Liza Gyllenhaal — a writer in the garden

The Sweet Autumn clematis that festooned the trellis with small glossy leaves all summer has burst into blossom. Swarmed by bees, its tiny, star-like flowers give off a heady aroma of vanilla and clove. In another few weeks, these flowers will morph into clouds of fluffy silver seed heads. The mint and basil in the herb garden have already bolted, sending up soft purple plumes, studded with golden seeds. In the wildflower field, the pods of the milk weed have burst their seams, letting loose their silky filaments into the air. And all day long you can hear the sound of acorns dropping from the stand of towering oaks – hard little self-contained embryos seeking fertile ground. Though the garden appears to be dying back, it’s actually a time of rapid transformation when so many plants – in a last great burst of energy – rush to propagate themselves as the colder days set in.

Fall

Mary Oliver

the black oaks fling
their bronze fruit
into all the pockets of the earth
pock pock

they knock against the thresholds
the roof the sidewalk
fill the eaves
the bottom line

of the old gold song
of the almost finished year
what is spring all that tender
green stuff

compared to this
falling of tiny oak trees
out of the oak trees
then the clouds

gathering thick along the west
then advancing
then closing over
breaking open

the silence
then the rain
dashing its silver seeds
against the house

There’s something a little fussy and old-fashioned about phlox. The flowers, arranged like over-sized five-leaf clovers, mass into airy clusters that give off a sweet, slightly musty aroma. My phlox paniculata were already well-entrenched in our long border when we bought our place almost thirty years ago, though I didn’t pay much attention to them at the time. I still don’t for most of the summer. With the peonies and lilies in riotous blossom, it’s easy to overlook the lanky plants standing quietly in the back of the border. Until, usually around mid-July, I notice that they’re sprinkled with powdery mildew  – a white talcum-like substance that causes the leaves to wilt and brown. Every year I vow to dig them up in the fall. Then August rolls around. The roses and clematis and the daisies and astilbes have withered. But the phlox! The phlox are in wild, luxurious bloom – shaken from their long slumber to splash the fading border with great swaths of magenta. Dowdy no more, they flirt between the sedum and hydrangeas, belles of the late summer ball where they’ve danced for who knows how many decades.

The Gardener

by Patricia Hooper

Since the phlox are dying
and the daisies with their bright bodies
have shattered in the wind,

I go out among these last dancers,
cutting to the ground the withered asters,
the spent stalks of the lilies, the black rose,

and see them as they were in spring, the time
of eagerness and blossoms, knowing how
they will all sleep and return;

and sweep the dry leaves over them and see
the cold earth take them back as now
I know it is taking me

who have walked so long among them, so amazed,
so dazzled by their brightness I forgot
their distance, how of all

the chosen, all the fallen in the garden
I was different: I alone
could not come again to the world.

What took me so long?  It wasn’t until early this spring that I tasted my first watermelon radish, though I imagine they’ve been around forever. Rough and earthy on the outside, inside they’re a shock of gleaming dark red. Not always solid red, but riffs on the color: rings or spirals or sprinkles of red, swirled against a field of crisp white. It’s no surprise that radishes belong to the mustard family. Though full of nutritional and medicinal benefits, they can be spicy and pungent enough to cause some gastric distress. I’ve discovered, though, that the watermelon variety is milder and less assertive. A Daikon offshoot, it’s also rounder and bigger than most other radishes.

Entranced, I tracked down some watermelon radish seeds and planted them earlier this summer. They sprouted almost overnight and shot up three feet in the air while my back was turned. I finally had to stake them a few weeks ago, right around the time I noticed a thick red bulge pushing up through the earth.  Once pulled and washed, the radish turned out to be the size of a small apple. It wasn’t as perfect as the first one I’d tasted – it had a few bumps and dings – but it had the same delicious, almost nutty taste. It would have looked lovely, sliced on top of salad, but it didn’t make it that far.

Radishes

by Ange Mlinko

Smoke and ash of November.
A landscape of sediment and char,
lead and gold leaf, mutilated sod
racing on its planetary camber.
On a kitchen table’s crude altar
a bowl of radishes is offered

with a dish of salt for dipping whole.
That’s how my father would eat them.
My mother sliced them thin.
Theirs was no house in a fairy tale.
Yet the knife that trimmed the stem
and scraped the blemished skin

would halt at her intrepid thumb.
Radishes of rosy cheeks, of snow,
peppery radishes of yesteryear,
which made my tongue go numb,
why are you so much milder now?
You don’t set the mouth on fire.

Did something in your cultivation change,
or does sensation wane with age?
In a French film, I saw two friends
spread butter on radish halves; strange,
I thought, but now it’s all the rage
to sauté them. Their trailing ends

clog my drain-stopper. Best is raw:
it’s “war” backward, like a spell
grown in the cold ground, color
of rose and snow—good to gnaw
a vegetable so filial and feral
late in the year, when the knife is duller.

A few weeks ago, I noticed something strange at the bottom of our frog pond: what appeared to be two dark fish, swimming in circles. They looked like carp, each about 8 inches long. But how did they get there? Our pond is small, self-contained, and pump fed.  Could a passing bird have dropped them in?  I once saw a crane stalking around the area, but it seemed to be looking for fish, not disposing of them. As the days passed and the two fish kept circulating, I noticed the frog population seemed to be thinning out. I’ve grown to love our frogs, and I couldn’t help but worry: could the carp be eating them? “Carp have a tendency to eat almost anything,” the internet informed me, “bottom matter or even minnows, crawfish and frogs.”

I knew I had to get them out. I tried to scoop them up with a butterfly net but they just darted away under the rocks.  So I consulted the digital authorities, and ended up purchasing this crayfish trap, made in China of mostly green plastic twine. As recommended, I baited it with corn kernels and dropped it into the deepest part of the pond.  The next morning, what turned out to be catfish (carp don’t have whiskers) were thrashing around inside. They’ve since been relocated to a nearby brook, but the mystery remained.  How did they get into our frog pond in the first place?

Very slowly, something began to take shape in the depths of my subconscious. Fragments of a memory circled through my thoughts — then surfaced in a flash of insight.  Several years ago, a young nephew proudly showed me a mason jar with a couple tiny fish he’d caught in Stockbridge Bowl aswim inside.  He wanted to keep them, but his family had to head back to the city and board a plane. Could he leave them behind in our pond? They were no bigger than minnows. When we gently tilted the jar into the water, the fish disappeared immediately. I doubted we’d ever see them again. The frogs, I thought, would eat them.

Here’s a lovely sonnet by the classicist and poet A.E. Stallings that is nominally about fishing but has a lot to say about fathers and daughters.

Fishing

By A.E. Stallings  

The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her—
She’d rather have been elsewhere, her look told—
Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
Life and death weighed in the shining scales,
The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

This is the time of year when meadows in the Berkshires take on an almost otherworldly beauty. Clover, wild carrot, violets, forget-me-nots  –- overnight, drifts of wildflowers have spread across field after field. Banks of blue and white wild phlox glow along roadways and at the edge of the woods.  In the deeper shade, columbine, jack-in-the-pulpit, and Indian pipes — complex, curious-looking shapes — have sprung up out of nowhere.  A month or so ago the fields were still mostly stubble and the landscape monotone.  It’s a magical moment. A time to savor the everyday miracle of our natural world. Here’s a poem by the great American poet James Wright on the subject.

A Blessing

by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Up close, they look like loosely scattered pearls or bubbles popping in a glass of champagne. Take a few steps back, and they resemble clusters of far-off galaxies, glistening in the dark. I came upon them the other morning on the northwest corner of our frog pond, right where our Field Guide to the Animals of Vernal Pools said that wood frogs prefer to lay their eggs.  Look closely at the photograph and you’ll see tiny dark brown tadpoles, grazing on the symbiotic algae that colonizes the egg masses after the larvae hatch. By June, the frogs will have developed legs and started hopping off into the uplands, only to return to the pond late next winter to begin the cycle all over again.

The miracle of Spring is at its most vivid this time of year, when the sun can be unforgiving, and the air still has a bite. Against a dull backdrop of flattened fields and leafless trees, it’s easy to spot the cardinals and phoebes setting up house, the turtle half-way across the road, heading to its breeding grounds.  But laid bare, too, is nature’s random violence: the pile of feathers and bones leftover from a raptor’s meal.

Despite being chosen as the month to celebrate poetry, April has always been problematic for poets. T.S. Eliot famously called it the “cruelest month.”  Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote that it “comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” Here’s a poem on the subject by the American poet Alicia Ostriker, one of her seemingly offhanded meditations that is packed with purposeful delights.

April

by Alicia Ostriker

The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing their e-mail petitions
marching with their satiric signs
singing their we shall overcome songs
posting their pungent twitters and blogs
believing in a better world
for no good reason
I envy them
said the old woman

The seasons go round they
go round and around
said the tulip
dancing among her friends
in their brown bed in the sun
in the April breeze
under a maple canopy
that was also dancing
only with greater motions
casting greater shadows
and the grass
hardly stirring

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon
sniffing this way and that
how gratifying the cellos of the river
the tubas of the traffic
the trombones
of the leafing elms with the legato
of my rivals’ piss at their feet
and the leftover meat and grease
singing along in all the wastebaskets

Photo: Diginatur, CC BY-SA 3.0

The gouges on our garage door were deep and angry, ripping into the old wood, leaving splinters scattered across the breezeway. Our porch, too, had been attacked, the screens sliced diagonally, the cuts clean as a razor — or a bear claw. A very hungry black bear, it turned out, roused too early from its somnolence by this year’s weirdly warm winter weather.

Black bears are a regular feature of life in the Berkshires. Harmless for the most part, sometimes even comical.  One summer, several years back, we had one break into our garage, pull out a full bag of bird seed, and proceed to sit under the trees at the top of the drive, bag between his legs, shoveling seed into his mouth and refusing – despite the banging of trash can lids – to leave. The cop who was finally called had no better luck with his horn and flashing lights.  It wasn’t until he turned on the siren that the bear, with visible disgust, got up and lumbered away.  He was spotted again, hours later, at the bottom of the driveway, gazing up longingly at the scene of the crime.

Bears, I’m told, can smell bird seed a mile away, and they never forget where they discovered a tasty treat.  There’s a chance that our recent marauder is one and the same as our summer guest. Bears in the wild can live up to 30 years. If so, his visit this time was a lot less light-hearted. The claw marks and sliced screens testify to his innate brute strength ­– a male can weigh up to 600 pounds – and ravenous appetite.  Though his hunger, unleashed perhaps by our warming planet, could very well be of our own making.

The Bear

by Susan Mitchell

Barred owl. *Photo: Anders Gyllenhaal

If I happen to be outside at the end of the day — usually when dusk is beginning to fall — I’ll often hear the gentle, haunting cry of a barred owl: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? It’s unlike any other bird song I know, close to human-sounding in tone and cadence. But also intimate and somehow loving, like a mother calling her children in for dinner.

Nearly thirty years ago, the night we first moved into our house, something swept across the road in front of us just as we were pulling into the driveway.  It was hardly more than a shadow, flying low, its wings outstretched: a barred owl. It almost seemed to be welcoming us to our new home. Over the decades, there’s always been a barred owl or two around the place. It’s the perfect habitat for them, facing the wooded rise of Harvey Mountain and the rapid babble of Baldwin Brook. They hunt on our land, then sail across the road to perch in the hollows of trees or the repurposed nests of squirrels and hawks. They tend not to migrate, or even travel very far.  Cornell Lab reports that “of 158 birds that were banded and then found later, none had moved farther than 6 miles away.”

It’s comforting to think of us living side by side all these years. I don’t often see them; they blend so beautifully into the landscape. But their songs at twilight let me know they’re still there.

Snowy Night

by Mary Oliver

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

*For more on barred owls, including a gallery of stunning photos like the one above, go to: https://flyinglessons.us/2020/04/23/quarantined-with-an-owl-nextdoor-but-will-we-ever-find-him/

Except for a light dusting at the beginning of the month, it’s been a snowless December in the Berkshires.  Though hardly a dry one. The unusually inclement year is doubling down as it nears its end with rain forecast almost every day this week. The fields are water-logged. The road is mud. Our seasonal creek is overflowing its banks.  The ground has yet to freeze for more than a day or two at a time. Morning mists linger well into the afternoon.

Winter will surely arrive at some point.  But the demarcation lines between Continue reading →

All summer long a pair of blue jays flitted around one of our espaliered pear trees, hopping from the barn gutter to the ground to the top limb of the tree where they’d disappear into its leafy shadows. Despite all the feints and evasive maneuvers, it was clear that the jays were nesting. But it wasn’t until the last of the leaves had fallen a few weeks ago that I discovered where. Packed into the spikey circle of twigs at the tree’s crown, woven with moss and straw and pine needles, was a miracle of avian engineering that had blended perfectly into its surroundings.

The fall reveals so many things that had been hidden in plain sight by summer’s canopies of green: the cresting wave of Continue reading →

The back of the house as seen from the kitchen garden

Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay from 1925 until her death in 1950, is just over the hill from us in the Berkshires. A decade or so ago, after an extensive fundraising and restoration effort by the Millay Society, the house and grounds were opened to the public for tours, but financial setbacks forced the place to close again in 2018. We paid a visit recently during one of the rare occasions when the Continue reading →

We drove up to Provincetown on a recent trip to the Cape. The place was still in a summer mood with traffic bumper to bumper on Commercial Street in the East End and tourists lining up for ice cream on MacMillan Pier. But I was there in search of something that couldn’t be discovered in any of the bustling antique shops and art galleries, something I’d been longing to find for many years.

Continue reading →

Ranks of Queen Anne’s Lace have taken over the wildflower field this year — tall, pale, and lithe as ballerinas. This August’s endless rains have brought them to their knees time after time, but by morning they’ve sprung up again — seemingly taller and stronger than ever. Despite the royal title, Queen Anne’s Lace has quite humble origins: it’s actually wild carrot and considered to be edible in its first year of life. Like many wildflowers, it possesses a litany of uses. The Romans ate it as a vegetable and the American Colonists boiled the taproots to make wine. Its sugar content is second only to that of the beet among root vegetables, and it’s been employed as a sweetener in various cultures around the world. Continue reading →