the shorter of the two big display beds near the street and planted all the ones I dug yesterday plus a dozen or so more that were either sitting in a pan of water or growing in pots.

Getting them planted before they bloom is exciting, but even more exciting is the sight of new seedlings breaking the surface. I spotted them from the bedroom window yesterday morning and confirmed what I saw when I took the picture of the robin eggs. Here's a picture of a mass planting of several dozen seeds sown densely about an inch deep.

That cross marker, "BCVL x Boundless" means my seedling from BUTTER CREAM X VICTORIAN LACE by BOUNDLESS BEAUTY. The marker at the bottom of the photo, "Papa Luz x Boundless" is shorthand within shorthand. "Papa Luzio" is a nickname for a seedling from (BETTY WARREN WOODS X PERSIMMON PUNCH) X BUTTER CREAM. My friend, Ken Luzio, had admired a bright yellow seedling from BETTY WARREN WOODS X PERSIMMON PUNCH, so I nicknamed it "Ken's Yellow." Then I nicknamed its offspring "Papa Luzio." That seedling was vigorous and it had a nice scape with bright medium yellow flowers that just didn't thrill me. So, before abandoning it, I made a final cross with the exemplary BOUNDLESS BEAUTY.

Here's another one that stirs up my hopes:

"Tulip" is a nickname for a seedling of exceptional blue pewter color from BEST KEPT SECRET X TARTA. As the name indicates, there is often an opening problem, resulting in a flower that resembles a tulip. "Ummies" is the exceptional pink, rose, and pewter lavender flower, UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG by the late Steve Moldovan. My goal is to retain the distinctive color of "Tulip" on a flower that opens correctly.

We were finished for the day a little before one and had our lunch staring out the big sliding glass door at the water of Hidden Lake. I wish I had the power of Hercules and the endurance to go out there and plant another seventy, but I don't think I ever had that kind of energy.

I'm starting to think ahead now to the circles and broken circles I've designed in the gardens in the back yard. I'm going to encircle the shrub, Spirea "Gold Mound" with plants of the daylily, ELIJAH, and that will be my "Ring of Fire" bed. I need a plant of the daylily, JOHNNY CASH somewhere nearby. On the far corner of the lawn, I have four beds around a circular bed. I've "painted" the picture to show one of two ideas I had for planting on the curve of each bed. The picture below shows, with too bright a pink, the effect I have in mind with a mass planting of the daylily JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS.

The next photo changes the color to cream with just a hint of pink, which is not visible in my painted picture. In this case, the mass planting would employ the daylily GREEK EFFECT.

I have two sets of four beds like this in the back yard and might just use both ideas, as I have enough plants to realize this vision this season.

Robin Eggs at Turtle Haven

2011-05-28T16:49:00.000-05:00

I took Lola the poodle along our lake shore this afternoon. There are so many good sniffing opportunities there, what with turtles, lads fishing, and ducks. As we approached the cherry tree I noticed a robin's nest, looked in, and saw this:

A Bed for Tender Loving Care

2011-05-27T18:31:00.001-05:00

Oh my, this post sounds like it's either going to be a country song or a sappy novel. Actually, it's a report on my project of digging daylilies I "parked" last August in dense spacing at the Green Center. I used the empty space in one of my seedling beds after I had cleared out everything that wasn't selected. The selected ones stayed where they were. My house was on the market and I needed a place to store my daylily collection over the fall and winter.

Last August, this planting scheme seemed like a good idea. I thought I would have that bed cleared out by the end of April. But April proved a very wet month, and I only began the job this morning, at the end of May. Fortunately, the soil in that seedling bed has been amended so much over the past decade that it digs really easily. Less fortunately, plants that get started early in the spring shade the plants that get started later. Everything is more lush than usual, thanks to all the rain, so the early risers have provided total darkness for the late risers.

This morning I had to set aside the late risers in their own pile. The plants were really puny! I came home for lunch and told Kathy I'd have to create a zone of TLC in part of the garden just for those small plants. I only wish I weren't setting them out in ultra-dense clay. However, they will get full sun, no shade from larger plants, and lots of moisture. The first batch are in the TLC bed now. I imagine there will be many more.

Rain, mulch, and mud

2011-05-25T17:48:00.002-05:00

It's going on 5:30 pm on an afternoon where we've been alert to a line of potential tornado storms in our region. This morning it rained and I went out to plant more daylilies as soon as the rain passed. My earth auger works easily in the wet, heavy clay. I can dig holes seven or eight at a time, then pause to set in plants, then dig more holes. All in all, about 40 plants in an hour's work.

In South St. Louis they've just measured a hail stone at softball-size. No hail fell here this afternoon. This morning I quit after pieces of dime-sized slush came down briefly. If that had been hail, it sure would have stung! You'd never know another rain was sweeping in by the look of this picture I took just after I took the equipment inside.

It looks like a dove is taking off in the upper left corner of the picture. I've got 183 plants in this bed now.

I took a look at the storm water running down our swale a few minutes ago. It's staying within the banks all the way to the lower section where I haven't tossed the obstructions out yet.

Our new berm for the dogwoods on the north corner of our lot is catching runoff from the higher ground of the street and the neighbor's big front lawn. Then the water flows onto the line-out bed that Kathy has been planting, where it is sponged up by the thick layer of leaf mold.

In the back yard, I can new see the patterns of downhill runoff, and I see what I'll have to do to divert this runoff away from seedling beds and onto the grass of the lower back yard. Much of the water flows directly onto one of the eight big planting beds for mixed perennials. Now that I understand something more about what our potential ornamentals need, I see a good spot for Louisiana irises and Hydrangeas as well as Siberian Irises and, of course, the water-loving daylilies.

I had several new daylilies open today, blooming in pots. Here is the third bloom open on Larry Grace's DELIGHT OF MY EYES:

Sorry about the rain spots, but, "Sometimes in this life, Baby, ya see things ya don't wanna see" (my favorite cliche in the movie, "Dirty Dancing").

Got Trees

2011-05-22T18:50:00.000-05:00

It has been a big weekend here, as we dodged rain for three days and started "moving in" where our immense landscape is concerned. Friday offered a prime opportunity to build berms on the two outside corners of our property. But when Carl Brandt checked in with Chesterfield Topsoil, they told him there was too much rain Thursday and their soil was heavy and wet.

I gave Carl the names of two local suppliers and we settled on my favorite nursery, Daniel's Farm, just two miles away. Their topsoil is sandy loam from Troy, Missouri, up on what used to be the tallgrass prairie. Steve Brandt arrived with the tractor and with his helper, Tim, and they began to work on drainage trenches while we waited for topsoil.

We needed four truckloads of 5 cubic yards, we figured, maybe more, but we'd see as we went along. The soil started to arrive before noon. At that point, rain was forecast for three o'clock. We asked the driver to have the trees delivered after lunch.

Three Korean Sousa dogwoods (they take full sun and require attention to good drainage in the heavy local soil; that's why we made berms.) and three Forest Pansy redbuds, plus one fragrant Viburnam. Since we were in a race against time, I decided to be part of the crew.

Yes, the lot is immense at the street side. It's shaped like a quarter of a pie. Tim's out there checking the depth of the hole so we're sure the top of the root ball is up at the top of the berm.

It took a lot longer to place the trees than I thought it would. Tim tweaked the shape of the berm with a rake. Long sleeves? Probably for sun protection. We were lucky the sun wasn't out and the temperature wasn't bad.

OK, one side done. Rain not threatening yet. Tim said it wasn't expected until 8 o'clock. Time was on our side, but we didn't have enough topsoil. Steve had borrowed a lot of it from the other corner to make the first berm right. So I called in for a fifth truckload and Steve and Tim began to place the redbud trees on the other corner, expecting to fill in between them later.

You can see there was only enough topsoil to surround the trees. Shortly after 5 o'clock, Daniel himself drove up with the fifth load of soil and Steve set to spreading it while Tim and I manned the rakes.

Still not enough soil. We'll need another three yards next week to get the berm right. Tim was pretty played out by the time they quit at six o'clock.

I couldn't thank them enough for completing that part of the job.

It never did rain Friday night. Saturday morning was sunny, so Kathy and I bounded out of bed and started the long job of planting the daylilies. Her part of the job was to plant the "line-out" plants in the bed near the dogwood berm. We weren't able to plant there until the tractor work was done, so Friday's work moved us into the next phase of planting those beds.

I went to University City and dug fifty-three cultivars and ten seedlings during the morning. After lunch I fired up my new earth auger and drilled planting holes in the curved bed farthest from the redbud berm. The near bed can't be planted until Steve finishes the tractor work on the berm there.

No rain materialized.

Today, with another opportunity in the morning, we worked the same routine. I dug plants at the Green Center for two hours, came home for lunch, and we both worked another two hours planting.

Here's the line-out bed that Kathy's been working on.

And here's the quasi-display bed I've been working on. I've got 83 plants in now.

We've got severe storms in the forecast for tonight. The tornado sirens went of an hour ago, but the menacing storms went north and west of us. More threats are expected around nine.

Rain Songs and Hostas

2011-05-19T19:49:00.000-05:00

I was thinking of rainy songs today. (I took this picture of a child watching a duck in Vienna nine years ago.) A brief shower came along today at an inopportune time, so the topsoil could not be brought over for the berm, and the crew could not come to complete the drainage project in back.

"Rainy Day People," a song by Gordon Lightfoot from the seventies. I learned it and many others and sang them one night a week at La Posada in Santa Fe in the summer of 1975.

"Rainy Days and Mondays Always Get Me Down," a song I don't know and don't want to know.

"Singin' in the Rain," a song made immortal by the movie scene in which Gene Kelly sings it.

"Buckets of Rain," a Bob Dylan song I'm trying to adapt for the absence of a string bass. I work on it a little every day, trying to toughen up my finger tips and work out fingerings that will let the music come across with clarity, no fumbling.

With nothing to be done in the garden today, I took Lola over to the house-for-sale in University City and dug good pieces of my hosta collection. The heavy rains of April have made everything lush, and the hostas have increased beautifully in the last several years, or many years. I was able to take good pieces for myself and leave a substantial plant behind. I didn't want to spoil the curb appeal.

"Krossa Regal," a vase-like hosta of distinctive and truly elegant blue-gray-green leaves that leaves me breathless.

"Elegans," an elephantine hosta of huge, round blue green leaves. My friend David Watkins recommended this one to me in 1997. I know where he grows a huge specimen of it in his garden in Ithaca, New York.

"Hadspen Blue," a superb blue hosta that forms a procession in the front garden at the U. City house.

That's Hadspen Blue on the curve of the bed.

"June," a milky yellow and green mixture that I fell in love with at David's house. David sent me a plant of it, along with....

"Inniswood," which I also loved there.

"Gold Standard," which thrived at our house after not doing so well at our friend, Amy's, house just a mile or two away.

"Regal Splendor," which David sent me after I admired it at his place in 2008.

"Solar Flare," with the same story.

"Aureomarginata," a cream and green mix that was special to my friend, Oscie Whatley, and which he shared with me back in 1997.

"Halcyon," a wonderful smaller blue green one which thrives here. That's Halcyon next to the concrete planter.

And one with a forgotten name, maybe "Golden Tiara," maybe not, but it's special, and I have a piece of it.

Every rainy day now I wonder if I will have any hybridizing season with the daylilies at all this year. I am intent on moving my collection over here. I don't want to bear the expense of daily trips over there to collect seed pods for a month or more. This is a seedling I won't try to set pods on this season. It's a cross of JOAN DERIFIELD X AUGUST WEDDING.

My plan has changed with the extension of rainy weather. Now, as soon as the guys can make the berms and plant the trees out front, I'll plant the breeding daylilies that are potted and here. I'll get some good things into the ground quickly. Whatever is here and blooming will be my hybridizing world this season. Once I get these in the ground, I'll start moving the U. City plants over here.

Seed-planting Day at Turtle Haven

2011-05-18T14:49:00.000-05:00

The little strip of lakeshore next to "Boone's Dock" here at the Duckworthy Estate is called Turtle Haven. There are some floating trunks of dead trees a few feet from the shore, offering a perfect tanning salon for the local turtles. This morning as I was completing the task of planting my daylily seeds, I noticed that the turtles had decided my non-standing position was non-threatening, and so they mounted the logs as well as each other!

It was a perfect Spring morning in the garden. The temperature was in the low sixties and there was no wind.

I fired up my small tiller and mixed some leaf mold into the never-before-planted clay soil, deep enough to start seeds, and raked the bed smooth.

Then I fetched my trowel, kneeling pad, and short length of plywood, put some extra wooden plant labels in my pocket, and carried everything down to the seedling bed.

The seeds were arranged alphabetically in a cardboard carton that I removed from the refrigerator. They have been under refrigeration following spring rehydration for four weeks.

I'm trying a new planting method, new for me, that I saw in use at Daylily World (the garden of David Kirchhoff and Mort Morss in Lawrence, Kentucky) last July.

Seeds are placed very close together in a four-inch wide row, about an inch deep. They'll germinate over the next couple of weeks and grow as tiny seedlings until late summer, when they will have two pair of leaves and enough of a root system to tolerate transplanting in August.

At that point I will move the seedlings to four-inch spacing in rows eight or nine inches apart in a hundred linear feet of seedling bed five feet wide. The advantage of this method is that there will be no wasted space in the final bed. Heretofore, I've planted seeds in four-inch spacing, only to witness big gaps where lots of seeds failed to germinate.

Last year I had 381 seedlings growing in a space designed for about 2,000. That's a lot of wasted space!

The wooden labels are disposable in August. When I move the young seedlings to their development bed, I'll insert metal EON labels to mark the position of each cross.

After the phenomenal rain delays of the past six weeks, getting these seeds into the ground was a milestone to match the accomplishment of moving and planting the 381 seedlings last Thursday and Friday.

Tomorrow we expect to form up the berms for trees in the front of the property, so next week at this time I hope to have the redbuds and dogwoods in their places. Once the berms are formed and planted I can begin planting daylilies in the beds near the berms.

First Plants in the Ground

2011-05-14T18:16:00.000-05:00

Hallelujah!

Yesterday, Friday the 13th, Kathy and I re-planted the 381 seedlings that germinated in a University City garden in 2010 and were dug with the help of Seajay and Richard Mock on Thursday. Since there were so few seedlings to put into the new garden space I allowed for a regular crop of about 2000 plants, we gave them generous spacing in rows a foot apart.

Three hundred eighty one seedlings out of about two thousand seeds is horrible germination. With hybridizing there are "disaster years." One man I buy from lost a big section of "futures" to a sink hole in Florida. Another man I've known for over a decade lost almost a whole crop recently because he planted the seeds too deep. I've lost a crop in a cold frame from fungus gnats in the potting soil. They awoke and feasted on the tender roots of the seedlings. Friends supplied me with surplus seeds. There are so many ways to be shocked and disappointed with seed storage and planting, and yet when I weigh my disappointment with the monumental disappointment of a farmer who can't get a crop in or out, I have to relax about my own problems.

Each plant came over in a plastic grocery bag or bookstore bag or drugstore bag. I get them at the recycle bin at the grocery store. Then I save them for more trips. There are hundreds more plants to move here.

In the background you see the lawn has been regraded somewhat and half the deck has been removed to allow room for the regrading. On Thursday, Steve and Tim thought they would only have half a day of work before rain moved in, but the rain didn't come, so they were able to install a new rain drainage system to collect the outputs of all the rain gutters and empty them onto the middle of the back yard. The last thing we need in the swampy front is water!

The existing drainage system hadn't been carried out well. It was causing erosion and swampiness around the basement. There is more grading ahead, to make a gradual slope to the planting beds in the middle of the back yard.

Here's the finished work. I'll plant this year's seeds densely on the end of the near bed. Then in August, I'll transplant those that germinated to another two beds that I'll have two months to prepare.

The promised rain arrived this morning, a gentle all-day soaker that will prevent any more garden work here for many days. Rather than work today, we went to Daniel's Farm and Nursery and bought two more dogwoods, two more redbuds, and a fragrant viburnum. They will be delivered and planted in berms we'll make with Steve's help in the coming week or two.

When the ground it too wet to work, we have the all-summer project of tossing hunks of concrete rubble out of the swale that drains neighborhood storm water. Since the swale lies on our property, the city isn't able to help with the cost of fixing it when sections collapse. That's our worry entirely, but we don't actually worry about it. Even with the clear-out only a quarter done, the water is remaining in the channel rather than running over the left side of the gardens. We'll make more progress on it every day it doesn't rain for the next week or two, until we can work the ground again.

A Man and His Horse

2011-05-13T13:27:00.000-05:00

In the early morning mulch
With a tiller in my hand
With a sweatband on my head
And a horse at my command,
I’m a long way from done,
Don’t know how long I will last
In the early morning mulch,
With a tee shirt from the past.

See the corner, see the shade,
See the place we’ll make a berm.
There’ll be dogwoods in a glade
On a mound we hope is firm.
There’ll be flowers on the curve
When we line them out in blocks;
All the colors, all the forms,
All the social after-shocks.

What a shape we have to tend,
Like a quarter of a pie,
With a swamp we must rescind
Where the low spots never dry.
So we garden on the left
And we garden on the right,
Always thinking of a curve
For the senses to delight.

This will be a redbud stand
In a shape that’s like the lot.
We’ll have three there on a berm
Long before the Spring is shot.
We’ll have veggies in the back,
With a view of Heron’s Cove,
With the company of birds;
This is why we made the move.

Things look closer than the pic,
It’s a wide-angle, you know.
It is only half a click
To the haven down below.
There are turtles on a log,
There are ducks upon the dock.
You can feel how tired I am,
Like a run-down mantel clock.

One more pass before I quit,
Then another, then again.
Haven’t done this since Vermont,
Sixteen years ago was when.
I was fifty, I was fit,
There was a river in the view;
Now we live on Hidden Lake,
KEB and me, and sometimes you.

We Call it "Heron's Cove"

2011-05-10T18:39:00.001-05:00

Here at the Duckworthy Estate at Hidden Lake, we have Turtle Haven to the right of "Boone's Dock" and Heron's Cove to the left.

The day we moved in last September, a convention of ducks was napping on the dock. Thus, this "estate" in Hidden Lake Estates was dubbed "Duckworthy." It sounds somewhat like Old Money, from Way Back, around the era of the Great Gatsby.

There are probably many places named Heron's Cove. Most are real coves, not little curves in a man-made lake that was once a hog woller, or wollow, depenting how how fastidious you are about spelling.

We named our little curve Heron's Cove because of this bloke, or blokess. I don't know how to determine gender in a Heron. This afternoon when Kathy spied this bird, I grabbed my telephoto and fired off a dozen pictures from the open door to our deck. The picture I like best shows a bit of our new Japanese Iris and Siberian Iris collection, the bright flowers on the Knockout roses, and a goldfinch swooping just above the shorter rose bush.

I think I had five-star horoscope today. At least I felt like I did. Steve, Carl, and Tim showed up this morning to take off half the deck so that Steve could more easily correct the grade of the lawn there. We plan to replace the deck in a few weeks.

That's Steve Brandt in the black tee shirt. He's President of Branco Construction. Timmy is sawing through the deck joists as Carl Brandt, the company's founder and former President looks on.

My un-tilled seedling beds are in the background. The larger beds behind Steve are for mixed perennials.

By horoscopic providence, the first of two dump trucks full of leaf mold arrived just after lunch, eighteen cubic yards for the new daylily beds on the front lawn. Steve offered to spread the compost with the tractor he'd brought. Now there's a piece of luck! The rich black compost always smells like pipe tobacco to me and reminds me of the twenty years that I was seldom without a pipe in my mouth.

You can see the big pile of eighteen cubic yards behind Steve. He dropped one bucket at a time and then dragged the bucket over the dumped material to distributed it at the six-inch depth I wanted. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I'll till those beds to a depth of eight inches.

The small bed with some mulch on top that's beyond the big pile is a triangle where we will add dirt to build up a berm. Then we'll plant three Redbud trees on that berm to anchor the view of the property for those driving past on Hidden Lake Drive. On the other end, seven hundred feet away, we'll plant three white dogwoods. Here's a picture of Steve working on those beds after the second dump truck arrived with another eighteed yards about an hour later.

Family Life a la Goose

2011-05-04T18:08:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I wrote about a goose trapped in the ice on Hidden Lake. An eagle landed on the ice and walked carefully over to the goose to see if there was an easy kill to be had. But the goose flapped powerfully and the eagle thought better of an attack.

The next day there was enough of a thaw for the goose to escape the ice. Day after day we watched that goose, alone on the lake. Then one day another goose joined the recuperating one. Was it the missing mate? We hoped so.

Suddenly a week ago we saw a pair of geese with a little gosling on our grass by the lake shore. And then this morning all heaven broke loose here.

When I walked out onto the deck this morning with my camera, the goose family started to walk to the lake. The three little ones hurried along. Soon they were sailing away...

A couple of hours later, Kathy called for me to rush to the window and see the TWO families of geese in the back yard. Each family had three goslings. As soon as I walked onto the deck with my camera, the group on the right began to move immediately toward the water.

See how the three little ones are trying to fly? Their wings are out at their sides. Instinct tells them the wings have an important purpose, but they don't work yet. The legs do, though, and the little webbed feet.

Life on the lake. The turtles at Turtle Haven thought nothing of what was going on and continued sunning themselves on a floating log.

Easter Vigil

2011-04-23T20:35:00.001-05:00

I consider myself a Christian. I was raised in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, by two devout parents. My mother, in her nature, needed to be told what to believe. My father, in his nature, needed to live up to the hopes of his father, the Lutheran minister with ten children, of whom Dad was number nine.

I think he was nine. I have never kept them straight. I think Uncle Paul is the youngest, and Paul is still alive, my favorite relative, along with his wife, Aunt Vicki.

Church attendance and avoidance of scandalous behavior/attitudes were part of my upbringing. Bible stories and church music were also part of my upbringing. Before I was eight years old I sensed that I had ideas and perceptions that were uniquely mine, yet I was formed in the cosmic view of my church until I was over fifty years of age.

Here I am, an acolyte, age 11, with Pastor Bartels at Bethany Luthern Church in Trenton, New Jersey.

I welcomed the opportunity to cease church attendance when I went away to college. I didn't resume until I was 52 and my late wife, stricken with cancer, needed to reestablish her connection to a church, though she rebelled against organized religion. Because we were Anglophiles, loving the sheer beauty of the words in the Book of Common Prayer, we joined an Episcopal congregation in St. Louis and remained members until her death in 2008.

I left that congregation then. I had seen and felt the ugliness of church politics.

But I had also authored that church's new mission statement as part of a committee working on self-assessment. That statement began, "We are followers of Jesus Christ, whose example prompts us..."

For me, that was a radical statement, ushering in other radical statements that no one would argue with. My mission statement contained no assertion of "creed language." It made no reference to redemption, salvation, virgin birth, or resurrection. It pointed only to the principle of making oneself a disciple of Jesus and trying to follow the way he lived and preached.

For me, that is what is essential to being a Christian. It is not about whether an unbelievable tale is literally true. It is not about faith in the unbelievable. It is about faith in the rightness of a teaching that made life itself a sacrament and made us all responsible for the stewardship of other people. "Love" of one's neighbor is stewardship. It is, first, acknowledgment that their existence is sacramental in its nature, even if their soul is diseased and they are consumed with evil.

Sin, in my theology, is a failure of love. The sin-sick soul hasn't a clue about stewardship of other people, and probably not about stewardship of tangible property or the environment.

In my theology, Easter is pointless if we are to take it as a proof of the divinity of Christ. I don't have to believe in the Resurrection to have faith in the teaching of Jesus. I don't have to have an opinion on his mother's sexual history. He didn't. He had nothing at all to say about his miraculous origins. From his perspective, the philosophy of living correctly was at the center of his teaching.

The cross is a symbol of his "walking the talk." It is a symbol of his absolute integrity. In that sense, Easter is the essential marker of the seriousness of his life. Up against the regime, he had to lay his life on the line. That's why the story of Peter is also essential to Easter. Peter at that moment cannot walk the talk, cannot risk his life. Only Jesus could see that if his teaching mattered, he had to stand up to the Powers That Be and take the consequences.

And so he walked into the most gruesome form of death by torture then practiced in the Roman world.

The torture is in the nails. Death comes from slow suffocation. When you're hanging with arms above you, you can't properly exhale. To resist suffocation, the person on a cross must push against the nails holding his feet to the post to try to raise the torso with respect to the arms. This goes on for hours, while the sufferer also experiences a deep sunburn like no other. Pain, fear, dehydration, sunburn, shock. It was a horrifying thing to behold. I imagine the grief of his mother. When the soldiers became bored with how long it took, they broke the victims' legs so they couldn't push against the nails any more. Then their suffocation was assured.

Perhaps Jesus rose from the dead three days later. Perhaps he ascended into heaven. In my theology, it doesn't matter. He spoke of the essential importance of how we behave, not what we believe about his life. To be a Christian is to listen to what he said.

We are all children of God. Jesus is my brother. So is Hitler. While I can't reconcile that, I don't have to. I only have to listen to Jesus and see if I can follow along, see if I deserve to be near him.

My sweet Lord. I really want to know you.

Let's Go Swaling!

2011-04-22T13:02:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I spent another three hours tossing chunks of rock and broken concrete driveway out of the swale that carries storm water from this part of the neighborhood, through my yard, down to Hidden Lake. I figure I have about ten more three-hour sessions ahead of me until I've removed all the rubble, or enough of it, to start over and place small rocks in there to hold down further erosion.

We had a brief, heavy rain this morning, so I was able to assess our progress and get some pictures to remind me of what I still need to work on.

I see that the channel I've made down the left side is doing its job. However, there is still too much rubble in the channel. A large obstruction about halfway down the picture forces water to the right, out of the channel, and onto the back yard.

That's the major problem that prompted this weight-lifting project. You can see the excess water flower down a low spot in the lawn, following the line of the rubble.

In the next picture, you'll see how the escaping water, about where the little red flag is in the ground on the right side of the picture, flows across the areas we want to develop for vegetables and flowers.

You may also have noticed the bright orange cord across the swale near the bottom of the picture. That is apparently a cable from Charter, to which we don't subscribe. It's only in the lawn an inch or two deep. I don't know why it needs to run across the swale, but I think it's a candidate for being cut and disposed of.

Here's the way the excess water gets into the planting area:

The two four-foot wide strips closest to me are Kathy's vegetable beds. The distant beds are part of a design for mixed perennials. The daylilies will adore all this water, but I want no flooding in the yard!

Here's a look at the grand scheme of things for the back and right side. In the distance is the zone for seedling production and evaluation.

We're had twice the usual rainfall this month, so rototilling those areas is in the distant future, I'm afraid.

Closing Time at the Duckworthy Estate Rubble Museum

2011-04-21T10:13:00.000-05:00

It's all about beginning the ending of bad things. Someone who will not be named had a really, really bad idea one day on the side of the Duckworthy property he couldn't see unless he stepped out on his deck. "Someone" is not me, by the way.

On that side of the property, a neighborhood storm drainage system empties into Hidden Lake by means of, first, a concrete swale, and second, a ditch of some kind that may once have been lined with concrete. The concrete part at the top of the hill cracked over the years, allowing water to gradually undermine it, causing further cracking and further undermining and erosion.

The former owner addressed the problem, if addressed is an apt word, by tossing patio bricks into the holes and gaps. It looks like an extensive patio was sacrificed to provide those bricks. Other pavers, concrete blocks, and hard things were tossed in over time.

This was the beginning of the Rubble Museum. At some later time, the owner had his concrete driveway broken up into convenient twenty- or thirty-pound pieces and replaced. Rather than have the broken driveway hauled away, he thought the pieces would make good rip-rap material for the eroding gully. However, instead of keeping the shape of the gully concave, so that water could course through it, he mounded up the concrete rubble with a bad consequence. Water began to run around it.

Also, the continual undermining of the upper part carried dirt down the line to the pile of rubble, where it dropped between the stones, bricks, and concrete pieces, gradually raising the bed of the gully.

A few days ago we had the heaviest rain in the past seven months, though nothing for the record books, and I woke to see most of the back yard covered in the runoff that should have gone down the gully to the lake. That's when I decided we'd have to close the Duckworthy Estate Rubble Museum and return it to its former glory as a gully.

Yesterday Kathy and I spent an hour and a half or two pulling rubble away from the left side. We got a lot more done than we thought possible in that time. I think we can clear the watercourse in the next couple of weeks and then try to remake it, perhaps with some help. Here's what it looked like at the end of our first work session.

The orange cord in the foreground is not an electrical cord, but seems to be some sort of cable system no longer in use at our house. The company that installed it (Charter?) only put it a couple of inches into the ground.

My Way Or The Highway

2011-04-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

Old Highway 94 slumbers beneath the grass of my new back yard. Before lunch today I went out with my heavy iron prying bar and shovel and started trying to remove a piece of the highway that was visible at the soil surface. This section of the lawn is nice and flat. It's an ideal planting space for a lot of my daylilies.

You may ask what Old Highway 94 is doing under my grass. The road is a mile away from here, after all. The story I heard from the former owner of this property is this: he wanted to make the slope of the lawn gentler, and he was trying to economize, so he approached the crew working on the highway to ask if they wanted a place to dump some fill. He forgot to say, "clean fill," and so what he got was a load of rubble with some dirt bulldozed over the top to cover up the hideous mess.

As I began this task, my memory drifted back to our new tract house in a new section of Levittown, just northeast of Philadelphia, where we moved on my December birthday in 1954. Levitt had thought through the details of instant landscaping for every homeowner, so the first spring we were there a crew came by and planted fast-growing trees and shrubs and then seeded a lawn.

This is a favorite family photo from the spring of 1956. There's no human being in it, just the jazzy red and black Mercury station wagon with seat belts. The color was chosen to please me. This was the car I learned to drive in four years later.

To the left of the car, outside the picture frame, is the brick patio that was to have been a weekend project on Memorial Day in 1957. My father had selected a style of kiln-fired brick with variable color, and we had a pile of bricks along the side of the garage and a pile of sand. Dad planned to use no wet cement, but to lay the bricks dry and then brush a dry cement mixture into the cracks and wet down the patio to affix the bricks in place.

However, there was a hitch. When we began to remove the flagstone walkway and level out the ground for the bricks, we hit a chunk of concrete. Much of the first and second day of this one-weekend job were spent in digging around the chunk to be able to lift it out.

We dug and we dug. Finally we had exposed something the size of a pony. It was left-over concrete from pouring foundations for the houses in the vicinity. They'd used a backhoe to open up a hole the size of a grave and just dumped the concrete into the hole and covered it up. There was no way we were going to remove that lump. We had to build the patio on top of it and hope for the best.

This took all summer, as I recall, but we did get it built. Here's a picture of me on the patio, indexing my record collection one summer day in 1970 as I recall.

There was never any furniture on it, nor any potted plants. It was just a way to make the place different from every other place in the neighborhood. All the neighbors did one thing or another to redesign their houses and original landscaping. Within sight of our house, just across the street and down an embankment, was one of the very few older houses belonging to people who would not sell out to the developers. There were three such old places within a mile of our house, and they had for me the only attraction of "history" in that immense landscape of tract housing.

We were living in a new place that had once been some other, "historical" kind of place with some other identity. We were in the cradle or uterus or seedbed of the American Revolution. Washington's Crossing State Park was about a half-hour north of us. My father had received a commission to design a small auditorium there to house Emanuel Leutze's painting of "Washington Crossing the Delaware." The local school district had an Indian name, "Neshaminy," though nothing about Indians was taught us.

And now I am back in such a place. I have come full circle since my tenth birthday journey to Levittown. I am in a thirty-year-old ranch-style house with more access to the garden space I've wanted than I ever had before, and I'm facing an unknown extent of asphalt obstacles just below the surface. Oh, Dad, are you smiling? Are you having a good guffaw about what I'm remembering about our patio project? Are you straining with me on the prying bar to help me heft the hundreds of pounds of chunks out onto the grass?

Would you have left the Bradford Pears alone, as I have, until they shatter in a wind storm? I'm already planning their successors.

Would you have cut down the ill-trimmed cherry tree and started over, as I have decided not to do?

Would you have reminded me of all your beautiful raised beds for your iris collection in Levittown twenty years ago, or would you have been more direct and just said, "you should not fight the rubble under the grass. Just bring in truckloads of soil and raise the level where you want to plant your daylilies."

Would you have guessed, as I didn't, that this blog was going to be about you? There you are with Mom, at some architects' convention in a tropical city, about forty years ago and ten years before your retirement. You were in the decade of your best work as a school designer, at the top of your game, head of the firm, both children out of school and married.

Your passion for growing irises would emerge by surprise during your retirement years. Your hobby of making furniture from rosewood xylophone keys would continue until your move to Florida in 1996, when you would develop an interest in watercolor and paint some of the Vermont landscape photographs I'd had published in Vermont Life magazine.

And then one day in late September of 2000, I would come to your hospital bedside and bless you, and then you would learn that your days were numbered, literally, in mere days. You would tell Mom what she already knew, and then you would fade away into the fog of your death.

Since that time I have been unable to sing all the way through the Christmas hymn, "Once in Royal David's City." My throat becomes a knot and my eyes fill with tears on the last stanza, "And our eyes at last shall see him." The knot binds me to you, Dad. It's my memorial.

Loveliest of Trees

2011-03-27T08:43:00.000-06:00

In my senior vocal recital at Penn State in 1967 there was a song titled, "Loveliest of Trees" by John Duke, a setting of the poem by A. E. Housman. I had occasion to recite that poem last night before dark as Kathy and I drove to our favorite local restaurant, Spiro's, for dinner.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with snow along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

I walked out this morning about 7:30 to take this picture before the snow melts away. This specimen tree is just up the street from us. It's probably one of the most beautiful sights in the neighborhood.

The morning began with a feast of beautiful sights, the early sun streaming through Kathy's white curtains. Steve and Tim finished their part of the six-month remodel project last Wednesday. Kathy and I have been continuing with odd jobs that are within our respective skill sets. Today I'll finish painting the wall beneath our new set of safe stairs to the basement.

We had the bedroom window enlarged so that we could enjoy the view of the gardens we will develop in the back yard along the shore of Hidden Lake.

Our own cherry tree stands next to "Boone's Dock." You can't tell by looking at the water that we've been visited by a squadron of ducks named Northern Shovelers. We had never seen such ducks before and had to get out the bird book to identify them.

This was the view as I walked down the hall to open the door to the basement and let the cats come up. We had that opening widened so that we could enjoy the sight of the dining area and kitchen, including our Hubbarton Forge light over the table and our special pendant lights over the island.

We painted two of the living room walls a "cinnamon swirl" color to show off the dark beams.

When we bought the house, the ceiling matched the beams, as did the far wall, and the room felt somewhat like a cave. Painting the ceiling cream was my big November project.

The "butter pecan" walls make a good, neutral background for our Santa Fe Opera posters and various watercolors. Kathy's design called for an enlarged window on either side of the fireplace. When she added the curtains two weeks ago, the whole character of the room became gentle.

As I entered the dining room this morning, I saw how the reddish light enlivened the reddish wood of the deck we hope to replace some time this year. The wood is worn out, and nothing about the construction stirs confidence. We do not take the view of the lake for granted. The presence of waterfowl is a year-round attraction.

Outside as Lola the Poodle and I walked back from taking a picture of the cherry hung with snow, I decided to record the view of a slope that will be a riot of daylily bloom this summer if all goes well.

I hope the two trees you see here will be gone by then. The Sweetgum on the left is one of the champion nuisance trees, dropping thousands of thorny seed balls on the lawn every year. The Silver Maple on the right is an accomplished breaker in heavy wind. Why is it that the fastest-growing trees are also usually the least welcome?

These are some of my daylilies in pots along the driveway just outside the garage. I moved 140 of my selected seedlings over here during a warm spell three weeks ago and have washed and potted half of them. The rest are in bags in the garage waiting for favorable washing weather. I'm cleaning them well because I don't want to transfer the runners of bindweed from my other garden over to this one.

Tomorrow I'll pick up another case of pots at Hummert's and be ready for any clear day with a temperature near or above 50 degrees with no wind...weather for plant-washing.

Safe Stairs, and What We Can Imagine

2011-03-24T17:06:00.001-06:00

These are our new "safe stairs." You can see the outline of the old "unsafe stairs" on the wall underneath the new set. They are probably the most important job within a 6-month remodel project that finished yesterday.

On our first visit to this house, we made mental notes of what we would correct and improve if we bought it. The stairs and bathrooms were at the top of the list. Other things were added after the formal house inspection. Still other things came to mind when we realized we would have to rid the dwelling of the smell of cigarette smoke, which we hadn't noticed on our first visit. That part of the project involved ripping out all the shag rugs and throwing out all the textile curtains. We washed down every surface, primed with an oil-based primer. Primed again with a water-based primer because the colors were so dark. Then painted with a coat or two of premium finish paint from Benjamin Moore.

The safe stairs are a masterpiece. I do not fear that one of us will stumble on them.

This is my friend, Richard Ashburner, who passed away last Friday after coming down with a sore throat three weeks earlier. He was the manager of our symphony chorus, and his manner of working and enjoying life were uplifting to all who knew him. He was a gifted manager, generous with the well-timed witicism as well as an encouraging phrase after an audition.

I suppose Richard never imagined that in his excellent physical condition he would not be able to "throw off" or "get over" the fever he developed. Three days after coming down with his sore throat he was in the ICU at the best hospital in St. Louis.

Richard consented to be heavily sedated, with a ventilator to help him breathe. I suppose he imagined he would wake up in better shape...no more fever, easy breathing, and quite a tale to tell.

But alas for the things we can't imagine. Alas for bad luck. Richard had a systemic infection, not just a case of pneumonia. He was dangerously ill, with woefully narrow odds of survival, just "out of the blue." He hadn't run himself down, done something taxing in awful weather. He had simply and unwittingly crossed the thin line that separates ordinary experience from the end of experience.

I am grieving for my friend and at the same time celebrating the way he lived his life. Had Richard been killed by a drunk driver, I would have a target for my anger that he died young. But how do you rage at fate? How do you club a thin, invisible line, the one that separates "safe" from "mortal peril?"

Driving to his funeral Tuesday morning to sing in his honor with the symphony chorus, I found myself warming up with the closing passage of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, the "Songs on the Death of Children." I had met Richard's mother, sister, and brother the previous afternoon. Richard was someone's dear child.

"In this weather, in this gale, in this windy storm,
They rest as if in their mother's house:
frightened by no storm,
sheltered by the hand of God,
They rest, they rest as if in their mother's house,
as if in their mother's house."

The way I hear that passage, the final "they rest, they rest" has the character of a halucination; it sounds like children's sing-song, and then the mood grows bleak, resigned then, resigned to inconsolable grief.

Oh, Richard, you died.

A Ghost of a Chance

2011-03-06T11:18:00.000-06:00

Call me crazy, but I often follow whimsical impulses in the garden. One impulse is to follow what eludes me, the thing most surprising, the moment of "ah-ha!" It is the elusive color of blue in daylilies that tantalizes me.

The beginning of my tale is a gift from my friend Paul Aucoin, who gave me a small piece of his new daylily, THIBODAUX TANTALIZER, ten years ago. First let me show you its parents, MILDRED MITCHELL by Kelly Mitchell and ETCHED EYES by Matthew Kaskel.

MILDRED MITCHELL sports both a big lavender blue eyezone and a bright silvery midrib that forms a point outside the edge of the eye. It has a double edge of dark purple and cream.

ETCHED EYES is a big pastel yellow flower with a "feathered" edge around a lavender blue eye. I thought my friend Paul took a gamble when he crossed a lavender purple daylily with a pastel yellow, but he got lucky with two of the kids from that cross. Here are photos of THIBODAUX TANTALIZER and WHICH WAY OUT.

THIBODAUX TANTALIZER shows how colors and patterns can negotiate strange outcomes. We've got the base color of ETCHED EYES with a light brushing of magenta color from MILDRED MITCHELL. We've got a hint of the MM edge, but in place of an eye, we have a "ghost" of one. To my way of thinking, the dissimilar eye patterns "cancelled" each other out and planted recessive genes to be expressed in later generations.

In WHICH WAY OUT, the color of MM triumphed, but its continuous edge became a partial edge, called a picotee, the shape of the MM eyezone has been exaggerated somewhat, and most interesting, the color of the eyezone now includes two "water drops" on each petal. You might notice that EE contributed some "feathering" around the edge of the eye.

I wanted to see if I was right about THIBODAUX TATALIZER carrying recessive genes for blue eyes, so in 2006 I took its pollen to Karol Emmerich's CAST YOUR NET, which has yet another sort of blue eye pattern. This is called a "webbed" eye.

In 2008 I saw the results of this cross. There was a range of colors and blue eye patterns and also a range of shapes. In 2009 I decided to keep a dozen seedlings and study them for a few more years with no competition from close neighbors. Here is what made me keep them.

Seedling 08-26 has a feathered outline around a complex eyezone of multiple bands. I think this pattern is coming from one or both of the parents of CAST YOUR NET, particularly, Jeff Salter's ANCIENT REFLECTIONS.

Seedling 08-53 has a look of magenta wash over pale yellow. There's a dark picotee edge and a bold lavender eyezone around a strong green throat.

09-50 has fascinating color shading and "crispate" pinching along the midrib.

09-60 has the clearest lavender purple color of the kids, which makes a nice background for the much darker magenta outline of that saturated lavender eyezone and strong green throat.

09-61 is a large flower with a grainy, sandy look in the magenta wash over pale yellow. The white midrib is slightly pinched, and the big green throat bleeds out into a nice lavender eyezone.

09-63 gives me the impression that it's trying to look like ETCHED EYES and failing.

09-81 looks like fainly blushing sandstone with the blush seeming to veil the lavender color in the eyezone.

So much variety from one cross! I am going to take other ghost eyes to CAST YOUR NET this summer to see if what happened for me was a fluke or an important discovery.

Eagle and Goose

2011-02-12T10:12:00.000-06:00

This week I've watched a lone goose frozen in the ice on Hidden Lake behind my house. Dozens of other geese, and dozens of ducks, were luckier. In the bitter cold, the geese huddled on the ice near the small patch of water the ducks kept open.

All the lucky ones stayed apart from the unlucky one, aware, perhaps, that the bald eagle who nests in the trees on the opposite shore would arrive when the trapped goose looked weak. Four days ago I saw the eagle checking the situation in a series of low swoops.

Three days ago, the eagle alighted on the ice near the goose and watched closely. The goose had the strength to raise its head and honk, but the energy level appeared low. Seeing the same thing, the eagle took a few steps closer, moving behind the trapped goose. The goose must have sensed the approach of a moment of attack, as I did, because just when the critical moment seemed at hand, the goose flapped its big wings and reared its head in defense, causing the eagle to backtrack. Then the eagle approached again, and the trapped goose, at the critical instant, flapped and honked the eagle back. After three tries, the eagle flew away.

Until I saw this, I had thought of eagles as fearless. Now I have seen the conservative instinct for avoiding a fight. Eagles succeed because they wait for clear advantage.

Yesterday the temperature rose well above freezing for the first time in weeks, and the trapped goose seemed energized. It continually looked down at the ice that held its legs, but it did not try to break up the ice with its beak. More and more of its body was visible as the top layer of lake ice melted. Sometime after lunch, I saw the goose standing away from the place where it had finally pulled free. It stood in that place all day, never entering the water. I think it is missing a leg.

This morning it is still standing in that place. Dozens of ducks patrol the patch of open water. All the other geese have gone somewhere else. Can the lone goose fly? Has it been written off by its community?

Tuesday as I watched it "calling for help" while trapped in the ice, I relived the last days of my late wife. I had sometimes called her a Dutch goose. I didn't want my Dutch goose to die, but there was nothing to be done about it, and nothing to be done about the goose on Hidden Lake. I hope not to see it still and lifeless on the ice next week, a meal for an eagle.

Daylily Blue

2011-01-24T13:02:00.000-06:00

On this crisp white January day, I spent the morning sorting and thinning my digital pictures of the daylilies in my garden. Because of the move to a new house in September and the almost nonstop fixing up since then, I haven't taken the time to get my photo library in order. The past few days I've been working on the quest for blue in daylilies. It's one of the holy grails, and I'm a knight.

Today's post is about the category of lavender or purple flowers with large centers of "daylily blue." I use the term in quotes because the chemistry for true blue color is apparently not present in the daylily. Many valiant knights are questing for a way to either achieve real blue anywhere on the face of the flower or to expand those quasi-blue centers to the extent that they cover the face of the flower and invite an illusion that something real is there in the color.

The illusion of something real; there's a subject for romantic poetry, but my topic today is blue eyes, not crying in the rain.

Here is Jack Carpenter's TEXAS BLUE EYES. You can tell by the absence of direct sunlight on the background foliage that the ambient daylight is shifted toward blue. I took this before the sun was up over the trees. Once the sun is up, the light shifts toward red.

The sensor of my new Nikon 5000 camera thrills me with its sensitivity to purple floral colors. Of course, the plant cooperated by giving me this perfect display of multiple blossoms. I hybridize with this daylily because the blue eye is larger than most, but I haven't seen the results of my work yet.

Next, here's another prime example of beauty in this class, Larry Grace's DOYLE PIERCE. The same light conditions prevailed. The morning shower had cancelled my plans for hybridizing. Wet pollen is dead pollen, you know. So I spent my time scouting for photo ops. This is the best I've seen this flower. It's laying open perfectly and the gray blue color in the center is accented by the really nice green of the throat. The lavender edge on the petals itself is edged in cream. It's a confectioner's dream! The other details that make this special is the rounding of the petals, the broad, blunt sepals, and the absence of a lighter midrib bisecting the petals.

My personal favorite in this class is Phil Reilly's SUPERCHIEF, below, in the same sort of early light. In the garden this one looks to be edged in crystals, and the surface of the flower is uniformly dusted in diamonds. This does not have the general rounding that DOYLE PIERCE has, but it does have silvery ruffling along the sepals, and the sepals show not a trace of deformity. There's a light midrib on the petals, and I wish there weren't, but in no way have I ever felt like quibbling when I see this flower open in the garden.

I have collected dozens of daylilies in this class. No two are alike. They are masterful variations on a theme.

A Death at Boone's Dock

2010-12-13T16:53:00.000-06:00

The view from my living room this morning was picture perfect. I was inside in 70 degrees of warmth and the crisp dock down at Turtle Haven looked much better than usual.

Usually the look of it makes a person hesitate to step on it. An inch of snow, however, doesn't weigh much.

Hidden Lake looks to be only about three or four acres in area. There are eleven houses on it, some less lucky, goosewise, than others. The Visiting Goose Association came for a visit last week and augmented the local flock by hundreds of additional birds.

I much prefer ducks to geese. Ducks are friendlier fowl, I think, and by all appearances, the keep their poop off people's lawns.

The unlucky neighbors have vast, sloping lawns that offer great sun exposure, and so those lawns are black with visiting geese this week. The honking of the geese is audible up here at the house. At night when I take Lola out for her bedtime constitutional, the geese are apparently guffawing about something only geese know about.

Sad to say, one of them appeared dead this morning, laid out apart from the community of warmth and fellowship on the right side of the picture, one lone, solitary, private expiration. Was it from disease, poison, or a fatal lack of insulation from single-degree cold last night? Much as I don't want the water fowl to foul my lawn, I don't wish them death apart from the succor of companions. Alas for this one. One less member of the chorus down at Boone's Dock on the Duckworthy Estate at Turtle Haven.

Lake Margarita

2010-12-10T20:15:00.000-06:00

Hidden Lake has been frozen the last few days. This morning when I got up I saw ducks keeping the circle of unfrozen water open, while the visiting geese watched from the ice's edge.

The ice on the right was curiously white and crystaline, looking like salt on a Margarita glass. So today, Hidden Lake is Lake Margarita.

Today was the warmest day of the week, with 50 degrees predicted for the afternoon. I wished the ground were dried out enough to fire up the rototiller again, but it's still too moist from the big rains we had more than a week ago. After I painted the master bedroom, I went Christmas shopping. Meanwhile, Steve and Tim worked on the second of two new windows for our big living room.

There's Steve Brandt finishing up the frame for the 4-foot-wide window that will replace a redundant, 6-foot-wide sliding door. The frame was perfectly square, but the opening wasn't. That's no surprise. This house is a case study in careless construction. Steve has corrected innumerable faults as he has rebuilt the bathrooms and shaved floor joists to give us level subfloors.

Now the frame's in place. It's not ready for the window, though. Steve has a pair of laser levels to check the frame before he screws it in place. Part of his framing is compensation for poor construction of the house. His new frame adds strength and stability to an unsatisfactory area of the original frame.

Voila! After many small adjustments to the window's aluminum frame, it achieved a "perfect" fit to the wooden frame. Steve was satisfied and happy with it six hours after he removed the sliding glass door.

The reason to hire a meticulous builder is so you don't lose sleep worrying about the project. Steve is phenomenally good. It's an education to watch him work.

Stunning Monteverdi Heard Here

2010-10-18T09:23:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning I saw a piece in the newspaper about a rare opportunity to hear Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 performed by Apollo's Fire (The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra), conducted by founder Jeannette Sorrell. I got online right away, reserved two tickets up close, and looked forward to the evening all day.

I bought my first of two recordings of Monteverdi's Vespers back in grad school, 1968 or so. I'd read a rave review in the defunct magazine, High Fidelity and Stereo Review, and then saw the records on sale in my favorite cubbyhole at Penn State, Nittany News. The Nikolaus Harnoncourt recording captured the flashy, intricate lines in a "perfect" acoustic that sounded like a church but not like a train station.

Monteverdi didn't title his work "Vespers of 1610." These were "Vespers to the Blessed Virgin." The program liner notes last night informed us that solid scholarship has established that Monteverdi wrote these Vespers most likely for the wedding of the son of his patron, the Duke of Mantua, in 1608. They were later published in Venice, though they were certainly not written with the acoustics of St. Mark's Cathedral in mind. Monteverdi didn't work there until 1613.

Enough of scholarship, on to the making of music. Jeannette Sorrell is a most impressive conductor. She gave us a vibrant, sensual, fresh, vigorous, dramatic, languid, even playful experience of this piece. I was moved toward a gush of tears twice in the first couple of minutes.

I only wish this rare opportunity had been paired with a suitable acoustic. The Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis is a space more like a gigantic train station than a place to hear musical details. The space is so vast, the famed cathedral of St. Marks in Venice could be tucked inside it! The reverberation in this space suffuses intricate musical detail in a glowing Venetian mist. Hearing Monteverdi in there is like seeing great paintings through waxed paper. We got all the benefits of supremely graceful pacing and phrasing, but few of the benefits of Monteverdi's bravura writing.

It's too bad that the Cathedral Concerts have to take place in that cathedral.

Getting There

2010-10-16T21:26:00.000-05:00

The humming birds haven't been around for a few weeks. They've moved on. I feel one with them.

In every sense of the phrase, I'm getting there. The phrase came to mind as I thought of all the household drama that's going to erupt next week when the fixtures arrive for our double bathroom remodel project. We've been living amid demolition and reconstruction for three weeks, and it's been fun to adapt while skilled workmen go about the business of correcting the flaws in a thirty-year-old house. We've been reminded on several occasions of the need to expect the unplanned detour.

Two days after our new furnace was installed, the plumbers came in to prepare the main floor for new locations of toilets, sinks, and showers. They drilled a circular hole in the floor for a toilet and said, "were those PVC pipes down there when we bid the job?" It seems I had not thought to tell the furnace guys that their choice of a route for the PVC vent pipes should take into consideration the expected new bathroom drains above. Fortunately, the problem was easily solved with some angle joints, and work flowed ahead with only a hiccup.

A few days ago, Steve Brandt, our general contractor, said, "did you know there's a roof vent up there that runs the length of the house, but that there's a big section of the roof that's not opened up to use that vent?" I said I thought I'd heard something to that effect from the house inspector. Could he open it up? It turns out that he could, and so we're getting the top of the house in correct order and trim before Steve closes up the options with drywall.

If I lived anywhere near Steve, I'd want to be his friend. He's one of those people with a gift for thinking well, for doing things completely right, and for dealing with people well.

So we're getting there, and the journey is as much of the joy as the arrival. So much of life strikes me that way. Last week I gave a daylily talk to a club near Evanston, Indiana, and I began and ended my slide show with a photographic "setting" of some lyrics of Bob Dylan's song, "Mississippi," which is one of my favorites.

Every step of the way
We walk the line.
Your days are numbered,
So are mine.
Time is piling up,
We struggle and we scrape;
We're all boxed in,
Nowhere to escape.

I used mainly some scenic photos I'd taken in Vermont almost thirty years ago and had sold to Vermont Life Magazine over the course of a decade. I used a backlit shot of laundry flapping in an October morning breeze to go with "we walk the line." I used a "still life" of an interior of a Victorian historic house -- a small writing table in a bay window looking out to a red maple tree -- for "your days are numbered." I used an old photo of myself holding a small pumpkin on the ground as if for a place-kicker in football - for "so are mine." A late afternoon shot of a clock belfry in the distance in a small town illustrated "time is piling up." A shot of the back of a Ford pickup hauling a load of firewood down the Granville Gulch (taken while driving behind him!) illustrated "we struggle and we scrape." And a green-gold scene of tall trees on either side of a vacant downward path in the Hyde Park cemetery illustrated "we're all boxed in, nowhere to escape."

My days are numbered, but I don't know the magic number. Here I am watching earnest young men the age of my children ply their trades to create "the perfect house" for Kathy and me, and I pray I'll be vigorous and able to make this place hum with gardening for another twenty years.

This is our Master Bedroom on a Saturday morning. Steve and Tim are using it as a "shop" for the work they're doing on the master bath and guest bath. As soon as they finish, they'll replace that window with a longer one. Then Rick and a helper from Beseda Flooring will come in and lay down golden oak hardwood flooring. Then Steve will put in baseboards, and I'll follow up fixing the nail pops and dings in the paint job on the walls. And then Kathy and I will move in from the guest bedroom to the Master Bedroom. Steve and Tim, and the plumbers and the electrician, will then remodel the dining area and the stairs to the basement. We won't be done with this in October, I'll bet. There's landscaping to prepare for, too.

There's the shower in the Master Bathroom. Carl Andersen brought in the cultured marble shower pan yesterday. We're getting there, and in other ways we're not.

These fibreglass entry doors do not belong on this style ranch house. They remind me of typical entry doors of steakhouses in The West forty years ago. I expect to see a sign that says, "Please check your firearms at the door." Putting a proper set of doors on this house would set us back about $5,000, so the entrance became "low priority" yesterday when we priced what's needed. We'll live with these doors and play saloon music on our music system.

I don't drink whiskey from shot glasses, though, and I don't wear cowboy attire with any grace. I sip single malt Scotch from crystal glasses I bought in Colle val D'Elsa ten years ago, and I sip it rarely, and slowly.

Tattooing the Back Yard

2010-10-08T09:15:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago we moved onto a lot with an immense amount of planting space. Our acre and a half is shaped like a wide slice of pie that is tipped downwards toward the tip, which is submerged in Hidden Lake. When I considered how to map out a large daylily hybridizing operation on this sloped triangle, I thought of making a big, horticultural tattoo like the doodles I used to draw during meetings.

I enlarged the survey of the property and used a French curve to lay out a series of sweeping curves around the right side of the house. We'll develop the left and right back yard first.

Yesterday I got down to business with a Bosch rangefinder laser, a tape measure, and my map. The survey is pretty much drawn to scale, but "pretty much" was the cause of much figuring when it came to establishing marks on the grass. For one thing, the concrete and rock swale that takes stormwater down the left side to the lake is not a straight line, as drawn. Nor is the line of the fence on the left positioned accurately with respect to the brick wall. The fence is gone now, but a line of straw shows where it once was.

My plan called for the garden beds on the left side to have edges 8 feet to the right of the swale. Since the position of the swale was inaccurate on the map, my first challenge was to establish a straight line roughly eight feet from the rough edge, taking into account the evidence of secondary water flows on the grass. The swale, you see, is a jumble of concrete rubble that does more to divert the water away than to channel it.

Then I tried to mark the location of Kathy's six vegetable plots, each 4 x 10, with 6-foot paths between. With some fudging, I got them plotted and then discovered that the slope away from the driveway had forced my plot much farther down toward the lake than I'd imagined.

So I worked back from the shoreline, 15 feet, and laid out my big area for growing selected seedlings, measured what was possible, and marked the dimensions on the map. Then I used up my two cans of bright orange "upside down paint" to mark deeply enough that something would remain after today's lawn mowing.

When Kathy and I looked at that design from the deck, we both agreed that we needed to change the design and try another idea there. This morning I took a picture of the layout we saw. I used the "pen tool" in an editing program to reinforce the lines I painted on the grass.

My big bed is about 50 x 50 feet in this view. Each small bed is 4 x 10. The new plan is to pull the right boundary of my big bed back from the lake another four to six feet. Then we'll move the left set of three small beds onto the left side of my big bed, making the big bed a rectangle. What's sacrificed from the big bed will be restored to the left of the veggie beds on the slope up. I may terrace that area. The new plan will keep the veggie gardening entirely on flat ground.

A Mystery Tree at Hidden Lake

2010-10-04T16:23:00.000-05:00

I have a mystery tree in a walled-in corner just outside my garage door at Hidden Lake. My local nursery couldn't tell what it is from just a leaf sample. Here is a full frontal picture of my tree.

It is about six feet tall and can grow taller, I think. I looks to be more than six feet across. The leaves haven't begun to turn color and I can't say whether they will do that.

The trunk appears to peel, reminding me of birch. Color is copper brown. At a height of three feet, I appears to have been purposely "topped" to force all its branches to emerge from its head. Growth is dense.

Leaves are dark green, mounted in pairs, with buds at the leaf notches. Veins radiate from the base of the leaf. Edges are smooth, not hacksaw. Form is rounded, generally coming to a point.

Note the buds at the leaf notches.

Growth habit appears to provide for substantial expansion each year. If so, this tree has no business in its current location. If you know what this is, please drop a comment.

Aquatic Invaders - Water Hyacinth

2010-08-11T10:31:00.001-05:00

There's some kind of annual aquatic plant in a pond in one of the city parks. I don't know what it is, but it has bulbous formations at the water surface at the base of the leaves. It spreads by stolons just below the water surface. They look like tubes and are about a foot long. The plant spreads rapidly to form a thick carpet on the surface of the pond. The leaves are glossy, with a shape that reminds me of clover.

In some places the plant ascends almost a foot above the water.

Here's the sort of carpet it makes.

Since posting this eight hours ago I've heard from a dozen people who've identified the plant as Water Hyacinth. It floats on top of the water and is either a pest or a desirable water plant in the south. In the north it dies over the winter and is often sought after in pond gardens. I've heard that at least one southern gardener grows it on purpose and pulls out the surplus to use as daylily mulch!

What I Want To Learn

2010-07-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

As I ponder pictures of my seedlings with patterned blue or violet eyezones, there are things I wonder that I can only determine by making test crosses. I suppose this is true of any trait, like plant habit, hardiness, ruffling, flat opening, or brilliant color.

All the pictures in this post are my seedlings. I keep wondering what it's useful to try to do or find out, as I can't do everything that comes to mind and I can't grow all the test crosses I have time to make. So...I am keeping fewer yellow bridge plants but am still going to try to develop the ones that seem to me to have something distinctive to contribute in form or size. I still want to see if I can get into the same ballpark as the yellows I buy to improve my seedling line.

I look at my patterned blue eyezones and the forms of the flowers those patterns are on, and I consider how to narrow my range of choices, which seem nearly infinite right now. There are a couple of important avenues I think I should try. Structurally, I should take my consistently arresting patterns on bridge seedlings to plants with excellent vigor and scape structure -- like Vertical Horizon, Point of Divergence, Articulate Matrix, Bridgeton Finesse, etc., working for clear background colors and flat, early openers.

In terms of design, I think I should cross complex-from-one-line X complex-on-a-different-line.

In March I must inspect all the keepers from Mysterious Eyes to see which look hardy and which look tender. I'd love to grow Mysterious Eyes again, having lost it to this past winter, but if I come up with a hardier kid with complex pattern, you know I'll want to see how it breeds with several test crosses.

I might also want to increase the level of complexity by crossing to Water Drops. Since I now have good seedlings from Thibodaux Tantalizer that resemble TT but contain additional recessive genes for blue eyes, I will want to cross those seedlings with patterned blue eyes to find out if I get complex results such as I got from taking TT to CAST YOUR NET, and I'll surely use TT all over the place one more time.

Quickly, this line of thinking can crowd out my interest in yellow, white, lavender, purple, and pink. I have some nice, clear lavenders now, with nice branching and vigorous plants. I'll want to keep working for larger lavender flowers with big white edges and a shimmering quality of color to make me have to dry my tears.

I'm not going to work on red flowers with lighter borders. Unless someone comes up with such a flower with a true cherry ice cream background rather than rosy brown bag lunch color, I don't want to see them in my garden. Even then, what would I do with them? I would marvel. That would be enough, just as I marvel at a wondrous double from David's hard work or the silvery lavenders of Steve or Curt.

Today I picked blossoms from five eyed varieties still blooming here. KING JAMES and KING OF THE AGES on rebloom, ELISA DALLAS on rebloom, SAM ABELL on rebloom, and THIEVING MAGPIE, which is not eyed but is clear dark blue purple with a blue center. I brought them home to show house guests, who ooohed and ahed, and explained why I was interested in trying a cross of the two biblical names with "king" in them. But then I said that my favorite blossom is actually ELISA DALLAS. The shape and color of the eye, relative to the shape and color of the flower, and the lively green in the throat all combine to thrill, rather then please, me. Being a guy, I suppose I'm addicted to thrill. You should see me drive!

When I imagine colors, I'm in a zone of thrill. I want to be swept away with feminine mystery, allure, and willingness to dance. I want to express male boldness, the haughty insecurity of the Flamenco dancer, the man who plays a mariachi trumpet and the man who sells ice cream or balloons. I want to express the eye for balance and rightness of my general contractor and the sense of oratory of my favorite Episcopal priest.

I want to make music with color. I want to make love with form. This art, for me, is not about grabbing your attention for five seconds of fame. It is about winning your heart long-term, bordering on forever. It is a form of courtship and flirtation.

It's also an extension of friendship. When I'm working with David and Mort's flowers, I think of David and Mort, and their arts. When I'm with Melanie Mason's flowers, I recall the lightness and joy of her talks and her prose. When I'm with Steve Moldovan's flowers, I think of the eye he developed. My garden is a reminder of a circle of friends whose respect I want to earn and whose friendship I want to keep. It is a zone of the highly personal and social aspect of horticulture and the nurture of living things. Those who would steal from a garden have fallen from God's grace, cut themselves off from it, and are at risk. Pray for the thief. His act brings failure to the love force that drives life toward the good.

Morning Light

2010-06-01T21:49:00.000-05:00

I take daylily pictures in the morning. The time before breakfast is when I like to discover if a new daylily opens fully before I go out to enjoy the garden.

This one is named ARAGON. It's by Patrick Stamile, who is one of the foremost breeders in our time. I took the picture with out new compact digital camera, the Canon S90 set on Program mode with ISO at 200 and a minus 1/3 f-stop adjustment. I've set the camera colors to neutral rather than vibrant. The greens in the background look realistic to me, but the red seems less saturated than I observed.

The plant itself arrived in the mail about six weeks ago and is growing in a pot. I don't know, therefore, whether its fading during the day is due to an iadequate root system. I would have to grow and evaluate it for two or three seasons in the ground and undisturbed to have a clear idea of its garden value. In the morning, growing in a pot, I'd rate its value high.

This is Ryan Gossard's HEAVENLY DARK MATTER. It has been in the ground since last June and is blooming for the first time here this year. Its first blossom opened today, so it's an early season daylily.

The flower is big and its maroon purple eyezone is big, too. The base color is a pale greenish yellow. I bought this for its hardiness in zone 5. I'm trying to set seeds on it with pollen from Patrick Stamile's GIANT PANDA, a new plant here this spring of unknown hardiness.

The end of May is when those sentimental orange "ditch daylilies" begin to bloom in St. Louis. I have always loved seeing masses of them along the roadside or around a tree stump. They don't belong in a context of these bold, modern hybrids, and they really don't belong anywhere near a lawn because they are invasive. But let them invade a wooded roadside, and I'll love that road!

A Time for Reflections

2010-04-05T17:56:00.001-05:00

Today's to-do list:

Practice being fully retired
Play with my compact Canon S90 digital camera
Bring home Venti Coffee and Venti Mocha from Starbucks
Dig 9 daylilies at the Green Center and plant them at home
Do this in the mud if necessary, but avoid the cloudbursts and lightning bolts
Call 5 mulch guys from Perryville and buy 8 yards from the first one to call back
Read Dennis Johnson's Alread Dead while awaiting the mulch, after making tuna sandwiches
Pay my auction bills and update my daylily database
Feel additional degrees of separation from my 33-year humanities career

I have been heavily into reflection since I turned the corner in December, but with a camera in hand, reflection becomes a theme. Take, for instance, our dear companion, Lola The Poodle.

Lola is getting a lot more rides, now that I'm home more than not. With a poodle's intelligence, rides are essential to a sense of well-being. She especially loves a ride to Starbucks.

She nudged me when she read "Admit it. You want one." I couldn't translate what she said to me about that, but I don't think she wanted to admit anything at that point. She had her eye on the car ahead of me, and on the mirror.

Reflection, reflection...oh, there is no boundary to it. Italo Calvino could have started a novel with a picture like this, but I can only start a sub-reflection:

She had a far-away look made formidable by the oversize dark glasses. The narrow mouth closed without energy. A thought formed...what was it? "Did I turn off the stove?" No, nothing that mundane, not in a story by Calvino. Not, too, a thought about what to order this morning. This is a thought about something that might have been, if not for...

Or was that my own thought, imagined in the car ahead, or was it not a thought at all but just a brief reflection on the way good and evil contest in the world and on the ways that evil often seems ascendant, even triumphant?

Even the lens of the dark glasses contains a reflection. The car's surface is another mirror, a symbol of arrest without warrant, to play with words. It's all about Stop and go at Starbucks, nothing about the play of good and evil, just spreading cheer with a bit o' banter.

Lola waits to make her remarks. At the window, she barks, "That's hot! Watch out! Don't spill that!" and the girl smiles. They know Lola and all her warnings.

In my jesting about retirement careers I have posited a life as a pirate on Missouri waterways, or as a counselor for out-of-work government torturers who have an immense weight of reflection on them as they push their grandchildren's strollers down the sidewalk, always attentive to the possibility that an assassin from "the enemy" is in the neighborhood, waiting. I wonder this, I truly do: do parents and grandparents who torture people feel the disquieting and self-killing feeling that the person they torment is someone's child or beloved? Does the torturer's capacity for empathy boomerang back and inflict a terrible wound to the soul?

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole,
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.

The suicide bomber and the torturer are expressions of the One Evil. They walk the same side of a dirty street no one travels but the broken, those lost to the world and estranged from the One Good.

Oh, lost people! Are you tugged and dismembered spiritually when you hear a line like this, from Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush?"

I was thinking about what a friend had said,
I was hoping it was a lie.

She turns the corner; her face is gone.

Spring Emergency

2010-03-29T09:55:00.002-06:00

"Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury.

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendered is the flour;
..."

In An ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound instructed us all in the fine art of syllabic music that Geoffrey Chaucer had absorbed from the French poets of his era. Chaucer brought into the English language the perfect elision of sound wedded to a perfect choice of words to define true lyrical poetry in our language.

I usually recite this passage aloud at this time of year, in my garden, as I rake the leaves off the emerging green shoots of my beloved daylilies. There is a guilt I have felt in late March each year during my employed life. It is the guilt of being pulled away from my desk work by the "other master" I serve, the master that is the mystery of my garden. I am a steward of an environment of 'thworms, as every good gardener must be. I care for the health of soil. This husbandry of soil, creatures, and plant life is a calling. It is in my deepest memories of tending a huge vegetable garden with my retired grandfather in New Jersey.

The emergence of malevolent weeds among my plants is like a state of emergency to me. I prioritize what I must do with the limited time after my work day. I look for ways to quit early, take work home for later.

And so, by stealth, and to avoid the embarrassment of a big retirement party, I announced my retirement Saturday, seven weeks ahead of schedule, after my succession was assured, and changed my status to volunteer. For me this is the perfect solution. I can face the diminishing workload without any guilt now. I need show up at the office only when one of my few final projects needs attention, and then when I have them safely in harbor or approaching there, I can fade from the scene entirely to make space for my successor, who will be formally introduced in the next edition of the MHC Passages newsletter. I can still enjoy the fellowship of my colleagues and assist Patricia Zahn, the finest colleage I have ever had, who is now the Interim Director, until my chosen successor moves to St. Louis next month.

Most of my attention right now is on my daylilies, which are just now declaring their survival or injury from the severe stress of this particular winter. Many new plants I gambled on in the Lily Auction last summer were not hardy enough to take what St. Louis reality dished up this time. The living center of their crowns is gone. If there is any life at all in those tissues, it will emerge from the side and bottom of the crown several weeks from now. But I won't let them have that chance. I only consort with the fit. The unfit are relegated to the yard waste bag to make room for another gamble.

If you hybridize, you are a gambler. The only question is how much of an ante you dare to put up each year. You can see how serious I am about this by checking my garden web site at daylilylay.com. Here is a special new one that I bred in 2001 and flagged for keeping in 2003:

I'm going to name this one LIZ PAINE, for one of my longtime professional friends at the Federation of State Humanities Councils in Washington, D.C.

Today, Palm Sunday, it's a bit rainy, but not much more than a drizzle. I must go dig several plants of my GOODNIGHT KISSES and DAVID AND ALAN to send to buyers who begged me for plants as early as possible. Both of these are frostproof and hardy, as I hope I will be for a lot more years. I like telling garden club audiences that "you'll love my Goodnight Kisses." It's important to have something to laugh about when you're sitting on a chair you would never actually want to own and use. Do you know that type of chair? It's standard issue in community centers. They are designed to encourage brief meetings.

I am designed for life, and I'm going out now to affirm that in my garden.

Reading in a Chinese Garden

2010-02-04T15:11:00.001-06:00

Last month Kathy and I visited the Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon. It's the type of garden that one of the high officials of the Ming Dynasty might have built for himself in some remote city to remind him of the splendor of Peking. We arrived just in time to join the one o'clock guided tour for a small group of people numbering no more than ten.

Our guide began with an imaginary orientation of where this garden might have been sited in a crowded Chinese city. She pointed out the high walls, for privacy, and let us know that the decorative openings in the walls were not authentic. They were necessary because of the Portland building codes.

She began to talk about ancient China, and the stages of examinations that a scholar had to pass in order to become a high court official. Immediately she reached into a blue tote bag and withdrew a map of China. This would be a reference point as she spoke of the geography, the distances, and the differences in population.

As we moved from one stopping point to another, the guide discussed the variety of plant forms in the garden and the symbolic importance of fish in the water. "You may wonder why you might see a whole fish on a platter at a Chinese festivity," she said. "Why don't they remove the head and tail before serving it?" We all waited a few seconds before she said, "It's because the fish represents abundance, or the wish for abundance, and the head and tail symbolize the entirety of life."

We entered a variety of rooms around the garden and heard about what they symbolized to the owner and to his visitors. One room had a small library and a writing desk with inks and brushes, the trappings of beautiful thoughts, beautiful writing, and beautiful images.

At last we came to a set of carved wooden panels. Our guide pointed out the theme of the carvings and the presence of poems there.

And then, to end the tour, we all had a special treat. She reached into her tote bag and withdrew a book of Chinese poems and their English translations and she asked for two volunteers to read to the group. I thought immediately of so many museums back in Missouri, places where I had seen a Civil War loyalty oath, a telegram from General Alexander Doniphan to the Governor of Missouri in 1838 in which he refuses to carry out an order to execute Joseph Smith and a party of Mormons. I thought of the journals and stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the stories of Mark Twain, the letters of Harry Truman, Eugene Field. I thought of the recollections of former slaves, the diaries of German immigrants, the letters of soldiers to their parents in time of war.

There are so many opportunities to use a map or to engage visitors in reading the primary sources of history. I saw the magic of props like that in Portland.

"Design Intelligence" and Its Enemy

2010-01-05T13:06:00.004-06:00

A couple of years ago I visited the Sikeston Depot Cultural Center and admired the tastefulness of the exhibits in the small space that was available. I think it is true that most of us sense the features of any space we enter. Some of us sense in more detail than others, and some of us can verbalize what we sense more readily.

Probably the first thing we sense is cleanliness and the qualities of color and light, unless an ordor grabs our attention! (I won't go near scented candle shops. A museum friend is especially sensitive to mold that I can't detect. On the other hand, I like the aroma of fresh-baked bread or a good beef stew.)

In the picture above we see "design intelligence" at work in a small area that tells the story of cotton production. The lighting is beautiful. Three-dimensional objects shape the space we enter and draw us toward the two-dimensional pictures and text panels. The objects defeat what would otherwise be a "tyranny" of right angles. If the room is a box, and the pictures and text panels are flattened boxes, you have to introduce curves as well as "empty space" like the space in the branches of the cotton plant and between the legs of the table. Think of curves and empty space as the "freedom fighters" in your displays.

I see design intelligence almost everywhere I go. You don't need formal training to do a good job in a local museum. You just need a sense of cleanliness, light, space, variety, and narrative.

Here's an exceptional example by a volunteer at the Katy Depot in Sedalia.

Everything in that small case is placed to perfection. Everything contributes interest.

The Enemy of design intelligence is not a person but a feeling that impels you to add something to an excellent display because you happened to acquire it after the display was perfect. A voice inside you says something like "What's wrong with displaying another treasure?" It may also say, "If someone donates something, I have an obligation to display it immediately!" As you listen to that voice, see if you can hear the camel's backbone break. It only takes one additional thing to destroy the perfection of a sentence, a meal, or a display.

I write this in a mild sense of mourning for the museums that once had fine examples of design intelligence and ruined what they had by filling up the space with more and more "stuff." There are times, when writing a sentence or a paragraph, that the new word that comes to mind is a destroyer of what's already there. It's best to dismantle the whole thing and start over.

That's true of museum displays, too. Nothing good happens when you keep adding and adding. You don't make "bad" any better, and you quickly degrade "good." The mission is not to display things, anyway, no matter what the mission statement says. The mission is to stimulate (not numb) the intelligence of a visitor. The unique power of design intelligence is that it invites discovery and learning. The enemy of design intelligence creates only a desire to flee.

This cold season is an opportunity to look around the museum and find an area where you can take everything out and start over again. Go ahead. You have eight weeks, maybe ten. Give yourself an empty space, clean it up first, and then create a learning opportunity in that space. Create something different that suggests an idea. Juxtapose items that have never had a chance to inhabit the same space and see what happens. Play around with combinations for four or five of your eight weeks and then polish up what works best in the final three. And then invite me over!

Round Barn, Morrisville, Vermont (1980)

2009-12-22T10:49:00.004-06:00

From 1975 until 1995 I drove the back roads of Vermont, very often with my camera. I adored my adopted landscape, of course. In the fall of 1977, San and I moved to a big new house on the edge of the village of Hyde Park, about 30 miles south of Canada and an easy 2-hour drive from Montreal. We were ten miles north of the year-round resort town of Stowe, an hour's drive northeast of Burlington and the view of Lake Champlain, and about 45 minutes in good weather from Montpelier, the state capital and home of quite a nice book store and a natural foods market that sold the home-made bread of a local humanist baker, Jules Rabin. Just east of Hyde Park lay the town of Morrisville, and just outside of town, on the road to Lake Elmore and then onward to the back entrance to Montpelier, sat this round yellow barn.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boumanm/4205141150/sizes/l/

Just beyond the barn was a small country home of a woodworker whose business was named The Wood Nebbish. The word nebbish, I have just discerned, means a "pitifully ineffectual, luckless, and timid person." Until the age of 13, I hadn't heard any Yiddish expressions, having been raised Lutheran and schooled with Lutherans.

I am not moving toward endorsements of any particular religious theme here. This passage is about how the notion of religion was formed in me as a cultural idea rather than a theological one. My father, the architect, recounted a fateful letter home from boarding school at the age of 15, when he informed his father, minister of the Lutheran church in the small German-speaking town of Hamburg, Minnesota, that he was not going to become a church minister, musician, or teacher like his 9 siblings. This declaration was not a separation from his church. Church-going was at the core of his way of life. It was the same way with Mom, who had been raised in the Catholic church and had become a Lutheran before she met Dad.

Dad and Mom were different kinds of Lutherans, but neither was given to discussion of religion. For them, a code of beliefs was a fixed point in life, an anchor. It was in a Lutheran Sunday School that I had a transformative experience that gave status to questioning and opened the door to interpretation. So I became a third kind of Lutheran, more in league with my cousin, Walt Bouman, one of several theologians in the family. I became the kind of Lutheran who could inquire into other religions, stop attending church, and one day welcome a marriage ceremony conducted by a Buddhist priest who lived in a monastery in Jemez, New Mexico. I, too, am anchored by a system of beliefs. I, too, have something one might call a theology, or a cosmology. What I might call it doesn't matter to me. That I have it at all is what links me to my parents' cosmology and to yours, Reader.

A propos of the Christmas season, I discovered the fervor of Dad's convictions when I was in 7th grade and said I wanted the Elvis Christmas Album for Christmas. I might just as well have proposed that he give me an encyclopedia of satanic practices. He exploded in rage. There is no better way to say it. He didn't break up the house or batter me. Remaining in his easy chair, he simply "went balistic" as we would learn to say a decade later. He didn't use the term "blasphemy," though it applies to his reaction.

I did acquire that LP record, though not through any act of his! He did not seize it, ruin it, confiscate the record player, or prevent my memorizing its satanic verses. To this day I do a fair imitation of Elvis's "Blue Christmas," if you're not paying much attention and have other things on your mind.

This began with "nebbish" and the exoticism of Yiddish expressions. In junior high school they buzzed around me left and right. My 9th grade girlfriend, Arlene, liked the word "meshugganah" (crazy). I never asked her to translate it and I never used it myself. I sensed these terms were "cultural property." The absurdity of violating those cultural boundaries is one of the jokes in the movie, "A Mighty Wind." Another word I heard a lot and never understood until just now was, "schlemiel," meaning a habitual bungler.

Last Saturday Kathy and I watched the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Les Contes d'Hoffmann. It was a fabulously theatrical experience, true Grand opera, and one peripheral character in the third tale is named Schlemil. Nothing about his deportment suggested he was a bungler, though.

Well, enough reminiscing about how we form ideas about ourselves and others.

My photo of the round barn is the first of a series of desktop wallpaper images I'm going to post to my Flickr site for any and all to enjoy. I'm using the round barn this week as my desktop image.

Once I started growing daylilies, farm fields like that always caught my eye as potential daylily farms run by me. I imagined acres and acres of vibrant color and I went on like that for several years before it dawned on me that someone was going to have to do a tremendous amount of digging, washing, dividing, and weeding. I didn't have to ponder the scale of that labor very long before I scaled back my dream to a scope that I could possibly manage if everything went well for me and I developed the strength of Hercules.

My heart goes out to those who have lost their mothers recently. My mom died peacefully, slipped away during a surge of misplaced optimism about her imminent release from the hospital after her final COPD episode. Mom only had to endure 9 months in the nursing home. It may have seemed like an eternity to her. Until the big hurricane in 2004, Mom had been able to live independently, in a manner of speaking, with very limited eyesight and intensive visitation by my sister and brother-in-law. The stress of the hurricane or simple progression of her disease made it untenable for her to live without continuous monitoring. On Sunday evenings before her transfer to the nursing home she and I had weekly chats. I remember the sound of her voice on the other end of the line as if we just spoke last night. She had an earthy sense of humor, having been raised on a farm in New Jersey, and it served her well when there was nothing to do about various indignities except extract a laugh with a play on words. Her response to word play led me to name my big, raspberry 2010 daylily MOM'S MIRTH. The flowers are as colorful and big as her sense of humor.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boumanm/1582918607/in/set-72157602146585261/

San, too, had a laugh the night before the life ebbed out of her. I recall her last days as if I just helped her through them. My daily life seems nested in memories like those Russian wooden dolls-within-dolls. When Kathy recounted her day for me yesterday I was sure I discerned the 10-year-old who carries a bubble of joy up through the layers of memory to the adult Kathy I married in July.

The turn of another year approaches; the light of days lengthens again; our sorrows and joys disperse and blend within us and like geraniums in the window we lean toward the light.

Imagination of Boundless Fertility

2009-11-18T13:59:00.013-06:00

This time of year, I imagine more people are studying the music of Handel's Messiah than are listening to the 2009 remastered recordings of The Beatles. I sure am. I'm getting ready for one of the great musical treats of my life -- singing 18th century music under the direction of Nicholas McGegan. He's leading the St. Louis Symphony and Chorus in Messiah on December 11-12-13. Hot Diggety Dog is all I can say about that!

I’m completing a year of listening to 5-star recordings of Handel operas. I play them on my car stereo during many long drives through Missouri. I also play them during short drives. I play them in drives of all lengths and never use the radio.

One might think that all these arias, overtures, and tempests would be indistinguishable after a month or so. They are no more indistinguishable than 500 grandchildren would be to the doting grandparent. Each one bears the stamp of creative spark. Even the ones that have been borrowed from another opera and reworked slightly delight me none the less.

What enchants me is the play of three imaginations – Handel’s, the conductor’s, and the singer’s. Most of the pieces in Handel’s opera were written as vehicles for international stars. He had to write music that would show off the distinctive gifts of each star in his opera company. Handel’s audience, too, expected ever-new productions with ever-new music to show off some of the best singers in Europe.

Modern conductors approach Handel as a master of theatrical and dramatic effects. They sense the way that a dramatic impression can be rendered through a manner of increasing the energy of the bow on the violin or cello. They imagine themselves as Handel himself, urging his orchestra to play one aria in a different character from another, to suit the dramatic moment more closely than the musical notation by itself could indicate.

I am replaying a 2008 recording of Riccardo Primo in my car and on my office computer because I realized that it will be impossible to make a “highlights” playlist of this opera for Kathy. Almost every aria is a highlight. Paul Goodwin conducts the Kammerorchester Basel. The countertenor, Lawrence Zazzo, sings the role of Richard, the Lion-Hearted. Soprano Nuria Rial sings the part of his fiancé, Costanza. Soprano Geraldine McGreevy sings Pulcheria, daughter of the Cyprian ruler, Isacio.

It’s too bad that you can’t buy MP3 samples of this opera from iTunes or Amazon. Some of it has been posted on YouTube, though, and you can listen to a few samples of what modern Handel performances sound like.

Here is Riccardo’s Act I aria about his stormy shipwreck on Cyprus, “Agitato da fiere tempeste.”

That gives you a good idea of what expert "divisions" sound like nowadays. The same artist conjures with gorgeous tone in Riccardo’s Act II aria, “Nube che il sole adombra.”

Just a few minutes later, Riccardo and Costanza sing a ten-minute duet that makes time, and Act II, come to a stop. Here’s a performance of “T’amo, si” from a 1996 recording of the opera, with Sandrine Piau and Sara Mingardo:

Here’s the Catalan soprano, Nuria Rial (Costanza), celebrating her good fate in the Act III aria, “Il volo cosi fido” from the 2008 Paul Goodman recording.

It’s nice to see the actual singer after all these pseudo-videos, so here is Lawrence Zazza singing Coronato il crin d'alloro from a 2004 Paris production of Aggripina Ottone.

And here is Nuria Rial, singing Belinda’s first song from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

"So What? Who Cares?"

2009-09-30T11:53:00.008-05:00

The question, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
The question is blowin’ in the wind.

The winds of change are blowing across our continent. The winds are not named Mariah this time; they are named for Baby Boomers like me and my juniors. The 1945 calendar on the wallpaper of the Schowengerdt House in Warrenton marks the beginning of "my era" on the earth. "My stuff" from childhood is in museum displays now. I'm about to be a voice from the past. My theme is a phrase from a song that Bob Dylan wrote about twelve years ago:

Walking through the leaves falling from the trees,

Feeling like a stranger nobody sees.

There is no clear demarcation between my parents’ generation and mine. The border between generations is broad and blurred. When I retire next year I won’t be on the cutting edge of the Boomers; I’ll be behind it by a couple of years. The trailing edge of “The Silent Generation” overlaps my generation. I’m made up of both. If you’re in your fifties, you’re solid Boomer.

This national wind of change will last about 15 years. People over 50 are part of it. “Empty Nesters” are past midlife now and they are reorganizing their stance in the world for greater meaning. They are entering nonprofit life with technical know-how and with attitudes about learning that represent a big step forward for museums and libraries. They want to make a difference as never before.

To give a few examples, my late wife and I were in our 50s when we made a three-year pledge to the capital campaign of our church. We were also in our 50s when we made our first thousand-dollar gift to a nonprofit other than our church.

Our involvement in the capital campaign surprised both of us. We were at dinner with two friends who had agreed to spearhead the campaign. They were not soliciting us over dinner; we were just discussing how the campaign would be broken down into levels of workers. I volunteered to be one of the workers who would solicit a set number of other parishioners. Then I started thinking in terms of what would be possible if I selected a number representing “spare cash” in the weekly flow of money through our checkbook. I picked $20 and multiplied it out over three years. I said, “Do you realize that a commitment to allocate an extra $20 a week to this cause would enable us to make a pledge of $3,000 over the three-year campaign?” Our friends were amazed at the magic of breaking down a big challenge into something doable on a weekly basis. We pledged that amount on the spot.

My point is that we had financial means in our fifties that we didn’t have before then, and we wanted to use those means for the benefit of organizations that meant the most to us. During the same period in my life I became more actively involved in developing a curriculum for a horticultural organization to which I belong, and I served as President of my garden club and as a board member of a national association of state humanities councils.

The youngest Boomers are in their fifties now, and the eldest will retire this year and next. They constitute a wind of change in the nonprofits in town. The question that’s blowing in the wind is the one we ask of the institutions our parents set up: So what? Who cares?

In the museum and library fields there is a natural tendency to think about the stewardship of objects or environments. We want to create clean, well-lit, “inviting” spaces for the public. We want to provide “access” to information of all kinds.

Ten years ago when I said to a group of library people that I supposed the inherent mission of a library was to nurture “better readers,” they recoiled. They wanted nothing to do with helping people appreciate good writing. That couldn’t be considered part of a library’s mission.

Seven years ago I said to a group of museum supporters, “How do you imagine you will use the new space you think you need to succeed? If you had twice the space, would the museum be twice as boring?” Of course, when people start to imagine a lot more space, a lot of the space is empty, so people can move around better and have a better experience. I suggested they create the space they dream about by subtracting display cases and objects in the current square footage. Pull your vision of a better future into your present; don’t wait for it. This was the beginning of my conversion to visitor-centered thinking.

Visitor-centered thinking goes well beyond creature comforts like clean carpets and a quiet, well-lit room. Those are helpful, to be sure, but they are not in the realm of “So what? Who cares?” Visitor-centered thinking is concerned with engaging and nurturing the intelligence of the visitor. That is the only source of an answer to “So what? Who cares?” That is the beating heart of an educational mission.

I see failures of stewardship everywhere I go. The maintenance problems of museums and historic homes are often crushing. People base appeals on what they suppose to be the inherent importance of the institution. Unfortunately, the mere existence of an institution does not provide an answer to “So what? Who cares?” The institution has to provide an active benefit to the population.

There is hope in that proposition. It is possible to become a community’s engine of learning even while the wallpaper peels off and the place needs better climate control. In fact, it is necessary to be an engine of learning in order to persuade the public that the institution deserves support. The most noteworthy failure of stewardship I see is the failure to stimulate the intelligence of the population. This is a failure that can be reversed much more easily than mold in the basement.

I see huge educational potential everywhere I go. Last week in Warren County I visited the historical society and led a discussion exercise in which each trustee and volunteer was asked to tell one personal story of a connection to the county’s history. Two of the trustees spoke of personal research projects using primary documents in the collection. I encouraged them to share their passion for these materials with visitors. The person telling the story of research has to be regarded these days as “part of the collection” and “part of the display.”

Two others recounted memories of growing up just after World War II. These were “Boomer” stories, but they seemed to emerge from a time warp. The town of Warrenton had been electrified in the 19th century, but one museum trustee grew up in a rural home with kerosene lanterns. Another trustee remembered that when her father expected the water in a local creek to rise, he would park his car on the opposite bank. If he needed to drive somewhere, he would disrobe at the creek, wade across with his clothes held high, and dress on the other side.

As we sat around the table comparing those memories – Boomer memories, all of them – we began to imagine that one theme of that county museum has to be about “Town and Country.” The gap between Town and Country closed in our remembered past, and “country life” became so easy that Warren County attracted new people.

The most important assets of a museum or library are the people who engage the visitor’s intelligence and help it grow. A library that does not care about more and better "reading experiences" is not in a position to answer the question that is blowing in the wind. Why should a library be less interested in promoting that than Border’s or Barnes and Noble? If you look carefully at what retailers are doing these days, you’ll see more and more “staff recommendations.” I see them on the bulletin board at Whole Foods Market, too. Retailers are “personalizing” the experience, giving big places a human face and personality. I see this as part of the new, questioning wind.

You can catch this wind. It can fill the sail of your little boat. “So what, who cares?” demands the energy of motion. It’s up to you to make that motion refreshing, not just another blast of hot air.

Grandfather of Eight

2009-09-21T14:24:00.007-05:00

"They all got married and they didn't hesitate,

I was, whoo!, Oh, Lord, the grandfather of eight."

I am called toward retirement.
With the beginning of another school year, this lifelong teacher is feeling the rush of possibility. Every year since I began Kindergarten I have felt a surge of positive energy at the end of the Summer. That energy was intense last year. I was bursting out of the cloud of grief over San’s death in June. This year I feel it and savor it as one savors the last sip of a good bottle of wine, because this year is my last as the leader of the Missouri Humanities Council. Each opportunity to shed light, to liberate creative energy, feels like a chance to pitch for a World Series win or to write a line as good as “Fourscore and seven years ago.”

I will retire on May 15. I am not leaving because the work has grown predictable. To the contrary, in the work of discovery, nothing is predictable, nothing is done by formula. It is all done by meeting people who want to be effective, who want to work their way out of knots and pockets of discouragement, and by thinking with them about “what if?” This work is done by learning about this or that town, or this or that subject, or this or that challenge, and seeing what can be done that is uplifting, constructive of human intelligence, and constructive of relationships.

I am “called” to my retirement as I was called to music, to writing, and to teaching. I am called to create what I hope will be a happy closing section in the story of my life. San felt that death cheated her out of sharing this part of life with me. We had been thinking of how and where we might spend it, and then we were suddenly focused on negotiating for the best quality that could be wrestled away from a quickening shortage of time.

In one sense, I owe it to San to live that wished-for final chapter, and I owe that chapter to Kathy, who married me in July. Before she died, San blessed me, and whoever would become my next love and marriage. Kathy and I feel as if our departed spouses nudged us toward each other. We belong together. Our life honors the lives of Tom Wofford and Sandra Bouman, and their parents and grandparents all the way back to Adam and Eve.
I think of retirement as a lived blessing. One of life’s miracles or graces is that an imagined good is instantly transported from the future to the present, so that it is spilled liberally on our path, a libation of goodness.
My cup of goodness includes eight grandchildren. The baby girl in the picture is my youngest, Arianah Wofford. This time last year, thanks to my daughter Jennifer's marriage in 2006 to Jared Steagall, I had two teenage grandchildren. Now Kathy has brought six younger ones into our big family. Until last month, when I met Arianah and her three siblings, I had not actually held and entertained a baby in thirty-six years! It was as if no time had passed. I am called to be a grandfather! Visiting my big family is now a calling.

In my new chapter, I imagine I will join the Y, and that I will volunteer in some form of teaching capacity. I would love to be a tour guide in a fine art museum, for instance. I would love to conduct a workshop on collage and Cubism in which the song lyrics of Bob Dylan were part of the mix. I would love to lead book discussions. I would love to write a form of music criticism that I haven’t seen much of since I last wrote a bit of it 35 years ago. I think the music critic has a social function to fulfill and that the function is to expand the intelligence of the reader.
Naturally, I will sing as long as I can with the St. Louis Symphony Chorus. I will take Kathy to the opera, here, in New York, in Santa Fe, and who knows where else? She and I will develop our gardens and I will breed daylilies in the summer and dream about their beauties the rest of the time. If you want to see some of mine, just Google for Daylily Lay, and sing that name, don't just speak it.

Retirement is eight months away now. Until then, I'm going to have the time of my life in this work I love so well.

Marital Haiku #1

2009-08-31T09:06:00.001-05:00

Your eyes enchant me

And your voice is beautiful.

So, what did you say?

Auras of Power

2009-08-26T09:49:00.004-05:00

So I learned a minute ago that Ted Kennedy died last night of his cancer. I know something about the vigil of a family, the death rattle, the astonishing, holy quiet that fills the room when the body no longer breathes but the warmth of life has not yet cooled on the forehead. The fingertips blue, the face relaxed, and a sense of awe and wonder for those alive to sense it. Alas for the end of life. Alas for the loss of having any more tomorrows to plan and look forward to. Alas for entering the time when we hope the end of tomorrows comes quickly.

I think Ted Kennedy sensed the special mantle of leadership that is available to those who rise, either by force of personality or by station in life. Ted Kennedy, I think, had both of those things. He was infused with the aura of his family name and the people's sense of hope that stuck to the family name despite the human failings of individuals. He was blessed with a strong constitution, such that early in his career when he suffered a broken back in an airplane crash, he came back from it and rose above any further mention of it.

He became a champion of things his family was expected to champion, either because he personally believed in them or because he needed to appear to champion them in order to retain the devotion of the followers. There is a border zone in the human spirit between truth and pretense, or truth and feigning, in which the thing we feign one day becomes the truth of us by and by, either because we have come to believe in it, or because we have "incorporated" it, made it a part of our body and soul and identity. I'm saying that Ted Kennedy was born into a societal role and he filled that role splendidly all of his life. A former age would have termed his "performance" the Obligation of the Noblility, Noblesse Oblige.

I'm not suggesting that he was posing as "the good man." I'm suggesting that in his public life he passionately advocated what the populace hopes those of noble spirit will advocate. In his public life he upheld our hopes, those of us who wanted leadership like his or hoped for better social conditions in the ways he did.

I used to receive hate mailings at my office from a source in southwest Missouri who absolutely did not want America to have leadership like his. For that faction, Kennedy's name was synonymous with the sure destruction of the American Way.

Mourn with me, then, also, the blue finger tips of the girl Mary Jo, trapped in a small pocket of air in the sunken car that Ted Kennedy somehow escaped as it sank into a pond after he drove off a short, low bridge in 1969. He later said she had asked for a ride back to the hotel. She had told none of her five co-workers at the party that she was leaving. Her purse and hotel room key were still at the party.

Mourn the people who are caught up in the auras of power and personality and who are consumed.

In the paper today I read about two bright hopes of Missouri politics who played dirty in the 2004 election, lied about it to investigators, and who will now do jail time, not for playing dirty, but for lying about it.

Back in August of 1969, the month I finished graduate school and began my teaching career, the month of Woodstock, the month after Mary Jo went for late-night ride with Ted Kennedy, our society was in a time of transition from hushing up the misdeeds of our nobility to gleefully exposing them thirty years later during the humiliation of the Clinton household. I have wondered this morning if a situation parallel to the last ride of Mary Jo Kopechne could possibly result in only the brief suspension of a driver's license were it to happen today.

I mourn the loss of Ted Kennedy, and his failures of spirit and judgment, and of the damages that occur inside those auras of power.

A Passing Form of Institutionalization

2009-08-20T10:40:00.007-05:00

I have a step-nephew, once or twice removed, and named Wilson Oldhouser, III. He is the grandson of my stepfather-in-law, Wilson Oldhouser, who I first met in 1975. I’ll call my stepson “Bill” to avoid confusion. Bill is a lawyer in Baltimore, an hour’s drive south of York, PA, where Wilson lived most of his life. Bill had formed a lifelong bond of affection for Wilson, and vice-versa, and so, by the grace of God, Bill was in the right place, with the right maturity and legal connections, to intervene by degrees when Wilson began to lose his senses.

Wilson died in April of this year in an Alzheimer’s care facility near Bill’s home. Alzheimer’s was Wilson’s largest and possibly only fear in life. He had seen his brother Woody succumb to it. When it came upon Wilson’s own mind, it buffered him from a terrifying self-awareness. Thus, as far as I know, Wilson never spoke of losing his senses. He didn’t know they were gone. There was some god-given essence to Wilson that prevailed in social interaction even when he could not remember.

Wilson was larger-than-life to the members of the family and to many of his friends. He had a big, outgoing personality. He had a piercing baritone speaking voice and a huge smile. He loved adventure and feared no risks. As a fighter pilot in World War II, he had lived to tell the tale of more than one brush with death.

My late wife, Sandra, was his stepchild. That was an uneasy relationship for her. She had lost her father in a divorce that took her by surprise when she was fourteen. A couple of years later, her mother, Gladys, married Wilson in 1956. In 1975, before I was taken to meet Gladys and Wilson, Sandra thoroughly cautioned me about Wilson’s brash manner. I think she feared he would scare me off.

When I met him I made a brash game of our getting to know each other. I made wise cracks. I gave him goofy answers. I made him laugh. He realized that we were in for a long game of verbal delight. And so, as our relationship developed, he never once tried to throw me off balance, and I never engaged him in anger. We had become something like buddies.

During my period of grieving over Sandra’s death these past months, I didn’t keep up with Wilson’s condition. I contacted Bill in April to ask about Wilson and learned that Wilson was in failing health at the time of my note and that he had died five days later.

Bill is an excellent writer. His Christmas letters to the family are always warm and interesting. I saw that warmth and ease again this week when Bill sent me the transcript of a memorial gathering of lawyers and judges on August 7 in York, Pennsylvania. I take this transcript as a “historic artifact” because it is evidence of a vanishing form of memorial called “Minutes of Respect.” It resembles a Quaker assembly in which various people rise in turn and say something in memory of a departed friend.

At the close of the proceeding, Judge John Uhler remarks on “Minutes of Respect” as a passing institution. He speaks of the manner by which a profession memorializes its members and considers whole people and whole lives. He says, “There is always a debate as to the appropriateness of the continuation of these Minutes of Respect, and the debate evolves from the younger members of the Bar. They are not swelling to include themselves in observance to these Minutes, and it's a passing form of institutionalization of times gone by. I'm an advocate that these Minutes continue. How else can we memorialize the history of our members, the sheer diversity of interests that our members bring to the table and before us? And quite frankly, the Minute that has been presented by Bill has, quite frankly, given a new focus, a new picture of Wilson that I never had the opportunity to experience, and I thank him for that. We need to memorialize our history, and it's important not only for the family members but it's for the members of the Bar to recognize that there are more things to life than billable hours.”

I have made a PDF file of the Minute of Respect with Bill’s permission. I have also connected Judge Uhler’s final remark – “there are more things to life than billable hours” – to the objects I see in museums. Local museums have long served the function of “memorial station” for town residents. There is a memorial quality to donating tangible objects to a museum, so just about everyone, sooner or later, will approach the museum board with a proposed donation of objects.

It is the job and duty of the museum people to bring objects to life. Last week as I gazed at an array of rusting old farm machinery I thought, “There is so much more to life in a farming community than obsolete tools and machines.” What Judge Uhler is responding to is a compelling story. The presence of rusty equipment is not the museum’s problem. The problem is the absence of story. That is a problem that can be solved over and over, in ways that offer a fitting memorial to the forbears and departed friends and relatives who worked on the land.

Life in the Attic

2009-07-31T12:08:00.005-05:00

A museum colleague passed on an email report about how the Ohio Historical Society has redefined itself in response to a 42% cut in state funding in the past two years. The key information in the report is this statement:

“In direct response to what the public has said they want the Ohio Historical Society to offer, the Society will be transforming the state history museum at the Ohio Historical Center to focus on collections learning. In studies that have taken place over the past three years, the public has said they want more direct access to the collections, more opportunities for hands-on experiences and ways to explore stories of interest to them using current technology and the resources of both the museum and library.

“Plans call for public labs and workspaces in which activities that are usually carried out behind the scenes will be front and center. In addition, collections that are normally stored off-site will be brought to the facility for easy viewing. A distance learning studio, spaces for new exhibitions and technology enhancements are also among the innovations under development.

“The collections learning center will be created in phases, beginning with the removal of current exhibits, many of which are more than 20 years old. Development and implementation of the first phase is scheduled to begin in January 2010. OHS Director Bill Laidlaw was quoted as saying, "the collections-learning-center concept will help make Ohio's story personally relevant and engaging to today's audiences. We will be creating more exhibitions and programs for traveling to OHS sites, libraries, historical societies, community centers and other museums across the state. In this way, we are redefining the concept of 'state museum.' We will be a museum with a presence all over the state-not just in Columbus."

I have added boldface to the report I received. Reporter Tim Feran, in a July 24 blog for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, used the well-chosen word, “attic,” to describe the collection of the Ohio Historical Society: With 2 million objects in a wide-ranging collection, the society is known as "Ohio's Attic." That characterization is followed in the blog by a direct quote from OHS Director, Bill Laidlaw, "We have to protect the collections first. That's why we were founded. We would never sell anything to cover basic operating costs. Never have, never will. If you lose it, it's gone forever."

I gather that the state historical society is saddled with an ungainly mission. Although it has existed since 1885, it has been charged with the management of a network of local historic sites. For the past 50 years it has also been designated as the archive for the state’s three branches of government. Apparently, it serves a large number of people interested in genealogy, too. This “mission creep” is a familiar feature of historical organizations large and small. The financial difficulties of the Ohio Historical Society provide a case-in-point. The organization has to redefine its mode of operations to use much less money and have a much more compelling effect on its visitors/clients/users.

I can see in the quotations above a certain tension between an “object-centered” approach to museum management and a “learner-centered” approach. The fault of most mission statements in the nonprofit world is that they fail to talk about the nature of the transformation they cause within the served population. In the field of education, the key result of an organization’s activity is “enlarged intelligence.” Stewardship of intelligence is the primary function of education, and yet you won’t find it in the statement about “protecting the collections first.” You won’t find it in most museum mission statements.

Of course, anyone in Bill Laidlaw’s position must say that the collection won’t be auctioned off. There are a lot of people who believe that collecting and preserving objects is a complete and sufficient statement of the mission. "Collect and preserve;" it rings in my ear like a lead bell, I've seen it so often. Bill Laidlaw has to honor a swath of influential people who have not yet thought beyond "collect and preserve." Everyone in his position has to say what he said while doing everything in his power to enlarge the vision of what a museum’s true purpose might be.

The media want to spin the stories of big museums around the money theme. They take the easy way out. Money stories are easy. The reports talk about staff furloughs, reduced hours, etc. Laidlaw plays into the media’s chosen spin with a “protect the objects” refrain. He, or his PR person, should have played the unexpected “learner-centered” card.

If only he had spoken of a museum’s social function rather than its “collect and preserve” function, he could have made the kernel of the case for restoration of all that lost funding. Over $7 million is at stake! The money-winning function of a museum is to engage people in a richer story than they would ever devise on their own. The museum exists not for the sake of its objects, but for the sake of nurturing the intelligence of the population, no matter what the mission or the statutes say. People are not hungry for bigger and bigger attics. They do not mourn the loss of an attic, they just make another one and put it out of mind. They are hungry for meaning. In nonprofit life, money always follows meaning.

In some of the boldfaced passages above, you can see the public hunger for more interesting learning experiences in a museum. They want more hands-on experiences, more opportunities to explore stories of interest to them. But I am disheartened by what I read next. The response to the public’s desire for more engagement is to focus on the object-centered work the conservators do, to bring it “front and center.” They’re going to create a living exhibit of museum staff work!

People of good intent will differ on whether that is strategic thinking. I hope OHS reconsiders that idea. It looks to me like “see how interesting life is here in the attic?”

Making Life More Interesting

2009-06-25T16:13:00.008-05:00

Every morning from mid-June to mid-July I’m usually in the garden by 6 am with my notebook and camera. One of my creative occupations is the cross-pollinating of hybrid daylilies. I’m one of thousands of backyard hobbyists or business people who raise anywhere from 50 seedlings a year to mind-numbing numbers exceeding twenty thousand. I’m on the low end of the spectrum. I raise about two thousand a year.

There is luck, whimsy, and disciplined thought in this occupation, as there is in writing poetry or moderating a workshop with museum volunteers. The triumphs are all the sweeter when they are unpredicted, when they come seemingly out of nowhere or from the grace of God. A good paragraph feels that way, or a bon mot when trying to convey a vision.

This morning I stood in the garden looking in awe at a dozen or so plants from a single pod of seeds gathered three summers ago. Every plant from this cross grows in a healthy way and has blemish-free foliage. That’s the ticket! Yet the flowers on each plant have their own style of opening in the morning, which surprises me, and their own coloration, which does not surprise me. It does not surprise me that the best flower in this cross (above) is borne on the plant that seems inclined to produce the lowest number of buds, and that the best bud-producers in the cross are producing ho-hum flowers.

If things had gone otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this reflection today; I’d be thinking of how I could conceal the “perfect daylily” long enough to increase it for the massive influx of orders at Daylily Lay, a garden whose name is sung, not spoken.

At lunch today with a delightful PR professional whose last name in Dutch means, “from Lion,” and whose hair is blonde but not leonine, I said “A humanities council helps people make life more interesting.” It’s as simple as that. Those classes we took in Literature or History or Archaeology or Comparative Religion or Baroque Art had a common focus on the production of meaning in human experience. They also had a common result of cultivating a habit of mind appropriate to the subject. In other words, those classes not only opened up a slice of the world to us, they helped us learn to think better, more widely, deeper. We learned to ask more and better questions of the world around us. We learned to appreciate our place on the long highway of human experience.

When I listen to a recording of a Schubert piano piece, I enter another world and live in the ebb and flow of musical ideas that make more sense to me because of some instruction I had a long time ago. A professor taught me how to listen. Have you ever had such a music teacher?

I studied poetry once with a man who taught me how to read, how to notice on many levels, how to savor, how to devour.

Sometimes how a story is laid out is as interesting, or more interesting, than the story itself. Kathy and I were talking the other night about the artistic choices in the screenplay of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We were trying to imagine the F. Scott Fitzgerald story behind the movie. Neither of us had read the story. I placed a bet that the notion of a backwards-running clock was borrowed directly from Fitzgerald’s original. It seemed so “literary,” so unnecessary to the film. Yesterday I found the story online and read the first page or two, finding no mention of a clock. There might be a clock in there, but I don’t intend to read further. It’s low priority now. What was great was that Kathy and I could have that interesting discussion because of how we’d been schooled to think by our teachers.

A humanities council helps local people and institutions carry out activities that make life more interesting – in families, school classrooms, libraries, historic houses, museums, community centers. My colleagues and I are teachers and guides. We facilitate action that constructs a better family, school, library, museum, town, county, country, and world.

The Greek term for daylily is hemerocallis, which I’m told means “beauty for a day.” That gorgeous rose pink daylily may prove to be a phantom of experience. The toothy white edge may be an effect of a prolonged heat wave and high humidity. When the weather cools off, the next flowers may be merely gorgeous pink, and the white edge will be wire-thin or not there at all, like the present flourishing of homo sapiens during a long ice age that appears to be on the wane.

I learned some interesting things about ice in a rented BBC documentary on the earth last weekend. It provided a very long view of earth history, such that the human experience could be seen intimately connected to the history of ice and atmosphere. How strange to feel that the past and future I imagine, as well as the present I live, are all related to something, some energy, much larger than all of us put together. I have certainly felt that way in connection with spiritual ideas, but not before in connection with what might be called natural history.

Oh, how I came to love her very nature!

I feel intimately connected these days with Schubert and Bach, Handel and Verdi. The molecules of my dear late San are intermixed with theirs and with mine, too, and mine are intermixed with Kathy Wofford, who I'll marry on July 19 in a circle of friends near my daylily garden, far from the collapsing glaciers, but not far from the thought of them.