The Fairy Gardener: Of Fish, and Graves, and Waxy Bells...

by Jim Edminster, Chicago, IL

Let's start this glorious May Day with a seemingly gloomy item from the NY Times:  A woman, Katrina Spade, is trying to start a composting business.  For human bodies.  She has titled her enterprise the Urban Death Project & estimates the whole process would cost about $2500, much less than any burial.  Think about this a bit - I've kidded for years that I wanted to die on the dance floor & be put in my compost heap.  Cemeteries are overcrowded and even crematoria chapels (with niches for ashes in urns) are becoming too full.  Ms Spade will return about 3 cubic feet of perfectly good dirt to the bereaved for the garden or forest or park.  Dust to dust you all.

A couple more sad stories:  Horticulture magazine reports some (unlabeled) flats of flowers have been sprayed with pesticides that attract & poison bees.  Don't plant Callery (aka Bradford) pears anymore:  they have weak crotches which break easily & worse - when blooming they smell like something nasty your dog has rolled in.  (These are ornamental non-bearing plants.)

I hereby establish the "Ivy League Sub-section of the Guerilla Gardening Society."  Lately people have been putting up large windowless, unornamented red brick buildings in the hood.  These buildings need something.  Ivy comes to mind.  My house has ivy & it has ivy berries.  These berries seem to be flying to the bases of these buildings.  Imagine!

Garden notes off the top of my head - I've been planting some spring bulbs & plants.  My yard is fairly dense so I've marked their burial (this is a theme in this essay) spots with bright bendable plastic drinking straws.  The yard looks like it's full of little periscopes.  I've planted 3 packages of borage which is a foot tall herb with fuzzy jade green leaves & bright blue flowers loved by bees ( & it's not poisonous!)  I moved a trial geranium in & out of the house 3 times before it stayed warm enough for it outside.  My wonderful tenant, Brit, (helped by her white husky, Nova) helped me haul my water lilies, cannas, dahlias & amaryllis out of the basement onto the patio.  I will have to pull MANY yellow jewelweed babies out (because their parents loved the yard & multiplied!)  I've never planted a red tulip in my life but a third of my yard's tulips are red.  All my fish are having a good time in the pond.  I have an actual bed frame in the yard (for a flower bed, of course) & I found 2 old cracked but handsome chairs for plant stands.  This garden is going to be a real garden room.  Just took my sasquatch out to put on the garden path - he's my green apeman I found a couple of years ago.  Found some hardy primroses to plant along my garden path . .I have a 3 foot wide, 40 feet long stretch of dirt between my sidewalk and my neighbor's house - it has many blank spots in it.  I'm going hogwild and planting every color of heuchera (coral bells) that I can find in those spots.  I need more shooting stars along the path and where a small oak-leaved hydrangea passed away (we return to the theme) I'm going to put a yellow wax bells (Kirengoshima) as soon as I can find.  

Ai Wei Wei: Using the New to re-claim the Old

    T4781 contributor, Jim Edminster, recently attended the Ai Wei Wei Circle of Animals exhibit in front of Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

    Wei Wei, a Chinese dissident artist, has stepped back into themes of controversy in the arts, this time addressing the complicated issue of the looting of cultural treasures by imperial powers or occupying armies.

    In 1860, British and French troops looted the Imperial Chinese Summer Palace during the Second Opium War, removing the heads of the Chinese zodiac clock-fountain from the palace grounds.

    As seen in the illustration, the twelve figures, designed by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Castiglione for the Qianlong Emporer, were grouped around a fountain in the garden and are thought to have spit out water as a sort of fountain clock.

    Now we hit upon the controversy:  the Summer Gardens and statues once defined a semi-public space celebrating aspects of local culture through the arts.  These figures were undeniably vandalized and looted by invading armies and arguably, aught to be returned to China.

Summer Palace Plan ca 1888, courtesy WikiImages.

    On the other hand, the remaining original heads probably owe their 20th Century survival to have been looted and removed to Europe where they were somewhat ironically safe from the horrors of Asia in World War 2, from the ravages and destruction of China's Communist Revolution, from the evacuation of China's armies from the mainland to Taiwan, and furthermore, from the intentional destruction of much of China's intact Imperial heritage during the Cultural Revolution.

    Now a stabilized economic world power, China is anxious to rebuild its past and to reclaim a heritage it once wantonly destroyed, as a symbol of its cultural prestige and contemporary ambitions.

Monkey, original

Bull or Ox, original

    Wei Wei wades into this debate with secure footing, having reproduced a set of disembodied Chinese Zodiac figure-"heads," which despite the heated political and cultural debate surrounding them, yet retain a power to define space and elevate one to contemplate time and destiny. 

    Perhaps the original Garden of Clear Ripples could be restored, finally providing a secure and culturally-intact sense of space and cultural connectivity to the people of Beijing.  Perhaps also, Wei Wei's Circle of Animals could help inspire the former occupying powers to create their own images and recreate similar spaces within their own parks, for their own people.  The British, French, and Americans are hardly bereft of their own artistic resources, and perhaps Wei Wei might be willing to continue to lend out his works as inspiration and models, a sort of diplomatic transitional shift allowing the originals to retire back to their homeland while passing the torch to a new generation of sturdy, much less controversial, traveling heads.

images courtesy of Jim Edminster
editing courtesy Agassiz Media & Consulting 

   
   

Clean-up Day in Chicago!

    T4781 volunteers have been very busy celebrating Spring in Chicago with a clean-up day.
 
    Will Lipscomb of Mongo, IN, and Steven Wall of Elkhart, IN, met up with Chicago garden columnist Jim Edminster for an old-fashioned clean-up day.  Debris was cleared, sheds re-organized, ponds cleared of debris, fountains cleaned and started, and a truckload of no-longer-needed garden implements was hauled to Elkart where they will be used to help implement Urban Orchard projects in Elkhart and South Bend.  Lipscomb was especially thankful for a large stash of recycled plastic milk crates that can be washed up and reused to haul apples and produce to farmers markets.

    A celebratory meal was shared afterwards with Elkhart-native Jeff Snyder and Charlie Hope of Chicago at Flat Top Grill in north Chicago.

    This was the second volunteer activity of Spring in Chicago.  Previously, Scott Ziemer of Minneapolis, MN, and Wall helped Edminster collect and deliver newspapers to a local no-kill cat rescue shelter.  The papers will be used to line cages and play areas for in-coming cats.

    The delivery was followed by a presentation by Edminster of a new Chicago-based program whereby feral cats are spayed, given their shots and adopted out to homeowners with yards where they can be fed and allowed shelter in exchange for their developed ability to help control rats and other rodent pests in residential areas.