A predecessor to the garden blog

What do garden bloggers do anyway? Some write to inform their readers about garden-related topics, and perhaps defend a point of view, but in most cases, blogs are like public journals of a garden's progress and the gardener's reflections. It's no wonder that one friend recommended that I attend BNAN's workshop on keeping a garden journal (which, unfortunately, I missed due to a conflict), and another lent me her copy of An Island Garden Daybook by the late poet Celia Thaxter.

Over a hundred years ago, Thaxter returned to the place where she spent part of her childhood, on one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire, and created and tended a spectacular garden featuring fifty varieties of flowers, including hollyhocks, sunflowers, lupines, poppies--many that can be found in the Minton Stable Garden today. While modern-day bloggers rely on their digital cameras for visual documentation, Thaxter benefitted from the talents of her painting instructor, Childe Hassam. His paintings of flowers, birds, and garden landscapes provided the illustrations for her book The Island Garden.

The 1990 reissue by the Houghton Mifflin Company features excerpts from Thaxter's text and Hassam's artwork alongside blank spaces for each date of any given year, but whose documentary scribble can compete with poetic observations such as this?

The snowdrops by the door
Lift upward, sweet and pure,
Their delicate bells; and soon,
In the calm blaze of noon,
By lowly window-sills
Will laugh the daffodils!

Even if the book wasn't on loan, I would probably just as well leave the expression of the joys and trials of gardening on these pages up to Thaxter. We are both New England gardeners, after all, operating in similar climates on similar schedules. About late May, Thaxter writes: "Pulling up and throwing away...superfluous plants is a very difficult thing for me to do...but it must be done...The welfare of the garden depends on it." I can certainly relate, on the painful experience of digging out a volunteer sunflower, denying its majestic future in my plot to ensure adequate sun on my tomatoes and broccoli, and yanking out strawberry runners invading my perennials despite the potential for even more sweet fruit.

Celia Thaxter is one of many writers whose gardening experience most likely enhanced not only her writing but her ability to keenly observe her surroundings. As I've worked on my own documentation over the past year, I find myself taking more notes, and looking for details that I had recently taken for granted, including the size of a plant, the contrast of colors, the level of ease or difficulty involved in pulling a weed...just as a garden remains a work in progress, so is the writing.

Now I'm looking forward to this moment in late June when, as Thaxter states: "...I can begin to take a breath and rest a little from these difficult yet pleasant labors; an interval when I may take time to consider, a morning when I may seek the hammock in the shady piazza, and, looking across my happy flower beds, let the sweet day sink into my heart."

Garden poems for your pocket

I'm a sucker for Days. Record Store Day, ESL Awareness Day, and Teacher Appreciation Day are just a few that I have recently observed, though I admit that a few of those are self-serving. Last year, while I was teaching a unit on poetry (to prove my previous sentence), I became aware of the Poem in Your Pocket Day, on April 30. The idea behind this observance, a final bow to National Poetry Month, is that in order to appreciate this literary medium, one copies (or writes) a meaningful poem and carries it around in his or her pocket, to pull out and read to friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else with the courtesy to listen.

The hardest aspect of this day, at least for me, is to choose one poem to have the honor to share space with my keys, spare change, and lint. This year, with the blog in mind, my choice addresses a gardening theme. I have decided to go with "The Garden Gate" (see below), though a little web research has dug up a few contenders, including:

"Guests" by Celia Thaxter--she captures the sensory essence of gardening, not just through her poetry, but through other written reflections about her own experiences tending an amazing garden on an island off the coast of Maine. More from her in future posts...

"They'll spend the summer" by Joshua Beckman--a sweet little haiku leaving the reader wondering who "they" are. My guess is that they are people like you and me and the garden alleviates our stress.

"The Glory of the Garden" by Rudyard Kipling--a decent garden takes hard work. Though I object to the poet's suggestion that only men carry out these duties, I'll acknowledge just a little that he was a product of his time.

"My Garden" by Emily Dickinson--though vulnerable, the garden will always be a place for birth.

If anyone out there has another notable poem within this theme, please share it. "The Garden Gate," written in February by Joe Bergin and Terry McAweeney, is a thoughtful tribute to the Minton Stable Garden and the people who have made it a special place. Joe has read the poem twice, at the Sounds of the Garden benefit and the Gardeners Gathering, but to our knowledge, it has not had its Internet debut, until now:

The Garden Gate

You get up early in spring in the morning

The riotous birds are mating high handsome and wide

The early light has beamed through your bedroom window

You trip down the steps to the great outside

Crocuses at your foot, the promise of a daffodil

The breeze doesn't bite, and the garden gate defrosted

is in a stone's throw sight

and in your bones you feel the old thrill

You've studied the January seed catalogues

You've sent for the heirloom strains

You've consulted the Farmer's Almanac

You've prayed for a sunny May and a tapering off of April rains

It's a short march to the garden

A shovel and hoe in hand

to turn the soil, put your back into toil

and your time and energy to sweeten the land

On your walk down the radius gravel path

you pause by the 3 granite monuments to the man

and give a thought to old John Carroll

and think to yourself

just how this glorious garden began

It was back in 1993

after they tore down the ancient horse barn

John, who'd seen much death in Vietnam

looked across the overgrown vacant city lot

and in a vision saw a neighborhood flower and vegetable farm

And you know he knew that was the old horse trail

where pleasure riders into Franklin Park would prance

and his mind must've reeled at the sheer infinitude of biomass

of all the equine road apple gifts

that down through the years

became the rich land grant of nitrogen to our plants

Now, onward, you open the wooden and iron ball and chain gate

and proceed to your 10' by 10' plot

The sun is kissing the back of your neck

and you feel sweetly high as if you've just had a large chocolat

Turn the soil, add compost, look for earthworms

Level the land, sow the seeds, hum a song

Thank Mother Earth, say a prayer to your little garden

May miraculous germination

please not take very long

Say, there's your beloved neighbor!

You converse as you're down on all fours

You delight in airy conversation

as they till their soil on their plot down from yours

It's a model for communities everywhere

It makes a hamlet of our corner of Jamaica Plain

Where you work side by side with fellow gardeners

growing crops in the sun and the rain

So it is, come summer, down on Williams Street

Home from work, ask a neighbor how their day has gone

and you can tell it's been a hard one

...but they smile and say

"I'll see you in the garden, later on..."