Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments : www.terrain.org Issue No. 18 : Spring/Summer 2006 : Garden Gate Theme PDF Version. View full version online at www.terrain.org. Contents Columns • Guest Editorial: “Giving Up the Garden” by Carleen Madigan Perkins, Storey Publishing • The Literal Landscape: “Spirit, Fallen” by Simmons B. Buntin, Editor/Publisher, Terrain.org • What a Fool Believes…: “The Constant Anti-Gardener” by Todd Ziebarth, Editor, Terrain.org • Bull Hill: “Professor Naess’s Garden” by David Rothenberg, Editor, Terra Nova • View from the Summit: “The Labor of Our Fruits” by Catherine Cunningham, Editor, Terra Nova Interview • “Defensible Boundaries” Terrain.org interviews Bruce Babbitt, Former Governor and Interior Secretary UnSprawl Case Study • NorthWest Crossing in Bend, Oregon ARTerrain Gallery • Twelve native animal and plant photographs by photographer Michael D. Weber Poetry • Three poems by Suzanne Frischkorn • One poem by Brian Swann • One poem by Melissa S. Stein • Four poems by Simmons B. Buntin • One poem by Patricia Smith Ranzoni • Two poems by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee • One poem by Philip Fried • One poem by Lois Beebe Hayna • Twenty-one poems, with artwork by Andrew Rush, excerpted from Voice of the Borderlands, by Drum Hadley Essays • “If you Love It… Why Nature-Loving Gardeners Should Learn to Let Go” by Flora Cordis Johnson • “Working Wilderness: The Malpai Borderlands Group and the Future of the Western Range” by Nathan F. Sayre • “Greening Up the Slackers: In Search of the Gen-X Garden” by Scott Calhoun • “The Death and Life of an American Garden” by Barnet Schecter • “War of the Roses” by Fleda Brown • “The Genius of Kaaterskill Falls” by John P. O’Grady • “Experiential Layers of the City” by Bruce F. Donnelly Issue No. 18 : Spring/Summer 2006 : Garden Gate Theme 1 Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments : www.terrain.org Contents Fiction • “Shillington Lilies” by Deborah Fries • “Precious” by Andrew Wingfield • “Hunter’s Point” by Martin Ott • “Chicago on the Web” by Scott Spires • “Fish Story” by Tiel Aisha Ansari Articles • “Cultivating Natural and Cultural Landscapes through Conservation Subdivision Design: A Narrative Slideshow” by Randall Arendt • “America’s First Rare Plant: The Franklin Tree” by Lucy Rowland • “Sustainability Comes to the Canadian Prairie: Lessons and Caveats from the Town of Okotoks, Alberta” by Ernest J. Yanarella • “Butterfly Gardening with Native Plants of the Desert Southwest” by Karen Hillson Reviews • “Poetry in Context, in Craft” Simmons B. Buntin reviews Murder Ballads, poems by Jake Adam • “The Human Hand of Eden” Todd Ziebarth reviews Imagining Eden: Connecting Landscapes by Lyle Gomes • “Desire as Beauty” Terrain.org reviews Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites by Susan Cerulean Issue No. 18 : Spring/Summer 2006 : Garden Gate Theme 2 Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments : www.terrain.org Guest Editorial by Carleen Madigan Perkins : Editor, Storey Publishing Giving Up the Garden One of my first gardens was in the urban front yard of a three-family house in a scruffy neighborhood outside of Boston. Any experienced gardener wandering by would have thought I had lost it completely. (Fortunately, the garden-society ladies didn’t stroll the avenues of our humble town with any frequency. “Oh, dear,” they might whisper to each other from behind gloved hands. “Can you imagine putting a garden in such a sorry spot?”) The house was in rough shape, and the yard was even rougher. But to me that was exactly the point. The Trillium erectum thrives in undisturbed yard had been sorely neglected and if I were going to woodlands, as it reportedly takes seven years to bloom from seed. walk by it everyday, it needed to be improved. Photo by Jim Stasz, courtesy USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database. It was a challenge. Every round with a spade into the compacted, dusty soil brought up shards of glass, Mexican candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and bits of plastic drinking straws. The roots of a nearby Norway maple (Acer platanoides, a notoriously shallow-rooted weed tree) permeated the surface of the soil, and monopolized any available water. A fierce stand of Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) had staked a claim at the edge of the yard, and needed to be whacked back at least twice a year. But I saw myself as the savior of this particular plot of ground. I would valiantly garden on! I ordered a load of compost and dug it in. I watered (and watered) and mulched and weeded. There would be a garden in that front yard. The unbelievable thing was that the plants I forced into that poor, pathetic soil actually grew… kind of. They were much-diminished versions of their ideal selves, but in the spring, there were green leaves and blooming flowers where before there had been only tufts of grass and a thick crop of bindweed seedlings. My time in the front yard also gave me an opportunity to meet the gardener next door (a friendly old Italian man who grew vegetables in his back yard and peonies out front), and sometimes to bump into our downstairs neighbor’s girlfriend, who could be seen sneaking out the bedroom window early in the morning. A few gardens later, I moved to the Hilltowns of western Massachusetts, a largely forgotten rural area in the Berkshire The fruits of cranberrybush Mountains. “Flatlanders,” as we call them, have told me that this part viburnum offer a feast for birds in late winter. of the state looks like most folks’ notion of Vermont—old farms, Photo by Carleen Madigan Perkins. maple sugaring operations: a Rockwellesque New England feel Issue No. 18 : Spring/Summer 2006 : Garden Gate Theme 3 Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments : www.terrain.org (Norman Rockwell lived not far from here, so the designation is not entirely inaccurate). Certainly there are gardeners here, but one has the sense that much of the land is either too rocky to be gardened easily, and perhaps better used for grazing sheep or dairy cows. I lived in a broken-down farmhouse on a dirt road lined with majestic but decrepit 200-year-old sugar maples. There were still working farms on our hill, mixed with vacation homes and more sugar shacks than seemed economically viable for such a sparsely populated area. Throughout that first winter, I walked along the back roads of the Hilltowns, admiring the persistent, papery leaves of the beech trees as they rustled in the cold wind, and wondered what kind of gardens I would see when the ground thawed in April. Goldenrod provides reliable color in gardens and When spring finally came, I began to realize that I had natural areas in late summer and early autumn. been walking among resting jewels all winter. The edge Photo by Al Schneider, courtesy USDA-NRCS of the woodlands was lit up by the creamy white PLANTS Database. blossoms of hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides). Growing along the roadsides, in gravel and not much else, were bluets (Houstonia caerulea) and yellow trout lilies (Erythronium americanum). In gullies and other spots of wet ground were Jack-in- the-pulpits (Arisaema triphyllum). Later in the spring, the local pond would be encircled by the rose- pink blossoms of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia). What struck me most, though, were the dark blossoms of purple trillium (T. erectum)—three-petaled ephemeral plants that bloom in April and May, then go dormant for the summer. I had only read about them, and thought they were very rare. Trilliums need seven years to bloom from seed—something the severely manicured landscapes of the Boston suburbs were unlikely to offer. In the Hilltowns, though, trilliums were everywhere— along the road, at the woodland edge of a sugarbush, in the meadows and old farmyards of abandoned houses. When I searched the streambanks for fiddleheads and hunted for mushrooms in the spring-leaved forest, I began to watch carefully where I stepped, for fear of leaving a trail of smashed trillium stalks behind me. Issue No. 18 : Spring/Summer 2006 : Garden Gate Theme 4 Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments : www.terrain.org When my husband and I bought our own house in the Hilltowns the following spring, I was so busy painting, unpacking, and learning about the inner workings of a septic system, I had very little time to garden. The plants I had brought with me (some of them remnants from that ill-fated urban yard, repeatedly dug up and schlepped from one garden to the next) were hastily heeled into the ground around the house. “I’ll fix up a better spot for them later,” I thought. I unintentionally did what every garden planner says you should and most people never do: spend an entire season observing the land around you. White birches at Bear Swamp Reservation, Ashfield, Mass. Photo by Carleen Madigan Perkins. What I saw almost made me bury my trowel for good. In the spring, there were trillium seedlings everywhere. We couldn’t decide where to put the compost heap, because it seemed like wherever we turned, there were those eager young plants, just waiting for a chance to bloom. Lining the shoulder of the road in front of our house, there were packs of trout lilies. By late summer, goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) and Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium fistulosum) filled the edge of the wetlands, and asters (A. novae-angliae) took on the role of embellishing the roadsides. Autumn brought the famous New England fall foliage, a slow progression of turning leaves, an elegy of death among the trees. What the leaf-peepers miss, in their eagerness to get all their kicks in one snapshot, is that the progression continues beyond the length of an afternoon bus ride and deeper into the forest.