LATE SUMMER ON THE MOUNTAIN

SOYBEAN FIELD AND MOUNTAINS FROM COWAN, TN

A beetle resembling a roach upended, his feet in the heavy air, lies near part of a speckled moth wing — porch tokens, beside withering flowers. Driftwood fencing the herb garden has become drier. Crickets protest 80-degree temps, singing the same chorus. Empty yard chairs face the bleached fence slats. We’re all looking for invisible streams, a flowing landscape. Gulls fly over, bringing news of the coast where thunder rolls in, promising afternoon rain. Equable tempers ride the wind, the heavens busy making water for a disinherited earth. I look up and see a calendar written on the moon’s face; fall unfolding in a sky dark and drained of heat.

I wrote this a few days ago in the middle of a hot day, and then rain obliged us, bringing in a spell of cool air. The heavens also showered corn patches along the road to Cowan, Tennessee, and even flooded our struggling herb garden at the back door, which perked up the mint, rosemary, thyme, chives… Like amateur farmers, we seem to watch the weather more often than we did in Louisiana. I suppose it’s because we find so many fresh vegetables and fruit at markets on The Mountain and have eaten them aplenty this summer, especially corn and peaches, huge home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers. Many days we drive into the Valley just to look at and buy a few ears of corn and a carton of peaches at the vegetable and fruit market on the highway leading to Winchester. 

I sometimes long for the city so I can get a shot of “culture,” but I think more about the pastoral aspects of life on The Mountain than I did ten years ago. We pass a sign advertising a chicken farm for sale and tell friends we’re going to buy it, but the notion soon passes. Pulling weeds in the small herb garden by the back door is about as much farm activity as we can muster. And we’re sorta’ turned off when we read about the nine billion chickens that are killed each year in the U.S. The unfortunate poultry are raised in warehouses with 20,000 other chickens, and half of them are fed feed with arsenic in it because this concoction is reputed to foster growth. Some of us remember the spacious chicken yards of our grandparents where chickens roamed freely and weren’t fed anything to promote abnormal growth. Anyway, chicken farms? No way!

I do read and think about agriculture a lot; thus the interest in weather, I reread my favorite essayist, E.B. White, who divided his year between bustling New York City and a getaway place in Maine. His description of late summer is worth a few “words worth:” 

“Summer, languishing but not really sick, receives her visitors with a certain deliberateness -a pretty girl who knows she doesn’t need to stay in bed. The yellow squash illuminates the aging vine…and zinnias stand as firm and quiet as old valorous deeds…the farmer picks up the first pullet egg, a brown and perfect jewel in the grass; …[This is] the day a car stops and a man gets out and tacks up a poster advertising the county fair…” (from The New Yorker, September 3, 1949, p. 17.)

Last night we attended a dinner featuring “radical hospitality” in the cottage of summer interns at St.Mary’s Convent We met guests from different locales in the South, including Louisiana, a fund development director from Boston, and a physical therapist from Chicago, and during dinner, the thought occurred to me that we sometimes had no need to search out a shot of culture in nearby cities as it was right there at the table among congenial young people who had migrated to The Mountain and liked the good life here. 

Photograph by Victoria Sullivan

ONE OF THOSE GLAD SURPRISES

We often overlook what’s in our landscape when serendipity is right under our nose. Today I discovered a garden my botanist friend, Vickie, had told me about that she passes on her walks for exercise four or five times a week: the Shakespeare Garden here on the campus of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee.

I'd never heard of a Shakespeare Garden and was surprised by the number of them that are cultivated on campuses of universities and in public parks and gardens throughout the U.S. As a poet and an advocate of poetry, I decided to visit the garden sponsored by the local garden club, a small haven that provides a place to sit on a rock bench and contemplate some of the words of the English bard who’s reputed to have loved gardening.

The photographs in this blog are only snaps of a few plants in the Shakespeare Garden on Tennessee Avenue that are well tended and carry out the theme of some of Shakespeare’s plays. Space in a blog permits inclusion of only a few of those plants that inspired the gardeners, but I was drawn to many of the herb plantings since herbs seem to be among the plants that deer don’t feast on here on The Mountain…and, I might add, we have a straggly garden at our back door.

Interest in creating Shakespeare gardens was revived in the United Kingdom in 1852 and spread to the U.S., but plants that Shakespeare mentioned in his many plays were included in medieval herbal manuals. Plants in the Sewanee garden include marjoram and thyme and indicate the bard’s love of herbs; however, the entry to the garden features a cultivated climbing rose that he lauded in Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…” (Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2.)


For those visitors to the garden on the University of the South campus who aren’t familiar with Shakespeare’s flower citations, placards with brief quotations and identifications of the plays that mention the particular plants have been placed at the base of plantings.

At 9 a.m. before the summer heat sets in, a visit to the small garden is a meet way to begin a day, and here’s hoping more garden lovers will discover the Shakespeare Garden at Sewanee and spread the word about the poetry of small “literary gardens.”

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan.

SPRING’S KISS

In 2014, Border Press published Between Plants and People, a book of my poetry about plant life accompanied by eighteen color photographs by Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan, a noteworthy botanist. It contained metaphors describing the impact of plants on humans — food plants, medicinal plants, and decorative plants, and is an innovative account of “humanistic botany” in poetry.

The second volume of plant poems I wrote this summer, with accompanying photographs by Dr. Sullivan, is now in press. Spring’s Kiss, a book of poetry praising the qualities of wildflowers that inhabit and create beauty in the plant kingdoms of the world, is a nod to Susan Albert’s: “One person’s weed is another person’s wildflower,” and many of those weeds are included in this volume. Medicinal, as well as aesthetic qualities of the plants, are touted in some of the poems, and the beautiful blooms of these weeds reinforce Albert’s observation about plants.

The cover of this volume is a photograph of Karen Bourque’s glass rendition of the Pickerel Weed as inspired by Susan Elizabeth Entsminger’s illustration of the aquatic weed in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown by Victoria I. Sullivan, and the photograph was used in the cover design by Martin Romero, a landscape architect who renders the final designs for my book covers.

Spring’s Kiss can be pre-ordered from Border Press, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375 for $20 including shipping and will also be available from Amazon by Aug. 15.