LANDSCAPES

THE ODES' BAYFIELD PERENNIAL GARDEN

RHODODENDRON GARDEN ON CHEQUAMEGON ROAD...NEWLY CREATED  BY ART ODE

BAYFIELD ORCHARD COUNTRY LANDSCAPE...CREATED BY NATURE

Thursday,  8:30 AM.  61 degrees F at the ferry dock, a few degrees cooler on the back porch.  Wind NW, calm to very light.  The sky is clear, the humidity down to 67% and the barometer is trending up, currently at 30.1".  It will be a beautiful Fourth of July.
   There is an old horticultural term that pretty much describes the work I have been doing for over sixty years now... much more of it since I have "retired" from being a botanical garden and arboretum director.   I am a "landscape gardener,"  in many ways  self taught, but with a lifetime of absorbing knowledge, formal and informal, and ideas about plants, history, landscape design, and man's relationship with with nature.
   Sometimes what I create seems to me rather mundane, more often pretty good, and every once in a while, inspired; I accept that most human endeavor reflects the normal bell-shaped curve. I enjoy the challenge of creating landscapes of functional beauty.
   Our perennial garden is not an example of the current penchant for neatness, with carefully placed, displayed and mulched plants; rather it is a tumbled down affair that often goes through rather disappointing periods  with more green foliage than colorful flowers. But it looks and acts natural, everything in competition and changing constantly.
   I  have just completed designing and installing a Rhododron garden on  Chequamegon Road on the lake shore.  It is entirely green now, but next spring it will be wonderfully colorful, and its beauty will, with careful maintenance, increase manyfold over the years.  One of the challenges and joys of what I do is that no matter how much knowledge and skill I have acquired, I usually come up short in my own expectations of how well I should perform.  I may make mistakes, but each mistake is a learning experience that leads to future improvement.  As Thomas Jefferson said,

   "I may be an old man, but I am yet a young gardener."

   It has also been said that at its best a garden is an idealization of nature, but I have found that there are times that nature creates its own idealization of itself.  A case in point is a landscape of currently abandoned fields in Bayfield's orchard country.  I am sure that in the not-too-distant future the presently unused fields will be planted to apples and cherries, rendering the Monet-like landscape I photographed  an ephemeral thing.
   The hues of that work of nature are the result of a combination of yellows (tickseed, Coreopsis lanceolata), smokey blues (American vetch, Vicea americanum), and white ( white daisy or Marguerite, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum). The patterns are the result of natural competition between species that have invaded the abandoned fields. As the Sixteenth Century English poet John Pope so wisely proclaimed,

   
     Nature...in whose variety we see,
     Though all things differ, all agree