Around the stone wall, the garden appears as the secret return!

I had intended to write about the home garden as an escape...

But then a dream got in the way.

Fast asleep I dream that I enter a hidden garden, one that I pass during my morning walk. An elderly gentleman owns the property, the strange part is that I have toured this garden in real life (it was on the second annual eyedrum garden tour) yet, the way that this garden is hidden continues to entice my curiosities each time I walk along beside the towering front wall masoned out of Georgia's granite or up the street next to the garden shed that sits blocking the side entrance view.

In my dream, I am found out among the garden's Albertine Rose. I can not resist sticking my nose in to the center of soft fluffy pink petals. In my sleep, I feel it's silkiness against my skin. Then a woman, I believe one of the man's three daughters (of course, I don't really know if this man has any daughters or children for that matter!), approaches me. "Excuse me. Can I help you?" "Oh! I'm afraid you've caught me... could not resist another minute. I walk by here and I only want to see the garden." The woman then sits down right there on the ground next to me, a worn stone path, and tells me of how she played in the garden as a child and how her family has watched it grow and how the garden is just another part of the family. Then we walk inside the grand old mansion and have iced sweet tea.

You see, the wall or overgrown plant is what creates a dream garden or a garden to dream of and one that's worthy of pondering a dream while sitting upon an hand forged metal bench under an arbor covered in Clematis Armandii . Gardens are designed, cultivated and maintained to serve a higher purpose than that of just being eye candies. The Japanese garden, for instance, helps in Zen meditation; it relaxes the senses and takes the mind off concerns that cloud one’s consciousness. Even Jesus goes to the garden, unloading the burden in his heart in the garden of Gethsemane. The proper garden provides privacy for it's owner and mystery for those on the outside.

So, I guess this post is about the garden as an escape after all...

June 21 2009
Let’s Do the Twist,
Like We Did Last Summer: the case of the wandering vine

I suppose every plant person has a type or category of plant that they have a real affinity for, maybe even a type of plant that got them interested in horticulture in general. Back about a thousand years ago (it seems) when I was a kid in a rural agricultural area, I remember the first time I came across a Campsis radicans, otherwise known as the Red Trumpet Creeper (although you now occasionally see a yellow version) and which the old country folks called the cow itch vine…apparently it causes some reddening of the skin, although I’ve never experienced it. (And as these things go, I have found another plant totally unrelated to the trumpet creeper which is also called the cow itch vine, Cissus trifoliate, in the grape family ) I can still remember gawking at those huge red tubes, thinking it was so beautiful yet alien looking (and at that time I don’t ever remember seeing it in cultivation but always beside the road or on the edge of the woods. Now of course it is fairly ubiquitous and with several cultivars (‘Madam Galen’ for one, and the flava version).

Maybe the trumpet creeper is what got me hooked on vines. The very things that I find compelling about the vine are often times (as these things go) problematic for others: a vine will generally not remain neat and tidy but, depending on the vine, want to roam, ramble, cascade, attach itself wantonly by little sticky pads or twirling tendrils or just managing to weave itself through other plants; from a small start at the beginning of the season, it can seem to take over, and of course they can seem to require almost constant care and a watchful eye. Wisteria for example requires several prunings a year at least if you want to keep it under control or shaped to a trellis (by the way: I noticed recently that many now consider Wisteria to be an invasive, almost to the extent of Kudzu; I do notice many more stands of wisteria alongside the road than just twenty or so years ago….makes me wonder if the average temperature is rising to so encourage it.) And then there are the ‘polite’ vines like Clematis, very many of which require a drastic pruning at end of season and don’t really travel very far even when they are in full tilt boogie. There are a few Clematis which are more headstrong such as the beautiful Clematis montana var. reubens . I grew this one on the same arbor with a white and blue wisteria --- quite an overpowering result (some would say I’m just a glutton for punishment). Sweet Autumn Clematis is another forceful, some would say rampant, Clematis.

And certainly all the big flowered cultivars which have been apparently bred for the mail box at the front of the drive way are ok also. Truth to tell, a whole post could be done on Clematis types alone, there are so many of them.

My favorite small vines would probably not be Clematis however. One of my favorite vines, which is more of an annual here ( tender perennial, just pot it up and take it in) but flowers the first year from seed is Rhodochiton atrosaguineum or the Purple Bell Vine, grows about ten feet with a spectacular flower.

Another favorite is Mina lobata, also known as Spanish Flag, with red-orange flowers fading to yellow and then white. The whole effect is quite beautiful but since its not a perennial, all you have to do is clean up at the end of the season (and save the seeds and send them to us ;-) and proceed on.

There is also the Cross vine (Bignonia capreolata – all the Bignonias seem to have that very pronounced bell flower) which is native and with very a florivorous blooming cycle, flowers so thinck you can hardly see the stems. Occasionally I have seen it in the woods, scrambling to get into the light and its always a pleasure to try to track it down to where it started from…and since it can grow to 50 feet that can be quite an adventure. Its odd perfume has always smelled like walnuts to me, but not unpleasant at all.

Gosh, when I think about it, vines seem to be the most bang for the buck flower-wise (if flowers are what you’re after; many folks like leave patterns/texture just as much). And when you think about it many of our food plants are very prolific viners: beans, peas, squash, pumpkins, gourds, watermelon, cucumber, melons of all types all of which I love but also Malabar spinach, which is not really spinach and which you seldom see. I grew and ate the leaves of this one year and it really is a beautiful tasty plant--and with red stems to boot!

In my previous house (the infamous Casa de Vin) I reckon I grew, between the mailbox and the back wall (a standard quarter acre city lot) around 40 vines at various times, including several types of Passion flower (passiflora, another huge family of vines); several types of Aristolochia, commonly called Dutchman’s Pipe; Honeysuckle and Morning glory certainly, along with the Cardinal climber and the Cypress vine, both often confused for one another; and some of my favorites which required more care such as the incredible Solandra maxima, known as Cup of Gold, with six inch long flowers smelling of coconuts (this one is very easy to propagate an keep over from year to year…well worth it!)

And there is always a plant or two I’m forever lusting to grow, given the right living circumstances …and yes, they are exotics; if there wasn’t a challenge, it wouldn’t be worth it. As any gardener can tell you and as I repeat endlessly under these circumstances, if you haven’t killed it three times you haven’t tried to grow it. I have a whole list of these plants to attempt but as regards vines, I keep mulling over the Jade vine (ahhhh, Stronglydon macrobotrys) with its surreal racemes of turquoise flowers (beautiful photo here ). There is also a very similar red flower form called Macuna benedetti which I have actually managed to kill as a small seedling once already … and yes it does look like a vining version of an Erythrina. Oh be still my vining ruddy heart!

Speaking of that previous house, Casa de Harold, after it was built I worked to transform it into Our Blessed Image of the Vine using the ferro-cement technique. I no longer have the house but here you can see a few features, now sadly removed by the current owner: the stairway and wall going up to kitchen area, the front door with some concrete vines sticking out from the door and the bones of a resting climbing Hydrangea petiolaris , a picture of the inside landing looking toward the front door – coming from the ceiling, the vines look sorta like a shot from ALIEN maybe. Kurt Schwitters could have been done proud if I had stayed I suppose. Do you think he would have liked tentacles/vines?...could call it Schmertzbau maybe.

I built the second lower studio (the first one has collapsed but here you can see some concrete vines roaming out of the top) at Camp Freedonia from an area where two large trees had fallen, and crossed each other in an X (which we moderns know always marks the unknown). I saw a mystical mist arising from the X-marks-the-spot place every morning as I visited the bathroom. Fighting my way through the dense privet I found a large round cleared area with grape vines (small berries of the sort called Fox grapes). The resulting studio overhang/porch is a homage to the vines there, to its genius loci as the architects might say. The front approach to the lower studio is heralded by two ‘triffids’ or vining herms.

Poduction

Growing up my older sister, to whom I've always looked up to and believe to be the coolest person I know (for no reason other than she's my big sister), had a poster on her bedroom door of a pea pod, opened revealing different colored peas and it read "Categorizing is not something we do here." I loved that poster, both for the message and image. You see, I love plants' pods, the fruit of the plant that forms after the bloom that holds the hope for the next generation.

Every morning Rowan and I take a walk in our neighborhood. Most of our fellow walkers, take the route around the park, but we merely skirt the park's top edge and then head left to the residential streets where we can see who's growing what and admire the old homes. One neighbor trains a Wisteria Floribunda, the Japanese form and a Southern favorite, on a low, horizontal metal trellis on the front edge of their property (I could insert a mention of the exotic vs. the native version of this most glorious vine, but I'll save that for another post. Besides, can one imagine this low region of ours without the occasional site and vigor of this lovely lady Wisteria that's been here for over one hundred years? I, for one, can not). Our neighbor's choice location of the planting is particularly kind to us passersby. Earlier this spring, I breathed in the lush scent of it's grape flower. Today, I could not help but to stop and pet it's velvety lobe-like pods that dangle the vine. How can one resist caressing a pod? At The Camp this Sunday I was reminded of how much I love a plant's pod upon seeing a huge bulbous shiny green one atop an iris- I wanted to reach out and cup my palm around the globe.

I love watching a pod mellow on the vine, dried papery and yellow or sometimes rubbery and black as is the case of Hyacinth bean also known as confederate vine. Autumn is the appropriate time to capture seeds from the pod, and in doing so, I feel powerful, a link to the ancient past of botanical propagation. I place the little gems in an envelope, seal the fold then place the envelope in a Mason jar where it remains, awaiting the winter seed starting season.

The pod has an alien appearance to me. Its contents secret, unknowable but when parted and opened, the gardener finds matching little pearls. Perhaps, I've seen too many sci-fi movies from the 1950's where the Martians come down from the sky emerging out of a pod like vessel and incubate the human in a pod spun from alien silk. It's no accident that these symbolic classics, made during a time when nature was seen as alien or 'dangerous' to the upwardly mobile folks moving as far away as possible from the family farm and into pods, otherwise known as suburbs or, as Robert calls them, barracks, fore shadow the unfortunate results the mass migration to the 'burbs, destroying the natural world and our relationship to it along the way, would have.

At the risk of sounding a bit corny and/or preachy in our cynical culture, I say thank goodness & halleulujah! for the green movements of today, reacquainting us with the Earth and teaching the pod people how to share our planet's bounty.


Find another nice blog post with cool images here.

Where the Wild Things Are: Invasion of the 'Exotic'!

June 13 2009
Where The Wild Things Are … the 'Invasion' of the Exotic!

I often kid Sloane that I will enact revenge on my enemies the gardener's way: I will plant Giant Hog Weed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) in their midst and so shall they be destroyed by their own seduction! Sorry for the biblical tone but certain plants seem to set off that reaction for me. I have never seen Giant Hog Weed (both its common name and its scientific name are enough to send me into a rapturous swoon; I have come to belatedly realize that one of latterly seductions for me of the plant world -- besides what should be, but seldom is, its obvious charms -- is through naming – but let’s leave that to a later post) and I can’t now remember how I came across a reference to this ‘monster.’ One of the unfortunate things you will learn about me, is that I have a predilection for monomania, for plants which seem to have a blatant - even hostile! – disregard for the human world and which have a terrifying profligacy, one plant able to release up to fifty thousand seeds at seasons end. I guess you could call it the ‘Triffid Effect’ (based on the book by English author John Wyndham ) Maybe it was that industrial/punk band I played in during the eighties that helped release some of that chthonic plant energy, still squirming around in the underbelly of my psyche.

Here are some of the particulars of this particular eldritch squirmer:
Heracleum mantegazzianum is from Asia and was imported by the Victorians, those insatiable plant fanciers, as a bodacious architectural scale plant and that it is! It can grow 10 to 15 feet high in a season, can have a central, hollow stalk up to 2 inches in diameter and grows beautiful final umbrels of white flowers a foot or more in diameter (looks kind of like a monstrous Queen Anne’s Lace). But the final straw for many is that it is covered with small hairs which can cause photo-dermatitis on those who may touch it: upon contact and then going into the bright sun, burning sensations ensue which can lead to something like chemical burn scars for some and identical sensitivity to the uncovered skin for two years! Yeah, sounds like a bad mama jama …. (o.k. rest assured that I would not REALLY plant this, unless, you know….)…but damn it's abeautiful plant. If one were an art critic, no doubt there would be (and has been!) plenty of room for ruminations around ideas of beauty, exoticism, how categorization works, nationalism, regionalism, globalism and many other sorts of, uh, turf wars, a little bit of which I will address at the end of this post.

There are two web sites of varying degrees of hystericalness here and a video here which will give a flavor of the tensions around the plant. At this point it certainly has become a mythical Triffid for me, an aura only enhanced by these reports of dread.

But of course the most beloved/hated ‘invasive exotic’ for us southerners is the ubiquitous Kudzu (Pueraria montana var. lobata). I have to say that, among the favored few things that positively define the south for me (two others being the smell of Mimosas blooming in the summer along side the roadways) the ‘Kudzu monsters’ as they are affectionately called are also one of my favorites. They are called monsters because the vine imported from Japan creeps (at a high rate of speed one might add; the standard joke for Kudzu is that abandoned cars, concrete block, and 40 weight motor oil make the best fertilizer for Kudzu) over everything around it: phone poles, houses, bodies, cars, leaving large green bulbous masses, a veritable Telly Tubby landscape along large stretches of highway, smoothing everything into a pleasant, undifferentiated, undulating green mass, becoming maybe a teeny bit ominous as night fall approaches.

The hysteria is not nearly as pronounced as over my favorite-plant-to-hate the Giant Hog Weed, perhaps because it was first introduced in the late 1800s for erosion control, and like the Mimosa (Albrezia julibrizin) decided it liked it here in the south better than its homeland in Japan where apparently it is used for all sorts of things from tea to paper and more. None of those things for some reason has caught on in the US, although it sometimes is used for nitrogen fixing and silage but it is better known as an icon or logo or allegory. Here is a page which gives it more credit than common wisdaom would credit.

But I would dare say that for most southerners, who have mostly abandoned the family farm and moved to the city/’burbs that Kudzu is simply an emblem and an occasional nuisance, an unwanted reminder of a much larger kingdom that awaits outside the gates.

Wait a minute hold the presses! Another Kudzu analogy here! These conurbations/exurbs/whatever you want to call them, are like Kudzu in their out of control nature, and their making undifferentiated areas of blankness; in a way, its the story that a southern J.G. Ballard might have written: THE SMOTHERED WORLD.

Oops! Maybe it’s already been written
I’m now reminded of an old favorite of mine I read when I was much younger by bucolic sci fi author Clifford Simak, ALL FLESH IS GRASS. You gotta like it: aliens come to earth as plants and take over to create social harmony. I found a free on-line copy you can peruse if you like. Needless to say, Simak takes a quite different approach than Ballard.

O.k., maybe you get the drift of where I’m going with all this, there’s probably no need to go into the volumes of names which are now considered ‘invasives’ and ‘exotics’. If nothing else, I would like to problematize these characterizations for you. (And before you start writing your congressperson, let me say that even though I have some appreciation for the problems involved – the family farm in MS is now abandoned and largely engulfed with Kudzu – it sometimes behooves us to try to think outside the box, er, yard).

I’m sorry, but I’m an inverterate lover of exotic plants. One gardening wag once wrote that ‘you’ve never really tried to grow a plant until you’ve killed it three times’, a sentiment I can attest to…but that’s another post also. I do love native plants (just went recently to the Native Plant Garden out on Panthersville Road recently and its a great place) but I am suspicious of the appellation ‘native plant’: native since what period of time? The time of the Mississipi Valley mound building Indians? Before or after the Little Ice Age? Before or after European colonization? Before or after Middle America Indians began trade relations with North American Indians? It seems to me that we can barely, if at all, know many of these things. Rather, indeed, there seems to be an (excuse this word in a gardening blog) ideological inclination in the categorizations which are used, an apparatus which has become adapted to an homegenized world. It’s always some thing which has been interesting to me, the threat level certain plants seem to bring forward and sometimes even apparent misinformation. (The Malaleuca forests of Florida are another extreme example of an ‘invading species’.)

Perhaps some may think that I am approaching this whole native/exotic thing from too much thinking … or maybe I’m bringing some form even of exotic thought to the ‘problem’ … maybe so, after all, it’s kinda what I do….but whatever happened to 'biodiversity'? Evolution?

But even inasmuch as that might be the case (i.e., I’m off my punk rocker brain) I was heartened to find, while I was doing a seed search, a seed bank proprietor who also has a different take on a the matter. A quote then I’m outa here for a couple days folks.
(btw: check out the J.L. Hudson seed site … incredible).

Well, this is a little longer quote than I meant to take down, but the whole page is very interesting and controversial I would suppose.

NATIVES Vs. EXOTICS: THE MYTH OF THE MENACE

Non-Native Species as Allies of Diversity

There is an idea, popular in some circles, that 'non-native' species are somehow harmful, that 'aggressive exotics' can invade ecosystems and destroy 'native species'. It surprises me to see the public and biologists alike uncritically accept this absurd notion.

"But the Emperor has no clothes!"—Folktale.

In this spirit I would like to point out that there is absolutely no biological validity to the concepts of 'native' and 'exotic' species, nor is there evidence that man's introduction of species into new habitats has any negative impact on global biological diversity. On the contrary, the aid we have given species in their movement around the world has served to increase both global and local diversity. It is one of the few human activities which is beneficial to the non-human creation. It cannot be distinguished from the movement of species by wind or ocean currents, or the aid other species give to their fellows, such as the distribution of seeds by migrating birds.
"All living beings have the right to engage in the struggle for existence."—L. H. Bailey.

There are no adequate definitions of 'native' and 'exotic', since there has been constant movement of species since the beginning of life. Witness the migration of species across the Bering Straits and the Isthmus of Panama. Great exchange of species has occurred between both oceanic and continental biota in these areas as they have been repeatedly submerged and exposed, alternately being corridors for aquatic and terrestrial life. In response to the Ice Ages, great movement of species has occurred. Even now, I understand that the armadillo is extending his range north from his native México. Is he an exotic invader? If we naturalize elephants in the tropical Americas, will they be exotics, or will this simply be the return of the Proboscidea to their pre-glacial range?

Apparent cases of destructive invasion by 'exotics' are usually examples of the beginning of an outbreak-crash population sequence occurring as a species moves into the niche provided by a heavily man-disturbed habitat, to be followed by the inevitable crash and subsequent adaptation and integration of the 'exotic' into the local ecosystem.

Intact ecosystems are highly resistant to invasion, and there are also many cases of 'exotics' acting as nurse-plants and revegetators, helping the native ecosystem to reclaim its man-destroyed habitat. I have seen a grassy meadow and a field of star thistles side by side, with only barbed wire separating them. The fence can't stop the thistle seed, yet it does not invade the intact meadow, showing the thistle to be an antibody-like response of the prairie ecosystem to overgrazing by cattle.

New species create niches for more species, further increasing potential diversity. Many species are extinct in their original habitat, existing only where they have been introduced to new areas by man. We are changing the world through our destruction, pollution, and now possible climate change. Local ecosystems need the infusion of new species to help their adaptation to a changed environment.

"You stay, I go."—Ishi, last of the Yana.

It is ironic to me to hear people of European ancestry accuse other organisms of being 'invasive exotics, displacing native species'.

Even the wildest unfounded claims of invasion by 'exotics' pale in comparison to the land area occupied by technological man's monoculture crops. These crop-deserts and modern man's extractive land-domination economy are the threat to biodiversity, not 'escaped exotics'.

Every Garden Links to Eden

It’s not unusual that one’s first experience of the garden is through the graces of a woman. In my case it was my grandmother Taylor’s garden in Mississippi. The Taylor’s had what would now be called a small homestead, seventy acres, some of it in bottom land where blackberries grew in profusion (how idyllic it was to go picking berries in the late afternoon, with the lengthening shadows beginning to cast the small hollow along the creek into a cool, damp refuge from the heat of the day, the gentle slopes having the look almost of a mowed yard from the eating of the couple of milk cows, two horses, and sometimes a goat. On the way back, as we went though the gate we would pick some mulberries from a large tree by the gate. I can still hear in memory the soft clank of a cow bell in the distance and the hoot of an owl beginning its evening menu as dusk began to set in.)

My grandmother’s flower garden was enclosed with a little wire fence and stretched around the old L-shaped porch, a fixture of many of the old unpainted clapboard farmhouses. The only flower I really remember, other than the spring Lycoris, shooting up nakedly, all pink and sprangly looking, was the flowering maple or abutilon, with its peculiar stamen poking out the bottom and striking red and yellow motif. It’s funny how flowers go in and out of fashion: one rarely sees the flowering maple in urban gardens – although I’ll bet you can catch a glimpse of it occasionally out ‘in the country’ (not the ‘burbs for sure, all of which tends to ‘monocrop’ otherwise know as Fescue). Every time we would visit, I would rush to the push lawnmower and begin to run wildly with over the small yard, amid cries from the porch to watch out for this or that newly emerging plant. In the back yard to the side was a chinaberry tree (Melia azedarach: I love the name, sounds Babylonian), known for its berries (nothing better for a young lad with a slingshot!) and a peculiar habit of sending up loads of vertical shoots – another tree you seldom see in the city (alas, now consdered as an alien invasive by some). The back yard itself was a swept yard, that is, nothing but fine powered dirt scratched up by the wandering every-present chickens, occasionally broomed with a handmade rough broom by my grandmother.

A few paces from the house were a couple of cherry trees, not the bing cherry but a yellow fruit, a small bush or tree often found by the roadside of the many dirt/gravel roads in the area. And of course a large fig tree, a very large pear tree further out, a small pecan orchard of about 5 or 6 trees out across from the small vegetable garden, and a muscadine vine formed into a large lump with a sort of hollow inside, formed from the growth of the stems as it wrapped around its little arbor and kept moving toward the light. I always loved the little pop of the hard skin and then the gelatinous pulp, then the almost impossible to extricate seeds. I later found out as an adult that my grandfather ordered many of these plants from the old Hastings Seed and Feed store in Atlanta. The building is still there on Marietta Street (and strange to think that I did an installation piece there a number of years ago, as the building was commandeered by an arts group). Hastings of course is still around over on the other side of Lenox Square on Peachtree but in nothing like its former farmerly glory, not even a reminder (since most folks wouldn’t remember its origins as a seed and feed farm supply) but a flower boutique shop complete with parrots and a large outdoor miniature train set.

Of course, the most immediate garden nestled up close to the old farmhouse was for pleasure, the next vegetable gardens for more corporeal sustenance, and then my grandfather grew many acres in corn, which he took into town to sell. These days the farm would be called a sustainable enterprise (he even had a little blacksmith shop) and there many of these little enterprises all throughout the rural areas of the country. Now they are almost non-existent (although circumstances seem to mitigate they come back – if nothing else, to give the hope and prospect of having access to non-industrial-method-non-agribusness non-toxic fruits and vegetable)

At any rate, this closeness to the green world must have indelible imprinted itself somewhere in my psyche since much of my sculptural work (such as this kitchen table I designed and built) seems informed by a biomorphic impetus. (Alan Sondheim once said to me as he was taking a tour around my old house which I reformed in relation to the vegetable kingdom, something to the effect of "Gosh, why are you still doing this surrealist stuff?!" A I write this, I am reminded of the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard who, as he was coming to my house for an interview for perforations, made some negative comment about surrealism, in retrospect, an obvious slam against the house and surroundings….it might have been more appropriate for him to have addressed it as a mater of the 'art noveau' era; but then I suppose they both have a lot to do with the ever-fecund floral underbelly of the human, the tendrils of which always threaten to emerge and swamp our more right-angled – read: rational -- world. And there is the case that Professor Lyotard is now part of that green world.)

At any rate, the bioform is a perennial 'thing'. Us humans have managed to escape as far as possible from the vegetable kingdom ( I can't help but think there is a certain fear there) but there is a definite, and great, price to be paid for it. And besides that we carry it with us deep inside and will continue to do so until we become completely transformed by the 'Matrix' into something other than human.

So for better or worse, I am stuck somewhat on the bioform as an ur-form – not necessarily to the exclusion of everything else but certainly as something that always carries a charge for me, something that brings the outside inside and, oddly enough, vice versa.

So it is no wonder that the Garden is a fabulous thing, a wondrousness which has a consistency all though out history and probably pre-history, a place of myth where fairies and dryads show up, and all sorts of creatures that interlock with the human id.

As far as I can tell, a garden is a necessity, not a luxury: there is something of the garden we need both physically and mentally. The distance we have become removed from that ancient kingdom is the distance we lapse into a sort of cultural sickness, an (ongoing) lapsarian order which is defined by conflict on all levels. Even the placement and care of a simple cottage garden can restore some sense of balance, some acknowledgement of those vast green ‘intelligencies’ which allow us to stay alive. In a less than romantic age, in an age that tries to forget its history, the Garden (harkening back to all the Gardens of Eden though out all cultural memories) somehow maintains its subdermal grip on imagination and memory, a romanticism of all forms and of the highest order, but one indebted to the most profound work of all: life.

Freedonia is dedicated to a new appreciation of this new yet very old world. This blog site will exist to drum up some business in design and construction of gardens (baby always gotta have new shoes you know), to talk about gardening issues, favorite plants, an occasional rant here and there (as some may know, committed gardeners are also often very good ranters), favorite plants, the philosophy of gardening, design issues and who knows what else. We hope you will return and engage in some conversation with us AND engage us for some money to change hands in return for some beauty, contemplation, and maybe even a new way of thinking.

But I’d like to close from an extended passage from a most wonderful book I am currently reading, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison .

Happy gardening and stay in touch!
Robert Cheatham

"If life is indeed a subset of gardening, rather than the other way around, then there is every reason to believe that if humankind has to entrust its future to anyone, it should entrust it to the gardener, or to those who, like the gardener, invest themselves in a future of which they will in part be authors, though they will not be around to witness its full unfolding:

' The gardener wants eleven hundred years to test, to learn to know, and appreciate fully what is his …. We gardeners live somehow for the future; if roses are in flower, we think that next year they will flower better; and in some few
years this little spruce will become a tree – if only those few years were behind
me! I should like to see what these birches will be like in fifty years. The right, the
best is in front of us.' (Karek Capek, The Gardener’s Year)

Even if history tells us that this is by no means always the case, the gardener must continue to believe that 'he best is in front of us.' For without such faith there would be no gardeners, and without gardeners there would be no future, for better of worse."

A window ledge garden

"Erasmus said that a garden should renew the spirit- a need which can apparently arise even when things in general are going well enough: a modern writer on garden design has suggested that 'If a man were in Heaven, he would wall off a portion and design it himself and call it Hell and go and sit in it from time to time just for relief.' Gardens are essentially places where nature is selected and controlled, leading some to see them as symbols of consciousness, as against the wild forests outside the boundary which stand for the unconscious. Gardens have been compared to islands in an ocean. Then again, they are feminine, because they contain: they are a precinct."
taken from Gemma Nesbitt's Garden Graphics

It's befitting for my first Freedonia blog post to include a quote from the book that inspired me to ask Robert if he'd consider creating a garden company. "Let's do it together. It's the perfect thing for us! And we can have something to leave Rowan," I said attempting my most positive and upbeat go get 'em voice while simultaneously anticipating Rob's hem and haw. The book was a gift from our friend, Terry, and could end up being one of the most important gifts Robert and I will ever receive, for, if you haven't figured out by now, he said Yes! Now, this idea of mine to start a garden business is really not a huge surprise to many who know us. Others (including myself) have certainly suggested Robert open just such a company, what with his vast knowledge of plants and his unique design talent and carpentry skills, not to mention he is an experienced and passionate gardener, it's an obvious fit. But, I suppose timing IS everything...

As for myself... I've always had a garden in my life. I would not call my parents gardeners, per say, but my father and mother have always tilled and sown and planted in the small plots suburbs provide. The folks kept a vegetable garden throughout my childhood and in the summer my mother canned and froze and 'put up' the garden's bounty. Like most children fortunate to be born in the time before the fear of our children being stolen, I ran, biked and played outdoors long in to the hour of dusk. The outdoors represented freedom and time to discover oneself. My earliest gardening memory is when I was 5 or 6 years of age, I planted a watermelon patch next to daddy's vegetable rows. I remember my father telling me how to make the soil 'rich' (I have no memory of the little patch producing any fruit, and I imagine I grew bored with the garden after not seeing a seedling push up through the soil with in a few days).

Since moving out of my parents' home, I've moved from apartment to apartment, apartment to house, house to apartment, house to house, and back to 'the apartment'. In my adult life there have been few addresses where I've lived more than a year. The one thing that remains consistent no matter where I dwell is my desire to dig in the earth and plant something or start seeds in the middle of the coldest month (I must admit that sometimes my 'garden' has been nothing more than a few pots on the window sill or outside the pane in long, plastic, rectangular boxes or annuals planted in permanent concrete Italianate planters found as part of the grounds of early twentieth century buildings). I realize most folks don't dig up the front lawn and design and plant a garden in a place where one will never see a financial return, but I feel it's a terrible thing to 'shelf' part of oneself, an essential part, waiting for an event that may never arrive. Besides, as a great woman author once wrote, I believe we are not owners here, we are merely passing through. As anyone that's ever been the 'original' gardener on a plot of land knows, the worst part about this moving around and gardening bit is that it is a laborious, perhaps desperate, effort to dig in where no one has ever envisioned the salty green double serrate leaf of Russian Sage nuzzling the wild scented pineapple sage, or watching the butterfly and bee make a light dance out of capturing pollen on a royally colored butterfly bush or try and catch the sticky tentacle like runners of Creeping Raspberry from running over Thyme.

I did own a house once, and before I moved one item in to the house I was out digging up the front lawn and creating the foundation of my first very own perennial border. I planted various iris tubers that one of the dearest people I know gave to me upon clearing out her front garden that was nothing but irises. I believe she had received these tubers over many years from her mother and maybe a sister and friends that lived in Pennsylvania. She brought them to Georgia with her and enjoyed them for many years, but once she was ready to part with the blooms Monet loved so dearly, she donated them to the gardens of friends, not to the local Goodwill store, as one does a piece of something or other from the interior home. No, she would not have given away her tubers to be sifted through and handled by strangers, because there is something special about giving gifts from one's garden to a fellow gardening friend; it's... personal. Of course, gardens and plants are for sharing and are on display for all those who walk or drive by to enjoy. I kept my friend's tubers for quite a while in a brown paper shopping bag in the cool vestibule of the apartment I lived in prior to purchasing the house, a 1900's bungalow in a slightly less desirable neighborhood. I envisioned a Spring when irises shoot up out of the Earth on either side of the path leading the huge front screened in porch (living in Atlanta, I need a screened in porch to truly enjoy the long summer afternoons or our mosquitoes eat me alive! - and that's no joke with the West Nile horror going around). I lived in the house long enough to see them grow and bloom one season. Now my ex-husband has the good fortune to tend to the rainbow of iris; even though my ex did get to keep the irises,a he must also look upon the arbor I hired Robert to build while I lived in the house. The arbor has a most lovely gate that Robert specially designed for that arbor. There is a large grid like pattern in the center of the gate but instead of straight lines, he cut the wood curvy. It's beautiful and is perfect for the property.

After moving out of my house, I found a wonderful garden world to belong to at what would soon be called Camp Freedonia. Robert and his mother had already established the garden but I cleared an area for the vegetable garden and helped clear and add to the hut's garden area.

And so, here I am. After years of working in the interior design and custom flooring business, starting a garden design business. I always enjoyed the design end of my work and communicating with my loyal clients, but I could never figure out why I felt like a round peg pushed into a square hole. Of course, now it's obvious; I was longing to be in the garden. I believe when someone finds oneself in something, something that makes one feel extraordinary, one must do that thing, be in that place as soon as possible. For me that place is the garden.