Is this a trowel which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. Shakespeare is often horticultural, something that leads to the countless creation of Shakespeare Gardens and Elizabethan Gardens around the world. Macbeth, however, is not usually considered a top horticultural play despite containing the largest mass transplantation in literature, Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.
 
Not long ago I was complaining about heat. But now my way of life is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf. Well, not quite, but Autumn is here in Central Virginia. The leaves are just beginning to change and fall. Some parts of our garden succeeded and other parts did not succeed very much. Certainly everything had its day. The esthetic pleasure, sense of accomplishment, and occasional exhilaration justified our efforts—at least in the philosophical sense brought to light in Wolfram Eilenberger’s freshly-published Time of the Magicians, which I earnestly suggest for your must-read list—and yet for the small creatures and every least sprout, and for the soil itself, teeming with nematodes and bacterial types, existence remains Darwinian to the core. The voles lost to the cats. The moles thought twice and retreated beyond the cat fence. Birds were hatched and fledged and flew away. Other birds died, though not by cat—most often by hawk or owl. Lizards scurried, privileged by all the rockwork around here. The larger insects, a fine meal for birds, precariously depended on their camouflage or other defensive measures but luck was maybe their best ally.

A garden is an acculturated space. The human tendency to anthropomorphize the things in the garden is natural. We are aware of our own consciousness. We extend our theory of consciousness to the things around us because for all we know, maybe they are. The hardest thing is to set aside the cognitive echoes of our own self-awareness and, in the words of Ram Dass, who died in Maui last year aged 88, “Be Here Now.” The creatures in a garden are just trying to scrounge a meal and lay eggs without being eaten in the process. They have no hope of survival, personally. But they have no commandment to survive. Their commandment seems entirely to Be Here Now, both proactively and reactively. In between, for all I know, it’s possible they meditate. But tranquility is a state of mind, not a state of nature. Thus one of humanity’s primal functions since the beginning has been brushing off, slapping, and getting bit. If you’re not having that experience you must be Somewhere Else Now.

As Shakespeare wrote, “Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.” And, while on the subject of figs, figs are a real success this year.

Meanwhile, in Don’s Covesville garden, the raccoons spared the Looney corn. It grew so huge and off-the-ground that maybe the coons didn’t know where the cobs were. Looney is a late 19th century hard corn designed for the whiskey industry, especially local whiskeys, but the Covesville chickens love it.

Autumn is a good time to plant some things. Kale. Collards. Lettuce. We won’t get much from these plantings until March. They will suffer through the winter, use each warm spell to revivify, and then take off in 2021 before anything else.

I ended the last blog with photos of iris beds being rebuilt. Time passes. The job got done. It went faster and faster.

My evocation of Be Here Now at the beginning of this essay seems less obvious looking at this picture of a raised iris bed. In gardening everything is done for later. Hardly anything is for now. Nothing is ever really ‘done’ at all, merely ‘worked on.’ To get to Now, you have to stop doing things for later. Upon arriving at Now, shall I meditate upon this wall? I shall. This could be a better wall. Every rock in it could be a better rock. Some of the individual rocks seem misconceived for this purpose and others seem misconceived for any purpose. These are not the rocks they could have been. The builder was not the builder he could have been. The irises themselves will, I believe, never know they’re living in correspondence with an imagined iris bed in my mind. Consciousness! The thing’s hilarious.   

Tomatoes, from the small to the gigantic, are like emblems of profound lushness, rain, heat and daylight.

Mammoth Beefsteak—a state-fair-sized specimen from Don’s Covesville garden.
 

Readers of this blog may remember last summer’s Covesville field reclamation project, working only with rain and aboriginal creek bottom soil, red clay thickly studded with white quartz fragments. This year, with better planning, results in Covesville are interesting compared to our intensive raised bed scheme maintained primarily by Karen. Since the Covesville garden is primarily maintained by Don, it’s obvious that I personally am too lazy to garden.

The tale is not finished at Covesville, but plant diseases and insect infestations are still not an issue there, possibly due to the comparatively huge space. Weed/squash overgrowth forms cover for insects, reptiles and amphibians. That’s good. Rabbits and raccoons are a real issue, but that’s good too, for rabbits and raccoons. In this less closely tended and much more spaced out garden, nature (i.e. weeds and the things that weeds shelter) seems fairly harmonious with garden produce. This year’s corn was chosen to be big corn. Winter squash, if it’s wet enough for them to survive, will then shade and cool the ground. Field peas have ‘field’ in their name for a reason. So we will see. But it is interesting about the roominess of the large-scale stand versus the pest propensities of closely-gardened concentrated beds. As usual or as ever, the main limitation of gardening is available labor.

Gardens are of the insects, by the insects, for the insects, so insects shall not perish from the earth. We surely must battle select insect pests to get our share of what we planted, and as Abraham Lincoln well knew, you can fool some of the insects some of the time, though victory over all of the insects all of the time is not in the cards. Insofar as there is an answer to bug problems, part of the answer is to draw in even more insects, because many of them eat each other—efficiently.

Meanwhile, weeds explode ungovernably, the lawn seems to need mowing every week, and yet it’s also time to restore last year’s desperate iris losses by re-digging the beds, improving the soil, disentangling the iris rhizomes, and straining out the rhizomes of Bermuda Grass. This task should be done every third year anyway, or the irises will suffer. I also like to top layer irises with ash and charcoal. The irises don’t seem to mind, while some weeds do. The soil in this bed did not drain well enough for irises in a really wet year. We’re having another really wet year now. Gardening is a process. Every allocation of labor means something else gets left to its own devices, which is how Three Stooges episodes begin. I do enjoy gardening.

I sometimes wonder why I natter on about gardening as I do in this blog. The current plagues of the world, some of which are viral or bacterial and others secular or religious, and the well of suffering that is the earth, seem to call for more than morning glories. But reality will not take our bullshit. That does not leave us with much. No sense slinging muddy philosophical crap at nature. Nature is the real king of life and death. In all humility, here are some morning glories.

It is the 28th of July and the 31st consecutive day of 90+⸰ F temperatures. The heat index, taking humidity and general oppressiveness into account, reckons most of those days equivalent to 100+⸰ F. At this moment it is said to be 98 and to feel like 110. Several other heat indexes (hottest July days ever, hottest number of days in a row, single hottest day, the most heat records broken in one month, etc.) have been recorded in tones of awe on local TV, but it is not as if that matters to plants. Plants, individually and as a kingdom, have no concept of television. Some may call that a bold claim. I’m positive plants do think. I’m not at all sure how. But the thin wash of radiation that comes off TV screens would satisfy only the most modest of plants, such as cave algae.

Piedmont Virginia, like the rest of the Piedmont south, bakes in the summer under long dry spells, suffocates in humidity, and hosts violent storms coming off the Gulf, the Atlantic, and the Monongahela. It’s a brutal, fertile, heartbreaking climate where trouble can blow in from any direction, though insects and things that eat insects seem to love it. The ancestors had to battle the July sun. They did not get to sit in a shady arbor with a bit of breeze and something chilled and bubbly. If they had thrown in the sponge on summer, none of us would be here and the Raccoon would be the dominant species on earth.

These are days of danger for the gardener. Heat stroke is not a conspiracy theory, and even incipient heat stroke can ruin your week. We pop out in the early morning and do what we can before the sun takes over. Younger gardeners can do more. Older gardeners are obliged to do less. Something I’d consider a warm-up task in October or May—some little job to finish before putting in a full day—turns into all I can do for the day, in July. The air seems hot and sticky, even syrupy. You are bitten, scratched, crawled on. There are poisons concealed in the most innocent places. Brushing against a tiny Saddleback caterpillar on the underside of a leaf (the likeliest place to find one is the out-of-view underside) is about equivalent to a hornet sting or, if you’re lucky, a really full-on sting from a red wasp. The Spiny Oak Slug is a good deal worse. The Buck Moth caterpillar, also an oak caterpillar, is just about common here and a run-in with one will put an end to the day. Sometimes in July, all that really makes sense for a gardener to do is to go inside and let the neurotoxins burn themselves out while the swelling goes down. C’est la guerre.  

The ornamental parts of our garden are laid out with summer in mind. I hope my summer flower beds are arranged loosely enough to give the summer plants a chance of living almost as if they were wild. Some (not all) have to have an annual feeding, especially the big lilies. Feeding is done in the spring or fall. The minimum ornamental garden hand work is three main weedings a year, in the spring and fall and at the end of June, to prevent nature from reclaiming the whole thing. If the local cloudbursts, cold fronts and hurricane remnants are inadequate for water, I usually try to preserve annuals like zinnias, or dahlias, by watering. With luck a few senescent hurricanes will drift through and things will be wonderful. But if you get very much water, the weeds will erupt—something to keep in mind when playing with the water hose. Generally I regard artificial watering as a last resort. In July the last resort can arrive in about 12 hours. To sum up, the ornamental garden requires a lot of preparation to still be an ornament in July, because July is harsh.

Oriental lilies, doing well in partial shade.

The daylily or Hemerocallis is not a lily, but like the lily it is a monocot, a very ancient branch of the plant kingdom. The daylily can thrive even in baked red clay soil and is fully naturalized for easy high summer bloom in Virginia. Deer love both daylilies and real lilies, and will eat them to the ground if given a chance—the post-scientific or ‘disappointing’ phase of the plant’s existence.

Both the ornamental and the vegetable garden have been showier and more productive in 2020 than ever before. This is largely because the pandemic is keeping us home. Karen now has time to go through the individual vegetable plants nearly every day, picking eggs, larvae and destructive pests off by hand. The hand-picking technique is a bit prehistoric but we can see that it works fairly well, time and energy allowing.

Extreme heat causes extreme thunderheads.

The vegetable garden has to be weeded as much as possible, of course. Even in July. If water is deficient it must be provided. And the ladybug and the mantis really are our friends, as are the wasps and every other pollinator.

I re-read Rappaccini’s Daughter this spring, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 garden romance, Giacomo Rappaccini’s walled garden in Padua, secret to all but a few, is poisonous—as is his delicate and lovely daughter, envenomed by a life spent among the rarest and most toxic horticultural peculiarities. The story has legendary and mythological sources, though it’s hard to be sure Hawthorne knew all the potential sources. Back in my student days, when Hawthorne was just barely dead yet and his remains had only recently been put on display in the Old Customs House at Salem, Mass., the battle for this story was fought out mainly between stodgy old Freudian interpretations and exciting new Jungian interpretations, and there was plenty of ammunition for both sides.

Doctors and druggists ordinarily compounded with acutely poisonous medicinal plant materials in Hawthorne’s time. Herbalists’ gardens and medical gardens of biologically active plants would not have seemed entirely strange in 1844 and a secret poisonous garden is not an enormously exaggerated possibility. There would have been herbalists with plant collections in the Boston area. There were important medical gardens in Padua, whose university has been at the forefront of Western science since 1222. By romanticizing an equally poisonous secret girl, Rappaccini’s Daughter joined the tradition of desperately doomed Italian love affairs, a tradition including Shakespeare and Boccaccio and probably the Etruscans.

Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe were both redefining the brief prose romance genre in the 1840s, and Poe was already publishing about the structural details, for instance in “The Philosophy of Composition” in Graham’s Magazine in 1846. Hawthorne’s main vision in Rappaccini’s Daughter could well have been setting a fatal Italian romance in a particularly original type of garden. When Poe says one of the best emotional prose effects is to kill a beautiful woman, we can be sure he knows what he’s talking about. It’s all very well to believe in genius, but genius without method wouldn’t be anything.

The notion that gardens can be sinister seems contrary to the main garden tropes of paradise and beauty, going back to Virgil’s Bucolics, not to mention Genesis. However, Virgil’s shepherds complain, and the Biblical Eden, with its spring-loaded snake trap and permanent punishments, is sinister to a degree. But real garden stories are more humble. They are the fleeing stories of trespassing baby rabbits who encounter Mr. Man. The best are stories like “The Little Red Hen.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5dowCyaP7I

No one in the near future is very likely to look back on 2020 as an inconsequential moment in time—not in the United States, anyway. Some of my suspicions about the world of the future are on display in the third edition of The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. and its ongoing sequel, The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I. But before turning to that topic, I would like to mention something more important: Karen’s and my 49th Anniversary last week. 

Back now to literary news: another winkle has washed up on the beach. There is now a 3rd Edition of The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. I found some glaring imperfections in the second edition, unsurprisingly. Also, the increasingly detailed features of the world of Macaque in the sequel, The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I., made textual reconciliation in the Adventures necessary.

The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I. is now represented on Kindle by two finished stories: a tidied-up new version of “President Nero’s Golden Palace” and the all-new “Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro,” a sideshow so dryly funny that readers will wish they could be there now. But no hurry. We will all get to Texas soon enough, in God’s good time.

“Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro” incorporates a good deal of backstory for the world of P.I. Macaque in the Adventures and Casebook, and it’s a little eerie to watch parallels forming in real life. I would have supposed only nonfiction writers get this much reality. Fortunately, the world of P.I. Macaque is in some ways not as disconcerting as the world of the present.

The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. needed historical underpinnings to clear up how the post-Federal world got the way Reese finds it. I would never have realized this myself. My coauthor Ted worked more on this point than I did.

Composition is a ghostly business. The composer is in many ways not unlike a phantom, and the composed world is entirely made of shadows. Rather than trying to describe how that works, I’d just recommend watching or rewatching Carl Laemmle’s 1925 film, The Phantom of the Opera. The patent for creation is almost all in there. The parts that aren’t covered, and much else, can just as easily be found in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film, Vampyr.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1925_film).

But back to the Adventures and the Casebook—in the first place the world of the North American Exarchate circa 2400 C.E. is not post-apocalyptic. A full-on apocalypse (thermonuclear annihilation for instance, or something like that) would be too definitive to yield up the world of Macaque. However, things more in the Mommsen-Gibbon-Carlyle-Toynbee-Hobsbawm line, a coherent historical theory of the fall of the Federal Empire and the rise of the North American Exarchate, would be too advanced for fiction. Ted and I, as we conjured up the world of Macaque, weren’t looking for a theory—just for some explanations.

After we put theory and apocalypse aside, the most self-evident remaining list of likely causes for the fall of the Federal Empire were individually more trivial—things that would rock society to its foundations, force a belch out of it and then be digested. In the Macaque series, we’re positing—or glancing back at—four centuries of unexplained history. A drowned coastline and a few economic crises is not enough to collapse a world-empire like Federal America. It just isn’t.

So, like a gamer sorting playing cards, Ted put some options aside and collected others into a really great losing hand. In the world of Reese Macaque, it was no one thing that slew the Empire; it was all the things. And very stupid things they were. I suppose few of our Macaquian conversations were very memorable, but this is my chance to say to Ted, I was listening carefully.

There’s a lot of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall lurking in the background of the Macaque stories, like the quaint human figures in Piranesi’s Roman prints. A greater influence generally, in this case, is John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium Trilogy.

One of the tremendously fun things about Norwich’s three-volume history of Byzantium is the sheer smallness, and often the silliness, of the vast ocean of real-world minutiae in which the Eastern Roman Empire floundered for so many centuries before finally drowning. While Gibbon practically viewed Byzantine history as a volumes-long crime story, the point of Norwich’s history is not Byzantium’s crimes; rather, to me his larger point seems to be the stark reality of a “tide in the affairs of men”, and the blunt fact that governments unable to swim in those tides will drown forthwith.

The polities and dukedoms of the American Exarchate that Macaque knows—Cascadia, Tenn-O-Tucky, the Grain Republic, the Wisconsin Economic Zone, Carolina, Dixie, New Virginia, Texas, California, the rump Federal Territories and so many others, large and small—are the fruit of Byzantium in a way. Politically and culturally this is the sort of thing history’s ‘Byzantiums’ tend to produce. No sense panicking about it—but we might all be a trifle better off if, like Reese, we still had our tails!

Some nooks and crannies are beginning to come together.
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Snow on the Blue Ridge, April 15, 2020.
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It’s a little unpolished, but it absolutely works!
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Why an early wild tulip would bloom at the same time as a Chinese peony is something to ask the lilacs about.
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Yellow “Lady Banks” Rose.
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The least demanding rose I know of.
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Along the abandoned lane.
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Oh were my tulips to speak!
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Treena pointing out a rose bed weed explosion. 
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Some deer—three members of a herd of ten, spread out along the edge of the woods.
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​The earliest gardens were human attempts to get something to eat. The cultivars in those gardens began as weeds. We hear that Paradise was tended. Ornamentation soon followed. Later the Babylonians hung their garden, making the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World list. It must have been spectacular. Gardens seem to have become overtly metaphorical—living and growing handcrafted metaphors for nature—very long ago. Metaphorical gardens abound in painting and verse. Why does nature need any such translation into metaphor? Some of the most aesthetically gratifying gardens are the most naturalistic—think of the Japanese garden and the Romantic garden.

But then there are Continental gardens, knot gardens, shrubberies and formalized beds, Dutch gardening, Versailles. Patterned gardens have been called metaphors for the conquest of nature. They could also be seen as humorous gardens, gardens designed to make you smile; or scientific gardens, designed to elevate landscaping to architecture and the mathematical. It is an awful lot of cost and work. Why do we do it?
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Do we even have any hints about the answer to that? The best I can come up with is a parallel comparison. In our humanity we struggle high and low to make experience itself metaphorical. Poetry, song and story, music, sculpture and painting, the arts and sciences in general, are how we re-represent our physical presence in the world and our incidents and involvements large and small, whether with people or with plants and insects, to ourselves and others. We have to have these metaphorical structures. There is probably no one reason why.

Yesterday was wet, windy and chill. Despite the raw and emphatic weather, the redbuds reached full bloom, blooming directly from the bark as well as the limbs. 

We don’t see this every year.
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The skeleton shed and old worn-out gates.
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Mortared brick and stucco over cut slab granite.
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Some delicate teasing with a crowbar and a ten-pound sledgehammer enabled the stones to be eased out.
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Camellia “Black Prince”— A much deeper red than this back-lit snapshot shows.
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And yet, so nice I photographed it twice. Note weeds in foreground. 
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A finished corner.
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Peony root, “Eden’s Perfume”, sitting in a five-gallon bucket waiting to be planted.
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Karen planting onions.
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Thriving kale.
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Siberian kale—so sweetly flavorful, and dig the cool red stems!
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Karen saying “Don’t take my picture.”
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The last crocuses of spring.
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