I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future.

— Frederick Law Olmsted

The best thing to happen to Blue Note Garden this year did not come about in the garden but in the publishing world with the publication of three seminal works of “lessons learned” by longtime, accomplished gardeners. After many years of artistry and practice, all of them have become more naturalists than cultivators, for whom ecology and stewardship have become the primal force. Instead of merely immediate effect, they advocate caretaking of landscapes that is far more attentive and wholistic.

Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard by Douglas W. Tallamy, a researcher at one of my favorite public gardens, Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, who routinely signs his books “Garden like your life depends on it!”

Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again by Page Dickey

Windcliff: A Story of People, Plants and Gardens by Daniel J. Hinkley

These three recent books have helped me to more clearly understand what I’ve been reaching for here at Blue Note Garden for over two decades. They are the mature thinking of truly great gardeners and I am delighted to live long enough to read them. The dramatic topography of massive rocks and statuesque trees here at Blue Note Garden has long won out over my tendency to fall in love with a plant for its color, its fragrance, its beauty—what I have come to think of as a “doggie in the window” sensibility. Instead, within the limits of my funds, this land has taught me many hard truths and made me think in much larger and longer-term ways about both the ecology of this woodland space and the good of the earth and its creatures.

Would that our entire peninsula of Lakemoor Hills could be viewed as a treasured native landscape and not merely the “driveway dressing” for individual plots. I won’t live to see that distant future but I can do my part now. Every day I go out to find and ponder wonders I never saw or conceived before—that are or could be. Never have I needed nature more than in this year of pandemic and isolation.

I’ve recently had the occasion to overhear conversations where home buyers talk about finding their “forever home” and I have to marvel:  There is no such thing. As much as I think about my home and garden as something I hope will persist and thrive very far into the future—and I act every day to make that possible—that is not in my power as an individual for all time; I will die and others will take my place. Any number of events may happen and change become inevitable. When one loses a spouse, one learns that perforce; he could only be my “forever husband” because I had lost him to death. By a certain age, all of our best friends—our forever friends—are the ones who are dead because they can no longer change from their state of complete perfection. There is great comfort in that instead of the despair that one might expect—while everything else does change and new losses pile up.

Be that as it may. I am sure no one else wants to hear my philosophical rantings so I will change course and move on.

There are days I try to articulate why Blue Note Garden has such a hold on my heart. I think the word “organic” begins to convey why I am deeply charmed by the house and its setting. It is exceptional for a modern structure to appear so at home on its natural site. In my view, too many modern homes are certainly slick and stylish but they can also be sterile for all their spit and polish. They don’t have a soul rooted in place, wrapped ‘round by a living landscape that can be surveyed at almost every angle from within the home at its center. Every day is alive with the sounds of birds and the change of seasons.

At the risk of sounding too “higher order,” I think of how much time and trial-and-error it has taken to have an inkling of what this place calls for. Every season I see new angles and sights and I try to respond to those. And then I stand aside and nature does the rest, as it knows best.

A few photos from March 2021: edgeworthia, cornelian cherry dogwood, pussy willow.