Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Gertrude Jekyll Garden at Lindisfarne Castle

We had spent most of the morning waiting in an Edinburgh queue for our rental car.  Then Milo had to go to the bathroom so we stopped in Dunbar on the Scottish coast, where we enjoyed the self-proclaimed "Best Loo of 2010" facilities. In addition to the loo (which really was pretty fantastic), Dunbar boasts the ruins of a "slighted" castle, one deliberately destroyed in 1568 to prevent it falling into enemy hands.  The castle is set on a promontory in Victoria Harbor, the day was fresh and beautiful, and we lingered.  The children rolled down the steep grassy embankment to the harbor again and again. 

So by the time we got to Lindisfarne Castle, our destination for the day, it was early afternoon.  I had plucked this site from the British Heritage Pass list in haste, thinking it had literary associations.  A Scott novel?  (It turned out to be where the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of England's finest surviving illuminated manuscripts, was created in the eighth century.  Oh well.)  The castle is on Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, and can only be reached by a causeway.  The causeway, in turn, is accessible only at low tide.  And the tide comes back in at 3:45 p.m. in August. 

We raced across the causeway and skidded into the parking lot just in time to catch the last shuttle bus up to the castle.  Our first acquaintance with the truly impenetrable Northumberland accent was when the driver told us, not once but several times, that we would not get to the castle in time for the last entry at 2:30.  We just kept saying we wanted to try.

We hustled the children up the steep stone path to the castle entrance.  As we were showing our pass to get in, I noticed a pamphlet about the Gertrude Jekyll garden at Lindisfarne.  Which I had not known.  Anything.  About.

I pretty much lost my mind, abandoned Madge and the kids, and raced across the meadow to the small walled garden Jekyll created with her collaborator, the architect Edwin Lutyens, who renovated the castle in the Arts and Crafts style starting in 1901.  The two worked together on some famous commissions, but this one, for publishing magnate Edward Hudson, is one of the few that remains.  Hudson featured the work of Lutyens and Jekyll, as well as their writings on home and garden design, in his iconic magazine Country Life, confirming their status as households names of the English domestic arts. 

I like to think of Jekyll as the Gertrude Stein of English garden history.  (She never married, and wore men's boots.)

Although the garden had fallen into disrepair by mid-century, it was restored according to Jekyll's original plan when the property was acquired by the National Trust in 1944.  It's one of only four Jekyll gardens left in the world.  I had stumbled upon a jewel.

Jekyll's designs are known for their untouched sweeps of lawn and naturalistic planting.  Hudson had originally envisaged a vast landscaped area stretching from the original 16th-century walled garden all the way up to the castle walls, creating a unified work of art from house and garden as was typical of Lutyens-Jekyll collaborations.  But he ran out of money by the time Jekyll began work in 1911, so she was constrained to this rather boxy design.  Needless to say, she rocked it.

Jekyll's signature massed beds of one color,

and unique cultivars--she herself developed almost 60 new varieties and introduced hundreds more to English gardens from around the world--including woolly lambs-ear, a staple of Austin gardens--

bear all the marks of her signature style.  She used form as well as color to shape her garden artifacts.

I had only about fifteen minutes in this treasure-box before the tide rolled in.  I snapped pictures so quickly I actually broke my camera and had to use my iPhone for the rest of our trip.  Madge and the kids almost had to drive off the island without me.

All the more precious for that.

 

Holyrood Palace Garden

Plodding down the rain-soaked Royal Mile in Edinburgh in August, we four drought-battered Texans could not have been happier.  We toured the palace best known as the royal residence of Mary, Queen of Scots, and then the skies cleared just in time for Max and I to walk through the garden.

Holyroodhouse Palace is the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland, and the Queen spends one week a year here in early summer.  (Like Queen Victoria, she prefers Balmoral for family vacations.)  Built in the twelfth century by King David I of Scotland, the palace was where Elizabeth I had the advisors of her cousin and rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, murdered, as both a strategy and a warning.  We saw the tiny royal bedroom where Mary was sitting at dinner when her men were dragged into the adjoining chamber and audibly slaughtered.  Although Mary lived for another twenty years, Elizabeth managed to keep her from the throne.  She essentially kidnapped Mary's son James and raised him as a Protestant as the price of letting the monarchy fall back into Stuart hands after her death.  The green, northern darkness of the 10-hectare garden seemed a fit setting for this bloody history.

A privy garden has existed on this site since the 16th century, although the current design dates from the 19th, when the current carriage drive was installed to spare royal visitors the trip through the Canongate slums on their way to the palace.  Sculptural features include a 17th-century John Mylne sundial and this undated piece of Burnsian whimsy:

The overcast day showed off the garden's subtle contrasts of color

and texture. 

For a color slut like me, the garden was a little monochromatic, but it certainly had its dark charms, including lots of my favorite color, purple. As you complete the circuit, you come back around to the front of the palace from which you get a spectacular view of Arthur's Seat, the hill overlooking Edinburgh. 

As I write here at the end of the driest 11-month period since Texas began keeping records in 1895, Holyrood Garden's damp northern beauty is a cooling memory.

 

 

 

Yorkshire Cottage Garden

In an earlier post, I commented on the beauty and ubiquity of everyday gardens in England--what are known as "cottage gardens."  The art of gardening is so widespread and well understood that gardens that look spectacular to North American eyes are seen as nothing special in the U.K.--just what anybody would do.  So it was that when I praised the beautiful cultivated quarter-acre outside the front door of Gate Farm, the bed and breakfast where we stayed in rural Yorkshire in August, the owner, Karen, said, "Garden?  Oh no.  Things are just shoved in anywhere."

Not exactly.

Karen and her husband are the sixth generation of tenants to farm here, dating back to the first decade of the nineteenth century.  When Karen married and moved into the house, her mother-in-law had been living alone there for some time, and had not been able to keep up with the garden.  (The vine arch in over the path, above, was the work of Karen's father-in-law.)  While running the farm and the B&B, raising children, and now looking after grandchildren, Karen has been planting whenever she gets the chance, focusing mainly on big splashes of color. 

Like most of us, she doesn't design in advance, but rather edits the garden as she goes along, moving plants as they reach maturity and she realizes they are in the wrong place. 

In addition to beautiful planted elements, among the garden's charms are the antique farm implements and machine parts strewn around the space, adding interesting textures, shapes and shadows.

Of course, there is plenty of equipment currently in use as well on a working farm.

Beside the walled-in flowerbeds is an open lawn shaded by a large oak,

bounded by an ancient stone wall,

and hedged with yew.

And from every seat in the garden, you just have to look up to see the breathtaking Yorkshire Dales.

 

 

Harry Potter's Garden

Travelling with ten- and seven-year-old boys, you come to see the U.K. as one giant Harry Potter theme park.  In Oxford, you can do a Harry Potter tour of colleges used as film locations.  In Edinburgh, you can sit in the back room of the Elephant Cafe and gaze at the view of Stirling Castle that inspired J.K. Rowling when, as an unemployed single mother, she penned the first two books in the series.  (And of course, you can purchase the indispensable "Birthplace of Harry Potter" muggle...er, mug.)  But our best day of Harry Potter tourism took place at Alnwick Castle, the "Hogwarts" of all eight movies, where Max and Milo took broomstick-flying lessons.

Fortunately for me, Alnwick is the site of what is reputed to be the most ambitious current garden project in Britain.  The castle, built after the Norman Conquest and renovated many times to fit the tastes of different eras, is the home of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.  The family is in residence for part of every year, and Alnwick Castle Garden is the project of the current Duchess, Jane.  Many of the gardens I've written about have the goal of historical re-creation, attempting to showcase a classic design from another period.  This garden is decidedly contemporary.  Work did not begin on the garden until 1996.  Since then, Jacques and Peter Wirtz, the stellar Belgian garden design team, have been working with the Duchess to bring her vision of a "garden for gardeners" that is also a "garden for families" to life. 

The first thing you see is a spectacular water feature by William Pye, The Grand Cascade.

The bold linearity of the design is set off by luxurious textures, such as the river rocks at the bottom of the small waterways

that run throughout the garden.  At the top of the Cascade is the Ornamental Garden, where this hard/soft tension is expressed through the contrast between the perfectly-trimmed, sharp-angled box and beech hedges

and the lush shapes and intense colors of the plantings.

Once again I greeted the familiar coneflower (ecinachea), which it turns out is as popular a garden flower in England as in Texas, where we like it because it can tolerate drought and heat.  Apparently it doesn't object to temperate climes and lots of rain either.

This part of the landscape garden is walled, and makes imaginative use of the textural contrasts between stone and shrub.  Often, the relationship is a delightful surprise:  it is the artfully-shaped yew topiary that seems hard while the warm, weathered stone looks soft.

The rectilinear crabapple pergolas shaped the space beautifully,

reminding me of the Donald Judd sculptures in Marfa, Texas.

Alnwick Castle Garden currently consists of ten different features, and I was not able to visit them all, but I could not resist venturing behind the locked gate of the Poison Garden.

In addition to well-known posionous plants such as deadly nightshade and stinging nettle, there were familiar garden plants such as laurel and vinca that I had not realized "can kill."  Opium poppies, cannabis, and even tea had their place, for as our guide (no one is allowed in the poison garden without a guide) reminded us, addictive substances work because they are just a tiny bit toxic.  I'll bet this is where the the students in the Hogwarts Potions class do their fieldwork.

My Mother's Garden

My mother, Joyce Moore, is a naturalist and writer who published a book last year called A Guide to Alberta Outdoors: Rides, Hikes, Birds and Beasts.  We visited her and my dad this past weekend to help celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary (and while we were there, Madge and I decided to get legally married too.)  Visiting "my mother's garden" in the wake of finishing Sister Arts  led me to pay some professional attention to her landscape aesthetic.

My mom's degree (from 1960) is in home economics, which at the University of Guelph at that time included design.  Her taste definitely runs to Danish Modern (they still have a classic living room set I love) and her eye in the yard is equally clean, favoring beautiful lines and plenty of open space punctuated with color.

Southern Alberta has had a long, cold, rainy spring, which was miserable for the natives but for July visitors resulted in a spectacular landscape:  green, lush, and blossomy.  My parents' yard in Calgary is in a neighborhood that dates from the 1950s (my dad actually worked construction on the crew that built it when he was in vet school). 

The trees are huge and the plants well established. 

I remember this mountain ash from when it was about six feet tall.  It bears bright-red berries that ferment in the Alberta sun.  They attract cedar waxwings who gobble them up and then fly drunkenly into the living room window.  As kids we used to tape paper cut-outs of hawks to the window to scare the waxwings off and save their little lives.

My favorites are the flowers I remember from childhood:  bleeding hearts,

poppies,

and lilacs, here overgrown among the branches of a fifty-foot spruce tree by the driveway.

This green, deep-bosomed yard was like a cool draught of water.  Now we're back to the Texas heat.

 

Editing the Garden

Growing herbs in the window box outside the kitchen window was a lovely idea, and while they lasted it was great to slide open the window and snip whatever you needed for your recipe.  But that spot gets full sun through the afternoon and ended up being way too hot for such tender plants.  They got burned to a crisp, so I dug them up and relocated them to the front bed where we have a few straggling herbs from last year.

Who knows, they might make it.

I made the requisite Memorial Day trip to Home Depot and bought some moss roses, which look lovely in hanging baskets and are supposed to tolerate full sun.  We'll see if they can stand up to the heat reflected from the window.

I guess heat is not the only thing the window reflects.  I swear, I have been photographed (or as in this case, photographed myself) more often in that red T-shirt I got at SteinMart in Midland than in any other garment I own.

Meanwhile, the potted herbs were doing splendidly so I planted chives and virtually invisible cilantro (it had spent too long unplanted) in a new container.

Looking forward to sprinkling these on grilled fish and vegetables.

In front-bed news, the Starry Eyes flowers we planted in our newly-ameliorated soil just withered up, so Madge put some balloon flowers there:

Hope they last; they are gorgeous.

Did you all see the wonderful article by historian David Blight in today's NYT?  Turns out Memorial Day was first celebrated in 1865 in Charleston, S.C. by thousands of African-Americans who buried the Union dead left behind when whites fled the city.  Very much worth remembering.

Mother's Day Garden Tour

Mother's Day is kind of a big deal in our family, since we have not one, not two, but three mothers on site.  Madge's niece and her children came up from Houston to join us for the weekend so we decided to do something special and got tickets for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Garden Tour.  Since it was promoted as as Mother's Day event, we thought it was on Sunday.  Turned out to be Saturday, when we had the kids' school festival, closing night of Madge's play, and a wedding to go to, so in the end Barbara, Madge and I only got to visit two gardens.  But they were varied in scale and both inspiring.

First we went to 1008 W. Monroe, a nicely-renovated, modest-sized home in Travis Heights.  The landscapers are Kim Beal and Becca Cealy of Rain Lily Design and Landscaping.  They were both on hand to answer questions.  Kim told me that the previous owners had installed a wooden deck that stuck out halfway across the sloping yard, creating a wet, unusable space under and beyond the structure.  Rain Lily removed all that (as well as a lot of scruffy St. Augustine grass) and installed good drainage, rainwater irrigation barrels, and rock and pebble pathways and steps to allow access to the whole yard. 

The front yard was transformed from a depressing swath of St. Augustine to a native plant garden with interesting textural and color variety.  The buffalo grass was especially lush and gorgeous the day we visited, a wonderful canvas for the palette of purples and soft grey limestone.

The site is quite uneven so the designers used a variety of materials to make walkable pathways

and landing places.

Personal touches like this sculpture by a friend of the owners make the garden homey and unique.

Next we drove to 2604 Stratford Drive, a sumptuous West Lake Hills mansion on 7/10 of an acre overlooking the city.  Glee Ingram Growing Designs had transformed this steep, rocky hillside into a welcoming, beautiful, usable space.  It was spectacular, if still not completely accessible to all--you have to be in good shape to scramble up and down the well-laid out paths, some so steep they are more like ladders.  But there are lovely surprises around every corner, like this water garden at the front door:

Painted exterior walls, like these in the outdoor kitchen

and sculptural elements such as metal fencing, staircases, and a rainwater collection system

by Chris Levack, the artist who also made the spider and plant sculptures at the Mueller prairie greenbelt, punctuated the beautiful natural plantings. Like the Travis Heights property, this one is entirely irrigated by rainwater collection.  I overheard a visitor say every garden on the tour shared this feature.  She asked, "Do you think they're trying to tell us something?"

The descending pools (including a hot tub) and waterfalls were very inviting, like swimming in a combination of the Trevi Fountain and Barton Springs:

Open spaces like this alternate with shady woodland paths that invite exploration.

Seeing these beautiful examples of landscape art was a great start to Mother's Day weekend at the House of Many Moms.

Shallow Pot Succulents

According to Typepad Help, my recent travails with sideways pictures have to do with a painful interaction between the iPhone and Typepad.  I have saved these photos in a smaller format in the hopes that they will consent to appear right side up.

Madge bought three small succulents for the pot on our backyard table.

Wow, it's sideways.  Okay, we'll have to try another fix.  In the meantime, these are:  Aloe vera

whose sap is of course great for cuts, burns, and other medical uses;

Gymnocalycium mihanovichii "Hibotan" (I kid you not):

and Devils' Tongue Barrel Cactus:

Madge was attracted to the barrel cactus by its beautiful bloom.  Guess what!  When she got it home, it turned out that Home Depot and GLUED ON an ARTIFICIAL FLOWER to sell the plant!  It doesn't bloom until October or November.  Madge performed surgery and here's our unadorned plant, waiting to bloom at the proper time (and probably sideways):

Backyard Herbs and Flowers

We have not yet managed to achieve a full-on vegetable bed on our tiny Mueller yardage, so our stop-gap is that echt-urban garden, the pot. 

Umm, not sure why you have to tip your head to the left to see this, but do so please.  This is our very healthy crop of rosemary, basil and mint.  Last year I learned that with basil and mint it's very important to harvest from the bottom of the stem to encourage new growth.  That has been great for the health of these plants. 

Madge and Barbara picked up marjoram, Greek oregano and thyme one day when Madge was making a Mediterranean feast for the teacher lunch at school

In the background you can see the kitchen windowsill, where Max keeps his prized Venus flytrap.  The other pot (right) is a catnip we are going to plant out front for Ruby and Toby.

If this picture looks a little posed

it's because Milo actually does not usually help water the begonias and impatiens in this pot.  He sure decorates a photograph though.  And here is Blue, as usual inserting his beloved ball into the picture.

Okay, time to google Typepad and find out how to turn these pictures around!

Wobbly Petals: Sarah Sarai's Princess Di

Today I want to showcase another group of poems published in the excellent online journal Fringe.  Sarah Sarai is a New York poet who recently published the collection The Future is Happy (BlazeVOX).  I love the surprising ways flowers appear in her poems: 

A Bullish Run into Chambers

When a stranger is killed and laid to rest
at an altar for Public Mass of Remembrance,
African violets torn from a window’s sun
buttery as a tea cookie or rose petal,
prim Queen Anne’s lace for Diana,
buttery herself and silky, a fallen sulky,
for a child we will never meet,
a teenager who standing is caught
in crosshairs of our blood extravaganza,
aren’t we allowed our impersonal grief?
We pay to be hollowed by cinematic gore,
are immunized against capitalism’s rule:
a business must grow. The word was gore,
a bullish run into chambers born bursting
and broke. Along chain-link fences,
at street corners and Buckingham Palace,
wobbly petals mark our bid to be human.

African violets "torn,"
rose petals "buttery,"
Queen Anne's lace, paradoxically, "for Diana."
This last reference speaks so powerfully to me of the streets of London after the death of Princess Diana (which I take to be the occasion for the poem).  Madge and I happened to be in London that week in 1997, staying in a B&B in the gay neighborhood of Earl's Court.  Even though (or perhaps because) I'm Canadian, I have no real interest in the royal family, so when I had heard about the accident the week before while travelling in Greece, I thought it was sad but it had no personal meaning for me.  Not so the gays of Earl's Court.  Walking to the tube station, we passed window after window and fence after fence that had been turned into an altar or memorial, strewn not just with flowers (their "wobbly petals," in Sarai's phrase, drifting into piles on the ground as days passed) and pictures of the princess but with personal testimonies.  "You visited me in the hospital when my family would not, because I had AIDS."  "You came to our fundraiser."  "You gave me hope with your kindness and love." 

This Diana, beloved AIDS activist and icon of the gay community, had not been quite so visible to me before.  I could not help but be moved.  So although we had not planned to, Madge and I went to Kensington Palace.  Sarah's poem talks about Buckingham Palace, and there were memorials there too, but Kensington was where Diana had lived and Buckingham was the residence of "the estranged queen, keeping mum," as Madge reminded me today.  We shared the tube with families dressed in their Sunday best and drag queens equally carefully attired, and paid our respects.