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Neither snow, nor wind, nor rain, nor multiple frosts have put a damper on this bamboo. We planted Fargesia rufa 'Green Panda' (from Song Sparrow) in 2006 and it has performed beautifully. It is a clumper and is almost at its mature size of 6-8 ft. high x 8-10 ft. wide.
That's a pair of dwarf Ginkgos inside the chicken wire cages. Don't know if critters are likely to munch on them but I'm not taking any chances.
On Friday a friend mentioned that CBS was streaming in real time their original Kennedy assassination footage all weekend. I tuned in Saturday morning and had trouble tuning out again. I felt like Alice falling down the hole into a world that I had once lived in. When I've thought about that long weekend in 1963, I remember that my family watched everything unfolding in front of us as national television networks broadcast round the clock. But I couldn't quite picture what that was like until I saw members of Congress, the diplomatic corps, and governors of all 50 states start arriving at the White House to pay their respects to President Kennedy, whose body lay in state in the East Room, as part of the CBS footage.
With that blurry black and white broadcast flickering on the screen and the voices of Harry Reasoner and Walter Cronkite describing the proceedings I was transported back to our living room. I was a political junkie even in high school and remember watching all these people arrive with rapt attention. This time around I recognized a fair number of faces but what I noticed about the situation was nothing that would have struck me at the time.
This time I first noticed the little things: Almost everyone — man or woman — was wearing a hat. Then the big thing hit me: It was a white man's world in 1963. Almost every woman I saw arrived on the arm of a man. There were few people of color visible or minorities of any kind. That world is what the Tea Party folks want to return to; a world where we all know our place and wouldn't dream of stepping outside of our assigned role. That's a world that I have no intention of living in. No woman in her right mind wants to go back there.
What was also striking to me this time around was the quality of the work done by the broadcasters who were winging it most of the time as unforseen events unfolded around them. They used big words and assumed listeners understood them; I caught Cronkite saying "embroglio"! When have you heard anyone use a word like that on TV? They refered to the funeral cortege without explaining cortege and noted the riderless horse had its "stirrups inverted" without further ado. While I mostly saw male reporters, I did spot a female journalist in the basement of the Dallas Police Station just after Oswald was shot.
And that was another surprise. Bob Jackson's iconic photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald is burned into the brain of everyone who was alive back then. But when you watch the live footage you realize that's not what you see. An interview with Jackson in the Denver Post points out that it's photojournalism that told that amazing story because it has "the capability of telling a full story by freezing time." It's a striking thought given that it is TV that has always been touted as the medium that came of age with JFK's assassination. Yet it is the image from print journalism that has stayed with us for 50 years.
Watching even snippets of those events in 1963 is painful; not so much for the events themselves — tragic as they were — but for the realization that we seem to have lost the best part of ourselves in the intervening years and none of us have yet figured out how to make our nation whole again.
I always make the rounds of the garden in early November putting together bouquets that are mostly fresh leaves and dried seedheads. I did three of them on Nov. 8 and they are all still looking good. Leaves are from assorted Geraniums and Heucheras, Epimediums and Helleborea, Columbine, and a spiky Foxglove stem.
Scientific studies have shown that our memory, more often than not, plays tricks on us. What we remember and what actually happened are often very different; a fact that's nicely illustrated in one of my favorite books, Mary McCarthy's "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood."
My memories include four years spent at a Catholic all-girls high school in Buffalo, NY. I recall sitting in 11th-year math class after a typical Friday quiz when our Principal came on the school's intercom to announce that President Kennedy had been shot. And not long after to tell us that he'd died.
East Coast. Irish. Catholic. For us, being told that President Kennedy was dead was unimaginable. I don't remember much about the rest of the day except walking home from school. I remember it was a beautiful day. I remember the leaves piled at the curbs and covering the sidewalks. I remember the sound and the feel of them crunching underfoot. Somehow I felt that if I just kept moving I would reach Washington, D.C. That the sidewalk would roll out before me like a spool of thread that I could follow.
Fifty years later I've always assumed my memory played me false. It was almost the end of November; the perfect autumn day of my memory can't really be true. When you're a teenager it certainly doesn't occur to you that you will still be here fifty years later wishing you memorized the moment.
Of course, we all did memorize the moment but it's mostly a blur of repeated shocks, sadness and tears. For the first time in my life I saw my father cry. And I saw his father cry. There was never a more sad Thanksgiving or quiet Christmas. Life evertually returned to normal but it was never the same again. We understood that everything we had taken for granted could disappear in a moment. A lesson that's been endlessly repeated across the world for the last five decades.
But the memory that's stayed with me of walking home on a beautiful autumn afternoon was real. The high temperature in Buffalo that day was 62 degrees F.
About the pictures: I wrote to Jackie Kennedy after President Kennedy's death; this is the response card she mailed to people who sent condolences. The envelope bears my handwritten name and address below her signature rather than a postage stamp, the method used on all these thousands of cards. The second image shows my copies of special memorial issues of Life and Look magazines which were published shortly after the assassination.
This is the final fiber portrait I did in my seasonal sihouette series. I knew I wanted to use some natural materials like dried seed pods in this portait. But when I attempted to stitch the needles from Scots pine trees onto the linen background, it was such a frustrating experience that I gave up.
In fact, I decided that the Winter portrait would be the only one I would do. I put everything away for a little bit but then it snowed again and I needed a project. I went on to create the Spring portrait and enjoyed the process enough to return to my original idea of four portraits, one for each season.
This autumnal self-portrait has the widest mix of materials of the series: natural items, metal, threads and ribbon, felt and feathers. I included everything from the feathers of a dead pheasant's wing that a student had given me when I was an art teacher in the early 1970s to a piereced metal rondel that was the remaining half of a favorite pair of earrings.
I stitched down a dried honey locust pod whose color and curled up shape nicely completmented my earring. And I figured how to attach the pine needles. I tied them in tiny bundles and then couched the groups in place. It was an easier method but using bunches also made more of a visual statement that individual pine needles did.
I would say this portrait was the most complex to sew as I wanted to include so many different textures and types of material. There were soft and sharp items and very fragile pieces like the seedpod from our Carolina Silverbell tree that I used as part of the nose. But it's this mix that makes this Fall portrait my personal favorite.
In the final stage of the process, I mounted each portrait on black foamcore. And then Mark made beautiful wooden shadowbox frames painted black inside and out so the little textiles take center stage.
You can see the Spring, Summer and Winter portraits by clicking on their titles.
We took these photos of the entrance area at Olbrich Botanical Gardensn on Oct. 30. We'll be interested to see what's happened in the last two weeks when we go to tonight's WHPS meeting. Creating access for the workers who installed Olbrich's new copper roof clearly inspired the staff to make some major design changes to the gardens around the front entrance of the building as well.
We love gravel gardens and I hate the closed-in feeling of the space that surrounds our front door at home, making us both excited to view the changes at Olbrich as they progress. All three images are looking to the left of the front door area.
I grew up in the era when November 11 was still called Armistice Day and people wore a red paper poppy in remembrance of the end of World War I at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. Most memorials to the men and women who died in that war — and in all the various conflicts that followed it — are substantial structures. Whether they're figurative sculptures or abstract monuments we always recognize them and understand the references.
That's not the case with the relatively unknown war memorial that hundreds of people drive by each day on Madison's west side. That includes me; I passed right by it for the first ten years I lived on this side of Madison without a clue to its history.
Driving west on Tokay Blvd. the very first side street after you cross Midvale is Togstad Glenn. The street is named after Morris Togstad and Victor S. Glenn. Togstad was Madison's last casualty of WWI and Glenn was its first casualty of World War II, according to the history of the Midvale Heights Neighborhood published in 2004.
In his book on Madison history, Stuart Levitan notes that Morris Togstad won the Croix de Guerre and died fighting in France on the day before the armistice was signed. When Togstad's body was returned to Madison for burial in Forest Hill Cemetary, 3,000 people turned out for the ceremony.
Victor Glenn died on December 18, 1942 in Papua, New Guinea. He is buried in Roselawn Memorial Park in Monona, according to the "Find a Grave" website.
A few years ago I wrote a blog post about a new book by Linden Hawthorne: "Gardening with Shape, Line and Texture: A Plant Design Sourcebook." Hawthorne considers gardens an art form where you "paint with plants." As a result of my comments about the book and designing gardens in general, a local garden group — the Madison Chapter of the Wild Ones — asked me to speak to them about how to make prairies and native plants work as gardens — especially in front yards or urban environments.
I suggested that one of the things that instantly distinguishes a garden from a woods or a weedpatch is intent. A garden is an environment that was intentionally created by the gardener even when it looks natural. One of the easiest ways to indicate that a natural or wild-looking space is a garden is to provide somewhere for the gardener and friends to sit.
A fence and a gate are other signs that this is a garden, a planned landscape.
This view from a second floor bedroom window shows that this prairie is a deliberate design, not something that just happened.
Though this prairie is in Door County and not in front of an urban house, the concept of defining it and enjoying it as a man-made garden is the same.
These pictues show the two doors that Mark added as the finishing exterior touches to the Tea House. The only thing that's changed in the month since these photos were originally taken is the fall foliage. Most of it is now on the ground rather than still on the trees.
The door above is a bi-fold so it folds back on itself when you open it. It is about the same size as the stucco wall panel on the left. This entrance requires you to bend down and essentially crawl inside.
This door is for those days when our backs and knees need a break!
Next Spring we'll do the landscaping around this door and decide exactly what size and kind of step is needed.
Note the interior side of this door compared to the exterior design.
His next projects include adding the wiring for an electric tea kettle and all the interior finish carpentry work. Those odd pipes are the unfinished water line and electric line (to the right of the door).
Before attending the opening reception at Olbrich Botanical Gardens for their fall fiber exhibit, Mark and I took a quick spin through a couple of areas at Olbrich that are closest to the Atrium entrance. I bet we weren't out there for much more than five minutes, but when I looked at the images that had caught Mark's eye, I realized they illustrated some of the design ideas that Olbrich does so well.
Here are five concepts from our five minute tour.
SCULPTURE
Whether it's an abstract object as here, or floral like Sylvia Beckman's gorgeous bronze Hosta leaf just outside the Atrium, Olbrich offers visitors some of the best public sculpture whether we're talking design or placement. The rest of the city should take a lesson from them.
This sculpture is raised on a plinth to give it more presence and to keep it from getting overshadowed by the plants. The sharp angles of the sculpture nicely play off of the rounded box balls and the wavy Hakonecloha grass and Chamaecyparus.
STRUCTURE
Whether its a shed, a stone wall, an arbor or a support for a vining plant like this wisteria, Olbrich offers a lesson in finding the right look as well as the appropriate size and strength of materials for the job.
TEXTURE
I continually find textural combinations at Olbrich that go way beyond perennials. Placement of shrubs, grasses and trees are treated with the same attention to contrast and repetition that most of us only give to our flowers.
SCALE
Getting scale right — that's the relative size of elements to each other and to the whole garden — is one of the big challenges of gardening, no matter the size of your garden. Olbrich gets it right whether the space is intimate or wide open.
This little tree below is large as far as Japanese maples in our region go, but it's small when put out into the garden. Solution: Put it in a pot so it's raised up and has added stature — and put it near a path where you can't miss it.
Below: the sunken garden and reflecing pool. Look at the relationships of the width of the path to the pool and the height of the hedges. The sculpture at the center of the border is given a little breathing space and placed next to mid-size shrubs rather than adjacent to the trees. (We also got to see the pool empty with its innards exposed — which is always of interest to anyone with a water garden).
The Great Lawn is the largest open space in the garden and Olbrich takes full advantage of it making it seem as expansive as possible with big plantings on the edges. Also note that this garden uses evergreens in the foreground compared to the Sunken Garden where the evergreens are the backdrop for ornamental trees to create different kinds of effects.
LIGHT & DARK
Olbrich creates a sense of mystery and anticipation with changes in the natural light. Some spaces are left bright and open like the Great Lawn while others twist and move in and out of the light like the path below where you have to walk under shade trees.
Structures offer a dry and shady spot to rest that emphasizes the light elsewhere in the garden.
Pergola, grasses and shrubs all contribute to the sense of moving in and out of darker and brighter spaces as well as focusing your attention on the rose garden tower in the distance.
Don't wait much longer to make a fall visit to Olbrich while its landscape is looking so lush and lovely.