A funny thing is happening in my mourning garden. In between the garlic and the strawberries, a stout rainbow chard volunteer has emerged. These three edibles are for me associated with Thom's Olivebridge garden. He was probably best known for his garlic and then the Honeoye strawberries which appeared from May into June and would attract neighbors for basket after basket after basket. Well, he had a reputation for potatoes, cabbage and tomatoes too but more on those later. Chard was a more intimate crop, not usually shared with others but sauteed up with olive oil, good salt and fistfuls of sliced garlic for summer dinners at his house.
When I met him, I fancied myself a bit of a gourmand however, I quickly realized I'd been deceiving myself with years of copious amounts of Stellensboch white wine and other libations because, when asked one night to help him chop Swiss chard for dinner, I was at a loss. What to do with this hard midrib running down the center of the leafy bit? Well, Thom showed me how to prepare chard, kale and collards but also how to coax them from the earth. 'Chard will make you strong," he said one time early on after giving me a bouquet of it.
not chard but red Russian kale
He was also quite fond of handing me arrangements of asparagus - usually around my birthday. That's how he'd mark the asparagus' arrival - 'in time for your birthday, Karina.' By the end of asparagus season, I'd find piles of them slowly wilting in his lower refrigerator bins. "I can't look at them anymore," he'd say. Ah, the joys of the abundance of eating with the seasons on your own farm.
So now, the single chard volunteer has decided to grow itself in between the garlic and strawberries and next to the solar powered stained glass orb that glows and marks the garden at night.
This year my birthday came with several gift cards - thanks to my sister - to Adam's Fairacre Farms. Somewhere along the way I'd mentioned that Adams has a fair selection of black plants and she plied me with a nice budget to chose black plants for the Mourning Garden. One of the things I was thinking about that day at Adams was ground cover. What to fill in the spaces and gaps between showy plants?
And then I saw an entire table of red cabbage seedlings which have beautiful silver gray purple-ly leaf. Cabbage. Yes. Of course. Cabbage to honor Thom's talent for kraut. He'd concocted it one year in a little crock and we'd eat it - piled high on black Angus hot dogs for him and faux dogs for me. After a little research, he started drinking the kraut juice for health reasons and adding whole peeled garlic cloves and red and green jalapeno peppers to the brine. Then came the rave reviews from family and friends and up went a whole field of green cabbage.
Another time, after I asked him to try his hand at sweet potatoes, he ordered up some slips from sown south and covered entire rows of earth with clear plastic to heat up the cold northern soil. All that work and we only harvested a basket of sweet potatoes. Something didn't work quite right. Either the soil temperature didn't get hot enough or it got cold again too soon or maybe the critters got to them but sweet potatoes never appeared in his garden again.
This season in my garden, 'Blackie' ornamental sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas 'Blackie) is planted throughout my garden intermingling with red cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata), an easy to grow edible that enjoys cool weather - perfect for the Catskills.
Other color appropriate edibles which are currently establishing: purple-leafed sage (Salvia) and dwarf purple basil (Ocimum basilicum). Nasturtiums are here again this year - how can any summer garden, edible, mourning or not, deny itself the old-fashioned romance of a heaping pile of nasturtium vines and flowers? And then there is newcomer marjoram (Origanum majorana), which I suspect is related to oregano from its Latin name, and keeps company with the creeping thyme and the lemon thyme in a hot and dry section of the Mourning Garden.
Mountain springs are notoriously fickle. 70 degree days followed by 20 degree nights. Recently, on a 70 degree evening with a full moon hanging over the Bushnell Creek, I sat on my garden path with Bella. We both just breathed in the warm air. And stared at the moon.
Here it was. The warm weather carrying with it scents and sounds of last spring when Thom was still alive and fussing in his own garden where the temperatures were always 5 to 10 degrees warmer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he would say, the tropics of Olivebridge.
Lately, all I've wanted to do is lay myself down on the warming earth in my garden and fall asleep under the moon. Pressing my cheek into the soil feels like it will bring me closer to Thom. After all, somewhere under me is a root creeping along in the dark, through all of the bacteria and microorganisms, that originates in a garlic clove or a strawberry plant from his garden.
So, on a sunny, warm Monday this week, the basic black went down in the fenced edible garden. The black canvass for the plants. Dark brown compost for the interior garden beds and mulch for the walkways and exterior garden beds.
All the rage of late, black mulch is sharp, highlighting the lime green of the emerging daylilys, garlic, iris, daffodils and chives - the only things of any height growing in late April in Zone 4 Shandaken. Here are there, purple green rosettes of monarda and anise hyssop lie close to the soil, as if knowing that there still are several nights of freezing temperatures waiting and they'd better huddle low to keep warm. Tonight is one of them. 27 degrees.
I wonder, will this spring ever get warm and stay warm?
The first two plants went in - both of them clematis.
Earnest Markham.
and, Jackmanii.
Vines with large vibrant purple and red blooms to offset the black and reach for the sky. Or the heavens. Whatever you want to call it.
And because tonight is forecast to be 27 degrees, both tender young vines will be covered with plastic to protect them from the spring frost. I notice how my spirit expands and contracts with the temperatures. When it's warm, I open, unfurl and breathe a little easier and with each suddenly cold night, the thermals and curse words come out.
Well, the Buddhists have a saying: There is no cure for hot. There is no cure for cold.
Black. The color of death. Goths. And cocktail dresses. In mourning, people wear black. When someone dies, black is just black, not new. Not old. Just is. Some, wear black for a year. Others, like little Italian old ladies, never wear color again. So, when Thom died on January 5th and I was preparing to go to his wake and the funeral mass, I was thinking about black.
Then, I thought about gardens. I create gardens. Thom did too although he referred to his garden as a farm. Four years ago, on a rainy spring day, we kissed in the rain in his garden in Olivebridge.
poppies in Thom's Olivebridge garden
This kiss, not our first - that occurred alongside the Ashokan reservoir - was a sensual, deep, crazy thing. Soulful. Earthy. Delirious. Maybe, it was his damp skin (he was wearing a tank top) pressing against my own damp skin. Perhaps, the rain drew the wet warmth of our kiss outward. Mists rose from the soil. Birdsong floated down from sassafras trees. The sweet, sweet promise of a light, warm spring rain. Probably, it was the insane romance of kissing a new lover in a garden in the rain. Just like they do in the movies.
Heaven!
Well, at least for me.
And maybe, because he called me the next day - still exclaiming surprise and wonder at our rainy day garden kiss - for him too.
Black. Gardens. Mourning.
In January, my grief was sharp. Precise. Gouging out interior space I never knew existed. A day, the month and the year ahead loomed. I knew I wasn't getting around this thing. Grief would be part of my life for a good while. This hurting was going to go on and on, get better at some point, yes, but slowly.
In January, I thought forward a few months to spring when everything I did, and saw and smelled would be reminders of him and me and us. Sowing seeds in the hoophouse he helped construct. First rain that threw the soil's smell up to me, hitting me like a punch to the gut. His German hardneck garlic poking through straw. His 'Anne' ever-bearing golden raspberries breaking green, sending new shoots up throughout my garden from three plants I dug up from his garden. Wood Prairie Farm seed potatoes arriving from Maine. Weeding on hands and knees like he did.
Pulling the straw back from the Honeyoe strawberries that he gifted me - three to a pot - in what was to be the last spring of his life.
In January sometime, I thought about all these things and also about him not being in his garden and maybe, that his garden would mourn. Do gardens mourn the daily absence of their gardener?
Thom's garden
I believe plants are conscious living things. Can they mourn? I don't know. But I could sure dress up my garden to mourn. To miss, yearn, be sad, cry. And - also to go on, and do and plant and express wonder and surprise at a beautiful black plant - like Landini Asiatic Lily whose only purpose for one season was to reflect my process of mourning.
'Landini' black Asiatic Lily
So, I decided to create a mourning garden this year to honor Thom and my memory of him with an array of black, brown, deep purple and dark red annuals, perennials, vines, grasses, edibles and shrubs.
