Let's Go Swaling!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.