Gnarly Commute

When I first started out with my urban horticulture gig, my '89 Ford Ranger was a key part of my crew. All the tools I needed, and many things I didn't, were squirreled away under her fiberglass cap, behind the seat, strapped to the roof.

But I've simplified things greatly. Now it's just me and my steed, currently a 25-year-old French Motobecane racing bike, a backpack full of sandwiches, my epi pen in case I'm swarmed by hornets, a few simple tools, and, on the days I tend the estate, a gnarly 17 mile commute.

And by gnarly I mean glorious, for a folklorist and a lover of richly inscribed human landscapes. I follow old Route 30, which follows an old Indian trail, which became the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad's main route. Devastating, beautiful: rowhouses crumble back to the soil. Abandoned factories and iron works. Crass commercial architecture. Pockets of proud, hopeful neighborhoods. Corner bars and storefront churches fight it out at prime intersections.

It is too much to take in, I have to pack the camera and the notebook firmly away. Every block, a story. So I just take it in with my eyes. I watch certain stone churches slowly crumble in on themselves, until one day, they are just gone. I watch the School District of Philadelphia knock away at an old brick schoolhouse for weeks on end, in the name of progress. She wasn't ready to go.

I look at the proud old shops and factories, where trades were practiced and goods manufactured.

Scrapyards and lumberyards. Boxing clubs and social clubs. Flea markets and rescue missions. Discount rugs and live crabs from the back of a truck. Grave blankets and hubcaps. Popeye's chicken and Furniture Sir Plus. Lancaster Pike: Avenue of Dreams.

But for every tumbledown ruin with a Tree of Heaven growing up through its roof, for every vacant lot of abandoned dreams, there is a well-scrubbed block where neighbors sweep front stoops and tend their gardens, as little girls jump rope and boys lob well-worn basketballs through makeshift hoops.

Traversing this landscape is an essential part of my work, in ways I do not fully understand. Its richness feeds me. I need to see this every week. It is both changeless and ephemeral. I need to feel the pavement underneath me, I need this tangible connection to the city I call home.  I need to see the moon rise, and see the sun's slanting rays cast long shadows after a fulfilling, long day, as I make the trek east, toward home.

If I hadn't junked the Ranger, at one of the scrapyards that besmirch this place, it would be all too easy to hop in the truck for an easier ride. But then I wouldn't have this: this time each week to be in my environment, this place where I live. I see the buds swell each week with the sun's warming rays. I see the same kids on the same corners change and grow.

I have time for my thoughts, my legs pumping oxygen to my synapses across each rutted mile. Too much of our life is spent trying to find "easier" ways to do things. But this simple truth I know: labor is good. Our bodies were made for this. These movements, these exertions of effort, are the times we are doing exactly what we should.

About the time I realize these things, I leave the city's grid and that old pike that transects it. I cross the city line and enter a sheltered place. If I time it right, the seminary's carillon chimes my arrival with just the right hymn.

Suddenly there are lush lawns, and rolling acres. A canopy of trees, the bustle of landscapers, in a place otherwise silent. SUV's whiz past me, windows up and AC on, to the driveway, to the house.

And then I arrive, at the garden I made this journey to tend. I love this place all the more for the route I traversed to get here. I could not love each of these places to the extent that I do, if I did not have one to cast the other into sharper relief. That's my gnarly, glorious commute.

Days Like This: Under A Scottish Mist

On certain sunkist June days, clients or passersby are apt to say, "You get paid for this?"

I'm never offended, I know where they are coming from. My job does look fun, and I give the impression of one who enjoys his work, heartily.

I do. I tend the earth. The degraded earth. Here in the city. It is the best job, ever.

But, they usually only say that after I've plunked a pretty flower into the soil. Soil that did not exist before. We had to make it.

I honed my craft at the Warrington Community Garden, in West Philadelphia. It's the site of a burned down carriage factory. There was no soil, only busted up concrete, broken bricks, rubble. In compost bins made of cast off pallets, we make soil every year. Eventually, that leads to a bountiful harvest.

Gardening is about patience, and deferred gratitude. You do the work now, for future bounty. You always have an iron in the fire. Something is always planted, waiting to come up. I have never met a pessimistic gardener.

This is the best work. The first work. And when you get right down to it, the only work that really matters.

It's not all sunshine and daffodils. In fact, more days than not are like this: the last day of March. After a long brutal winter. You work all day under a fine Scottish mist. The ground is sloggy. No sun to speak of. Your layers slowly soak, a chill that goes deep, to the bone.

Your task? Rejuvenating an ancient apple tree. Each storm brings down another section of its mossy, rotting trunk. But it is a giving tree, each year its branches droop to the ground under bountiful fruit. The owners love this tree, perhaps more than is reasonable. That, I get.

Today is not about instant gratification. It is not about songbirds splashing in the fountain and chickadees alighting on my pitchfork to warble a happy tune. That will happen in a few weeks. This is a day for labor no one sees.

If I do my job right, I will remove the diseased branches, the ones that cross and add weight the rotting trunk can no longer bear. If I do my job right in six months there will be enough apples, but not too many apples that will split the cleft trunk.

I make my cuts. I do my pruning. I thank this tree, I relish this garden.

I grind my prunings into wood chips that will become mulch. I rake the debris.

If I have done my job right, no one will even know I was here. Until six months from now, when we hope this tree will bear sufficient fruit, at least once more. The finished tree:

Days like this. Under a Scottish mist. We labor for fruits we hope will come. With skill and care we tend this degraded earth. As the poet said, we try to praise this mutilated world.

We take off our soggy boots. We set down our simple tools. We bask in a day of the first, best work

Autumn at Malwyd: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Urban decay and suburban sprawl are just blocks away from the Malwyd esate I have tended for 6 years, but St. Charles Seminary and the Merion Tribute House, with spacious grounds and tolling carillons, lend a pastoral air. On certain clear autumn days, the bells chime familiar old hymns, uncannily perfect for that moment. I have to stop work, and for those moments, just be.

Autumn announces its arrival with shafts of golden light. Summer is a glare of bright even illumination, but in the fall light, things glow, and cast long shadows. The sudden crimson of the dogwood leaves and rapidly rising pampas plumes mean rapid change is on the way.

The sky shifts rapidly in brisk autumn wind. Passing clouds change the light by the moment. Gazed through a mature pieris grove, a hint of golden ginkgo behind the gable.

The magisterial autumn blaze of a rugged ginkgo, against a cerulean November sky.

 Asters, dahlias and hibiscus light the burgeoning perennial garden.

Japanese anemones are among the best flowers for carefree late-season informal cottage garden bloom.

Weeping scarlet maple and Virginia creeper color the entry.

From September through November, the canopy changes subtly each day.

Golden pine needles carpet stone paths in the woodland garden. It is easy to forget that ys, pine trees shed their needles, too.

A few weeks later, scarlet stars fall from Japanese maples, creating a most perfect carpet. Walking these soft paths, a pure pleasure.

Scarlet stars on English ivy.

The gray sinew of the mature maple grove, blazing in autumn glory.

Late afternoon rays ignite a gnarled maple.

Perennial hibiscus, otherworldy and startling.

Sheffield daisies turn their faces toward the rapidly setting sun.

Perfect days, but not enough hours. The moon arises as we finish our work. As the poet said:

Come Nymphs and Shepherds, haste away
To the happy sports within these shady Groves;
In pleasant lives time slides away apace,
But with the wretched seems to creep to slow.

Three Perfect Days

The last day of September was picture perfect, and found me in Chester County, provisioning for the next day's horticultural adventures.

 October 1 found me in Center City, finishing three very rewarding urban horticulture jobs.

I shouldn’t have been startled at the end of a long workday to look up and see Liberty Place casting a long shadow down 16th Street, but I was. A week past the equinox, autumn’s rapidly shortening days creep up on me still. So immersed was I in despairing over dishearteningly compacted soil, untangling a pot bound liriape’s circuitous roots, and various other horticultural duties, I forgot for a moment I was in a city. The skyscraper’s sudden long shadow jarred me back.

Not that the day lacked urban excitement: a near miss with the notorious Philadelphia Parking Authority, axe-wielding firemen responding to a conflagration at a neighboring highrise, and, of course, the endless cavalcade: nosy neighbors, prospective clients, and just plain oddballs all having something to say to the dirty overall-clad guy carrying holly trees across Spruce Street.

But still, it is possible to forget. After a while you tune out the honking cabbies, the pedestrian cellphone chatter, the whirling med-evac copters, and it’s just the work: all-consuming, intensely rewarding, and just plain hard.

I only do it a few times a year, but my Center City landscaping days always feel epic. The logistics are half the battle: procuring the materials, conceiving a central drop point, lugging plants…soil...stones…everything…from homebase to the four properties I maintain in a few blocks radius. Everything must be brought in. For the most part, I am making stuff grow where nothing lived previously. And that is rewarding, so it’s worth my hassle

.

I walk two blocks east to deposit hard-earned money in the bank. I look up to see Broad Street illuminated. Standing on the island in the center of Philadelphia’s longest street, I realize that moments ago, so immersed in the zen of work, I forgot I was planting in a metropolis. Because the work is the work, and once you get past the surface noise, it feels basically the same wherever you do it.