Book Review: and I shall have some peace there by Margaret Roach

I like biographical books describing someones sudden change in life, travel to new places, or how they deal with new environments and experiences.  There are many great books about such challenges, from very introspective, to nature writing, to childhood tragedies.

So, when I picked up this book, I thought it would be about something similar, how a person did find peace on her own little dirt road.

Margaret Roach was an editor at Martha Stewart Living for many years, and lived a fast and stressed Manhattan life.  On the weekends she drove up to a cottage she owned a few hours north of New York City, where she tended a garden on a slope near the Berkshire mountains.

In the book she describes how she quits her job, leaves the city, and moves up to the cottage (hmm, I just realize that I have no idea how big her house is or how it looks), to live there full-time.  This is when the trouble starts, both in reality for her, and with the book.  She never describes WHY she left, what it was she wanted to get away from.  It is just very vague. Same thing when she is in her cottage, WHY is she lost and feel invaluable?  Her writing is great, but the content is fragmented, and there is hint after hint, but very little data about her (except she needs to point out several times that she is very petite and only a size 2, and a vegetarian for 30 years... it gets a bit tiresome).  I wish that she had described the situations and challenges better.  After reading the book I can't even picture her garden or house, nor the landscape it is situated in. I can picture many of her snakes though...  It is just not descriptive in a sense where you can understand, it is just fragments, like specks of paint on an old T-shirt.

She leaves her job at the start of the American recession in 2008, while the health care debate is going full steam and we are about to elect a new president.  The world is full of war, environmental problems, health care issues, unemployment disasters, and stock market crashes.  But all she cares about is to move to her little cottage, tend her garden and be alone.  That is all well, but she never seems to realize that she is incredibly lucky by obviously having amassed a fortune big enough to buy such a place, not work for pay, and still be able to have health insurance, enough food, and all others of life necessities. This is not how most people's lives are, so if she want us to understand her personal challenges and life story she better have to describe them better because most people would LOVE to be in her position. But, I have a feeling she thought that writing this book would be a great way to get some more money (she says so), so the content of the book was less important than that it was a book, period.

Maybe many upper-class women at a similar age (50s) can connect with her feeling of being lost in the world, but I cannot.  Is that because my world is filled with valuable things such as education of a new generation and research that improves society, knowledge and people around me...?  I can see that if you work at Martha Stewart Living how mostly caring about wall color, having a perfect geranium, and collecting green glass could get tiresome in the end.  Tiresome and maybe with a loss of doing things that really matter in the world.  But the solution to this would not be to create a garden just for you, but to do something that matters and brings change to many, I would think.  But Margaret Roach did not. There is a lack of balance here, and the lack of balance consist throughout the whole book.

She really lives a luxurious life in that she could make this decision and spend 2 years gardening and write a book...  but she seems totally unaware of what is going on in other people's lives and the world and is 100% self-centered.  In fact, after reading the book I must say that she portrays herself as very selfish.  Many people would love to have a garden they could spend all their time in, but few can realize this dream.  Margaret does, and she opens up her garden to the public a few times a year, but the rest of the time it is mostly her and the garden and a few friends.  The worst things that seem to happen is when a gray fox family moves into the garden and starts a communal fox bathroom in a corner, which she fights day after day with coyote urine. She comes through as a spoiled Manhattan rich girl, unfortunately.  I am sure she is a nice person, but her self-centered focus gets tiresome early on in the book.

Her deep fear of snakes is a theme in the book, as is her longing for 'being someone'.  So, there are snakes, and I am afraid of them too, and eventually she deals with them and manages her fear.  But everything is so personal, in the sense that you get the feeling she thinks the frogs are there for her, and her only.

People love her book, and her blog (which is equally self-promoting and selfish, I think), but I got rather annoyed.  If you want to make the world a better place, then go out and do something about it.  Make small changes in your local community if you like, you don't have to join the Peace Corps.  It is a great way to feel important and valuable, if you become valuable to others and creative positive change. (All Margaret seems to have done is to flip burgers on the grill once in a while at a local community picnic.)  But hunkering down behind a garden gate that you rarely open more than once a week and become an hermit living on past earned money, it is luxury and not a challenge.  Well, maybe a mental challenge, of course, depending on how your mind works.  I don't like to critize people that write biographies and stories like this, but I have to say that this book rubbed me so much the wrong way.

Summary: Rich girl moves to country where she writes and gardens, full of self-pity, selfishness, fear of snakes, and in the end realizes she is somebody. Grade: C (but the writing is good).
(Note: I am sure Margaret Roach is a nice person, and this review is only based on the book. But if you write books like this you set yourself up to get criticized, especially if you turn out to be as navel-gazing as portrayed in this book.)

Walk the High Line

On southern Manhattan on the eastern side of the island in the neighborhoods of Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea and the Meatpacking District are the remnants of an elevated train line. It was used since the 1930s to get the dangerous freight trains off the street, and shipped in produce, meat and wares to stores, warehouses, and markets in lower Manhattan.  As trucks took over this type of transportation, the High Line because less and less used, with the last train delivering frozen turkeys in the 1980s.  Since then it was abandoned and became an eye sore, until a visionary proposed to make it into an elevated long, narrow park.  Imagine a steam locomotive coming by on that elevated railroad.  It once did...

The High Line is a long narrow park, with gorgeous plantings and many places to sit and ponder the city scapes. The first section opened in 2009, and I walked it a few weeks ago.  Two more sections will open (one just did), and when finished it will run from 34 Street all the way past down 13th Street.  In many places, the High Line is the only real green you can see in this urban landscape.

Right next to the High Line are abandoned old factory and warehouse buildings, inhabited only be pigeons and rats (and maybe some homeless people too). You have the urban history within literally hand's and feet's reach, and you walk the line past in time. 

I love the benches, with shapes inspired by railroad sidings ('sidospår' in Swedish).

You can see New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson River from the High Line.  Tugboats, ships, ferry terminals, they are still there.

Parts of the elevated tracks are wider and have been made into meeting spaces and performance scenes.  Even trees are planted up here. I bet they have a large water bill.

This railroad spur once went into this building to unload cargo, but now it is a wildflower meadow.  What a juxtaposition with the industrial, natural and architectural all meeting at one point.

You are not allowed to walk on the tracks, except here. I love 'frogs'.

You can walk under people's bedrooms.  And underneath the High Line is a Bier Garten.

The High Line is really an amazing place.  It brings people outside, and it is green snake oasis in a environment of hot (in the summer) or cold (in the winter) concrete, metal, and glass.  It elevates the whole neighborhood, from just regular dirty New York (with fancy bars and stores mixed in) so something that is awesome. The person that pulled this off and got this done, has done amazing things for southern Manhattan.  Finally some green is back on the island.

I didn't see one weed on my hour-long walk.  There are gardeners everywhere and the plantings are impeccable, made to look natural but with horticultural varieties and species. It is gorgeous, designed, and honestly, not naturally planted, but who cares?  This is really like painting with living plants, and I love it too. And after all, the plants are growing on a railroad track, in the air, on a man made structure.  I was wondering what would happen if you stopped weeding and watering - probably just what happened when the railroad was abandoned in the 1980s.  Weeds and trees came in, and now they are all gone.  Removed for more organized plants and less dirty, less chaotic plant life.

Many more photos from my visit here.

Stamp of the Day: Gräslök (chives)

The Swedish name for chives if you translate it literally means 'grass onion' and that is what the leaves look like.  Bunches of tiny linear leaves from tufted plants. Of course the plants have no nodes, a tell-tale oniony smell, and very ungrasslike purple flower heads, but otherwise, just an onion grass.  Chives grow wild in Sweden, and here in New Jersey you can grow them as a deer-proof garden plant.  Well, I do, but nobody else has figured this out yet.  Chives really should be more popular here, it is a great plant both for its taste and looks. (Latin name - Allium schoenoprasum)

The Wood garden in Wij

Last weekend we went on a car trip to Wij trädgårdar (gardens). It´s a lovely inspiring place, a garden with large influences of swedish nature. One such example is "Skogens trädgård" designed by Ulf Nordfjell. He is also the winner of Chelsea Garden Show 2009.



This is a part of his northern garden inspired part,

and high grasses stand tall against windbattered wooden walls.

In a secluded area a lake is reflecting the trees.

More photos are here

Book review: Second nature by Michael Pollan

I have just finished the book Second Nature by Michael Pollan, a writer famous for his books Botany of Desire and An Omnivore's Dilemma (books I have yet to finish). I was really eager to read this book, written about 10 years ago, but it was a disappointment. Not in the sense that it was bad writing, in fact, it is excellently written, but the thoughts are hard to follow and there are a lot of words and not much analysis. I had to push myself to finish the latter half of the book. But if you are into garden philosophy, and are not too easily bored, then read it!

He talks about things like 'what is wilderness?', 'the American lawn', and the feel in us to control nature. The title of the book comes from his suggestion that a garden is a kind of second nature. There are plenty of historical references and discussion of the difference between American and English gardening mentality, which is quite interesting. The problem is that in the end you are left without any conclusion - it is like a long evening discussion over one or two bottles of wine and the next morning you don't remember what you decided or if you decided anything at all.

He got a lot of criticism for the book, both from ecologists and gardeners. For example, the review in the Library Journal reads:
"Pollan, executive editor of Harper's and self-proclaimed amateur gardener, has written a book that is by turns charming and annoying, insightful and shallow, droll and banal. His collection of a dozen essays arranged by season is based on his experiences over a seven-year period in his Connecticut garden, along with vignettes from garden history. Unfortunately, Pollan's text is characterized by dubious and unsupported generalities, self-conscious humor, and extended, labored metaphors, and his lack of gardening authority dooms the book to superficiality. Experienced gardeners and devotees of garden literature will find little here that is original."

A few quotes from the book itself:
"Without the editing of our perceptions, nature might prove unbearable." (think - the killing of a mouse by foxes, heartbeats of owls, and suffering during droughts)

"Suburban America has been laid out to look best from the perspective not of its inhabitants, but of the motorist. " (He is referring to the omnipresent lawns, lack of fences and hedges, flower borders along the house and the vegetable garden hidden in the back, and I completely agree with this.)

"Domination, translated into suburban or rural terms, means lawn. A few acres of Kentucky bluegrass arranged in a buffer zone between house and landscape, a no-man's-land patrolled weekly with a rotary blade. [...] A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."

The last comment reminds me of the culture of fear here - fear of ticks, fear of snakes, fear of nature, fear of all things unknown, fear of immigrants, fear of terrorism, and so on, and on. Most people around here seem to think that only if you are a conformist and not wander out in nature or into the wild world, you are safe... Of course, nature and the world has a tendency to get into your life anyway, it is just part of their nature.

With American gardens, here are my pet peeves:
* too much lawn!
* no pretty fences along roads
* too little vegetable and herb gardening
* too much leaf blowing
* too many gasoline-powered tools at dinner time
* too many deers and groundhogs
* mulch vulcanoes around trees
* ridiculous landscaping using non-local stone, colored plastic mulch, and plastic edging between borders and lawn
* pink flamingos and stepping stones made out of concrete and bought at HomeDepo...

Also, personally, I think large, hybrid roses are completely overrated, hummingbirds are amazing, and I would love to have a pond for frogs and dragonflies. Anyone want to come here and help me dig?

(The photo is from my idea of a garden, a livable place for people, plants, and creatures and pretty for all. Photo by LS)

Post number 150 - Garden update

You come home from vacation and are looking forward to see all the things that have grown so well in the sunny and rainy weather, and what do you get? Well, there are large lilies that are flowering, yellow like sunflowers, that never made it before O.K. and I improved the deer fence. The hostas are untouched as well, so we have for the first summer managed to keep the deer out most of the time. But we have an inside enemy as well, a fat little brown thing - THE GROUND HOG (or HOGS, might be several).

And the hot dog (a fitting alternative name), seemed to have had a party in the vegetable garden. Sigh. It got in somehow, probably by chewing chicken wire, and ate all the beans and bean plants, most of the beets and swiss chard (mangold), all peas, all parsley leaves, and a lot of lettuce. That nasty thing! But we had the answer. In an old hardware store in Vermont we found the real thing - sulfur dioxide smoke bombs you put down in their burrows! These cartridges are appropriately named too: THE GIANT DESTROYER - the super gasser. (Remember, this is after trying to trap the groundhog and it managed to get the bait out of the trap and snap it shut after it left, we are not dealing with a normal hog here).

But to find the holes to the burrow, we needed to clean out the barn, since it has a fondness of digging under the barn, and especially under walls and beams. So PP and I got a lot of junk out of the barn, and found 3 burrow holes, plus the one in the flower bed that the kids found a few weeks ago. Down went the smoke bombs, the holes were covered over with dirt, and then we waited. Lots of smoke, no fire, and no groundhogs to be seen. Since then. This was yesterday, and this morning, there were no traces of animals trying to dig themselves out either. So we hope this is it! We are also reinforcing the gate to the vegetable garden with stainless steel, plastic lumber and electric wire, just in case.

Gardening is really a fight with nature, not something that is easy. Michael Pollan writes really about this in his book Second Nature, which I am reading right now. He got mad at a groundhog too, and ended up pouring gasoline down a burrow and then lightning it, only to burn off his eye brows or something like that, and not killing the groundhog. Maybe he needed the Super gasser made in Iowa. I have checked, the cartridges are legal here, and they have more (and bigger) at our local Farmers Co-op. (And not as smelly as rotten herring, suggested groundhog remedy by AnS.) The groundhogs are common, and can live anywhere they want, except in my garden. They are really just vegetable destroyers in a cutesy furry package!

There are some good garden news too - we have lots and lots of perennial arugula, and our concord grape vine has loads of grapes, which will be ready in maybe a month. Our corn (mixed in with asparagus, long story), are 4-5 feet tall now, but not flowering yet. Tomato plants and peppers are doing good, and our inedible celery is 10 feet tall and flowering. Thyme is flourishing, lavender flowering, and soon we will have lots of tomatillos. I have harvested over 25 fresh garlic heads today, and I am not sure what we will make of it yet. Garlic-infused groundhog, anyone?