'Growing Through' Summer on Snob Hill

A relative offered this chair earlier this year, saying, “It’s great chair that just needs a new seat.” Little did he know it was destined to become a Grow-Through chair.

It’s a bit ironic quoting Robert Frost – with that icy surname – as we experience the height of summer here on Snob Hill, but we sweatily embrace his notion that, “The best way out is always through.” The heat and humidity of life here have definitely “built” as they say. The two Hs are a fact of life here in the upper south, an area that may well become the middle south as the planet warms.

We have no choice but to embrace the weather and be grateful for air conditioning. Things may slow a bit in the summer, but they don’t stop. We visited an architectural salvage “yard” last weekend and acquired a length of wrought iron railing for an upcoming project. We also brought home two metal chairs to add to our collection of what we call “Grow-Through” chairs.

This became a thing several years ago when one of us brought home a chair, plucked from a pile of free items on a neighbor’s lawn. We said at the time, “Don’t know why I picked this up, but I like it.” The chair was missing part of its back and had no seat (as none of the Grow-Though chairs have had). For reasons lost to us now, we spray painted the chair purple – a color not in the usual Snob Hill palate. We moved the Purple Chair around the property for a few years before hitting upon the idea to use it as a decorative plant support. That seemed like a risky thing to do because it skirted the practice of repurposing old toilets as planters or bathtubs as grottos for virgin mary statues.

The original Grow-Through, the Purple Chair.

We strive always in the gardens of Snob Hill for balance and conservative use of decorations. With the two new chairs (painted a chartreuse similar to that of the potato vine in a front planter) we don’t want to overdo the use of Grow-Throughs, but these, with their mismatched grape cluster backs, are a welcome addition. It’s too late in the garden season to use them, but we have decided to try to use all of the chairs in what will become the trial Chair Garden.

The Grow-Though chairs serve more than one purpose. Yes, they support tall plants. We like this year’s for a clump of Bee Balm and the first Hollyhock we’ve ever grown successfully. The chairs support the plants, especially after rain, and they protect them from our big-butted dog Maggie, who can unintentionally decimate a garden with her sashaying hind quarters.

We think of our bees, who begin their winter preparations with the summer solstice. The heat and humidity can be unpleasant, but that’s life in this part of the world at this time of year. The cold and too-dry days are ahead of us, and we will dream back to today’s enveloping summer season.

The Grape Chairs, painted and ready for next year’s Chair Garden.

Digging, Not Praying

Life On Snob Hill: It being Spring here – as everywhere else in the northern hemisphere – our hands and hearts have turned to the soil. Spring is Dirt Time in a way not shared by the other seasons. After the hard-packed, frozen winter, it seems right to exchange mittens for our leather gardening gloves, to plunge our hands and trowels into the earth, and to embrace the faith that good things will emerge and thrive.

“Wrought - Spring” from the CB Adams film photography project titled Wrought.

Yesterday, we were assessing the open soil left when we removed a row of red twig dogwood bushes along the metal fence as the front of the Snob Hill property. We acquired the dogwoods cheaply at a school fundraiser more than 10 years ago. The bushes grew well enough, but the promised winter red twigs never really “redded up” and during the growing season they were just a bland green screen. So, we made what felt like the heartless, ruthless decision to pull them up.

Aristotle coined the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum.” To that we would add, “and so do gardeners.” The now-bare bush row practically begged to be replanted. After the substantial amount of hard landscaping we added this year, the budget for plant material (what a heartless phrase, that) is not as generous as we would like. So, we repurposed the decorative side panels from a black metal arbor by attaching them to the fence. We then planted a “mailbox blend” of Morning Glories, blue and white. Inexpensive, traditional and almost guaranteed to grow and thrive. As we dug the holes for the hard, black, pre-glory seeds, we thought of how we must look to passersby: prostrate, eyes downward, hands and arms gesturing rosary-like. We have acquaintances who say they begin and end each day, “on my knees.” We are reminded of our own Christian upbringing and our parents’ gentle admonishment at bedtime to “say your prayers” with hands clasped and pressed firmly against our impressionable faces.

We are reminded, too, of a plaque that graced the gardens of both of our mothers. If you search the interwebs, it is the first thing we see. We have seen various forms of this plaque in many gardens. We know you know it, too. It is from a poem called “God’s Garden” by Dorothy Frances Gurney (1913):

…The kiss of the sun for pardon,

the song of the birds for mirth,

one is nearer God's heart in a garden

than anywhere else on earth…

We have distanced ourselves from the gardening and godliness connection, but we still feel something reverential about the act of gardening. On our knees, almost in supplication, we may not be praying per se. We are, instead, in a state of uncertain hopefulness. In addition to the Morning Glories (what a hymn-like name!), we dug in a bag of 30 small Peacock Orchids (Acidanthera) and five “Anastasia” Amarines, as well as emptied a packet of heirloom Nicotiana, or Scented Jasmine Alata. These are all new to us – hence the uncertain hopefulness.

Will these plants “like it” here on Snob Hill? We can’t really know right now. Only time will tell, as it always does. In the meantime, we hope. On our knees, opening the earth and filling those small fissures with hope in the form of seeds and roots and corms and tubers. Hope for our dear Emily Dickinson may be a thing with feathers, but to us, hope is the thing with leaves and stems and stalks and flowers and nectar.

As the imagined passersby observe us in our reverential, soil-bound gaze and reverie, they cannot know that for reasons not entirely clear, as we caress the earth, we are also reminded of Jimi Hendrix and that line from Purple Haze:

“ ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”