I'm Ready

Something shifted in me. I know it is not the cornucopia of holiday ads, or the now TWO all-Christmas-music radio stations in town. It is not that the shopping is done. No. It is that there's not one more excuse to go out in to the garden. I've done everything. I prolonged it as long as I could.

I didn't put away all the pots in one day. I didn't pull up all the plant support stakes in ten minutes. I didn't roll up the hoses or better secure staked plants for winter winds in an afternoon. I didn't even mulch in less than a week. Today it will be 54, and the next three days 30s, then 20s, and maybe snow.

But the biggest problem is that my garden is in college--that's the age I think of it as, maybe high school. It can cook and clean for itself, it does things I don't know about, it likely talks behind my back, it parties and gets drunk and french kisses dates. In another year or two I could be an empty nester. How time flies.

In just four years I've made an ecosystem, a self-sustaining individual. There is less and less I have to do in the garden each month. Few weeds, minimal staking, minimal plant moving and even dividing. I putz because I want to, but if anything I might be more of a nag, too intrusive, trying to dress up my garden child in clothes long outgrown and outdated. I have to let the garden go.

I only ask for a good winter. A hard winter. Lots of snow, which my garden captures and holds exceedingly well. Give me the full season, make me hunger hard for spring, the distance between us closing as the days grow longer in January even as the ice holds us down, still, patient and impatient at once like a coiled spring. There is nothing I want more to do each day than look out of my window at the beautiful dead stems piercing the sky, echoes of the future, and know how loved we are when we surround ourselves with the life on this planet.

Dazed in the Pre Memoir World

I had planned to have all my research annotated and in Word documents by 12/1. This clearly won't happen. 12/15 is the new target date. The next memoir is a freaking beast and I'm in no mood to have a foot race with it. As long as a first draft is done by the end of March I will be most pleased. Even after all my notes are typed up, I still have to go and organize them into viable topics and folders, then, perhaps, chapter outlines. At least I know what the first chapter will be. The rest will come as it comes, and that makes writing exciting.

I asked my wife at lunch today who in the world would care to read a book about some guy exploring his family history, lamenting the lost lessons of his grandmother who tried so hard to teach him about his family, but he never listened. Who would care to read a book that says Oklahoma is our apocalypse, a nexus of everything wrong and right with this country, a convergence of greed and hope that reshaped prairie ecology, Native American cultures, and Mennonite German settlers. We never listen. We don't change until we have to. Until it's too late and we have to start over, start the story over that we cut off and killed.

“How will our children know who they are if they don’t know where they come from?” – John Steinbeck

“For in OK all the experiences that went into the making of the nation have been speeded up. Here all the American traits have been intensified. The one who can interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world.” -- Angie Debo

As I'm bringing together literally hundreds of sources I stop along the way to research some question I asked myself in the margin of a book or pdf document, so I spend an hour more researching. At some point, the research must end, because it could go on forever and ever. Just as I'll never know the lives of my family or the true prairie, so this memoir can never be fully researched--in the loss and the absence, the negative space, is the story of our species.

I ask myself--remembering the first draft debacle of my last memoir, Morning Glory, unpublished but much better than it was three years ago--what kind of narrative will drive and sustain this book? My search for myself, myself and America, or just America? I will have stories of my own, then there are stories of my family, of Cheyenne, of Mennonites, of prairie animals and grasses. Will those dozens of smaller stories coalesce into a larger narrative? Will they spiral together and collide, play off one another like metaphors, lead to one point naturally, or will I have to force it to a head?

Obviously a writer has to be careful at this stage--a memoir is a marathon, and the writing is the discovery, and the editing is the real writing. First thing first. Get me a brown paper bag. I'm on a slippery slope, about to slip into memoir writing hyperventilation and coma.

Turkey Red: A Memoir of Oklahoma

Last Fall Images / Imagine the Last Fall

I find the garden much more visceral as I think about this, potentially, being the last autumn here. Or not. You never know. I will go where the door opens. At least November in zone 5 Nebraska still provides breaths of fresh air--one day it's 30, the next it's 60. This makes winter seem more manageable to me, since really, things start to warm noticeably come late February. Just enough winter to make spring worthwhile.

Some winters the weeping bald cypress dies half back. Stinks.

Tossed a bunch of seeds in that black pot. We'll see.

Rare view from the other gate.

I had a surprise call this week from UNL and was offered to teach a few classes this spring. Truly a godsend, both for the money and for the fact I miss teaching. And bringing the research together for my next book is taking longer than expected, so I now hope to begin writing the memoir in January and have it done by mid spring. Really need to have that first draft laid out asap. Isn't this an exciting blog post? Well, this next book will be rich, I tell you, rich like the finest dark chocolate mousse. It's my great American memoir.

A Garden's Land Ethic

I've been swamped organizing research for my next memoir, so TDM has been a bit quiet (and shallow I suppose). However, I do have a post up at Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens that is a "thinking" post, based on some reading I've done lately. Here's the first bit:

I’m going to start off my semi philosophical / ranty / musing post with two quotes from Richard Manning’s book Grassland:

“Our science, our poetry, and our democracy fail because they lack specific information of the plants.”

“The culture of plants is the same as the culture of people.”

That last one is around a discussion of Aldo Leopold’s idea of a land ethic (and if you’ve not read A Sand County Almanac, exactly what are you waiting for?). In all my thinking and writing, and sometimes in my doing out in the garden as I plant or photograph, I’m developing a land ethic. It is not one that is in response to the land—not as a manager, caretaker, or gardener—but one of learning from the land the cycles of life, of creation, of existence beyond myself, which in turn makes me more aware of my own creation.

Recently there was a video, which I posted to my blog’s Facebook page last Friday, showing a massive swarm of starlings shifting and pulsing like bed sheets over a lake. Superimposed on the spectacle was loud music, which destroyed the birds, the lake, the moment. I wonder why we have to push ourselves so much on the world, why we can’t or won’t or don’t shut up and listen and be in it (why do college students surgically implant ear buds into their ears?). Maybe we’d be less apt to get angry, be jealous, and want something else, that promised land over the next horizon where life must be better, where we won’t be so human. Oh, the history of our pioneers....

My Etsy Photograph Shop

Over the last few weeks I've spent some free time putting together a collection of my photographs for sale on Etsy. Most of the photos are from a series I've been working on, the autumn leaf project, but I've also got some flora and fauna shots. Here are some samples:

Maybe you'll stop by and let me know what you think? Buy a print? 4x6" is $10, 6x9" is $15, and 8x12" is $20. I also have my little garden memoir listed for sale. Hey, why not.
 

One of My Poems

I normally prefer to post poems by other writers, but here's one of mine (which will, ahem, be in the forthcoming book Afterimage next spring). Also, lots of really cool autumn leaf pictures coming soon I've been working on for weeks--stay tuned. But for now I'm swamped, so, to the poem.

Last Rites                                                                   

Believe me when I say that lavender cries.

This is why in autumn mornings butterflies

move silently across the stalks, buoyant

like bells that slide over altar candles.

That exhalation, after scent has ambled

toward the heavens, removes life’s memory, fervent

intensity of freedom from the stem—

it makes the world a stunted requiem.

And insects burning with the forests—wings

a folded canopy of maple red,

yellow ash, umber oak—these inclined

transmuted shadows slip into this wonting.

Even we, within our lightly tended beds,

will fade into another, intertwined.

One More Spin

70s the next two days (not the era, the temp), then 50 and freezes by the end of the week. I've set out all my cut flowers for the insects since a lot succumbed to the 22 degrees we had last week. I'm trying to fully immerse myself in autumn, in the garden, not just like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter, but a squirrel gathering nuts for years (perhaps). I don't mean to sound melancholy--if anything, I'm seeing more in the autumn garden than I ever have before. And having fun with the camera along the way.

Cosmo v. fly

Tachinid fly--scourge of the monarch

Paper wasp

Unique design

Add caption

I've had the house to myself the last few days, and in an effort to focus on the next book by making metaphorical room, cleaned up my office (I see carpet!) and tossed many old student papers. The latter is always particularly sad for some reason--all I need to do is see a name or read a sentence, and I instantly know that student again, the class, the context, the conferences we had, the good agony of living through language. It's hard trashing all that work, but I don't have any need for it. At the same time, I feel cruel--like a mother robin pushing out young from the nest. I suppose I had my chance, did what I could when I could. Fly, papers, fly. (Better than burn, papers, burn--right?)

Leaf Project and Bee-tude

First, my entry for Gardening Gone Wild's October Picture This Photo Contest (whew), part of my autumn leaf project. This is Cassia hebecarpa, or wild senna.

Yesterday, before I cut the cosmos and brought them in, I was able to get this shot of a bee. I was lucky with it--the wind was howling and the bloom rocking, as was this rudely-interrupted bee. Rocking. She flew off, bouncing into the siding a few times, over pollinated I presume. I hated to cut the flowers, but a freeze was imminent.

Well, my job applications for university teaching positions are out after weeks working on them. Hopefully, in December, I'll hear I've got some interviews. Then maybe in January some campus visits. Then.... Can you tell I'm excited and hopeful? Right now it's back to organizing research for the Oklahoma memoir--which I better start writing in November. Today I'm re-reading accounts of Custer's slaughter of a Cheyenne village near where I grew up in Oklahoma, and it's simply just hard to get through--particularly because the world hasn't changed that much since 1868. Well, uh, sorry... bee happy and look at that last photo above.

The Rooting Season

I never know what to make of a season, or for that matter, a time in my life. Years from now I'll remember moments only by vague notions, switchbacks and curvy roads, metaphor and insinuation, a moment of displaced memory mixed with some present sensation that takes me back and replaces time, giving deeper meaning. I shift, multidimensional. You know what I mean--how the juniper scent takes you back to your grandparent's apartment, or the taste of cinnamon on your tongue to a Sunday morning, or the way the wind lifts the leaves high enough to cross the sun and eclipse your vision for a second and you are twelve again.

The only reliable constant is motion. The universe is expanding as our experiences are, our sensations, and when we stop having those experiences, whether by choice or circumstance, we falter. I think this faltering tends to happen a lot in winter, but it doesn't have to. Growing up in Minnesota people had no choice but to go outside to maintain their sanity, becoming a more winter hardy folk (or doing a good job of pretending). Of course, plenty stay holed up inside until April. But you can't do that.

I look at the garden and walk it everyday. I will ride down this week like a nurse or loved one at bedside as the hard freeze comes. We'll have the wind knocked out of us, but we won't die. Thankfully there is rest. And I can guarantee myself, and you, that life is so fast, that so much happens, that it will seem like only yesterday that is was fall and the first hard freeze occurred. I won't even remember the date. It is October, but it might as well be March and the green is just coming up from the mulch, and in disbelief I think it's moss or mold.  But the only way that will happen is if I live and don't brood, don't become frozen in nostalgia. It may be easy for someone who's 35 to say that, though.

I'm not too worried about winter. I'll take the time I need to hunker down and shift my energies to my roots (writing, reading, hopefully job interviews), just as the perennials are set to do now. I know we are connected, intertwined, if not physically then in something much more real and tenable--time is nothing. Get out there in the coming cold and smell the goldenrod once more, how it reminds you of your grandmother's perfume. Gather the fragrant mountain mint and put a clump on your desk. Dig your numb fingers into the still-warm soil and know your home, yourself, even more. This is your ceremony, touching the roots and the microbes, gathering and storing the nutrients of memory that will feed you well into next spring.

Moth Leaf Bloom Day Thing

Seeing the below moth makes me want green eyes--gives me an idea for a Halloween costume (but who will be my goldenrod?). And the leaf is from a series I'm working on that I'm thinking has Etsy written all over it.

We've Got Color & Blooms Until the 11th Hour

Did you know it's October? Neither did I. I went outside a few days ago and saw what you are about to see. Finally, after four years, the troublesome upper slope of the garden is starting to fill in--and I purposely have it as fall blooming so I can see it from the house, as if on a stage.

Bald cypress (rust), Aster 'October Skies' (blue), Amsonia (yellow), Sedum (red), Baptisia (green)

You might think this tired and worn, but I find the above view stunning and rich--a haven for winter birds.

 

A view from the deck.

This is our west fence, and it always provides a bucolic view I'm envious of, since it's not visible from any of the windows.

L-R--Viburnum nudum (red), Miscanthus 'Nippon' (white), and the Asters and Amsonia.

The last few days have seen warm temps, and in conjunction with the asters blooming, a final resurgence of butterflies. Yesterday we even had 5 monarchs on the Aster 'Purple Dome,' surely their favorite fall nectar source. This garden pleases me immensely (though it isn't perfect--every year only one part of it is, and since this is a drought-like fall, the shrubs aren't as showy, but the flowers are doing well). As I garden year after year, this small landscape teaches me more and more about my own fleeting existence. It was just yesterday that the coneflowers bloomed; it was just yesterday when I got my first car and headed off to college.

I can't wait to see how plants mature next year, but I know too they won't last. As I get older, lust turns to love, looking to the future becomes patience and looking to the now. It's a slow process, and I'm sure I won't have even begun to learn it when I'm old and (more) crotchety. But at least with my hands in the soil I can temper my humanity--a good thing, even as an owl hoots from dark trees as the last bit of light settles behind them.

Boring Post Title, But Nice Pics

Not feeling talky, am feeling pictorial. So let us see the garden in early fall transformation, or, where did 2011 go, exactly? Luckily, the asters and late goldenrod are still bringing life to the garden, and will for 2-3 more weeks. No frost yet, though it was 33 two nights ago. Appendages crossed.

Tree frog 6" from aster bloom

Fly on Eupatorium 'Prairie Jewel'

View outside bedroom door

Monarch charging up in AM

This male hung around all night before leaving--the last one

Maple leaf--click to expand

Black chokeberry leaves

Playing around with roof geometry

Looking southwest from the fountain--quite full, huh?

Hadn't seen this aster in 4 years!

I like the aster branch against the jagged grass

Side oats grama

Sculpture 1, with indian grass

Sculpture 2, with indian and switch grass

An 8' eupatorium against chokeberry

There is much change in the air, and it is more inside the house than out. No, we aren't pregnant, but my mind is swimming with the future--something I try not to do in my life too much. For the first time I will collect some seed this fall and store it away, perhaps using it in a new place next summer. Or perhaps not. What I know about uncertainty is that, in the past, it has made me sick and lost, spun around like a record. But now I'm older and seasoned, and uncertainty feels more like hope, more like faith, more like precision (negative space?).

Even if the world falls apart, if the leaves really do drop at any moment, there is a constancy in the loss, an accretion of wisdom and patience in the speed of the season, death, and birth. I'm not sure what I'm saying, other that in a time in my life when I could, and maybe should be afraid, I feel the most confident and certain. Time accelerates, and yet I feel steady and patient, leaning a little more into the wind, making ready. I know this is vague. But the story is in the pictures above--and it's not mine alone. Just look at the frog.

Gypsy Moths, or Beloved (a fall poem)

tremor in the walnut grove,
stand of near emptiness where I once stood,
demolished, hooked
unto a sorrow as the moths
belong now to these branches, the smoke
and burn of twilight,

the dreamers aroused,
unbound from their nest, wings unfurling walnut
tree-patterns, adult colors—
bronze and gray of decay, although
they are newly born.

This is the why and the way
of how I love them: savoring the end-
of-summer’s diminishing hours, unafraid
of the coming dark, enthralled by the applause
of bodies caught like hatchets
in the bark.

-- Paul Bohince

(Fall) Gardening -- Passive Aggressive Tips

Being a host for Garden Chat on twitter last night made me think about how I garden, esp in the fall. Also, how I've learned to garden. Folks tell me that by looking at my garden pics, they assume my garden is much older, and that I've been a gardener my whole life. Really, the garden and I were born together in July of 2007, and what I've learned has been by trowel and error, and by lots of book reading and obsessive google searching. Hope some of this helps, esp if you're a newbie:

-- Each spring I get hatchback loads of free compost from my city. I use this to top dress the garden and lawn in March / April. I also use it in each new planting hole, on the bottom and sides, and top dress the new plant, water, then mulch. That's all the fertilizer I use. Know what I mulch with? All my herbaceous perennials--which make great homes for insects and spiders on the garden floor.

-- In fall I cut nothing down. Why? Let's take for example the black swallowtail caterpillars currently munching on fennel and parsley. They will soon venture off to form a chrysalis, and remain attached to sticks and stems until April-ish when they emerge. Why would I toss them? A lot of insects are bedding down for winter, insects that will pollinate my perennials, give me more seed, and that will also feed hungry baby birds in May. Speaking of birds--I have 5x as many in the winter now that my garden is mature-ish. Flocks and flocks. Here are some things that depend on you leaving your sticks and leaves alone.

-- Not cutting down part 2: I can see the garden so much more clearly, walk it, and think about what needs work. If you try to design in the summer you can't see anything. Besides, winter sucks already, if you at least leave the garden standing you can IMAGINE it alive, you can dream and plan, and that gets you through. Oh, and plants will grab snow with their stalks for insulation, and hollow-stemmed plants are less likely to freeze and die.

-- I do a lot of research. Right plant for the right place. This often means a native species plant, not a hybrid or cultivar because....

--GARDENING IS NOT HARD WORK. It can be if you want it to be, if you love the act. But look--I think even gardeners suffer from the misconception that gardens mean tending, tending, tending. NO NO NO. If I wanted to do the bare minimum necessary to sustain my 2,000 square feet, I could spend 2-4 feverish days in March in it--that's all. This is because I have the right plants in the right soil and light, because I use compost, because I mulch, and I believe because I use so many natives. If a plant doesn't make it, it doesn't get a second chance, but most do make it.

-- As the garden grows, it supports itself more and more. Roots intermingle and share information and nutrients, also choking out weed roots (and weeds themselves from sunlight in a growing canopy of perennial foliage). Don't plant your garden thin -- go thick. Go tall.

-- Garden pests? Forget about it. I may have 5 million aphids and grasshoppers, but within a week of their appearance I have 10 billion apex predator bugs--assassin, garden spiders, mantis. I don't have to use pesticides, which also means more insects, which means more plants and birds, which means more predators, which means I have more insects, which means more plants and more wildlife....

-- My garden is starting to self sow. I move some seedlings, I kill others, I toss seed in my garden and over the fence on to my neighbor's acreage (and out of my car window). The garden wants to do what it wants to do, and left to its own for years it would become a prairie. But it's a garden. So I garden here and there in bits throughout the year because I want to--but it's not really maintenance.

-- I garden for fall. I have blooms into November here in zone 5 with many species of grasses, burnet, chelone, solidago, aster, eupatorium, (yes I use Latin, you should too, and you'll pick it up naturally as if being in a foreign country). It's fall, think fall--but think spring. Dig now and give your plants a head start. Get things on sale. Water well once, then mulch, then forget about it until March.

Don't know if that was interesting to anyone. I speak about some of this stuff in my memoir Sleep, Creep, Leap, but if anyone ever wants to ask a question, I'm game. I might not have the answer, though, contrary to my cat's opinion of himself (he's walking across my hands right now).

I'm on Twitter's Garden Chat & a Giveaway

Every Monday night from 8-9pm cst gardeners from everywhere log on to Twitter and blab like crazy about, well, uh, gardening. Each week there's a different host and topic, but folks often careen away then back again into that topic. It gets a bit nuts. Monday night I'm hosting Garden Chat after hours, from 9-10pm cst--I'll be guesting and the topic will be fall gardening--move it or lose it. My advice, ideas, demands, pleas, and complaints, for what they're worth.

*** I'll be giving away two copies of my garden memoir,  

Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Nebraska Garden 

(link for excerpt & to buy). To enter, just leave a comment on this post 

about what cheezed you, what you learned, or ask a question related 

to the Twitter discussion. I'll randomly choose two winners--

or, choose two winners who brown nose the most. Haven't decided. ***

If you want TWO CHANCES TO WIN, go to the Q&A at Garden Rant, read why 
I decided to self publish etc, and comment there to enter.  

Amazon -- Kindle

Peeling off sheets of skin from a sunburned back. Spending $1,000 at five nurseries in an afternoon. Raising 200 monarch butterflies. Hearing the wing beats of geese thirty feet overhead at sunset. How one piece of mulch can make all the difference. These are the stories of Benjamin Vogt’s 1,500 foot native prairie garden over the course of three years. After a small patio garden at his last home teases him into avid tinkering, the blank canvas of his new marriage and quarter acre lot prove to be a rich place full of delight, anguish, and rapture in all four seasons. 

Full of lyrical, humorous, and botanical short essays, Sleep, Creep, Leap will leave you inspired to sit a while with your plants, noticing how the smallest events become the largest—and how the garden brings us down to earth so that we can come home to our lives.

Thanks to Brenda, the creator and lord of Garden Chat, for asking me to host this double header! Visit Garden Chat now! Or just log on to twitter and type in the hashtag #gardenchat (but don't forget that for each tweet you'll need to include that hashtag!).

Below are some fall color pics from last year. 

If you want to see my garden from day one in 2007 

I suggest becoming a fan of The Deep Middle on Facebook 

and visiting the year by year photo galleries, 

or you can also link here.

White Boltonia, NE Aster, Wood's Aster

Gold Smokebush, Coppertina Ninebark, Fineline Buckthorn

Bald Cypress

Indiangrass

Saliva azurea 'Nekan'

Lots of structure here for wildlife and winter interest.