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rainy day musings
10:23 am
Well, they say the rain’s going to continue right through the weekend and maybe up until next weekend. Be careful what you wish for, eh?
I guess it’s as good a time as any to talk a little bit about the Fens, where my garden is. I’ve been meaning to give a little background on it, anyway.
To me the Fenway Victory Gardens is the ultimate community garden. And a slice of history, to boot. it’s the only remaining “victory garden” from WWII, established by FDR as a response to wartime rationing, to encourage Americans on the home-front to grow their own vegetables. Even before that, the Fenway was a part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, a ring of parks and public spaces that together form a sort of greenbelt for Boston:
Olmsted’s original vision has been sadly compromised, and history has not been particularly kind to the Fenway neighborhood, in my opinion. Yes, it has its charms, but the grand boulevard that once led to it and connected it to the rest of the Back Bay was long ago sacrificed to traffic expediencies. The damage the Mass Pike, the highways, overpasses, underpasses, shortcuts and expressways, have done to the neighborhoods of Boston is incalculable. Like a lot of American cities, it has sacrificed its neighborhoods to the automobile, so that, as Richard Sennett says in Flesh & Stone, which I’ve quoted elsewhere, “we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them.” Not so great for those who live in them, but too bad, right?
I mean, take a look at these two photographs from the same perspective, the first from 1926 and the second from ‘91:
This area was once a European-style boulevard that integrated human-scale buildings and pedestrian-maneuverable walks with wide, automobile-accommodating streets. What you notice about the first picture is that Commonwealth Ave., which is pictured, is not only a throughway. It is a place to be in itself. In the picture at right it’s not. The overpass there is a formidable barrier now delineating neighborhoods in the city. Homeless people live under it now, as well. It has become a sort of no-man’s land.
The fracturing of Boston in this way–the dead-ends and empty, unusable spaces–can be found not only here, of course, but all over. And there is almost always a big, ugly barrier dividing one side of the tracks or the highway from the other. A small part of the impetus for the Big Dig was the recognition that the North End, and the Harbor, had been completely cut off from the rest of the city, for the sake of the automobile, for the sake of those who want to get through the city quickly, to the detriment of those who actually live in it.
This is part of modernization, of course, and we have to live with choices made before our time due to visions of what our city should be that we may not share today. But there are still fragments of older visions, too, and the Back bay Fens is a part of what remains of one of those, and a noble and worthy one, at that.
5/12/06
Ravaged
10:48 am
4/22/06
what you see on your knees
10:04 am
Now, see, here’s what I’m talking about. Gardeners have great faith, but it’s not for nothing. Yes, you’ve got to believe, there’s no doubt. But gardeners are also big on proof. And here it is.
I mean, you look at the snapshot, above, of my garden (roughly the Northeast corner of it, at least), taken yesterday, and, like I said, it appears, to unschooled eyes to be, well, mostly a dirtpit. But gardeners spend a good deal of time, like all the faithful, on their knees, where they see what the naked eye doesn’t see.
Par exemple:
I took these shots yesterday, too. You’ve got your bleeding heart there at the top. And a peony next. The purple flowers are flox, and they’re actually quite small. Then a forget-me-not. And some rhododendron buds. And finally a tulip.
You can see it’s not a chichi exotic affair, just your ordinary garden-variety garden. Still as gorgeous now up close as I have faith it will be from a distance in the not-too-distant future.
4/20/06
Ultra Gamma Grow Rays
12:02 pm
Well, there has been a lot of activity in the garden this past week.
They turned on the water in the Fens Monday, which will make things much easier. I sowed some grass seed the other day, before we had water, in the hopes that all those cries of rain all weekend would result in at least a drop or two, but we got nothin’. Nada.
And then, you know, the thing about birds–I got nothing against them, mind you–but you have to admit, they’re greedy. You toss out that grass seed and ten minutes later there are about a hundred and fifty of them feasting it. Do they visit when there’s no grass seed to gorge themselves on? No. It’s just rude, is what it is.
I took the picture above of one of the magnolia blossoms on this fabulous tree in the garden next to mine. When I was in the garden last weekend, which is when it really started to pop, literally hundreds of people filed through to see it over the course of the day.
They would look at my neighbor Rob’s garden, where the magnolia is, and just marvel at how lovely the whole thing is, and then they would stroll down the lane to mine and look pityingly at me in my dirt-pit, and walk on without a word.
Well, I’m used to it. It’s a little like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, when he’s freaking out, making that model of Devil’s Tower, and nobody but him knows what’s going on. That’s how I feel sometimes. My friends are cool. They drop by, and they’re like, “um, yeah, I can, um, see it, heh heh.” But I can sort of tell they can’t quite see it like I can see it right now–I mean, I see it. But come back in July and you’ll see it, too.
That’s the funny thing right now. You go to your garden and you see fellow gardeners in theirs, and they’re just standing there for the longest time, staring at it. A lot of it is just sending your “grow rays” out. But I’m afraid it’s a little like the old watched pot.
But it’s coming along…
In Bloom
9:20 am
