OK, I wasn’t going to have any non-natives in my new garden. But who can resist daffodils? Especially surprise daffodils!
The other surprise has been the variety of birds compared to midtown. Lots of woodpeckers.
I hadn’t seen a piliated in ages and forgot how huge they are! This shot is from a few weeks ago.
Winter is in full swing and that’s when I catch up with my philosophy reading for the year. I mean, the only thing you can do outside is hardscaping and planting bare saplings, so why not.
Reading a collection of old essays by Leszek Kolakowski, I was delighted to run across his forgotten farce “The General Theory of Not-Gardening” amid his laments about totalitarianism, modernity and general failures of decent humanity.
Here he posits a few constructs to underpin guilt-free avoidance of gardening:
People garden in order to make nature human, to “civilize” it. This, however, is a desperate and futile attempt to transform being-in-itself into being-for-itself. This is not only ontologically impossible; it is a deceptive, morally inadmissible escape from reality, as the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself cannot be abolished. To garden, or to imagine that one can “humanize” Nature, is to try to efface this distinction and hopelessly to deny one’s own irreducibly human ontological status. To garden is to live in bad faith. Gardening is wrong. QED
Did the existential approach convince you? No? How about psychoanalytic:
Fondness for gardening is a typically English quality. It is easy to see why this is so. England was the first country of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution killed the natural environment. Nature is the symbol of Mother. By killing Nature, the English people committed matricide. They are subconsciously haunted by the feeling of guilt and they try to expatiate their crime by cultivating and worshipping their small, pseudo-natural gardens. To garden is to take part in this gigantic self-deception which perpetuates the childish myth. You must not garden. QED
Well, this argument would apply double for America where large swaths of the natural world were converted directly to industrialism with no intervening generations of genteel farming. OK, so that didn’t do the trick? We resort to pure analytic philosophy:
In spite of many attempts, no satisfactory definition of garden and of gardening has been found; all existing definitions leave a large area of uncertainty about what belongs where. We simply do not know what exactly a garden and gardening are. To use these concepts is therefore intellectually irresponsible, and actually to garden would be even more so. Thou shalt not garden. QED
Let’s face it, if you’re still not convinced then you are condemned to this admonition: “The alternative to not-gardening without a theory is to garden”
There’s a great article in the newest issue of Georgia Historical Quarterly (Vol CII, No.3) by Bryan Rindfleisch about an Irish settlement in colonial Georgia.
Seems that George Galphin obtained a 50,000 acre grant in the colony and wanted to bring in a large Irish population. The result was a short-lived town, Quennsborough which Krakow describes:
Queensboro(ugh), Jefferson County. Established in 1769 as a trading post, eight miles northwest of Galphinton. Now extinct, it was located on the Ogeechee River at the fork of Lambert’s Creek… Named for Queen Anne (1665-1714), the first queen of Great Britain and Ireland.
Short-lived by destruction during the Revolutionary War. But before that, the settlers constantly encroached on Creek lands. These conflicts even involved trees which the original population used as important landmarks. This paragraph (p.218) really captures the issues:
As was the nature of colonization, the source of conflict between the Queensborough Irish and the Creek Nation was land. At first, the tension seemed rather minimal, as Creek micos asked imperial officials to restrain the Queensborough community from “falling Trees into the River,” which impeded travel and defaced markers used by the Creeks as part of the deerskin trade. However, over the course of the 1760s and 1770s, Creek leaders increasingly asserted that “[our] Young People made great Complaints…about the white People settling on the Line and over it,” as well as “Building Cowpens” from which cattle roamed onto Creek lands and consumed food stores and other resources. Because “the White Peoples’ Cattle were Miles from [any British] Settlement,” Creek men often vented their frustrations by “kill[ing] some of them [cattle].” Such actions angered the residents of Queensborough, who “Stole Horses in Return for their Trouble” and at times opened fire on any Creek Indian who approached their community. By 1770, violence had become commonplace, which prompted Creek micos to forewarn imperial agents: “If you do not put a Stop” to such conflict, especially when it came to settler and livestock encroachments, “it will bring on a War upon your Country & it will not be in [our] Power to Stop the Young People.”
But the conflicts roiled on into the war for independence a few years later. I always knew the trail trees were important, but it’s fascinating to see them referenced in such legal briefs.
Bigleaf snowbell is going gangbusters
I think these drupes grow into the bells
One of my favorite natives!
I don’t remember buds looking quite like this
Wonder if it was the back and forth from freezing to 60 degrees over and over again. Love it
I like this new poem by Mary Soon Lee in the current Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. Imagine the idea of the multiverse, and you try your hand at a new universe….
Love it! You can find this and some top notch new fiction in the January 2018 issue. At a newstand near you or buy it here: F&SF Mag online
We’re definitely getting a cold winter so far. Happy New Years! Here’s a little evergreen hello from a sweetbay magnolia
Re-read this in a beautiful 1893 edition with soft leather boards presented to my great uncle Herald for his “perfect attendance cards”
Ahh, “warmer sun and softer rain”, sounds good!
I just stumbled on this poem from the 1930’s from Daniel Whitehead Hicky who used to be a well known writer. Let’s get him famous again!
Beloved, Autumn tells us all we know
And all that we shall ever know. Your hand
In mine, this hillside scarlet with the glow
Of orchards ripening on a ripening land,
No word I speak to measure out my love
Avails me anything, nor lip to lip
No kiss, no whisper here shall ever prove
A thing beyond these tremulous leaves that drip
In yellow silence down the listening day.
Once April, like the youth we know this hour
Lay on these boughs, and blooms in bright array;
Now fruit, unbroken promise of the flower,
Drops and is done where stubbled grasses drowse.
All life, all love, is written in these boughs.
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