Hodgepodge Season

“the history of the world was so often the history of men not knowing how to respond to beauty"

This post-New Year time is hodgepodge season in Oakland. Bit of fall sunshine, peak winter rainstorms, the bluest of blue summer sky. My marigolds aren’t sure if they should keep blooming forever, or just one more day. Out back, I had tossed a bunch of seeds into a raised bed, and they’ve come up now. I recognize the fava from Companion Platform, an old scarlet runner bean maybe buried by a squirrel, and a bunch of brassica friends from Alex Arzt, scholar of feral cabbages. There are other things, too. A scabiosa? This edition of the newsletter is not unlike that garden bed and this season. Some good things!

I visited the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents in Berkeley. Mandy Aftel is a natural perfumer, who no less a poet than Leonard Cohen called “the great alchemist.” What an incredible experience! I would rank it one of the very best things you can do on some random weekend. And I’m now someone who wears perfume.

In an ADU next to her house, Mandy has created a miniature museum (god I love those) dedicated to the science and history of smell. As she pointed out to us, the history of people perfuming themselves with the products of the more-than-human world is so deep, deeper than civilization itself. It’s amazing to handle frankincense, to see the squid beaks embedded in ambergris, to touch the ancient books that she has consulted for sensory wisdom.

If you want to go deeper, you can pick up her new book, The Museum of Scent. Read up on oud, for example, a fragrant wood derived from “mature Aquilaria trees that are saturated with resin as the result of disease.” We learn, “pieces of oud are graded by immersion in water: the best are the heaviest, which sink to the bottom, while poorer-quality pieces float.” The essence of the good stuff costs $50,000 a kilo. It’s amazing to me that a resin produced by a tree in response to infection by a mold would create such intense pleasure in humans. Magical, really.

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I got to have Flora Grubb, the legendary nursery owner, on Forum. She said something about Bay Area winter gardening that’s worth thinking about:

We're not gonna have a silent season in our gardens, the way they might where everything is covered in snow and they look at seed catalogs. That's not coastal California gardening at all…

So what is that metaphor for us in the Mediterranean climate where winter doesn't mean cold, it means wet, and wet just means more life. It messes with our quiet, dark metaphors a little bit.

Maybe there is metaphor in the revelation of the green hiding in the grass, the green mosses plumping back up. Maybe our winter is really about revelation, not burial. Renewal, not rest.

Maybe you have a better metaphor. I’ll listen!

I finally identified (I think?) the weird tree that planted itself near my tomatoes. I believe it is an earleaf acacia. It has intrigued me because it has two types of foliage, which I have since learned is common in acacias. There are bipinnate leaves, which are real leaves. And there are “phyllodes,” which are “flattened leaf stalks modified to function as leaves.” Who knew?! You can see them both below.

There’s definitely a metaphor in here, too.

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Twilight Greenaway’s newsletter continues to be great. She has a new interview with Manjula Martin (who was also on Forum yesterday!) centered on Martin’s new book, The Last Fire Season. I have the feeling this is gonna be a big book in Bay Area circles. Twilight quotes a line from the book that I immediately texted to friends: “the history of the world was so often the history of men not knowing how to respond to beauty.”

That’s just such a sharp insight, this connection between different discourses about gender and the environment. And as phrased, it also retains some space for the men to be in their bewilderment. Responding to beauty is not a simple thing, after all. Don’t you want to cut the flower?

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I leave you with a poem from the anthology Leaning Toward Light, edited by Tess Taylor. I’ve mentioned it before, and I have kept returning to it. Because it’s really good. Here’s Jane Hirshfield’s “November, Remembering Voltaire” (which I read on the Forum episode with Flora).

In the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor—
more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb, plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols, but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-
familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.

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It may be a bit before you hear from me next. The final draft of my book is due January 21. Wish me luck. Send me good vibes. Plant your bulbs on my behalf.