A Bird in my Garden

Occasionally, I have a real bird in my garden, the little ones that come to peck at the ground in hopes of food, and the big ones--such as this wild turkey--who come for a rest or perhaps a dust bath:



But now I have another kind of bird in my garden, a ceramic bird made by my old friend Christy Hengst.

Christy and I were friends and dormmates for a year at Amherst, and though we have lots of friends in common, and I've heard bits and pieces of what she's been up to over the years, we hadn't seen each other since graduation almost 21 (!) years ago. So, I was delighted earlier this spring when I found out that Christy was going to be at Amherst for a few days as a visiting artist and that she was bringing with her her most recent project, a flock of ceramic birds, silk-screened with photos and text. While she was here, she guest taught a class and gave a lecture, and the next day, the birds had a day-long "landing" on top of Memorial Hill.

This is the way that Christy describes her birds:

"They are, in a sense, carrier pigeons, as the forms carry images, text, and other documents, which have been printed with cobalt blue and fired into the surface. The message they bear is an exploration of the beautiful and the horrible side by side. Originating with the shock and dismay I felt as the US government began the war with Iraq, and expanding to consider the phenomenon of war in general, the questions posed by the birds are about the humanness of us all. How we are connected, and also the unthinkable ways in which that bond is disregarded."

You can read her fuller text about the project here.

These birds are well traveled--they've been to various places in the US including Central Park and the Mall in Washington; to Europe--they've landed in Germany, where Christy's husband is from, and in front of the cathedral at Chartres in France; and even the Galapagos, where one went diving. (There's a very cool photo of this on Christy's website.) If you want to read about their visit to Amherst, it's written up here.

I saw Christy at her lecture, and the next day, I went to see her on Memorial Hill. It was the end of the day, and she was packing the birds up--they travel in 4 large heavy suitcases. She mentioned that one had broken in transit and that she was going to throw it out. I was rather bold, and I asked her for it, for my garden. And then, in a very Christy-like moment, she said, "But I don't know if that one is pretty enough for you."

And while it's true that this bird was maybe not one of the prettiest (some of them are quite lovely), I was happy to be able to have a bird for my garden at all. I glued the broken end of the tail back on, and now I'm figuring out where the bird might like to live in the garden. I tested a few different places:


Maybe as more flowers come in, its new home will become more apparent. Meanwhile, it was lovely to see Christy again after so many years, and I love that I have a reminder of her--and of who we both were all those years ago when we knew each other better--in my garden, among the flowers, company, perhaps, for any wild turkey who happens to wander over for a visit.

Photo of the Day

My lawn has become a meadow. It's partly because of our weird hot/cold/wet/dry weather and partly because my ancient lawnmower seems to have given up the ghost. (By the end of last summer, I was bargaining with it to hang on til the end of the season. It's never a good sign, to have to bargain with an appliance.) Every time I look out the window to the back yard, I cringe a bit. (It's a good thing I have no neighbors on that side.)

But there's one reason that I'm glad this year's mowing has been delayed:

It's my ajuga circle down the lawn towards the woods. Other patches of it are scattered in different places across the lawn, but this is the most concentrated section.

I know that ajuga can be invasive, that it's common (its other name is bugleweed), that its a ground cover like many others. But I just love that circle of purple on the lawn, and I am always sad to mow over it. Look how pretty the flowers are:

Soon, the day will come that I will have to be ruthless and just mow the damn lawn, purple fairy circle or no, but that day is not quite yet.

The asparagus bed, at last

This is the story of my attempt to grow asparagus at my house.

First, there was the sad asparagus bed, the creation of which is documented here, one of the very first posts on this blog. The short version: I dug the bed in a place that was too shady and wet, and the only asparagus that's come up is extra spindly. If there were such a thing as anorexic asparagus, that's what I had.

Time passed. Nothing changed. No asparagus. But in the fall of 2008, as documented here, a lovely (and very strong) Tibetan fellow came and--much more quickly and efficiently than I ever could--dug a bed out of the lawn right next to the rest of the garden. Voila--a new asparagus bed. I was delighted. The next spring, I vowed, I'd start over.


Except, the next spring, this is as far as I got digging the trenches:


And so another asparagus-less year passed.

But this year, I was determined. I ordered 1 year asparagus crowns from Johnny's Selected Seeds, and while I waited for the crowns to arrive, I got back to the trenches.

And yesterday, it finally happened:


Those are the asparagus crowns in one of the two trenches, uncovered.

And here they are tucked into their bed.

There are things I would do differently--besides taking so long to dig the damn trenches. I wish the bed were a few feet wider (so there would be more space between the rows) and a few feet longer (because I only had room for 22 or 23 of the 25 plants, so I had to pick the sickliest looking roots not to plant). I wish I'd dug it all up last fall and mixed all the compost/lime/organic fertilizer/wood ashes/etc., so the bed could have settled.

But the bed is the size it is, and the trenches got dug this spring. What to do. As the summer progresses and the asparagus grows, I will gradually fill the trenches in bit by bit. Next summer, I might be able to pick a stalk here and there. But the summer after that, there should be enough asparagus to use for soup and for risotto and for other spring delicacies. The best of all, I think, will be when I can pick a stalk right there in the garden and take a bite when it's as fresh as it's ever going to be. I'm looking forward to it.

Blogs I Can't Live Without

Today is the first group blogging day of the blogathon, meaning that all participants have the option of writing about the same thing, the easy topic of our favorite blogs. Since I write mostly about food, gardening and books, I'm going to name a few of my favorites in each of those categories. (Alas, I haven't found an Indian-related blog that I read regularly, so I'm going to skip that category.) I'm also going to throw in a few miscellaneous blogs that I also read often, just to round it out to 10. (I have to say that blogs I can't live without is rather a dramatic statement, but it's getting late, and I don't want to parse words too much. Suffice it to say that these are all blogs I read, enjoy and recommend. Whether I could or couldn't live without them is another story.)

Food:

I hate to admit it, but I'm not very adventurous when it comes to food blogs. I do use the excellent Food Blog Search when I'm looking for lots of recipes using one particular ingredient or for variations on a particular dish, and that's led me to a number of interesting blogs and good recipes. On a daily basis, though, I find myself going back to the same few sites.

Smitten Kitchen: Beautiful photos, well-tested recipes, glimpses of an adorable baby--what more could one want? Deb has a recent book deal for The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, and it's well-deserved. I don't know why she didn't have one sooner. Favorite recipes from there that I've written about include the excellent chewy granola bars and blueberry buttermilk cake. Then, there's her recipe for creamed chard and spring onions with pasta, which I've made twice in the past 2 weeks and have had to fight Alex for the leftovers . . .

Orangette: Lovely writing and lovely recipes. Plus, vicarious glimpses into opening a new restaurant, as Molly and her husband did last year. Over and over again, I've made her spinach and green garlic soup and her warm chickpea salad, not to mention the banana bread with chocolate chip and crystallized ginger. I can only say yum. (Molly's memoir with recipes, A Homemade Life, came out last year.)

The Wednesday Chef: I'm a more recent reader of this blog, but I like Luisa's sensibility, her writing and the recipes she chooses. Now that my rhubarb plant is close to its usual massive size, I'm particularly intrigued by her recent forays into new ways to cook rhubarb. (Luisa's book, tentatively titled My Berlin Kitchen, is under contract. Not sure when it's due out.)

Garden:

A Way to Garden: Former Martha Stewart garden editor Margaret Roach has created a site with gorgeous photos, handy monthly to-do lists and a wealth of gardening information. There's also a forum, where you can ask gardening questions. The site has only been up for a few years, but it's an invaluable resource. Margaret's book, which she calls her "dropout memoir", is due out next year.

Garden Rant: I have to admit, I don't read this one as often as I'd like, but whenever I do, I'm glad. This is, in part, a reminder to myself to check it more often.


Books:

Like Fire: I may be biased, since Lisa Peet, woman behind the blog, is a friend, but I think she's done a fabulous job with Like Fire, where you can find news, reviews, interviews and all things bookish and often quirky. In Lisa's words, "Like Fire champions the offbeat, the independent, and the underdog." I'm all for it.

Keeper of the Snails: This blog, by British writer Claire Dudman, is a recent discovery for me. (I found her through a post she wrote on my beloved Barbara Trapido.) Since then, I keep going back, as Claire's posts are always interesting, and her last few reviews have made me want to pick up the books she's writing about immediately, even if it means paying lots of postage to get them here from Britain.

My Porch: Another recent discovery (through a review Thomas wrote on Maggie O'Farrell's new novel). Thomas is a prolific poster and reader, and I like his taste in books. He also takes on reading projects, which I admire in a person, even if I can't always manage it myself.

A few others:

The Daily Dish: I started reading Andrew Sullivan's blog at the Atlantic website during the election and haven't stopped. I don't always agree with him (and think he can be annoying, certainly), but I haven't found any other place that gathers up the quantity and quality of stuff that he and his under-bloggers do. I like that he sometimes focuses on stories the mainstream press isn't covering, and I like that he frequently posts letters from people who disagree with him. I often skim, but this is one I do look at every day.

Local or Express: I can no longer remember how I found my way to Robin Aronson's blog, but it's another I check often. I like Robin's musings and like to think that if we actually knew each other, we'd be friends.

Briefly, about short stories

Thanks to my friend Lisa over at Like Fire, I learned that May is Short Story Month. At the main short story month page at the Emerging Writers Network, you'll find a bunch of short story related links, and through the month of May there will be more posts devoted to short stories. I'm definitely planning to return to see what's up there. I did note that right now they have up a couple of posts on short stories by Tracy Daugherty, with whom I studied for awhile at the University of Oregon in the early 90s. (He needs to update his website to include his newest book, the biography of Donald Barthelme, which came out last year.) I think of Tracy whenever I think of the Isaac Babel quote he had up in his office: "You must know everything." Talk about intimidating. (The quote, not Tracy.)

That May is short story month is fitting because I was going to write about short stories anyway. I don't read them much anymore--not as much as I used to, at least--but I just finished Amy Bloom's new book, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, and I wanted to give it a mention. I'd enjoyed her first book of stories, Come to Me, and when I saw the new one on the library shelf, it looked intriguing.

Of the 12 stories in the book, only 4 stand entirely on their own. The other eight stories are two sets of four linked stories, the first set about William and Clare, who begin an affair while married to their long time spouses. The second set of linked stories re-introduces us to Julia and Lionel, stepmother and stepson, who, after the death of Julia's husband and Lionel's father, spend one irrevocable night together, the repercussions of which continue for decades.

I know that this may be sacrilegious during short story month--though I hope it's not--but I mostly wanted to write about how much I enjoy linked stories. Linked stories sort of take away the purity of the short story--it's not necessarily a perfect and complete whole because you can turn the page and find out more about the same characters. Still, though, it's a form I really enjoy. The two four story sets in Bloom's book give us the range of a novel in a much shorter space. Details are elided, time jumps without warning. No matter. In each, there's a wider story arc, a sense of movement, of completion. People don't really write novellas much anymore, but that's basically what these are.

Reading Bloom's linked stories made me think back to one of my best books of 2009, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, which ends with 3 linked stories which are the emotional heart of the book. And that made me think back to other sets of linked stories I've enjoyed over the years. There's Elinor Lipman, whose The Family Man, was also on my favorite books of 2009 list, but whose first book--Into Love and Out Again--included a series of stories about Tim McCormack, who meets the cool, blond Hannah Thorson on line at the DMV and falls in love instantly, despite the fact that Hannah is 9 months pregnant. And then there's one of my favorite Laurie Colwin books, Another Marvelous Thing, which chronicles the unlikely love affair between a gallant older man and a cranky younger woman, Francis Clemens and Josephine Delielle, known as Billy. We see them together, we see them break up, we see Billy's baby with her husband Gray, and we see them reunite, in a fashion, one more time, in the story called "A Couple of Old Flames." Among its other many fine qualities, this book contains one of my favorite pickup lines in literature. It is in the first story, titled, "My Mistress."

Billy and I met at a reception to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the journals to which we are both contributors. We fell into a spirited conversation during which Billy asked me if this reception wasn't the most boring thing I had ever been to. I said it wasn't, by a long shot. Billy said: "I can't stand these things where you have to stand up and be civilized. People either yawn, itch, or drool when they get bored. Which do you do?"

I said I yawned.

"Huh," said Billy. "You don't look much like a drooler. Let's get out of here."

And with that, I'm going to end for the moment. Happy Mother's Day!

Eleanor Perenyi: A brief appreciation

A year ago yesterday, May 7, 2009, Eleanor Perenyi died at the age of 91. I gasped a bit when I saw the New York Times obit, even though I hadn't been entirely sure that she was still alive anyway.

Perenyi was a writer, editor and gardener, best known for her single book of garden writing: Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, first published in 1981 and reprinted by the Modern Library in 2002. In my first year or two of gardening, I picked up a copy of the 1981 edition at a used bookstore for $3 and have been reading it ever since.

Green Thoughts is a book of essays, ranging in topic from Annuals through Evergreens and Herbs to Vegetables, Vines and Weeds. Interspersed are less traditional topics as well; there is an essay on Autumn, on Earthworms, on Invitations. on "Partly Cloudy" and on Toads. A few of the sections are quite brief. Here is the section on Mazes, in its entirety: "Should you ever find yourself lost in one, choose either the right or the left wall and follow its every turning. You can't fail to emerge."

A just slightly longer section--1 medium-sized paragraph--is on Seed Tapes and starts like this: "Many catalogues, notably Burpee's, offer these ridiculous devices designed for the gardener too stupid to sow seed by himself--and of course charge extra for them; and to put it plainly, they are a swindle. Anyone who can't scrape a shallow trench with a hoe, then walk down it scattering seeds from a packet, had better abandon gardening forthwith."

Perenyi, clearly, had opinions about things, and in this book the reader learns many of them. Its format makes it an ideal book to dip into. I took it out this week because I'm working (again) on (another) asparagus bed, and though I'd re-read the asparagus section in The Garden Primer and on Margaret Roach's A Way to Garden website, I wanted to check to see what Eleanor Perenyi had to say about it. (More about that later, when the asparagus bed is finished enough to write about it.)

I've re-read her sections on garlic and tomatoes and strawberries, on annuals and vegetables and mulch, on asters and blues and ivy. Like Beverley Nichols (though without his extensive literary output), Perenyi manages to be personable, whimsical and knowledgeable (and, of course, opinionated) all at the same time. She's really an ideal gardening companion.

Perenyi ends her brief introduction to the book this way:

"I am no horticultural expert and wouldn't want to pass myself off as one. All I can claim is some thirty years of amateur experience, which is to say that I know something about a lot of things and not enough to call myself a specialist in any way . . .

"Why, then, presume to write a book about gardening? The simplest answer is that a writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject--I take that as inevitable. One acquires one's opinions and prejudices, picks up a trick or two, learns to question supposedly expert judgments, reads, saves clippings, and is eventually overtaken by the desire to pass it all on. But there is something more: As I look about me, I have reason to believe I belong to a vanishing species. Gardens like mine, which go by the unpleasing name of 'labor intensive,' are on their way out and before they go, I would like to contribute my penny's worth to their history."

In this last paragraph, she's nailed down exactly why she's so ideal as a garden writer. But I also suspect that the way the future of gardening looked in 1981 is different from the way it looks now, and I'm glad Perenyi lived long enough to see that gardeners like her might not be a vanishing species after all.

Photo of the Day, and a mystery

On Wednesday afternoon, when I went to the Amherst College gym, I saw an unexpected sight on the hill near the Octagon:

Why were there enormous letters on the hill, I wondered, and why was Amherst misspelled? Was it a prank? An accident? The offering of a group of visiting Williams students?

Yesterday, when I returned, the letters were gone. No trace of them, and no explanation. For now, the mystery remains.