The Warm Welcome



This is what I think of when I feel the chill of autumn.


Or maybe a string of pearls -the puffball, or rather the giant puffball, Calvatia gigantea, growing in the back woods among the hog peanut.



These are the things of late September and early October.



 Not basil!



 And green as can be green beans!



 Eggplant that simply won't quit.



And tomatoes that continue to produce -only now beginning to show the wilted leaf of cooler nights.



The vegetable garden here is as green as my beach farm plants were in late July. A rarity, maybe? Not the norm, say some. The coming five days are looking to be quite autumnal -blue skies, cool air, days in the lower sixties, nights in the lower forties. This should bring an end to the vegetable patch, and not a moment too soon as the garlic seed is on its way, and more front lawn needs to be tilled under. But wow, what an exquisitely long growing season.




Job One


There is an entry door in the back, off the utility room, that went completely unused. My idea was to seal it up, put a wall, or at best a window, in its place. Yet it's hard to remove a door that is already there -it's like giving up some power. Before we could decide fully what to do with the space, we had to excavate the situation -a situation that anyone with experience in these kinds of things could see wasn't going to be good.


The heart of the problem is a landing at entry level. It sits directly beneath an expansive roof valley that channels falling moisture from two roofs onto the landing at high speed, leaping over the gutter and dropping 8 feet, then splashing up onto a door situated on the cool, wet side of the house. The rust at the bottom of the door is clear, so is the rotting door jamb. The deck boards didn't look so hot and the railings were simply pushed over.


This is what it looked like behind the landing's framing. Not good. Moisture from rain and melting snow was channeled through the wall via lag screws anchoring the landing deck ledger board to the house. Well-designed homes do not do this anymore, particularly where construction methods make use of rim boards made of oriented strand board-like materials as was done at our place. They still penetrate the rim board, but more than a lag is required, but I digress.



"Engineered" lumber is extremely common, but it doesn't hold up to constant moisture and insects. Only the sill plate is made of a durable material -aluminum. The siding, joists, rim, and sheathing are all "engineered" products.



From above you can see that the rot extended under the sill and into the plywood underlayment, subfloor, and joists. On the right is the door framing that shows water penetrating from above the door -probably due to ice damming on the roof in winter.


The door removed, it then became necessary to remove the basement window. We never opened it and its light would not be missed. I also do not like the soil "framing" necessitated by below grade windows. It too was under the same valley that dumps water onto the landing.  Removing this window was one of the easiest decisions we've had to make. 



The window removed and the void studded and sheathed with treated plywood, we then set to remove the rot, what I consider the cancer of wood frame homes. Some carpenters leave rot if it will be covered by dry siding, but even these guys would remove this rot -it's too far gone.



We cut out the subfloor rot, the sheathing rot, the rim rot, leaving only the 2x6 wall plate and joist ends that, although blackened, appeared sound or that removing them would have been more problematic than their soft wood. I applied a bleach solution to all blackened areas. Underneath the cantilevered wall plates and the future door sill I installed supporting 2x10 cuts. To the left is a natural gas inlet pipe that had to be cut to remove and replace the rim joist. That is when we started hanging our laundry.

It was here that I confirmed what had already proved obvious -underneath the staircase to the left is a void with no insulation. The room above the garage had its heating vents closed and the stairwell uninsulated. We learned this when we stored water and my garlic supply there in January. Both froze overnight -the garlic never recovered.


We installed the new rim using a similar strand board lumber -at one and a quarter inches it is thinner than framing lumber, so necessary for the proper fit. We then removed the soil "framing" around the old window, filled the hole, and replaced the treated ply kick plate that surrounds the house.


We sheathed the framing with 1/2 inch treated plywood- possibly overkill, but then we had the material. The subfloor, under the door sill, was also replaced with treated ply.



For a month we went without a door, just a plastic tarp and flimsy plywood covering. This is when the cat learned about the outside. Time was running out, as I was nearing time for my trip to NYC, Vermont, and Boston. The evening before I was to leave, we crammed the new door into its pocket.


When I returned, over three weeks later, I began framing the landing. The 4x4 posts are ground contact treated and anchored to piers just below soil grade. I graded the soil along the house to drain water away from the building and so that no soil comes into contact with the posts where coarse gravel fills the void. The deck framing is treated as well, but the cedar tone stuff common to the box stores these days. The ledger is mounted so that the new deck boards rest a full step below the door sill and the lower level allowed me to lag directly into the foundation wall. I framed parallel to the house so that the deck boards would run perpendicular, allowing for easier flow of rain away from the house. The deck landing slopes away from the house at an eighth inch per foot.


Stair cuts are always a hassle. Here we decided to have a deeper tread than previous, although the rise is a common seven and one quarter inches. The stringer plate rests on a bed of coarse gravel.


I custom flashed the ledger with galvanized sheet metal after adding a layer of protecto-wrap tape. Flashing is one of the more complicated applications at door sills. The best way to think of it is like siding -work from the bottom up. I made sure our lowest flashing element protected the ledger lag bolts. I then installed the cedar riser trim and tread planks. The landing planks, posts and handrails had to wait until the siding was replaced and the gas line restored.


This was how it looked about a week and a half ago. The kick plate installed (designed to support the overhang of the aluminum sill), we were able to have the plumber redo the gas line. Fortunately I did not have to change the rail post placement, and it went in as planned. The door is not the standard box store item as the conditions of this location have only changed by seven inches. Its best feature is a plastic composite lower jamb that should resist the jamb decay that is at least partially responsible for some of structure's rot.


To the right of the landing I replaced the penetrations through the strand board siding with a scarf-jointed cedar plank, flashed above and drip-rabbeted below. The penetrations include the sump pump over-flow (black), the fresh air replacement vent (hooded) and the one inch hose sillcock which has yet to be soldered in.


To the left I have been stymied by the utility meters attached both to the sheathing and to the siding. It will cost a few hundred bucks to get an electrician to remove them so I can build a similar cedar plank plate for those to rest on. The lower four boards are Hardie cementitious siding because no matter what all the contractors say, I have a hard time, given the evidence all around me, that the LP brand strand board product can hold up to the moisture. Our siding hasn't lasted 20 years in places, so where it counts, where there is contact with other materials, I've put in Hardie.


This shirtless, burly guy was sent over by our trash hauler to take away our project waste.


Then a Craigslist ad provided a family to haul away the old playhouse. It took 4 hours, but now their chickens have a swanky bunk.



I removed a ton of horseradish that was growing along the wall, fully expecting it to return next year.



And the lilac I posted about weeks ago has been finally cut out of the soil near the foundation. I can only hope I got it all and I never realized what a weed they could be! In its stead will likely go the New Dawn climbing rose I brought from Brooklyn this August.


This is only a sample of the many projects that have gone on here since May. There are rooms inside with new Sheetrock, new lighting, we have a new well pump, there are bats in our belfry soon to be excluded, there's a new roof, and clearing for an outbuilding. We hired out some siding work to take the load off a little bit, but I am not happy with the craftsmanship. I'm likely too much a perfectionist, and that is not necessarily a good thing. Hiring people to do the work winds me up if only because I know that if I had 17 arms I could get it done and do it better without having paid them what I consider a lot of money for a couple day's work.

There is much more to do, including the front porch and door opposite the one shown here, rotting brick mould on several windows, siding replacement, and the house (and this new door) will need to be painted. The fleshy pink has got to go, but its replacement is daily in question.




September Twelfth



This potted plant approaches the feeling of today. Raking sun, brilliant blue sky, sixty-two degrees F. Autumn is around the corner but the leaves are still green. A warmth-loving being soaks in the last of summer glory before a retreat indoors. 

Squirrels recklessly toss acorns from above. Yellow jackets investigate any possibility. Monarchs, southward bound, flutter and rest. Geese, arrive from the north in formation -here they still travel south for winter. Blue jays dominate the daytime songbook. A single engine plane's hum vrum a passing bass line. 

And the people make lists of things to do before winter. 


Hog Peanut


Amphicarpaea bracteata, the Hogpeanut, is common in our woods. It grows in sunny patches or where mature trees have fallen. By that measure, its habitat is expanding since so many trees have come down this year.



These flowers will produce small seeds in pods. The "peanut" of its name is a seed produced at or below ground by this plant's other self-fertile, closed flowers. These seeds are quite edible.



Hog peanut is a vine, although it does not have tendrils, and plays well with others outside of a garden. It scrambles along the ground in the woods, but arrives on the scene quite late, well after most ephemerals have retreated back under the soil. It also contributes as an uncommon, woodland nitrogen fixer.





When People Ask Where The Good Food Is


...I usually tell them its right outside.


Four heirloom tomato plants have produced more than most any I had ever planted at the beach farm.



I've been looking forward to the German Stripe, the latest to size up and ripen.


Japanese eggplant, 'Kyoto,' have been exceptionally prolific.


I put my green bean seeds in a little late, but still, they are producing now. 


Although my broccoli starts were a failure. Too late, as always.


But I was saved by this guy (sorry to say that I lost his name with a piece of paper) and Anderson Acres. You see the sign, to the left, that says start your fall garden. Yes! Getting starts together at the right time in summer is challenging given busy summer schedules and difficult weather. Hardly any garden business has starts available at this time of year, probably because there isn't much market for it. I'm so glad to have found them at the Minneapolis Farmers' Market in stall 311.


I bought a handful of these lettuce starts, broccoli, cilantro, parsley, and basil.


The fall lettuce.


Betsy's dill, the pickler that she is.



Our local hardware gave away (really, for free) many vegetable starts in July, most well past their prime. I focused on those sturdy sorts that do well in cooler weather -chard and kale. Small and weak when planted, they are now doing fantastic. We eat them every day.



A four pack of heirloom peppers from Shady Acres (whose stall Anderson Acres occupied at the farmers' market) has become quite a bounty of peppers. I've never had such luck. One plant has eight large peppers!



And they're beginning to turn red.



Of course, there are still tomatoes ripening.



These "cherry," or is it "grape," have been fantastic. The name I believe is 'Juliet' -a little sweet, little tart, and meaty -that is the key for me. I do not like watery small tomatoes that pop when you bite into them or crack after heavy rains. These I pick and eat right there in the garden.



With more to come.



The woods has not produced its usual bounty this year, except for the morels early on. Maybe we've missed them, having been so busy with work on the house and field. Of course, we'll keep looking.






The Lilac

We have an aging lilac, probably twenty years old, in the path of some house repair. My hard edged assessment is removal. After all, it's running along the foundation, suckering as it goes. At some point it is a weed that is very hard, nearly impossible really, to yank. For what? Two or three weeks of lightly scented flowers? 

I am not a fan of shrubs up against a wooden house, if for nothing other than the inconvenience to repair and the humid environment they create near all that wood. So what is slowing me down? Shouldn't have this old, rangy lilac been cut down months ago? 

What would you do?


More information: the tree has a pretty sizable knot of 4" stems at its base. On the left is the septic electrical and the right the gas line. The septic electric wire definitely crosses the lilac without proper protection as I found when digging for the landing piers just a few feet away. Digging will be treacherous. Hmmm. I may transplant one of the many suckers and take it out without removing the roots. Too bad this has to play itself out with nearly all of the foundation plantings. 


The Notions


This is what a beginning garden looks like. A few old farm implements, an older garden overcome by the shade of growing trees, a tub of transplants waiting for human inspiration, a lawn overrun by creeping charlie, and a trio of notions about how things will come together in the future. The notions: grandma's tea, seaside goldenrod, and Heuchera of Brooklyn.





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.


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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.


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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.


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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.



Travelers

Tomorrow I leave Brooklyn for Minnesota, early as my body allows and after a day's respite. These will travel with me: Grandma's tea, Rosa 'New Dawn,' a handful of Huechera, and some Red Hook sidewalk Seaside Goldenrod. 




The Gardner



My friend, Steve, took me to The Gardner -a Boston mansion of yore festooned with incredible artifacts, whose rooms invite photography yet rules regard it with suspicion due to an embarrassing theft of grand proportions 25 years ago. 

One may use a camera on the first floor, from which these images are taken. The court yard is truly divine. Those tall purple and white flowers belong to the plant Campanula pyramidalis. 




















All That Gutters Is Gold


A friend of mine in Boston is in the market for a house. He invited me to see one that he is considering; to give it my critical "fixer's eye." I'll spare you my assessment, but I did name all the plants in the yard -garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, and day lily. 

His broker invited us to the open house of a 1.3 million dollar home on the other side of Dedham. The home had a waterfall that could be turned on or off, rockface inside the house, and so many levels and quarters I hardly knew where I was. But it also had purple loosestrife blooming in the gutters. That, my friends, is a serious plant. And if you're serious about selling your home, I highly recommend weeding the gutters. 

Landscape Into Art


I'll be teaching my summer intensive course Landscape Into Art this week in the perfectly pastoral hills of Bennington College between the Green and Taconic Mountains. As I arrived the breezes whipped up, the temperature about 78 degrees, the skies blue. Tomorrow, eleven students arrive ready to have fun, work hard, and be challenged. It's an intense week. We make art, we read, we challenge each other to try new ideas, to push beyond our limits, and then we eat together. 






Varieties of Nature Experience





"...there must be no talk of moods in things they must need accomplish. They must be free from this care and that they must not let their feet linger. It does not turn to summer after spring has closed, nor does the fall come when the summer ends. The spring ahead of time puts on a summer air, already in the summer the fall is abroad, and soon the fall grows cold. In the tenth month comes a brief space of spring weather. Grass grows green, plum blossoms bud. So with the falling of leaves from the trees. It is not that the trees bud, once the leaves have fallen, but that because they are budding from beneath, the leaves, unable to withstand the strain, therefore must fall. An onward-urging influence is at work within, so that stage presses on stage with exceeding haste."

Yoshida Kenko, 14th century




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I've always loved photography, since my first 110 camera. I remember my first picture - a seagull passing in front of the summer's evening sun, to the west northwest of Hither Hills State Park not far from the town of Montauk, on Long Island. I think I was 6, but maybe I was 10, so at least somewhere between those ages. My incredibly crisp recollection of that moment is probably the memory of its photographic image, intensified by an aggregate of sensory experience of summers near the ocean. Film was a precious canister of patience, you waited, you were discerning.

My early experiences with paint were often with the putrefying, outdated tempera paints available at school. Their colors were pale with adulterants and the finished project flaked off the paper with any wrinkle. When my sister received a paint by numbers kit, she was probably eight or nine and I just a year or so younger, I stole into her room to check it out. My memory of this experience is visceral, both tactile and olfactory. I wasn't much interested in the picture, a horse in a gradation of browns. No, my focus was on the half inch semi-translucent plastic rounds strung together and lidded. In each one a rich brown in various shades sunken under an eighth-inch amber fluid. I opened each canister, dipping my pointer finger into the fluid, then raising it to my nose. This was my first experience of oil paint and I still, on occasion, lift the tubes to my nose.

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As a young man I was feverishly involved with abstraction, with the composition of my gestures, with layering of translucent color, and light and dark coming from within the painting. Later, I began seeking new challenges and ways to undermine the repetitiveness I found in my work. I began looking less toward abstraction and more at the world around me. That was over twenty years ago.





I went to graduate school in southern New Mexico to work on the observational drawing skills that seemed to elude me in those earlier years. What I learned there was that I am a keen observer, not at all impatient, drawing was not the problem, and the intimate experience of land and space had become my subject.




















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In the summer of 2000 I attended Skowhegan. The peculiar experience I had was that other artists seemed to be more interested in the performance of landscape painting than the resulting works.  I always had a bit of anxiety about being an artist on the land, so I instigated a project as a way to confront that anxiety.




In Janine Antoni's presentation to the artists I became aware of a work that she had begun on campus, in the upper field, a few years prior. What I saw was an effort of labor and a relationship between the artist, her work, and the land.





At the same time I was reading Thoreau's The Maine Woods, in which he described the woods filling in to obscure his path as he cut it. I decided to explore the field in search of the remains of the circle she cut through the field in the making of her work, and trace her path to resurrect it from the oblivion of natural growth. What I found were remnants of trenches designed to support timbers arranged to hold the stones. With that, and the photo from her catalog in the library, I was able to piece together the location and diameter of the circle.





I staked the ground and began to walk. The plan was to walk every day for two hours, at different times as schedule permitted, rain or shine, until the circle was complete.








It took three weeks. In so doing, I became a body present on the land, an ascetic as much as an aesthetic laborer. 

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I returned to New York City after Skowhegan and had difficulty building interest in my painting. In fact, I began to feel my painting was going nowhere, within the studio and without. Was it the loss of the desert subject, being in the city, or was it the practice altogether? After 2001, most paintings I began on site went unfinished. I toyed with painting from projections of my slides, but I found the process tedious and disconnected. It wasn't until 2004 that I began painting seriously again.

Yet I continued to make landscape projects. In September of 2001 I was at Socrates Sculpture Park to erect a greenhouse, complete with brick floor, electricity, and plants. I had built a private landscape within a public park, again my presence on the land being part of the work. I couldn't be present everyday, but I became a sort of public hermit at night and on weekends, in my little "house."








The only activity I defined for my residency period of September 2001 through June of 2002 was to keep the plants alive and healthy through regular visits. 





The small greenhouse is a desirable object, an attractive marker in the landscape. It speaks of leisure, not work. Visitors interacted with it in their own ways, but were locked out from all but viewing the interior through the crenelated panels. Sometimes I arrived to find it had been broken into, cigarette butts laid on the table. Others shrieked when they realized somebody, a body, was present inside as they peered in through the panels. Small children climbed in through the vents and retreated in fear when they became aware of my presence. 






Often I had the park completely to myself, which was a great pleasure in a city wracked by September eleven. The miniature landscape became a sheltering escape, a coping mechanism.





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I met artist Carrie Mae Weems at Skowhegan in the summer of 2000. She had been a supportive yet tough critic that summer. I worked for her for a period, and saw her from time to time afterward. In 2005 she encouraged me in subtle and quite direct ways to consider photography. She wondered aloud what a painter might do with a camera, but ultimately suggested it in the service of painting.





Although I resisted this for years, that fall I began using my digital photographs as source material for paintings and drawings. The process engaged me, quite unexpectedly, with several new challenges. I appreciate the intensity of feeling people have for an on site painting experience; it's not unlike painting the figure -it is immediate, you must adapt to changes, engage your senses, and the paintings have a freshness that only stales in relationship to its conventions. However, what impresses me after many years of working with the photo is that each day I return to the studio I see the static image quite differently. The photo-source allows me an experience of observation and painting, of digging deeply into an image, and painting without the constraints of time.









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I have a photo of a bridge to the Rockaways on my wall. It's been there for some time, and was intended to become a painting, but that painting was never made. The original image was a small file, taken on my first digital camera. To print it large, I needed to upsample it in Photoshop. Unlike many small photos printed this large, the artifacts of the upsample process did not wholly undermine its printed quality. In some ways, it makes the photo, and I like the photo as it is, and this makes it suspect as a source for painting. A good photo doesn't need a painting; a good photo is not a painting problem.






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In a little while I will be leaving for a new landscape -the hardwood forests of nearby Connecticut. I will be the artist in residence at Weir Farm Art Center, part of the Weir Farm National Historic Site. Last January I spent two weeks in the winter wonderland of New Hampshire at MacDowell Colony. This new program will be much different -I'll be the only one in residence, with all the house-keeping, cooking, and what-else performed by yours truly and that's just fine by me. If they'll let me, I may even get to cooking over fire.

I know little about the woods of Connecticut, only a slight sense of it from drives on the Merritt Parkway. I'm hoping for Beech trees. I like them most in winter when they appear like apparitions in the woods, but I'll take them in late spring without complaint. There are hiking trails throughout the acres that I will have to myself, I think.

The site is surrounded by woods and residential development; not too far from NYC. The landscape was a farm and artistic retreat for painter J.A. Weir in the late 19th century, then artists Mahonri Young and Dorothy Weir, and lastly, before it became a park, artist Sperry Andrews. It is the rare home and studio that has for over one hundred years been in the hands of artists.

I'm interested in the role of the rural retreat as a nurturer and shaper of art. Most artist residency programs are in locations removed from urban settings. Obviously, it's the quiet, the lack of social distraction, the clean air- it can clear your head. But as a landscape painter, I'm more interested in the institution of the bucolic, art retreat and how it shapes a way of looking at landscape and art. The easel painter 'en plein air' is certainly a part of this set of expectations.

Do you remember when Captain Picard would retire to his quarters on the Space Ship Enterprise to paint at his easel? This always made me cringe. How is it that easel painting is still the image of art making? I find it hard to imagine people in space, traveling the light years, painting at easels. Is it the lack of imagination on the part of film and tv that brings us this image?


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The radar has been showing no rain for hours, but for hours I've looked out the window and saw mist, sprinkles, and rain. I went out for a walk, to make some more movies, and just to get out.

In NYC, one rarely has the feeling they can slow down, move slowly through a space or landscape. As I move through the grassy fields at Weir Farm, I have a heightened awareness of what appears as intentionality in its formal boundaries. It's in the light transitioning to the dark, abruptly sometimes, other times gradual. It may only be incidental to field and stone wall architecture, where trees grow and create dark spaces that are then punctuated by bright, grassy fields beyond, then again broken by the deeper woods.







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I recently finished Ordeal by Hunger by George Stewart, the harrowing tale of the fate of the Donner Party. I spoke about it with National Park Service ranger Emily and another woman from San Francisco. Each of us had read the book at some stage in our lives. The woman (excuse me as I do not remember her name, lets call her Ruth), Ruth, was in her late sixties and she said the story was all the rage when she was a kid. Emily, the park ranger, is in her mid-twenties and she read it in high school. Having just finished the book myself, I began asking around, "have you heard of the Donner Party?" Every person I asked said in return, "Jeffery Dahmer?" How odd. Ruth says she thinks it's odd that there is a diner at Donner Pass and yet every year her family would eat there on their way to Idaho. 

It doesn't escape Ruth or I that Interstate 80 occupies much of the same route as the Donner Party trail. It cuts through the Wasatch Mountains, the very same path these California-bound pilgrims cut with brute force and determination. 

Ranger Emily tells us that the artist Mahonri Young, a Mormon, had included a depiction of the Donner Party in his most famous work, the monument This Is The Place, in Salt Lake City. Young lived at Weir Farm after he married Dorothy Weir, daughter of artist Julian Alden Weir -the namesake of the National Historic Site. Mahonri Young was the grandson of Brigham Young, the man who lead the Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake via the exact same path that, less than one year earlier, the Donner Party struck out on. What did he know of those who cut their path? Did word of the tragedy confirm the divine wisdom of Brigham Young to the Mormon pilgrims? Did it convince him of its rightness?

It was during these same years that Henry David Thoreau was having his nature experience on the opposite coast, an experience of self-proclaimed self-sufficiency while under the spell of the morning star. What if Thoreau had left the cultivated east, and struck out west for his year of nature experience and writing? What if, by some accident of fate he had found himself accompanying those who journeyed to discover their holy place, or those destined to consume themselves on their journey to economic salvation? What, then, would Walden have reflected?



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As much as you do, undoubtedly, I grow tired of the tense shouldered, hunching posture of winter, the gray ice pavement, even the frozen dog turds. But I don't want it to end. I cannot ask for it to be over. Time is as slick as that puddle ice. GO SLOW.  The quiet is everything. Spring moves far too fast for me to beg for it. It is something to be savored, contemplated, in the ever-lasting distance of winter.


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I've been relishing the brilliant spring greens and pale reds, some of the best I can recall, at highway speeds for a couple of weeks now. First on my trip to the upstate garlic farm, and this week on my trip out to Amagansett to explore a possible location for next year's crop. 



I cannot recall winding my way through the Long Island Pine Barrens in early spring, since my trips to the farthest reaches of the southern prong had always been reserved for summer days.



The colors this year rival autumn's best. The russet and salmon reds are the most intense I've seen, contrasting as they do with the long-holding chartreuse.



Add to this the dark greens of pitch pine, and...



the white-green of blooming, roadside russian olives, and...


salmon-pink sheep sorrel and the ochre of old grasses...



and you have something I could hardly take photographs of, with my phone, while speeding down the highway at 65 mph. It all made me wish, much like two weeks prior, that I didn't have purpose other than finding and photography.

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I was in the studio the other day, working on some unfinished paintings. On the radio was Fresh Air. Terry Gross was interviewing Jonathan Franzen. I had read his book The Corrections and, after the interview, am considering his new book Freedom. I was interested in something he had to say on adulthood:

"And the key moment of becoming an adult, the difference, one of the defining differences between an adult and a kid is that adults relinquish a certain kind of freedom. You can't lie around on your bed all afternoon, and you can't be possibly any number of things. You have to only be one thing, or a couple of things (my italics)."

I am haunted by this. The notion of being "one thing" has been going on a tear in my mind the last few years, growing in strength as I approached 40. What is it that keeps me from painting every free moment? How much time should my other landscape activities be taking? Should I be making a living on the land? It's like I have been living a life visible through a kaleidoscope, looking in there are all these pieces of me spinning around, somehow not whole or resolved, yet you know there is a whole person there.

When I was in residence at Weir Farm, last year, I spent much more time exploring the land than painting. I read books, I photographed, I blogged. Why paint when I can communicate in such a rapid manner?





Yet, I've been working on a small group of Prospect Park images. Most include people. The colors are insanely green, toxic green. My colors are not to everyone's taste, but then what is?




Neither of these is near done, although this one is a little further along. Space, atmosphere, an intimate relationship with distance is important in this work.


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In the autumn of 2001 I had an experience at the Mattituck Museum, in Waterbury, Connecticut. The exhibit, Images of Contentment: John Frederick Kensett and the Connecticut Shore was on display upstairs. His Hudson River School style is typically described as Luminism, its hallmark a tranquil scene with evanescent light, and in Kensett’s case -more often than not an image of the conjunction of water and land. The impact of each work is an experience of restfulness and calm, a bath of even, transcendental light in the reassuring, supportive bosom of nature. 




On the first floor was Mattituck's permanent exhibit titled Brass City –a brutal display of miserable working and living conditions in Waterbury, one of Connecticut’s several industrialized river cities through the 19th  and early 20th century. 

In this contradiction I recognize how the Hudson River School paintings were a looking or turning away.

The history of the Hudson Valley is one of industrial and commercial enterprise, of resource extraction, where the hills, especially those closest to the river, were cleared of timber for use in iron production, charcoal production, tanning, building, and of course, cleared for farming. The valley was home to quarrying for road making, building, brick making, and of course, cement production. Rail and steam terminals, dikes and dredging, and other riverside alterations were commonplace thanks to the opening of the Eerie Canal in 1825. One hundred or so brilliant white ice houses, many hundreds of feet long, were built along the river to store ice cut from the frozen river to ship to NYC. Yet it is the rarest of paintings from the time period that represents any of this. The image below was made by one of the "lesser" artists of the time -it depicts industry on the shores of the city of Hudson, NY.


Samuel Coleman, 1866


I expect people to desire the dream, but what never occurred to me is that anyone would confuse Hudson River School pictorialization for truth. The painters of the time, like any artist, did not stay true to the world before them. No, they were creating visages of a dream and they were as well aware of it as we are today. 


The Viewshed

A view shed has been defined as:

"the geographical area that is visible from a location. It includes all surrounding points that are in line-of-sight with that location and excludes points that are beyond the horizon or obstructed by terrain and other features."

This singular point of view sounds awfully like perspective, a system that prioritizes the view of a single eye, a single individual, or in the case outlined below, a single institution. This singular point of view is an expression of the utmost power, not the benign locus of landscape appreciation.

I've always found the term view shed indigestible, primarily because it shifts meaning from laws of fluids and gravity to laws of man. So how does eyesight flow, how is it "shed?" That single viewpoint radiates outward from a point somewhere on a 35 mm retinal disc. The shedding is done by the human brain, and what flows from it is not out there, a part of nature, but something within the mind of the shedder. Optics prevent us from seeing around obstructions creating what amounts to blind spots, but what of the "view shed" in the age of technological prosthetics like drones or remote cameras?  

Nowhere has the application of this idea been more apparent than in the Hudson Valley, where the view shed has been legitimated by the apparent "truth" of Hudson River School paintings. While there are many grand views in the Hudson Valley, the most often cited, preeminent view is that from Olana, the home and landscaped acres of the Hudson River School's Frederic Church. While there is plenty of evidence, if one aims to find it, of quite a different landscape in his day, it appears that plaintiffs commonly utilize the "historic" view as the basis for legal argument against any industrial activity that may alter it. 


“This discussion, while it addresses the prospect of a nuclear power plant, is not about nuclear energy,” commented Sara Griffen, President of The Olana Partnership. “It is the story of how the importance of the Olana Viewshed factored into the siting of a plant, and how this mattered on a national and regional level.” “Olana is famous for its breath-taking panoramic views that draw thousands of visitors to this magnificent historic site every year,” said Kimberly Flook, Site Manager of Olana Historic Site. “It was Frederic Church’s vision that actively shaped his landscape to frame the Hudson Valley’s unique natural beauty."

"The resulting Environmental Impact Statement caused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff to recommended denial of a construction license for the proposed nuclear power plant (just south of Catskill). This was the first and only time that such a recommendation had been made on any grounds—let alone environmental or aesthetic." 

The image below is an "artist" rendering of the view of the proposed power plant, looking south from Olana. The rendering isn't terribly offensive, except that the image of a parabolic cooling tower has become an architecture of anxiety.




Again and again the "historic view" is used as justification to halt or alter proposed industrial projects in the Hudson River Valley. One of the more recent and controversial was the case of the proposed St. Lawrence Cement plant in the town of Greenport, NY, just upriver from the now hip town of Hudson. The National Trust for Historic Preservation cited the St. Lawrence Cement Plant as an imminent threat to the area, declaring the Hudson River Valley one of America’s eleven most endangered historic places, as its scenic areas and historic landmarks are constantly threatened by sprawl and industrialization. 

Mark Brobowski's study, "Scenic Landscape Protection Under the Police Power," shows us that the Supreme Court decision in 1954, Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26, helped pave the way for future landscape preservation efforts based primarily on aesthetic values." Further, he states "The increasing value of tourism to local economies has prompted local governments, under their police powers, to move towards legitimizing aesthetic regulation, and landscape protection based on aesthetic values has evolved from a secondary purpose to a constant theme in environmental protection (Brobowski 1995, 700-702).

The view shed is not so much something to protect as it is an enclosure of a kind, a way to exact a great, limiting influence over many square miles of land and the human activity within it. At who's expense is the view kept a dream? We all dream of a land unspoiled by industry, but we have to engage it to deal with it. A quote from the brilliant Paul Shepard:

"My point is that their origin is inextricably associated with a surplus agriculture, that cities tend to grow beyond what the local agriculture will support, and that there is an urban attitude toward nature which is insular, cultivated, ignorant, dilettante, and sophisticated. At the same time, by virtue of the very polarity in the landscape that cities create, they contain and educate and produce men who retreat to nature, who seek its solitude and solace, who study it scientifically, and who are sensitive to its beauty. The very idea of a sense of place is an abstraction, a sort of intellectual creation like sex or climate or fashion, which is impossible except in a world of ideas whose survival depends on the city. The dilemma is that those who yearn for the warm garment of landscape security are already deflowered. They can only go back so far. They can regain the hunter's, pastoralist's, farmer's nonverbal responses, limited to an extent by their self-consciousness; but the yearning is thrust upon them in any case, for they were all children once and they had wild ancestors and they dream and to some degree all have premonitions of special places."



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My initial impulse to paint the park grew out of my excitement for the spring color of trees. Over time the work was carried on out of the feeling that it was as much my landscape as ours. I began to believe in the public commons, not as a preserve or even a special place, but an ordinary place that defines our relationship to nature. Painting landscape is a reflexive act, a looking back, but how do I do it so it is not also a looking away, a premonition of pastoral dreams? In painting Prospect Park, I've chosen to intensify this reflexivity as a way to move my work forward. 
































































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Below is a discussion, a critique, of The Highline and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Both are new parks developed during the Bloomberg era and, I think capture the attitude of life in NYC. While I think many of my thoughts are still relevant, I developed these essays before either park was open for viewing. I love the physical Highline, its planting and architecture, the way it floats above the traffic below, but do not connect with it as a parade ground and viewing platform. I have mixed feelings about Brooklyn Bridge Park and admit that I have spent little time there since it has opened.


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The Problem With Brooklyn Bridge Park

 The proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park contains 85 acres, including 6 piers and 1.3 miles of waterfront. The estimate for the budget to build Brooklyn Bridge Park is $370 million dollars. This is massive public spending for a park that is, from what I've seen so far, a much less ambitious design than Central or Prospect Park and without any of the democratic rhetoric of either of those projects. Assuming that the land was still available, as it is for BBP, it would be possible to build both Central and Prospect Park for less money ($312 million). Somehow, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benape sees this park as "a bargain."

What we get is a park that operates primarily as a plinth for the viewing of lower Manhattan, an interface for harbor activities, athletics, concessions, and a deepening real estate boom where it isn't at all needed. Should this area be a park? Of course. Are we getting our public money's worth? Not at all.

The north end of Brooklyn Bridge Park, years ago re-configured into a public park where it was once a run-down, old New York kind of hangout. There was a time when hardly anyone would accept a park in this location, if only because of the incredible amount of rattle and thrum from the trains on the Manhattan Bridge. Not anymore, ever since artists and musicians gave the Walentas family the Dumbo it always wanted and the massive gentrification of Brooklyn's gold coast, there has been pressure to transfer dilapidated, once working waterfronts into leisure grounds.






As smaller city parks go, the old Fulton Ferry Park is popular -people are sprawled out on the grass in warm weather, wedding photos are taken, tourists photograph the bridges, dogs are walked, little kids are bicycle-trained. The crowds accept the noisy racket of the bridge and embrace the waterfront. The concept here is a bold revision of the city's infrastructure as a sublime backdrop for leisure and a long overdue acceptance of our desire to be near the water. The pleasure here comes from the calming of the watery middle ground while the Manhattan Bridge's massive, dark underbelly and rumbling incite.




The Brooklyn Bridge operates on the level of a functioning ruin in the landscape incorporating a sense of history into the picturesque sublime. There are hints of current day ecological influences in the native plantings. The massive stone ampitheater and kayak-launching beachfront under the Manhattan Bridge are two bold strokes. This experience is as a big brother to those significant, original design decisions at Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens.




Touted for the new addition to Brooklyn Bridge Park is the view of the palisade formations of lower Manhattan. Yet, much of what I get from the view of the lower Manhattan skyline I already receive from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, along with its quaint nostalgia for old New York. The low viewpoint offered from the piers has the effect of bringing us to the foot of the Emerald City, looking up, and if you're me - get to thinking about who's behind the curtain.


The sketch below, from the Urban Strategies Inc. website, proposes something of interest. It appears to add something new to the context between the bridges that I can only hope survives the process.



A park with such an exhorbitant budget should have a bold design. Not only formally, but conceptually. A park that incorporates new conceptions of our relationship to nature. A park that gives us more than the plinth effect. Telling is that this new park is named after the Brooklyn Bridge. After all, that's the part of the park that we know has a heart. That's also the part that is essentially finished, functioning as it should, and won't require residential development to "pay for its maintenance."





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What Should Become of Community Gardens
...Community gardens should be made into NYC Parks. This is the only permanent solution to city-owned lots that have the potential to be sold for housing. Although history has shown us a few fools to suggest it, land under the Parks sign should never be looked at for development. As NYC parks, community gardens combine Olmsted's democratic rhetoric with community gardens' democratic aesthetics. As I question the passive use of our parks and wonder what more active involvement in parks would look like, I've come to the conclusion that part of the answer is in community gardens. Could the community garden be the seed of some larger civic park landscape?


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High Time For the High Line




There has been only one major park in all of New York City that has managed to go from waste land to park land in 10 years -the High Line. Recent money donated has given the completion of the new parkway a boost. In fact, as the New York Times pointed out, "This could be the friendliest public/private venture ever attempted in New York City." With a total cost of about $150 million, the High Line has created a stir at under half the cost of the proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park. Of course, no one can complain about the private capital connected to the High Line, as that it is of its essence. While the city owns most of the High Line trestle and NYC Parks appears to have some role to play, it is not a stretch to view this parkway as a privately funded and maintained park that offers access to the public.

As a public/private partnership, it makes sense that this parkway has a dual personality -its public and private function. It is the most viscerally dual-purpose, built landscape that I can think of. On the one hand it is a high fashion, high design parading platform for the the viewing of NYC architecture. On the other, it is a lowly, industrial structure, re-visioned as a metaphor for a car-less NYC. One aspect serves the vanity of individuals, private institutions and developers' dreams, the other has the potential to serve the public imagination of a future NYC.


The High Line is an elevated parkway connecting destinations and residential neighborhoods. In this way it is not unlike Vaux and Olmsted's original NYC parkways designed to separate horse carriage, and pedestrian travel. Yet the new High Line parkway will function as a platform for taking in the sights of lower and midtown Manhattan. Imagine it as a stroll through a sculpture garden, but the sculptures are the size of buildings. If you live or work in one of these new buildings, you can take the step back to appreciate how wonderfully your own starchitect designed building resides in this newly structured New York landscape. If you do not, you may stroll the High Line, panoramic foldout at the ready to identify any building seen in the growing architectural landscape. This is the essence of the private High Line.


On another level we have the romanticization of the railway ruin. Functioning and defunct railways have been picturesque components of landscapes for decades, and their minimum of infrastructure is easily incorporated into park designs. These ruins have hosted many parkways throughout the country, mainly as part of the rails to trails initiative. In Paris, the Promenade Plantee created a formal garden from an elevated railway. Many cities are now looking at conversion of their dilapidated high rail. In our own city, Gantry Plaza State Park incorporated industrial rail into its original park design in the mid 1990s. The incorporation of rail into park design isn't new, growing out of an attempt to make sense of a post-industrial landscape -often the only new space open for park development in our urban centers. What is new, however, is the attitude of an elevated railway park in NYC.


It is my view that the primary public aspect of the High Line is its manifestation of a changing attitude towards street vehicles and traffic. It does this by anticipating an elimination of vehicular traffic below, ironically through the preservation of the conduit for a mode of vehicular traffic previously considered too dangerous to keep at street level. It allows us to walk along the previously unsafe terrain of train track and in doing so, gives us a glimpse of a future where walking along the street is safe. The High Line removes vehicular traffic from our urban experience in what appears an apolitical, non-threatening fashion -high above the streets, out of sight and mind of the political body of vehicles racing below. Lastly, the High Line's elevation promotes a sense of the civic idealism to which it speaks while, to the speedster below, perhaps, it's a floating spectre of a return to biological speed.

As we watch the collapse of the American auto industry, and entertain the idea of a city free of automobiles, what new urban landscapes will we dream up?






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Wet Dreams and Other Pursuits


This is how most folks at the garden (or any garden) like to water their plants. They probably have a trigger spray nozzle or some such device. I cannot explain the feeling given by watering plants this way, but it is definite and possibly trance inducing. Is it the sense of control over one of the most important elements in all of life? Is it the power of 'making it rain?' Or is it something more sensual -the wetness, the mist, its cooling effect? Could be its sound, the splish and splash, but what of the pfffffft? I cannot say. 

No matter, I make it rain with electronic valves and gravity, near the ground and at regular intervals. This is smarter because no matter what anyone says about farms in the city, I will not be slave to watering or rain. I am a city dweller and I long to escape for two weeks at a time, to see the land and its produce, to marvel at the broad expanse of forest and field, to bathe in the cool moist understory of air seeping from woods on hillsides without ever worrying of his tomatoes or green beans -that is in the contract! You -in the countryside will have great expanse and distance between you and others, neighborliness and drive by wavings, a slow pace, cleaner air and honesty. We -in the city will be free from rising at dawn to milk the cows, will have variety in all things, hustle, bustle and irony, and never, ever, will we have to worry about the state of the food growing on our little 'farms.' Because I am a city dweller, I must tend to other pursuits.



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The Eddings Tide

I was as surprised as anyone when I heard of Amy Eddings', host of WNYC radio, departure from New York City. Not because her decision was shocking, or even that she has chosen to leave the number one public radio station in the nation, but because, and I sense I am not alone in this, she is moving to Ohio. Anyone who has heard my road traveling stories knows well enough that I'm not sweet on Ohio (although they do have the best rest stops between New York and Wisconsin) and I thought, good lord, what will she do there? Where is this Ada? Parents passing, or have already passed? Going home? What?! This morning I decided to discover why and what I found is that there is no one to tell it, but her.

I met Amy once when her program asked me to come up to the station to explain the difference between pea shoots and pea sprouts and concoct a recipe to share with her listeners. A minor connection, really, yet in reading through some of her blog posts I see that her reasons for leaving WNYC and New York City are, at least in general ways, quite like our own. We share (or, maybe I share it with her husband, as we both moved to the home regions of our wives) that sense of insecure longing for some thing or event that validates our decision as the right one. Inescapable to any ambitious person leaving NYC is the thought that they are leaving the game, maybe their ambition has melted away and are putting themselves out to pasture. Yet, what grips my thinking, now, not quite four weeks after leaving, is not what I have lost by leaving NYC, but what I have gained, and how remarkably privileged we are for being able to do so.

NYC can shield our privilege behind crumby buildings, raucous neighbors, dirty streets, and low-paid work that is largely chosen, not inherited. In the context of that great city our income, our utter lack of savings, retirement planning, or insurance made us feel poor, but truly we are rich in the context of the poor. Outside of that city we shed that shielding skin and with considerably less conflict than if we had sold off our far away inheritance to make the best of someone's misfortune, a crumbling house in the gentrifying edge of a community about to be displaced.

So we are now suddenly landowners, suddenly landowner-neighbors, taxpayers, insurance payers, and so on with more house and land than we can justify, or feel completely comfortable with, in a region of homogeneous ethnicity and income. Despite any misgivings, we intend to make the most of ourselves and new home, with hope that we can find an income stream that allows us to stay here, in the upper midwest, or what I prefer to call the northern tier, or north woods, or some such descriptor that doesn't exact such dismal recompense, and continue our creative industriousness.



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The Transplant


There is a patch between the curving drive and the yard, on the north side, where Rex's dogs used to reside. The dogs, Trixie and Elmo, passed away years ago. Last autumn, Betsy flew out of LaGuardia with a box of bulbs, roots, stolons, and rhizomes in her carry-on. She planted them here, among the old dog pens. This spring we sold the chain link pens to a woman tending goats, or was it pigs? 


As it turns out, this is a very prolific location, maybe the most fertile in the yard. The plants that grow here are a hodge podge of Lamium, Creeping Charlie, Jewelweed, Milkweed, Bellflower, Virginia Wetleaf, and smattering of Lambsquarters, clover, grasses, and other weeds. These surround the remaining dog house, one that is hard to part with because it was so lovingly crafted to resemble the human house it shared land with at Rex's old place.


This is the canopy of a single Jewelweed, Impatiens capensis.  I say canopy because it is built like a tree and is beginning to shade out the transplants.



Just look at the size of that stem, maybe three or four inches in circumference. To the right is a Maximilian sunflower, Helianthus maximiliani, carried to Brooklyn from southern New Mexico, and now to Minnesota. To the left is one of two Bleeding Hearts, Dicentra eximia, holding their own under the shade of the giant Jewelweed.



I'm happy to see what I know is an aster growing among the Milkweed, but I cannot tell if it is the weakly growing Anna Potschke or the more aggressive New York Aster. I'll take either, but would love to see Potschke do well here since it suffered so much in Brooklyn.



The Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, grows strong here and like common Milkweeds everywhere, it appears rather randomly wherever it prefers. I suppose that's what makes it a weed to the farmer or landscaper. I hope gardeners appreciate it. I've seen some spectacular specimens in yards here -they are quite sculptural, exerting considerable presence. We are planning on a wildflower meadow over the septic drain field and will likely transplant some of these to that location.



Each lily transported from Brooklyn have made this home. They are all doing quite well, as they had in Brooklyn (people's sticky or damaging fingers aside). I may miss the bloom, or part of it, as I will be away in New York City for a presentation in late July and then in Vermont for the first part of August teaching my course Landscape Into Art.

When I am there I will pot up some rather large specimens that could not be, nor should have been, crammed into a box. Roots trimmed, watered heartily, I will leave them for the week while I am in Vermont, and then, on my return to Brooklyn, pick them up for the return trip to Minnesota. I do not look forward to this drive, haven't for years now, but the plants, their care, and the stowaway creatures that will make the van a home for the trip will make it a more interesting ride.




Off Season Woods

Summer is the off season in the woods. This is because the field and home require attention while the weather is right, but also because mosquitos own the woods at this time of year. There is, however, one draw and that is mushrooms. 


There had been an explosion of Jelly fungus on cut logs downslope near the north wetland. It has, by now, yellowed with age, but still a fascinating fungal mass. Mosquitos be darned, in the woods with the camera I took a stroll to see what else was going on.


 A mysterious white fungus or mycelium between two logs.


An incredibly striking red slime mold on upright cut log faces. Anything this red within the green understory grabs your attention.



The channel connecting the north wetland to the southern, great wetland runs with rain water. We cleared this area of most garlic mustard two months back and the Jewelweed is beginning to take off. Now, let me get out there and clear those branches.


Recent storms haven't been terribly windy. Still this large limb, about two feet in diameter at the base of the break came down. It's Basswood, Tilia americana, not the strongest of trees, and prone to hollowing of the stem at height. One nearly came down on me as I walked the woods in March. Just pop and drop! Lucky for me I was distracted by the sound of running water which altered my path. A minute later I watched the large, single stem tree break about 12 feet up and fall over onto the path I was about to walk.


In the back woods I find another Basswood down (that's three this year alone). Those that have fallen are the oldest of the Basswood in our woods and two have been large, multi-trunked trees. Basswood can be easily identified by its multi-stem growth habit -its the sure fire way to ID the tree in winter, when young, or with similarly barked trees. We're not big fans of Basswood trees, largely because of their weak wood and propensity to fall without notice (a local woman died under this tree species recently). Incidentally, the tree reminds me of my former position in an architecture lab where basswood was the model building wood of choice. I'll take oaks, ash and maples over bass any day.



The back swale hasn't had time to drain down with all the recent heavy rains. It appears this area will be wet year in and year out and I should rethink my attitude towards it. Several years of heavy rains have kept the soil water logged and the trees standing in water that aren't already dead are only hanging on by a thread. When cold weather comes we may have to tackle some of the larger standing trees, leaving woodpecker stumps that won't fall immediately, but when they do they shouldn't take anyone out.