gardening

Old cheese, new peonies.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The girls come find me where I’m swimming, the water brackish, strewn with pollen. A blackbird keeps me company. The girls have snagged out-of-date cheese that’s perfectly fine and a tomato that’s sweetly ripe. At home, I dice last year’s garlic. I insist the girls admire the Bartzilla peony that’s blooming now, two blossoms and more fat buds of blossoms. The Bartzilla was a gift a number of autumns ago. My youngest planted the hairy root with me, skeptical. Now, for these few days, this peony’s a marvel.

All day, I’ve been thinking of this Mary Oliver poem. Well worth a share.

Peonies by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
pools of lace, 
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them, 

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls, 
craving the sweet sap, 
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding, 

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again — 
beauty the brave, the exemplary, 

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? 

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, 

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

Stealing Flowers Gone Wild.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Bear Pond Books in Montpelier reopened yesterday, nearly two months after the July flood, beloved bookstore in Vermont’s capital city. “The flood” sounds Biblical, and I’ll note that the Old Testament has never been known as a Hallmark read.

Last fall, I often parked my car behind the town garage so I could run on the rail-trail. On a heap of gravelly slag, a variety of yellow asters blossomed. At the fall’s end, shortly before frost, I brought a bucket and shovel and dug up a clump of stalks. I buried that clump in my garden. The leaves emerged this spring. By then, I had forgotten that re-homing of the yellow aster. Now, the green buds are on the verge of opening.

There’s a submerged theme between the three things in this post that I imagine only I can see— the bookstore and the flood, my stolen flowers, Mary Ruefle’s lines about clouds: the unstoppable force of our planet, immense, immense. Meanwhile, our toiling: the bookstore folks carrying out mud bucket by bucket, me with my shovel and a small handful of what might appears to be merely weeds.

Mary Ruefle:

All that summer there were so many clouds we

didn’t know what to do with them. They overflowed the

sky – they were on our streets, in our homes, in our draw-

ers, and in our cabinets. They were in our cars and on our

buses, I even saw them in taxis. No one had ever seen so

many clouds, to the extent that, as often happens with a

glut, no one could remember a time without them…

From My Private Property

Field of Sunflowers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In a former garden I tended, I planted elecampane whose yellow blossoms bloomed over my head. The plant spread along the garden’s back edge, a natural fence between the bed where I planted greens and tomatoes and the field where I sowed potatoes. We had reclaimed that stretch of field from the forest, and the sparse soil was hungry for manure and the cover crops we rotated.

Now, in search of elecampane to transplant, I find this flower, the long ragged-edge leaves already fading from this year’s growth, the greenery not particularly lovely. I plant this strange flower before our house.

Flowers have the undeserved rap of girlyness, of flimsy decoration, of false medicine. Not so, not so.

how quiet
the light-blue morning glory —
such good manners

— Issa

Peony Metaphor.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

A few years back, owners of a stellar nursery gave me a cardboard box with a twisted root inside, tangled ends clotted with dirt. I planted as directed, and then the bartzella was at the mercy of nature and its own self whether it would grow, or not.

This June, the irises have flooded a purple pond around the lilacs. The mock orange is opening its snowy petals. And these yellow peonies with their ugly name — a few days of inimitable beauty.

A day of cold rain in the forecast today. A Saturday of writing and catch-up chores and my determination to do something about the mold on the bathroom ceiling. It’s mid-June. We’ve lived in this house for five years. The blossoms are rampart. I’ve added my own gifted dull root. For a few days, heart-pausing beauty.

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready

to break my heart

as the sun rises, 

as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers…

— Mary Oliver, “Peonies”

Planting Bulbs…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On this frosty November morning, a few lines from Rebecca Solnit’s newest book:

To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.”

Woodbury, Vermont

Shape of the Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I drop my daughter at the high school for soccer practice. There’s maybe 12 high school girls on the field, the music cranked up, kicking balls and laughing. There’s no coach, no boys’ team, no open locker rooms, quite possibly not even a game this year. Just these girls, sunlight, grass, soccer goals.

I’m utterly grateful for this hour and a half, in a way I’ve rarely been grateful before. Just these moments of youth and aliveness.

Who knows what will happen next week when school is scheduled to open, or not. This coming fall? A greater, scarier unknown.

But this afternoon. Here. Now.

So, this Saturday, waking from a dream of Vermont’s enormous Lake Champlain, with its stony shores, the cats and I work through these dark hours as the sun slowly rises, and decide to declare this day the day of sunflowers, apples, tomatoes, and pie.

“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world.” 


― Robin Wall Kimmerer