Last week we had some freakishly hard, heavy rain. The first of these storms knocked lots of nearly-ripe blueberries off their bushes, whch was very sad, but that’s the way it goes with gardening.

A few days later there was an even heavier rainfall. In Chile they call this kind of downpour “lluvia mata pajaritos,” rain that kills baby birds. I didn’t find any nests on the ground aftwerward – I found an entire tree. There was no wind; the damage was from the weight of all that water on an ash tree that had been attacked by emerald ash borers, an accidentally imported species against which native trees have no defenses. There are so few ash trees left in Ann Arbor, I didn’t notice that we had one back there behind the garden, until it fell. Then it was obvious.

I didn’t hear it fall because the rain was making such a racket. I wouldn’t have seen it go even if I’d been looking out the right window, because visibility was about six feet. I had been working in the garden in the morning before the rain started, came in when the clouds got alarmingly thick, worked on a poem for a couple of hours until the rain stopped again, and only looked out the appropriate window by chance as I fixed a cup of tea.

Yikes!

From the house all I saw was a leafy mass. I put down the teacup and went out to find one of my wonderful blueberry-net cages bashed in and one section of fence reduced to half height, but – miraculously – the blueberry bush inside the ruined cage survived, and no tomato plants were destroyed, though a couple were somewhat dented. The tree lying across the fence looked suspiciously like a ramp for the woodchuck. I wonder if she has any little beaver friends in the nearby creek.

Having spent much of my time recently writing poems and weeding the garden, I have now drawn up this comparison chart:

item                                                                               poems         weeding

makes order out of chaos:                                       yes               yes
work is never done:                                                    yes               yes
efforts greeted with enthusiasm by others:       no                no
urge to persevere nonetheless:                             yes               yes
results in tomatoes:                                                    no                yes
can do on rainy days:                                                 yes               no

I think it’s a wash.

On our walk this morning, a neighbor coming the other way with her poodle paused and gave us a significant look. “The eagle,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, perhaps so the poodle wouldn’t hear, “is sitting about four feet above the nest. Easy to see his white head.”

This slowed our walk down considerably, trying to remember where the nest was that we hadn’t seen since last summer. But then we heard that screamy call, so like a seagull’s; and then we saw the white head against the sky, and the white tail flicking like a sunglint in shadows.

Happy Fourth of July, national emblem. How’s it going? We still have a country, dire predictions to the contrary notwithstanding. Are we all resilient enough to make it through this era of incivility together? I put American flags out in the yard, red-white-and-blue bunting and garlands hanging from rails and flowerpots. It’s everybody’s country, and it’s everybody’s flag. E pluribus unum.

I’m decorating because we’re having a barbecue. We’ll grill burgers and set out lemonade and iced tea and beer, and in fine Midwestern fashion the guests will all bring contributions to the meal. There will be amazing salads and excessively delicious desserts, and cultural traditions from all over the world will be appropriated. I approve.

And then there will be sparklers. We won’t wait until dark because there will be rapidly-tiring children, and in Michigan on the 4^th of July the sun sets at 9:15 and twilight lasts till ten o’clock. Sparklers are bright enough to shine in the late light, dancing and twirling across the lawn in hands of all ages.

Then the guests will leave, the sparklers will be replaced by fireflies, and neighbors who go in for noisy fireworks will set them off. I wonder if the eagles are secure enough in their own nests to sleep through it.

One of the charming things about Michigan is that everyone carries around a map of it. Two maps, in fact. Hold up either hand with the thumb facing right, and there you have the entire lower peninsula, also known as The Mitten. You can point to your hometown, or summer lakeside cabin, or favorite vacation spot, without reference to state or federal highway systems, and without struggling to describe landmarks obvious to you and obscure to your audience. It sounds funny, but I was really appreciative of these illustrations when I came here knowing only Detroit, Ann Arbor, and the airport in between. Those who are good at making rabbit handshadows can, while forming the mitten with the right hand, improvise a fairly decent Upper Peninsula by saluting the mitten with the left.

Michigan does, clearly, have the shape of a mitten, but it never occurred to me to see it that way until I moved here. Looking at something is not the same as seeing it; what we see is conditioned by what we expect to see, which is conditioned by our experience. This was brought home to me recently in my living room.

Fog Leak

Campanas Saddle

San Gabriel Valley

These are three pastel paintings I made of mountains, snow, and fog, the first two in Chile and the third in Pasadena. I’ve shown them many times, and their Chilean and Californian viewers have always expressed the belief – the recognition – that these are mountains, snow, and fog. But my Michigan friends, viewing them, express the belief – the recognition – that these are waves breaking on the beach. Michigan has no mountains, but more coastline than any state except Alaska. Of course people here have seen mountains, and pictures of mountains. It’s just that coastlines spring more readily to mind.

In the same way, I have seen coastlines, in Chile, in California, and here, but I had not seen how much my mountain pictures looked like waves on beaches. I am grateful to my fellow Michiganders for this insight.

baby geese in a parking lot pond

Tonight, a little after midnight in Ann Arbor, is the summer solstice. That being the case it seems better to call it the shortest night of the year rather than the longest day. These astronomical markers seem to argue with the earthly seasons: summer and winter in full swing before their solstices, fall and spring unhinged from their equinoxes. The heat lags the light.

All manner of life gets its start now, looking to ripen in a few weeks or months: green tomatoes in the garden; flowers; baby animals, probably,

alas, including woodchucks. The birds have finally found my birdbath, and the female cardinal is especially fond of this little spa. There’s not much more

two blond kids

to plant – more basil seeds, good to sow in succession so I can let them go to flower; more woodruff in the woods, more lamium in the shade. Everything wants to be fed and weeded, or staked. But now the days are long enough to accommodate however much there is to fill them, a feeling that flows over onto all other subjects: that time has expanded – thank you, stars – until there’s plenty of it for all you could ever want to do, have, or experience.

thyme overwhelmed

As summer glides in, the dame’s rocket is subsiding, and the yarrow and nepeta are stepping up. The long leaves of my hundreds of narcissus turn yellow, and I pull them up by the handful each time I walk along the driveway. Lamium and ceratostigma

nepeta doing its part

chuff over them in places and even the nepeta does its part to hide the leftovers, but the thyme I thought would do likewise is overwhelmed. Here you can see what worked and what didn’t in the Great Daffodil Cover-up Effort.

ceratostigma wins!

I realize I have a different idea of what constitutes a hot day, compared to most Michiganders. It’s my California experience, I’m sure. They walk around in shorts while I’m still in my sweater; they turn on the air conditioner while I’m sitting on the deck enjoying the breeze. No, I do not think eighty degrees is hot. Eighty degrees means you can finally wear your sandals. Ninety degrees, however, is hot.

last resting place

This level of heat usually waits for the Ann Arbor Art Fair in July, but there’s no arguing with weather; we’re getting a dose of July right now. Still, the problem’s not heat – tomatoes love it, and the sturdy Michigan perennials, I was surprised to learn, can take it. The problem is watering them. The weather map is festooned with tiny thunderbolts, the weather radar teems with green and yellow blobs, and with much rain predicted I’m not going to run the sprinklers, overwater everything, and encourage rot and fungus.

hot, happy incipient tomatoes

But then the large blobs and tiny thunderbolts dissipate into the ether, a monsoon in Grand Rapids, a deluge along the Ohio River Valley, and peaceful blue skies over Ann Arbor. Leaving my yard and garden unwatered. The last three days have been like this, so I watered everything today. This should make it rain tonight, right? I’m doing my civic duty for the benefit of the whole town.

The dame’s rocket that was just coming out a couple of weeks ago has become exuberant. I’ve always loved exuberance in a flower and this rampant, luxurious petalmania is no exception. But I have also come to appreciate a certain kind of restraint.

Last week I posted a photo of some iris standing preternaturally straight and tall, but neglected to comment on them. They are Siberian iris, and their habit is to stand like that, though all around them – outside the photo – the bearded iris are losing it. The bearded iris are gorgeous, but they get top-heavy, fall over, and have to be propped up; and as blossoms fade they turn sort of slimy while clinging to their perches, impinging on the grandeur of the newer blooms. Spent flowers of Siberian iris shrink discretely back into their spathes, withered but polite, getting out of the face of new blooms. No need to deadhead them; I just cut the whole flower stalk down at my leisure, when the plant is done with it.

Siberian iris, top-down view

I found Siberian iris while looking through the White Flower Farm catalog for something dark blue and deer resistant for my Michigan yard. The color was called “Caesar’s Brother” so they must have seen it as royal purple, but it looked blue enough to me. The deer-proof claim turned out to be true, it did very well where I wanted it, and then I discovered this tidy habit it has. So I expect I will plant a little more every year.

I don’t have to plant dame’s rocket. As long as I yank the garlic mustard and pull the buckthorn sprouts, the dame’s rocket will flourish. I discovered this by trial and error, the key to gardening: the garden shows you what it wants, you just have to pay attention to see it. As they say in “The Trouble With Poets,” ain’t that just like life.

Sort of like life, if not just like it, is my Shady Lady. She sits in a right-sized chair next to my garden bench on the north side of the garage, and I’m still working out plants for her. Her lamium shoes have established themselves nicely, but it’s hard to keep her hands and knees watered, with the pots on their sides like that. These are all supposed to be perennials. Last year, her first on the scene, I tried Jacob’s Ladder for her hair, but though it’s doing very well on the ground there next to her, it didn’t like being in a pot. So this year she gets coleus, perennial in Pasadena but annual here. I won’t feel so bad when it dies. If it does well up to frost, she’ll get a new treatment in a different color every year, just like the hair of lots of other ladies.

photo by stephen marrinan

When I was growing up, Memorial Day meant a parade down the main street of our small town. People’s fathers appeared mysteriously in uniform, accompanied by the high school marching band, scout troops, local service clubs, and fire engines. My sister Lorna and I walked into town to see it, and followed the end of it to the VFW post, where speeches were made, ice cream in dixie cups was given out free, and a softball game was organized in the weedy next-door lot.

We had pictures at home of my father wearing the Army Air Force uniform that hung in our hall closet, but he did not put it on or join the parade. He was raised a city boy, but he hated crowds. Lorna and I weren’t big on crowds either, but we were very big on ice cream. Still in our single digits, we didn’t understand what memorials, or veterans, or foreign wars were, or what they had to do with the official start of summer, permission to wear white shoes, or free ice cream. But we gleaned from the speeches and the surroundings that the point was to be grateful: for the veterans who fed us, expecting nothing in return; for the musicians carrying their shiny instruments in the gleaming sun just to play for us; for the watchfulness of the firemen; for the warm light of summer; for the softball game that might last until dark; for all these things we licked our sticky fingers with gratitude.

Sometime later I found out what war was, all loss, terror, and heartbreak, and then I was truly grateful for anyone able to pitch in and stop one. This meant the World War veterans, of course, but I had also heard of Victory Gardens. Now I thought I knew what they were – a way to stop war by getting people to garden. It made sense to me: if people put in the effort needed to grow things, to care for them patiently and see how beautiful they were, why would they want to blow them up?

It was later still that I found, sadly, that people could think of other people the way I thought of, say, the woodchuck. His needs opposed to mine, he becomes The Enemy. It’s a word that has momentum.

Over the weekend Doug put another round of cedar planks on two of my raised garden beds. I lugged a few hundred pounds of dirt into them, and though they could have used more, I planted my tomato seedlings anyway. They were getting leggy indoors. The Supersteaks had grown so tall they already needed staking. Here they are with tomato towers from two manufacturers: the galvanized ones from Burpee are heavier gauge, so they stand up to windstorms better; the green ones from Gardener’s Supply, which they call tomato ladders and which stack, are taller and support the tops of the vines better. I don’t have a favorite between them, and never having been one for matched sets of things, I like mixing both kinds. I have a third type of stake, too – the spiral kind – which I will deploy for the other tomatoes. I don’t use tomato cages. They make it too hard to weed, and anyhow, I like to claim I have free-range tomatoes.

Speaking of weeds, a number of them snuck into my herb garden, so I’ve also been putting time into evicting them. It’s the herb garden that’s really free-range, right out in the open because deer won’t eat fuzzy, scented leaves. Except for getting weeded now and then, it really fends for itself. It has a long season, providing sage for Thanksgiving dinner and thyme whenever not covered with snow. The lavender, garlic chives, and chamomile are self-supporting, and it also boasts monarda, russian sage, and shasta daisies. The only annual is – or, will be – basil, various kinds, colors, and sizes. As soon as I get the aforementioned weeds out of the way.

Another area getting my attention now is the woods. I have vastly reduced the amount of garlic mustard growing there, but eternal vigilance is required, as many of the neighbors upwind are not so careful. I don’t so much weed the woods, as curate it. Pulling the garlic mustard has made the ferns very happy. The lovely tall flowers blooming all around my chair here are dame’s rocket – not phlox, as I thought when I first saw them. Many people put them on an equal footing with garlic mustard and react to them with horror, but they are way less trouble, much easier to keep out of places they’re not wanted. And the deer don’t eat them, which is not true of phlox.

And then there’s the front yard. No time for that right now.

A few days ago I went on a tour of urban farms in Detroit. The city has large swaths of empty land where derelict buildings were torn down, and a lack of fresh produce available to current residents. This combination would seem to make urban farming an obvious win, but as we learned on our tour, there are many complications. The soil is poor, and full of debris; the city still has many restrictions in place that limit farm options; and then there’s the human factor. For every group happy to have the tomatoes, there’s a group that wants its city back. What is the best use of this land? What is the possible use of this land?

Detroit is about 140 square miles in area, and there’s not even agreement on how much of it is vacant. One group claims it’s 40 square miles; another claims it’s only 25. Being a city built around cars, its glory days featured neighborhoods spread out with plenty of road access and parking. When you knock down two houses that once had landscaping around them, you get a bigger empty space than when you knock down an apartment building where several times as many people once lived. Houses in these neighborhoods stand now like a melancholy smile with teeth missing.

Emus guarding city chickens

In one such neighborhood – Boston Edison – we visited Food Field, an urban farm named as a play on Detroit’s home football stadium, Ford Field. http://www.foodfielddetroit.com

Miufi farm

Not far away in the North End, we saw a farm run by the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, or Miufi. http://www.miufi.org

The various small farms in Detroit get together to sell community farm shares, since each farm grows a fairly small range of produce. The miufi farm gives its produce for free to anyone who shows up and asks for it, though that may soon be only for North End residents.

Up on the Roof

And one more example of urban farming in Detroit is up on the roof of the fifty year old restaurant/bakery/ microbrewery/dairy, Traffic Jam and Snug. They grow fresh herbs and vegetables for the restaurant, and with a greenhouse up there too they have fresh herbs all winter. They don’t have to struggle between their urban and farm roles, but do both at once.
https://www.trafficjamdetroit.com

If Detroit real estate recovers its value, these farms may find their land worth too much to keep undeveloped. Farmland around Ann Arbor is protected by non-profits that buy the development rights; thereafter the land can still be sold, but only as a farm. Will Detroiters come to love their urban farms, and conserve them? Will they outgrow the farms? Or will urbanization by mid-21^st century will take some completely different form? Detroit may be a good place to see what happens.