Pruning the Pyracantha

I met Roberta last winter over knitting. She walked right up to me at Cafe Carolina and asked about the poncho I was wearing. It was to be only the first of many things we discovered in common; and talking to strangers only the beginning of my admiration of her. One morning I shared my blogging and we further bonded around creative gardening. On a sunny Saturday last spring we exchanged garden tours. She toured mine, then I followed her to hers, where we had wine on the beautiful porch of her lime green outbuilding. Roberta loved my garden door and got her husband to put up a wooden screen door in a frame sitting right in the middle of her back gardens. She planted vines on the trellis on either side of it. It is crazy fabulous. I got excited by the flowers she painted on the glass in window frames hanging on her fence and tried my hand at it for my fence--with results that surprised and pleased me. Roberta is a decade and change beyond me in years and my new idol. She took up painting when she was no longer young, and gardening, and house-renovating with Allen. She had been a crocheter, but had just delved into knitting when we met. She loves my writing, I love her painting. We love each other.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I return to see her receding summer garden and we sit on her front patio before the warmth of a chiminea, drinking wine and watching blue birds and jays as the evening approaches. I admire the pyracantha trained to follow the contours of a low wrought iron fence around the stone patio. The prickly pyracantha tree in my side garden is the bane of my existence. I have to trim the top through the dining room window, and it sprouts suckers pretty much daily.  But I love the winter berries, and the texture it gives the garden, so I endure it. I comment on the artful way hers looks, and lament the raggedness of mine. Roberta says, "Cut it back! Cut it back as far as you need to so you can reach it and control it." Huh. What a concept.

A few days later I pull into the driveway and sit looking down the garden at the wicked thing. I notice that it has only a few bunches of berries up near the top, amongst the overgrowth I am trying to pretend isn't there--it is begging for an overhaul. Then I see it--the line along which it needs to be cut into a new shape. I am not a sculptor or a wood carver, but I have often heard keepers of those gifts say that they sit with the stone or the wood until it speaks to them. It is the medium that tells them where to cut to make it what it is meant to be, they do not force it into their own vision. That prickly pyracantha was speaking to me. It was showing me what it needed to be better looking, healthier, and more manageable.

Last weekend I gather my long sleeves, my leather gloves, and my loppers and set to pruning. I work slowly, one clip at a time. I step back several times to re-engage with what it is telling me. I fine tune the lopper cuts with my clippers. I am so pleased with the result. I can see over it from the window now, instead of into it. And I can see the top of my lime green door when I pull into the driveway. Hopefully some day it will again be full of berries for the birds to eat, that will encourage blooms followed by more berries.

The pyracantha had become shapeless as it grew helter skelter and as I lopped it off in the same haphazard way. It was out of control and I was overwhelmed by it. This is not the first time I have pruned the heck out of it. When I created the side garden, I observed that the long-ignored suckers had woven themselves into the branches and choked it all up. It was as dense as the rose bushes around Sleeping Beauty's castle tower. And it was entangled with a nandina growing right along with it through its core. I did not study it first, I just took off with my little saw and loppers. I cut the sides, I cut the lower branches so I could plant under it; it never occurred to me that it was acceptable gardening practice to cut the top off. In my haste I cut one of three main trunks and left a hole in the back side. It never recovered. In fact, this week as I am pruning, I pull the rotted remains of that bone out of the ground.

Dreams can be like the pyracantha, at least for me. I can’t deal with really big ideas; they quickly become too big to tackle, and I end up in wholesale abandonment. I can't tell you how often that has happened to me.  When I can't deal with the branches, I cut it off at the trunk. I need to learn the lesson of the bush and move slowly into my visions. Friends can help with that; and therapists and clearness committees. When we are looking at really big transitions in our lives, they help us step back and look at what to prune or put on hold to make it manageable, and to identify the main bone that needs to be protected. At yoga on Monday, Julie leaves us with the YMCA thought-of-the-week: "A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and sings it back to you when you have forgotten the words." (Unknown)

This week my co-worker and I attend a training for the a software product we are considering for the church. We are taken aback by the number of participants who say their church has had (and paid a monthly fee for) the product for years, but never used it. The trainer says he hears that all the time. What is the matter with it, we wonder. Is is something that sounds good, but is really useless? Is is hard to use? But Fred says over and over throughout the day, and again in a conversation at the end of the training another attendee and I have with him: "Roll it out slowly. Pick one part of it and do it well. Then, and only then, move on to the next thing." He say users try to do it all at once, get overwhelmed, and abandon it all.

Late yesterday afternoon, I go for a walk. As usual, I end up in the cemetery walking among the multi-colored trees.

My favorite over-the-top tribute in the Oakwood garden is to a woman, active in the community, who died young a century ago. It has been newly decorated. I wonder if the flowers were left by a descendant, or by a stranger with a sense of artistic whimsy. I love the idea of the latter; but in either case, it was probably not anyone who knew her personally. I sometimes set things straight at markers, but it never occurred to me to pay homage in this way. It gives me ideas.

As the sun begins its descent toward the horizon, I sit down on a gravestone, deciding that staying to watch it set is an appropriate way to spend the last late afternoon of Daylight Saving Time. It takes longer than I anticipate, but I stick it out. Who knows what might happen. It is not a spectacle, but sitting in the crisp air watching the landscape of the sky change and the color shift as the sun slowly sinks until suddenly it is gone and the sky turns dark, is pure joy.

Find your song. Stand back and observe it. Take your time. Find your clearness committee. Move slowly. One foot in front of the other. One step at a time. Enjoy the journey, because it is everything.

Dust to Dust

I went to the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art yesterday. He was a remarkable human being. It seems like there are some people who should be exempt from physical death: those who make a difference in the larger world, and could continue to do so. Those who speak for us, interpreting the world and helping make sense of it. Those with exhibited potential to do that. Those with better ideas about how things should work who haven't yet had a chance to make it happen. Norman Rockwell is one of those people to me. And little Christina Green who was born into tragedy on September 11, 2001 and whose bright future ended in tragedy in Tucson last week. But no one escapes.

If you read my blog on pretty much any given week, you know that my favorite garden in Raleigh--or anywhere, if truth be told--is the Oakwood Cemetery. I love to walk in the cemetery in all seasons, from the lush green of spring and summer, through the colorful then barren fall, to the cold beauty of the snow. You would think cemeteries are the most stagnant of places. But I find there is always something new to discover--in both the physical landscape and in what my mind conjures up about the former lives of the residents.

It is time to say more.

A cemetery is the great equalizer. Every person on the planet has two things in common: we are each born into the pain and blood of our mothers and we all die and return to the earth. In between anything can happen. Like snowflakes, no two of us are exactly alike. The cemetery is the place where we all come together in the end. In what lies beneath the ground, though the box may vary, we are all eventually dust. What marks the spot above the ground, speaks of who we were in life. And how it speaks.

There are the beautiful, if ostentatious, markers of the famous--locally or globally: statesmen; presidents of women's organizations; early Raleigh landowners with neighbor- hoods now named after them; doctors and coaches whose lives touched many with healing or inspiration. There are the plain white markers in even rows straight in every direction of those who served their country in all the wars from the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression as perhaps those lying here knew it; I have not found any union soldiers, but surely they are here) to the present day wars; those who died fighting and those who lived on. The markers in the slave section, those who were not allowed beyond obscurity in life or in death: tiny metal plates bearing only numbers. There are the "unremarkable" people to whom, though they are strangers, I feel a bond: Mabel, who left this life on my eleventh birthday; and Mary, who for 57 years loved the house and gardens that are now mine. And there are the children: many of their graves marked with angels and lambs. The stair-step markers of Annie, Emmie, and Johnnie, and two nameless infants; the children of one family who all died over the decade of the 1860s. How do parents survive such grief? Little Ashley Nicole, who should be celebrating her sixteenth birthday this year, but is forever four and a half. And, of course, there are the legions of ordinary lives. The ones who lived their  days in the usual obscurity that most of us do. Beloved by family--or not; successful in whatever they might have done--or not; living long lives--or dying way too soon; happy--or not. For most of the residents of Oakwood who were ordinary people, how they lived is invisible. But not for all.

There are the sometimes odd markers that speak of who the deceased was: the wife of an architect who designed a house on a pedestal to mark his beloved's resting place; the tree trunk markers of Woodsmen of America; the photographs permanently affixed to the marble. And the beautiful or strange sentiments engraved in stone: "Beloved Dad," "Not gone, merely sleeping." Among the grand, landmark tombstones and monoliths, are the homegrown decorations added seasonally to plain markers. These are my favorites. Wade Edwards--and now Elizabeth--of course has one of the most noticeable works of art in the cemetery. A 15-foot tall angel holding in her bosom a young man. But at her base and around the bench that bears Wade's name (interestingly there are no dates anywhere to be found) are perennial and annual plantings and pieces of garden art: a rabbit and stakes that say things like "Welcome to my garden." More have appeared since Elizabeth joined her son there. Ashley Nicole's mounded grave is a well-tended, year-round garden, with a bench on which I once saw perhaps her mother sitting. Clearly she was loved in life and not forgotten in death. "Dad," whose grave marker is not remarkable save for the seasonal decorations: jack-o-lanterns replaced by a Christmas tree; and a hanging marker proclaiming, "If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever." How better could any of us want to be remembered, really? I am watching for valentines. 

I could describe so many...but really I want to share it visually. I invite you to a slide show; just click on the link below. But mostly, if you are able, I invite you to visit in person. Give me a call if you want company. I would love to be present as you discover for yourself this remarkable garden.

Oakwood Cemetery