the cassandra pages

A Philadelphia Garden

Alliums, poppies, and veronica at Chanticleer.

We're back in Montreal now, after a long drive yesterday. While in the outskirts of Philadelphia, visiting my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, one of the nicest things we did was to visit Chanticleer, a large public garden on a former estate. It's quite different from Les Quatre Vents, the incredible garden we visited in the Charlevoix -- smaller, more urban, less quirky -- and planted in a considerably warmer growing climate. In fact, my initial reaction was zone envy.

More alliums planted through ornamental grasses in the bulb lawn.

The garden has a number of areas, closer and further from the house, each planted differently. One leit-motif throughout, during these weeks of early June, were giant alliums, which appeared everywhere but made a different effect in each context.

A great strength of the garden as a whole was its masterful use of texture, and of unusual plants to achieve this. In one planting I noticed frilly red lettuces, beet greens, and crinkled apple-green kale mixed in with more predictable perennials to add their own particular textures and colors.

The garden also plays with ideas of scale, with long views and meadows contrasting with smaller, more intimate tableaux.

Succulents reflect in a flat pool in one room of "The Ruin."

These hens-and-chickens are planted in an armature of -- what else? -- chicken wire lined with sphagnum moss.

In the "Library," another room in The Ruins, visitors can browse the collection of carved stone books...

Mature trees and flowering shrubs form a backbone for the smaller gardens. And the Korean dogwood was in bloom.

Have you ever seen anything lovelier?

The lily pond contained not only pink waterlilies and lotus flowers, but Eastern painted turtles and many koi.

The cutting garden.

And another view of the poppy hillside: almost everything was in shades of purple/fuschia/lavender to contrast with the brilliant crimson poppies: a banquet of color.

For me, a garden like this is a living artwork, a giant sculpture. I find it endlessly inspiring, not just for my own gardens but for painting, textile design, printmaking -- any place where texture, color and form work together. And of course it's also a source of genuine joy and calm.

In the next post I'll show you a gallery exhibition of sculpture that alludes to very different forms and ideas.

Eric dans son jardin

Eric in his garden (Parc Baldwin community garden, early May.) Pen and watercolor, 9"x 6".  Click image for larger view.

This was the scene in the community garden in early May, a couple of weeks ago. I spent several evenings on this illustration; one to do the drawing and a couple of others working on the color.

The fence on the left separates our garden from a large community swimming pool. It's still too cold in Montreal to swim, but work crews have been cleaning the pool to get it ready to fill, probably in early June. I'll try to do an illustration later on of the many people enjoying the pool - on hot days it gets absolutely packed, and the two side of the fence make an amusing contrast. We've planted a lot of flowering vines and tall plants along the fence, to make this aspect of urban life more pleasant for everyone, bathers and gardeners alike.

Checking in with you -- and a visit to the pépinière

Well, we're halfway through the month, and I admit that it's a becoming a challenge to keep up with this drawing-a-day project. But I'm wondering about you readers, too -- how do you feel about art vs. written posts, or the occasional month of all-the-same (haiku, small stones, drawings, etc.)  I never know for sure how these things come across, so please let me know.

Anyway, I'm taking a day off - or at least it looks that way at 3:00 pm this afternoon!

This morning Jonathan and I went out to Jardin Jasmine, the nicest and most extensive nursery/pépinière I know of on Montreal island, with our friend Michel from the community garden.

Michel looking happy among the annuals, with his favorite shocking pink geraniums overhead!

It was really fun - both the ride there and the browsing through their fabulous grounds and greenhouses. It's always hard to restrain the desire to buy everything, because it's like a candy store...but we were both pretty reasonable. None of my Pacific Giant delphinium came up this year - don't know why - so I bought replacement plants, and a yellow clematis, and some coleus for the terrace. Michel bought some wonderful things for the garden he creates and tends each year outside his apartment building, which brightens our entire street. Mostly it was just great to be among all the beautiful plants with dear friends who love this annual display of color and beauty and variety just as much as I do.

Michel and me, photos by J.

 

 

A Drawing a Day: #5

The first bouquet. Pen and watercolor on paper, 6" x 9". Lifesize detail below.

I wasn't planning to do pretty flower pictures, but I brought home this little bouquet of violets and a dwarf tulip from the garden today and put them in a small, heavy Victorian glass vase with a gold wash on the rim - and they ended up calling out to be drawn more than anything else in the house. I love the busy but delicate shapes of all the members of the violet family, from Johnny jump-ups to pansys, but these ordinary field violets are probably my favorites. I wasn't totally into this drawing - I was rushing because we had to meet someone - and had some trouble as a result. (Perpetual note to self: Beth, don't rush!)  Anyway, it's all OK, this is practice!

A Drawing a Day: #3

Time to Clean the Terrace. Pen on paper, 6"x 6"

The last of the April drawings, and Happy May Day!

Still Life with a Persian Miniature, pen on paper, 5"x 7"

It was another still life to finish up the month, and the April sketchbook. I like this one as much as anything I've done lately. Many of these objects also appeared in the drawing of the desk and other drawings that appeared on April 3, but here's they've acquired a new life, not so much as objects in their own right, but as the excuse for lines that run over the page and don't stop the eyes at the edges of things, in spite of the close composition.

That freely dancing line is a quality I've always admired enormously in Matisse and Picasso, where you can see it in both drawings and etchings, and in the best of ancient Greek vase paintings. Picasso's "Vollard Suite" is a particular favorite: there's both a stillness and a dynamism in the pages that I just love. These masters make it look so easy, but I know it's very difficult to achieve.

Above, the complete April sketchbook. Some real dogs in there, but some worthwhile experiments too -- and some diary-like drawings that recorded other aspects of life: a broken favorite cup, a weird aerial view of the lake where I grew up, the spiny drawings of that difficult week, the coming of spring.  I learned quite a bit about drawing and about myself.

And now, suddenly, it's summer! This is the day the leaves are popping out everywhere. A mere week ago, it was cold and spitting snow. But sometimes it's like that in Montreal: there's no discernable spring, just a lot of cold wretched weather and then, one day, it's hot.

Happy May Day, everyone! I'm heading to my garden soon, where everything is growing by leaps and bounds. I hope you live somewhere where you can pick some flowers or some flowering branches, and celebrate the day and the season.

 

Back in the Garden!

The Parc Baldwin garden, looking south toward rue Sherbrooke. In the absence of plants, you can see some of our characteristic details: the aqua water barrels, the black compost bins and white sheet-rock buckets we use for toting water and plant scraps, green recycling bins that we used for planting, the tennis balls that mark the edges of our plots.

Two days ago I went to the community garden for the first time this year. The "official" opening day is Sunday, but some of us couldn't wait. It was the first really warm day we've had -- it actually got up to 70! -- and you could smell the earth and practically see the plants becoming green. I took some photos and made this wash drawing, and think I'll keep sketching the garden as it changes over the season. It's funny how the manmade onjects dominate the scene now, with their strong colors and size -- before long we won't even notice them.

When I got to my own plot, I discovered that someone had left me a message!

It was my friend Michel, who's a neighbor and a master gardener. He was there on Wednesday too, so we caught up on all the news as well as checking out our plants. My yellow rose made it through the winter in great shape, and has strong stems with lots of leaf buds - it was an experiment last year; the peonies are sticking their red noses out of the soil, and daylily's green leaves are growign strongly in everyone's plot. Montreal's climate is actually a bit milder than Vermont's, where Zone 4-5 plants like roses and lavender were pretty difficult. I feel encouraged.

 Here's Michel, cleaning up along the fence. As you can see, the garden is right in a residential neighborhood.

The social aspect of the community garden is one of the parts I like the most -- we have lot of fun. But I also like going there early in the morning, with a little thermos of coffee or tea, when I can be alone with the birds and the plants and the day as it arises. After such a long, grey winter I'm really looking forward to this season and can't wait to get my hands in the earth! That will have to wait a few days though -- it's rainy and the temperature in Montreal is back in the low 40s again this morning. Patience!

 

From Jacarandas to Living Walls: Plants of Mexico City

Inner garden of the Palacio Nationale, Mexico City, with cats

As you all know by now, I'm in love with plants. One of the things I was looking forward to the most about being in Mexico was seeing palm trees, and finding out more about what plants grow in that particular climate.

Unlike some parts of Mexico, the capital city is neither tropical nor desert. There is a rainy season (not now) and my impression was that in general it's quite dry there. But it's also high - over 6,000 feet, in a region of high mountains -- the major volcanoes to the southeast rise to over 17,000 feet!

Mass planting of clivias, at the zoo

I haven't read anything yet about the ecology or botany of the area. Basically, what I saw were succulents and cactus growing to enormous sizes; small houseplants that we're used to having indoors growing as small trees and lush hedges (crotons, rubber plants); banana trees, clivias and agapanthus used as mass-plantings under trees in parks; bougainvillas trailing over trellises and balconies and clambering up trees; and everywhere, breathtaking violet jacaranda trees -- an icon of Mexico City -- in full bloom.

Jacarandas

The Palacio Nationale, where we saw the Rivera murals, has a large inner garden (top picture), open to the public. Part of it is filled with trees, and inhabited by cats who are given food and water and, in return, stay there safely, though some of them they looked pretty scruffy.

The other side is a botanical garden (above), full of succulents and cactus growing on black volcanic rocks. We spent quite a while there, taking pictures and enjoying the atmosphere of an entirely different sort of garden.

I hope the photographs manage to convey the scale, and show you just how huge these plants really were.

An old cactus with new leaves. In the streets and the markets, people are preparing leaves like these to eat, cutting the spines of with sharp machete-like knives, and cooking the leaves on a hot griddle. I didn't try them but I was curious!

It was a shock to me to see that people had carved their initials in some of these magnificent plants! First, because it seems like such an unnecessary thing to do, and second because of the longevity it implied for the plants themselves, which stoically continued to grow, slowly, year after year.

But the most extraordinary thing we saw was this living wall. I could hardly believe it. The substrate is a thick landscape fabric that feels like felt. The plants are all growing in pockets in that fabric, and there must be some sort of internal irrigation system. Isn't it fantastic?

The Quirkiness of Memory

When I came across this watercolor from the late 1980s I still liked it, but had no recollection of the scene. It reminded me of twisted trees I saw last year along the coast of Florida, but I knew that couldn't be it. I studied and studied the painting, and then suddenly it came to me - these were the branches of a Siberian peaberry in our Vermont garden, and the ferns that grew underneath them. When we sat on our terrace in back of the house, you'd see this view up underneath the branches. I must have been trying to capture the energy and busy-ness I found in the mixture of foliage. Once the memory snapped into place, I was right back there.

The painting also reminded me of a recurrent dream: I am seated at the piano, or preparing to sing, but the music in front of me is a painting or picture, not a score. I have to "play" or "sing" the painting.

This watercolor looks like music to me! The rhythmic punctuation of the spiky vertical foliage at the top; the twisting branches could be chordal structures; the curving ferns a repetitive, looping pattern of melody. Last night at choir we worked for two hours on works by Stravinsky for our upcoming annual fundraising concert, November 2. We worked hard on a piece called Credo, which has a complex rhythmical structure that our director parsed for us; we went rhoguh,marking our scores, then saying the words in rhythm, then singing them. It took a lotof concentration, and it's no wonder that my mind went in that direction this morning even though the dreams were a while ago.

My bedtime reading lately has been a book called The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places, by Bernie Krause. Krause is a musician, recording engineer, and scientist with a PhD in bioacoustics who has spent a great deal of time making recordings in very wild places, capturing and studying their particular "sound signatures." In a lot of ways, his premise seems pretty obvious to me, and has since I was a child - of course music came from the natural world, of which we (and our voices, our talent for mimicry, and our ability to make sounds with tools) are an intrinsic part. I read the first half of the book, and skimmed the rest. Of course, Krauses' book is all about animals and the natural sounds of water, wind, and rain -- he doesn't say anything about playing or singing inspired by foliage or rocks! But visual rhythm and pattern exist everywhere, and I see no reason why they too can't be translated into sound, music, dance and movement.

 

Les Ruelles Vertes 2