clippers, shovel, trowel. those are the implements of my tranquility. of returning to my roost and sinking in my roots.
i’m back from travels far and farther. old home seeps into all the crags and crevices. knows me as intimately as any living soul. the familiarity of this old house’s creaks and cracks, the way the one floorboard at the top of the stairs whines its arthritic whine (you too might whine if, for a good 85 years, you’d been underfoot to the clumsiness and weighty soles of so many), the way the light falls in at the same afternoon hour day after day and casts a halo on the old clock that never chimes the proper hour, it all is home to me. and it all comes rushing in, as if a tide pool filling once again, oozing into hollow parts now on their way toward sated.
i loved the adventure of my travels. loved being nursemaid to my boy. but coming home is, in deep down ways, where i belong. it’s in this old house that i finally found my peace. and, every time, it soothes me, quietly awaits me.
tasha tudor’s thumbelina
the garden, most of all, is living breathing companion. more than just a place to dig and poke, it almost speaks to me in whispers. delights me. returns the favour of my attention with its unfurled petals, its landing spot for bumblebee and butterfly and red-breasted robin. as one schooled in the storybook pages of tasha tudor, kate greenaway, and the norton anthology of children’s poetry, i honed early on my imagination’s muscles (thank you, mama). i spy a delphinium in bloom, a bloom as cobalt blue as neptune is thought to be, and i am certain an elfin soul will soon be stretching out a hammock from stem to stem down there where ladybugs and caterpillars roam. and so the garden to me is endless canvas of delight, whimsy, and unfolding tale, as if i’m something of the puppeteer to my plantings.
i relish sinking back into the rhythms of my chores: the way i stack the mugs, the wee bouquets i tuck around the house, the shopping list i know by heart.
all of it serves to cradle me. tells me i’m home where i belong.
the world and its adventures will be mine again, should i choose to wander. but for now, the summer––and the cicada––are upon us, and the tempo’s slowed, and my tank feels very much in need of filling.
i intend to surrender to summer, and let the whimsies steer me. i might not write each friday. i might write wednesdays instead. i might go a spell in silence. i might write in the middle of some night.
the point is, summer plays best in serendipitous tones. and i intend to listen. and to play along.
should you poke through the lore-and-legend files of the black-eyed susan, that luminescent exclamation of the august meadow, you’d find it’s long been treasured for its curative charms. the keetoowah peoples (formerly known by the name cherokee, which translated to “people who speak a different language,” which begs the question who’s the different one?) squeezed juice from the roots to cure an earache. a tea made from dried leaves served as a mild diuretic; in other words, it made the bloat go away. and the native peoples of my neck of the woods, the neshnabék (formerly known as the potawatomi) chased away a cold with the ooze they squeezed from black-eyed susan roots. the anishinaabe (a name that means “the good humans”) used it as a poultice against snake bites or open wounds.
i’d like to amend the apothecary: rudbeckia hirta, it turns out, is the perfect balm for rinsing away whatever hurts you deep inside. and i mean the sort of hurt that won’t show up on x-ray, nor splotch a purply bruise on flank or limb or bum. in other words, the black-eyed susan just might be the original pick-me-upper. especially when those nodding heads embroider the banks of a ripple-less pond, especially when their cheery saffron heads stick their necks out as far as the eye can see.
i stumbled onto such a swath this week, after days and days of poring over medical journals that must have been quick-sinking me into summer’s gloom. i’d not known quite how much i needed a spoonful of black-eyed whimsy till it unfurled before me, and far, far beyond me. but once i crouched down low, once i spied the bumbly bees doing their doh-si-doh and la-dee-da, poking their probisci into pollen pouch upon pollen pouch, i found myself entranced. and might have plopped myself permanently amid said swath, except for the fact that chicago’s finest would have given me a chase come the closing hour of the grand old park.
i can’t quite put my finger on whether it’s the hoop skirt of golden petals or the way the fuzzy black-eyed dome periscopes up the middle, or the way the flock of them insistently interrupt the summer fade to jolt us back to joy, but there is a certain je ne sait-something that stands tall and wafts my way, and ever makes me break into a jolly when i come upon a black-eyed susie.
maybe the other day it was the unendingness of it all, the exuberance of earth, rising up and rolling out the golden carpet, one french-knotted with those black-eyed buttons. it was as if the earth was daring me to laugh, to set aside my worries and my dread, to roll with what it offered: it offered stubborn testament to holy hope. it all but rubbed joy in my face, plucked the weight right off my soul, shouted in its earthly way: ”be not afraid; this here’s a world where skies turn pink at dawn, and posies rise in paint-box colors.”
the black-eyed susans got it done. and thus i poked around, to see what else i just might learn while traipsing by their beds.
with one of the more curious common names among the prairie inhabitants, i exercised my curiosities and found out that the name traces back to an old english ballad, one penned near the dawn of the eighteenth century (in 1720, to be precise) by a fellow named john gay. it tells the sad, sad tale of a lovelorn lass (aka susan) who leaps aboard a fleet of moored ships soon to set sail for battle. she’s desperate to find her lover (a sweet fellow by the name of wiliam, the tale so goes) before he shoves off to sea. with tears spilling from her dark, dark eyes (here we find the black-ey’d bit), she cries out his name, he hears her from high above the ship’s yardarms, and, don’t you know, he scrambles down to bid his susan one last farewell. and so it goes in “sweet william’s farewell to black-eyed susan,” the first stanza of which rolls out like this:
All in the Downs the fleet was moor’d, The streamers waving in the wind, When black-ey’d Susan came on board: Oh! where shall I my true love find? Tell me, ye jovial Sailors, tell me true, If my sweet William sails among your crew!
never mind that love language of the seventeen hundreds all but drips with sticky treacle.
and here’s a gardener’s tip to go with it (cuz we never stop pouring it on here at the chair!): it’s said that if you seed wild Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) with Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), the pair will bloom at precisely the exact the same time. forever twinned, the star-crossed, black-eyed lovers.
so goes the etiology of the common name, and now for a bit about the latinate, the rudbeckia hirta, so named by the great father of taxonomy, carl linnaeus, who tidily ordered the world of nature, dividing and naming every which thing according to genus and species.
as these things go, there’s always a backstory. and it’s all in who you know. in this case, before hitting it big in the taxonomy department (binomial nomenclature, his claim to fame), it seems mr. linnaeus needed a little side job. a professor at uppsala university, a school founded in sweden in 1477, a professor by the name of olof rudbeck, was in need of a tutor for his three children, and, in 1730, he hired linnaeus to do the job. linnaeus returned the kindness years later when he conferred immortality on his boss, the good prof, by pinning his name to the black-eyed beauty. as andrea wulf explains in The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession: “For his old teacher Olof Rudbeck, Linnaeus chose the popular Rudbeckia. The tall flower reflected Rudbeck’s stature, Linnaeus explained, and the ray-like petals bore ‘witness that you shone among savants like the sun among stars.’”
its second name, hirta, is latin for “rough and hairy,” which if you rub your nose up against the black-eyed dome is pretty much what you’ll bump into.
but from here on in, i’m going to think of the rudbeckia hirta as the bloom that makes the hurt go ‘way…
…and there’s pretty black-eyed Susan,
perfect as the night is blue…
George Elliott Clarke, from “King Bee Blues”
where’d you find your joy this week?
should you need your own dose of rudbeckia hirta, i beg you waste no time and point yourself in the direction of the brilliantly restored north pond in chicago’s lincoln park. it’s breathtaking in the extreme. and will cure whatever ails you.
p.s.s. the perseid meteor showers — summertime’s biggest celestial splash — hit the skies this weekend. without a full moon this year, the good folk at NASA promise A+ viewing. just find yourself a cozy spot to plop (i’d vote for black-eyed susan proximities), align your spine with the curve of earth and look straight up. they’ll be hard to miss.
pull up a chair 