Lake house, December 29th, 2009
It's So Peaceful In The Country. Sung by Mildred Bailey (1907-1951), one of my favorite singers.
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Jacarandas in Bloom
4 hours ago
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Amaryllis (1910) by Piet Mondrian, Watercolor on paper, 39 x 49 cm (15 3/8 x 19 3/8 in), Private collection
Red Amaryllis with Blue Background. (c. 1907) by Piet Mondrian, Watercolor on paper, 18 3/8 x 13" (46.5 x 33 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
"It was Sebastian's idea. Part of his life-long war against the herbaceous border"
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The recent well-reviewed production of A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM (I didn't make it, sigh) reminded me of another Tennessee William's play, Suddenly Last Summer. This is perhaps his most garden-y work, though it's not really about gardening at all. In its movie form, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal and starring Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, it is indeed gay, gay, gay. In fact, even in the watered down 1958 screen version, the film is a big, sloppy, overbaked slice of mid-20th century closeted gay life when everything was done with a nudge and a wink. Not like today where the gay folk are so boring, dutifully getting married, raising children and becoming mayors of major American cities (in Texas no less!)
But the film is well worth watching, during these quiet days at the end of the year, despite the heavy subject matter. Its historic camp value and the vivid performances alone recommend it—minus Clift who seems drugged. I include it here primarily for the flamboyantly primordial sets by Oliver Messel (nudge and wink) depicting Mrs. Venable's New Orleans garden. They are "like the dawn of creation," as Hepburn announces. (More shots below)
Batten down the hatches, and if you are sensitive to heavy-handed symbolism and stagey poetic pronouncements then you might want to sit back from the screen since things might get a bit sloshy. I'll just curl up right here next to my Night-Blooming Dementia Praecox and watch it with you.
You can start viewing it from the beginning here. Or rent it from Netflix here or buy it from Amazon here.
Oliver Messel's set design for Suddenly Last Summer
Oliver Messel by George Hoyningen-Huene (1929)
The Christmas tree shakedown
Did you know your Christmas tree may be mechanically shaken to get rid of cute little amphibious hitchhikers? I didn't. This is one of those fun fact stories that will help bridge uncomfortable gaps in conversation at any upcoming family holiday gatherings. Read more about it here.
Christmas trees showing up with live 'ornaments' (AP)
Sissinghurst after the ghosts have gone to bed
For the past many weeks, I have been chained (or at least bound with a fragile and only too easily broken string) at my desk trying to meet my book deadline. So I apologize for my infrequent posts. I will have so many great gardens and imagery from my book to show you in 2010.
My book is on sustainable design in the smaller garden. The topic of this post, as you can see, is a grandly famous Kentish garden that is neither small nor probably very sustainable. Sissinghurst comes out of another age. But while searching for some reference for my writing, I came across these photographs I took there several years ago. Thinking they were lost to the digital ether, I was very happy to find them. They so vividly remind me of a wonderful visit, gracious hosts and the interesting things that happened to me during my brief hours there and I wanted to share them with you.
The view through the tower gate
I was working for Domino Magazine at the time (do you remember magazines? weren't they nice?) Deborah, my editor, suggested that while on a London shoot that I should visit Sarah Raven, one of our magazine contributors and friends. Sarah is an author of several wonderful cooking and gardening books and she is married to author Adam Nicolson, the grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West who famously created the gardens there. I was thrilled when Adam and Sarah invited me to stay with them for a night before I went back to New York.
We had a wonderful day. Sarah picked me up at the train station and we went buzzing around buying things to cook together. Adam gave me an evening tour of the fantastic garden, which I had never visited before. Dinner was simple and delicious. I learned that boiled quail eggs rolled in celery salt make a great appetizer. We talked for a long time afterwards in front of an ancient fireplace so huge that Sarah could actually sit under its mantel on a stool. Tired and a little drunk from several whiskies I went up to my bedroom quite late.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by voices, several loud voices seemingly coming through my open window from the direction of the courtyard. I half-consciously thought they were produced by some deranged family next door and rolled over to sleep. Even Sissinghurst can't pick its neighbors I thought ruefully.
Shortly before sunrise, which came early there around 4:45 am, I heard the shouters again. This time, annoyed, I stumbled out of bed to see who could possibly be so noisy and running around outside at that hour.
Just as I stuck my head out of the window the shouting stopped, almost leaving an echo to bounce between the various buildings. I was trying to imagine what I had heard. It sounded so realistic, like two or three people hailing each other between distant parts of the garden. I waited to hear more but nothing came, so I started to head back under the covers. Just then I was struck by the beautiful view of the golden light starting to come over the horizon and into the misty garden. Bolstered by a dawn chorus of birds I thought to myself, "You dummy, don't go back to sleep get your camera and go see the garden."
The sunken Moat Walk
I splashed water on my face and tried as silently as possible to get dressed and head outside. A marvelously unpopulated Sissinghurst greeted me tinted by that radiant English light that we garden editors dream about and so rarely get. Wandering alone, I could see how the garden had been planted among the foundations of the Elizabethan castle and sense how it might have been for Adam and his siblings to grow up there in a place where the roles of indoor and outdoors seem to have been reversed. Here the garden is the centerpiece to a collection of former outbuildings turned into one unconventional collective "house". Adam writes beautifully about his life there and the long history of the place in a new book Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History. It's available now at Amazon.uk and will be published here by Viking in May 2010. Pre-order it here.
Several hours later, I was rushing to Heathrow still in a state of stunned amazement. Thank you Adam and Sarah for your hospitality and continued friendship.
The hot colors of the Cottage Garden (above and below)
Surprising long views open up at every turn
Early summer beds in the Rose Garden
Looking back at the Tower from the Rose Garden (above and below)
Remnants of the old castle walls divide the garden
My bedroom window was the open one on the left
The good kind of gladiolas
The Courtyard where the voices were heard
The poppy problem
Listen to yesterday's story above or here at npr.org.
Peters has interesting things to say about how heroin finances organized terror groups, the danger cheap, readily available heroin poses to a new influx of American troops, and the "chemical jihad" in which as she reports certain Islamist gangs want to turn western infidels into a nation of addicts.
Listen to Gretchen Peters previous segment here at npr.org where she explains how Afghanistan provides 90 percent of the world's heroin supply.
There is so much that we don't know about this complex situation, including our own government's involvement with opium poppy production over the past decades. Only thing I know, we can't blame the poor innocent plant for the problem.
Disney gardens
Some of my earliest garden memories are of the fantastical cartoon flowers in Walt Disney movies. I especially loved the talking plants in Alice in Wonderland and all the different varieties of dancing flowers in Fantasia. As you can imagine from this revelation, I wasn't of much use on the sports field...
On the occasion of the upcoming spring release of Tim Burton's new live action version for Disney which looks like it might be pretty marvy (pictures above and trailer here). I wanted to remind you of how great Disney's original mid-20th-century animation really was. I can almost taste the combination of salty popcorn and lemonheads now. Enjoy and have a good weekend!
Time lapse mushrooms (Thank you Maggie)
5 days, 18 hours and 25 minutes condensend into one minute. We all know what they look like so please keep comments on a mature level.
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Classical Landscape—Illustration to Johnson's 'Rasselas' (1798) by Thomas de Thomon, The Courtauld Gallery, London
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