Wednesday, November 28, 2007

home again

We are home again. After three weeks of travel to New Orleans, Houston, the Eastern Townships, and Montreal, we have arrived back in Vermont to the cold, lean days of late November. This is a beautiful time of year here, but you have to look beyond the wash of browns and grays, and embrace the austere lines of the land, the naked branches and knarled trunks of the trees, the atmospheric low-light of the days and evenings. You have to watch for the magic of shooting stars across the November night sky.

Where to begin to write about this past month? New Orleans and her bright hope and blown-down past, slick, sophisticated Houston—no cow-town here folks, and snow-glad Quebec with wine routes and handmade cheeses, fatted ducks, hard cider. We would like to start chronologically, but somehow our rememberances of these places have situated themselves more like a collage with new narrative threads connecting us from point to point. So the next few weeks, and perhaps the next month, will be peppered with tales of the journey, along with the trials of growing winter greens, the barrel tasting and bottling of the wine, the tasting of the Christmas walnut liquer. In the meantime, fore more information on what's happening in New Orleans go visit the valiant
www.neworleansladder.com.





--Deirdre and Caleb

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Dear Reader

Dear Reader: Thank you for coming to the blogsite, and apologies for the hiatus. We have been traveling for the month of November and have had difficulty being able to post. We will return to Vermont at the end of month and be posting in the days after November 27th. In the meantime, you can check out our guest blog at www.thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com. We will be posted on Monday, November 26th!

--Deirdre & Caleb

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Night Gardening

Tomorrow has arrived. Since those first few days of vacation, a slumber has set in, or the need to do something else. Sunny mornings perfectly good for gardening, still warm enough to laugh at a hard frost, have been spent sleeping late, drinking coffee, and reading. Then the afternoons get eaten by the need to straighten the house, cook a meal for friends visiting, or painting the front door, the bathroom, the staircase.

The week speeds by. Strange how that always happens. When you want time to drag, it always chooses to do otherwise. Now, we are confronted with the day before we leave for a trip down to Delta country, New Orleans and Houston. We’ve had that cold, hard frost already two nights in a row, the landscape in the early mornings covered in a film of diamonds. It almost looks like snow. There are still terra cotta pots full of roses and lavender, and winter gem boxwood waiting to be freed from their bound roots and put into the ground.

It is always like this, the mad rush before leaving home. There is always something that needs to be done, that can’t wait because the loss will be too great. If we don’t plant the roses, the lavender, and the boxwood, they will die. The terra cotta pots will crack. So at 3:00 in the afternoon, we fuel up with hot, dark coffee and begin the Herculean, if not Sisyphean task of emptying the pots with their frozen dirt and root balls. We hack at the concrete-like soil with hand shovels and screwdrivers. We are elated when we realize that if we can get past the initial crust, the earth inside the pots is soft and we can pry the plants out.

We work doggedly together, then separately when we see the sun starting to slide past the mountain ridge. We are not cold, even though the temperature now is below freezing, the worst time to try and transplant. I wonder if any of these prized canes and woody stems will even survive the upheaval. We spend several hours bend over digging and pulling. Our backs and forearms, our hamstrings begin to burn with the fever of too much.

When darkness finally descends, we can still see for quite some time because the sky is so clear. We light tikki torches to keep at the work in the perennial garden, and turn the outdoor house lights on that reflect a warm glow over the stone garden. Finally, most of the plants are all in the ground, one way or the other, and most of the pots are clean of dirt. We lay the pots face down near the gardens so they won’t fill with water if it rains while we are away. Caleb takes the last of the boxwood, ten pots in all, the ones we can’t shake loose from the terracotta and puts them inside. They are lined smartly in front of the French doors in our bedroom. I feel a little like the garden has come to haunt me.

There is still packing to do, a hot shower to take, a warm dinner to eat, some unfinished business to attend to. I collect the red and white striped sling chairs and put them away for the season, stripping them of their fabric to be washed and stored until next spring. These chairs have become our symbol of summer, and our reluctance to fold them up is testament to our reluctance to move on past autumn. By doing so, we are finally putting our season to bed.

I look up at the clear, vast sky littered with stars. At this late hour of the evening, the night sky is the inverse of the morning field, covered in a film of diamonds.


-Deirdre

Saturday, November 3, 2007

first days

It always takes a few days for a vacation to kick in. The body and mind continue to race around as if there is something imperative to accomplish, and feels at loose ends because in reality there is nothing pulling you forward. Everyone knows it takes at least a week to unwind, then another week to begin to relax.

On day two of our vacation, a friend leaves a message on the answering machine. “Hi! I hope you have all your projects done now so you can start to enjoy your time off!” We groan and laugh. We haven’t even begun our “projects”, a long list of before-snow-flies duties that hang over our heads like heavy, metal gray snow-clouds. For me, the perennial gardens are at the crux of the list. All month a voice at the back of my mind has been admonishing,“You need to cut down the garden. Dig and divide. Plant. Mulch.” I have been a reluctant listener, avoiding the garden as if it doesn’t even exist.

I love my garden. I have spent nine and half years toiling over the 900 square feet of flower and herb beds, stone paths, and painted gray fence. Those square feet have seen two variations of garden, three tractors to till, and then season after season of hand-tilling, all to keep the grasses at bay. My garden sits in a meadow surrounded on all sides by switch grass, buttercup, madder, and wild chervil. Every year, the grasses threaten to overtake as they thread their roots through the coreopsis and bearded iris. There is also the problem of the mint. Years ago, as a novice gardener impatient for thick borders of vegetation, I planted mint, along with tansy. Now the two run like wildfire through the beds and require constant taming throughout the season. Each season is like starting from scratch.

This summer and fall, I have neglected my garden. Too much time was spent building and planting the new, sunken garden which now has officially become Caleb’s garden. He has taken over all the raised beds for his vegetables, especially his lettuces, chicories, and wild arugula. He still quite can’t believe that he has become a gardener. He always thought it would be my realm. Caleb enjoys looking at gardens, and has often been my help in the structural elements of the garden, but never one to become animated over the winter nursery catalogs that start to arrive in January. His mother is an inveterate gardener, and he used to buck at the gardening chores that he was given as a child. Now, he thinks about his garden all the time, ways in which he can improve the soil, collect more heat, make clever cold frames. Almost as if it is a necessary inverse, I have turned my back on my garden, and the numerous pots of plants requiring my attention before it gets much colder.

Perhaps it’s my reluctance in admitting that it is time for the garden to be put to bed. I am uncomfortable with death. Perhaps it is something I’ve inherited from my mother who wails at autumn. She has always hated the loss of the plants, the onslaught of dead leaves and brown stalks. Her own mother died in the autumn and I am sure that is a large part of her aversion. Just like she hates the scent of lilies because they were the flowers at the funeral.

I look out over the brown stalks in my garden, though the mint is still valiantly green, and the salvia is incredibly still blooming. I look at the stacks of outdoor cushions and red and white striped chairs ready to be put away before the weather really turns. I make a list of all that needs to be planted: 20 roses, 14 box wood, a hedge of black-eyed susan, 4 plum trees, 2 hydrangea, one apple. I have written this all before. I am somehow hopeful that writing it again will help me to actually go in the garden. But, of course, before I can begin planting, there is a host of other things to accomplish: the cutting back, the weeding, the dividing, and amending the soil. Tomorrow.