The Headwaters

Driven to rise early by force of street sweeping law, I headed south to my old place on Friel to see how things have held up. Little has changed in our old building. Still the disrepair and blandness, but now less a garden. 

In autumn of two thousand two this was the sunniest, most pleasant of all the apartment wrecks I had seen in several Brooklyn neighborhoods. I had never considered living in, where? -Kensington? Behind a chain link fence, under the blazing hot sun, there were telephone poles stacked in what would later become the garden.

With the arrival of three Russian Zelkova, sun had been replaced by shade -the light loving garden I had planted then stretched beyond its limit. Change was a force, plants groped for light or gave up, and when we chose to move, some of these plants were boxed for transport on a plane and a few others went to friends. I assume that the rest met a dark end by glyphosate.

The corner piece of a neighborhood has returned fully to the weeds, excepting a few daylily and phlox -stalwarts of the brown brick wall. Gardening is presence. We assert ourselves with the language of plants. For my old neighbors my presence is still felt, now in absence of flowers and a plethora of ailanthus, smartweed, and poke.

_________________

Having made a quick peace with the old place, I moved on down Coney Island Avenue, Avenue J, Bedford Avenue, and the Belt, over the Gil Hodges to Fort Tilden, the beach.

To my eye, beach farm neighbor, Jimmy, has taken over the old plot. This pleases me. Jimmy's a good gardener, fun, conversational, and present.

 It is reassuring that the neighboring plot, adjacent to the west, is still as weedy as always.

And that Wolf has continued on with his tomatoes.

I was charmed by the sight of my old garlic signs used as stakes to support new beds.

______________________

At the moment I have the sensation that this is all I miss of New York City -the ocean, its sandy buffer, the dunes and the salt-enduring flora.

I stood, I sat, for about an hour, alone, but for the gulls.

_____________________

I was reminded at Tilden that I wanted to bring Seaside Goldenrod back to Minnesota, yet I didn't want to risk taking a plant from the sandy roadside of Rockaway Point Blvd -outside the park (but why chance it). I headed to Red Hook, where the cracked asphalt streets and sidewalks can yield many clumps of S. sempervirens.

I found this cluster on a trashy, industrial block, growing below a security cam and above the asphalt. I grabbed my shovel and scraped its roots from the pavement.

I've grown one Seaside Goldenrod, pulled from a Red Hook pier, in my Friel Place garden. It did okay, suffering from an orange rust each year until, finally, it did not return under the shade of the new street trees. Of course, I like it for its air of the beach, its flowers well-loved by bees, and especially because I thought it may do well in a garden covered by sidewalk-salt laden snow.

I do not know how tolerant of cold it will be, after all it is a seaside plant, but indications are that it is growing along the Great Lakes. I am saddened to see it is listed as a non-regulated invasive species in states like Wisconsin and Indiana. Apparently it is making inroads along our salt-encrusted highways. Could it be that a coastal native is problematic, as much so as a day lily, queen anne's lace, and all the others along highways that are among the most highly "disturbed" sites we have? Am I at the forefront of an invasive wave of Solidago sempervirens? Will it be my fault?

In a case like this, I choose a source that supports my endeavor. From the USDA:
"Nevertheless, because seaside goldenrod has a moderate growth rate, a shorter life span than other Solidago spp., a limited ability to spread through seed, and produces seedlings with low vigor, it is not considered an invasive plant."

Additionally:
"It increases the value of wildlife habitat by providing food and shelter for butterflies, birds, and small mammals. The migrating monarch butterfly uses seaside goldenrod as one of its primary food sources in the fall."

This adaptive plant has the potential to spread itself along the corridors of our own ruination. It also provides an excellent bit of habitat in the difficult, salty locations we've demanded. I have attempted to walk the garden plant/native plant tightrope over the years and it appears that Seaside Goldenrod in a Minnesota garden is the net I fall into. A condition of native is always where one chooses to draw the line. At one end is purity (and Michael Pollan's take on nativism's racial and nationalist ideology) and the other end chaos (and the destruction of the beauty we perceive within ecosystems).

Solidago sempervirens, bagged and ready.

Gardening at the Boundary

That day, maybe a week ago, it really came down.

I know nothing about late spring snow. Nothing. When I was a child, in New York, it snowed during our Easter break -it was early April. The day prior was warm, even the day it snowed it was warm, so much so that I was out riding my bike in the street with my brother. Although it was cloudy, the big, wet flake snow came without warning.

This snowfall is different, intermittent pellets and flakes. It was windy too, driving the pellets hard. As is often the case, the snow did not stick. The snow was not the trouble at all. It was the cold that presented itself the following night. 

I woke to find a frost on the little wetland.

 Crystals coated all the leafed out, saturated-looking plants in the early sun.

The parsley I had just planted showed crystallization along its veins (interesting that this happens, no?).

The  cilantro.

The Virginia Wetleaf succumbed (but recovered) to the eight or so hours well below freezing.

____________________

The last frost date for our location is roughly May twenty. I do not think anyone would suggest that the last two months have had ordinary temperatures, we haven't. Since March, we have had days that topped out at 10ºF and 82ºF, although most have been in the forties through the sixties. Our March monthly average high temperature was nearly 46ºF and the April average so far is 59ºF. Daytime temperatures have long suggested I should be growing things that California is having trouble providing. Think twice. I watch the trees and the vegetable gardens. Only this week are the oaks beginning to show the chartreuse of spring and there has been zero garden activity.

Warm air masses, heated by their descent from the Rockies and Great Plains, move in from the south and west, and locally there is sunlight warming the thermal mass of land without the cooling influence of great bodies of water. The day warms nicely. At night, however, without the moderating influence of clouds, radiational cooling is strong. I recall a typical temperature differential in NYC to be about 15 degrees. Here, in Minnesota, I have seen 20+ as the norm. Beyond nightly cooling, there is always the threat of a cold airmass coming down from the north whenever the jet stream decides to do something funky. Minnesota is the common entry point for cold air, it is the reason people think this state is cold. 

Which brings me to another weather detail. I noticed the window box of just planted pansies was bone dry. What? I had watered it in, deeply, just the day before. Hmm. Something unusual had happened -dry air, exceptionally dry air. Two days after the snowfall, and the day of the overnight freeze, our relative humidity had dropped to 12%, twelve percent! Our dewpoint was nearly 1ºF by the late afternoon. Meanwhile, our high temperature was 55ºF and the winds were up. The water simply evaporated. Despite this, the pansies toughed out the freeze and drought, as those in the pot above attest.

The dry air, the sudden cold from the north, the high temperatures, the wind, no rain, and of course, heavy rain are all typical. We live at a climactic boundary with little to moderate each influence. This is the education of a gardener.

If A Tree Falls In The Woods...

And no one from New York City was there to read it...

When I moved from one place to another there was the feeling that I was about to begin again, start over, endeavor for a fresh start. Nothing wrong with this, in principle, but in practice I could have been more measured. In this case, that measure is in the order of hundreds. Simply put, my newer url isn't ranked.

New York City Garden, the blog address, continues to get hits in the hundreds per day, which is piddly by Internet standards, but something compared to the single digits Mound is receiving. It has not been an issue of content, either. NYCgarden is a blog address with a link history, a search history, let's face it, a Google history, and the history of the web is long. Pages are not forgotten, they are linked to or hit upon as freshly today as the day posted. It became a brand, in a sense, my brand, however ridiculously named by my ignorant logic. I thought, then, that the blog name needed to be attached to the content so that google searches would find it. The name is local, bland and functional. No matter, nycgarden dot blogspot dot com gets traffic, prairiewood dot blogspot dot com does not, and in this way nycgarden has value.

What I intend to do is resurrect the dead, just in time for Easter, by publishing again at nycgarden.blogspot.com. All prairiewood and mealhub posts will be integrated into nycgarden. Nycgarden will take on the MOUND masthead and its updated visual appearance. Sidebars will be integrated in some fashion, although many sidebar links will be dropped because they are NYC-centric and superfluous. It will be searchable, all posts and labels will imported and categorized by date and label, back to 2007. Eventually, I will look for a new dot something url that Blogger can redirect all traffic toward.

When a tree falls in the woods, you'll have a much better chance of hearing it.

There's No Good Way To End

As you could imagine, packing a studio and apartment into a truck, then driving it over 1250 miles of cold highway under the gun of a brewing snow storm, and finally unloading the eleven hundred seventy six cubic feet of deeply frozen objects in subzero temperatures, left little room for blogging. I was fortunate to have Matt, friend and artist I met long ago at Skowhegan, help me pack the apartment and half the studio into the truck on New Year's Eve. Big thanks go to friends of two decades, Mark and Shelly, who kept me well fed and rested after the apartment became unusable New Year's Eve through the second of January, Andy and Rachel who threw us a never-ending party the Saturday before, Mark, again, for copiloting my drive of two days, then carefully hustling things into and out of the house all through a blustery, subzero snowstorm, Marie for her generous tribute on her blog, and Sara, who has been cleaning and organizing hundreds of items into categories of keep, yard sale, auction, and trash.

So, nearly two weeks after that balmy Saturday walk around Prospect Park's lake, I can sneak a few moments from the cleaning, the disposition of a lifetime of things, the organizational relating of new, old and less so, to move this blog ever closer to the present moment...

Forsythia, having had a cold November, thought December must be spring.

The lake was in fine form.

On its south side, newly laid plastic to smother view-killing phragmites. 

Because the lake is all for the seeing of it.

Inspiring towers to go up, as they are beginning to, around Prospect's most affordable corner.

As expected, the new skating rink is immensely popular.

Many new people are visiting, leading to much needed, improved maintenance on the south side of the lake and ever more likely are towers to surround it.

But the beauty of Prospect Park is the ability to disappear into it, to disappear the city around it.

Yet all agency is marshaled toward development for the wealthiest and all too often in the name of preserving what is intended to benefit all. 

Tenacity

The last few days have been the hardest, after ten days of packing both apartment and studio, but this morning, well, just before noon, Betsy made her way out of Brooklyn, in our van, via the tunnel, up the West Side Highway, which hardly lives up to its name, to the GW Bridge, and then on to I80 westward. 

In the back of the van are various items that cannot or should not freeze, things that, along with the cat, Betsy must haul into a roadside motel. Among these are three houseplants -a Norfolk Pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a Pothos or Philodendron (Epipremnum aureum), and a purple Oxalis (Oxalis triangularis). These have been with us so long that I often confuse their origins. The pine may have been a gift, the Pothos possibly a specimen from my greenhouse project at Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Oxalis a yard plant bought when I was living in New Mexico. All three should survive the move, after all, they've survived considerable neglect in our apartment, but I do think the Norfolk Pine will suffer under the unrelenting low humidity of the Minnesota house. I am no daily mister, so maybe a spot in the bathroom will suffice? 

Several days ago I clipped the Pothos so that it, along with two other plants, can be easily moved between van and motel in an old plastic laundry basket. When I slid the white-stained terra cotta pot from its roost of a dozen years, I was surprised to find that the vine, above, was not rooted in any soil at all! It was and is still rooted only to the painted wall. Is it gleaning moisture from the air, the walls, the paint, or is it not in need because it has entered winter dormancy, a time of exceptional drought tolerance? 

I would leave it there, for the next tenants, if I had half the belief that the landlord would appreciate its tenacity. Instead, I will pry this talisman from the wall paint and carry it along. 

Silent Night

Larry's trees, sometime in early December, after a brief snowfall.  

I haven't spent Christmas Eve in Brooklyn since 2001, but this year it was necessitated by packing both studio and apartment. We bubbled and glassined, crated and boxed delicate painted, ceramic, steel, and fabric objects until seven thirty, at which point, if we were going to cook, we needed to cease. After a stop at the grocery store, the van did not start. I jumped out, did some fixing (at least it was warm), and got it going. Cooked a quick meal, then collapsed on the couch, surrounded by piles of boxes and bubble wrap, escaped into a Nature episode about Tibet on PBS while the upstairs people banged and harangued with heavy heels, dragged furniture, and the whining of a motorized toy for the man-boy. 

______________________

Today it is Christmas. We are going for a long, quiet day at my cousin's place in Carroll Gardens, no packing, a day of rest. Betsy is scheduled to leave tomorrow, in our van, with cat, and things that cannot freeze (my paint and houseplants, for instance). I am scheduled to continue packing, until Tuesday, when I pick up the twenty-four-foot-box truck, and begin to load the apartment. If I complete this mission according to schedule, I will drive out of Brooklyn on Friday, January 2, with every thing we have in tow.

I believe I just saw a little sun on the wall, in the cavity of an emptied bookshelf.

A History of Surveillance

A history of our Friel Place garden, front and then side yard, over the last eight years or so as seen through the changing lens of the Google van-o-scope.

Two Kinds Of Night

In the dim and deep grey-blue of early morning I saw the beast ambling along the tree line and thought myself silly for thinking two people could be running out there. Six points, eight? I flicked on the light, startling the animal then twisting its neck backward and up to come to terms with the sudden contrast. We stood absolutely still for a minute, then I turned out the light. He trotted across the creaking snow and I laid back in bed to wait out the last half hour before the four-thirty alarm.

Arriving home after two hours of airport, three hours of airplane, two hours of subway, and nine-point-five hours of work, under the red-yellow street lamps, a temperature fixed above fifty, a coat unnecessarily heavy for coastal, Mid-Atlantic December, I surveyed the garden. A rescue had taken place; a reader, a Hudson Clove customer, Toby, had come at some point to do the digging, the bagging, the carrying, and replanting in a new garden and I thought, good, one less thing.

I have since extracted the climber rose, climbing hydrangea, and my grandmother's tea, all hastily spaded and ripped from the earth, delivered to their temporary garden in Williamsburg, but not without acknowledging the irony of saving on the purchase of new plants by driving 2500 miles to attempt their relocation.

There are still several plants in the garden and they are free for the taking. Email me: nycgarden@gmail.com.

The UnBecoming (of a) Garden

When I announced to my landlord that we would be leaving, he could barely contain his joy. It was not so much in regard to our departure as it was the opportunity to share the news with the landlady. The rent shall be raised! Hallelujah! Praise be to God! And that garden, enough! Her disdain for the garden means that this garden plot will be no more, as he wasted no breath to tell me that as soon as we depart, the garden will be filled with concrete.

So the plants you see here, and so many others, will not make it without me, unless someone comes to rescue them this week. Transplant is usually no big deal around here at this time of the year, but the weather is about to turn significantly colder at night, freezing these out and making it harder to identify what is what. That said, the ground is unlikely to freeze and most should be just fine.

Russian sage is a a tricky transplant, although I succeeded well enough last year. It's fuzzy calyx never loses color, the wispy leaves, pungent odor, drought tolerance and also a bee's delight, are plenty of reasons to plant it.

Gaura, still blooming, is also drought tolerant (I have a lot of those). A great plant.

An aside, the petunias started flowering again this October. 

They are unlikely to survive the coming freeze.

Asters, so many asters. Why do without them in autumn? This one doesn't self seed,  is easy to keep in check and is loved by flying insects.

The climbing hydrangea will be coming with me, eventually. 

I cut it back hard a few mornings back and will suffer the cold this week to prune its roots. Along with the climber rose 'New Dawn' and my grandmother's tea, it will rest in a trench covered with wood chips at a friend's in Williamsburg until I can take them to Minnesota.


Plants I have available:

Dwarf spirea (pink flowers, chartreuse foliage)
Everblooming shrub rose (magenta flower)
New England and NY Asters, (blue-purple flowers)
Yarrow (yellow flowers)
Tradescantia (blue-purple flowers)
Snakeroot (white flowers)
Daylily (orange, orange-burgundy)
Geranium (the real one, pink and blue flowers)
Phlox (pink and white flowers)
Sedum (different kinds, large, small, pink flowers)
Primrose (yellow flowers)
Coneflower (pink, maybe white)
Heuchera (copper and mahogany leaves, white flowers)
Dicentra Eximia (pink flowers, lacy blue green leaves)
Goldenrod (non-spreading variety, yellow flowers)
Chrysanthemum (Korean type, apricot flowers)
Sage (deep blue-purple flowers)
Culinary sage (pale purple flowers)
Hosta
Liriope (Purple flowers, blue berries)
and many others.

If you are interested, email me: nycgarden@gmail.com. You may have to do this on your own, but I will tag the ones I plan to keep if I cannot be present to help out.

A few nights ago there was a radical fog.

Autumn Oak

On Wednesday I was teaching my architecture students how to visualize within Photoshop, importing base images, adding found textures to planes, tweaking them with exposures, levels, brightness or what have you to give a convincing sense of light and space. Then I caught the sliver of light, in the cleft between the pull-down projector screen and a wall, a space which mirrored the architectural slit between A.M. Stern's high class money and Donald Trump's trash money, an aperture that sharply focused the park as a luxury, a painting, as it so often is, an image of security and status. Olmsted was a genius.

I am employed at an institution, just one block from the park, where it is seen fit to salary its presidential figurehead at one million, six-hundred thousand dollars a year, it is reasonable to renovate the figurehead's floor every five years, where the handbook unashamedly stipulates that deans and their superiors have all drinks paid at social and business functions, but cannot see to provide students who are mortgaging their futures at forty thousand a year with the proper staffing and equipment, nor offer any incentive to keep good people on their staff, and doesn't wish to consider the financial pressures of life in this city. The College has become part of the problem. Yesterday, I resigned.

_________________________

Last weekend, on my roundtrip to Boston, across the oak-filled coastal New England landscape, I was struck by the intensity of color of the oaks this autumn. I thought there was something unusual going on, and maybe there is, but I figured it a local phenomenon until I caught these oaks on Broadway. They are simply brilliant this year! I've always felt oaks were somewhat drably colored in the autumn, -russet, maroon, sienna and ochre. Yet not this year, not at all.

Shift

I haven't had much to say, lately, if only because I'd say the same thing, repeatedly. Things are moving along in the way that leaves slowly shift from green to russet or snow pack gives way to the dark earth. In two months time I should be getting settled in our new home. My wife is working on the internet issue, ahead of our arrival. Later this week I announce my resignation at work.

Announcing one's intention to leave NYC arouses subtle forms of defensiveness. If you've ever done so, you know what I mean. Leaving anything unsettles the shifting sands that conceal our doubts and talk of it is treated like a contagion -don't spread that shit around, just get out of here!

This is particularly prevalent in the art world of NYC, where proximity to finance and media underwrite the conceit of prominence, but on a personal level it's just the matter of whether or not your presence will help fill out an exhibit's reception, whether or not your support is localized. I understand, but it isn't worth the sacrifice.

Finally, when leaving one is tempted to do all enjoyable things one last time, but I've come to regard this as nullifying as much as it is virtually impossible. So, now, I see those who must be seen, and continue with my responsibilities, and attempt to finish paintings that should be dry before they get packed.

Have Garden, Will Travel

What is one to do with a garden full of plants when moving in the dead of winter? Certain plants can be given away, but one gets attached to others. My large-ish Hydrangea petiolaris, Grandma's tea rose, the iris, Dicentra eximia? I can dig out almost any plant in my garden at almost any time for transplant here, but they need to travel. Far. To a frozen earth zone. It will already be below freezing in a week's time there, it may never freeze here.

Some cuttings will fly in Betsy's suitcase on this Tuesday's trip, although it may well be too late for them. Mulch will be applied. Others will need to be nurseried until they can be collected, driven, and replanted. This may very well be in the heat of summer. Not ideal, but I've been lucky before.

It would seem, at the moment, that moving plants should be of the least concern for anyone leaving their position of ten years, moving twelve hundred miles away from friends, family, a network of colleagues, packing an apartment and two art studios, and going about shutting down one's life infrastructure (bank accounts, utility accounts, mail, and all else). The plants, then? Really?

Yes. Consider it a way to carry forward a piece of myself, something familiar, all component to an identity built over a decade in one place. I will not see the neighbors from the garden as they pass, but the plants will remind me of them. I will not be able to smell the sea or listen to the cacophony of the fall migration, but the plants will suggest it. The plants become a memory bank, or rather a trigger to it. They help establish myself in a new place. This is nothing new to me. I have perennial sunflowers from my garden in New Mexico, and fifty year old iris and roses from my Grandmother's house, and asters and primrose from a field in Maine. If this summer's herbicide spraying didn't kill them, I will move Mayapple saves, transplanted from Van Cortlandt Park, and Seaside Goldenrod from a pier in Red Hook.

When we move there are always things we are eager to leave behind. These things go without saying, all the better to help the forgetting. Carrying forward and leaving behind is inventive, recombinative action. We aim to change, so we change something.

Chrysanthemum (your choice, could be Dendranthemum) 'Sheffield Pink' is the jazz hands of the autumn garden. A few stolons of these will travel, but might not survive Zone 4b.

I have many asters, I cannot even recall which is which any more. Rooted cuttings will travel. New York Asters are good within Zone 4-8.

'Alma Potschke' will travel, although it has not done well for me here (NE Asters suffer disease), Zone 4-8.

Gaura blooms long, is graceful, but I have a hard time believing it will travel well. Maybe. Unlikely to survive zone 4b.

Clever aphids, so well-matching the colors of the lily stem, won't travel. The lilies will, however, be shipping out with Betsy on Tuesday.

The autumn red leaves of primrose will travel. Zone 4-8.

Heuchera, or Coral Bells as above, will travel. Zone 3-9.

Well, no, not these. Although we can bag up the begonia for winter storage.

Hmm. The 'New Dawn' climber is a beast. It's blooming again and can tolerate some shade, in this case, underneath the Zelkova. It will get pruned hard, and will travel, but when? May need to be nurseried until warmer weather returns.

The shrub rose? Sure, it blooms forever, but I've never gotten attached to it, so it won't travel.

Today I will head out to inventory the garden. Some plants will be missed, it is mid autumn after all. And soon, very soon, a plant giveaway will be necessary. Interested? Email me: nycgarden@gmail.com

Gettysburg

I visited Gettysburg for a new project. Below are some images from the first two days.

I arrived in the evening on Saturday, van camping at a state park in the hills to the west. In the morning, I opened my eyes to this.

The map, marked up as I explored, indicating forest or field.

Sandy Beaches

Life is more interesting at its boundaries, and here both a boundary between the sea and the land and the sports field and the dunes. The redistribution of dune sand, nearly two years ago, was quite a blow to the shoreline ecosystem GNRA is intended to protect. Keeping people off the dunes is a full time job, so the Fed made the right decision when it put up a tall chain link fence instead of trying to police the summer hoards. Now, autumn brings quiet to the dunes and beach, so I took some time after tomato picking to check in on its recovery.

Virginia Creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, growing across the dune.

Solidago sempervirens, the hardiest of Goldenrod, tolerating salt and wind, drought and flood, poor soil and nearly zero nutrients.

It is hardly considered a garden plant, but its structure, succulent leaves, yellow autumn flowers, and downy late autumn seeds are perfect for the garden.

And insects love it.

In fact, ecologists recognize Seaside Goldenrod for attracting native bees and predatory insects.

The dunes, prior to Sandy, were easily 8 feet above the concrete walkway.

These are now beginning to rebuild with the help of snow fencing and simply keeping off.

I'm always impressed with plants that colonize sandy beaches. Is this because I had the darnedest time trying to grow vegetables in our Long Island sand when I was a teenager?

Cakile edentula, (American) Sea Rocket.

Kali turgida, I think, creating its own dune.

When we leave Brooklyn for another place, one likely known for draining water, not containing it, I know I will miss the beach and tidal marshes, even the scent of muck, the most. Appreciate, respect, and protect it.

Ornaments

Saturday, the rainy day, someone had left a large glass jar in the garden.

Larry put out his pumpkins. They look, to my eye, like the jar.

Beach Farm Virtue

The beach farm is winding down, and quite frankly, so am I. I've been lucky to visit about once every two weeks. My cover crop of buckwheat has grown, flowered, gone to seed, seeded, and sprouted once again. No harm, but folks are beginning to whisper into cupped hands. I have not planned for garlic, nor an autumn crop of cool weather greens. A volunteer sunflower has appeared, its presence among the tattered buckwheat welcome and self-sustenance a virtue.

Japanese eggplant, preferred by this cook, continue to produce into the cooler days.

They take quite awhile to begin, and then decline slowly toward the freeze.

I've harvested all the tomatoes fit to harvest. 

The bigguns mostly look like this, although, I did get a few worth ripening at home with only cosmetic issues, namely -black spots. We'll eat those this weekend, before Betsy returns to Minnesota on Tuesday.

The fennel is home to several swallowtail pillars. 

And the chard, grown from seed several years old, is still quite good. 

The Portrait

If you've ever wondered "what does this guy look like?" or have thought that I'm am just a bit anonymous (like they did), this post is for you. A couple of Fridays back, a New York photographer named Ben Hider, came to take my picture. He sent me a link to some of the shots, from which I selected the two below (all photos courtesy Ben Hider). Despite the mid-day, overhead sun, harsh shadows and my self-conscious avoidance of any lens, I think he did a bang up job.

Ben has been a customer of Hudson Clove for three years running, and last autumn he asked if he could take some shots of me out at the Amagansett farm. For one reason or another, that never happened, and of course this year I am growing in the Rockaways, and the garlic has been harvested. Good enough, said Ben, and he made the journey anyway, first on the A train from the Financial District where he is the official photographer of the New York Stock Exchange, and then a bus from the last A station. We spent two hours chatting and maybe twenty minutes on either side of the lens. 

Harvesting hundreds of small Roma tomatoes and on the phone answering silly questions about life on Saturn and what I could do with a paper clip that isn't clipping paper (these are creativity questions and I dislike them). Why? I (and another) was being focus-grouped. That lasted about 24 hours, after which I excused myself, having little to say about a Unilever shampoo from a gardener's perspective. Had they read this, they could've saved us all some time. Had I remembered that experience, I could have simply said no.

I even smile when asked nicely.

The Cosmos

It took me over a week to pull the Democrat primary fliers off of the borage. This is my confession. Had I made time for maintenance, I would have noticed that the cosmos seeds had finally grown into their own and that the borage has come down. The dayflower may not have taken over quite as much as the chartreuse potato vine, and the pots, yes the potted plants would be just a little less, shall we say, tan. Of course there is little I could have done with the advance of shade on the front yard and the plants there are keen on a solution, and even less I could have done about the spraying of herbicide under the yew tree, terminating my mayapples, lilies, monkshood, phlox, and yes, poke and smartweed. If I were a more attentive gardener, the lord may have not concocted such a browning scheme. Shall I say a few hail Marys now?

And the Solidago has fallen over, making it less appealing to me, as to the bumble bees that fly right on by.

The Russian Sage has bloomed for months; a proud, successful transplant of a well-dug-in, tap-rooted perennial. White Gaura is its friendly neighbor.

Appealing about this sage is its pubescent, lavender-colored calyces that outlast the pale blue flowers, extending the appearance of bloom far longer than the flowers alone.

The bumble bees also find it quite appealing.

But not, to these bees, as appealing as the large Heuchera, with it's small, white flowers nodding behind the autumn marooning Primrose leaves.

 Around it, a swarm of bumbles.

Return To The Beach Farm

We made a bee line for the beach farm not long after we returned from Minnesota. August weeds had become September's monster and the order among the tomatoes had decomposed into a fermentative morass.

Anthracnose, Bacterial Speck, Late Blight, and the Wilts had infected tomatoes in the new plot. Any large tomato was infected, none of which were edible.




Many lay rotting on the ground, split, fermenting in the warm sun, fizzing spittle and stinking of solanaceous putrefaction.

Tarry-looking specks and alien pods grew on some tomatoes making them rather unappetizing.

Fortunately there were eggplants that only lacked for water.

And the chard that I did not pick. Cooler weather will inspire harvest. Of course, the fennel is a monster. I'm leaving it for the enjoyment of the creatures and my occasional nibbling of flowers.

Speaking of nibbling, there has been a good amount on the tomatoes in the lowest reaches, so it was no surprise to see this bunny making his rounds on a quiet afternoon.

 Despite all the disease, our mid-July planted, retail Roma starts, produced a bumper crop of little tomatoes.

On Sunday, quite a beautiful day here in the city, I processed enough tomatoes through the mill (Norpro) to make 8 quarts of tomato juice and pulp. Perfect.