Dear Folks, It’s lilac time on Foundation Farm! The air smells of lilac — inside because of the bouquets, outside because they’re blooming everywhere. We have a big old-fashioned light purple one by the back door, and some white ones by the barn, and some new-fangled double ones and red-purple ones in the perennial garden out front. Put them together in a vase and they make the most spectacular display we’ll see all year, though we have a steady succession of beautiful bouquets from the first daffodils of April to the last asters of October. Nothing beats the lilacs.
They’re especially welcome because they come in the lull between the spring burst of bulbs and the first summer perennials. For weeks now, the front yard has been giddy with crocuses, scylla, daffodils, narcissus, tulips. The display lasted and lasted, because this has been such a wet, cold spring. (The silver lining of coldness — the daffodils go on forever.) Then, finally, the wild shad trees popped open, scattered at the edges of the forest all over the valley. Then the plum trees, pear trees, apples and crabapples. My bedroom has windows that open out on three pear trees, which were covered in bloom! Fortunately, we had a few sunny days during that period, so we think they got pollinated, though it was pretty cold for bees to fly. (A sad note — there are almost no honeybees. They are being exterminated by a nasty mite. The newspaper said that the bumblebees saved us. They were out in force pollinating the fruit trees. There were also, I noticed on ours, a lot of very fast small wasp-like bees.)
Then the blossoms fell, making white and pink carpets beneath the trees. The dominant color is now green, green, green — except for the fragrant purple lilacs. There’s hardly another flower in bloom, except for little ones, violets, forget-me-not, blue Jacob’s ladder and the bright pink creeping phlox in the rock garden. There will be about a week’s pause here, then the wild phlox will open and make everything smell of carnations. Then finally will come iris and peonies and delphiniums, and summer will be launched.
Late, late, late, everything this spring is late. We had a frost night before last. Just this week the garden dried up enough to become tillable. We’re planting most things three weeks later than usual. I’ve been pacing, festering, muttering, and occasionally, impatiently, going out to plant something just because I can’t stand it any more. A few weeks ago I threw the peas and spinach into what can only be described as a large patch of very wet cement down at the lower end of the main garden. To my great surprise they germinated, but I can hardly hoe them — it’s like hoeing a sidewalk. As the clay soil dries up, I wonder if any water will be able to percolate through to their roots for the rest of the summer. But I keep on doing impatient things — two days ago I put in beans and corn, and then promptly had to cover them (and the blossoming strawberries) against the frost.
Grrrrrrrr! Frustration! Farmers are never satisfied with the weather, but this year the valley is full of the most unsatisfied farmers I’ve ever seen. I’m watching them try to plow through standing puddles on the fields, desperately dig drainage ditches, sprinkle strawberry fields all night to keep off the frost.
Well. Enough griping. Let us count our blessings. Because Scot was foresighted enough to make us a big, walk-in hoop house, we have all the fresh salads we can eat right now, plus a safe haven for the tomato and pepper seedlings that we don’t yet dare to set outside. The rhubarb is lush — I’ll make rhubarb-carrot marmalade today. We’re eating fresh asparagus. The cabbage family loves all this coolness. The grass is growing faster than the sheep can eat it. The shearing is done. Two of our Khaki Campbell ducks are sitting on nests. The wood thrushes and veeries and indigo buntings and chestnut-sided warblers and rose-breasted grosbeaks and orioles are back. The chicks are growing big. We got the potatoes in the ground yesterday, and Chrissie has come to the end of the seventeen zillion onions she had to set out in the brook garden. Narayana has gotten everything tilled, even though our tiller is on the blink. Scot is nearly finished with the three presentations in a row (two of them on his thesis work) that have been shadowing his life. And the world around us, when we have the sense to stop complaining and look, is BEAUTIFUL!
And Mom was here! Now there’s a blessing!
I had to go to St. Louis earlier this month for a National Geographic meeting, and from the perspective of New Hampshire, St. Louis is just about Tulsa, so I went on to Oklahoma and picked up Mom.
Before I get to that, though, I should tell you about St. Louis.
The research committee of the National Geographic gives away a part of your membership fee to folks who do field projects around the world. We fund volcanologists studying lava flows in Kamchatka and anthropologists picking up bits of early hominid bones in Kenya and naturalists watching dolphins in Australia. We meet 8 times a year to go through piles of proposals, usually at NGS headquarters in Washington, but occasionally we assemble at a field site to see some of the results of our funding. One of our fundees is the Missouri Botanical Garden, which sends out explorations to find and classify wild plants all over the world, so this time we met in St. Louis.
We spent half a day across the river at Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, the metropolitan center of a Native American empire that stretched all along the Mississippi Valley. The mounds there reminded me of the structures the Maya made in Central America. Imagine, building massive mounds covering dozens of acres several hundred feet high by digging mud with a bone hoe and carrying basketloads of it on your back. The marks of the baskets can still be seen in the mounds. I guess if you live on the floodplain of the Mississippi (which makes sense because the soil is so rich), it would occur to you to make mounds.
The distinguished anthropologists on the NGS research committee thought that the interpretive museum at Cahokia, which tries to bring that ancient culture back to life, is one of the best they’ve seen. I loved it. I won’t tell you more; I’ll just recommend that if you’re ever around southwestern Illinois, you should go see it.
That afternoon the Missouri Historical Society took us on an unusual bus tour of the city — unusual because we saw the good and the bad intermixed, and St. Louis seems to have an extraordinary level of both. It has the wonderful Botanical Garden (more on that in a minute) and a great symphony and a great museum, and the Arch and the Mississippi-Missouri convergence with its great history. It has universities, beautiful neighborhoods and nice restorations downtown. It has corporate headquarters of Monsanto and Anheuser-Busch (can you imagine a loading zone the size of several city blocks, jammed with massive trucks loading up nothing but beer?) and several other major companies. And it also has East St. Louis, across the river and the state line, where they’ve pushed the dirty industries and the poor (black) people. And an increasing number of casino boats along the riverfront. And more blocks of unrelieved urban decay than I’ve seen anywhere else.
The Historical Society did a great job of explicating the whole of it, good and bad, and how it came to be that way. We stopped to see the sorts of things I most like to see about a city — its sewage treatment plant, one of its power plants (an ancient one, a massive coal-burner, soon to be retrofitted to combined-cycle natural gas and district heating.) But the last stop of the day is the one that burns in my mind.
It was just over the edge of the city line, so the city doesn’t have to be responsible for it. It was in the middle of a very poor black neighborhood. It was an abandoned plant of the Wagner Electric Company, empty shells of great brick buildings, occupying an area maybe the size of a city block. It is a hazardous waste site, the soil saturated with PCBs, a classic “brownfield,” unusable for anything, sitting there blighting an already blighted area, jobs gone, no economic activity, no taxes paid, no trespassing. They showed it to us as a sign of hope, because, at public expense, they’re capping over the soil and rehabbing the buildings to become a job training site.
Some day I may see it revived and take away a different message. But the message I took, as the spring wind whipped across that ugly, empty, toxic place, was: The people who made money from all this have gone away and left it like this, for the rest of us to deal with. There are sites like this in every city in our land. Why should we ever believe industrial hype about bringing in taxes and jobs? How are we expected to trust capitalism? How can anyone believe that technology and economic growth will save us? How much longer are we going to let them go on doing this to our land and our people?
St. Louis is typical of aging America cities. It may look worse because, on the great plain, it’s spread out, so the blocks of abandoned buildings with shattered windows go on and on — while the vital edge of the city is expanding into prime farmland 35 miles west, creating a need for massive highways and long commutes. This picture is so wrong. The system is so sick. City centers shouldn’t die; suburbs shouldn’t expand endlessly onto arable land. I wish we would all admit that, and get together and create something better.
On a cheerier note, we got to spend the next day mainly in the Missouri Botanical Garden. I’ve been there before, I know all its paths and special places — the Climatron where you can experience a bit of tropical rainforest, the iris garden just coming into bloom, the English woodland garden full of native wildflowers. Seventy acres, just the size of Foundation Farm, only here every inch is groomed, every trees and bush labeled. I snuck off with my binoculars and watched birds and people. (Lots and lots of people come here.) In my next life, I want to be a botanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, or even a groundskeeper.
NGS meeting done, I took off for Tulsa, drove to Tahlequah, spent a day there and scooped up Mother. I don’t think she’s been out of eastern Oklahoma for six years, since Karl’s health started failing. She was nearly overcome a few times, just with the excitement of traveling. She is a great trouper, a good traveler, and, of course, an intrepid gardener. Shortly after arriving at the farm she was pulling ground ivy out of my flower beds. She managed to read a few books while she was here (she got caught up with Helen and Scot Nearing), and we went on excursions. I took her to see the new farms in Hartland (more about them in a minute) and the glassblowing at Simon Pearce and Dartmouth and the Vermont Crafts Center in Windsor. We went to Edgewater farms where Chrissie works (almost lost Mom forever as she wandered off into greenhouses full of double impatiens and tuberous begonias) and to the New Hampshire Wildflower Society’s reserve on the bank of the Connecticut River. She cheered every apple tree as it burst into bloom and deadheaded the daffodils as they expired. Gee, it was fun to have her around! I hope I’m half as vital and in love with life when I’m 80 years old!
After a week she had to get back to her garden, so I put her on a bus, and then she disappeared, somewhere between Boston and Tulsa. Took most of the night before she showed up again, having had a plane canceled, a rescheduling on another airline with a different route, an arrival at Tulsa airport after midnight. She thought it was all high adventure. (“Just think, I got to see the Dallas-Fort Worth airport!”) And she got home safely.
So, now I’m concentrated on getting our garden in at last, and on trying to buy the Hartland farms, and on keeping the community that’s forming around them talking and coming to know each other as much as possible, given that we’re widely scattered geographically. We have a wonderful email conversation going, which is evolving into a joint statement of visions and fears. We seem to be full of both.
Negotiations for both farms are interesting and scary. The current owners are great people — I can’t bring myself to see them as any sort of adversaries. But appalling sums of money are in play, and the truth is, more money for them means less for our community. I don’t like this zero-sum game. I keep trying to transcend it, but when you get lawyers and real estate agents in the middle of the picture, it gets fairly un-transcendable. Fortunately, some great folks are working with us, including two land trusts and my dear friend Wendy Walsh, who is directing us to listen to the land (and teaching us how to do that). I have other friends who know the technologies of green architecture and energy and water systems, who I know will help when it comes to the design stage. I can hardly wait for that stage. But first we have to know that we’ve got the land.
I’m probably too fixated on these farms. They are way too expensive. There is other good land in the valley. They could be bought by someone else tomorrow. But there they are — they called out the first time we saw them, not only to me but to everyone who’s been there. I loved them in February, when it’s pretty hard to love land around here, and now that I see them in May, I’m dazzled. I feel like I’m not deciding this, that it’s been decided for me and I’m just doing my best to answer the call. Until last February I was sure that I would live the rest of my life on Foundation Farm. But now I’ve got three farms in my heart. It’s a strange feeling. Somehow I’m calm about leaving this one (but not too soon, certainly not this year). More than ever I want to savor every moment of every changing season here, but there’s a sense of completeness, even though everywhere I look I can see a major project to do.
Well, we’ll see. We just have to do our best and pray for guidance and see how it comes out. And listen to what the land wants. And meanwhile go plant some more beans!
Love, Dana
