Category Archives: PERIPATETIC

The Peripatetic Gardener Visits Naumkeag

October 11, 2016BEAUTY, PERIPATETICLois Rose

by Lois Rose

By chance, because of my son’s wedding, I was able to visit a unique and memorable garden near Stockbridge, Massachusetts recently. We had part of day “off” from wedding festivities and decided to see this estate which includes a “cottage” designed by Stanford White and built for Joseph Hodges Choate, a well-known attorney, between 1886 and 1887 on the top of a hill overlooking fields and mountains.

The 44-room mansion called to my husband and cousin but for me and my other cousin it was the gardens. Mabel Choate, the daughter of Joseph, worked with Fletcher Steele for over 30 years to produce them. They are a “collection” of garden rooms, eclectic and entertaining, spanning most of the space around the house on the hill top. Unfortunately they had fallen into disrepair over the years. The Trustees of Naumkeag took over the restoration of the gardens and there is a tremendous amount of new planting and replanting going on.

The Blue Steps are the most well-known aspect of the rooms, extending from an area near the house down to the lowest part of the gardens. If you have ever glanced through a book about structures in gardens, then this picture will be familiar.

The Tree Peony Garden has been completely redone and the peonies are not looking their best after a serious drought this past summer. Built into the side of the hill on terraces, it must have baked in the heat. The Chinese Garden is quaint with mostly hardscape at this point. The Evergreen Garden is impressive and elegant. The Afternoon Garden is against the side of the house and has a great view down to the fields below the house.

Water features, stonework, paths—all restored or in the process. New plantings have restored privacy and recreated vistas throughout the gardens. There is an unexpected grove of pines and older trees five minutes from the house: suddenly you are in the woods, away from anything planned or ordered.

The house delighted my companions, but I think my cousin Dan and I got the better part of the tour.

Beyond Today

March 15, 2016BEAUTY, PERIPATETIC, POETRYLillian Myers

by Lillian Myers

Baby

Blow a kiss

To the smallest child

A ray of Hope

Pass her to adopting hands

Like a flame lights a candle

Never diminishes

Girl

Brilliant, open hearted, mrembo (beautiful)

Unprepared

She enters school, bewildered

Bullied for her long legs and big feet

Her flip flops, one bit broken, repaired, broken, repaired

Mother, Father and classmate beat her on the back of the head

With a leather shoe

Teenager

Clever, direct, survivor

Abandons one school

Moves into another school, then out the house, to the street, to a new school

To be worth something to herself

To respect her own skin

Sometimes at the top of the class

Sometimes at the heel

Young Mother

Proper, regal, mud hut

Sings Hope into the braids of her three daughter’s hair

Sleeping baby on her lap

Young to divorce

Shines in the refuse

Older Mother

Searching, strong, stressed

Ask the Mother of seven, “Can you see beyond today?”

Abusive boyfriends pass like seeds in the wind

Lucky with 350 Shillings a week ($3.50), no chakulla(food)

Mother’s Hopes for 1 kg of flour on her table, water, electricity

Must offer her eldest to older men on the streets

50 shillings per shot

Baba (Grandmother)

White black hair, light heavy face, open hearted bosom

Old for her years

During the peak of her wealth she is abundant in family, tradition and time

Once she wove late night stories into the mornings of her long short days

During gatherings of company, she treated people more important than food or wealth

Once her classic firm slow handshakes

Wore wrinkles into her fingers as rivers wear into the rocks
Watched the introduction of HIV, English colonialism and steel

Asphalt, telephone and street child,

Saw the birth of a Christian God

Still relies on her neighbours and family for

Health

Now must trade big Bobs, big money, for clear water
And she still believes in you

Has time for you

Smiles for you

Child

Survivor

And she always will

The Earth as Mother

Patient, wise, empty

The eldest child

1,000 black birds cross the East African sky

As she drinks cups of late night milky mountain mists

She still lives in the volcanic rocks of Menangai crater

She still flows out from her own hills

Bleeds into her own ocean

The womb of the sky rises to meet her

Upside down

This blue burnt bonanza of uncontrolled mystery is rewritten

A Traveller

Giving, optimistic, bewildered

“How are you?” sing the children as she walks the slum’s dirt roads

Smiles

Teaching youth, she wears her mothers used trainers

Contemplating the ladder

Of the Ivory tower

Lillian Myers

A Visit To Holden Arboretum’s New Canopy Walk and Emergent Tower

October 9, 2015GENERAL INTEREST, PERIPATETICElsa Johnson

by Elsa Johnson

Of course it’s neat!

When I was a kid we had a big sugar maple at the end of our driveway with one low branch so that a child could jump up, grab it, and swing herself up; after that there were regularly spaced branches. One could climb up as high as one dared to go… which in my case was not very high. My brother climbed it to the top, and so did the neighbor boy (and fell and bounced off every branch on the way down, but miraculously did not break a single bone – though he never tried climbing that tree again, either).

The Arboretum Canopy Walk puts you up there at the top of that big sugar maple, so to speak, and it isn’t scary one bit. The ascent is a solid gradual ramp up to a tree-canopy-level walkway laid out in a triangle, with the interconnecting walkways suspended on cables between the non-moving transition-towers (think the Brooklyn Bridge on a much, much, much smaller scale).

It’s lovely and fun (of course the walkways bounce!), although not terribly educational at the moment (there was a notice saying that there will be educational signage coming soon)…but the walkway is beautifully designed, and the design is impeccably executed. One could go and appreciate it for no more reason than that.

On to the Emergent Tower (yes, yes, a wacky name – what else is the purpose of a tower if not to emerge?) – and yes, yes, really worth the trip; I enjoyed every step of it.

Like the canopy walk, the tower is an exquisite piece of well-thought-out functional design and construction detailing. Just one example is that the risers on the steps are slightly low, allowing even a couple ladies with one cranky knee apiece to walk up (and down) it without pain and hardly any sense of exertion. How cool is that! And every step of the trip is a visual pleasure, noticing how the floor grid allows one to look through, either down or up, turning the entire tower into an ever-changing kaleidoscope of beautiful metal and wood joinery.

The tower is 202 feet high, which is above the tree canopy at the top (having emerged). One can see in all directions….north to the lake, east toward Little Mountain, south and west… in every direction a green blanket of rolling hills and trees. Also a tension structure, there is wind movement. It is delicious. Go see.

The Peripatetic Gardener Visits the Cloisters in NYC

September 9, 2015BEAUTY, GENERAL INTEREST, PERIPATETIC, PERMACULTUREElsa Johnson

A Visit to The Cloisters in New York City

Meanwhile — Sloth in the cloister would not have been deemed desirable. You could think of a monastery garden as an early form of permaculture. The Cloisters in Manhattan has three cloistered gardens open to the sun and air. Only one is planted with plants that would have grown in such a place in Medieval times. A monastery garden grew its own food, but also grew plants for other purposes, and some of these plants were dangerous – poisons that were medicinally useful, like foxglove (digitalis)… or just plain simply poisonous, like castor bean plant (ricin — for which there is no antidote), and datura (tropane alkaloids). These plants would have been grouped together in their own quadrant of the garden.

Another quadrant held plants used for culinary purposes… thyme and sage to flavor foods , hops (to flavor weak ale, which was commonly consumed instead of water), comfrey (a mineral accumulator, also used medicinally). Another quadrant grew vegetables (not tomatoes, which would come from the new world when it was ‘discovered’), some of which we would not recognize today, like skirret (tastes something like sweet potatoes, but is a bit more trouble to dig and use; (See Tom Gibson’s recent post) and stinging nettle (a pot herb that loses its sting when cooked). Both of these are important permaculture plants today.

Ignorance can be a form of sloth. An ignorant gardener would not have been long tolerated. He or she would have posed a danger to the community. While a natural landscape like a park may benefit from some form of benign sloth, true sloth would never have been tolerated in a cloister garden.

The Peripatetic Gardener: Native Plants in the New York Botanical Garden

August 31, 2015PERIPATETIC, POLLINATIONElsa Johnson

GARDENOPOLIS Cleveland visits the Native Plants Garden in the N.Y. Botanical Garden

The newest of the New York Botanical Garden’s specialized collections, the native plant garden, designed to be aesthetically pleasing in a kind of wild and messy way, is so much more than just a collection of some 100,000 native plants representative of the indigenous flora of the northeastern and northern Continental United States.

The garden is made of several diverse ecosystems, including wetlands, a lake, meadows, and hillside forests. I saw nothing that is not also indigenous to northeast Ohio.

In late summer it is the billowing prairie flowers and grasses that speak most strongly: goldenrod, ironweed, silvery native mints, rattlesnake master, liatrus, Joe-Pye weed (all with their accompanying pollinators – our native bees, wasps, flies, and butterflies)….

and– in wetter places — both blue and red lobelia (with accompanying hummingbirds) and the showy hibiscus moscheutos.

Both dry and damp hillsides grow many varieties of ferns and carex,

false Solomon’s seal, native ginger,

and so much more …and of course a multitude of native shrubs and trees. To peruse a list of plants used in this native plant garden go to www.nybg.org/native-plant-garden.

A garden of native plants can be perfect for practicing sloth in, as many of these plants look their best when not expected to be too neat and tidy. Thoughtful design can supply the look of intentional order so many people in urban residential settings desire.

Permaculture in Leipzig 2

August 20, 2015PERIPATETIC, PERMACULTURETom Gibson

Permaculture in Leipzig 2

Leipzig, Germany, is the site of many more than just one thriving permaculturist. (see Part 1 http://www.gardenopoliscleveland.org/2015/08/permaculture-in-leipzig-1/). In fact, the city is abuzz with cutting edge permaculture and sustainability projects that should make Cleveland’s green advocates, well, green with envy. Some context:

The city (population 556,000, or a little bigger than Cleveland) has a number of things going for it. First of all, it experienced relatively modest destruction from World War II bombing and then in the early 1990s, when many old buildings were close to collapse, German reunification funded major restoration. So the city has preserved much of its past.

Second, it has a tradition of resisting authority—- from Johann Sebastian Bach, who (unlike his contemporary, Georg Friedrich Handel) battled secular rulers and addressed his music to commoners, to the Monday night marchers in 1989 who led the peaceful revolution against communist rule.

Third, it has enjoyed an explosion of young people, who, when they aren’t riding bikes, are generally creating a vibrant local scene. Here’s a song from the Sachsenbrϋcke, a bridge that has become a young people’s hangout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpKoNFx8yy0&feature=youtu.be.

Finally—and this is a blog about gardens!—Leipzig is the origin point in 1864 of Schrebergärten—the hugely successful community garden movement in Germany. Leipzig still devotes enormous space to such gardens:

Taken together, it’s no surprise that Leipzig has become a post-fossil-fuel Transition Town (http://www.transitionus.org/) and made substantial progress toward sustainability across the board.

The Leipzig Transition Town organization has even put together a map describing (in German and English) 58 separate sustainable efforts. Here, picked at random, are four:

• KunZstoffe. Recycling and upcycling centre. A stock of materials based on leftovers, waste and discarded products is provided for creating new added value.

• Lost Food is a self-governed cooperative to distribute organic, healthy and local food for an affordable and fair price.

• Dölitzer Wassermühle is a project rebuilding a historic watermill for electricity production. Also environmental education is provided for kindergarten children.

• Lastenrad Leipzig und Radküche: Selling, refurbishing and renting of used Dutch cargo bikes and a vegan, fossil-energy-free kitchen on a cargo bike. (Cargo bikes are bikes specifically designed to carry large loads.)

Here’s the full map list: http://www.nachhaltiges-leipzig.de/wp-content/themes/increase-child/image/Degrowth-Stadtplan-LiW.pdf

See any ideas for Cleveland?

Permaculture in Leipzig 1

August 11, 2015PERIPATETIC, PERMACULTURE, PERTINENTTom Gibson

Permaculture in Leipzig I

On a recent trip to Germany, my wife, Carol, and I decided to forgo the usual hotel/Gasthaus travel routine and test the alternative economy. In that economy people tend to live simply and earn their livings via multiple income streams—maybe, for example, raising most of their own vegetables, selling goat cheese, and holding a part-time job in the mainstream economy. For us the question boiled down to: What permaculturist will rent us shelter?

The answer turned out to be Rainer Kühn, a charismatic and innovative leader in Leipzig’s very dynamic alternative economy milieu. Rainer has built an active web presence, both via Facebook and his own site, under the name of Rainer Blütenreich (which translates as “Realm of Blossoms” http://bluetenreich.jimdo.com/). Like many on left in the former East Germany, he feels no nostalgia for the former dictatorship and its spy network (the much hated “Stasi”), but also has a deep skepticism of Western capitalism. He has helped start Leipzig’s alternative currency, the Lindentaler, and is laying the groundwork for a future intentional community. Continue reading Permaculture in Leipzig 1 →