Though it was a little on the warm side, the biennial Easels in the Gardens tour in Edenton fulfilled high expectations. Where else is there so exquisite a blend of art on canvas and porcelain, get-up-and-dance music on Broad, and verdant, blossoming gardens in splendor?
Where else can you hear while wandering in a Victorian garden, like I heard at Beverly Hall, echoes of “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder?” It was Gabriel’s Men singing out of the long corridors of singspirations and brush arbor meetings, Christian Endeavor on Sunday nights.
I knew right then that time was tuned this day to a different key.
At one moment, I’m listening to my artist friend Patrick, in his and Lorrie’s courtyard, list about twenty specific hues of what I would have called, like a Philistine, a “pretty orange hibiscus,” the subject of his current canvas. Only an artist could narrate a mystical journey from the persimmon fringe of the petals down toward the glowing amber heart.
An artist, or a gardener, does not merely “know about” a flower. For any poet, knowing a flower is a matter of communion. Memory is never mere information: it is always a present relationship in the here and now, no matter how far it seems removed in the past.
In another moment, a few blocks away, Marsha and I are walking with Craig, a town councilman, down the pea pebble path of the garden at Coffield House. More hibiscus, even bougainvillea.
“Sure is different now.” His speech had turned wistful. Memory had flown back to September 6, 2003, on a fateful Thursday afternoon. Two weeks without power or water. Pecans and oaks torn down by the hurricane gales. So much damage, so much destruction to homes, historic buildings, especially at the historic Kadesh AME Church, which had been front and center of the African-American community hereabouts.
Neighbors banded together. The whine and roar of chainsaws and heavy machinery filled the air, along with the charcoal fires of hotdogs and hamburgers smoking on the street. A lot of “ties that bind” were forged as the gardens healed, homes and buildings repaired, and trees replanted.
“Leaders lead, they do not drive,” I suggested, because that is exactly how the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel sounded like to me, a time-traveler bystander, who was just listening in on what Hilaire Belloc once described as a “climacteric moment,” when spiritual realities are unveiled and brought out into the open, if only for a fleeting glimpse.
Memories are like ghosts. It takes but a magnolia leaf, the wisp of jasmine, the shoulders of an ancient skyscraping oak, the scent of a field of roses, to take you back to a time that does not diminish but grows in vision and aroma as gardens of the past waft and wave under the breath of the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters before time ever began.
“I woke up this morning feelin' fine. I woke up with Heaven on my mind.” Gabriel’s Men again, this time in the finely wrought bower of Bruce and Marilyn’s Chapell House. It was stepping in the light, stepping into the living green everlasting: it was Eden again.
My friend David died on Saturday, the second day of Easels, in the fourth watch of the night in upstate New York. He was found in his easy chair, having “shuffled off this mortal coil” sometime in the dead of night, likely of a coronary event.
So I took him with me, in memoriam, as my better half and I drove off to the Jubilee estate to visit the gardens of Cy and Nancy.
There was something meet and consoling about the magentas, the delicate fuschias, the opals and the array of petals that comprised – if you squinted your eyes just right in the silver sun against the azure sky – a fresh-cut peach, with its pink flesh exterior and crimson depths.
These were the timeless roses. I wondered, in melancholy reverie, just how many angels it’d take to wrap their arms around the titan trunk of the century elm to make it stand for a hundred years. The undulating waves of the finely sculptured boxwoods, framing the archetypal frame of the Jubilee main house, reminded me of the wild romance of Capability Brown at England’s Stowe.
“Hey David.”
“Hey Jonathan. You might have heard.”
“Yes.”
“I could have announced this on Facebook. Like ‘You won’t believe what happened to me today.’ Just think: I would have gotten a thousand likes.”
“Sheesh, Dave.”
“I know, I know, it would have been in bad taste.”
David and I had styled ourselves as Statler and Waldorf on the Muppet Show, plagued by upstart whippersnappers who execute new programming and what-not and are afflicted with the unfortunate sense that the world had been waiting for just their generation to solve all its problems. When we saw these newly ordained clerics walk by, who were always getting younger and increasingly less responsive to our clever allusions to the Beatles and to Shakespeare, we shook our heads and muttered darkly about the state of education these days.
I took him with me to Jubilee, which is a deeply Old Testament name, chockful of time and redemption. “Things change, David, but the beautiful things remain.”
“Da, brati,” his baritone uttered, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, in a more hopeful key, the longer the memory, the more beauty, goodness, and truth, remain and obtain.
Marcel Proust, in “Swann’s Way,” wrote that the ancient Celts believed that the souls of the departed lingered in a stone, a leaf, or a flower, until you passed by and looked deeply into that pool of memory. Then the living soul of your friend would speak then, in a lyric deeper than rational thought, in chthonic sonorities that plumb the depths of the heavenly spheres.
We carry the dead with us into the roses, the fragrance and the petals, the leaves of Eden whispering in the wind, hoping to meet the Risen Gardener.
We carry, these days, so many dead. So many children and the innocent.
So I wandered out into the symmetrical garden of my friends, Russ and Elizabeth at the Skinner-Paxton House, and communed with the roses. As expected, my dad was there, who in his preacherly peregrinations all his life ever cherished the rose, his ever present but ever elusive aspiration, standing at my side.
“This is a most excellent rose garden,” he said with satisfaction. “Look, son.”
On the borderlands of the Sound and sky, that metaxological threshold between the pastel turquoise firmament and the slate and indigo Albemarle, there he was. David, my old friend.
“Hey.”
“Hey, Dave. You’re like, on the horizon.”
“Cool. Yeah, I’m unstoppable now. It’s okay.”
Gardens and paintings, in their constant flirtation with mystic beauty, are perilous realms. They are haunting. There are ghosts indeed. Terrifying, even, but they are sweet and saving.
More than any other place, a garden is a vestibule of earth and sky, a sacred liminal space of memory rooted and blooming into art and memory. At Mary Ann and Jack's garden, I rejoiced to hear Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” – utter perfection as we wended our way through the matriarchal primrose, the artichokes and fennel, the roses. And of course, the still and silent copper burnished angels, sculpted, hovering, silent.
Then we fared our way to Deanne and David’s place.
There she was, statuesque in a quiet shaded corner, crowned in May wreath, choired in antiphonal glory by the Madonna Lily. Bowered from the blazing sun, sheltered in timeless coolness, under the veil.
It’s all right, she said. It’s okay. “Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom. Let it be. And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me. Speaking words of wisdom. Let it be.”
That’s what the flowers said. Memory and the rose.
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