Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

The Swan of Litchfield

This week's project (already past deadline!) is to write a book proposal for a new edition of poems by Anna Seward.  Here's an excerpt, followed by one of my favorite poems by the writer who made her small English city famous in the eighteenth century as "The Swan of Litchfield."

Seward (1742-1809) was one of the most popular and prolific poets of the early Romantic period.  So high was her reputation that none other than Sir Walter Scott edited the standard edition of her poems, the three-volume The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, in 1810.  Among other achievements, Seward was admired for renovating the sonnet form in English.  Arguably the dominant form in Renaissance English verse, the sonnet had gone into eclipse during the eighteenth century in favor of more public forms such as epic and satire.  Seward, along with two other important women poets, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, initiated a renewed interest in the form, which then became a prominent aspect of nineteenth-century poetics. 

Seward was admired by canonical first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, but her reputation went into decline with the emergence of the bardic role of the poet in later Romanticism.  Shelley, Keats and Byron, as famous for their athletic and sexual exploits as for their poetry, emphatically masculinized the image of the poet, and for the first time the term used to refer to women poets became the denigrating “poetess.”  The formative role of late eighteenth-century women poets in the emergence of Romanticism was obscured in literary history until the last thirty years of feminist scholarship.  Following on two decades of archival recovery work, the 1990s saw the publication of new editions of the work of Smith and Robinson (Oxford, 1993, ed. Curran; Broadview, 2000, ed. Pascoe).  What is missing is the third leg of the stool of the early Romantic sonnet revival:  a new edition of the poems of Anna Seward. 

I first became interested in Seward as a poet of love between women.  In my book Sister Arts, which includes a chapter on Seward, I describe the trope of "lesbian death wish elegy" in which the poet writes about the loss of her beloved after marriage, mourning it as if it were a death.  Here's one of Seward's notable contributions to the tradition.  It's addressed, as were many of her poems, to a beautiful younger woman, Honora Sneyd:

Sonnet XII

Chlll'd by unkind HONORA's alter'd eye,
"Why droops my heart with pining woe forlorn,"
Thankless for much of good?-what thousands, born
To ceaseless toll beneath this wintry sky,
Or to brave deathful oceans surging high,
Or fell Disease's fever'd rage to mourn,
How blest to them would seem my destiny!
How dear the comforts my rash sorrows scorn!-
Affection is repaid by causeless hate!
A plighted love is changed to cold disdain!
Yet suffer not thy wrongs to shroud thy fate,
But turn, my soul, to blessings which remain;
And let this truth the wise resolve create,
The Heart estranged no anguish can regain.

If Gardens Are Art, Who Is The Artist?

Yesterday I had the very great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on my book, Sister Arts.  Several of my graduate and undergraduate students were there, including Max, an especially engaged member of my lower-division Introduction to Creative Writing class.  Max asked the first question and it was probably the most productive of the whole discussion:  "If gardens are art, who is the artist?"

In some ways this is a very American question.  There is a long and distinguished tradition of English garden historians who have made careers out of studying gardens as art, an equation that is rarely questioned in English academic or museum contexts.  When I participated in a workshop at Sir John Soane's Museum to help plan the Mrs Delany and Her Circle exhibition, the group of about twenty curators and academics included a specialist in the history of grasses, one who studied shellwork, and Mark Laird of Harvard, who had just finished re-creating the eighteenth-century plantings at Painshill Park.  

But by the same token, the English themselves make a distinction between garden designers, whose work is studied by historians of landscape architecture like Laird,  and gardeners, those who carry out the "simple job" of maintaining the garden.  I've written here and here about the status of gardening as England's national pastime; working-class men who in America would be fixing cars on the weekends instead tend their roses,

or as in the case of this 2009 winner of the Scarisbrick Parish Best-Kept Garden Competition, their petunias.  At most, this work is regarded as craft rather than art; at least, as property maintenance, a kind of outdoor housework.  In the sister arts tradition of confounding the line between amateur and professional, art and craft, garden and landscape, we want want to claim these blokes as sister-artists.  (Wouldn't they be surprised.)

In answering Max's question I talked about three kinds of garden makers:  the wealthy patron of taste who envisions and funds the project of a major garden, such as Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, whose Alnwick Garden, which I wrote about here,  is the most ambitious contemporary landscape design in Europe:

the celebrity designer, like Capability Brown (1716-1783), seen here in a Nathaniel Dance portrait:

and the groundskeeper who actually plants, weeds, trims, waters and sweeps to keep the garden looking as intended, as here at Alnwick.

One of my favorite examples of how this third, often overlooked garden artist can affect meaning is on the UT campus just outside the English department.  UT's landscape is liberally strewn with statues by Pompeo Luigi Compini, dating from the early twentieth century; many of them are of rather dubious figures from Confederate history.  On the plaza in front of the Main Building, topped by the infamous UT Tower, two statues face down the quad to the Texas State Capitol a few blocks away:  Woodrow Wilson to the east, and Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy, to the west.  

The plaza's axial design means that the statues were meant to be a matched set, equally visible from the quad.  But over several years of teaching a course called Sister Arts in which I take students around campus to look at its design features, I've noticed that someone has trimmed the trees beside the Davis statue so that branches obscure its face when viewed from the quad.  You can see Woodrow Wilson just fine, but Davis has been literally thrust into the shadows by the anonymous garden artists of the UT groundskeeping crew.

Fifties Experimental Film: A Glimpse of the Garden

My friend Chad Bennett sent me a link to A Glimpse of the Garden,

a wild little movie by the mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaker Marie Menken.

Born in 1909 in Brooklyn, Menken was associated with the fifties underground film scene in New York that also included Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Kenneth Anger (considered by many to be a forerunner of queer cinema).  She also appeared in several Warhol films herself.  Her famously rocky marriage to poet Willard Maas, said to be jealous of her greater success as an artist, was the inspiration for the toxic relationship between George and Martha in Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Yikes! 

I must say that in Mike Nichols' famous 1966 film version, Elizabeth Taylor does look a little like the picture above of Marie.  Maas has been identified as the off-camera presence providing fellatio to DeVeren Bookwaiter in Warhol's 1964 film Blow Job, and he also had an affair with botanist Rupert Barneby, whose lover Dwight Ripley is credited in Menken's film with giving her access to their garden. 

In this five-minute film, we see only plants and landscape and hear only birdsong; the sole indication of a human presence is the camera itself, proceeding at a walking pace along paths and across lawns, occasionally pausing to focus on a particular bloom or tree, and finally gazing at sunset over the garden.  Alternating between long, swooping shots, quick cuts between images, and steady-camera shots in which the only movement is the wind through the leaves and flowers, the film is formally ravishing.  Menken's work is noted for its respect for the objects filmed (as is also seen in her film Lights), her desire and ability to sense (or is it produce?) consciousness in inanimate objects.  This aesthetic is of a piece with the interest in materials and in abstraction of the New York School, Fluxus and Abstract Expressionist artists that formed part of Menken's circle.  Her painterly sense can also be seen in the title frame, above, which might, like her film Drips in Strips, be a humorous and loving tribute to Pollock-style drip painting. 

Sister artist, species fag-hag.

 

 

 

On Phillis Wheatley's Imagination

Today I had the pleasure of hearing Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley give a talk on the voudon loa Ezili, a force of nature that protects femininity and creativity, as an epistemology for understanding Caribbean genders and transgenders.  I have been working slowly and with great pleasure through Tinsley's book Thiefing Sugar:  Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature.

I was electrified to read the following sentence in Tinsley's Introduction:  "What happens when the beloved/landscape and the poet/lover are both women?"  Although Tinsley is writing about Caribbean literature and I'm writing about eighteenth-century gardens, these questions also describe the project of my own recent book, Sister Arts.  I think that makes our books sisters.

In this afternoon's lecture Tinsley spoke movingly about the hard work of being a black woman (as instanced by the cultural work of misisis and madivines, the Haitian genderqueers who are the focus of her new research).  She also talked about the transformative power of feeling good, and about the crucial role the imagination must play in that transformation.  My friend Omi Jones was in the audience and asked Tinsley about how she was experimenting, post-tenure, with new, poetic forms of writing (for instance in her recent essay "Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic.")  And that made me think of Phillis Wheatley

whose poem "On Imagination" I read this morning as I continued to make my way through Black Nature, which I've written about here and here.  It's always seemed to me a stunning poem on many levels, not least of which is the sheer ambition of writing a sublime and existential poem that engages with a major Enlightenment aesthetic debate, all from a position of enslavement.  But not of the imagination, and that's the point.  That's the way in which the virtuousity of Wheatley's poetry is always making a rhetorical argument in favor the humanity of the speaker, but in the face of dizzyingly high stakes that would have silenced a lesser talent.  For your inspiration today, here is her poem:

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.
From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov'd objects strikes her wand'ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring though air to find the bright abode,
Th'empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind;
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd;
Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow'r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought.
Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler Thou,
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high;
From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

1767-1773?

Wheatley is, as Tinsley would say, one of Ezili's children.

My Face Felt Loved: Eileen Myles' Inferno

Busy writing this week so I thought I would post a brief excerpt from my forthcoming review of Eileen Myles' new autobiographical novel Inferno.  The review will be in the Women's Review of Books in the fall. 

"Best known as a poet, Myles was affiliated first with New York School figures surrounding St. Mark’s Church (Ted Berrigan, Bill Zavatsky, and, especially lovingly rendered here, Alice Notley), and later with a new generation of queer punk performance artists including Sister Spit, with whom she toured in the post-Riot Grrl era.  Myles’ ability to remain cool to succeeding generations of queer and vanguard artists is what led Bust to call her “the rock star of modern poetry.”  Patti Smith moved to Detroit and Alice Notley to Paris, but Eileen Myles, although she chaired the Creative Writing Program at University of California-San Diego for five years, won the Shelley Prize, toured Iceland and Ireland and criss-crossed the United States numerous times, lives in the same East Village apartment that’s been her home base for thirty years.  Myles is the author of nearly twenty books, but her downtown cred is still impeccable—so pure that despite her iconic status among outlaw writers and performers, she has never published a book with a mainstream press or been reviewed in the New York Times.  A lot of poets I know would say that that pretty much guarantees that her work will be immortal...

This book contains some of the most memorable erotic writing I’ve ever read—words that evoke not just what is sexy, but what is specifically lesbian about two women together:

Another mouth.  Like lips between her legs and the taste of it.  Piss and fruit.  I pressed my face against its bone and it moved.  She was letting me.  All this was happening.  I smelled the future right there, a present and a past.  All that went through her, known through the soft sweet flesh of her lips and clit.  It was like my face felt loved temporarily.  It wasn’t even long this feeling of total rightness.  I was telling her clit a story.  If there is a warm disassociation this was it:  placing my head one night on her warm puss and lapped.  I felt plunged into a tropical movie in which light was bathing my head and her pussy, her cunt, her crotch was a warm smile and for a moment I lived in her sun.

In this description of effortless ease, Myles effortfully manipulates time, not only through telling us that present, past and future collide, but also through the distorted verb tenses:  “If there is a warm disassociation this was it”—are we in the moment of the encounter with the protagonist (“is”) or remembering it with the novelist (“was”)?  Are we “placing” a head on a woman in the present or being told what it was like back then, when she “lapped”?  This dizzying, disorienting syntax not only describes but enacts the narrator’s vertiginous pleasure."

For more pleasure, buy and read Inferno.  And don't forget to subscribe to The Women's Review of Books while you're at it!

Molly Peacock's The Paper Garden

It's not just me.  Those eighteenth-century botanical illustrations really do look, in Molly Peacock's words, as if the artist had "shined a flashlight on nine hundred and eighty-five flowers' cunts."

I just finished reading poet and memoirist Peacock's new book, The Paper Garden:  An Artist (Begins Her Life's Work) At 72, a biography of Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, the subject of a long central chapter in my book Sister Arts and really, the inspiration for that whole project.  Between Peacock's book and the sumptuous 2009 exhibition catalog Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,

my obscure, beloved Delany is having a moment of unprecedented visibility.  Peacock's approach is to use Delany's life and work as an opportunity to muse on her own second marriage and work as a mature artist:  "She had no children.  I had no children.  She had a deep connection to a second husband.  I had such a bond....She had a plethora of arty girlfriends.  So do I....Her husband had died.  I was afraid mine would."  Both life narratives, Delany's and Peacock's, are absorbing reads.  Peacock's writing is often thrilling, as in this chapter that begins like a prose poem:

Now let Mrs. Delany be blooded.

Let her eyesight fade.

Let her stop painting.

Let her sit in a stupor.

Let food be tasteless in her mouth...

Let bloodlines be formed.

Let the generations fly.

Most gratifying to me, though, is Peacock's unabashedly sexual reading of the images.  Peacock gives more attention than I do to Delany's heterosexual romances (though she does note in passing the "atmosphere of gay attachment" in Delany's life and very kindly cites me on this), but we agree that Delany's work expresses a forthright and active feminine sexuality.  Here's Peacock on the shell-lined garden grotto Delany constructed with Anne Donellan, the friend with whom she travelled to Ireland in the 1730s and whom she nicknamed "Phil:"  "The grotto was like a secret garden.  It was shadowy, moist, and close:  sexy." 

Peacock on Delany's Lilium Canadense:  "She built up the surface by pasting red pieces on top of red pieces.  The lily petals have a bumpy, labial look to them.  And the colors are of excited female sexual organs." 

Umm, yeah.  In my book, I come to similar conclusions about Delany's work and use these readings to make an argument about its place in a tradition of lesbian erotic expression.  Lesbian critics are often accused of "reading too much into" images like this, distorting the past in order to find ourselves there.  It's nice to meet straight sister artist Molly Peacock in the same place.

"Not Afraid of Ikea:" Jason and Mike's Home and Garden

It's especially fun to write about the home Jason Craft and Mike Craigue share on East Side Drive, because Jason is the whole reason I started this blog.  Jason and I met when he was a grad student in the English department in the 1990s.  He left academia and stayed in Austin, and we've kept in touch over the years.  About six months ago, I contacted Jason and asked him for some professional help.  He's been a blogger and website designer and other things I can't even name over the years (he's now a software developer) and he was the one person I could think of who could help me figure out:  with three books coming out in one year (which you, dear reader, can find here, here and, in January 2012, here), do I need my own website?  No, Jason said.  What you need is a blog, and you need to post to it EVERY TWO DAYS for SIX MONTHS.  So here we are.  Such is the power of Jason.

When Jason and Mike moved into the house in 1997, the area was, shall we say, affordable.  "Have you seen The Last Days of the San Jose?"  they asked me.  I haven't, but remember South Congress in the 1990s--no business going on after 5 p.m. except drugs and prostitution.  They said their house was "a shack" when they moved in; now it's a polished gem set in an inviting, well-used front and back garden.

Inside, the 1700-square-foot house is colorful and inviting.  Almost everything Jason and Mike showed me they credited to a friend or family member.  The beautiful curved glass-brick entry piece was suggested by their friend Mark, whom they call "Markitecht," apparently because he is an architect.  His name came up a lot.

Markitecht is also responsible for the beautiful built-ins

that make the relatively small space so functional.  Jason admits to getting "nervous" when things get messy and says that built-in storage areas calm him down.  The couple credit their friends Jonathan and Billie Jo with the color scheme, a different value of the same teal/turquoise color on every wall:

Here Jason shows me another important influence, Mike's cousin Hazel Kight-Witham, a California artist and writer who has given them several of her prints. 

Jason's mother Donna also loves to buy them art.  The pieces they display range pleasingly from treasured family heirlooms like this needlework motto made by Jason's grandmother Dot, which Jason remembers from visits to her Kentucky home as a little boy,

to the whimsical

and even downright creepy,

a combination I find irresistibly queer.

In the yard, these two big guys are trying to grow some food, mainly tomatoes.

Like all of us, they have to fight the birds and squirrels for them.  They've hung red Christmas balls on the tomato plants and planted a bed of catnip to attract the neighborhood's feral cats into the yard,

but they admit the tomatoes they get to eat are mostly green.  Winter vegetables include lettuce and greens in one of two seasonal beds. 

They enjoy cooking outdoors on one of those cool ceramic eggs,

a gift from Jason's dad and the source of Mike's much-beloved slow-cooked brisket.

There's a nice outdoor dining area on the back porch and they also cook for friends at their "New York-style" Ikea pull-out dining table, which they keep pushed up next to the kitchen island so guests and hosts can visit while the food is being prepared.  The Ikea bar stools they bought "for, like, twelve dollars" years ago as a stop-gap have not been bettered over the years, and indeed, they look great in the beautiful cook's kitchen.  And that, my friends, is why Jason and Mike are not afraid of Ikea.

 

 

Drawing in the Landscape: Rachael Shannon's Lesbian Land

Last summer, I gave a gallery talk at Women and Their Work called "A Brief History of Queer Space," in conjunction with Leah DeVun's exhibition about the Lesbian Land movement of the 1970s and 1980s, "Our Hands on Each Other."  At the time, Leah and I argued in a friendly way about whether or not the practice of lesbians creating communes was dying.  Leah told me that the women in the wilderness and backwoods communities she had visited were concerned about their legacy; either they did not have children, or their children were not interested in going "back to the land."  My point was that while those particular groups of people might be struggling, the concept of lesbian land lived on, both on a large scale, such as the fabled Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and in smaller-scale experiments in living like Rachael Shannon's small East Side lot, which she refers to as her "land."  I finally got a chance to visit Rachael's land this week, just as she gets ready to leave it to spend two years in Baltimore getting an M.F.A. in Community Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

This mirror leans against the fence near Rachael's outdoor shower.  First at Darcee Douglass's iconic lesbian compound on East Riverside and later as an attender and worker (or "festie") at Michigan, Rachael grew to love showering outdoors and built her own version on East 16th St.

She showers here every morning and says she has never been bothered by or bothered her nieghbors (with whom she is very close)--although she does avoid showering on Friday mornings when the rather high-sitting trash truck rolls by her fence.  (Well, one time she did have a problem with a neighbor, or maybe just a passer-by, who stole the first crop of green pears from her front-yard pear tree.

Her painted response earned her the local nickname The Pear Lady.)

In general, though, Rachael doesn't like hard-and-fast boundaries like fences.  She says she was first attracted to this neighborhood when she bought the house--then "a shack"--in 2002

in part because the unfenced yards flowing from one household to the next reminded her of the small Texas town of Wharton, where her dad grew up.  Rachael's parents and grandparents are all designers, makers, builders, not professionally but as a way of life.  Rachael recently visited her 91-year-old grandfather on the land he visits every day to watch the sunrise and sunset.  He knows the birds, animals and plants on the property and keeps track of them all.  This kind of "piddling and tweaking" is also how Rachael describes her ongoing projects around her land--including planting this sago given to her by her grandfather:

Surrounding Rachael's small, always-in-renovation cottage is a series of other buildings.  Her studio is in the house, and that's where her roommate also lives; Rachel herself sleeps in a trailer,

decorated with flats from this year's Gay by GayGay festival in Austin.  There's also a silo,

currently used for storage but which Rachael ultimately envisions as studio and living space as well.  And here's the bike shed she just built with her dad:

Rachael's love for adding these outbuildings reminds me of a series by iconic lesbian-feminist photographer Tee Corinne that commemmorated the storage tanks and yurts of her Oregon back-to-the-land community.  I wrote a little bit about those photographs in the conclusion to my book.

Rachael's design sense is organic, sensual, curved.  She says there was not much she could do about the squareness of the house--"you just had to work with the box"--but her plantings and outdoor architecture have a rolling, sinuous quality, like Hogarth's "line of beauty".

Rachael calls her design practice "drawing in the landscape,"

and says she is seeking a homey, inviting, yet crafted and intentional feel.  Her garden is a wonderful place to visit.  Rachael will be leaving it in other hands for the next couple of years but she says she's like "a kite on a string"--she'll keep coming back to her Austin land and with the help of her community, it will continue to evolve and provide a home for many.

 

 

"desire exceeds the bounds of any garden": Ed Madden's Prodigal: Variations

Last weekend when I interviewed my friend Neville about his garden for this blog, he asked, "What makes a queer garden different from a straight garden?"  I rambled a bit about how it could be a matter of who uses the garden and how, or a matter of how the garden is made (I mentioned that Neville's own garden includes sisterly-sissy elements such as his grandmothers' favorite plants and some canna lilies he dug up from the yard of my old house when we moved), or the use of certain well-known erotic shapes, like the arched grotto entrance.  But ultimately, I made my away around to saying something about how a garden is always riding the line between nature and culture, between order and chaos, between art and life.  It's art in a living medium that simply obeys its own unruly, asocial sexual laws (of reproduction and growth).  So in that way, every garden is a queer garden.

What a pleasure, then, to read Ed Madden's new book and find a similar idea encapsulated so beautifully in the quotation in my title.  Ed, who was one of a beloved band of queer UT graduate students who befriended me when I first arrived in Austin in 1991, is now an English professor at the University of South Carolina.  He's the author of a critical study of modernism, Tiresian Poetics, and a previous book of poems, Signals, which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize.  His new book, Prodigal: Variations, explores the very queer territory of intra-family erotics and does so through memories and experiences of plant, garden and farm.

Ed was raised by conservative Christians on a farm in Arkansas, and he beautifully evokes the fear of his father's wrath that shaped his gay childhood in the opening poem, "Sacrifice:"

When my father bound me, I submitted,

 

closed my eyes to the lifted knife in his fist.

Even now, the cords still hold my wrists,

 

rough ropes of love.  My chest is bare,

my heart lies open.  He loves his god more

 

than me.  I open my eyes, watch my father

raise his fist against a bright and bitter

 

sky, no angel there to stay his hand.

The speaker's childhood farm, like all farms, is a place of both lush growth and violent death, as in these lines from "Osage orange:"

This is eating tomatoes from the vine.  This is the cutworm,

this viscous smear of green.  This is killing worms.

This is breaking windows in the pig house.

Many of these poems were written while Ed was the poet-in-residence at the Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia, South Carolina,

and here the poet, still struggling with the legacy of love and anger bequeathed him by his father, sees clearly how this laid the groundwork for a satisfying intimacy with another man as an adult.  In the garden, and with his lover, he is able to "learn the vocabulary of sweetness."  He asks,

How do I know I will miss you?

 

And why does it come to me

in a garden, of all places?

These lovely, grave, formal poems belong in the Sister Arts tradition in which garden art is poetic, philosophical, even theological, offering an occasion for us to meditate on our deepest and hardest truths, and to experience the out-of-bounds wildness of being alive.

How Ruby Saved the Neighborhood and Other Stories from Vic and Neville's Garden

Neville Hoad and Victor McWherter assured me that their garden was "where Queer Gardens meets Grey Gardens."  The large corner lot on Lullwood Road in the Wilshire Woods neighborhood does seem to have two different personalities.  The front yard is an impressive display of lawn that would have made a 1950s dad proud:

In the large, shady back yard, the aesthetic is lush, overgrown, and sensual, with a riot of plants, colors, textures, animals and uses.  "Nature in Central Texas is messy," Neville said.

As you can see, Neville (left) and Vic (right) are among the gardens most attractive features.  And that's Ruby, their Jack Russell/basset hound cross, who along with her sister Harley keeps the yard nicely pocked with holes.  But more about Ruby in a moment.

Neville grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa.  He describes himself as a "vernacular gardener" who "started off trying to plant all the things my colonial grandmothers planted:  camellias, azaleas, roses." He remembers a "huge bouganvillea outside my bedroom window" and says, "the thing that I really miss is a jacaranda tree."

And really, who wouldn't?

When I asked him about the trend toward native plants gardens, he said, "I respect its practicality but I don't like its ideology.  I think gardens should be cosmopolitan, and native gardens are a bit xenophobic."  But along with the English garden flowers he loves, Neville has also planted and come to enjoy colorful natives like Turk's cap, butterfly weed, salvia in many colors, and flowering trees including crepe myrtle and a small but thriving Texas mountain laurel:

Other personal touches in the garden include Geraldine the Giraffe,

a lovely pair of flamingos,

and what Neville calls "the ashtray of shame:"

One reason Neville loves the garden, he says, is because "I smoke."  He doesn't smoke in the house, though, which means a lot of time enjoying one of their two outdoor seating areas.  Does Victor smoke?  "Not officially, and you can put that on the blog." 

But I promised a Ruby story, and here it is.  When the new Mueller development was being planned just across Airport Boulevard from Wilshire Woods, the planners decided that there was not enough room to put the new water pipes down Airport.  They proposed to run them down Ardenwood instead, right past Ruby's house, which Ruby and her neighbors did not appreciate.  One neighbor, an ecologist, did some research and discovered that Wilshire Woods was the last extant strand of post oak savannah in Austin.  Post oak savannah is the only habitat of the endangered Texas red garter snake.

If the neighbors could find a specimen of a red garter snake to prove that it was still living in the area, the plans for digging up Ardenwood would have to be scrapped.  One day Neville was in the yard and saw Ruby looking like she was wearing "a Fu Manchu moustache."  He looked more closely and saw that she was carrying in her mouth a tiny snake with a red stripe.  He took a picture, sent it to the proper authorities, and the pipes now go down Airport.  And that, my friends, is How Ruby Saved the Neighborhood.