Perennial Wisdom with Judith Fetterley

For Annie Dawson Wilsdon

I track her handwriting from bold and clear and bright green to blue scratches across a page, words dotting the paper, scattered here and there, no lines, last word “sorry.”

She is a person I never really knew. Yet the title of my newsletter comes from words she spoke.

She was my grandmother. Always a shadowy figure, even on those rare times my mother and brother and I visited her in far off Chicago, she blended into a background dominated by my grandfather.

My mother worshipped her father.

“Where is Mr. Wilsdon on this? Is he for or against?”—this , according to my mother’s proud recollection, was all that mattered to the neighbors in his Chicago suburb when presented with a proposal to plant a tree or widen a street.

For her mother, Annie Dawson Wilsdon, a brilliant mathematician who had supported her parents and siblings by teaching before she married and who in a different generation might have been a math professor or a computer whiz – for this woman, my mother had nothing but scorn.

“She was a wretched housekeeper and worse cook. I was embarrassed to bring friends home,” my mother would tell me. My mother preferred cousin Flo’s where Auntie Belle, the good housekeeper and excellent cook, reigned supreme. Yet, inexplicably, her father loved her mother. “He always called her ‘my golden-haired Annie,’” my mom complained, “though I never saw any gold. Her hair was white by the time I was born. That’s why I dyed my hair for years. I didn’t want you to have a white-haired mother like I did.”

My mother became a gardener because her father was a gardener. Coming home from school, she would ask her mother,” Where’s Dad?”

“Out in the garden, dear,” was always the answer.

In her early eighties she moved to Georgia to live with her son, Harry. She wrote my mother faithfully. My mother saved her letters. I do not know why. But, reading them, I discover a person I like and wish I had known. I discover as well a story laced with the thematics of aging.

“Do not return this letter,” my grandmother writes as she encloses a letter from her other daughter, Alice, “Harry and Winnie hate Alice.”

Alice, it seems, has “stolen” my grandmother’s diamond ring. Harry is trying to get it back. Is he then the greedy one? My mother always thought so.

“He took her in just to get her money.” This was my mother’s view of the matter.

Apparently there was a lot of it. In her letters my grandmother tries to be fair about funds, faithfully sending checks to my mother and to myself and my brother, but always with the awareness of Harry looking over her shoulder.

“Harry wrote this check for me to send to you. You write to him instead of me when you get it.”

Money –one of the great thematics of aging. If you don’t have it, you struggle to get it. If you have it, you struggle with how best to use it while you are alive and after you are dead. You pray not to outlive it. And you live with the fear of losing control over it, of ending up dependent and under surveillance.

I catch a glimpse of a woman who was witty as she writes further, “Harry does so much bookkeeping for me you would think I was a big merchant.”

My grandmother writes how busy Harry and Winnie are, how busy my mother is, how busy Dan is, how busy Judy is. Everyone else is busy; she is not part of the busyness. I catch a glimpse of the intergenerational family – my grandmother, her son and his wife, their daughter and her son – supposedly a source of healthy aging. But this one is without the reverence for age that might include the older one in the busyness.

I catch a glimpse of my grandmother’s sadness. “I watch TV a lot,” she writes, “but I see some of it with my eyes closed. Not that I am sleepy but it is not good. I am too old for some of it.”

I identify. I don’t relate to much of contemporary culture. I am much too old for the current craze for noise. And, yes, I am willing to label much of what passes these days for great as not very good. It is hard to feel contemporary when contemporary feels hard. Like my grandmother, I feel left behind.

Boredom, lack of purpose – how they haunt the advent of old old age. I fear the loss of my garden, the loss of energy to serve on boards or get to my Quaker meeting every week, the loss of a sense of purpose. At a garden symposium on Saturday, I sit across the table from a woman who tells me she prays every day, “Dear God, just give me one more season of gardening.” To which I can only add, “Amen.”

I catch a glimpse of the stresses in that intergenerational setting. My grandmother writes my mother a version of “burn after reading.”

“I would not babysit for Stevie [the great grandchild] at any price. He is too . . . . Destroy this letter as soon as you read it.”

I can well imagine the nightmare an out-of-control two-year-old presented to my mild-mannered grandmother. I can also imagine the stress that my grandmother’s presence must have placed on that household.

But I wonder – did she not dare to label the child’s behavior because she was afraid Harry or Winnie might read the letter? Or was she a spirit too gentle to put such a harsh feeling down on paper?

For I see her as a gentle spirit. I am deeply moved by a line in one of the letters, inspired perhaps by the affair of the diamond ring. She writes, “I cannot forsake Alice.”

Reading these letters I am in a way meeting my grandmother for the first time, both as her grandchild and as her contemporary.

My grandmother visited my mother in Franklin, but only after I was in college. So I treasure a memory she shares in a letter that creates a connection between us across time and space.

In October of 1958, returning home after a visit to Indiana, she writes “I saw you folks waving for a while. Then I lost you for a while. Saw you again standing at the corner of a building. Mary, you had your big red handbag.”

I bought that handbag for my mother in the summer of 1958, a summer I spent in Mexico improving my Spanish. It had by October become my mother’s identifying mark, one that allowed my grandmother to see and perhaps remember my mother as she returned to Georgia and Harry.

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Airhart II Robert
Mar 5
Such a delightful, respectful, introspective ramble through the known facts to discover the complexities of this grandmother you did not have the privilege of knowing in person. Your thoughtful stroll around Annie Dawson Wilsdon’s garden invites pondering the state of my own. Thank you..Bob Airhart

January 9, 2024
The Magic in Tidying Up
Our 85th birthdays have forced upon Sara and myself the recognition that we might indeed be having to move in the relatively near future, say four to five years, to a smaller space, though one false step on side walk or path, one slip on any one of the throw rugs we should not have throughout the house, one unfortunate encounter with the cat might push that date forward considerably.
We have both begun the task of sorting through the masses of paper we have accumulated through the years, papers that we want to be the ones to manage the disposal of.
There is no magic to be found in the act itself. It is hard, often painful work. The magic lies in discovering memories, manifestations of the self, shards of past connections.
Among the papers I have discovered in my cleaning thus far is a letter from my father, dated February, 1976. At the time, I had a cat named Jujo. I had also just been denied tenure by the University at Albany and was in the process of appealing to the Chancellor for a reversal of that decision.
My father sent me a clipping from the wall street journal with the title “Jujo Paper Co. to Raise Newsprint Prices by 13%.” His letter begins, “I thought that you might be interested in knowing that your cat owns a paper mill in Japan and that she is raising the price of newsprint in April. You might explain to her that this makes it difficult for those of us who like to read newspapers and books to afford them and might ultimately affect her food options if she raises the prices too high.”
He ends his letter with the following encouragement: “don’t worry too much about tenure. If you don’t get it you should go to law school and become a trial lawyer. You would win every trial. I have never been able to win an argument with you or change your opinion on anything and if you can do that to me you can do it in a courtroom. We will pay your way.”
Had I not ultimately been granted tenure, I would no doubt have taken his advice.
Equally interesting to me is the draft of a commencement address that I was approached to give but that ultimately never materialized. It summarized what I had learned from 60 odd years of living. I ended up sending a version of it to Sonya and Emma somewhat later.
Reading it over, the advice still rings true – for myself as well as others, younger or older. So here’s my current version of the graduation speech that never happened.
First, the body. It is not, alas, rental property. You are in it for the long haul. Therefore it behooves you to take care of your body in every way you can starting as early as you can. To do this, you need to be in tune with your body, paying attention to what is going on and figuring out what works best for you to keep it functioning.
Walk as much as you can every day and keep as much motion of as many different kinds in your day as you can. Above all, don’t just sit there. But equally important, don’t overdo it to the point of injury. The older you get, the longer it takes to recover from such excesses. The gym can be your friend, but it can also be your downfall.
Second, the place. It is important to be in a physical location that gives you joy, lifts your spirits, makes you feel at home in the world. You may have to make sacrifices to obtain this goal but do so. It is worth it. The value of 24/7 spatial well-being cannot be overstated. You may need a city, you may need the sea, you may need a farm – find out what it is you need and go live there. The same dictum applies to offices and to houses/apartments. Obviously, achieving this goal may not be easy, may not even be possible at times given other necessities, but keep hold of your goal as something to work towards. The cost of living in an alien space is very high, emotionally, physically, spiritually.
Third, the social. Make at least one good friend at every stage of your life, and then hold fast to these friends through all the changes that may come upon you. Make this connection a priority in terms of time invested and energy committed. Phone, write, visit. Nothing sweetens life more than the presence of a long-time best friend (or friends, should you be so lucky as to have more than one). These are the folks we go through life with, share history with. Remember the line from that old camp song: “Make new friends but keep the old/One is silver and the other gold.” Be sure to preserve the gold in your life.
Fourth, the spiritual. While I am a Quaker, I am not here to promote that path over others. What I am here to witness is the importance of attending to one’s spiritual self. This can be difficult because much of the world operates on principles that are the opposite of spirit-centered: furious speed, endless “it’s complicated,” endless competition, self-aggrandizement, lying and cheating when it is to one’s advantage. Spiritual development requires slowing down, simplifying, helping others, maintaining integrity.
For women, it is often difficult to sort out what is genuine spiritual practice from what is merely sexist socialization. If I honor stillness, is that because I have been deprived of my voice? If I am compassionate, is that because as a woman I am expected to be other-directed? If I choose simplicity, will I be read as simple-minded?
Despite all difficulties, attend to your soul. Although there is no one path for such attending, it is essential to choose a single path and follow it. Little can be gained from dipping into Buddhism or trying out Quakerism. The paths all end up in the same place anyway: keep your room clean, be nice to your sister, write thank you notes.

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Words
JUDITH FETTERLEY

NOV 28

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November 28, 2023
Words
When asked to share what I was thankful for this past Thursday, I surprised myself by including “words” in my list. I have been chewing on that choice since turkey time.
In one sense, it is a no-brainer. How could I share the many things I am grateful for – friends, family, partner, good health, the ability to walk – if I did not have words? A rose might smell as sweet by any other name but if I did not have a name I could not share that sweetness with others.
Of course, “plants” appeared on my list. I am grateful for plants in good part because they exist outside of words, signaling a world beyond the human, one that has been around much longer and is more fundamental. They provide a blessed relief from my own self-importance.
Still, I am wordy with my plants. I share with them, as carefully, as I can, just what delights me as I touch, smell, see, listen. I take particular joy in telling them their Latin names. Latin feels good in my mouth and on my lips. It’s a sensory experience, as rich as that of touch or smell. Try it out. Say Cladastris lutea, the Latin name for my Kentucky yellowwood tree, out loud. Of course it is a form of love. Yes, lutea means yellow in Latin, though cladastris goes back to the Greek for fragile branch. But my sensory appreciation of my tree’s Latin name, my sense that some part of knowing it lies in its formal name, goes beyond this translation.
I delight in the English names of plants as well. Consider, for example, Prunella vulgaris. Translated, this means “common little plum.” “Common little plum” tells me nothing about this plant. Compare this to some of the English names of Prunella vulgaris:, self-heal, heal-all, woundwort, heart-of-the-earth, carpenter’s herb, brownwort, blue curls. There’s history here, and usage, and most certainly love.
George Orwell, in a 1944 essay, lamented the disappearance of these common names – “red-hot poker, mind-your-own-business, love-lies-bleeding, London pride” – into names based on Greek and Latin.
“Forget-me-nots are coming more and more be called myosotis,” he complained.
Why complain? Why not relish the profusion of possibilities to express our response to plants?
And, of course, let’s remember that we need the Latin names if we are to be sure we are talking about the same thing. I rarely lose my temper in the garden, but once, when a client of my small perennial design business returned from the nursery with Juniperis squamata ‘Meyeri’ when I had specified Juniperis squamata ‘Blue Chip,’ I lost it.
“What’s the difference?” he said. “Both are blue, and both are junipers.”
“Try five feet, maybe more,” I snapped. “Try fast-growing and weak, as opposed to slow-growing and sturdy. Try leggy liability as opposed to attractive, bushy, and manageable. Try learning the names.”
Coming home from Meeting this Sunday I noticed the message on a local church’s message board:“Thank God for gifts too wonderful for words.”
I was shocked to discover how angry this message made me.
I wanted to shout, “Nothing is too wonderful for words. Such a message is just an excuse for us not to do the hard work of communicating.”
I wanted to shout, “Give thanks for words.”
We have words. It is our job to use them to do the work of describing and sharing wonder. Too often we slip into the laziness of “I love you more than words can say,” or, as per the message board, “This gift is just too wonderful for words.” Nonsense. Do the work. Try to describe the way you love someone; try to share the wonder of a good gift. Isn’t that why we honor great writers – they have done the hard work of articulating wonder?
Of course, I cherish the words of Isaac Penington, an early Quaker, who wrote, “The end of words is to bring men to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter.” True enough, but a knowledge decidedly rare, a wonder if you can get there but most of us don’t.
I prefer to invoke the ancient Chinese saying, “The beginning of knowledge is knowing things by their right names.”
Perhaps my love of words began with my father, an inveterate punster, a creative wordsmith, a passionate puzzler. Coming home from work, he would immediately lie down on the couch with a crossword puzzle.
Crossword puzzles are for me, as perhaps they were for my dad, a form of meditation. I work them to clear my mind, settle my soul, relax my body.
Working a puzzle, however, I am surrounded by love objects that excite me and break the meditative state. I keep a list of words I encounter in puzzles that intrigue me and delight my palate. Perhaps at some point they may do some work for me as I try to express the wonder I experience in the garden.
I get discouraged, though. Rejections abound and years accumulate. I am writing this on my 85th birthday and I wonder how long I can or should keep playing with words. Couldn’t my remaining time be better spent in work of more immediate benefit to others?
Perhaps I was still engaging with a quote from Toni Morrison when I jotted down “words” on the piece of orange paper my granddaughter handed to me as we paused between dinner and dessert to express thanks. I had encountered the quote two days earlier on a visit to the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.
“It is the thing that black people love so much – the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It is a love, a passion. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language.”
She did the work. Who am I to stop trying?

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© 2023 Judith Fetterley
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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Micro-Cuts
JUDITH FETTERLEY

NOV 7

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November 7, 2023
Micro-Cuts
The gardens are ready for winter. The garage is swept and ordered, the ornaments and garden furniture brought into the swept and ordered garage, the hoses neatly coiled and stored in the not swept or ordered basement. Yes, there is raking left to do, off the lawn, but the bulk of the work for the 2023 season is done.
This year I have left the leaves on garden beds. The leaves will keep the soil temperature more even, avoiding frost heaves and they will keep the soil wet, protecting the valuable microbes. If the leaves decompose at all they will feed the soil.
I doubt I can hold off spring clean-up until daytime temperatures consistently reach the 50s in order to avoid harming the beneficial insects that hunker down for the winter in leaf litter as adults or as eggs or pupae. To manage my garden at my age I need to be out early, and some gardens, not all, need to be raked on a warm day in March.
My hands are ready for winter as well. In the garden season, they are home to multiple micro-cuts, and I am often bleeding when I work. I don’t wear gloves because I need to feel the precise depth of a garden weed from the resistance it presents to my fingers or the appropriate size of a hole to dig from the mass a new plant presents to my palm. However, my weeder is two-pronged and very sharp, and the hori hori knife is equally sharp with a serrated edge. Sometimes I misjudge the stroke and my weeder strikes my finger or my hori hori hits my palm. I do not stop just because of blood.
This year taking down the demonstration gardens at the Cornell Cooperative Extension was particularly bloody because we started well before a killing frost turned plants to mush. Remaining stems were sharp. I managed to garner a dramatic wound on our last day from, of all things, a Hosta stem.
There was a tinge of sadness as we took our break because we would not be working together again for several months. I picked up a napkin to deal with my wound and another to get a cookie. Fellow gardeners noticed the cut, and a conversation ensued on the wearing or not wearing of gloves.
I don’t mind the cuts I get when I garden. After all, I am inflicting cuts on the plants. I consider this mutual exchange of bodily fluids as a ritual. I also recall that the microbes in the soil that stimulate serotonin release get into my blood stream through these micro-cuts. I can honestly claim that my weeder is my best anti-depressant.
Since our gathering, however, I have been reflecting on a different kind of micro-cuts. With the world at large and at home so completely on fire, I narrow my focus to the day at hand and my immediate surroundings. How can I ensure that in my daily life I do not add to the violence of the world? It is relatively easy to eliminate the big ones – I am not carrying a gun or shooting anyone; I am not engaged in knife fights or fist fights; I am not screaming at my neighbors as they pour poisons on their lawns. I watch my words.
But there it is. How carefully do I watch my words?
From my work as a teacher, I have long been aware of the concept of micro-aggression, a term used, according to Wikipedia, for “commonplace verbal, behavioral or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.” How often do I slip into such usage, referring to small fib, for example, as a white lie or, without thinking, reiterating my father’s praise of good behavior as “that was mighty white of you.” Not often, I hope, but enough to remind me that aggression can occur on a scale both large and small and that sometimes the small can feel large.
As an older woman, I am the subject of micro-aggressions directed at both my age and gender. It is constant and it is depressing. “How are you, young lady,” I get from an older man at the checkout counter of the grocery store. I want to reply that I am neither young nor a lady, but I don’t. I just absorb. “What are you girls talking about,” I get from a man who feels it is his right to interrupt my conversation and that I will be pleased to be called a girl. “Look at him,” a mother says to a child, viewing a tiger at the zoo clearly labelled Lily. “Isn’t he beautiful?” Unwittingly, she tells the boy that strength and power belong to males and that creatures who elicit affection and respect must be male.
The problem is compounded when the micro-aggression occurs in a context of friendship and good feeling and is meant as part of that celebration of companionship. Shortly after the incident with my bloody hand and the possible chocolate chip cookie and the conversation about gloves, our Master Gardener talk turned to Halloween. We shared stories about the number of visitors we had this year and the items we gave out. And about our favorite costumes.
Top of the list was that of a boy. His costume was a magnet with chicks attached. I didn’t get it until someone said, “Chick magnet.” We all agreed it was clever, but I kept thinking, I don’t want some ten-year-old boy learning to think of my ten-year-old granddaughter as a “chick.” I felt it as a micro-cut. a wee wound.
I did not speak up; it was our last time together and the mood mattered.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about it. So many of the micro-cuts of gender appear in contexts where the speaker thinks they are being complimentary or where it would be bad form to object, where in fact to object opens you up to further micro-aggressions — what’s the matter with you? can’t you take a joke? you are taking this far too seriously, it’s a compliment. It is hard to speak up for fear of creating more violence in the effort to reduce violence.
But at what point do the micro-cuts add up to a wound that must be addressed? And to what degree is the humor a harbinger of violence? Is it possible that behind the “fun” of chick magnet lurks the attitude that creates a culture in which more than 600 women are raped every day in the United States and more than one third of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by someone who “loves” them?
Is it possible that not speaking out is itself a form of violence?

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© 2023 Judith Fetterley
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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October 24, 2023

Miscanthus giganteus

The third Thursday in October has historically been our time to take down the Master Gardener demonstration gardens at CCE and prepare them for winter.

Not this year. We couldn’t do it. Of course we could cut back the Hostas; they are always the first to go mushy even if there has not yet been a frost. Some of the Solomon Seal was ratty enough to merit the clippers. But with no frost yet and temperatures still in the zone of warm, most of the garden remains vibrant. We couldn’t bring ourselves to cut it down. Climate change? Here is living proof.

We did, however, proceed with our ritual removal of the massive Miscanthus giganteus that forms one end of a garden bed filled at the other end with a stand of Joe-pye and an elderberry bush. All hands gather and with loppers and clippers and conversation we dispatch it.

Globally speaking, this giant plant has much to recommend it. It offers a potential alternate source of ethanol with far fewer downsides than corn. It can grow on marginal land, is water efficient and non-invasive and is good at absorbing carbon. Various sites inform me that miscanthus’ high carbon to nitrogen ratio makes it inhospitable to many microbes, creating a clean bedding for poultry, cattle, pigs, horses, and companion animals. Miscanthus can also be used as a fiber source in pet food. Perhaps I should have brought some home for Tanner to sleep on or eat!

Much as we are challenged by this massive grass, we also honor it. Hence the ritual bracketing of the season with its takedown.

This year as we performed our ritual reduction of this giant grass to stubble, we got to talking politics. A sense of gloom and doom came over us as we considered the global situation and our American mess. One of our number honestly copped to a sense of relief in knowing they would not be alive to see the results of our failures.

In the midst of our talk on contemporary failure, I mentioned that I had recently watched the first half of the Ken Burns program on the American buffalo and was sickened by what it portrayed. As fellow choppers chimed in on whether or not they had seen it and as many suggested that we were all to blame for the slaughter that occurred, I heard myself say, rather forcefully, “I am not copping to responsibility for the disappearance of the buffalo.”

I am more than willing to cop for the many mistakes I have made in my life and for the failure as well of my generation of feminists to secure the changes we brought about. But thinking about the buffalo I insisted that white men of a certain kind were responsible for their destruction – white men constructed by patriarchy and living under unregulated capitalism. I got rather vehement.

Driving home, I asked myself why I was so insistent on my innocence in this matter. Here is my answer. A universal assumption of guilt implies something about the essential and hence inevitable nature of human beings. If we all, given the chance, would have slaughtered the buffalo, then there is no hope for a better future. And I do not believe that. I believe we live in a culture that is patriarchal in the extreme, one that fosters greed and violence, and, to put it most simply, one that constructs men as mean and women as stupid.

To me, the slaughter of the buffalo was made possible by the presence of three things: the technology of mass destruction; the capitalist market that rewarded such destruction; and the stomach for doing it.

Native tribes lived for 10,000 years in harmony with the buffalo, killing what they needed to keep their own people thriving, creating a relatively stable ecosystem. Would they have had the stomach for mass slaughter had they had the technology and the market? I don’t think so, because it seems they lacked the third requirement – the stomach for it. Their culture according to the Burns documentary, was quite different from that which propelled certain 19th century white men to murder buffalo en masse.

The possibility of a different culture is what I cling to. I don’t believe human beings are inevitably destined for patriarchy or the kind of unbridled capitalism that flourished then and even now. I believe we can be different.

While I was on vacation this summer, I read Frans de Waal’s book about the bonobos, the creature he calls “the forgotten ape.”

Unlike the culture of chimpanzees and gorillas, bonobo culture is female-centered and non-violent. There is neither sexual assault nor infanticide. If a male bonobo attempts any form of unwanted sexual activity, the female bonobos unite to drive him off. Because females may mate with many males, the killing of one male’s offspring to support another male’s dominance doesn’t happen because ownership of women and children is not present.

We share as much DNA with bonobos as we do with chimps and gorillas. This fact is conveniently forgotten under patriarchy which seeks to insist that its constructs are natural – look at the chimpanzees – and hence inevitable. I say, look at the bonobos and take heart and strength and energy. There is nothing in our DNA that says we as humans must be patriarchal.

It is not clear that we will be able to take down the gardens this coming Thursday either. No frost is predicted for this week. Perhaps this year we will be working well into November. If so we will consider it a blessing. More time spent with each other and our plants. An alternative culture.

Yes, we are living under patriarchy. And, yes, we can and must create alternative cultures. And, yes, even in the midst of global and local chaos and violence.

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Landscape

This past Saturday, Sara and I drove to Catskill to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site to view the exhibit “Women Reframe American Landscape.”

Entering the Visitor Center, we were greeted by a poster created by the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. Here is part of the text of the poster:

“It wasn’t a school, it was a club! . . of white males who painted the American landscape, hung out together, and sold their work to many of the same collectors. Female painters like Susie Barstow and Sarah Cole were welcome to tag along with the guys but couldn’t expect the same recognition. They would have to wait 150 years for shows like Women Reframe American Landscape. Black landscape painters like Edward Mitchell Bannister and Robert Duncanson could admire the Hudson River School, but never join the club.”

I fell in love with the Catskill mountains on my first trip to Albany, coming to interview for a job at the University, driving down the Northway to Western Avenue, seeing three peaks in the distance. For years I had an office whose window framed a similar view. I hung a reprint of Frederic Church’s “Above the Clouds at Sunrise” sunrise on a wall I painted Sunset Rose. My office faced west and in winter as the sun set I was bathed in a landscape of my own creating as the rays of sun hit painting and wall at the same moment making them one.

Sara and I regularly visit Olana, the home of Frederic Church. We bring our chairs and we sit on the lawn and we look down the hills, across the fields, at the view of the distant Hudson. I have a watercolor of this view, purchased many years ago at a fund raiser for Olana and given prominent place in the living room. The view, of course, indeed the entire landscape of Olana, comprise one of Church’s greatest works of art.

Besotted as I was, it never occurred to me to look further than the roster of males who constituted the “school” – Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey, Asher Durand, Sanford Gifford, John Kensett, and others, all male.

I spent 20 years of my academic life recovering the work of 19th century American women writers systematically excluded from the canon of American literature by the male creators of that canon. I should have been prepared to discover the same phenomenon in art. I wasn’t.

Somehow my passion for the landscape put my radical feminism to sleep.

Of course there were women who were part of the Hudson River school of painting and were successful and respected in their day, just as there were women writers successful and respected in their day. As was the case with women writers, the obliteration is an affair of the makers of the canon.

The primary artist featured in the exhibit was Susie Bartow. I was particularly enchanted with a small work titled “Pool in the Woods.” Painted in 1885, it was purchased by Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the 19th century women writers whose reputation I had worked to restore. It currently hangs, when not on loan, at Stowe’s home in Hartford. The connection delights me.

As a woman, Barstow faced serious obstacles in realizing her dream of being a painter but she early on expressed her determination to succeed. At age 20 she declared, “I will overcome every barrier to success and make myself a name and a position that will influence the whole world.” Perhaps her preference for women – she had a two-decade partnership with another woman painter — helped her succeed; certainly her class and race privilege worked in her favor. Still I am in awe of such self-assurance.

She used it to help others.

“Barstow lectured widely on the value of experiencing nature directly. She taught and traveled with female students to give them instruction en plein air in the northeastern landscape while advocating for progressive ideas such as women’s suffrage and access to study the nude male model as part of women’s late nineteenth-century academic training. As a professional artist, Barstow exhibited at major venues alongside male colleagues and realized comparable prices for her paintings. Furthermore she commanded the physical landscape of the Hudson Valley, the While Mountains, the rigorous terrain of Yosemite, the Alps– actually any mountain range she encountered that offered stunning vistas and marvelous views – all the while altering her long skirts and hiking garb so as not to be incumbered on those rugged explorations.”

I was struck particularly by her help with the outfits!

At the exhibit, we encountered a series of cards placed throughout the house – in chamber pots, by the door, in the reception area, by a water bucket – asking the question: who emptied, who opened, who served the food, who brought the water from the well. For even women painters are likely to have been served by unnamed and often unacknowledged others. Most certainly the men were. I was reminded again that there are two questions we must always ask of everything we witness: first, cui bono? Who benefits? And then, who did the work?

Driving home, I asked Sara what landscapes she would want to paint if she were a painter. This led us to ponder what constitutes a landscape. As we imagined the terrains that Susie Barstow tramped, concluding they were what is meant by the term “landscape,” we wondered if we could get access to such sites today. For is it not the case that the landscapes painted by the Hudson River School, whether male or female, present themselves as unowned by anything but the eye? “American Paradise” is the title the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave to its 1994 exhibit of the “World of the Hudson River School.” Nobody owns paradise.

Except, of course, reality is far more complex. Cole himself despaired at the destruction of the very landscape he loved by those who took legal ownership and began the endless chopping of trees. Church purchased his landscape, 250 acres of it, in order to control it, and those who seek to preserve Olana have fought long and hard to keep the viewshed from being destroyed by the “wrong” owners.

But still what engaged my thinking as we drove back to Albany was the absence of any representation of human ownership in the work of this school/club. As if indeed paradise depends upon such absence.

Because, I thought, after feasting on the views of spaces presented as unowned, what a bizarre thing it is to own a piece of land? I had so taken this relation of land to person for granted that, like the presumed fish in the presumed water, I had never noticed it. Yet it constitutes the fundamental reality of my situation. I built my garden, my own landscape, my own bit of paradise, because I owned a piece of land.

If my current delight, indeed happiness, depends upon my owning a piece of land, why am I so drawn to paintings that present nature as unowned and indeed as unownable. Is it possible that I am having these thoughts because my time for being on this land could end at any moment? Is it possible that I am having these thoughts because I know the next person who gets title to my 2/3 of an acre will most likely uproot much of what I have planted? Is it possible that somewhere inside me lies the desire for a different relationship to this bit of land?

August 15, 2023

Gardening for Others

Perhaps it is time to start gardening for others. By this, I do not mean other people.

Gardens have been human-centered from inception. They continue to be so. One of the major emphases in our current thinking about gardens comes from the recognition of their healing powers where people are concerned. We now understand the value of gardens for those in hospital and prison, for urban populations deprived of greenery, for children. But this is still a garden ideology based on the needs of humans. We use plants to help people.

Another current focus is on planting natives. But this trend is also rooted in what is good for humans. As in: we need pollinators to produce our food. As in: we need caterpillars because they are a primary agent of converting the energy of the sun stored in leaves into the food chain. As in: natives are beautiful and people love butterflies. I admit to having emphasized the latter in designing the native plant garden at the Bethlehem Town Hall. Since Carole and I wanted people who saw the garden to desire such a garden for themselves, we sought to create a garden aesthetic that people would wish to have at home, one with lots of color, one with lots of butterflies floating by.

While Sara and I were on Cape Cod these last two weeks, we attended a talk, sponsored by the Cape Cod Seashore National Park, on eels. It was one of the most interesting things we did. Eels, it turns out, are fascinating creatures and they are in danger from a variety of sources. But, as our lecturer pointed out, eels don’t have charisma. Pandas and sea otters have charisma. Butterflies have charisma. It would take a PR genius to make us care for eels.

Very few insects other than butterflies have charisma. Yet 97% of bugs are beneficial to humans. Nevertheless we are destroying at an alarming rate species we may know nothing about and that may provide valuable services. But people point to China, where fruit trees are pollinated by humans, to argue that it doesn’t matter because as humans we can deal with any mess we make.

Appealing to a creature’s value to humans to avoid extinction therefore seems a losing game. So let us base our behavior not on what is good for us but on what is good for other creatures. As gardeners, might we not have a unique opportunity to demonstrate what this might mean? Can we create gardens based on what is good for bugs, not because bugs are good for us, but because bugs are good for bugs? Is it possible for us to begin to question if what brings us joy, what feeds our sense of beauty, what provides us solace may reduce the joy and safety of another species and therefore we should change what we are doing?

I know this is a hard ask. But the native plant movement in some ways calls the question: why do we garden and who/what do we garden for. This shift of focus I am suggesting is, I believe, the logical outcome of the movement toward planting natives.

I realize that in some sense it is impossible to escape the human point of view, even as we seek to center other species. But the effort to do so is the best effort we can make. Especially now, as we proceed to alter the environment at an ever-greater rate without knowing the impact of these changes. We are just beginning to acknowledge the intelligence of plants on any kind of significant scale and to explore the nature of that intelligence and how it works, but we continue to mess with plants just as we continue to extinguish bugs and on an equally significant scale. What happens to a plant’s way of communicating with others of its kind or with plants of different kinds when it is genetically modified? We don’t know but still we act.

On this basis, I see no reason not to act on the basis of centering others. We don’t know what will happen if we do so but why not see? The problem of course is implementation.

While I was on the Cape I was intrigued by the plants I saw growing there in the scrub. It occurred to me that were I to live on the Cape at this moment in my life I would fill whatever space I had with the plants I found in the scrub and could identify as part of an ecosystem that existed before the importation of exotic invasives. My interest would lie in watching how these plants related to each other and to the insects they attracted. I would not be planting them because I found them attractive but because I was interested in centering them and whatever life they supported. I would want to believe I gave the leaf and the bug the same priority as myself.

If I were to begin my career as a gardener now, I would begin from a basis I did not have 45 years ago. I would start with an education in ecology, one that would lead me to design and plant differently. I can’t do that, of course, but I can do my best to honor the toad and the beetle. I can speak out on behalf of bugs. And I can point out the independence of plants.

Plants don’t exist for us; they exist for themselves. They may use us for their purposes, as Michael Pollan has so brilliantly argued in The Botany of Desire. But they don’t exist for us. They were here before us and they will be here after us. It is time we recognized this essential fact, with all its extraordinary implications.

Indeed, one of the greatest gifts of the garden is the recognition that we humans aren’t the center of the world. Spend one hour examining the life teeming in a handful of dirt and it will shatter your sense of importance. Or spend an hour exploring the intricate beauty of a Columbine flower and take in the fact that the columbine is not being beautiful to attract you. As I take in the exquisite geometry of a succulent or the intricate pattern of an unfurling fern, I experience relief in recognizing that neither plant is intricate or exquisite for my sake.

In some deep sense the garden allows me not to matter so much. And, paradoxically, that is perhaps its greatest value to me.

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Out

The telephone rang one June morning during Gay Pride Week some years ago.

“We need new blood in CommUnity,” Nora announced. “Would you be willing to write a column about gardening?”

Nora was the executive director of the Pride Center for the Capital Region, the oldest continuously operating LGBTQ center in the country as the home page of the Center’s website proudly proclaimed; CommUnity was its monthly paper. I had served on the board of the Pride Center, and at the time was working with Nora on plans to redesign the building’s backyard into an attractive and useable space.

Why not, I thought. After all, how difficult could it be to write a 1000-word column once a month? She was looking for a title that would interest and intrigue.

“How about we call the column ‘Out in the Garden,’” I offered. “That should at least make readers laugh.”

“Done,” said Nora and we hung up.

But where had I heard that expression before? I knew it went deeper than the joy of punning, an art I had learned from my dad and was perhaps overly committed to. Out in the garden, later in the day, I remembered. When I was a child and coming home from school, my mother would tell me about herself as a child coming home from school and asking her mother where her father was. “He’s out in the garden, dear,” was invariably her mother’s response.

Why was my memory of my mother’s memory so vivid that, decades later, it served as the title for my column and now this newsletter? What did it mean for me to be out in the garden? What possible connection could there be between being outside in a garden and being out as a lesbian? Plenty of gardeners are not gay, plenty of gays are not gardeners. And yet, somehow, the need to be literally outside and the need to be out as a lover of women were/are connected for me.

When I was in junior high, I joined my local Girl Scout troop. Marching in the Memorial Day parade, our troop was placed behind the horse brigade. We learned to side-step shit. At Christmas time we caroled outside the homes of those who were “shut in.” Sometimes we were invited in. Then I would see a person who could not get out of the house and the fear of being bed-ridden, confined to a room, would haunt me for days. I much preferred the parade.

Even now, so many years later, I panic if I cannot get out. Spring, summer, fall I cannot sit at my computer or in my reading chair in the morning if the sun is shining or even if it is just cloudy. I have to be outside. In winter, on those days following a big storm, before the roads are cleared, before you can take a walk or drive anywhere, before I can get out, I panic.

I panic at the thought of moving, as I age, to an apartment that has no outside. Sara and I visited a senior retirement center recently and I thought, I could die here. When I shared this response with my guide from the center, she took it as a compliment. I did not mean it as a compliment.

I would have died long ago had I not found my way to come out as a lesbian.

For some two or three years, I dutifully wrote my monthly column, in the late afternoon or early evening, in my study, surrounded by posters from past marches on Washington for gay and lesbian rights, each one exhorting me to “come out.” But whether writing or gardening, I was churning and spinning and thinking about “out,” becoming what Vivian Gornick refers to as a “mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows,” not necessarily finding answers but obsessed by inquiry.

As a child outside was coded “boy.” Outside I got to be a boy, which meant I was free to be a body in motion, discovering my physical self, my capacity to ride a bike or throw a ball or win a race. As a teenager, outside became the place where I could be sensual without censure. Even now, to Sara’s utter dismay, I relish a hot and humid evening, one without the air conditioning on, one that reminds me of evenings long ago when, after working our 3 to 11 shift at the hospital, I would drive the girl I loved to the Dairy Queen. There we would sit outside and together consume a gooey confection of vanilla ice-cream slathered with a mixture of chocolate and marshmallow sauce called a “Jack and Jill.” This reminder of enforced heterosexuality did not take away my passion; it just drove it underground.

I was lucky enough to encounter feminism in time to literally save my life. Feminism enabled me to understand that enforced heterosexuality is key to patriarchy’s control of women and that the panic over homosexuality is all about control. It is no accident now that the far right is frantic over the explosion of choice in the realm of sexual self-expression and is determined to ensure that boys will be and stay boys and girls will be and stay girls and that there will be no other options than boys and girls and that in this way boys will rule. If patriarchy wins out in this country, as it might well do, I will be happy to die for refusing to go back in.

I keep puzzling over “Out in the Garden” and what it means for me to connect my love of plants with my love of women. In the end I have come to think of “out” as a code word for “desire” and of desire as the force that has allowed me to survive and to flourish. I recall Dylan Thomas and consider that my passion for plants and my passion for lovers past and present is indeed the same as “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Sometimes I think I will change the name of my newsletter just so I won’t have to think about this issue of connection anymore. But I can’t. D.H. Lawrence famously commanded his readers, “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.” But for me, trusting the teller seems paramount. I want my reader to know who is telling the tale and to trust that this teller is willing to confront complexity and ambiguity and to rest in contradictions.

Nothing is simple and perhaps the best we can do is to leave things hanging, like my mother’s last garden, two geraniums in a single pot hanging out on the porch of her apartment at Laurel Oaks, the senior retirement center she moved to in her eighties.

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July 10, 2023

Real Toads in Real Gardens

Sometimes (always?) in the garden, there is blood. I have three hemlocks. Every other year I prune them back, severely. I work fast; it is the only way for the aging gardener to manage a large garden. But rapid pruning can be dangerous. With sharpened clippers I attack, snipping here, snipping there, snipping me. I take a break, clean the cut, put on a band-aid, and get back to work. Or sometimes I just keep working, much to Sara’s distress.

I don’t mind my wounds. My trees “bleed” a bit where I have pruned them, and I bleed a bit where they have scratched me or I have cut myself. I pretend we have signed a covenant to flourish this season, each with our own blood, each in our own way.

But one spring, raking out dead leaves from under the ‘Annabelle’ Hydrangeas, I felt something move, just a little, under my rake. I got down on my knees and gently sifted through the leaves. A large toad, exactly the color of the leaves I was raking, sat there looking up at me. I picked her up, then noticed she was bleeding. I had cut her with my rake. The sight of her blood filled me with remorse. If there had been an Urgent Care for toads, I would have dropped my rake and taken her there.

Instead I covered her up with leaves and said a prayer for her forgiveness. But now, whenever I rake out under shrubs in the early spring, I work first with my hands. If I find a toad still half asleep, I put her in a safe place before I pick up my rake. I don’t want any more toad blood on my hands.

#

“I, too, dislike it.”

By “it,” the poet Marianne Moore, writing in 1919, meant the genre she practiced. I resonated with her dislike, sharing it with her. This led me to read further.

One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it.

I, too, liked toads and so thought I might like the modernist poetry that was fashionable during my college years. I enrolled in a course, failed spectacularly, self-sabotaging my chances for admission to most graduate schools. Imaginary gardens did me in.

Real gardens, of course, are now my source of life. And when they contain real toads, my joy is complete.

Working on Friday, Kevin shouted, “Here’s a toad,” and I raced over to admire. We gently pushed back the wet leaves so that we could watch her pump her abdomen in and out in slow measured calming breathing, designed to fool us into thinking she wasn’t alive. We admired her speckled bumpy back and strong back legs. We immersed ourselves in the pattern made by the gray and brown and green shards of color on her back. We tried to catch her prominent eye to thank her for being in our garden. Then we covered her up with wet leaves.

Later we found two tiny toads and only high-fives could express our delight.

So why this excitement over a toad. Why would a recent Washington Post article claim, “Toads are the garden’s heroes”? Because, the article explains, “When it comes to pest control, toads are nature’s Orkin men. They can quickly plow through bug populations, eating just about any insect, larvae, snail or slug they can get into their mouths.” Truth be told, larger toads, it seems, may attempt to eat anything that moves, as long as it fits into their mouths. This can include small snakes, baby birds, and mice.

In addition to their function as pest controllers, toads in the garden are also a sign of a healthy-balanced environment. Toads have permeable skin through which they absorb oxygen – and toxins. As a result they are extremely sensitive to changes in the quality of air and water. They are often the first animals to be affected by pesticide use in or near their ecosystems. Toad health is a bellwether for the health of other species in the same ecosystem. If I have toads, then, I can imagine as well that other creatures are thriving.

This season I have witnessed a bumper crop of toads in my garden. I dream of an ecosystem slowly returning to health. The only toxin I bring into the garden is copper hydroxide which I have sprayed on the blue spruces to control the rhizosphaera fungus that is defoliating them. But in my brief research on toads, I have read that the common cane toad (Bufo bufo) is rather sensitive to copper. I suspect this is also the case for the American toad (Anaxyrus americanus.) I think it may be time to give up on the spruces.

I love the name Bufo bufo. Though ‘bufo’ does not mean “clown” in Latin, it has that meaning in Spanish, my only other language. I find it to be a perfect name for a creature that looks a bit like a clown yet does really important work. However, though all toads secrete toxins that are potentially harmful to animals that bite or feed on them, including native animals and domestic pets, the cane toad appears to be more aggressive, outcompeting native species for resources like food and breeding habitat.

So I hope my toad is the common American toad. I think she is. The American toad is 2 to 3.5 inches long, with short legs, a stout body and thick warty skin. Brown is the most common skin color but, according to National Geographic, skin color is highly variable and can also be red, olive or gray. We saw short legs, stout body, and thick warty skin. We saw red and gray and olive green as well as brown. I think we saw Anaxyrus americanus.

#

Though a lesbian, I do like princes, and am lucky to have many such men in my life. But I am grateful that, if I could kiss my toad, whether boy or girl, it would still stay a toad. I doubt if Anaxyrus would let me kiss her, though. That’s ok. It is enough just to stare in wonder.

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June 20, 2023

Path

I encountered the following headline in a recent issue of my local paper, the Times Union: “American Dream convinces people loneliness is normal.” And beneath a photo of Ted Lasso and others, I read, “Today, loneliness plays out on streaming TV all the time in the forms of shows like ‘Ted Lasso.’

In my “how to deal with aging” group, we discuss the fact that the U.S. government recently released a report claiming that loneliness has reached epidemic proportions among adults in America and that it is even more severe among the elderly. According to the Surgeon General, loneliness takes a toll as deadly as smoking.

Perhaps this explains the sense of joy I felt two weeks ago when Kevin and I completed our Friday morning work by creating a path between my neighbors’ house and my own.

Nancy and I have been exchanging plants and plans ever since the pandemic kept us more tethered to our specific location and promoted contacts that occurred outside. Nancy and Sara have shared recipes and kitchen equipment. Post pandemic, longer visits have included Paul and wine.

Recently, Nancy and I have begun to rely on each other for garden care when we are away from home. A better path between our houses would facilitate our helping each other out.

So much of landscaping is about creating barriers – hedges that block views and access, fences that create private space, space without impingement of the other, visually or emotionally. I delighted in doing just the opposite. When Kevin finished removing the last low hanging branch of the hemlock and I cut back the last over-reaching branch of the weigela and a clear path between my house and Nancy’s emerged, I felt not only joy but a deep sense of gratitude. The path symbolizes connection and if loneliness laps at my heels, no wonder I exult in having such a good neighbor.

On a recent trip to Amherst, Sara and I visited the home of Emily Dickinson. While Dickinson is no longer presented as the slightly mad poetess whose poetry was the result of her failure to find a man, our guide still brushed over Dickinson’s relation to Susan Gilbert. The love of Dickinson’s life before she married Dickinson’s brother, Susan was also Dickinson’s first audience and often co-creator. Indeed, Dickinson once wrote, “Where my hands are cut, her fingers will be found.” These words bring tears every time I read or write them. It would, I believe, be hard to find a more moving description of collaboration.

A path connects the home of Emily Dickinson and the home of Susan Gilbert Dickinson who lived “next door.” It is unclear how often Dickinson used the path to visit her beloved Susan but she could see the house and perhaps Susan from her second story room. Standing on that path, I imagined I could feel the love between these two 19th century women that was symbolized by this path. Ironically, a woman known to most for her isolation serves for me as a symbol of connection.

Paths are, indeed, most often a connection between two points. But sometimes paths do not have clear destinations, they are just a way through the world. I think of my garden paths in this light. They are not so much directed at bench or sculpture or focal plant as they are a way to move through the garden and observe what occurs on either side. I create curved paths as a way of slowing down a visitor’s progress through the garden. Sometimes I use stones to increase attention to the beauty of the way.

I suspect the spiritual path is more akin to the garden path than to the path I created between my house and my neighbor’s. Sara declares she is not on a spiritual path and I declare her knowledge is worth a million dollars. For if she is not on it, she must know where it is. And for that information, many would pay dearly, including me. But she’s not sharing.

At the Cape last week, on a much-needed rest from over-exertion, I had the chance to sea bathe. I did not swim so much as simply walk about in the waters of the bay as they covered me up to my shoulders. The waters did not reach above my head until I had walked a long distance from the shore. Looking back, bathed in the water, standing on the ocean floor, I thought: sea-bathing restores my soul. I must do something each day that restores my soul as these waters have.

Home now, I think that on any day I walk the path between my house and my neighbor’s, I will have fed my soul. For if loneliness is epidemic and if loneliness destroys the soul, then surely connection restores the soul.

I need to see if Nancy would like some of the Japanese anemone that Kevin and I plan to remove from a certain part of the garden this Friday. Perhaps later today I will trot over and find out.

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