A garden to look down on

Lately I've been thinking a lot about garden styles since I've lost so many big trees and now have some sun - something I've never had here in 38 years.  I used to dream that I had a cottage garden full of sun-loving flowers.  Of course, the house and lot didn't look anything like mine (dreams are like that), but I do think that my obsessive longing for sun must have had an impact on my sub-conscious.

So, what does this have to do with the above photograph, obviously a formal style I would never want or even have a grand space for?  The fact is, I've already borrowed something from this garden, something I never dreamed I would do.

 I took this photograph in Paris from an apartment I rented in the Marais district when my two daughters and I took a trip to celebrate birthday/graduations.  I never saw one person in the garden, nor did I ever see anyone enter the opposite building.  I don't know if it was another apartment building or some kind of business headquarters or offices.  There was no one to ask, since the rental was through an agency.

I do have good memories of sitting by the open window with my breakfast (part of a fresh baguette slathered with unsalted butter and cherry Bonne Maman preserves - I haven't found that flavor in any store here) and a piece of Caprice des Dieux cheese (can't find that here, either), along with my cafe au lait.  I would study the garden and try to identify the plants they'd used - I could see peonies and an allium, and I thought those variegated trees could be some sort of cornus.  There is Clematis armandii over on the left. And those espaliers in the boxes looked like sasanquas, but why would the left one have flowers at the end of May?

If I looked to my right or left out of the window at my level, I saw something much more to my liking - charming mansard roofs with window boxes overflowing with ivy geraniums.  The photos I took almost looked like paintings of an old, rustic Paris.  The style was in total contrast to the scene below and was something that pleased my eye much more than the stiff lines of the formal garden.

Yet, here's what I did.  I have a rectangular space surrounded by a rather unkempt hemlock hedge.  When I go on the back balcony (actually, I've always referred to it as a concrete deck), I look down on that area.  This past May, as I was staring down at the tall hedge with boxwood borders, wondering what on earth I could do now that two large oaks were gone, it hit me.

I came in here to the computer and brought up this picture.  See the two squares flanking a rectangle on each side of the center lawn?  At my house, where there used to be a rectangular lawn that never had enough sun to survive, I have made this same configuration, only I just have a single row.  Right now, I have cobblestones as the outline, and I haven't covered the surrounding hard pack clay with gravel (may have to go with sand to save money).   I put a wire obelisk in the middle of each square.  In the rectangle I have a taller tuteur I bought 25 years ago.

Right now, my composition looks awful.  There is a jumble of moribund tomato vines clinging to the wire frames, and some zinnias flopped everywhere, a couple still producing bright red blooms.  These temporary plants are headed to the compost bin soon.  Then, I'm going to make some decisions about what to put in the middle and how to make a very low box border to replace the cobblestones.  For the winter, I'm going to put two tall ivy topiaries in each square (that is, if I can get the containers moved - I'm afraid the ivy roots have grown into the ground where I plopped them some years ago by the basement door).

So, by next summer when I have it all together, I should have two squares and a rectangle within a rectangle surrounded by two rows of boxwood and a hemlock hedge (both already there).  Of course, it will be much smaller and narrower than the garden above and looser in feel.

 I've dreamed of gardens I wanted, but never, ever would I have thought I'd ever choose this one to copy.  I must say, though, that I love it already, as crudely done as it is, and I look forward to next year when I can show you my version of a garden to look down on.

A garden to look down on

Lately I've been thinking a lot about garden styles since I've lost so many big trees and now have some sun - something I've never had here in 38 years.  I used to dream that I had a cottage garden full of sun-loving flowers.  Of course, the house and lot didn't look anything like mine (dreams are like that), but I do think that my obsessive longing for sun must have had an impact on my sub-conscious.

So, what does this have to do with the above photograph, obviously a formal style I would never want or even have a grand space for?  The fact is, I've already borrowed something from this garden, something I never dreamed I would do.

 I took this photograph in Paris from an apartment I rented in the Marais district when my two daughters and I took a trip to celebrate birthday/graduations.  I never saw one person in the garden, nor did I ever see anyone enter the opposite building.  I don't know if it was another apartment building or some kind of business headquarters or offices.  There was no one to ask, since the rental was through an agency.

I do have good memories of sitting by the open window with my breakfast (part of a fresh baguette slathered with unsalted butter and cherry Bonne Maman preserves - I haven't found that flavor in any store here) and a piece of Caprice des Dieux cheese (can't find that here, either), along with my cafe au lait.  I would study the garden and try to identify the plants they'd used - I could see peonies and an allium, and I thought those variegated trees could be some sort of cornus.  There is Clematis armandii over on the left. And those espaliers in the boxes looked like sasanquas, but why would the left one have flowers at the end of May?

If I looked to my right or left out of the window at my level, I saw something much more to my liking - charming mansard roofs with window boxes overflowing with ivy geraniums.  The photos I took almost looked like paintings of an old, rustic Paris.  The style was in total contrast to the scene below and was something that pleased my eye much more than the stiff lines of the formal garden.

Yet, here's what I did.  I have a rectangular space surrounded by a rather unkempt hemlock hedge.  When I go on the back balcony (actually, I've always referred to it as a concrete deck), I look down on that area.  This past May, as I was staring down at the tall hedge with boxwood borders, wondering what on earth I could do now that two large oaks were gone, it hit me.

I came in here to the computer and brought up this picture.  See the two squares flanking a rectangle on each side of the center lawn?  At my house, where there used to be a rectangular lawn that never had enough sun to survive, I have made this same configuration, only I just have a single row.  Right now, I have cobblestones as the outline, and I haven't covered the surrounding hard pack clay with gravel (may have to go with sand to save money).   I put a wire obelisk in the middle of each square.  In the rectangle I have a taller tuteur I bought 25 years ago.

Right now, my composition looks awful.  There is a jumble of moribund tomato vines clinging to the wire frames, and some zinnias flopped everywhere, a couple still producing bright red blooms.  These temporary plants are headed to the compost bin soon.  Then, I'm going to make some decisions about what to put in the middle and how to make a very low box border to replace the cobblestones.  For the winter, I'm going to put two tall ivy topiaries in each square (that is, if I can get the containers moved - I'm afraid the ivy roots have grown into the ground where I plopped them some years ago by the basement door).

So, by next summer when I have it all together, I should have two squares and a rectangle within a rectangle surrounded by two rows of boxwood and a hemlock hedge (both already there).  Of course, it will be much smaller and narrower than the garden above and looser in feel.

 I've dreamed of gardens I wanted, but never, ever would I have thought I'd ever choose this one to copy.  I must say, though, that I love it already, as crudely done as it is, and I look forward to next year when I can show you my version of a garden to look down on.

My avoidable baseball error

Finally, I am able to look at the above photograph of this beautiful chartreuse version of Boston ivy and not cringe.  But, it's taken me a while.

Back in the era when I depended on catalogs and books for plant information, really before we were googling everything, I wrote something that was totally wrong in my column in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.  Before that day, I had made mistakes (misused the word "peltate", said a tree was an oak, when it was really a pecan, etc.), but nothing like this.  I still remember the sting of embarrassment over making such a glaring error that it caused an uproar among readers.

Here's the story:  My husband died suddenly of a heart attack in 1999.  He had many passions, but at the top of the list was baseball, and at the top of that list was the preservation of Fenway Park, the venerable home of the Boston Red Sox.  He was beside himself that the old ball park was in danger of being torn down.  He wrote letters and talked to anyone who would listen.  He even had a bumper sticker on his truck that read "Save Fenway Park".

He was such a devotee that the evening before he and I were to take our daughter to St. Paul's School for the first time (she was going into 9th grade and was petrified over the whole boarding school idea), the three of us sat shivering in the misty cold to watch the Red Sox play, so he could experience Fenway Park.  A couple of years before that, our family was touring Boston, and he had begged a worker to let us into the ball park even though there was no game.  My husband showed us the famous left field wall known as the Green Monster and explained that it was so high a player could be robbed of what would be a home run at any other ball field.  I took a photograph of him pointing to the Green Monster.  He framed the picture and put it on a shelf in his library.  I must have looked at it a zillion times.

Fast forward a handful of years after his death.  I was looking through one of my favorite catalogs and saw a chartreuse form of Boston ivy called 'Fenway Park'.  I went crazy.  What a great plant to have in his memory.  I could put it on the wall of the family cemetery in Tate, Georgia.  Also, I was excited about introducing a fabulous new cultivar to readers of the AJC.

I found someone who had a good specimen so I could take a photo (on the above mailbox) to go with my column.  But here came the error.  The writer of the catalog said the plant was a sport from the Boston ivy growing on the Green Monster at Fenway Park in Boston.  I repeated the information.  It never occurred to me to verify the story, nor did I think to look at the picture of my husband.  I did think about how pretty the Boston ivy was at Wrigley Field in Chicago and how Cubs fans valued the vine, even though at times balls had gotten stuck in the foliage and caused problems with plays.

But that's all the thinking I did. 

The paper came out on Thursday, and the e-mails started. The Features editor called.  The "Corrections" editor called.  There was no vine on the Green Monster and never had been, one man informed me.  A woman wondered if I had gotten Fenway Park mixed up with Wrigley Field.  Another irate man said you never call a ball park a "stadium".  Even his eight year old son knew better (I used "field" and "ball park", but I also used "stadium", as the writer of the catalog had done).  

I called Dr. Michael Dirr, who was kind, but said he knew the minute he read it that the information was wrong.  He gave me the telephone number of the man from the Arnold Arboretum who had discovered the sport so I could write a correction for the paper. 

The real story was that Peter Del Tredici, a senior research scientist at the arboretum, was walking to a baseball game with his son in September 1988.  He looked up as the sun was setting and noticed that some of the Boston ivy on an apartment building a few blocks from Fenway Park seemed to be glowing.  The lower portions of the vine were the typical dark green, but the leaves up high were bright yellow.

A few weeks later, Del Tredici obtained cuttings. When he determined that the plant was stable and would hold its color (depending on the exposure, either chartreuse or chartreuse/yellow), he sought permission from the Boston Red Sox to name the vine 'Fenway Park'.

I'm glad to say that I'm just about over the incident and am ready to buy the vine (sorry to say, I can't plant it in Tate due to a family feud over spaces in the cemetery).  But guess what.  When I looked on-line, there it was - the exact story about its being a sport from the Boston ivy growing on the Green Monster.  That's okay.  At least Parthenocissus tricuspidata 'Fenway Park' is still for sale.  And, maybe all those readers no longer remember the lady who "needs to go to a Red Sox game so she'll know what she's talking about."

My avoidable baseball error

Finally, I am able to look at the above photograph of this beautiful chartreuse version of Boston ivy and not cringe.  But, it's taken me a while.

Back in the era when I depended on catalogs and books for plant information, really before we were googling everything, I wrote something that was totally wrong in my column in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.  Before that day, I had made mistakes (misused the word "peltate", said a tree was an oak, when it was really a pecan, etc.), but nothing like this.  I still remember the sting of embarrassment over making such a glaring error that it caused an uproar among readers.

Here's the story:  My husband died suddenly of a heart attack in 1999.  He had many passions, but at the top of the list was baseball, and at the top of that list was the preservation of Fenway Park, the venerable home of the Boston Red Sox.  He was beside himself that the old ball park was in danger of being torn down.  He wrote letters and talked to anyone who would listen.  He even had a bumper sticker on his truck that read "Save Fenway Park".

He was such a devotee that the evening before he and I were to take our daughter to St. Paul's School for the first time (she was going into 9th grade and was petrified over the whole boarding school idea), the three of us sat shivering in the misty cold to watch the Red Sox play, so he could experience Fenway Park.  A couple of years before that, our family was touring Boston, and he had begged a worker to let us into the ball park even though there was no game.  My husband showed us the famous left field wall known as the Green Monster and explained that it was so high a player could be robbed of what would be a home run at any other ball field.  I took a photograph of him pointing to the Green Monster.  He framed the picture and put it on a shelf in his library.  I must have looked at it a zillion times.

Fast forward a handful of years after his death.  I was looking through one of my favorite catalogs and saw a chartreuse form of Boston ivy called 'Fenway Park'.  I went crazy.  What a great plant to have in his memory.  I could put it on the wall of the family cemetery in Tate, Georgia.  Also, I was excited about introducing a fabulous new cultivar to readers of the AJC.

I found someone who had a good specimen so I could take a photo (on the above mailbox) to go with my column.  But here came the error.  The writer of the catalog said the plant was a sport from the Boston ivy growing on the Green Monster at Fenway Park in Boston.  I repeated the information.  It never occurred to me to verify the story, nor did I think to look at the picture of my husband.  I did think about how pretty the Boston ivy was at Wrigley Field in Chicago and how Cubs fans valued the vine, even though at times balls had gotten stuck in the foliage and caused problems with plays.

But that's all the thinking I did. 

The paper came out on Thursday, and the e-mails started. The Features editor called.  The "Corrections" editor called.  There was no vine on the Green Monster and never had been, one man informed me.  A woman wondered if I had gotten Fenway Park mixed up with Wrigley Field.  Another irate man said you never call a ball park a "stadium".  Even his eight year old son knew better (I used "field" and "ball park", but I also used "stadium", as the writer of the catalog had done).  

I called Dr. Michael Dirr, who was kind, but said he knew the minute he read it that the information was wrong.  He gave me the telephone number of the man from the Arnold Arboretum who had discovered the sport so I could write a correction for the paper. 

The real story was that Peter Del Tredici, a senior research scientist at the arboretum, was walking to a baseball game with his son in September 1988.  He looked up as the sun was setting and noticed that some of the Boston ivy on an apartment building a few blocks from Fenway Park seemed to be glowing.  The lower portions of the vine were the typical dark green, but the leaves up high were bright yellow.

A few weeks later, Del Tredici obtained cuttings. When he determined that the plant was stable and would hold its color (depending on the exposure, either chartreuse or chartreuse/yellow), he sought permission from the Boston Red Sox to name the vine 'Fenway Park'.

I'm glad to say that I'm just about over the incident and am ready to buy the vine (sorry to say, I can't plant it in Tate due to a family feud over spaces in the cemetery).  But guess what.  When I looked on-line, there it was - the exact story about its being a sport from the Boston ivy growing on the Green Monster.  That's okay.  At least Parthenocissus tricuspidata 'Fenway Park' is still for sale.  And, maybe all those readers no longer remember the lady who "needs to go to a Red Sox game so she'll know what she's talking about."

To my favorite veteran on 11-11-11

Dear Uncle Claude,
It was so great to talk to you on this Veterans' Day.  You and I were on the phone at the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day in a year that ends with 11.  You sounded so good, so sweet and friendly and caring, as always, and you called me by my name.  I can't tell you how much that meant to me.  Aunt Wynette tells me that you won't remember our conversation, but that's okay.

The picture I've posted today is of Flanders Field poppies in a Georgia garden.  I noticed the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were wearing plastic ones at a benefit last night for England's National Memorial Arboretum.  You, of course, served in World War II, but the poppies are a reminder for all veterans everywhere that we'll never forget your bravery.

I am so happy to have a DVD of an interview with you, conducted by Georgia Public Television for their World War II veterans' project. The only thing is that you didn't tell the really horrible things that happened.  You were so humble and never took any credit for your great courage.  Nor did you complain about all you endured.

Until the last decade (you are 88 years old), you never talked about what happened to you during the war.  I found the letters you wrote to your mother (you were the youngest of nine children, born when your mother was 43 years old).  My grandmother never knew what you were really going through.  You told me a couple of years ago that you didn't want her to worry.  Not once did you say that your feet froze as you crawled along the ground in the cold forests of the Vosges Mountains in eastern France, hoping to avoid the Germans whose shouts you could hear only a few yards away.

I won't go into the terrors you experienced as you made your way all the way to Berchtesgaden or how you came to have the swastika armband of an SS officer.  You were so young, from the community of Rico in the Georgia countryside,where there was only a crossroads with two churches and a one-room country store.  And, to think how many there were just like you.

Okay.  You would not like all this maudlin carrying-on.  I will, however, say how much my mother and her six sisters and brother all loved you, as well as your son and daughter and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and your many nieces and nephews.  You have been the executor of so many wills and have carried out the wishes of your aunts and sisters and have been the backbone of my mother's large family.  You and Aunt Wynette have comforted all of us when we've needed your strength.

So, I think of you today and am grateful for you and for everyone who has served in the armed forces.  Thank you so much.

Your loving niece,
Martha

To my favorite veteran on 11-11-11

Dear Uncle Claude,
It was so great to talk to you on this Veterans' Day.  You and I were on the phone at the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day in a year that ends with 11.  You sounded so good, so sweet and friendly and caring, as always, and you called me by my name.  I can't tell you how much that meant to me.  Aunt Wynette tells me that you won't remember our conversation, but that's okay.

The picture I've posted today is of Flanders Field poppies in a Georgia garden.  I noticed the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were wearing plastic ones at a benefit last night for England's National Memorial Arboretum.  You, of course, served in World War II, but the poppies are a reminder for all veterans everywhere that we'll never forget your bravery.

I am so happy to have a DVD of an interview with you, conducted by Georgia Public Television for their World War II veterans' project. The only thing is that you didn't tell the really horrible things that happened.  You were so humble and never took any credit for your great courage.  Nor did you complain about all you endured.

Until the last decade (you are 88 years old), you never talked about what happened to you during the war.  I found the letters you wrote to your mother (you were the youngest of nine children, born when your mother was 43 years old).  My grandmother never knew what you were really going through.  You told me a couple of years ago that you didn't want her to worry.  Not once did you say that your feet froze as you crawled along the ground in the cold forests of the Vosges Mountains in eastern France, hoping to avoid the Germans whose shouts you could hear only a few yards away.

I won't go into the terrors you experienced as you made your way all the way to Berchtesgaden or how you came to have the swastika armband of an SS officer.  You were so young, from the community of Rico in the Georgia countryside,where there was only a crossroads with two churches and a one-room country store.  And, to think how many there were just like you.

Okay.  You would not like all this maudlin carrying-on.  I will, however, say how much my mother and her six sisters and brother all loved you, as well as your son and daughter and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and your many nieces and nephews.  You have been the executor of so many wills and have carried out the wishes of your aunts and sisters and have been the backbone of my mother's large family.  You and Aunt Wynette have comforted all of us when we've needed your strength.

So, I think of you today and am grateful for you and for everyone who has served in the armed forces.  Thank you so much.

Your loving niece,
Martha

Staying home for the ginkgo

Margaret Moseley has dug in for the duration, and nothing can pry her away from home for the near future.

"Everybody who knows me knows I will not leave home this time of year until the ginkgo leaves have fallen," says the 95-year-old, whose garden has been the subject of television shows and has appeared in magazines, newspapers and books.  "I'm not going anywhere, even to get my hair fixed."

What is this about?  Margaret planted a ginkgo tree right outside her large sun porch around 30 years ago. "It was about the size of a broom handle, about three feet tall," she recalls.  "It's now over 40 feet high.  My friend Cy says they are slow growing, but mine just took off."  Every November, the leaves turn a bright gold and then all at once, within an hour's time, they fall to the ground.

"It starts with just one leaf coming down," she says.  "And then, there will be three, and that's when I know that they are all about to fall.  If you see that one leaf, you'd better find a comfortable chair because you're about to see a show.  One of my daughters happened to be over here one year when the leaves started falling.  She went out there and stood while they just rained down on her.  She couldn't believe it."

Several years ago, a pine tree crashed down in Margaret's yard, taking out one side of the ginkgo.   "Everybody in Atlanta knew it, because I called them up and told them about it.  I cried for days.  But now, you can't even tell it ever happened."

Yesterday, as I was driving around, I noticed the ginkgo trees around town had turned yellow.  This morning I called Margaret to check on the progress because last night, it rained, and today is gray and windy and cold.

"It looks like the sun is shining out there, it's so bright overhead," she told me.  "It's the prettiest thing you've ever seen."

Margaret estimates that the leaves still have at least a week and a half, because some of them are still green.

"My daughter has invited me to Thanksgiving at her house, and I've already warned her.  If the ginkgo leaves haven't fallen, I'm not coming.  I wait a whole year to watch this happen, and I'm not going to take a chance.  I'll just stay here and eat a peanut butter sandwich."

Note:  I took the above photograph several years ago at my church, Peachtree Road United Methodist in Atlanta.  I'm taking my camera this Sunday in hopes of capturing the tree before the leaves fall.