A Work in Progress

At the Source: Cardiff

If I didn't already like Gillian Clarke's At the Source, her essay "Cardiff" would (and did, really) totally sell me on the book.  I love essays.  Why don't I read them more often and more regularly?  Maybe I need to do something about that.  But first "Cardiff".  If the rest of At the Source has something of a nature slant to it, the essays that make up the first part of the book (the rest is diary-like entries for each month of the year) focus more on home and history.  And of course they are written with her elegant (she is a poet) prose that makes you see, feel and imagine her world. 

"Cardiff" is about her family, their history--her history, and her childhood.  I can't begin to give you a summary that would capture her eloquence.  She segues from image to image seamlessly moving around in time and space and you can see it all in your mind.  But let me share with you a few random impressions of what I read. 

Ga is the name she uses for her grandmother.  A word I'd never heard--a family/childhood word or a Welsh word?  Her father worked for the BBC.

"My father's coat was whiskery tweed and felt like the fur of the black bear in the tobacconist shop near the Prince of Wales Theatre, where before dirty films and bingo, they showed Snow White, or The Wizard of Oz, or Lassie Come Home."

On an outing with her father as a child in the "city of tall stories"--even then there were bluebells.

"In the museum the Blue Lady's dress is so blue it is a lake of bluebells in Porthkerry woods.  So blue that she's the sea off Pembrokeshire.  Because of her, blue is my favorite colour."

Clarke's father worked for the BBC. Her mother was glamorous.  This was during the war years.  She and her family lived in a house in Cyncoed, a house she returned to later, where she lived at "crucial periods in [her] life".  It is a house she can never leave behind and she wrote about.  From her poem-sequence 'Cofiant' ('Biography'):

Houses we've lived in
inhabit us
and history's restless
in the rooms of the mind.

Isn't that lovely?  I like how it's not just the person who inhabits the house, but how it leaves its mark on the dweller.  Enviably (for me) it was a house from which she could always see the sea.

Beautiful and poetic imagery:

"Stories layered with stories, all laid down in the mind to become part of being."

Books surely must have been part of what inspired some of those stories (books and the view from her window and the experiences of a freedom of childhood--a true freedom children no longer have--to go about on their own from dawn to dusk--exploring the world around them).

Asterisked this:

"Libraries had always been full of objects of desire.  To a bookworm, there is nothing so bleak as reaching the last word of the last page of a book an hour before bedtime, and nothing more thrilling than the Saturday morning find in the library, a new novel by a favourite writer, or something vaguely illicit, and hours of secret reading ahead.  It was almost a vice.  From early childhood I'd read all night, unable to stop turning pages.  In school I read under the blankets by torchlight.  Home for the holidays, sent to make the guests' beds in the roomy old house in Plymouth Road, I'd be caught out reading the books on bedside tables."

As a youth she was in love with the idea of university, "and relished [her] new life.  She went away to school when young but later going to school in Cardiff was suddenly glamorous.  She recalls walking to college every day and walking along the "rose-red road of Edward VII Avenue" under the huge elms that touched overhead.  And then seeing them suffer with Dutch Elm Disease. 

"I saw them felled.  It was like watching a great cathedral fall."

She worked in the university's library.  Sounds she associates with that still associates with books, with reading and falling in love with the idea of studying English Literature (from her years working in the library): a tramp snoring over a book he wasn't reading, pigeons cooing on the window ledges.

I associate the smell of freshly cut grass on hot humid days with summers of my youth.  I smell the smell and am instantly and vividly transported back in time. 

So "Cardiff" is about memory, too. 

Here's a memory to end my post and one I think we will all be able to relate to:

"Learning for learning's sake would, we were told, give us the world.  This seems amazing to me now.  I don't think many students feel the romance of university that we did.  We knew we were privileged and were grateful for it.  I was no scholar, but I loved English, language excited me, and reading gave me other worlds."

Yes, thank goodness for books!

At the Source: March, April & Cardiff

I didn't mean to fall behind in my reading of Gillian Clarke's At the Source, but I hope to get back on track this month.  It's a book I like to read without lots of distractions, and I haven't had lots of those sorts of reading opportunities of late.  Yesterday afternoon I had a quiet hour or two and I devoted my time to catching up (or nearly so) by reading Clarke's March and April entries and her very wonderful essay titled "Cardiff".  That alone is worth the price of the book!

Her monthly diary entries are actually fairly short.  They remind me a little of last year's The Curious Gardener, though I feel slightly more in my comfort zone with Gillian Clarke than I did with Anna Pavord.  Don't get me wrong, I loved the Pavord, but I am not a gardener (the closest I come is an 'armchair gardener' and then my knowledge is pretty limited).  Clarke's observations are more general and they touch upon a number of subjects--writing, nature, Wales, and more autobiographical writing, too. 

March is titled "Breaking Waters".  It's what you expect and maybe not exactly so.  Snow, rain, rivers and even birth.  Yes, literally breaking waters.  I like to follow her train of thought.  She begins with the thrush and songbirds in general:

"We must live with nature if we are to live at all.  Then, one evening this month a thrush sang again in the beech brake at the end of Cae Blaen Cwrt.  There is no evening song like it.  The thrush sings in rhyming couplet, the poet among birds, as Browning knew: 'That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over'."

And then the blackbird:

"I love the blackbird.  It sings all day, everywhere, pausing only at nightfall.  At dawn it is the first and clearest song.  It does not stop for rain.  Indeed it seems to love the rain, as if each drop eased the song more fluidly, fluently from its throat."

See how she nicely segues from bird to bird to water?  I love birdsong, too.  It is the first sign that winter surely must be coming to an end when I am on my morning walk to the bus--still dark, still cold but I can hear them--birds singing to each other (and maybe to me--in their own way).  And now?  Light and soon warmth and a veritable symphony of birdsong.

The spring thaw and then the spring solstice and she moves on to those breaking waters--in the form of Britain's longest river, the Severn.  The Severn flows east through the mountains of Wales and then down along the English border gaining in power from the rivers it joins up with.  At the tides are at their peak during the spring solstice.

"To watch a heave of water travelling so fast!  To ride it between fields, past cathedrals.  What a water-beast!  What a muscular old mud-dragon of brown water!  The physics of tide and moon, of the turning planet, the geography of mountain and river plain, the particular geology, the deepest of horseshoe bends and the right funnel shape for the tides to back up, the push and shove, the give  have made it a wonder of nature.  Even thinking about it is thrilling."

She does convey that in her wonderful description.  She paints quite a picture and I can even hear the whoosh of the water.  Not just a gurgle, I think, but a force--water rushing!  If March is all about water, April is about warmth.  When Gillian Clarke writes you don't just see it mentally, but you feel it and smell it too.  It's vivid.  2007.  Dry March days turn into a heatwave in April.  Making it unbearable not only for people, but those birthing animals, too. 

"In the weather's present tense April heat feels like forever and ever.  We enjoy the thoughtless happiness that warmth and sunlight bring, caught too by the warning it carries.  This is not normal.  Nothing can be depended on any more, not the winds of March, nor April showers.  The climate is unweaving the poetry."

Isn't that last line great?  Those hot winds from Africa are famous, bringing that heat along and warming things up.  If too much water takes its toll on nature, so, too, does the wind.  It wears the stone away and takes away the topsoil leaving behind a fine layer of rust-red dust, Saharan in origin.  

Clarke meanders in an entirely pleasant way from topic to topic, returning to one she began in March and moving on to something new and particular to April.  The year she was keeping this diary was an especially "superb bluebell year".  I've never seen a bluebell wood, have you?  I hadn't even seen one or thought what it might be like.  I want to walk in a wood that might date back to 1600!  Clarke is fortunate enough to have one on her own land.

"Early winter rain and cool spring sunlight through leafless oak trees brought one of the finest flowerings ever.  The fact that they were ours, and while we were in charge no one would ever, ever plough them up, made theirs the bluest blue in the world, the almost violet of the dress in Renoir's La Parisienne in the National Museum in Cardiff, lapis lazuli blue, rarest of pigments.  And the smell!  We walked the coconut-scented gorse track to where the yellow gorse to the left gave out and the blue floor of the wood was spread before us, the scent changing from spice to floral.  We were dizzy with breathing it.  Ours!"

She worries that this native bluebell sitting so near the Atlantic, surely the bluest and most intense of all the world will be lost to climate change.  I appreciate her fear and wonder if I will ever get to see it myself.

I think I will save her essay, "Cardiff" for my next post as this one will otherwise get entirely too unwieldy.  It is my favorite bit of the book so far, and so much about it to appreciate and tell you about.  Lots of quotable bits so I will have to pick and choose carefully.  Until then, imagine those bluebell woods!  I'll be back in a day or two!

I wonder what May's chapter will bring?  A peek ahead and I see we return once again to the blackbird . . .

February: At the Source

Just under the gun.  My reading was enjoyable but my writing about this month's installment of At the Source might be a little perfunctory--am just going to share a very few highlights.  I've been under the weather for the last week or so and dragging, if that is any excuse.  February always flies by and even though it is a mere two days shorter than most other months, all of a sudden it just seems like March arrives.  Whoosh, if you know what I mean.

So.  Gillian Clarke.  She's a poet and you can tell, because she is to in tune with language and words and meanings.  She is also a reader and so is a reader's writer (isn't every writer a reader's writer?  Maybe so, but she writes in a way that tantalizes and I can appreciate that).  February's journal entry is titled "Land".  This is how it starts . . .

"On the cusp between winter and spring.  Mostly it's still indoor weather when I'm glad of bookish days.  The afternoons are gaining light, a minute at a time, but there's no shine to the garden."

Yes, that is how it has been for me as well.  March is coming in like a lion since it is bitterly cold and snowing lightly with the promise of more, and in a higher intensity on Monday night into Tuesday.  I keep fantasizing over my morning walk without layers of clothes, ear muffs, gloves, wool scarf.  But while my morning walk is in the dark still, I can (on a sunny day) return home before the sun has set and left me in the dark once more.  It is, however slowly in coming, giving me just a little hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

This is how Clarke plays with words.  "Wellbeing.  Being well.  A well of being."  An artist friend said to Clarke--"You know hoe lovely it is when you're sitting by a window in a big chair and it's raining, and you have a book and you think, 'How lucky I am!  How lucky!'  That's a 'found' poem.  I may struggle with poetry, but that is a poem even I can understand and appreciate.

"Those with a talent for sudden, inexplicable joy will know exactly what Sandra meant.  It describes being alive, having choice and chance and the gift of pleasure.  It's about the solitary but not lonely individual relishing the simple fact of being, the pleasures of body and mind.  Sight, sound and touch are explicit in that scene, ans taste and smell are implicit since the rain, the window, the chair imply a familiar room, its privacy, possession and pleasures, perhaps a fresh brew of coffee, the smell of rain, a street outside, and a city."

I do like that.  If Clarke continues to return again and again to the pleasures of solitude and privacy--she and I and this book are going to get on very well indeed.

Did you know the Welsh word, glas, means both blue and green?  And why not since this is a country where there are so many subtle gradations of the color in hill country.  "The many tones of green of the close fields shift through blues and violets as the land rolls into the distance."

Clarke was reading Colm Toibin's The Master at the time she was writing her journal.  I am going to pull my copy of the shelf.  Henry James, who the book is about, has always struck me as one very formidable man.  But if this is what he is like, and granted it is Toibin's rendering of him thus, I think I can understand and relate to James better than I think.

"He (Toibin about James) is wonderful on the pleasures of interiors, and of solitude."

"He shows how James turned away always at the last moment from emotional commitment, preferring the pleasures of solitude.  Toibin conjures the lovely interiors of apartments, villas, houses in New England and Europe, and in James's beloved Lamb house in Rye, where even the walled garden is a room."

* * * * *

"There's a side to all writers that loves nothing better than a book, a big chair, window."

There's a side to readers that loves that, too.

Reading Notes: When Books Cross Paths

My Contemporary Israeli Literature class has not met for two weeks in a row now, and I have to say I am going a little bit into withdrawal.  I was a little happy that last week's class was called off due to bad weather (it would not have been a fun walk in all that snow), but I missed not going to this week's class.  It was cancelled as my professor was out of town.  So, while I didn't actually 'miss' anything, I did miss meeting and discussing our reading.

Last semester the topic we studied was Israeli War Literature and this semester is Israeli Stories with the semester broken into smaller themed units.  We began with army stories, Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir and had the weather cooperated would have talked about Shani Boianjiu's The People of Forever are Not Afraid.  We'll be talking about it at our next meeting, so I will save it for a proper post then so I can share the insight my class is surely going to offer on her writing.  I will say I liked the book very much.  It is a group of interlinked stories posing as a novel.  It was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2013 (now the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction), which (as a side note) was an especially strong list from which I am still reading.  The Boianjiu is one of the books that most appealed and I had to have it then and there, though it has only taken . . . two years for me to finally read it.

Israeli fiction, maybe most European fiction is very different from American fiction.  At least it feels different--different even from the British fiction I read.  I'm not sure I can explain how it is different, but maybe by the end of the semester I'll be able to articulate why.  It's not exactly the writing style, maybe the content and the way the storytelling is handled?  Or maybe it just feels more 'foreign' to me than most of the other books I read.  How's that for being vague?  Before I took last semester's class I would not have even thought of traveling to Israel or anywhere in the region, but now the more I read the more I want to know and the more I want to travel there.  Maybe someday I will.  For now there are books and stories. 

Although we'll still be talking about war stories and the Boianjiu novel in my class next week, I have started reading the next book, which begins a new themed unit.  We'll be spending a couple of weeks on Arabs in Israel and have a story and a novel to read in preparation for the discussion.  Yesterday I started reading Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular.  Kashua is an Arab-Israeli writer who I believe is quite successful and popular in Israel right now.  His fiction has won prizes and one of his novels was even shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. 

This is where my books are crossing paths.  Yesterday I was reading Nick Hornby and inwardly agreeing with him about reading for pleasure and enjoyment.  He is quick to note that readers shouldn't feel as though they 'must' choose books that they think 'ought' to be read.  Those books chosen not for pleasure but for the lessons they might teach us.  [Disclaimer on my part--I think there is nothing wrong with choosing any book--easy or challenging as long as it is something you are excited to read and enjoy it].

I am going to have a lot to say about the Kashua novel.  Only 30 or so pages in and I can already tell this is a novel that has a lot to say about a lot of things in Israeli society and Kashua has piqued my interest and curiosity and has me questioning lots of things and learning lots of things, too.  The is about jealousy and maybe about adultery and likely lots of other things, too.  It begins with a thirty-ish narrator telling the story.  He is a lawyer, an Arab living in the more affluent side of Jerusalem with his wife and children.  He is successful and upwardly mobile and you can tell he is trying to improve himself and get on in mainstream Israeli society.  In an early scene he is in a bookstore, and this makes me infinitely sad really . . . he picks out a book he is reading in a group and the clerk sneers at him for his choice.  " . . . he hated the saleswoman for making him feel the way he did, and predominantly, hated himself for the many things he wanted to know but did not." 

He buys the books he reads about in the highbrow Hebrew newspaper he picks up daily.  It's mostly modern fiction, but what he really wants is to read the classics, the books that even nonreaders know about, but he is too ashamed to take them up to the clerk as it would be a sort of admission that he doesn't know about any of these books at all.  And the last set of literary fiction, the books that are the ones reviewed in the Hebrew paper are not the types of books he likes at all--the last set, he couldn't manage to make it through the first one at all.  What he wants is to be able to read the books that all his Jewish peers had read.

I'm going to sound like a broken record, but I am going to say it anyway.  I really like this book.  It's still very early days, but from almost the first page the (as yet unnamed) narrator has my attention.  He buys a copy of Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, which is what the Kashua is modeled after, and this is where the story really begins I think.  Yes, there is more to this story than meets the eye.  So I have a copy of Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata in hand to read side by side.  Now that is has been introduced into the story, I am ready to read. The Tolstoy is a short novella so should be easy to take on with all my other books.  I've got a couple of weeks to make my way through the Kashua and Tolstoy, but I think the story is going to move at a nice steady clip.  So yet another reading path where books cross and all will be enhanced by listening to Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, which I plan on loading on to my MP3 player. 

Aren't stories wonderful?  How perfect to be transported so many places all at once.  Kashua/Israel--Arabs/Jews, Tolstoy/Russia and all to the sounds of Beethoven.  Magic.

Nick Hornby: Preaching to the Choir

Nick Hornby's Housekeeping vs. the Dirt has a subtitle that promises "massively witty adventures in reading".  I'm game!  This slim volume covers fourteen months of reading (published in 2006 in book format--originally the essays appeared in the Believer magazine -- am so tempted now to get a subscription) and I momentarily thought it might be fun to read it serially, but then thought how silly since I feel like gulping it down in just a few gluttonous sittings and not spacing it out over the course of the coming year.  It is a very gulpable book, you see. 

I am a 'collector' of books--I collect certain authors, and certain kinds of stories, certain publishers, certain series . . . you get the picture.  I collect books about books and books about reading (I'm a serious pushover for this sort of book).  Since this year is all about reading from my own shelves, one of the 'themes' I want to explore is books about books.  I have a whole shelf of them (mostly unread) and thought it was finally time (zipping right along now halfway through February) to take a peek at what I have on hand.  Nick and I have crossed paths before, back too many years when I read his Polysyllabic Spree.  I was a convert back then, so I am not sure why I never picked up Housekeeping.  Now I see he has several more collections like this out that I am going to have to add to my next book order. 

Nick (I feel like I can call him Nick) has a breezy, chatty way of writing that I find very inviting in this sort of setting.  He seems like such a laid back, engaging sort of fellow, a little irreverent, but down to earth and best (because I think I am the same--hence he is preaching to the choir in my case) an 'equal opportunity' sort of reader.  There is nothing uppity or condescending about his reading or reading choices.  And he is quite deprecating, too.  I get the feeling that he paints himself as being decidedly low brow, but I'm not sure if that is at all accurate (when asking whose books will make us more intelligent--he answers by saying not his books for sure).  He may read primarily for enjoyment, but he does seem to read widely, too, and for a variety of reasons.  Oh, and I wonder if he really does buy so few books each month (is he not really owning up to what he adds to his reading stack?).  If so, I am feeling even more gluttonous now.

I like how he approaches writing about books in his essays (these are reprints of his Believer columns) --"writing about reading as opposed to writing about individual books". 

" . . . I would be paid to write about what I would have done anyway, which was read the books I wanted to read.  And if I felt that mood, morale, concentration levels, weather, or family history had affected my relationship with a book, I could and would say so."

He dismisses the idea of reading only books that "we think we ought to read, or that other people think we should read."  He lets his tastes guide him in his reading choices (me too).  And he is all for trying to "promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits."  He doesn't want to dissuade anyone from reading a book they want to--whatever the subject or type--as long as it's something they can't wait to pick it up again.  That sounds like just about the right sort of reading formula for me, too.

Each chapter he begins with a list of books bought and books read (not always one in the same) and then goes on to write about them in a very companionable manner.  I was most interested in today's essay since he writes about Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and compares ans contrasts it with Robert Harris's Fatherland (both on my list to read).  He talks about reading the Roth, an alternative history story, and how the alternative history drives the narrative but that feels sort of self-conscious in how it is all explained.  Whereas with the Harris the alternative history remains in the background and Harris just gets on with the thriller plot.  For him, these perceived flaws in the Roth didn't bother him one whit and it is only in critical reviews that the flaws are seen to inhibit real enjoyment of the story.  In his columns he allows himself to just say how much he likes a story without necessarily being critical about every aspect of it.  

I very much like Hornby's writing style, and his reading style to be honest.  I don't mind that our reading choices and likes might not always overlap, because his enthusiasm over reading is so refreshing.  I plan on reading one column a day (unless I can't help myself and end up reading more).  I might, as a matter of fact, just keep going now, since next up is (among other books) something by Amos Oz and (my latest 'find') Laura Lippman.  I even like the books he bought--by Kate Atkinson, Ruth Rendell and John le Carré.  I hope he writes about those books soon, too.

I've only read Hornby's essays.  I think his own novels are categorized as 'Lad Lit'?  That doesn't mean I can't read them, and have been looking through his backlist of books.  His newest appeals greatly, but maybe I should pick up an older title?  Has anyone read his fiction and have a favorite?  For now, I plan on continuing to enjoy his essays. 

January: At the Source

I've not yet told you about my serial read for 2015, have I?  My friend Cath sent me a copy of Gillian Clarke's At the Source: A Writer's Year and immediately when I opened the package I knew it was the book I would read in monthly installments.  I had never heard of Clarke before, perhaps because she is a poet, and poetry is a gaping hole in my reading history/experience thus far.  I will someday rectify that (there was a time, too, when I wouldn't have dreamed of reading short stories either, and now look at me).  Sometime this year I will find and read a copy of Clarke's poems.  It's only fitting, right?

Cath and I will be reading the book in tandem and chat about it along the way.  It is made up of six brief essays and a monthly journal, which as you might imagine (since Clarke is a poet) is gorgeously written.  It looks as though it will be a series of ruminations and reflections of her life in Wales, the dilapidated longhouse she and her husband bought and take up residence in when she accepted the post as Poet in Residence at the University of Lampeter, and most importantly on nature.

I'm not quite sure how I will write about the book.  The journal entries actually come after the series of essays, but maybe that doesn't matter (as I am starting with the monthly entries).  You see the hare on the cover?  I think he is going to be a recurring motif throughout the book so I will try and see what I pick up along the way.  Maybe it is best to begin with a few of my own reflections and share a few of my favorite passages.  I took a few notes as I was reading, so a few thoughts on 'January'. . .

The drama of extreme weather is "both fearful and thrilling"--how fitting that 2015 began for me with extreme cold, too.  Subzero temperatures during my break and return to work was what greeted me at the beginning of the year.  It was so cold I had to buy little handwarmers to stowe away in my gloves to keep my fingers from going numb (have you seen them?  you take them out of their plastic sleeve, shake them and let them heat up--genius).

Clarke is living in Wales, which I imagine to be lush and green and exceedingly cold in winter.  In the 1970s she bought an old longhouse which was in a ruinous state and moved in with her husband and children.  This is really how I imagine Wales:

"We spent our holidays walking the land, fetching water from the spring and collecting wood by day, and reading by oil-lamp light and a big open fire in the evenings."

I like this--talking about her children:

"They lived through books, as I did as a child, playing out their imagined stories in a place where poverty was not difficult to imagine. "

Despite the condition of the longhouse she buys, she decides to move in and live there--a braver soul than me.

"Solitude in a primitive house in winter"--how serendipitous that on the day I read this January journal entry I also came across a book by Doris Grumbach called Fifty Days of Solitude in my library.  It is another book of reminiscences on those days alone in Maine when she lived without speaking to anyone.  Which leads me to another favorite author, May Sarton, and her journals.

Clarke measures her own life against the previous owner of the longhouse who lived there in the 1930s.  She wanted to know how Marged lived.  Did she?

"No, but I thought of her a lot, and constantly imagined her life as I measured it against my own.  I learned about silence, independence, solving my own problems, not being afraid of the dark, sleeping alone miles from a neighbor with only a dog for company."

I'm hoping she goes into much more detail about this experience as I want to know about these things as well and apply them to my own life.  Solitude is a subject never far from my mind.  I am very good at appreciating solitude, but loneliness is still sometimes a problem I feel burdened by.

I love this bit and find it true as well:

"Each day sunrise and sunset inch apart by minutes.  Long, light evenings seem normal, short days like sickness.  In the darkest days you can't believe in light."

Ever so slowly the days seem to be lengthening, which for me is like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

The first essay, "A Local Habitation and a Name" is just as it sounds, all about her new home--the history, the grounds and views and landscape surrounding it.  Those Welsh names--so full of consonants!  And so intriguing to learn about that longhouse.  Two centuries old and built from stones in the field.  Imagine!  Hard for me living somewhere so 'new' in comparison.  It seems almost romantic to think of this place she lives as being smuggler's country.  The chance of ghosts?  And she is living alone?

Well, these thoughts of mine are all a bit random, so I hope I can gather my thoughts a little better next month.  This is going to be a treat to read, something new and different and refreshing.  And February is just around the corner.  That much closer to spring!

The Curious Gardener: December

Finally December!  Or should I really say, sigh, December and now there will be no more?  I am caught somewhere between the two.  I have really enjoyed Anna Pavord's The Curious Gardener while at the same time had moments of frustration when it all felt the tiniest bit over my head.  But I am sad to be done and not have more to read now (though looking forward to my-as yet undecided-new serial read for 2015).  She has such a delightfully chatty and engaging manner of writing as if she was sitting across the table from you, hot chocolate in hand telling you about her garden and giving you bits of advice.  I'm a hopeless gardener, but I do love the idea of gardens.  Who knows, maybe someday I will have a proper one of my own (or my own version of proper anyway).

Since it is the December chapter you won't be surprised that she talks about Christmas (and so I am happy to be reading this and finishing the book before my own Christmas holiday).  I do love this:

"There has to be an orange, an apple and some nuts in the stocking, not because anyone is panting for them, but because there always was in my stocking at home.  I used to crack the nuts by putting them under the leg of the bed and bouncing on the corner."

Hah.  Can't you just picture a child doing that?  Pavord grew up in Wales and she talks about the various traditions of her own family, which when she was a child meant spending lots of time outdoors on Christmas--building up an appetite.  Her family, and a tradition she carries on with her own children, would hang stockings on bedroom doors as the official beginning of Christmas.  My own family doesn't have much in the way of yearly traditions.  We had stockings as children but they sort of faded away over time.

For Pavord, and more childish innocence (chuckling on my part continues) she goes on:

"There was a perfectly good pair of nutcrackers in the dining room.  But to get there you had to jump from the bottom stair to the mat in the hall.  If your foot touched the wood in between you would be pulled for ever into its whorls and seams.  That was a nasty prospect to face at half past four in the morning."

Half past four being the hour she would find her stocking.  It's a little weird?  Sad?  that I sort of understand her reasoning.  Even now as an adult I have my own unusual idiosyncrasies and habits about doing certain things.

She wraps up the year with several items of interest to me.  One is her discussion of trees and how to choose one for your garden keeping in mind where you are planting it and what you want it to do.  There is lots of suggestions on how to look for the best tree to plant and just how to plant it.  Did you know that "in its natural state a tree has a root system as big as its top canopy of branches"?  I have two really big trees in my backyard and all of a sudden am envisioning just where all those roots are growing beneath my yard!

Based on her suggestions I think I would find a crab apple tree in my yard most pleasing--"a neat small tree with stiff, markedly upright branches.  Scented flowers grow in great abundance, pink in bud, open white in spring and are followed by yellow fruit flushed with red."  It reaches a height of 16 feet and does well in full sun, which sounds very suitable for my front lawn.  If it is the same tree I am thinking of, there is one on the university campus (well, one I pass by daily) and it is indeed a beautiful tree.  Maybe that will be one of the things I take away from my reading.  What a nice legacy, don't you think?  Every time I would look at my crab apple tree I would think of the Pavord book.

She also offers practical advice (and this I find very helpful) on the "principles of planting".  She talks about soils and how big a hole to dig, what to do with the root system and how to secure them in the ground for best growing conditions.  While this wouldn't work here in the midwest with our cold, snowy winters she says she prefers to plant in fall and winter as plants have so much other work to do in the spring--all those leaves and new buds.  So much to think about.  I had no idea before reading this book.

And she talks about nuts and the trees they grow on.  Personally I like nuts all the time, all year round and happily partake of them on an almost daily basis, but I know they are especially popular at holidaytime.  Like Pavord I think it's silly to wait until Christmas.  "Nuts have acquired a faintly Fabian air (she says): wholesome, of course, but not appealing to gourmands".  Well, a gourmand, I am not.  Did you know this:

"Choose young walnut trees for planting as they resent being moved when they are older.  Do not cut or prune them unless it is absolutely unavoidable.  They bleed horribly when they are wounded.  If it must be done, late summer is the best time."

I had no idea and wonder just what the "bleeding" is like.  Walnuts grow in a husk, which I also did not know.  (Walbuts go into my cereal or oatmeal every morning--and now I will imagine the tree they grew on bleeding.  What a thought!).

So many interesting things Pavord has shared.  I will never remember it all, but somewhere along the line in my later reading I can imagine making all sorts of interesting connections.

Maybe I will end on this note--advice that another gardener gave Pavord: "A garden is a process, not a product".  Now that is something I can take with me in many aspects of my life!

The Curious Gardener: November

Does it count that I read the November installment of Anna Pavord's The Curious Gardener in November, but I ran out of steam over the weekend so am just now sharing what I read.  It's only the first day of December, so not too terribly late.  It seemed fitting that I also share a very few of the photos I took of the new conservatory at the Lauritzen Gardens.  I visited the day before Thanksgiving.  It was a suitably cold and dreary day, which made being in a warm and colorful environment all the more pleasing.

The conservatory is huge.  It consists of several glass partitions that gently slope upwards.  The first section is the coolest but as you slowly walk up the incline you can feel the humidity get thicker.  You won't hear me say this in the summer, but boy how nice it feels on a cold wintry day. 

Isn't this gorgeous?  I wasn't able to stop and really soak it all in and read names of plants and flowers as the place was packed (despite how 'empty' of people my photos appear).  There are loads of exotic flowers, ferns, trees and even cacti.  I love the lily pond and the bamboo trees. 

At the very top there is a small area with cushioned seats and I can picture myself sitting there with a book on the coldest, snowiest day of the year sitting in blissful warmth while it is nasty outside.  And I love these Tiki guys.  Sadly my photos of this area didn't turn out well, so the fiercest of the group is hidden.  I like the holiday hats, however.  How festive of them!  You can't be too scared of a fierce-looking Tiki guy wearing a Santa hat!

Alas no Tikis in my Curious Gardener reading.  Pavord opens the chapter on the changing temperatures that the UK has shown, though she doesn't go on so much about climate change.  It is a matter of showing rather than telling in this case.  What I like very much about this book, while she does write in a way that assumes the reader is fairly garden-savvy, she never lectures or talks down to her reader.  Something I appreciate.  Climate change obviously does affect and changes growing habits and patterns, but when all is said and down, the natural world knows how to take care of itself.

"Self-preservation, not altruism, is at the centre of our concern with global warming.  Plants are exquisitely  adaptive creatures, and will survive things that we cannot.  Largely, they are destroyed not by climate change but by human greed.  When we have gone they can once again get on with what they were doing for a hundred million years before we ever arrived on scene."

I fear there is far more to the story, but I think she is right that nature does know how to adapt, even if it means things will be lost or altered. 

She's very good at segueing into peripheral topics that are a way to explore some other topic entirely.  She writes about "shedding"--about getting rid of all the clutter.  Somehow she gets onto the topic of Christmas cakes, and reading this only made my stomach grumble with hunger for something sweet.

"For years, season after season, I made vast Christmas cakes with tooth-rotting amounts of crystallized fruit soaked in brandy.  I made my own marzipan, whipped up royal icing with egg whites, traced spidery patterns and a drunken Merry Christmas on the top with my icing set (it was those icing nozzles that she was getting ready to "shed").  The cake was part of the ritual of preparing for a family Christmas, but nobody ever wanted to eat it.  First, they were too full after lunch.  Then, when the children got older and we switched to an evening feast, they said they were saving themselves for the turkey.  Finally, I got the message.  The cake was redundant."

Cake is pretty good, but it was this reference that I could mentally nod in agreement to.

"There's just a point sometimes when clutter, instead of being a comfort, becomes a burden.  Your dream centres on a space, free of jumble, with a log fire and walls of books."

Yes, now that I can understand completely.

She talks about minimalism in the garden, about Lotusland in California (she visits the most amazing gardens and every months shares something of her travels), about garden designers (she prefers her own ordering and creating in her garden space as it is a reflection of her own tastes).  But it's pears that I enjoyed reading about most this month.  She is a pear connoisseur, and I can appreciate that.  I appreciate a tasty pear, too. 

"I planted a pear tree as soon as we moved into our house.  You can keep your apples: cold-fleshed, self-satisfied fruit.  I'm for pears, melting pears, with skins speckled and freckled with russet spots and flesh that dissolves like butter in your mouth.  Already I'm prowling up and down pear trees--there are fourteen of them now in the garden--counting the crop, imagining the day, probably in October, when I can sink my teeth into the first 'Beurre Hardy' of the season."

Okay, so I will say that I am an equal-opportunity fruit lover.  Or maybe it's just plain greed.  I like just about every fruit--fresh or dried (with the exception of papayas--which I want to love, but just can't).  Apples are a daily staple with me, as are pears (most of the time).

"A pear comes to its climax very slowly, but, once there, collapses swiftly.  If you are a pear fancier, there is no greater disappointment than to sink your teeth into what looks like a perfect fruit only to find a grey, runny, slightly alcoholic mess just underneath the skin.  Pears are like Russian statesmen.  The outward appearance gives little indication of what is going on inside."

Yes, once they go, that's it.  A mushy mess.  But 'tis the season and I enjoy one after dinner nearly every night.  Only I get the common varieties and like so much else that I have encountered in this book--she writes about all the varieties of fruits and veggies that I will not find in my local supermarket.  More's the pity.  But it is always fun to read about them.

Only twenty or so pages stand between me and the end of this book.  I have enjoyed it enormously even if some of it has been a little over my head.  I am on the lookout now for my next serial read.  But there is still December to read about and write about.  Can you believe that there are just over four weeks left in the year?

The Curious Gardener: October

What a novel idea.  I've read the October installment of The Curious Gardener--in October!  And even with and entire week to go still.  October is filled with the usual mishmash of items ranging from apples (my favorite) to the irritation of cell phones in public gardens (bad cell phone behavior being a pet peeve of mine as well).  Another month of easy and entertaining reading along with a bit of the 'down to business' stuff as well. 

One of the main topics of this month's reading is--soil.  I know I have mentioned it before, as has Anna Pavord, because as the title of this mini essay says, "The Answer Lies in the Soil".  This is one of those things I will take with me from the book, even if I don't always recall all the variables she writes about that make up good soil.  I am sure I will remember that the perfect soil to strive for is "fabled" loam which falls somewhere in between soil that is either acidic or alkaline. 

"Soil is a mixture of bits of rock, water and organic matter such as rotted leaves.  Sandy soils are made from relatively large bits of rock, clay soils from small particles.  One is called light, the other heavy.  The essence of success in gardening lies in getting the right balance between the two, the right structure.  For that, you need the proper ratio between earth crumbs and air pockets.  On heavy clay soils, there is  not enough air.  Plant roots keep bumping their noses on the underground equivalent of brick walls.  On light, sandy soils, there is too much air and the fine hairy rootlets that absorb nutrients are unable to clutch at what they need."

I wonder what kind of soil I have.  And I bet the soil in my pots also has a lot to do with how well (or how poorly) my houseplants do.  In nature the soil takes care of itself more or less through the dying and decaying leaves and vegetation and animal droppings.  For the rest of us--it's compost, compost, compost.  Is it weird that I dream of having my own compost heap?  I really do, and someday I am going to create one.  Maybe that will be next year's project.  And a good hint she shares--never spend time doing work that others can do for you.  I like the idea of frost breaking up clods of earth and worms creating air pockets to improve the soil.  It's sort of weird (but then, not really) to think of what the soil in your garden/yard means. 

I'm envious of the vacations Pavord takes.  Often the destinations are so exotic, but sometimes, too, they are close to home.  Do you want to know what the view was like from a cottage in the Scottish Highlands?

"Out of the back door of the cottage stretched fifty miles of hill with nothing in it except red deer, heather, golden eagles and orchids.  No houses.  No roads.  No aeroplanes.  No people.  Absolute silence."

Sounds divine, doesn't it?  The only thing to improve this picture is a stack of books close at hand. 

But the highlight of the chapter for me, happens to also be my favorite fruit--apples.  I eat an apple a day (sometimes two).  My favorites are Macintosh (didn't find too many this fall, but I am hoarding a few in a bag), Honeycrisp (much better at this time of year than the other months--more flavor and the apples are on the smaller side), and Pink Ladies (what I eat when Honeycrisp begin losing their yummy, tart flavor).  Galas, Fujis and Braeburns are good in a pinch.

I'm afraid I don't know anything about British or European apples, but I do like the sound of some of these names: Egremont Russet, James Grieve, George Cave, Discover (a modern variety), Worcester, Beauty of Bath (doesn't the name of this one even sound delicious) and Laxton Epicure.  I'm not sure how common some of these apples are, but perhaps some of them can only be had in an orchard.  Pavord writes about some of the apple trees she has had and which have the sort of apples you need to eat directly from the tree, the sorts that you need to put a mattress of straw underneath for those varieties that have the habit of "falling rather suddenly off the perch", and the sorts that drop their fruit just at the moment it is ready that you had better be there to catch lest the slugs "beat you to the feast".

Don't read this section on an empty stomach or you'll begin craving apples (but I seem to crave them in any case).  The descriptions she gives some of them are literally mouth watering--the colors, scents and flavors.  You know how some people go on wine tasting tours?  I would happily go on such a thing as an apple tasting tour, if I found one!  I will leave you with a reading suggestion (I plan on getting a copy of this myself!): Edward Bunyard's Anatomy of a Dessert, which was published in 1929 (maybe foodies are already familiar with it?).  "He does not tell you how to grow fruit, but gives you a thousand reasons why you should." 

"When we think of dessert, our mind’s eye sees cakes, pies, and pastries. Yet the truly creative palate imagines things even more tempting, decadent, and, yes, sinful. So claims Edward Bunyard in this delectable paean to the wonderful fruits of the vine, from apples and apricots to gooseberries and strawberries, from pears to the grapes that give us wine." 

That is from the book description.  A book not just to borrow but to own, I think!  Yum.

The Curious Gardener: September

Can I make a little confession today?  As much as I have been enjoying my monthly gardening reading, I think I am ready to turn those final pages and move on to some other nature book next year as my 'serial'/monthly read.  Don't get me wrong, Anna Pavord is such an engaging writer and so much of The Curious Gardener has been pure delight.  But, and there is always a 'but' isn't there?  But I think the reason I have not been reaching for the book of late (once again this month I am lagging behind and am playing 'catch-up') has more to it than simple busy-ness of life at the moment. 

I love all the social history and personal experiences and travel bits that Pavord includes in her short essays.  There are all sorts of interesting things I never knew about gardens that I find really fascinating, but I tend to get bogged down in all the practical aspects of gardening that she writes about.  This book is as much about what to do in your garden as it is about all the peripheral things associated with them.  The curiosities I find so interesting to read about.  But the practicalities less so since I do not myself garden.  I don't feel as though I have enough of a background and basic knowledge about how to garden to get full enjoyment out of it all. 

Another admission on my part . . .when she talks the serious shop talk and begins discussing plants and flowers and peppers the essays with all the Latin references my eyes (at least this time around, and maybe I have been simply distracted by other things) tend to glaze over.  I realize I  haven't a clue what she is talking about as I have no frame of reference and am so often not near a computer in order to look up terms and get visuals (and let's face it, plants and flowers of a specific sort call for good visuals or a knowledge of them and ability to pull from memory what it all means).  So, some of the essays are wonderful and very evocative and I can relate to, and others are very specific and I just can't apply it in any meaningful way to my life right now.

Still, there is always plenty to like and enjoy about the topics she does choose to write about.  I just hate the idea that I found myself this chapter wanting to skim parts.  I never skim parts of books (not that I am properly reading like this one).  I always think of that as cheating in some weird way.  If I am going to read a book, I am going to read the whole thing or just set it aside.  But I did read it all and tried to pull back my mind when I found myself wandering on occasion. 

The bits I really liked?  She begins with mazes. 

"This maze is extraordinary.  It lies on gently sloping ground at the edge of the parkland and represents the Green Man, a potent figure in Celtic mythology.  Most of the outline is traced in beech, but the curling lips are made of yew, clipped in billows, the nose is a bank of lavender tumbling from a tumulus of stone and the chin is a pool, mostly filled with jagged upturned tree trunk."

The maze owner wanted the 'goal' to be simple--"very much a quiet place of nature".  The center of the maze also had a holly tree which is a symbol of the Green Man.  Now, this is exactly the sort of thing I like to read about and know enough about that I can visualize it nicely.

And I really liked the short essay on 'giant vegetables'.  She asked a group of gardeners why they grow these monster veggies.  And one of them replies (courtesy demanding an answer to so obvious a question), "I was looking for something to do".  Fair enough.

"The expertise needed to produce these monster vegetables, the love and care lavished on them, is self evident.  But why is bulk so much more interesting than quality?  Because it is measurable, say the people who grow them.  Incontrovertible.  It's a mine-is-bigger-than-yours situation.  No argument."

Am I just imagining it, or did I read somewhere that someone trying to grow a massive pumpkin milk fed it?  Hmm.  It is a curious hobby, but why not, right?

Even in the sections that are a little above my head there is often still something to latch on to, something to admire in the writing and appreciate.  Like how she can easily and smoothly segue from one topic to another--bicycle paths in West Dorset to trying to decide how to label each plant in her garden (the link between the two--tin--and in the end she decides to skip the labels no matter how good an idea they are.  Or, one other nicely turned phrase . . .when she talks about hydrangeas, I thought this was a lovely description:

"The flowers are cream and droop down in rather shapeless long panicles.  The way the other two hold their flower heads is so much better.  They present them like waiters swirling into a dining room with plates poised high on their fingertips."

Now that I can indeed imagine!  Hopefully some of the rest (which I don't) will rub off in a good way, in a way I don't exactly realize right now.