Following all this closely....And the Great Dixter conference left me green with envy. Do you have any impulse to write more about your garden? Mine has been my total preoccupation for nine months, involving new stone work, water features, the redesign of my fire ceremony space, tree planting from wild cherry to yellow wood, oak, buckeye and hawthorn, all culminating in a giant house party to celebrate my life and friendships, sixty people dancing and feasting and loving. Heaven. Thinking as I write this note of Pound:
"What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee....
Cleo - Thank you for this. And yes, I would like to write more on gardening - trying to find an outlet - perhaps Instagram - for "pure" garden posts. There are limits to reader interests, I suspect. My sense is that most of the folks on my current subscriber list (which is not large) would not really connect to the highly technical side of my garden interests - the "how did you build it and what's in it" audience - the long lists of scientific and cultivar names and the entirely technical stuff may be too tedious for this readership. Those folks are out there, but that feels more like an Instagram kind of thing. I do have progress images of our work, as well as detailed plant inventories for each garden, which the pure gardeners might find interesting but not necessarily this Substack audience...
And thank you for the Pound citation - I was not familiar with this!
Following all this closely....And the Great Dixter conference left me green with envy. Do you have any impulse to write more about your garden? Mine has been my total preoccupation for nine months, involving new stone work, water features, the redesign of my fire ceremony space, tree planting from wild cherry to yellow wood, oak, buckeye and hawthorn, all culminating in a giant house party to celebrate my life and friendships, sixty people dancing and feasting and loving. Heaven. Thinking as I write this note of Pound:
"What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee....
it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry."
C
Cleo - Thank you for this. And yes, I would like to write more on gardening - trying to find an outlet - perhaps Instagram - for "pure" garden posts. There are limits to reader interests, I suspect. My sense is that most of the folks on my current subscriber list (which is not large) would not really connect to the highly technical side of my garden interests - the "how did you build it and what's in it" audience - the long lists of scientific and cultivar names and the entirely technical stuff may be too tedious for this readership. Those folks are out there, but that feels more like an Instagram kind of thing. I do have progress images of our work, as well as detailed plant inventories for each garden, which the pure gardeners might find interesting but not necessarily this Substack audience...
And thank you for the Pound citation - I was not familiar with this!
replying by email...
I should have known why the long hiatus given all your posts on your fabulous garden project!
Well done with this article. I admire and share your fresh approach to stewardship as a guiding principle.