A Second Season of Planting Our Landscape

Last night just before Kathy served grilled salmon, I stepped out on the deck with my camera to record a few things that please me.  We've had a fantastic April in terms of beautiful working conditions and beautiful results from our repeated "nursery crawls" all over the metro area.  Our favorite nursery still is the closest to us, Daniel's Farm and Nursery.  They are not the biggest nursery around, but everything about their site, their people, and their plants resonates with our life histories of living in rural areas and getting to know "real" people who operate distinctive family businesses.

On one of our trips there a couple of weeks ago, we walked through one greenhouse devoted entirely to Hostas, and we walked out with eight pots of "First Frost" for the east-facing border of our patio.  Here is the view straight down when you walk out of the dining room and cross the eight-foot-wide sitting area there.

There are the pavers that Steve and Tim laid last fall, and there is the new sod from Daniel's that came in the nick of time before the November rains provided all the watering needed.  There is Hosta "First Frost" with cranesbill "Max Frei" growing next to it.  Kathy has planted Max Frei at intervals between the clumps of First Frost.  The powder blue leaves with cream accents make a perfectly composed emotional impression, and the small purple flowers of Max Frei lift that impression out of the merely sedate and into the sublime.

Here's a look at more of the border and more of the plants.

Looking beyond the patio, I see the product of Kathy's afternoon work on the bed she envisioned outside the basement and below the master bedroom.  She laid out the curved stones at the end of the summer.  This month a local youth brought more stones down and laid them in a row.  Kathy didn't like the lack of symmetry, so she took a tape measure and moved the near end of the row out onto the grass a foot or so, making the bed of uniform depth.  We're going to remove the old Hostas there and replace them with some majestic beauties, anchored by a dwarf Colorado blue spruce bush at the far end.  We bought the bush this afternoon.

Our neighbor's son, Adam Dobbs, planted those two Japanese maples and helped with planting a dozen other trees last week.  He's a great worker.

Looking in the other direction, there's our only shaded garden spot so far.  This hillside was eroding from storm water that washed over the driveway in small surges and flowed through the blocks of that wall.  In my previous blog post I showed the work on a new French drain in the flood side of that wall.  Kathy has been working on that shade bed for a year, and it is really starting to show what it will look like when the plants grow in.

At the base of that hill is the veggie garden plot.  Since it receives any runoff, it seldom dries out, and so it seldom is tillable.  Kathy had one of our helpers move some bricks and blocks down there so that she can build five raised beds in that area.

Then looking to the right you see the daylily beds we planted in early June last year.

I am moving a lot of plants right now, and every time I dig a place in those beds, I encounter more of the buried rubble that was hauled in years ago to raise the level of the back yard.  In a way, this back yard is "historic," if highway construction refuse is truly history.  Why wouldn't it be?  Whatever happens is part of the story and there's nothing that's outside the story of God's creation.

I am removing the clay I dig out of the hole and dumping it along the shoreline to build up the border there.  I'm replacing the bad soil with a topsoil/compost mix from Daniel's Nursery.

Down on the shore Kathy has placed two white poles to mark the locations for two more smoke trees. We'll have a trio down there, two yellow and one deep purple.

Back up on the deck, we have creatures great and small who like inspecting the world from behind those comforting vertical bars.  There's Topper, the immense and extremely conversational cat, with Lola the Poodle.

And there's Ginger, the resourceful hunter of birds and the lover of evening Netflix movies on the couch.

This is the cat who chose Kathy years ago in West Plains and who carries her mystique about her at all times.  I am happy to be a part of those times!

In the Last Week of March

Where has March gone, this glorious month of perfect outdoor weather?  Kathy and I took on a couple of epic projects and brought our favorite contractor back to help with two jobs we knew we couldn't do well on our own. 

One rainy day last week I bought a walk-behind lawn mower with powered wheels, a 21" Honda, so that I could do the tender areas where I don't want heavy lawn machinery chewing up the sod.  The early spring put the grass into a burst of growth, so I mowed most of the property in two big sessions on Sunday and Monday.  Today I feel like well-rusted machinery in a junk yard.  I'm used to 30 minutes on a treadmill at the gym.  Two hours behind a lawn mower put my legs into a state of emergency, and I had to do another hour or so yesterday to do the back yard.

This is not whining.  I am delighted to have the exercise outside rather than on a treadmill in a gym.

Steve Brandt and Tim Yanko have been correcting the French drain that probably never drained anything in its life.

This wall is on the right as you walk out of the garage.  On the other side is a steep grassy hill that was showing signs of steady erosion last spring, owing to the failure of the drain to catch any of the storm water that flows down the driveway and through the wall on the way to the lake below.  The French drain connects to a buried drainage pipe that Steve installed on the other side last April.  It empties into the storm drainage swale in the distance beyond the wall.  We'll get to that part of the story in a minute.

Opposite this wall is a companion wall on the left as you walk out of the garage.  They are moving the wall so that we can plant on either side of it.

They finished laying a new base yesterday afternoon.  The original wall was laid up without a base.  Since the soil can become waterlogged after a long rain, we wanted to protect against settling and tilting, so the base includes at least six inches of crushed rock.

Kathy has been at work since Sunday planting one of the two corner berms we built last May.

She planted creeping phlox in two colors all along the outer edge.  The wispy shrubs on the crest of the berm are Russian Sage plants just coming back to life.  The three trees are Kousa dogwoods.  They flower after leafing out in the spring and are suited to a full-sun location.  Our "line-out" beds for daylilies are laid out in S-curves inside the berm.

Looking at it from the other end, you can make out the pretty blue perennials (Lithodora) she alternated with a small variety of creeping Thyme.  The Lithodora is a creeping plant that she hopes will join with the Thyme in covering the surface.

The collapsed drainage swale I've been writing about is within two more work sessions of being emptied of rubble and paving brick.  I spent two hours yesterday lobbing bricks onto the grass.

I finally exposed the ugly break that had been obscured by layers of paving bricks.  Not that this is any better, but "inquiring minds want to know."  I imagine the developer built this swale in the same fly-by-night manner he built the house we live in.  Over the years it cracked, and water got under it, and a trickle became a rivulet, and so on, until a big section collapsed into the undermined area and broke apart. 

The problem I saw when we first inspected the property is that the mass of fill material was mounded up down the center of the channel, forcing storm water out to the sides and sometimes over the bank.  The sides in this area have been considerably widened by water flows, and the slope of the broken concrete exacerbates the problem.  A great deal of the rock I've tossed out has to go back in on the sides to protect the banks and force the water toward the middle, which has to be lowered.

"Sometimes in this life, Baby, ya see things ya don't wanna see."  There's one more pile of paving bricks in the way of seeing what I have to deal with, and one more small zone of rocks beyond the bricks.  I might have to invite Steve and Tim back with their jackhammer to break up that big sloping section, but there's another big section under the last brick pile. 

By the end of this week, I want to know what this looks like without rubble.

Landscaping, Our Second Spring

Greetings from Hidden Lake, also known, only by us, as "Lago Segretto."  A year ago I began to toss bricks and rocks out of the center of the principal storm drainage swale that divides the left side of our property.  The immediate goal was to clear obstructions and humps from the channel so that storm water would not be forced over the banks and across the left side of our back yard.  This was achieved, but there was a lot left to do with the enormous amounts of broken concrete, patio brick, and rubble that had been tossed willy-nilly into that swale over the years.

With such an early warm-up this March, Kathy and I got out there to try to finish the job.  I think we are about a third of the way into the finish.  Here's where we left off today.

At the top of the picture you see where I began to clear obstructions earlier this month.  That area is labeled "Kathy's Work Area" because Kathy knows something about fitting rocks together in a wall or on a bank so that they don't move.  She is establishing a layer of rocks on the floor of the swale and a firm slope of rocks on each side.

In the middle of the picture is my work area for the past week, where I've been using a crowbar to reduce an enormous hump running lengthwise and forcing storm water to eat away at the sides.  On the ground on both sides of the swale you can see a line of rocks and rubble I tossed out of the swale.  Some of this will go back in to firm up the floor and reinforce the sides.

Here's a close-up of Kathy's work where the swale empties into the lake.  I couldn't begin to do this well.

The view below shows the relationship between our shoreline and some of the neighbors.

 

Now we're looking uphill from the previous vantage point.  I'm up there contemplating what's necessary to help the water get to the area I've cleared out.

It's about time to quit for lunch in this picture, but I've just insisted that I want to toss out the last of the broken concrete rubble that impedes water flow on the right side.  That's a foam pad in my hand for kneeling.

This is Kathy's last picture before going in to warm up lunch.  I'm tossing bricks and concrete chunks onto the side.  When I stopped there were two improved channels on either side leading to the single channel from my work area on down to the lake.  By "improved" I mean pretty clear of needless obstructions.

My stopping point was within a few feet of the area I call "The Great Falls."  At that point, there's a sudden drop of more than a foot in the center, while on both sides there's a gradual but unwelcome set of new channels.  About six feet above The Great Falls is the bizarre arrangement of old patio bricks that form the main collection of The Lago Segretto Rubble Museum.

I plan to decommission the museum next month and "deacquire" the collection of broken concrete, rocks, and bricks.  But first I have to toss them all to the side and clarify what the real runoff channel should be.  The engineering problem is that the original poured concrete swale that lies outside the lower right corner of the picture has been undermined for years and is in various stages of collapse.  I can't do anything about the undermining action.  My goal is to eliminate an eyesore, shore up the dirt sides, and halt the gradual deepening and widening of the channel from the force of water striking dirt.  Where water is going to flow, I want it to strike rock all the way to the lake.

Steve Brandt and Tim Yanko are back this week correcting a French Drain along a wall near our garage.

Steve is applying a sealer to the base of the wall so a wave of storm water can't overrun the drain in the trench you see there.  The previous construction of the drain was faulty.  There was no way for water to get to the drain.  This correction and one other will help prevent the erosion of Kathy's shade garden on the other side of the wall on a steep hillside.  The other correction will be to cut a channel across the concrete driveway at the low spot and install a grated drain to catch and redirect the occasional waves of water that surge across the road from higher properties and straight down our driveway toward that wall where Steve is working.

On the other side of our parking area, Steve and Tim have dug a trench for a good solid base to support the repositioned free-standing wall there.

They are moving the wall toward the parking area about five feet to provide a good planting area between the wall and the concrete walkway on the right of the wall in this photo.  Currently there is only a useless 4" space between the wall and the walkway.  By moving the wall we can beautify the view from the road while still having some planting space on the inside of the area.  The wall will not go all the way to the garage but will stop about four feet away to make room for a paver walkway to match the paver landing on the opposite side, which leads onto the deck.

War Requiem

(I wrote this for The Missouri Humanities Council Passages on November 1, 2005)

In the religious tradition I know best, today is All Saints' Day.  It is a good time to remember people who have illuminated the life of humanity, with good example, with inspiration or vision, or with self-sacrifice, or with any other good thing given beyond the usual measure that is within each of us to expend, or not, depending on our power to express something that I will call "the energy from God."

I am studying two requiems this fall with the St. Louis Symphony Chorus.  One is the Brahms German Requiem, completed in 1869 when he was thirty-six.  It is my favorite piece in all of classical music. I have performed it twice in the past six years and will perform it next in St. Louis at the end of March and again on April 1 in Carnegie Hall.  Aside from the beauty of the music, I find the Brahms German Requiem to be, literally, a sacrament of healing in which each member of the ensemble is a celebrant.  I don't think a listener can get inside this music as the performer must, and so we who sing or play this work are the high priests of a divine energy of healing that Brahms bestowed on humanity.  Today I thank God for the gift of Johannes Brahms.

Johannes Brahms in 1872, three years after he completed his German Requiem, and his draft of the first chorus.

We are also performing in the same concert a 25-minute piece by John Adams titled, On The Transmigration of Souls.  The piece was commissioned to memorialize the many lives that were destroyed on September 11, 2001. 

 Our chorus has spent eight hours studying this work so far and we just about have it down.  The better we know it, the more difficult it is to sing it, because we empathize with the voices of survivors who are trying to deal with sudden grief and horror.  "I wanted to dig him out...I know just where he is!"  "He was tall, extremely good-looking.  The girls never looked at me when he was around."  "She was so full of life."  "I loved him from the start." A recorded tape plays sounds of street traffic, footfalls on sidewalk, a recitation of the names of the dead as we sing.  The text is presented in broken fragments, typical of John Adams's style, but so appropriate to the destruction of sky-scrapers.  In the final minute our voices become the souls of the dead, I think, as they approach heaven and say, over and over again, "Light!"

I have sung many requiems.  When I hear a section of a Fauré Requiem where the women sing about a chorus of angels, tears usually begin to form.  But I have never sung the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten (pictured below).

I remember the night I first heard it.  I was home from college for Christmas vacation, my junior or senior year, 1965 or 1966, and the Vietnam War was still in its early stage.  The fall of Saigon was ten years in the unseen future.  Our government was not yet speaking about "light at the end of the tunnel," or "not coming home until we nail the coonskin to the side of the barn."  (My high school classmate, Lee, a wiry little wrestler, is still alive in my memory.  His name is carved into the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.  I found it there.) I was reading a new biography of Handel, listening to my FM radio, when on came a live broadcast from a church in Philadelphia, a piece I had never heard of, the War Requiem.  I was transfixed by that experience.

Several years later I bought the recording with Britten conducting, his friend Peter Pears singing the tenor part that Britten wrote just for his voice, and the incomparable German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.  I ordered an orchestral score to follow and a vocal score to learn.  The War Requiem includes poetry by Wilfred Owen, a minor English poet whose brief experience in The Great War transformed him into a major literary voice.  He was killed in that war, a candle snuffed out, another saint to remember today.  I recall bits and pieces of the poems in the War Requiem.

"The pity of war, the pity war distilled*," spoken by a ghost who meets the ghost of his enemy in a poem that begins, "It seemed that out of battle I escaped/Down some profound dull tunnel long since scooped."  The two ghosts meet and one says to the other, "I am the enemy you killed, my friend."  Pity is, perhaps, a word that Owen found after a lengthy search.  "Hell" would have been obvious, but "pity" carries weightier meaning, and "distilled" combined with "pity" creates a sense of the density of sobbing for the reality of violent, life-sucking conflict.  

Almost every night the News Hour concludes with a silent memorial to the U.S. soldiers who recently perished in Iraq.  Their photographs are displayed, their names, their home towns, and their ages.  We grieve for them and for their families.  "Neither wrong nor right," I think of this war (and all wars), remembering a poem by Robert Frost, out walking through his dark night of the soul..."And further still at an unearthly height/One luminary clock against the sky/Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right./I have been one acquainted with the night." ** 

I am not writing about U.S. foreign policy.  I don't know if our government was wrong or right to start the current war.  I can wish it hadn't happened, but I can also wish that we lived in a world where there was no need for soldiers, no fierce competition for the world's resources, no terrorists, no vainglorious pride, and no foolhardiness.  I harbor a long list of wishes.  If they all came true, there would be no people in this wished-for world, including the one who wishes. 

We live at a time when the idealism that resides within the idea of America is challenged by what some might call "urgent realities," where a U.S. Senator who experienced torture as a prisoner-of-war has to argue, persistently and against resistance, that the idea of America goes down the tube if our government sanctions its own use of brutality and torture for whatever reasons. 

I don't know if there is a more urgent national question than this "idea of America."  Societies live and die by the myths they internalize about themselves.  By "myth" I don't mean "lie."  The United States is united by many things....the same TV shows, same music, same money, same fast food, same stuff in Wal-Mart, same national laws, and by a constellation of national myths...equal opportunity, equal justice, land of the free, "this land is your land/this land is my land," duty to country, nation of laws, exporter of democracy and freedom, exporter of civic ideals.  At issue is whether the myths we live by can endure if we officially permit acts of brutality on our prisoners.  On both sides of this debate, people are talking about results and possible consequences. 

I think this battle is over a myth of nobility, argued by knights, a myth that one side finds unrealistic and impractical and the other side finds indispensable to our national sense of honor.  If we abandon that myth, what sort of "We the People" will we become, and what sort of soldiers will we send abroad to export American values?  We must be noble in our practice of horror, says one side.  We must match the enemy's brutality, says the other.  I think we have imagined ourselves as the senders-forth of white knights, "a few good men."  What sort of people would send forth soldiers cast in the image of Darth Vader?  Our movies mirror our myths.

Wet, cold, hungry, scared, stricken with grief, Wilfred Owen conjured a revision of the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham has a notion that his duty is to offer his son as a sacrifice to God.  The original myth has God speak to Abraham at the crucial moment, having tested his faith, and tell him to spare the child.  In Owen's revision, an angel says, "Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him." The poem concludes, "But the old man would not so, but slew his son,/And half the seed of Europe, one by one.***"  In Britten's music, the baritone and tenor soloists repeat, and repeat, and repeat "half the seed of Europe" and "one by one."  The phrase "one by one" is staggered, one soloist overlapping the other's iteration, as if the echoes of sorrow and pity were never-ending.

For those in the way of harm, it may seem as if the sorrow, pity, and confusion is never-ending, and they would be right.  They are staring at the face of the Pity of War.  The History of Peace is a smallish volume.  Civilization is so very fragile.  It is an idea, actually, civilization, another myth we live by.

Hundreds of us who sing are about to brush up our performance of Handel's Messiah for the holiday season.  We will hear the Biblical question that echoes down the ages from the most ancient of times, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?  Why do the people imagine a vain thing?" 

I think of those bright faces at the end of the News Hour, candles extinguished in the service of country; some "tall and extremely good-looking," some not;  most of them younger than my own children; all mourned, grieved, missed terribly, remembered on a day like this and on any other day. They were rays of divine light from the beginning.  They are rays shining in memory now, rays united with

The original light,

With light,

Light!

*The full text of Owen's "Strange Meeting" is at
http://users.fulladsl.be/spb1667/cultural/owen/strange-meeting.html

**The full text of "Acquainted With the Night" is at
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/12143

***The full text of "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" is at
http://users.fulladsl.be/spb1667/cultural/owen/the-parable.html

++++++

Postscript:  I finally sang Britten's War Requiem with the St. Louis Symphony in the spring of 2007. 

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

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"

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

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)