Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Hello, my friends!  Below I have posted the transcript of a talk I gave this past weekend at a celebration of Emily Dickinson's poetry and gardens.  The event was hosted by the Powow River Poets at the beautiful Old South Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts.  At the end of the day, some folks asked if I'd be willing to share the transcript, and I thought posting it here on the blog might be the easiest way to do just that.  Those of you who read my blog regularly may recognize a few lines here from a post I wrote over the summer as I was drafting this talk.  I've included a few of my photos from past posts here with the talk, too.  Again, if you've read my blog for a while, and you know about my passion for gardens, fields, and woods, you'll immediately understand my love for Emily Dickinson.


Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Thank you so much.  I want to say a special word of thanks to the Powow River Poets for this wonderful celebration of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and gardens.   I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday--especially an October Saturday--and you’ll see why in just a bit.

I should begin by saying that I’m not an Emily Dickinson expert.  I’m simply a devoted fan, and I have been ever since I was a kid in the 1970’s.  Back when I was about 9 or 10, I had two summertime obsessions.  They weren’t obsessions that I shared with my friends or anyone else.  These were mine alone.

The first was one that I’m guessing many of you also had and probably still have; I read every single thing I could get my hands on. Magazines, books, cereal boxes—if it had words, I read it.  And somewhere in all that reading, I stumbled upon a collection of verse among my dad’s old college poetry textbooks that included some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. And among those poems I discovered the first verse beyond the nursery rhymes of my early childhood that I knew I had to memorize.  It seemed to me so clever and true that I wanted to put it in my pocket and keep it for myself always.  So I did:

“The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A clover anytime to Him
Is aristocracy.”

These lines embody much that I loved then and still love now about Dickinson’s poetry—economy of line, frankness, and a knack for telling the small but significant truth.  In these four lines she captures the perfect symbiosis between blossom and bee—one of the world’s most essential relationships.  This tiny poem has always stayed with me.  When I was learning calligraphy as a teenager, it was one of the sentences I would write again and again, decorating it with flourishes in the curlicued shape of a bee’s flight pattern.  In the years since then, it’s been a mantra, a touchstone that even now I repeat when I’m working in my garden: “The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee,” I murmur as I trellis the sweet peas or weed among the thyme and rosemary, and again at night as I drift off to sleep, knees aching, hair still smelling of mud and leaves . . . “a clover anytime to him is aristocracy . . . .”

But getting back to my childhood summertime obsessions.  The first was reading, and as you might have already guessed, the second was gardening. I loved spending hours in my mother’s flower garden with my face as close to the peonies, the phlox, and the tiger lilies as possible.  In the garden, my senses were heightened, things seemed more real, and I felt more connected to all the thousands of lives around me than I did anywhere else—connected to the worms in the soil, the butterflies careening among the cosmos, the cardinals calling one another from the branches of our white lilac tree.  I wanted to be near enough to spy on the bees working their dizzy magic, near enough so that the flowers would, as Dickinson writes, “make me regret / I am not a bee” (808).  Beyond the garden was noise and flash and distraction, the next-door neighbors arguing, planes roaring overhead, and the distant wash of cars on the highway—people rushing off to a world that seemed preoccupied with less vital things--at least to me.  There in the garden was the much smaller, more vibrant world that Dickinson describes in Poem 1746:

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
’Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

The garden to me, as a kid, felt like existence at its most essential.  While I reveled in its beauty, I don’t really think I held a romanticized notion about the pretty flowers, because, I saw life and death quite clearly for what they were when I was in the garden.  In fact, I think if you want a child to understand death, you give her a hoe, a spade, and a pair of shears, and you send her out to vanquish the weeds, turn the compost, and deadhead the roses.  Much as Emily Dickinson did in her own mother’s garden when she was growing up, I saw death all around me in the garden—and in some cases, I was even the cause of it, whether I wanted to be or not.  I quickly learned that this was an unavoidable part of being a gardener.

I also witnessed intimately how everything that dies helps to bring new life into the world.  And that many of the plants that died each year had ingenious ways of coming back to life the following spring.  As Dickinson asks, “If a pod die, shall it not live again?” (Prose fragment 18)  Over time as I continued to garden, continued to watch pods die each season and then live again, and continued to read Dickinson’s poems about the gardens, orchards, and fields surrounding her home in Amherst, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit—and isn’t this one of the key reasons that we read (and write) poetry?  Dickinson herself called the poets she read “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul.”

As a girl, I couldn’t put into words what I was discovering about the interconnectedness of life and death in the garden.  In fact, I don’t even think I can now, really.  As Dickinson writes,  “Nature is what we know— /Yet have no art to say" (668).

But she doth protest too much, because she did have the art to say it: When Roses cease to bloom, Sir, /And Violets are done,” she writes,

When Bumblebees in solemn flight
Have passed beyond the Sun —
The hand that paused to gather
Upon this Summer's day Will idle lie — in Auburn —
Then take my flowers — pray!”

Or in “A Bird came down the walk," where she describes the bird that bit an angle worm in halves, “ate the fellow raw,” drank some dew from the grass, and then “hopped sidewise to let a beetle pass.”  She intimately captures in her poems Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw”  (“In Memoriam A.H. H.") with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s sensibility.  At the same time, she also explores the sacred in the everyday.  “I hope you love birds too,” she wrote to her cousin Eugenia Hall. “It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”  And in “Some Keep the Sabbath” (236) that great old chestnut taught in Introduction to Literature courses everywhere, she eschews conventional religion, finding her spirituality in the family orchard:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

For Dickinson the garden embodied immortality. As a girl, she describes heaven in a letter to a friend as “the garden we have not seen.”  And many years later, just before her death, she asked to have her casket carried—by the workmen who tended the family’s grounds—in a circle around her garden, through the barn, and then up through the field of buttercups to the Western Cemetery in the center of Amherst.  Heaven was inseparable from the flowers, the birds, and the bees, which were all parallels to and metaphors for her own life—for our own lives.  That is not to say that she didn’t see them as ends in themselves, but that by seeing and valuing them for their own sake, she came to understand her own existence all the better.  In the garden she found a way to comprehend mortality—and proof of immortality.

When I was a little girl in the garden with my shears and my spade, Emily Dickinson taught me something that I would later come to feel in my bones as true, and it’s that at root, a gardener thinks about life and death always as one. In each flower's race toward blossoming is its race, too, toward decline. I'm saying nothing new, only that when you garden, this thought is always present. In the spring garden I am surrounded by the new growth of runner bean sprouts, the full flush of a climbing rose, and the last breath of a lush peony all at the same moment. My wheelbarrow is piled high with a day's kill: the weeds I pulled, faded blossoms I plucked, lily beetles I crushed between gloved finger and thumb. The gardener must not be squeamish about death. She must recognize its necessity even as she rejoices at the sight of her first ever iris uncurling itself with a flourish from the spear of its stem.  She must also accept its necessity when that iris blossom dies.

It’s a Saturday in October, and the garden is dying.  But it will live again—improbably, miraculously, this coming spring.  Even as it dies, it is living, and it will always live on, as will the iris, the rose, and the jasmine, the Indian Pipe and the clover, in Emily Dickinson’s words.

And so, because she had the art to say it, as well as anyone ever has, and as reverently, too:

“In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—
Amen!” (21)

Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to poem numbers in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, 1999.

The Edge of Autumn

Good morning, chickadees.  I was out working in the garden earlier, deadheading the Abraham Darby roses, weeding the raised beds, gathering ground cherries to make salsa, and harvesting scarlet runner beans for next year's seeds--and I thought of you.  As I worked, the sun warmed my skin without burning.  I looked up to see the bees hopping from the fennel to the bee balm to the anise hyssop.

The last daisies are opening and the phlox is nearly all gone by.  Even so, the dahlias are just beginning to hit their stride, the asters are on the verge of blooming, and the chocolate eupatorium has yet to even start.  We've a ways to go, and even though I know the frosts will come in another month, I can't help but love this very moment in the garden best.  Here, teetering on the edge, I savor every bit of September's sweetness as the tomatoes blush and the whole garden gives one last glorious push before the fall.

Gardens of Florence

Earlier this summer I shared my visits to two gardens in Salerno, Italy.  I've been promising Florence, and at last I am delivering.  As we head into September and the first leaves have already begun to fall, I find myself longing for springtime in Italy.  For now, these photos will have to suffice.  

Have I told you yet that I fell head over heels in love with Florence?  I know this is nothing new.  Everyone loves Florence.  As Mr. Magpie and I window-shopped the jewel-box boutiques that line the crowded Ponte Vecchio, we had to pinch ourselves.  We were finally in Florence, the city I've wanted to visit since I was an 8-year-old girl poring through the pages of my parents' coffee table books of great museums of the world.  The Uffizi and Florence itself were at the top of my list in those days, and  they stayed at the top through all the years since then.  

I am happy to say that neither the museum nor the city disappointed.  We stayed just south of the Arno, one block from the Palazzo Pitti and the famed gardens of the Medici, the Giardini di Boboli.

The Boboli Gardens are the epitome of formal 16th-century Italian landscape design, yet they also incorporate several elements that were unique at the time, including sweeping views of the city and the countryside beyond in the neighboring hills. 

These views are largely the result of the steep topography of the site.  A broad gravel boulevard (Viottolone) lined by cypress trees climbs the hill.  

Smaller lanes along the Viottolone lead off to more private spots in the gardens, often decorated by remarkable sculptures, like this colossus bust of Zeus.  

With grottoes, sculptures, and fountains spanning the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as some from antiquity, the gardens are truly an open-air museum.

As you can see, it was a grey day when we were there, but warm, and the peonies were in full bloom.

In the view below, we are facing the Pitti Palace from the gardens.  

While they are open to the public today, when the Giardini di Boboli were originally laid out in the mid-16th century for Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de Medici, they were intended as private family gardens.     

If you have time when visiting Florence, I recommend climbing a little higher up above the Boboli Gardens past the Forte Belvedere to the Giardino Bardini, with its beautiful rose gardens and yet even more sweeping vistas of Florence.

The roses at the Bardini are exquisite.  

It's difficult to limit this post to just one more garden, but I must or it will never be finished! Below I want to share with you a few shots I took on a different day when Mr. Magpie and I wandered over to the university district just north of the tourist center of Florence (it is a small city, so walking is very easy).

We went in search of the Orto Botanico, or as it is commonly called, the Giardino di Semplici (Garden of Simples), meaning medicines obtained from single plants.  Pharmacists traditionally make compounds, but a simple is one plant used to treat an ailment.

Founded in the mid-16th century, also by Cosimo I de'Medici, this is the third oldest botanical garden in Europe. 

Rosa 'Edgar Degas'

There are more than 9,000 specimens in the Orto Botanico, but what I love most are the many, many roses.

Curry plant

I also loved touring the old glass houses, filled as they are with surprising specimens.  It's not a large botanical garden, and it won't take more than a couple of hours to view, but I found it to be a peaceful respite from the madness of the tourist crush near the Duomo.  Plus, some of the plantings are truly inspiring displays of contrasting textures and colors.

Rosa 'Sally Holmes'

Rosa 'Clair Matin'

At the edge of the gardens, near the public restrooms, we found the storage area for the hundreds of pots used to display specimens.  Wish I could have brought a few of these beauties home with me.  Each one is between two and three feet tall.  

Rosa 'Pink Grootendorst'

This sweet little rose with petal edges that look like someone cut them with a pair of pinking shears was tucked away in a corner.  Happily, I researched it when we returned home and discovered that it's hardy to zone 4, so I think I need one for my Maine garden! 

One little side note, while I haven't included photos of them, when you're at the Orto Botanico, you will likely meet the resident cats who are taken care of and well housed there--one more thing that makes this place near and dear to my heart. 

I hope you've enjoyed this very mini and very whirlwind tour of three Florentine gardens.  I have two more very special Italian gardens to share from Verona and Rome--be looking for them soon.  In the meantime, my own roses and dahlias are blooming up a storm, so I'll have pictures of my little plot to share, too.  If you want a sneak preview, you can always check out my Instagram feed here (or click on the little icon on my sidebar). 

I have lots of surprises in the works in the coming months.  In the meantime, thank you so much to old and new readers alike!  Your comments, emails, and Facebook notes are a joy to read.  I haven't been blogging as regularly this year because I've been working so much on deadline with clients as well as with my own writing and photography projects, so I thank you all for hanging in there with me while the cupboard was a bit bare.  You are the best. 

Monday's Gift

Good morning, friends!  Just wanted to share with you a photo I shot this morning in my garden. The Abraham Darby rose is finally blooming, and, as I wrote an hour ago when I posted it on my Instagram feed, whatever else happens, today is a good day.  I just wish the interwebs had a smell-o-vision button you could click!

Wishing you a beautiful Monday and a week full of promise.  xo

The Garden in October: Taking Stock After the First Year

Rosa 'Abraham Darby' by David Austin--a repeat bloomer with a lovely light scent.
I'm growing it to ramble along the white picket fence that surrounds our herb and patio gardens.

I can't wait any longer.  I must give you a few peeks at the garden this fall.  I know I haven't shared much of what has been going on around here in the house and garden this year, but that's because we've just been so focused on doing the work that I often don't pause to take photos or jot down notes. 

Sweet Drift Rose.  This one is a fantastic ground cover shrub that blooms constantly.  The tiny blossoms are pale pink when they first open, and then deepen to this rich cherry as they age.  I've noticed that the cooler the nights get, the deeper pink these little beauties get.  I have two Sweet Drifts thriving in part sun.

Well, I finally paused long enough to snap a few shots while I was out working in the garden one late afternoon last week.  As I wandered through the gardens, I was struck by how many flowers were still blooming this late in the season.  It's easy to think of Maine as a place where the growing season is over by the end of September, but fortunately that simply isn't true.

Iceberg Rose.  A very strong repeat bloomer with creamy white petals.  I'm training it to climb up our sunporch.

An unusual, partly green radicchio.  Radicchio are perennials, and this one is forming its third head of the season.  Each time you cut off a head, another one grows.  What a fantastic plant!

Not only are the flowers still blooming, the vegetables and herbs are still producing.  

I'm praying that the first frost holds off until the end of the month so these sweet cherry tomatoes will have time to ripen on the vine.  Tomatoes came late this year, but they've been incredibly sweet, especially the full-sized 'lemon boys.'

A corner of the herb garden as the sun begins to set.  Chives, sage, green and purple basils, rosemary, and parsley are all giving one last beautiful show before the frost.

One of the raised beds.  On the left is part of a rustic arbor we're building as an entrance to the patio gardens.  We'll be smothering it with honeysuckle, clematis, and roses, of course!  To the far right is a teepee covered with scarlet runner beans and sweet peas.  

Sage is one of my favorite plants.  I love to cook sage leaves in butter to top fall dishes.

Italian parsley

Everbearing strawberries and alyssum make wonderful partners in the raised beds.

The sweetest smelling sweet peas I've ever grown!

Pine needles from our GIANT white pine have made a natural table cloth.

I love capturing that moment before the flower has completely unfurled.

Coleus in a yard sale urn.

The new Vanilla Strawberry hydrangea is just beginning to blush.

A corner of the patio garden where hydrangeas are tumbling into gooseneck loosestrife, chocolate eupatorium, acidanthera, and lots of other lovelies.

Our feeders are frequented by chickadees, nuthatches, goldfinches, cardinals, sparrows (of all sorts), and lots of other birds.  The doves and squirrels eat whatever drops to the ground, plus we scatter corn. In the garden we've been seeing lots of hummingbirds, woodpeckers, and even my favorite cedar waxwings coming to feast on the hawthorn berries.

Joey Chestnut

We leave the chipmunks cracked corn in a clamshell on our garden shed stoop.  Here Joey Chestnut fills up his cheeks until he looks like a cartoon, then he scurries off to store the booty in the incredibly cool chipmunk condo (old stone retaining wall) where they live at the edge of our lawn.

Perhaps the most wonderful surprise this fall has been just how well the dahlias have thrived.  I know some people detest these fireworks of the flower world, but I adore them.  It's worth all the work of having to dig them up every fall and replant in the spring.  They bloom for months and months, providing uninterrupted color and drama to the border.  Mine started blooming in August and they are showing no signs of stopping.  

This white dahlia is larger than my handspan, and each flower blooms for two to three weeks.  As old blooms fade, they are quickly replaced by fresh, frothy neighbors.

The beauty above is a true dinner plate dahlia.  I haven't measured it, but I would guess that it's about 8" across.  Each blossom on this one plant has emerged in a different pattern of fuchsias, yellows, pinks, and oranges.  I'm in love.

New blooms emerge on this dahlia nearly every day!

And then there are the standbys, like Russian Sage and Pink Phlox.  I think the phlox below has re-bloomed at least four times this summer.  I was expecting the show to be over by now, but a whole new set of blooms has appeared.

foxgloves, agastache, and dahlias

A sweet pale yellow sunflower

Petunias in the garden shed window 

Gathering blossoms to take inside

This first year of gardening here at the new house has been full of adventure and surprises.  I have loads more photos to share and plans to discuss with you.  We've only begun, really!  There were very few things planted here when we moved in, so we planted almost everything you see.  We created several new beds, including a large privacy border, the hobbit garden, and some smaller beds out front. As we've worked, we've come to depend on a few key principles:

• Amend, amend, amend.  We are gradually making our own compost and leaf mold, but since our piles weren't ready for the gardens earlier this year, we brought in tons (literally) of organic matter, topsoil, mushroom compost, manure, and other good stuff.  We are just this fall beginning to add our own compost to the gardens.
• Go organic.  Completely.  No excuses.
• In the vegetable and herb gardens, stick with the principles of companion planting to help make going organic much easier.
• Focus on the textures and colors of foliage as you build the garden.  I know most of these photos are of the beautiful blooms, but I will share a series soon that illustrates how important leaf color and shape is to creating a strong foundation for the overall feel of the garden.  One of my favorite new shrubs we planted this year was a ninebark 'diablo,' which we chose for its bronze leaves and gorgeous bark that reddens and peels in the winter, providing much needed color and texture year round.  It has sweet blossoms in late spring, too, but I'd still love it if it didn't.
• Create focal points and plenty of mystery (thank you, Alan Titchmarsh).  Remember that rustic arbor I mentioned above?  That is giving us a bit of both, especially since as you approach it, you catch sight of the gorgeous vanilla strawberry hydrangea just beyond it.  It catches my eye every time and makes me want to go exploring.
• Trust your instinct when it comes to color.  If you love a color, use a lot of it, and repeat it throughout the border to create rhythm and flow.  Our house is white with a red front door and red shutters.  I'm not a huge fan of red flowers, but I do love deep pinks and fuchsias, so I used them liberally to connect the garden with the house.  I also added whites, purple/blues, and soft yellows.  To contrast with these, we've used several plants with bronze and silvery leaves as well as a few, like creeping jenny, that are chartreuse.  The lime-greens provide a great backdrop to almost every color and they keep the garden lively.  
• Repeat, repeat, repeat--shapes, colors, single types of plants.  If you love one plant, create large swaths of it, or use it again and again throughout the garden.  I am gradually transplanting clumps of gorgeous 3-foot tall daisies throughout the garden, so that its blooms can create a sense of unity and flow all midsummer long.  I'll do the same with other plants I love, like brown-eyed Susans, Russian sage, drift roses, and catmint.  
• Use evergreens for year round architecture and color.  I used to ignore evergreens too often in planting schemes.  Now I am learning to use them (especially dwarf varieties in interesting colors) more and more.  
• Finally, buy plants from local nurseries and spring fundraising plant sales, or swap them with friends.  I am no longer buying plants from large chain stores for many reasons, including the fact that they use pesticides that are killing the bees and butterflies.  I plant my garden in large part to help support wildlife, so why should I go to all this effort to garden organically, only to bring in plants that are poisonous to the very creatures I want to help.

I hope this peek into my fall garden has been fun.  I promise more soon, including some shots of whole beds from above, to show some of the planting schemes I've been working on.  

And I haven't forgotten that I promised one more England post.  It's coming together!  Life has been full of travel and work all fall, which is a very fine thing, indeed. 

Happy October, my friends.  Thanks so much for your visits, comments, and emails.  They truly make my day.  I apologize for not always answering emails right away.  I can't always stay caught up, but you know how much I appreciate hearing from you.

xo Gigi