Reflections of an Apollo Astronaut
Oser, Lee
in awe, still sitting at her feet." You plant what you love, even if it's not the right spot or even the right gardening zone. It's okay, because "a garden is what results from years of...
...At home there is no rest: blue seas are rich, yellow harvests brim, and sounds of engines fill the mountains and the fields...
...We say goodnights while planes fly on, rasping the hard resilient sky, gliding in ample dawn, landing with a final click, continuous...
...In Pennsylvania, in winter's quiet, snow ghosts the hills and semis sleep...
...A musical dust burns at the air's edge, a musical light touches the towers of cities, and the amazed deaf wonder their souls should hear...
...Lee Oser Commonweal 2 3 June 5, 1998...
...Someone buys coffee, steals crackers: a meal for kings and queens...
...I prefer now to see the garden as a succession of enthusiasms...
...People like to dig, and they like to dig with the same spade or fork that their predecessors used a thousand years before them...
...Vivian Segall writes, and imagines gardens, in Noank, Connecticut...
...A car drives on in the spirit country, with the radio off and the winged snow like a messenger...
...He loves Judd's viburnum, Spanish squills, sedum Autumn Joy, and dazzling little flowers that bloom their heads off, like the roses Polyantha Grandiflora and Mrs...
...Flight...
...nearly any plant, superbly grown, gives him pleasure...
...Hypnotic voices charm the traveler siphoning his dreams-He wakes desireless, seeking just the placid drone of motion...
...Ocean's sleepy chant enwraps the coast...
...People like gardening precisely because it differs from the 'efficiency' of modern life...
...Modern technology, he says, hasn't done much for the home gardener, who still must hand-weed the irises and stake the lilies (he once had 2,500 lilies...
...He is not a snob...
...Is each new plant another beast in my zoo...
...Onyx and coral, Orion lusters in the moon's heavens, the Pleiades there are milky and virginal, beckoning to other seas and other gardens...
...Home is a song, my friend, heard in the runner's step, heard through the chaos of springs and stars...
...It's okay, because "a garden is what results from years of adjustment in size and successions of enthusiasms...
...He forgets to clean the lily pool, loves butterflies and cicadas, and can tell you how to grow dahlias or tomatoes or trumpet vines...
...Reflections of an Apollo Astronaut Nothing ever moves upon the moon except shadows, which circle the mountains and the maculate, still seas...
...I cringe, because in my favorite garden design book, 100 Great Garden Plants, author William H. Frederick, Jr., warns that when you wedge in a specimen of this or that, you end up not with a garden but a "horticultural zoo...
...trucks speed east and west, white and red lights...
...Funny and erudite, Mitchell turns a phrase effortlessly...
...wind whistles in the dark pine...
...Unheard, the lunar music radiates in sunlight on the cliffs and pours like wind across the tranquil sea...
...This is a relief...
...The gardener does these things with pleasure nonetheless...
...We ran like children, our souls laughed to see them...
...From once-tiny buds, "these opulent gorgeous flowers spring forth like clowns from a Volkswagen...
...He dismisses the envied British climate as bleak, saying it is "astonishing they even attempt a garden there, so sunless are their skies...
...vapor lamps, flood lights intensify, braceleting dusk...
...Tree peonies, which he loves, have blossoms the size of soup plates...
...Often when I bring home a longed-for plant-the now-beheaded hydrangea, Stargazer lilies, a Styrax Japonica--I don't know where it will fit, or what it will look good with...
...Locusts drown the orchard and the sky...
...In prospect from the Apollo Diner miles stretch away like open hands...
...And when they're finished, they like to sit on a couch and read Henry Mitchell...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 11
