Gothic Gardening

Gardens tell tales. They speak in shape and scent, in texture and color. They weave hidden messages in their names and in their seasonal growth. Medieval gardens spoke of adventure and betrayal, of healing next to death, of exuberance and bounty, of hard work and dalliance. Cottage gardens speak of coziness and welcome. Vegetable gardens all in neat rows speak of war against hunger, constantly vigilant for the weedy, buggy invader. Victorian gardens speak of nature constrained and tamed, bound tightly into a palette of paint regimented into formal beauty. There are gardens of pastoral delight and gardens of hedge and grass and granite monsters.

Modern gardens owe much to the Victorians, with its façade of ever-blooming paradise. It was the Victorians who made gardens prim and proper and prudish. Throughout history, the garden has held a persistent gothic thread in counterpoint to then-current notions of beauty. Nature was viewed as ambivalent, with all the shades of life – from the most beneficent to the most malevolent. Gardens routinely made space for melancholy. Amid the cheerful daisies, one could encounter the frisson of horror evoked by a half-glimpsed skull.

Before Disneyland, the great gardens were our ancestors theme parks. The designers of the gardens would deploy all manner of special effects to evoke carefully orchestrated emotions from the visitors, even going so far as to hire hermits to live in gloomy grottoes and highwaymen to add a moment of thrill – the precursor of costumed characters. We see some of this still in Japanese gardens. Consider the effects and evocative nature of grottos, overgrown ruins, bridges, waterfalls, garden grotesques and statues, fountains, and arches framing views. The Victorians took these tricks and special effects and tamed them into a bucolic and sanitized garden. Even the ruins were prettified. Utilitarian gardens of vegetables and healing herbs were hidden away, and only the sweet, charming, and wholesome garden was allowed to be in view.

Gothic gardeners reclaim the full beauty and power of nature. Thoreau declared he’d rather live by the most dismal swamp than the most lovely garden where nature became no more than tubes of paint. Even though modern gardens have become more naturalistic, they still owe much to the nostalgia of the Victorians. Gardeners are called upon to nurture delicate flowers and defend them against nature’s invasions of weeds and pests. It’s a classic Gothic drama of innocence besieged, and I think it’s about time this theme was well addressed.

Morticia Addams was an innovative gardener, with her carnivorous and poisonous plants, Her philosophy that there was something to be said for the thorns and the flower just got in the way, exemplified by clipping off the rose blossoms, was such an avant garde garden concept that it’s taken decades for it to percolate through our conscious minds. As ever, the fringes caught the concept and developed it. All over the internet, you find references to Black Gardens and Gothic Gardening, so much so that people try to breed black flowers and black plants to feed the need for the sinister side of nature.

There is, of course, no truly black flower. Many come close, but they are deep maroons, dark chocolates, and even intense violets. A completely black garden is impossible to create, and a true Gothic Garden wouldn’t consist of all black plants anyway.

Black would be the background, the twining thread that connected the garden into a theme. A true Gothic Garden would be layered with meanings. Even if the surface look of a Gothic Garden left a passerby with the impression that it was cheerful, a deeper look would reveal the message Goths want to send: that pain is, that melancholy matters, that the price of life is death. Decadence isn’t always evil. Innocence is besieged, whether it triumphs only time can tell. Pretty is poignant and the plants in a Gothic Garden remind us that nature has better things to than to flatter us mere mortals.

Most gardeners will tell you that the first rule of gardening is to include only plants that share the same growing conditions. In Gothic Gardening, that rule is meant to be broken. Consider microclimates, build them if necessary, to create the ambiance you want in your garden. We Gothic Gardeners want misfits in our garden and if it takes extra effort to keep them there, then so be it. Weeds, too, have their place. The Gothic Theme is broad enough to encompass a wide range of plants because even the most cheerful filler plant speaks to the theme.

A Gothic Garden is a mood and a message. If you can see past the bold spikes and defiant architecture, the Gothic Garden speaks deeply of life and death, of misfits and innocence, of betrayal and loyalty. Should you decide to design a Gothic Garden, consider all the elements – the fencing and borders, the benches, the arches, the plinths and fountains and reflecting pools, the foliage and flowers, the thorns and gnarls, the statues and ornaments and pathways as well as the plants. Design it as a theme park would be designed, with moments of intense emotion and moments of quiet reflection. Add a bit of whimsy. The theme can be drawn from the looks of the plant as well as its name or history or use. Poison plants also heal. Prickly plants nourish. Consider the ironic as a part of the Gothic Garden. Don’t be afraid to add color to a Gothic Garden, because life isn’t all despair, pain, and death. A bright garden butterfly on a stake over a plinthed skull resting among dark purple angelica says life is beautiful and fleeting, sweet and bitter. The garden is about life – the seamy, scary underside as well as the wholesome happy side. Any plant can fit into a Gothic theme – they don’t have to be black, burgundy, maroon, or deep violet. Candy pink roses and yellow buttercups have a place beside the brooding black bamboo and the gloomy black mondo grass. Mingle them judiciously, and your Gothic Garden will be a place of pride.

One Seed

Dill, Chives, Parsley, Nasturtiums

Originally uploaded by nodigio

I’ve been mulling over Al Gore’s movie, and the way we faced food shortages in WWI and WWII, and the energy crisis of the 70’s, and life as a hippy, and Numenism and its Bounty Ministry, and life as we know it today, and I wonder. I wonder just how we got from the united purpose of the World Wars and the dedicated activism of the hippy era and even the more recent bonding of the Murrah Bombing in Oklahoma City to the disenfranchisement and isolation of now – the “I can’t do it” attitude so many people now espouse, and the willingness to let “specialists” handle all of our affairs outside a narrow range of things we feel competent to do.

I’m not a social scientist to pinpoint when this decline began, but I have dedicated my life to studying patterns. The earliest ripples may well have seeded themselves all the way back at the founding of this country – or earlier still. When it began isn’t anything we can change and knowing the beginnings won’t alter how we proceed into the future. The pattern itself is the issue here – the fact that we did change, and the knowledge that having changed, we can change again. “Change Is” and “Everything She Touches, Changes” are two chants frequently sung among the Pagans, yet it doesn’t seem to have sunk into the psyche of the Pagans. Or maybe it did, but the zeitgeist overrode the message.

The point is, we have changed. We’ve become specialists. We produce one tiny thing (whatever it is we do for work) and we consume a great many things. Occasionally, a few of us vote. We depend upon a lot of other specialists to meet our needs and desire: the wheat farmer, the doctor, the teacher, the film industry, the music industry, and so on. Maybe we have a hobby that lets us expand our one tiny thing – maybe we knit caps for preemies, or play the guitar, or bake our own bread. We’ve severed our connections with so many things to build a society of innate specialists. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – specialization has given us computers, cars, and Fair Trade coffee. Specialization freed us to concentrate on one thing at a time. Specialization allowed us sell our skills far outside our local community, making us wealthy. Specialization allowed us to sell our skills far outside our community, destroying that community and severing our ties with our neighbors. Specialization allowed us to sell our skills far outside our community, taking away any personal responsibility for how we destroyed our communities.

Maybe specialization is a good thing, but it comes at a very high cost to us.

What made specialization on this scale possible was cheap energy. It allowed us to pay distant others to provide all sorts of things for us, from entertainment to food to problem-solving. It’s inconceivable to us to live without energy – how will we eat, what will we do for entertainment, who will heal us, who will make our decisions for us? We’ve become so specialized we can’t imagine doing things for ourselves – we wait for a specialist to come up with a solution – a politician or a scientist. Hopefully the solution will be elegant and easy and not cause us to change our lifestyle very much. We’ve put our faith in market-driven solutions on the presumption that those same market-driven solutions got us into this fix in the first place so of course they will get us out.

I was so frustrated at Al Gore’s movie because he presented us with a wide-sweeping problem and then told us in the closing credits that we could “change a light bulb” to fix it. The puniness of what he asked against the enormity of the problem told me clearly that Al Gore was a dedicated specialist. His mind could not conceive of the average American being able to do anything more. His is a mind divided and reliant, compartmentalized, and unimaginative. That is the curse of specialization – the inability to think beyond one’s specialties.

I can, though. See, I’m a Numenist and deeply involved in our Bounty Ministry. Our goal isn’t sustainability, nothing that paltry. No, we’re striving for a thriving, bounteous environment. We can have it, even if we must go through a Little Ice Age or a Long Drought. We can do much more than change a light bulb. We can plant seeds. Real seeds, as in planting radishes, and tomatoes, and strawberries, and seeds as in ideas and suggestions and inspirations.

The specialist mind looks at this huge, overwhelming problem and it freezes up. The problem has so many parts, is so wide-spread, so large, they can’t fit into any of their compartments, can’t imagine any single thing they can do to change things. Someone else will have to take responsibility, and they go back to their lives, convinced that by having thought of the problem, they’ve done all they can do.

We Numenists are people of patterns, of change. And we say we can all do something. Yes, even Al Gore’s little “change a light bulb” thing – it’s a start – a seed. If you change just one thing today, you can influence others to change that same thing. By changing one thing, you open the way to add another little change. Maybe this time, you’ll be influenced by someone else’s change. Over time, those changes will add up. This is a viral social change. If we all pick just one small thing to change – maybe we choose to eat less meat, or use cloth and net bags for shopping, or to ride our bike to work or out shopping or to the park or the movies instead of driving, or to unplug things that are energy vampires (how many clocks do we really need in one room anyway? – the kitchen has one on the oven, the microwave, the refrigerator, the toaster oven, the coffeemaker, etc. Only one needs to be accurate – I pick the refrigerator – unplug the rest when they aren’t in use), or to pick one day a month or a week where we don’t go shopping, don’t drive anywhere, don’t use anything electronic, where virtually everything we do is powered by our own muscles. One thing. One seed to get the others all going.

It’s easy. I know you can do it.

We’ve also been advocating locavorism and growing your own food. Putting in a garden is easy. Our ancestors did it without all the nifty tools we have now. We have better information on soil testing and amendments, and easier methods of getting good plants growing without a great deal of labor or expense. If you plant it from seed, nourish it from your compost and don’t need too many drives to a garden center or nursery, you can grow a free lunch! Not only that, but you’ve grown the freshest tastiest food you can eat with a carbon footprint so small it hits the negative numbers – meaning you’re actively healing the earth and making things better. Your compost is reducing the bags of garbage hauled away from your house even as it feeds your garden – a double positive! You’ll get free exercise, too, and reduce the trips to the gym – that means you’ll be healthier, stronger, get lots of good Vitamin D, and still reduce your carbon footprint. And when you’re in the garden, you won’t be depending on other people to entertain you – a further reduction in your carbon footprint.

If you live in an apartment or condo or hi-rise, you can garden in an abandoned lot, or on the roof, or in window boxes or join a community garden or work with your city council to get gardening land allotted to people who want to claim it (like Germany does).

More importantly, by planting and tending a garden, you will heal not only the earth, but your community and yourself. You’ll meet your neighbors (maybe for the first time!) and form bonds with them (zucchini bonds!), and you’ll gain personal power through your increasingly diverse abilities. You won’t be trapped into a specialization mindset, but will become the creative problem solver who can provide for yourself and your family not only without diminishing the world about us, but by actively increasing the bounty of the earth. Our relationship with the earth is not and should not be a zero-sum game – and gardening is proof of that.

Pick your seed. You can do it. We can do it.

Fence Update

I now have the fence posts seated in and cemented down.  The cement needs to cure overnight.  Tomorrow, I’ll screw the panels in.

Digging fence posts is hard work for a 60 year old woman.  I think I’m going to rest now and play with the doggies.

New Fence

Neighbor’s Fence
Originally uploaded by nodigio

This is why I need to put up a fence on my side of the property line – my neighbor’s fence is falling down and since it’s now falling into her yard, I can’t prop it up any longer. She’s refused to allow me to go halves with her on replacing it. Some days, she claims it’s her fence and she’ll take care of it; other days she says it’s my responsibility and I have to pay all of it. For her, it appears to be an all or nothing solution.

Me, I decided it was a different path. Her fence can fall down if she wants. I no longer care. But I will put up my own fence on my property so when hers finishes falling down, I won’t have to look at it.

New Fencing
Originally uploaded by nodigio

Behold my new fence! It’s still mostly inside the truck. I’ve taken out the 80 pound bags of cement mix and one panel, then realized that, at 5′ tall, 6′x8′ panels would require a bit of help. I’m waiting for people to wake up so I can bribe them with cookies and lunch to help me haul the panels to the back yard so I can get the posts out and start setting them up.

And not one single item was purchased at Home Depot!

I’ve got new fencing – panels. posts, cement, nails, and am good to go. When people wake up, I’ll have help moving the panels out of the truck. I can haul around 80 pound bags of cement mix, but maneuvering 6′x8′ wood panels is a bit beyond me – not the weight, the awkwardness of the size. I’m only 5′ tall.

Lazy Day

Today is a nice, lazy day.

It’s chilly outside and I don’t mind because I have no outside work to do.  It’s too wet to paint the house, the gardens are in, and the yard was mowed earlier, so it’s all in wait mode.

Inside, I have the dishes to wash and I’d like to re-organize a few things, but there’s no rush for any of it.  The laundry’s all done from MedFair and the costumes and accessories packed away until next year.  The ice chest and beverage dispenser are cleaned and out away.  The tables and chairs are folded and put up, too.  The dogs’ costumes are cleaned and folded into their drawers.  The dog carriage has been disassembled and put away.

At the Fair site, the tents are all gone, the Fair’s buildings are disassembled and back in storage, and the grass has been reseeded.  The park is as back to normal as it can be.

Later today I need to buy food for the big dogs and trash bags and light bulbs, but again, there’s no rush for any of this.

I wrote a couple of chapters on the new book, did some re-writing on 2 other books-in-progress, and wrote a couple of articles for my survival blog and my badges blog.  There are some new books awaiting my eyeprints, a freshly baked apple pie, and a dance performance video to put on for background noise and motion.

A lazy day.

Mowed

I mowed front and back yards today.  Then I weeded the rose bed, the lavender beds, harvested parsley, mint, sage, chives, lettuces, radishes, and checked the progress of my strawberries, raspberries, carrots, roses, and lavender.

I picked a bouquet of daffodils, hyacinths and tulips for the livingroom.

My wild violets are up and need to be picked later today, along with the dandelions.

Now, though, I need to take a shower and get ready to take my ex to get a colonoscopy.  I agreed to take care of him for life, but I never agreed to live with him nor did I ever have a condom compact with him, which is why we’re not married anymore.  But I take my responsibilities seriously.  I take him to medical procedures he needs to have done.  I visit him when he’s sick and make him soup.  I take care of his dogs and house and mail when he goes out of town.  I help him out when he runs his booth at fairs.

And I’ll keep on taking care of him until he falls apart and expires of old age – which he will likely do long before me.   I’m 12 years older, but physically, he’s 40 years my senior – old decrepit, falling apart.  He’s got arthritis, bursitis, whinitis.  Every time I see him he’s got some new ache, some new pain, some dreaded possible ailment because of his age.  Listening to him, you’d think he was in his nineties and about to expire with the next breath!

Me, I haven’t got time to be achy, cranky, and pampered.  I have a garden to finish getting in, a house to paint, dishes and laundry to do, homeless people to feed, sick friends to visit, dogs to care for (not mine, my son’s while he’s in Iraq), trees to prune, and a fence to put up.

More Gardening News

My violets are blooming.  I will need to start harvesting them soon to make candied violets and flower jellies.  I’ll have to freeze the flowers for the jellies because I mix them with roses, lavender, and carnations for the jellies.  The roses and lavender have buds, so it shouldn’t be much longer for them.

The redbud is in full bloom and I’ve been harvesting the tasty red buds for salads and soups.  There’s so much I’ll be freezing some to use throughout the summer.  The redbuds never last until fall no matter how much I harvest and put by.

My chives are up, too, about 6 inches tall, which means they are harvest ready.

The chamomile is  in full leaf and the nasturtiums have grown beyond their initial leaves and have a few buds forming.

The potatoes are set out in their bags and on their way to growing.

The lettuces and radishes have had their first harvest.

The onions and garlic are well sprouted.

The carrots should be harvestable soon, and I have sprouts up for the red Brussels sprouts.

The peas should be up soon.  I hope.  I think I may have planted them too early.  We’ll see.

Garden Update

This morning, I harvested rosemary, sage, parsley, nasturtiums, chives, dandelion leaves, dandelion blossoms, the last of last year’s potatoes, radishes, carrots, and the first green tomatoes.

I plucked daffodils, hyacinths, and marguerites to adorn the flower vases.

Year round, I can harvest something from my garden.  This year, the weather was kind enough to allow me to harvest rosemary, parsley, and sage even in the depth of the ice storm.

Next week and the week after, I have to  put in the rest of my vegetable gardens.  I’ve cleaned out the sacks in which I grow potatoes – something even apartment dwellers can do if they have a patio or balcony that gets about 6 hours of sunlight.  Buy some weedcloth, sew it up into 15- 30 gallon sized bags.  Roll the top down until you have about 8 inches at the bottom.  Fill that 8 inches with a good garden soil – Mel’s Mix (1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost) is good.  Plant 3-5 seed potatoes.  As it grows, mound up dirt around it and roll the bag up to hold the dirt in.  Do this until the potatoes stop growing and the tops die.  To harvest, you can either rip the seam out and let the potatoes spill out or you can roll the top down and pull potatoes out.  A 15 gallon bag like this will grow about 20 pounds of potatoes.

The best thing about growing potatoes in bags like this is that you can plant different kinds of potatoes (one kind per bag) without committing a lot of garden space to it.  It’s easier than growing potatoes in discarded tires (although tires are great if you can get them and your neighborhood allows you to have them in your yard/patio/balcony), plus it’s lighter – just some soil and potatoes, no tire weight to add in.

I’ve got several bags of potatoes going – Yukon golds, dark red hortland, German butterball, french fingerlings,  purple majesty, and some baking russets.

Garden

I have tulips up, along with daffodils, grape hyacinths, pink and blue hyacinths, snowdrops, marigolds, dill, parsley, sage, thyme, lettuces, snapdragons, violets, dandelions, petunias, peppermint, lemon balm, strawberries, raspberries, and bluets.

Today, I bought a Snowfire Rose bush to plant.  With luck, it will grow where the others have died.  My daughter wants the Snowfire Rose to be planted where we buried her cat because it’s a touchy, beautiful rose with the wickedest thorns – just like Eris was in life.  We had to have her put down for viciousness, one of the saddest things anyone ever has to do.  She was beautiful, healthy, affectionate when her brain chemistry wasn’t wacked out and turning her into a feral vicious cat, and unfortunately, her unbalanced days outnumbered her affectionate ones.    As long as she only attacked family members, we dealt with it as best we could, but when she attacked a 10 year old little girl (fortunately in winter when she was heavily clothed so the attack scared her but didn’t hurt her), it was time to admit we couldn’t control her anymore and put her down.  So we did.  This rose is in memory of her – sweet, beautiful and dangerous.