Each Little World

Arboretum Corps of Discovery

Last Friday afternoon I walked around the garden and took a few photos. That may not sound like a momentous event, but it's the first time since college that this girl has gone out with an SLR in hand to capture an image. I haven't thought about an F-stop since I was last in a darkroom in the late 1960s. I've spent the better part of the last 20+ years working with newspaper staff photographers, freelancers and a husband who's supplied my column and blog with stunning images for as long as I can remember. 

I'm used to ordering photogs around in the studio, on location, arranging portraits or ongoing news coverage. My job has been to come up with a rough concept, gather props and then sit back while a pro refines it all into an award-winning image. Now, suddenly, here I am having to think about taking my own photos.

It's all because I decided to join the UW-Madison Arboretum "Corps of Discovery," an intriguing series of four, day-long workshops designed to teach participants how to "communicate nature." This project, a joint effort between the Illinois Natural History Survey and the Arboretum, is based on the Lewis and Clark model re-interpreted for the 21st century. Each session is a full day from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. and includes a variety of hands-on activities designed to build one's skills in writing, sketching and drawing, and photography.

LEWIS AND CLARK JOURNALS / American Philosophical Society

The ultimate aim of the program is to create a group of local committed citizens who will aid the UW Arboretum in their work by helping staff document the Arboretum's biological and habitat diversity — using our newly discovered skills! Though the Arb is hoping we will sign on to help them, we can take the classes without making that commitment. 

The program is intense, with instruction divvied up among three instructors from the Illinois Natural History Survey. Each one is a specialist in a given area: Susan Post in nature writing, Carie Nixon in drawing and illustration, and Michael Jeffords in photography. I've rarely seen a group of instructors who are so focussed and so prepared; they schlep tons of material from Illinois — handouts, books, tools, etc. — each session. They manage to visually and creatively present ideas and projects that can be difficult to convey, like how to write descriptively or how to employ various colored pencil drawing techniques. Though we're learning technical skills, they are in the service of aesthetic documentation. And it's all lively and mostly fun.

 

A pair of my journal pages where I literally compared the yellows in five leaves from trees in my front garden. I made a list of all the ways to say "yellow" on the facing page.

I say mostly because much of what we're doing is reminiscent of what Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." So that means taking my own pictures for a start. It also means attempting to write in a different style than I've been using for the last 30 years as a journalist. I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater; but I'm using a lot more adjectives to capture the baby than I've done in the past. 

Someone once described my newspaper writing style as "straightforward and lyrical," a compliment I've always treasured. Now Susan's got us writing poetry. I love reading poetry; but I'm not sure about writing it. Indeed I'm feeling my way with words as much as with the camera in these sessions. How I will integrate what I'm learning into my own nature journaling — or this blog — is still unclear. 

What is clear is that what we're doing in these sessions — and in all of our many homework assignments — has already expanded my expressive toolbox.

 

My "cabinet of curiousities" (two images above) is based on the 18th and 19th century model of collecting specimens. These were mostly gathered from my garden with info on what each object is and when and where it was collected on the grid in the top of the box. Probably only curious and interesting to me.

Happy Anniversary to us

. . . or do I mean U.S.? Today marks the first anniversary of Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States. 

In that year the initial euphoria of many voters has ebbed away. We've discovered that Obama can't walk on water after all. He can't solve all our problems in a mere twelve months. After all, it took a good eight years for us to get into the fix we're in. On the other hand, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor at any age or stage in one's life. But astounding for a sitting American president in his first year in office.

I constantly remind myself that the most important lesson from Obama's election is that it was the result of ordinary people all over the country deciding they wanted a change and then organizing and working to make that change happen. Real change always comes from the bottom — the people — and not the leaders. And nowhere is that more true than here in the U.S.

When I feel like nothing ever really changes, I don't have far to look to know that's not true. When I was in high school there was no Title IX creating parity in women's sports. Heck, there were no women's sports! As for careers, it was pretty much teacher or nurse if you were a woman. When I graduated and went job-hunting, the employment ads were broken down by gender. No women need apply!

Look around yourself and then tell me nothing ever changes. Women demanded changes in their lives, and jobs and made them happen in personal as well as legislative fashion. The LGBTQ, the African-American, American Indian, environmental, the you-name-it-communities have all made change happen in the same way: by going out and doing it themselves.  

Merely by electing Obama, we said that this nation is willing to try to change. I think that alone is worth celebrating. And the President has picked the perfect place to celebrate this election anniversary: He's coming to Madison today! So don't look for us in the garden; we're taking to the streets.

A Reliable Wife

Since Robert Goolrick's novel, "A Reliable Wife," is all about deception, readers can start off by not trusting the pretty, woodsy scene on the book's cover to depict the winter hidden inside these pages. Nor should you trust that the spouse in the novel is going to live up to the title. As it turns out, none of the book's main characters are reliable. And it's the labyrinthian twists and turns the reader must make to ferret out the truth that make this story such a fascinating read. 

 

 "A Reliable Wife" is a Gothic tale of lies, lust, unrequited passions, and murder. The backdrop for most of the story is a fictional rural community in Wisconsin — in the winter. The date is 1907/08 which places it firmly in the timeframe of "Wisconsin Death Trip," Michael Lesy's classic 1973 illustrated portrait of small-town life gone mad. Lesy peopled his book with a selection of photographic portraits produced by Chares Van Schaick between 1890 and 1910, along with newspaper accounts of ghastly murders, suicides, failures, foreclosures, fires and all manner of sad and tortured lives. Goolrick encapsulates the era in one brilliant sentence: "Every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary." 

We own three copies of "Death Trip," and my husband has used it as inspiration for paintings and woodcuts, so I instantly recognized it as the novel's subtext. Later, I discovered that Goolrick has been fascinated with the book — and owned a copy — for just about as long as us. You don't have to be familiar with "Death Trip" to enjoy Goolrick's book, but I must admit that having Van Schaick's images in mind makes the novel even richer. 

 

Goolrick lives in NYC but he clearly knows Wisconsin, and his depiction of it is spot on. I was captivated by his description of the winter landscape from the very first page where I read:

"It was not snowing yet, but it would be soon, a blizzard by the smell of it. The land lay covered already in trampled snow. The land here flew away from your eyes, gone into the black horizon without leaving one detail inside the eye. Stubble through the snow, sharp as razors. Crows picking at nothing. Black river, frigid oil."

 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The reliable wife of the title, Catherine Land, is a mail-order bride who comes to wed a wealthy businessman, Ralph Truitt, who's looking for companionship, not romance. He's had romance, passion and despair with his first wife and hopes to redeem himself by finding his son from that disastrous earlier marriage. It's a long time before we know what Catherine is looking for, where she's been and why she really answered Ralph's newspaper advertisement.

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The book is complex and layered, revealing the story and the characters sometimes in tiny fragments, and others in shattering bomb-blasts. This is a story filled with sensuality, from the details of fashion and fabric to "foods that frightened Catherine with their beauty." With a different cover, you could sell the book as a bodice-ripper, it's so over-heated and over-wrought. Everything is overlaid with sex and longing. Though whether sex is pleasure or torture is rarely clear.

 

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Though Goolrick doesn't give us many lovable characters or couples who form lasting bonds, he beautifully describes love and marriage, even as characters reject it:

"She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind of simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else." 

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL  SOCIETY

"A Reliable Wife" is an almost perfect book. My only real criticism is from a Wisconsin gardener's viewpoint. The house Catherine comes to has a conservatory and a ruined secret garden. She begins to be interested in horticulture, and thus, there are numerous very specific references to flowers and plants. While this element of gardening and rebirth is important to the story, I found the specificity disruptive since no other elements were described in such detail. 

Frankly, I stopped dead in my tracks at least three or four times, and pulled reference books off the shelf to see if the plants mentioned — like Japanese painted fern — were really in cultivation in the U.S. in 1907. I did not find any information to the contrary but I've put down enough novels when the gardening part of the story was wrong, that I think I am overly sensitive on the subject.

 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

THE PHOTOS: These images are part of a collection of over 6,000 glass plate negatives created by Charles J. Van Schaick. Van Schaick learned the art of photography after moving to Jackson County, Wisconsin. In 1885, he opened a studio in Black River Falls, Wisconsin and served as the town photographer for over 50 years. His work includes both studio portraits and richly varied and intimate snapshots of small-town, Wisconsin life. A portion of his photographic work is represented in Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy. You can view some of those images on line at the Wisconsin Historical Society's flickr site.

People in the above photos are unidentified except for the studio portrait of deceased twin infants in coffins (directly above). They are Robert and Janet Fitzpatrick, born July 5, 1885, and died April 20, 1886, children of Robert and Martha Fitzpatrick.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: While trying to learn if Goolrick was familiar with "Wisconsin Death Trip," I discovered he had written a memoir before the novel. It was on the shelf at my local library, so I grabbed it to take on a garden tour bus trip. I sat there absolutely engrossed in the memoir, "The End of the World As We Know It: Scenes from a Life." I raced through its 213 pages during the hours we were on the bus, finishing it shortly before we arrived at our hotel. 

Though "The End of the World" was laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, most of it was unutterably sad. Reading in the midst of gorgeous heartland farms and gardens — where I could take periodic breaks to absorb the life and beauty around me — may have been the only way I'd have made it through this book. Alcoholism is a prevalent force in the life of Goolrick and his family, and there were deeply disturbing scenes of attempted suicides. 

But I am glad that I managed to read those difficult parts, enabling me to understand Goolrick's story. It's a book that reminded me again how lucky I've been in my parents, my happy childhood, my whole life. A book like "The End of the World" paints a painful picture of what can happen when parents fail their children.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,

Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?

William King, "The Art of Cookery" (1708)

I added my name to the waiting list for "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" at #72. By the time it came in at the Sequoya Branch Library, I no longer remembered where I'd heard about the book or why I ordered it on-line from the regional library system. Luckily, I decided I must have had a good reason and, thus, I should just dig in and get reading.

"Sweetness" is a quirky, charming and slightly macabre first novel by Alan Bradley, featuring amateur sleuth, Flavia de Luce. Don't let the fact that Flavia is only eleven years old keep you away; she is a fully realized character in a book full of them. The book could be set in the 1890s or the 1920s; in fact, it's the 1950s. But it feels like the 1930s and I mentally kept picturing Flavia as drawn by the late Edward Gorey; it's that kind of a book. 

"Sweetness" reminded me of Kate Summerscale's "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," in that it features a house that is as unique as its odd inhabitants. There's also masses of obscure information about stamp collecting as well as philately, the study of stamps; also lots of 19th century science, chemistry in particular; along with plenty of unfamiliar words, like prestidigitation. In a book that casually mentions Capability Brown, Darwin and Thomas Jefferson, plenty of secondary learning by the reader occurs along with unraveling the mystery.

Our heroine, Flavia, is saved from loneliness and boredom with the discovery of an ancestor's chemistry library and laboratory. She becomes a student of the subject, rejoicing in her "newfound knowledge of what could be extracted so easily from nature. I was a student of poison," Flavia declares. Though she is not the poisoner in this murder mystery, she uses her scientific knowledge to repay her sisters for their sibling torments. Nothing fatal, but all three girls get quite nasty at times. 

The 1840 Penny Black stamp with red Maltese Cross cancellation.

All of that however, is merely a subtext to the main story which revolves around stolen stamps. They're historic, highly valuable and definitely worth committing murder to obtain. The problem is that it looks like Flavia's reclusive, stamp-collecting father, Colonel de Luce, is the murderer. I've personally always appreciated stamps from an artist's perspective, but Bradley offers an absolutely loving description of stamp collecting. The famed "Penny Black" British stamp is at the heart of the story — albeit, with a lot of poetic license. This is a fictional story after all.

Flavia is a child who is wise and observant beyond her years. She's surrounded by death, decay and — as in Jacqueline Winspear's  Maisie Dobbs' mysteries — damaged veterans of war. 

"Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life. Even I knew that."

"The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" is an enthralling mystery. The kind you can't put down and race through in a day and a night, unable to stop, unhappy to reach the end. Bradley plans to write more Flavia mysteries. Whether he can continue to create such deep, dark and delightful tales is uncertain; but I'm hoping the answer is yes.

PHOTO SOURCE UNKNOWN

The Penny Black stamp is so widely known, inside and outside of stamp-collecting circles, that a number of "black" flowers have been named in its honor. Nemophila menziesii 'Penny Black' (above) is an annual that can be grown from seed.

Bread & Roses: Lawrence & Labor Day

When I was growing up, national holidays like Labor Day were true holidays with few businesses open on that day — including grocery stores and gas stations. It was very much a day for acknowledging workers, as I can see from old family photos; particularly the big panorama images of my paternal grandfather attending union picnics in the 1920s and 30s. He went to work in the Pennsylvania coal mines as a ten-year-old and, not-surprisingly, grew up to be a union man.

A lot of communities will be marking the holiday with special events this weekend. But, as my grandfather's first grandchild, if I could choose where to spend Labor Day 2009, I'd head to Lawrence, Mass., for the 25th annual Bread and Roses Festival, celebrating one of the landmark events in American labor history. 

www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/lawrence-strike/images

Children working in the textile mills.

In 1912, Lawrence was the leading American producer of woolen and worsted goods. Its main mills were those of the American Woolen Company, a consolidation of factories whose annual output was valued at $45,000,000. That year, when a Massachusetts state law reduced the work week at Lawrence's textile mills from 56 to 54 hours, the mills cut the workers’ pay. The majority of Lawrence’s 30,000 textile workers walked off their job, and stayed out on strike for almost ten weeks during the winter.

www.workerseducation.org

State militia confront crowds during the Lawrence textile mills strike of 1912.

During this period, U. S. Commissioner of Labor, Charles P. Neil, investigated 22,000 textile workers and found that "well over half were women and children who found it financially imperative to work in the mills. Half of all the workers in the four Lawrence mills of the American Woolen Company were girls between ages fourteen and eighteen. Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, a Lawrence physician, wrote: 'A considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three years after beginning work . . . thirty-six out of every 100 of all the men and women who work in the mill die before or by the time they are twenty-five years of age,' " according to one history of the strike.

www.workerseducation.org

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of the leaders of the I.W.W. as well as one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, addresses silk workers on strike in New Jersey, the year after the Lawrence strike.

The Lawrence strike is noteworthy for a number of reasons, including the degree of cooperation that developed among immigrant workers of 51 different nationalities, the role of women, and the strikers’ expressing themselves in poetry and song, according to the Festival's Web site. Though it has never been proven, the story has long been told of women strikers who carried signs saying “We want bread, and roses, too.*” Thus the Lawrence strike has always been known as the “Bread and Roses Strike.”

Art Young / Industrial Worker (March 21, 1912)

The strike — and the solidarity of the mill workers — panicked mill owners and city authorities who called in the state militia, jailed strikers and attempted to discredit the workers and their leaders, including "Big Bill" Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the Industrial Workers of the World (aka the I.W.W and the Wobblies). Conditions in the community during the strike were so dire, that many strikers sent their children away to sympathetic families in other Eastern cities, until the police finally used force to prevent them from continuing to do so.

www.workerseducation.org

Children worked in many mills in the early part of the 20th century and went out on strike along with the adults. Here, young strikers march in 1913.

This clash between mothers and the police was the turning point of the Lawrence strike, as people around the country read in their newspapers what was happening. Victor Berger, the great Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee, was among those who called for a Congressional investigation of the events in Lawrence. Ultimately public opinion, and the investigation sought by Berger, forced the mill owners to give in to most of the strikers’ demands. 

Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Two men working at the American Woolen Company, Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1935.

On Monday, in Lawrence, the 25th annual Bread and Roses Festival will celebrate their community's labor history and ethnic diversity, through music, dance, poetry, drama, ethnic food, historical demonstrations, and tours. They will "also host organizations continuing the struggle for social justice today." 

It's easy to think of the Lawrence strike as a romantic piece of history — unless you are one of the thousands of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed this Labor Day. For the first time in my life, I know dozens of people in that position. If we want good jobs, safe workplaces, health insurance and similar benefits for ourselves, then we must also agree to them for our friends and neighbors, for folks we don't know — and even for those we may not like or agree with. 

WALTER SANDERS/LIFE

Closed-down textile mill in Lawrence, Mass., February 1954.

Labor Day is a reminder — if we still need one these days — that workers have bettered their conditions only when they joined together and stood together. Whether we have the courage of the workers — men, women and children — who marched in Lawrence in 1912, is a question that remains to be answered.

* The slogan "Bread and Roses" originated in a poem of that name by James Oppenheim which was published in The American Magazine in 1911.

For information on the Lawrence 1912 strike, visit The Lucy Parsons Project, a wonderful site dedicated to discovering and disseminating information about Lucy Parsons, "a poor woman of color who took great risks engaging in revolutionary anarchist movements for social change," according to the site. 

Bread & Roses: The song

To fully appreciate the impact of women mill workers carrying signs that read “We want bread, and roses, too,” during the Lawrence, Mass., textile strike of 1912, you must be familiar with the words to the poem where the phrase originated (see below). It was written by James Oppenheim and published in The American Magazine in 1911, the year before the Lawrence "Bread and Roses" strike.

Ralph Fasanella / Labor Notes

The Great Strike: Lawrence 1912 

Oppenheim's poem was set to music in 1976 by Mimi Farina. The song includes an additional phrase at the end. Though there is a nice rendition of Farina singing it with her sister, Joan Baez, I've always thought the definitive version was done by Judy Collins with a full chorus of women. You can listen to Collins' version here.

BREAD AND ROSES

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

 

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,


For they are women's children, and we mother them again.


Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;


Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

 

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead


Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.


Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.


Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!

 

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.


The rising of the women means the rising of the race.


No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,


But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

— By James Oppenheim

September choices: Native plants vs. Asian gardens

One of the things that makes living in Madison so satisfying is the number of events happening on any given day. Unfortunately, this often means having to choose between competing activities scheduled for the same day. 

Sunday, September 13th is a perfect example of an embarrassment of riches. Local gardeners will be forced to chose between a superb lecture at Olbrich Botanical Gardens and a day-long native plant conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Before I can even decide my preference, I have to try to switch shifts with a co-worker since I'm scheduled to work that day.

UW ARBORETUM PHOTO

"Native by Design" is a how-to conference for gardeners. It runs from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 13 at the UW-Arboretum Visitor Center, a wonderful facility sited at the edge of the world's oldest restored prairie (and which should be looking just about perfect). This promises to be an excellent conference for a number of reasons including the fact that the 4-acre Wisconsin Native Plant Garden will function as classroom. That means you can see real plants as you learn about them and how they can be incorporated into the home landscape. Participants will also receive a notebook full of native plant resources. 

The keynote address — "Arboretum Reflections and Reverberations ... 42 Years Later" — will be given by Landscape Architect Darrel Morrison. If you've been in Madison long enough, you may remember Morrison designed the Arboretum's Native Plant Garden. But before that he received his Masters degree in Landscape Architecture from UW-Madison where, as a faculty member, he began field courses in native plant communities. Morrison was also the "conceptual landscape architect," as he called it, for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, one of the greatest public garden creation/restoration/education projects in the country in the last half of the 20th century.

UW BOTANY DEPT. ART AND PHOTO STUDIO

When we were just beginning our garden, I heard Morrison give the keynote address in 1996 at another UW-Arboretum native landscaping conference. It was an inspiring and informative talk, illustrated with images that I can still summon up. At the time, Morrison noted that Madison was a "hotbed of activity in the native plant world." That is even more true these days, guaranteeing this should be a great event for native plant enthusiasts. 

You can find the specifics about the program, the various workshops (including one on moss gardens) and speakers, here. The fee for the one-day conference is $50 ($43 for members of Friends of the Arboretum and $25 for students). Lunch is provided. Registration is required. Given today's date, I suggest registering right away as they are limiting numbers to provide a more valuable experience, according to the press materials.

“One of the ponds in the temple garden at Miyajima, Japan. A typical teahouse, huge old maples, and a small five-storied pagoda.”

At the opposite end of the gardening spectrum is the slide lecture on "Asian Gardens of the 1920s: The Travels of Elizabeth K. Roys," also scheduled for Sept. 13, at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. The program, by garden historian Betsy Anderson, is in conjunction with an engrossing exhibit of Roys' photos currently on display at Olbrich through Sept. 27 (viewing hours are Sundays 11 a.m. -5 p.m.). 

Roys, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, was born in China in 1905 and lived there until she was 15. She returned to Asia in 1926 with her mother, visiting gardens in Japan, Korea, China, Siam, and India while her mother inspected missions. What is noteworthy about Roys' photos is the fact that she was often able to visit gardens that few other people had access to. In all five countries, she was able to capture on film temple, palace, private, working-class and even ruined gardens, according to Olbrich. Along with her photos, Roys kept five notebooks full of her observations, complete with detailed records about these gardens; many of which exist today only in her pictures and notes. 

“Prince Yi is shown here standing in the doorway of his “Pavilion of the Lotus Pool” in his estate near Seoul, Korea.”

Roys' notebooks weren't discovered until 2002 after both she and her husband had died. Smith College Botanic Garden put this exhibit together, in collaboration with landscape historian Betsy Anderson, a 2004 Smith graduate. Roys was a botany student at Smith.

Why Madison you ask? Because that's where Roys eventually settled with her husband, Nash Williams, in the Waunona neighborhood. In Madison, Roys was better known as Betty Williams — which is the name I know her by. My garden mentor and former co-worker, Doris Lang, was a longtime member of the Waunona Garden Club, along with Betty Williams, and myriad other women who blazed trails in their neighborhood and in their professions. 

Doris Lang (left), and I, look down at a garden display last summer. 

I've met many of the members of the Waunona Garden Club, have socialized with them and seen their gardens. Though the Garden Club was the impetus for a lot of lovely gardens, it also was the driving social and political force during the neighborhood's formative years. The group was instrumental in creating parks, planting trees, dealing with the Beltline in its planning stages and working on anything and everything that affected the quality of life of their neighborhood. 

The Waunona Garden Club is sponsoring Anderson's talk, along with a reception afterwards. The lecture is free and open to the public; no reservation is required. 

Naming gardens

My interest in gardening initially grew out of my interest in U.K. history; horticultural and otherwise. In my readings I noticed how often people with noteworthy gardens lived in houses that had names; and the gardens were called by those names as well, like Rosemary Verey's garden at Barnsley House or Christopher Lloyd's at Great Dixter. Later I realized it wasn't limited to England, as places like Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck's garden at North Hill prove. Then there's Lisa at Greenbow and Frances at Faire Garden and Nan at Hayefield House. The list grows longer the longer I consider the subject.

But more than just naming the house and garden, each area within these gardens was named: the Bluebell Wood, the Lime Walk, the Long Border, the Rondel. So it seemed perfectly natural to me to name the various areas of our garden. Even before we moved in, I had christened the area under the three old and twisted Austrian pines: The Sacred Grove. Walking there always made me feel like the Delphic Oracle was about to appear with a cryptic message for me.

The Lime Walk at Sissinghurst (Photo by Susan Mahr/UW-Madison)

Naming is a highly personal choice and something that is probably most often seen as a romantic gesture. But as anyone with a garden knows, names have a practical purpose as well: letting us describe and discuss and plan our gardens in a way that everyone understands and can visualize. Our garden — with the house running right across the middle of it — is half an acre. And early on, the two of us often found ourselves confused — if not in the midst of an actual argument — about how to handle a specific spot or feature in the garden. 

Naming the areas of the garden solved those problems. We both knew where the other one was weeding or working or wanted to add a tree or site a bench because we could refer to those locations by their individual names. Naming also made it seem like the garden was larger than it was. But most of all, it let us see ourselves as part of the long tradition of gardening. 

That said, my overall garden and house still don't have a name. I considered "West Green House" since the house is painted a very dark green and is on the west side of Madison. It's also the name of one of my favorite English houses. The number of crows attracted to the pond suggested the name, "Blackbird Pond." Then I could be the resident witch, just as in my favorite children's book. We also considered Gaelic names as a nod to our Irish heritage and Japanese names since that's the dominant influence in the garden. But so far, we remain nameless in general, but not in the particulars.

The Oak Savanna

The garden spaces are almost all named. Those names fall into four self-explanatory categories: symbolic (Sacred Grove), descriptive (Oak savanna), function (bog) and location (East gate). 

 The Moon Garden.

SYMBOLIC

Moon garden: this area has its own story.

Sacred Grove

Buddha Mound and Turtle Mound: These are the hills above the pond whose names refer to the stone groups on each.

The Long Border.

DESCRIPTIVE

Gravel gardens: Beds of raked gravel in the front and back gardens.

Katie's Crescent: The curved bed that began as the pile of sod we removed when we dug the pond. Home to a spring-blooming Carolina Silverbell tree; a memorial to our niece who died too young. 

Long Border: This began as the "Hendrix Border" because it was going to be a floral purple haze. The color scheme changed somewhere along the way but it still has some strong purplish trees and shrubs.

Oak Savanna: the grassy area under our Bur Oak and a nod to a native Midwestern landscape type.

Serpentine Path: Covered with pine needles and usually how we refer to it despite it's more descriptive name.

Wild Time Garden: An ironic nod to Will Shakespeare and the bank that slopes down to the street where folks in cars toss their McD wrappers.

The Birch Grove.

FUNCTION

Birch Grove

Black Stairs

Bog

Dry Stream

Header Pool

Moss

Pebble Beach

Pond

Stream Bog

Teahouse

Tsukubai

Under the Spruces.

LOCATION

Compost corner: Compost bins are long gone but we have never found a suitable new name.

Library window: The area below said window and to the sides of it.

Tim & Mary's Fence

Traffic Island 

Under the Spruces

West Gate and East Gate: These two gates have yet to be built. They will define the entrances/exits on each side of the house.

The Sacred Grove.

So, is it pretentious to name an urban American garden? Mark would say yes; but as the resident Anglophile, I disagree. The fact that we've never decided on a name for our garden also might suggest we're too democratic to do something that reeks of privilege. I think it's a case of still searching for the perfect name; something we may never discover as the garden continues to grow and change.

What about you? Does your garden have a name and how did you choose it?

Woodstock: What I remember

On the walls of my studio, mixed in with family photos, my artwork and graphics awards, are two mementoes of the '60s. One is a framed poster from Bobby Kennedy's New York state Senate campaign. The other is the thick, glossy program from Woodstock.

The Kennedy memorabilia marked my initiation into politics. But the Woodstock program is only one souvenir from a summer of music festivals — each one a giddy list of headliners. In 1969 I had just graduated from a Catholic women's college in Buffalo, N.Y. I had a summer job and had just bought my first car, a used blue Chevy Chevelle. In the fall, I would be teaching elementary art at a school in Rochester, N.Y.

All the visible excesses of the '60s are what most people noticed and recall. But many of us became politically or musically aware without fully embracing the counterculture. I was an artist and a feminist rather than a hippie.

In fact, my boyfriend and I were just a couple of nice kids. We had too much Catholic upbringing to get into trouble but were too hip to go to church. Instead, we indulged our passion for music.

No drugs. No sex. But, oh, the rock 'n' roll!

The summer began with Toronto Pop, a weekend event in a stadium in downtown Toronto, only a couple of hours over the border. Richard went to school in Toronto, so it was familiar musical territory for us. We were veterans of the concert scene as well as the Mariposa Folk Festival.

We sat on the grass in the stadium in clear view of the stage where we saw Dr. John, Steppenwolf, Al Kooper wearing a white tux and leading a 15-piece orchestra, BS&T, the Band, Carla Thomas, Chuck Berry and more.

Music went on into the night, and eventually we all crashed on the floor of a huge club called the Rock Pile, where musicians jammed till 6 a.m.

That was followed by a blues fest at the University of Buffalo. Woodstock was the logical conclusion to the summer. We read about it in Rolling Stone magazine, sent for tickets (three days for $18) and got a AAA-Triptik guide to White Lake/town of Bethel, the actual location of the festival.

At the last minute my parents decided that, since I still lived under their roof, I couldn't go on such a trip with my boyfriend. I countered with the argument that I'd be leaving the week I returned to start my new job in Rochester. They yielded to my plans but were so mortified by the whole idea that they never revealed my whereabouts at the family reunion they attended the weekend of Woodstock.

We arrived at the festival area in mid-afternoon on Friday, parked the Chevelle in an empty field that was rapidly filling with other cars and started to walk over to the concert site. As New Yorkers, it was not inconceivable for Richard and me to drive across the state to see the premier musicians of the moment. We realized this was going to be different when we noticed license plates from all over the country, including the West Coast.

As we got closer, it became obvious that our tickets would never be collected. We climbed over the flattened entrance gates and rounded a corner to find ourselves face to face with the largest crowd either of us had ever seen. We both lived in big cities, but this was different. Everyone was our age — in fact most were white, middle-class kids like the two of us, and everyone was in love with music.

The music remains my most vivid memory, though it becomes difficult to separate the reality of the event from the experience of the movie. Sly Stone was great on film, but that night on the hill everyone complained audibly and waited impatiently for him to finish his set.

From high up on the hill, all the artists were reduced to dots of color. But even without being able to see the performers, everyone seemed awash in the same ocean of music and experience: dancing, singing, sharing food and laughter. Everything was reduced to moving points of light like a surreal version of Seurat's ``La Grande Jatte,'' a vast crowd of pleasure seekers facing the great wave of music.

There was a sense of a new community, if only because few of us had realized how strong our numbers were — or understood the variety of people who could come together to celebrate peace and music. The group seated next to us were from a rival women's college back in Buffalo, no more hippies and freaks than we were.

We weren't high on anything but the music. When you hear the Who play``Tommy'' with the sun rising behind them, it's not an experience you're likely to forget.

By Sunday, we had fallen victim to the rain. All our clothes were wet, the car was mired in the field and the hill facing the stage was so slippery that we couldn't manage to maintain our balance even if we had wanted to see the final performers. There was such a surfeit of music that missing a few performances didn't really seem important.

Woodstock was a musical event without precedent. It was joyful and peaceful. I never sensed tension or anger in the crowds around me and I never felt afraid. But neither did I think it was the beginning of a new era. It was wonderful but it was never part of the real world.

When the music ended, our car got towed out of the muck and we drove home to our real lives. On the back of the Woodstock program is a quote from the I Ching that sums up the event as much as anyone is able: "From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts and draws them together has mystified mankind."

I wrote this remembrance about going to the 1969 Woodstock event for the 20th anniversary of the concert. Neither my memories of the event or my feelings about it have changed since then. It was originally published on Saturday, August 5, 1989
in The Capital Times. My mother got annoyed with me all over again when I sent her a clipping of this article.

Antigo: A soil to know

Changing our garden paths from bark mulch to gravel provided an unexpected bonus: a big pile of dirt ready to be used in any number of garden projects. Digging into it during the last week has had me thinking about soil in general. 

Not long after I moved to Wisconsin, I can still remember my first sight of the farm fields lining the road to Black Earth. Their appearance lived up to the town's name; they were a vast blanket of dark, rich dirt that looked good enough to eat. I was sure a seed tossed from the moving car window would immediately take root and flourish in such black earth. But that lovely black earth is only one of the many soils found in the state. 

WWW.STATETRUNKTOUR.COM

Wisconsin actually has a state soil: Antigo Silt Loam received its official designation in 1983. And it has its own song by the late professor and soil scientist Francis Hole, as well. Since my husband's parents came from the Antigo area, I can report that I've seen this famous dirt in person. It's home to the state's potato crop which makes the fields look like a garden when the spuds are blossoming. My husband is the proud owner of an Antigo Silt Loam t-shirt which is how I first leaned about all this. And I've had my picture taken with the historical marker. 

NRCS/USDA

Third and fourth grade students from Antigo Elementary School sing the Antigo Silt Loam Song.

In 1899 the National Cooperative Soil Survey began and Wisconsin initiated its own survey efforts shortly after. But it wasn't until 2006 that Wisconsin finally completed its state-wide survey under the auspices of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. It was a massive cooperative effort that included work by folks at every level of government, the university, and five bands of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. More than 300 soil scientists did the soil mapping which covered more than 35 million acres of land and cataloged more than 600 different soil types in Wisconsin. 

CHARLES N. BROWN/STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN

This photo shows a wetland and grassy pasture at the College of Agriculture campus on the UW-Madison campus about 1900, around the time Wisconsin began to survey its soils.

If you live in Wisconsin and are curious about what kind of soil you garden in, you can find soil data and more about the study here. But since this site is the work of scientists and government bureaucrats, I found it a bit confusing to use. Nevertheless, it has lots of cool stuff, including a "2006 Year of the Soil" poster of state soils. If you want to know what's your state soil, Jim — from Art of Gardening — provided the link that has the answer.