on coming home

I didn’t think much about it before I did it, but I bet the unconscious, bedrock of me did, and waited patiently as only bedrock can do.  Waiting for me to realize that I needed to be back home. Allegheny home. I had been wandering, ungroundedly for a few decades.

Most of that time was spent giving the Ozarks a try on … having to give the Ozarks a try on and they never became comfortable. Too  dry and scraggly in the summers, for one thing, when I was used to drippy mosses, hillsides that seep water from every pore and sometimes a quick, sharp cloudburst at 3:15 every afternoon. Besides that, the Ozark rocks were angular, had square corners and arranged themselves into stoic shelves, whereas the creeks of the eastern uplands draped themselves into soft contours that were sensual and sparkled with bling; (surely the work of the Fae) glittering with specs of ground mica and swaths of pink seed garnets. This was obviously and comfortably  a feminine landscape. 

On the last drive east,  with our extremely culled down possessions (but keeping my motorcycle) I watched as the geology changed the flora at the eastern edge of the Cumberland Plateau. Poplars and hemlocks started appearing and I shivered, as my life had always been defined by the plants around me. Here, now, I was seeing childhood companions. 

At age 11 I found myself so smitten with the fragrant wild plum at the edge of our woods that I asked my dad to help me make some incense from the blossoms. 
Once on one of my evening rambles  I came  across some anise goldenrod (as opposed to goldenrod goldenrod) and at age 15, it held enough significance for me to remember precisely  the details, 45 years later. We moved away when I was 16 but I got another chance to resume the dialog with my first of kin when I went away to college in the mountains of North Carolina. For the next 6 years the Smokies became my more significant other, especially the years I lived next to the park in an attempt to homestead in a tarpaper covered cabin... where sometimes baby salamanders would come out the kitchen faucet and I would walk them back up to the spring.

Aaron Copland knew exactly what he was doing when he chose “Appalachia” to exemplify “Spring”  as both spring and his symphony  start out with a moving from stillness, into a startling aliveness.  They gather momentum as temperatures rise and the mountains release water and soon mists and fogs rise and swirl and coalesce  into delirious birdsong.  A million shades of green march up the slopes, week by week (the poplars as brush strokes) and the climax must surely be when the flanks explode into sheets of wildflowers that go for … m i l e s.

And now I am home. And now it is spring. And that pair of wings in my chest open up and float on updrafts of GLEE, the spirit plants within wear shit-eating grins and tears stream down all our cheeks.

Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4E1JYP5Tgc

photo credit Wyndhamtrips

a man and his moon gate

Jay has been working hard, carving our new garden from scratch and visions. Radiating out in concentric circles from Urnnie, (the center of our universe) beds are mulched and ever so slowly accepting new residents. Seedlings straggle up in the raw clay-minded dirt which has been amended with dried cow pats from the old Jeb farm. We water from rain barrels and do anti-deer dances; so far so good, one day at a time. Come see Lilac Corner 5 years down the road!

Appreciating Ayala Moriel

Smelly friends make the best friends. I have been lucky in that I have so many, sprinkled around the globe, to do swaps with. Lately I received a slim package in my mailbox from Ayala Moriel. That Ayala is a highly esteemed perfumer is no secret. She also has a talented hand at incense, another fragrant pursuit she has had perhaps as long as or longer, than perfume.

Her recent perfume release; Komorebi (roughly translated from the Japanese as the shimmering, dappled light in a very much alive forest) was a revelation to me. It seemed to encompass something much larger than a ‘perfume’ and grew on my skin into … a whole forest. The towering ancients were there as well as the supporting cast of the understory and I was having the forest experience! The vial went missing for a while and evidently made a reappearance in my husband’s keep. Which is fine with me as I still get to enjoy it.

To be so masterful with fragrance materials readily transfers to incense. Her vetiver  Kyphi was INCREDIBLE. At some point in her life she had to have been a ‘ladybug’ on the wall when the ancient Egyptian priests were formulating in their temples. The vetiver component weaves it's own melody through the song with a voice so smooth you would think vetiver is indigenous to Egypt (which I don't think it is; Doesn't Matter.) and a favorite of said priests.   I will be hoarding and eking this one out for a long long time.

Other incense blends to fall into my lap were cones, each one in a slightly different shape and size which clearly marks them as Hand Made, which is to me the highest compliment to bestow. They are layered and complex as beautifully as her perfumes. It’s futile to choose a favorite out of ‘Sweet Tobacco’, “Chypre Birds”, ‘Song of Songs’ and the Agarwood; they are all perfect for different moods and I break a tiny piece off to heat as I gave up the habit of actual burning incense; heating them releases the scents without scorching.

Now I have put myself in a mood to go do some listening. : )

Enfleurage; the poetic form of capturing fragrance.

The practice of enfleurage (a French term for a fragrance extraction method used in perfumery) is in itself pure poetry. The flowers and their fragrances, the gentle slow way of picking them and layering them into the frames... all speak the language of beauty and grace. I feel captured myself. 

Lilac Corner is holding another course, to start February 6th.
Contact Dabney at scent@dabney-rose.com to get more information.

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grounding the dream (or, the birth of Lilac Corner)

Work with me here friends; Envision! Envision! With the purchase of this tiny (acre & a half) farm {flower farm} we are finally able to ground the dream that has been in vapors for a year and a half. I will give you the bare bones of the back story; we needed to move. I had contracted lilac fever (to add to rose, violet, etc fever) and needed a cooler place to grow them than where we were living. For a long time our sights were set on NY but...NY did not work out. A very good friend living just an hour north of us pulled and pulled and pulled our rope until finally we were perched on the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, at 3000 ft elevation (up from 900) and a mere mile & a half from the Blue Ridge Parkway. As someone who had played along this backbone (not to mention the rest of the animal) of  the surrounding mountains for half her life, this last bit was a serious coup.

We ended up on a corner lot, of all things to be had 'out in the sticks'. Well I had the solution to that and it would take more patience before the whole dream coalesced from the mists. But does a dream ever fully coalesce before trailing off into a wisp of another direction?

To all those people driving by and wondering " who is that crazy woman digging holes at 7:15 a.m. or, in the rain??" It's me! This woman who is always swaddled in the mists of her dreams and requires poetry even as her mailing address. This woman whose vapors are scented by the flowers in her head and in the thousands of holes she digs across the span of her life. Whose vapors sometimes precede her; there was an elderly lilac already in residence.

Which put me up to 12 lilacs, 11 who had been uncomfortably waiting in pots, some for over a year while we waited for the mists to clear enough to give us guidance. Four of them were dragged down from NY, no doubt to pout in the heat and wonder "what the...". They should be happy now. Eight of them went into making 'the corner' and the remaining 3 went down to the bottom corner along with the weeping cherry I had started from a seed, 3 years ago and that many feet tall.

Prunus, dear Prunus mume, who had spent all 9 years of her life in a pot has now been liberated/released into the wild...the wild abandon of root freedom and into the wilderness of microbes between her toes.

The violet collection went through a major downsizing as we decided to wait till next summer to put up the glasshouse; the ark sailed with only one of each of the 8 different Odoratas, knowing that one violet plant is really a mama with fledglings under her skirt.

The roses are lined up out in the field under the watch of Urnnie.

And hosts of others. I never made a head count but I'd bet at least 40 plants moved up with us; from 'too large for one person to lift' to numerous small ones tucked in together. Some had been following me around for decades (the roses; 28 years) to last minute grabs as we fled before the developer's bulldozers arrived. I had a lot of help from understanding family & friends!

                                          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Another 'affliction' of mine is cyclamen fever. On one of our early trips from bringing a load of stuff  up from the flatlands, there, perched on the deck railing was a cyclamen. 

This post is dedicated to Steve.

Hyacinth in August

Perhaps it was because i ordered 25 (and that's not really all that many, compared to the 100 i would have rather gotten) hyacinth bulbs to force for spring enfleurage, but tonight i gave myself a hyacinth bath by pouring a few ounces of my grade B- hyacinth enfleurage pommade floral water into the bath tub. I caught a whiff or two as it shot up to the ceiling in a column of steamy vapor. Maybe it will even condense over night and we'll have hyacinth dew in the tub in the morning.
Always looking for ways to play with the flowers.

hedychium heat

The heat of summer lengthens like it is stretching out on the divan and the Ginger Lilies say; "bring it on". Or maybe it is the intensifying song of summer insects that  push the tubular buds out of their torches to spice up the evening with their fragrance. They announce their arrival with fluttering fanfare.

Butterfly Ginger is another fitting moniker but I want to up the ante with the white ones and call them Faerie Ginger. I have so far hunted down 3 different colors to grace the garden and each one is a favorite.

Not many people are familiar with the scent of Ginger Lilies, outside a little brown bottle, and they are as different as a caterpillar and a butterfly. Ginger Lilies enfleurage better than they distill but just to have them in the garden can and should be enough.

They can be grown up to zone 6 with good winter mulching.