Bountiful Autumn - A Guest Post by Jenny Sullivan

           

It is autumn, the best time of the year in the opinion of this gardener and many another.  We plan road trips to Skyline Drive to swoon over the fiery trees. We find ourselves humming “The Autumn leaves (doodly doodly doodly doo) drift by my window (doodly doodly doodly doo). / The falling leaves of red and gold.”  The stop-you-in-your tracks beauty of those splendid, bold colors stirs the heart to give thanks in this season of Thanksgiving.

But my favorite autumn poem never mentions leaves at all! It celebrates the harvest, that other feature of autumn that makes any reasonable gardener grateful to creation for this amazing phase of the diurnal process. Here is the first stanza of John Keats’ poem, “To Autumn.”

 Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

 Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

 With fruits the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; 

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shell 

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more later flowers for the bees,

 Until they think warm days will never cease,

 For summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Let’s slow down and go back. This 24-year-old Englishman, writing in 1820, is taking us on a tour of the abundance of autumn. If, like me, you have ever required your children or grandchildren to “stop and smell the roses,” you might want to follow the lead of Keats, whose poem invites us to look closely with awe and wonder at things we might be foolish enough in this busy world to fail to notice.

For instance, just look at those verbs, verbs that accentuate the abundance of autumn— deep, rich, wonderful autumn. Keats tells us that autumn and his close buddy, the sun, are “conspiring” together, hatching a plan to bring forth bounty.  They don’t want the vines to be puny or piddling. No, they want to “load” the vines, and in loading them, to “bless” the vines with fruit, with the blessing of food. These vines are so full of nature’s energy in this race to the harvest that they “run” around the thatch eaves.

The apple trees do not merely have apples hanging from the braches. Autumn and his friend the sun have caused those trees to “bend” with the weight of the abundant apple crop. Autumn and the sun “fill” and “swell” and “plump” the fruit and the gourds and the nuts all the way to their centers with ripeness.

The flowers, perhaps like your zinnias at this moment, just keep budding and budding so that the confused honey bees think that maybe the warm weather will never end. They are reaping such a grand autumn harvest because a lingering Indian summer has “o’erbrimmed” their cells, cells that look ready to spill a cascade of abundance.

Go back and read that stanza again if you like. I never tire of reading it any more than I tire of walking in an orchard, strolling through a garden, or looking out my window at the falling leaves.

Keats creates cornucopia of imagery in this poem, a word appropriate to our Thanksgiving season when images of fruit pouring out of cornucopias are pictured on the fronts of greeting cards and floral designers use the cornucopias in their arrangements for their Thanksgiving tables.

This might also be a good time to check out the Cornucopia Institute, a group working to promote family-scale farming.

Their website www.cornucopiainstitute.org is full of interesting articles such as one by Cathy Clabby from North Carolina Health News about “the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians . . . using research and new partnerships [with Virginia Tech] in expanding access to wild foods at the heart of their culture.”  They are tracking and cataloguing the wild food of the Great Smokey Mountains, maybe some of the same kinds of food at the first Thanksgiving and perhaps, in the future,  food that will again appear on  this autumn holiday’s bountiful table.

Jenny N. Sullivan is a gardener, author and garden club member in Northern Virginia, and the daughter of a storyteller. Instead of reading nursery rhymes and fairy tales to little Jenny, her mother told her about "the olden days," the 1920s in her beloved small hometown in south central Virginia. Those stories provide the atmosphere, the local color for Sullivan's first novel, From My Father's House. Sullivan grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, received a B.A. and an M.A. in English from Old Dominion University and went on to a long teaching career in the Virginia Community College System in the Tidewater area and in Northern Virginia

In the Orchard - A guest post by Jenny N. Sullivan

In the Orchard

I like to read memoirs. So often they are written by people who have lived lives of heroic virtue—like the saints. Adele Crockett Robertson is surely a saint in an apple orchard as revealed in her memoir, The Orchard, about her valiant efforts to rescue her family’s apple farm from foreclosure during the height of the Great Depression. A young woman of 32, Radcliffe educated, she left a job at the Hartford Museum when her father’s sudden death put the orchard, sitting on “glacial till and clay,” in danger of foreclosure.

Most of us will never keep an orchard, but this memoir deceives us into believing that we have. In her lyrical writing style, reflective of her deep love for the land, she takes us through the most mundane chores of the farm, and we find ourselves fascinated by how she gets the tractor, “crouched rusty and crusted with mud, just where last summer’s hired man had left it,into operation again.

She has the knowledge of a child who grew up on the farm, but a child with no intention of taking it over one day. However, this orchard was her father’s heart. Although he made his living as a physician, she remembers his farmer’s spirit and how he loved his apple trees and the smaller number of peach trees he also grew.

When we worked with pruning saw and shears in the orchard on winter afternoons, he studied the apple buds—how they lay close to the twig, folded tight, protecting the green heart of the spring leaf against the cold of winter. Or the triple bud of the peaches, in which were hidden the deep pink flowers that would precede the leaves when the warm winds blew and the snow melted.

Her only companion is her Great Dane, Freya, with whom she would spend the first long, snowy winter back home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, burning wood in the kitchen stove for heat, the kitchen being the only room in the house she could afford to maintain. But it is spring when she first returns and perches on that restored tractor, ready to begin the season. It is hot, and she has long hours, days, weeks, months of work ahead of her. But from her vantage point, sitting high on that most essential piece of farm equipment, she can feel “the breath of an east wind” and see “the lavender fog” offshore waiting for the sun to go down.

Her farming techniques might shock conscientious gardeners and farmers of today, the way opinions on the use of liriope can spark debate among garden club friends of long standing. But she was using the “best practices” of her day. She consulted other fruit growers, the county agent, and seemingly knowledgeable hired hands. She explains,

When I sprayed [with lime Sulphur and arsenate of lead], the trees looked as though it had snowed: every leaf and twig was coated with the powdery poison….The Sulphur and the broiling sun among the trees burned my skin raw.

But never mind that because

I sang and whistled and rejoiced as I rattled along on the tractor because all through that first summer, the fruit stayed clean and I stayed dirty.
                                                                                                                                                         

The pleasures of this memoir continues with episodes about capturing a bee swarm to pollinate her trees, digging a well, learning how to harvest, pack, and market the fruit and to fend off the banker who came around from time to time hoping to take possession of the property. She commits to being a virtuous employer who will pay a fair wage in a time of national and personal economic crisis and makes important business and emotional connections with the community in which she now finds herself.

The memoir was published by Robertson’s daughter, who found the pages of it under a phone book on the bottom shelf of a bookcase after her mother’s death. It was first published in 1995 and is still in print. The Orchard is that kind of wonderful find on a library shelf that one hopes many hands have pulled out from among its companions and taken home for a gratifying read about a venerable woman and her mesmerizing orchard.

Jenny N. Sullivan is a gardener, author and garden club member in Northern Virginia, and the daughter of a storyteller. Instead of reading nursery rhymes and fairy tales to little Jenny, her mother told her about "the olden days," the 1920s in her beloved small hometown in south central Virginia. Those stories provide the atmosphere, the local color for Sullivan's first novel, From My Father's House. Sullivan grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, received a B.A. and an M.A. in English from Old Dominion University and went on to a long teaching career in the Virginia Community College System in the Tidewater area and in Northern Virginia