Each Little World

Going forward

If you noticed the headline on yesterday's post you will have figured out that I republished my very first blog post to acknowledge my 15th anniversary of blogging. I started my blog after a 30-year career in journalism that ended as my liberal local newspaper left print behind and went digital. They needed to seriously reduce the staff and my job was eliminated as they reconfigured the newsroom.

Most of the people who left were like me: long-time journalists who were nearing retirement. None of us was ready to leave and we definitely were not ready to see our daily paper fade into the ether. 

All this is to say that I taught myself to blog to show that this old dog could learn new tricks. If you go back to my early posts you will see that they read like newspaper or even magazine articles; long, literary and covering a variety of subjects. Over the years I've pretty much concentrated on gardening as that has consumed more and more of my mental and physical energy.

I used to check my stats but haven't done it for years. Mark, however, took a look. He said that in fifteen years I've put up 3,005 posts or 200 times per year or every 2 days; however one wants to break it down. I've averaged 222 page views per day or 404 per post. You've commented 16,328 times or 5.5 per post. Not exactly an influencer or as influential as a number of you whose excellent blogs have resulted in books, lectures and more.

These days I'm self-publishing my own garden books but I was on the lecture circuit for years; going back to the early 1990s using slides. I've got a library of over 7,000 slides that are all archivally filed, labeled and cross-referenced and I'm on my 26th volume of hand-written garden journals.

All of which is to say that I'm 76 years old. If I want to read more, draw more, make more books, see friends more — do anything more often — then blogging needs to happen less frequently. How much less?? I'm not sure; but definitely on a more random schedule when I have something to share. I know many of you only at a distance. But I've met a surprising number of you in person because you brought a tour here (Daniel Mount), were visiting Madison (Flingers, Kris in Kansas City) or you live here and read my newspaper columns long before I stared blogging. 

I may be ready to blog less but I'm not ready to give up all these blog-related relationships. My e-mail is listed on the blog so we should all be able to keep in touch easily. I will try to see if I can find a system that works for you to sign up for notifications when I post. And you can also do what I do on many blogs I read, just periodically stop by to see what's happening and leave a comment. I will still be here and I know you want to see how our road construction project finally turns out!

Let me close by saying that the idea of blogging less makes me feel panicky. For 45 years the first thing I've done almost every day is sit down at a computer of some kind and start writing essays, op-eds, editorials, lifestyle stories, columns and blog posts. It is going to be a hard habit to break. 

The first image is a snap of all of us who left the newsroom in 2008. Some of us, me included (in the blue sweater center left), are automatically smiling when faced with a camera. But you can see on some faces what a very bittersweet moment it was. 

The third photo shows Wisconsin native Daniel Mount leading a group of PNW gardeners on a tour of Midwest gardens and prairies. 

The fourth photo was taken the day Daniel Mount's tour group visited our garden. Blogging has resulted in me becoming interested in photography and in preserving the history of our garden, in words and pictures.

The last photo shows the crew putting in the new storm sewer in front of our property. They've now started to prepare the roadbed for paving, but that's still a ways away.

Wisconsin's critical election

I've been reading Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters From an American" every day since sometime early in the Trump administration. Today's letter (dated April 2) is about gerrymandering and Wisconsin's Supreme Court election tomorrow. Or how former GOP Governor Scot Walker instigated the process of killing participatory democracy in our state. 

Richardson is a history professor at Boston College and one of her areas of expertise is the history of the Republican Party. Her daily letter looks at the big stories of the day as well as those that are coming into play. She puts them into historical context and provides links to all the sources of her information. 

The GOP in Wisconsin provided the playbook for the Republicans across the nation. Well-worth your reading.

NOTE: Me protesting Gov. Walker in 2011. Double click the photo so you can read my sign. 

Remembering Ravilious

During the Second World War, the War Artists Advisory Committee in the U.K hired 300 artists to cover the conflict. On this date in 1942, a plane on a mission off the coast of Iceland crashed into the sea, killing its pilot and 39-year-old passenger, artist Eric Ravilious.  He was the first official war artist to die in active service. I fell in love with Ravilious's work the first time I saw it. He was an illustrator, painter, printmaker and designer of commercial images like the one on this mug. 

This is one of a pair of large cups I have that were produced by Wedgewood to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth the 2nd, the current Queen. Ravilious originally designed this one for her father's coronation and it was reissued in this colorway for Elizabeth. 

I'm not usually a fan of pink and yellow combinations but I think it works in this design. At this time of year, however, my garden doesn't as offer quite as many choices for pink and yellow blooms as it does in the spring. Still I found more than I expected. 

The provenance of the cup is printed on the bottom. 

The two books pictured are "Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfield," edited by Gill Saunders and Malcom Yorke and "Long Live Great Bardfield: An Autobiography" by Tirzah Garwood, the wife of Eric Ravlious.

The first is a big, illustrated history of the group of artists who lived and worked Great Bardfield in England and the second is one of many superb books by the great Persephone Press in Bath, England. I am a huge fan of their books and have quite a long shelf full of them. In fact, they are listed as their own category on this blog!

Furious on the Fourth

I don't know why anyone in the U.S. expects women to celebrate the Fourth of July this year. 

Our government — via the Supreme Court — has just demonstrated that they do not consider women citizens with the full rights of men. Our independence has been dramatically curtailed and it's going to get worse. There is nothing for us to celebrate.

We need to elect more Democrats at every level of government, especially in state legislative races. This is where the biggest threats to women and democracy will be. It's clear the court wants to mess with the validity of elections. Trump came close on January 6th but that was just a preview.

If you are not already reading her daily, check out Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" for clear and insightful explanations of what is happening in American politics, along with a dose of context and history. An excellent way to be informed without going ballistic over the news. 

Mardi Gras to you . . .

. . . but today is Fastnacht to me. That's "Fast Night," the German celebration on the day before Lent begins. My maternal great-grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the 19th Century and this was one of the few rituals that our family maintained from that side of our heritage. Like Mardi Gras, it is a day for costumes, eating and partying.

On this day my mother always made Fastnacht keuchles, a raised and deep-fried "donut" that was square in shape and pressed together in the center, rather than having a hole in the middle. Then we dusted them in cinnamon and sugar or powdered sugar. Using up lard, butter and sugar before the long period of religious fasting began was the reason for making sweet treats.

The NYTimes has a story about a small community still celebrating this festival. One of the townspeople, pictured in the article, was wearing a mask that reminded me of one I have. I will bring it out today in memory of those long-gone childhood days spent in the kitchen with my mom. 

Change is inevitable

“You wonder after many years if any of it was worth the bother. The answer is, I think, more or less yes .... Entire sections of the garden have to be rethought and old friends given up. All seems to be nothing but change and irregular advances and collapse, as if paying little attention to the gardener, who is seen to be far less consequential than we supposed.”

 "The Essential Earthman"

Henry Mitchell 1923-1993

. . .

Our street is scheduled for a major rehab this summer. The original 1950s sanitary and storm sewers will be replaced, a shared pedestrian/bike lane will be added, most on street parking eliminated and the street resurfaced. This means the traffic islands will be removed, some curbs will be replaced and my front garden will be dug up to put in the water lines and update the fire hydrant on our property.

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time and money gardening on this little island. It's the sunniest spot I have and has rocky soil perfect for bulbs. 

Currently it has Tulips, Allium 'Summer Beauty', the famed Geranium 'Rozanne' and four big Calamintha nepeta ssp. nepeta. As soon as the plants come up this spring I will dig them out and move them to new homes elsewhere in the garden. Construction is slated to start in June and go all summer, seven days a week. 

The city owns the first 14' of our property as we have no sidewalks or "hell strips." So I intentionally filled this area with plants I could afford to lose or that could be easily moved.  Geranium macrorrhizum is a forgiving plant and should cover the construction quickly once I can replant. 

The most important point is the city will not have to remove the Oak tree that abuts the street at the end of our driveway. If they have to replace the gutter, they will hand-form it to protect the tree. This tree was here when the house was built in 1954 and for many years before that. (Don Smith, the original owner, with one of his daugthers and the oak tree.)

When we moved here in 1994, arborist and local tree historian Bruce Allison estimated the tree's age as at least 125 years old. It's our treasure and we are thrilled that we finally have a group of seedlings that will eventually create an oak grove that will be long after the road project is history.

A message ignored

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the county where I live in southern Wisconsin has seen relatively low infection numbers and high vaccine numbers.

But somehow folks seemed to have missed the message with this second round. 

Someone wrote this in the snow on the slope of the highway overpass where I was stopped for a traffic light.

Pond re-design: Why we did it

We moved to this property in 1994 specifically to create an ornamental garden. We spent the first two and a half years planning and designing the pond, which was going to be the centerpiece of the space. We belonged to a local pond group so we got to see a lot of water features in home gardens. That helped us decide what we did and did not want in ours.

Specifically we wanted a stream with multiple waterfalls to act as a natural filtration system. 

Eventually the pond was well-covered with waterlilies whose leaves kept the water cool; another method of keeping algae at bay. 

Though the pond was in the sunniest spot in the garden — to make sure the lilies got enough sun to bloom — it was surrounded by trees which created a maintenance nightmare.

With three large Locust trees, it was impossible to keep the leaves from falling into the pond each fall. That meant that ideally we needed to empty the pond and clean it out each spring. (Look for the rocks marking the edge of the pond; the leaves make it blend into the grass and the deck.)

Mark, with very little help from me, did that messy job for years. It was easy in the early days when he was younger and when there were multiple unplanted areas where we could spread out the muck and let it compost. Along with cleaning out the rotting debris, he divided the water lilies, repotted and repositioned them back in the pond.

The last bare spot was the former moss garden where Mark dumped the slimy debris a few month before I began to redesign and plant this area in 2017. 

That was the last time he seriously cleaned out the pond. He never was able to do this job without help and we found it almost impossible to hire a company to do the kind of job we needed done — with the care we always use when working in the garden. 

During our COVID summer at home, the pond started having more problems than not being cleaned out. It sprang three leaks. Mark managed to find and repair two of them. But the third one was the problem. It was likely located in the rubber liner somewhere under the rocks in the stream; a location which meant it would never be able to be found and fixed. We had to turn off the pond pump because of the leak, which made the water eutrophy. 

We knew it was time for a change; a big change. All winter long we talked about what we might do; we looked at most of the garden books we own for inspiration and information. It didn't take long before we agreed to turn our wet pond into a symbolic water feature; something Mark had been interested in from the day we moved here. 

In those early day of creating our garden, I was less enthused about having a traditional raked gravel garden like Ryoanji (below). Over the years, I have come to appreciate this classic style of Japanese garden and was excited to make the change.  

Our new gravel garden has one major difference from the traditional Japanese style garden. We followed Olbrich Botanical Gardens' directions on creating sustainable gravel gardens like they've done with the one illustrated below. Thus, someday we can plant directly into our gravel garden should we, or the next owners of our house, decide to do so. (More on that in the upcoming posts about making the change-over.)

OLBRICH BOTANICAL GARDENS PHOTO

The Bard said it best

As Women's History month is ending, enjoy these words from Shakespeare celebrating women:

ANNE HATHAWAY COTTAGE/SHAKESPEARE BIRTHPLACE TRUST

“From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;

They are the books, the arts, the academes,

That show, contain and nourish all the world.”

 

― William Shakespeare,

Love's Labour's Lost

My COVID-19 journal

Back in early October, Sam Sifton, the food editor of the New York Times newspaper, said that when the lockdown began he wished he'd recorded the meals he was cooking in a notebook: 

"It'd be great to look back on the months of experimentation and freestyle cooking, on the dishes that became standbys, on the once-in-a-blue-moon extravagances, the triumphs, the failures. I think that could have been the sort of thing to preserve, a piece of personal history, something to help remind me of the joys and frustrations of this extraordinary and difficult time.

Instead, I've only got memories, fragmenting already."

. . .

Guess what, Sam? I did start keeping track of what I was cooking. Not right at the start, but after the first couple of weeks, I decided to keep track of what we had for dinner as a kind of domestic journal. This was not that big of a stretch as I have been keeping journals (above) filled with photos and notes about our dinners and parties going back to 1984. I hoped that this pandemic note-taking would spark me into trying some new recipes and to being a bit more inventive.  

I made a great pasta dish based on a Pinterest photo. I trolled the NYTimes food section and Food 52. I pulled new and old cookbooks off the shelf. I ended these COVID-19 dinner notations on June 30th; three months after I began keeping track. It was obvious by then that home cooking was not something we were going to be able to abandon anytime soon.

Looking at what we ate in those early months, we tried a few new things but mostly we ate the usual: Pasta with white clam sauce, stew, home made chicken noodle soup, something from the grill. There were salads of every kind: mixed market greens, Thai chicken, chicken curry, mixed beans, lentil combos and wild rice with fruit and veg. And yes, there were hot dogs, tuna fish sandwiches and mac and cheese.

By autumn, I was bored with our menus and made a real effort to try some new dishes. Most of them were flavorful hits that we'll be eating again and again:

Salmon with fennel, bell pepper and black olives (Martha / my version above)

Avocado, black bean and pineapple salad with lime cilantro dressing (Smitten Kitchen Every Day)

Smokey tomato and red pepper soup with white beans (Food 52) 

Beet and tomato salad (NYTimes)

Ropa Vega (a fabulous Cuban dish from the NYTimes)

Thai green curry shrimp linguine (another Martha)

I was on a roll until I rolled off. I haven't tried anything new in a month or more. The change in the weather and the coming holidays home alone have thrown me a curve. Once I re-adjust to the new reality yet again, I'm sure I'll be ready for more kitchen experiments. Truth be told, if it was not for the pandemic, I would not be spending so much time at home. Nor would the idea of spending that time in the kitchen be as enticing as it has proved.