Gary Dale Mawyer
  • Home
  • Blog
  • DARK
  • Exemptions
  • MACAQUE
  • Rockfish
  • Sergeant Wolinski
  • SOUTHERN SKYLARK

Yet Another Gate

5/30/2014

3 Comments

 
It’s a bit gratifying to look back at my last few blog posts as our new garden area takes shape. Things have changed. The scale of the garden madness becomes a little more apparent as construction spreads.
Picture
The landscaping bricks are place holders for rocks I don’t have yet. I have the cobbles and slabs for paving the area I’ve dug out in front of the new gate and the stairs beyond it that lead up to rose bushes by the house. There are also some left-over blocks of granite in one of our sheds that I plan to use, and some boxes of marble and granite I bought. I haven’t used cobbles as a pavement before. As I imagine it, each cobble will need to be individually seated in wet cement between the slabs. Three cubic yards of cobbles should cover a considerable area.

With top and bottom views of the current state of the garden, the idea of this space as a walk through a shrubbery, with raised vegetable beds on the back side, begins to make sense.

Picture
Picture
Somehow I picture the finished space in the rain. I guess it’s a rain garden.
Picture
The drums are in place for the sculpture but it may take some time for the sculptures to take form. Ironically, the wheelbarrow also still seems to be in the same place.

Shrubs planted or in buckets waiting to be planted include Goshiki variegated osmanthus, purple Loropetalum (a Chinese relative of witch hazel) intended to grow to hedge size, dwarf Norwegian spruce, dwarf Cryptomeria, dwarf cedar, assorted spireas, azaleas, and tree hydrangeas, laurel, dwarf crepe myrtle, and roses.
Picture
Picture
I’ve done steps a number of times, from sets of little steps to the fairly monumental multi-ton stone stairs faced with red Devonian sandstone that my brother Alan and I laid at the old Cottonwood garden, as recounted in my blog post of March 27, each step nearly the size of a twin bed.

Once Alan and I did a flight of brick steps made from an old fallen chimney for my aunts in Lynchburg. Alan and I dug the stairs into their hillside looking out over the James River. Digging was the only technique we knew. We dug the steps in so deeply that if we had wanted to, we could have filled the stairs back in with the leftover dirt and produced a buried staircase. That’s an idea with some romance to it. The idea of a buried staircase is somehow a bit thrilling. We have a couple of unexploited declivities around here and I foresee a truly unusual project.


Another time I  knocked
together some wooden steps to suit some forgotten occasion, just to see if it could be done. I feel sure I have a solid grasp of every mistake that can be made constructing stairs of any size and material, and all these mistakes will need to be brought into play here. 

I recall the time my father Dover, a professional builder of real skill and ingenuity, was first confronted with one of my front door stoops. The play of emotions across his face was wonderful. He couldn’t praise it. No one could. He couldn’t criticize it either. The English language doesn’t have an adjective for that. There was nothing to say. Yes, it appeared to be patted together by desperate monkeys out of marble chips and cement in a rainstorm. And it was one of the heaviest objects for its size for miles around. It was Lovecraftian, Nietzschean in appearance. In a way it was visually offensive but first the mind had to stretch enough to encompass it as a possibility.

Finally Dover spoke. “Did you do this yourself?”

 “There was no one else,” I said evasively.

In the end the stoop had to be re-poured. I built a wooden frame and went with a simple tetrahedonal Brutalist slab of uneven cement inspired by Mies van der Rohe and le Corbusier. 
Picture
Anyone can abandon theory, but the real interest lies in abandoning technique as well. One should approach such a task as if no one had ever used such materials before. It’s just as important to have no real idea why one is doing it. The normal syntax of events will then be lost and the fallacy of Completeism, defined as the belief that tasks have purpose and an end point, can be successfully foiled.

There is another gate. This is the last gate until I build another fence. Fence first, then gate—although I suppose a person could build a gate first and then fence around it. Ultimately this comparatively tiny gate was the most trouble.

 Of the three gates, it has the least to do, being a sort of postern gate for the back door.

Picture
3 Comments

It Happens Every Year

5/17/2014

1 Comment

 
Humans mark their calendar with a variety of seasonal events, such as Halloween or the Summer Solstice, not to mention the Vernal Equinox which so nearly ran over Mark Twain’s scientific expedition in “How the Animals of the
Wood Sent Out a Scientific Expedition.”  
See http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1545/.
We
take many regular and predictable events for granted, but these are all very dull. Fascination lies in  mysterious events that make no sense at all. One of the most absolutely predictable of these regular mysteries is the annual Iris Torrent.
Picture
Photo above by Karen Mawyer
On the third day of the first flush of the German Iris season, the heavens open and wind-swept water pours down in obliterating masses, battering the sodden earth while lawn furniture, fragments of trees, and small animals whirl helplessly through the air. Sometimes the annual Iris Torrent is accompanied by dangerous amounts of lightning and thunder, and sometimes it isn’t—the electrical component actually seems to be random—but in my experience the thunder and lightning are the only random aspects of this annual event. 

Though I grow irises, I do not cause this annual event.  I am not sure if the irises themselves actually cause it or make it inevitable somehow; cause and effect is not as clear-cut in the natural world as it sometimes seems elsewhere. The irises may signal it, or the annual Iris Torrent could be some form of extremely regular
coincidence, like eclipses. 

I had been wondering if the Iris Torrent was really inevitable this year. Last fall I uprooted and replanted our iris beds. I do this every three years; otherwise they choke out and become prey to diseases and predators. The first year after replanting, the rhizomes often spend more energy rooting than making blooms and the new bed can be a bit sparse. Normally I do this by thirds, only replanting the oldest bed each year. But last year I replanted all
the irises, doubling the square footage that is “under iris” so to speak. I was not certain how vigorous this year’s iris flush would be, but after a cold, wet winter and spring most of the replanted irises undertook to bloom to some extent, so the first flush was at least respectable. 
Picture
Picture
Photos above by Karen Mawyer
In the upshot, we got 6 inches of rain this past Wednesday and Thursday.  There was wind and thunder, but no lightning. The power in our area went out just after midnight on Friday morning, when a full-grown poplar tree fell over and smashed the transformer up the road.
Picture
Picture
Photos above by Karen Mawyer
There was significant flooding in the area, with water over roads and bridges in some places, and still high as of this bright but relatively cool Saturday.  Yesterday after work I spent several hours clipping and pampering my battered and sodden irises. I’m hoping they will mostly stand back up in this newly drowned world and
re-bloom with a second flush.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
The newly built gates on the new 8 foot fence we built this spring to protect our raised beds and other tender plants held up just fine in the deluge. That is not surprising.
Picture
Note the way aged bits of wood in the back gate, pictured below, have been layered to produce an exquisitely irregular surface, and the complete lack of any right angles. The ancient lichen clinging to some of its boards adds a strangely organic quality to the overall effect.  This gate might appear to have been hammered together in the dark out of broken pieces of wood. The sheer ingenuity of the thing is subtly concealed. There will never be another just like it,  in part because the old fence that parts of it were cannibalized from is no more.
Picture
The front gate, below, is wider than the back one. It measures  7 x  8 feet,  as much of a span as a normal person could hope to lift without assistance. Its walkway remains to be paved, and the new wood stained or painted, and I have an iron handle for it, as it needs a closure. I spent a good deal of effort in building this gate, seeking to achieve a sense of unforced Procrustian polyhedronism, using bits of string to measure it and sawing off anything that stuck over. Its irregularities stem organically from hammering it together on the ground right in front of it, which is not flat. This is a locally contoured gate. You could not buy this.
Picture
Ironically, the Iris Torrent caused the peonies to start blooming. This white peony, a gift from Alex and Kirsten, is a favorite strain and a very robust peony. These were transplanted last year also. It seems to encourage them.
Picture
Photo above by Karen Mawyer
Picture
Stand by for the annual Peony Torrent, a cataclysmic and sometimes tornadic deluge of wind and water that occurs without fail every single year just as soon as the peonies open. What causes it I do not know. One theory
is that the water dumped in the Iris Torrent evaporates and forms clouds which then rain again. That, however, does not account for the eerie sense of inappropriate timing, the most striking part of such events.
1 Comment
    Picture

    Author

    Gary Dale Mawyer, a Central Virginia native, has over 40 years of publishing and editing experience and lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County. 

    Buy Gary's books now

    Sites I like

    afroculinaria.com/
    ​
    largea.wordpress.com/​livinglisteningandthingsilove
    naturalpresencearts.com/
    someperfectfuture.com

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    September 2022
    October 2021
    September 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013