The Solarium By Night

Pretty Poison

Down the Garden Path (Miya and Foxglove)

Lost in the Woods

Theatricum Botanicum

Stone Fox



"The only people for me are the mad ones ... mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn....." - Jack Kerouac



Gothic Gardening
Canada: Poisonous Plants / Common Names



HOME



Oh, yes, she'd been correct... at least some shred of lucid thought in her last day at that dreary estate had packed her things and shipped them ahead... some kind Unseen had even thought to begin unloading the trunks and setting out the planters.. how very gracious...

As she danced into the center of this chamber as high against the heavens as the house would allow, Foxglove turned on a slippered heel and waltzed in circles, her arms about an invisible partner, kicking up scarves and boas and bits of drying leaves... Her smile was nothing less than beatific, and as she turned, the thick rope of a braid swung out and toppled a Tiffany lamp... but no matter... though it landed with an ungodly clatter, none of the glass was broken, and so on she danced...

Here were all the steamer trunks, their lids thrown open, dapples of color and excess, silk spilling out everywhere... all the little things a girl needs to get by... mottled greens and blues... and purples, always purples...

But the best part, the very best part of all, was the sunshine, casting its unearthly glow on everything from the lowliest leather hinge to the most ethereal, the rice paper of her Oriental screen... reaching into the soil of the planters that circled the room and making promises, such sweet promises, for a season's cultivation... warming the darkest corners beneath the work bench, where dust might have been likely to grow unchecked under the cover of shadows, heating the copper and glass tubing of the apparatus up above, and casting the rows of ginger jars, with their lethal content, into a much more friendly light...

A momentary pause in the rhythm of her dance brought Foxglove wheeling to a halt, and as she pulled the ends of a velvet wrap around her, leaving its tassels to dangle at her waist, she turned ivory cheeks up to the ceiling... or what would have been a ceiling, but blessedly was not so, thanks to the forethought of some ancient architect...

Instead, there marched row after row of mullioned panes, a portal open to the sky... the glass barrier stretched all the way across the top of the warehouse-sized chamber, and even went so far as to angle down to form half of one of the room's walls (met halfway, regrettably, by an abbreviated wooden panel)...

This fourth wall overlooked the shore - at least one of the three that surrounded this property - and some disgruntled sense of foreboding told her that she might find herself tending as much to sentry duty as to her plants... but c'est la vie...

Oh, yes, the plants... those gorgeous, wretched creatures... green and blooming anew with the promise of deadly treacle still to spring from leaves and stalks... harmless and fragile, but each a boiling tempest of toxins... paralysis and death were the most blatant promise of this garden... but oh, didn't they look innocent now, with their buds just beginning to form...

The music in her head resumed, just then, in the middle of all her musings, and sacrificing her feet willingly to the swoon of violins and humming of piccolo trills, she swept towards that far window, and the cushioned seat beside it, landing in a flurry of marabou and effervescent giggles...

At her side rested a terra cotta planter, its base as large and round as tympani drum... just poking its head above the soil was a single seedling, a babe that would one day grow into a trailer, creeping up the wall of glass and forming arabesques on the ceiling...

With a mother's delicacy, she fingered the tiny bud and traced shallow furrows in the soil surrounding it, humming all the while...

"Oh, my darlings.. how I've missed you... though you do have a tendency to go to my head at times."

And her smile, as she gazed down upon that tender moonseed darling, shifted almost imperceptibly, from bliss, to a hint of the madness that had plagued her over the winter months, and would likely never leave her... at least not completely...



Glass Park: A Dreamer’s Sojourn (Foxglove)

So she went into the garden
to cut a cabbage-leaf
to make an apple-pie;
and at the same time
a great she-bear, coming down the street,
pops its head into the shop.
What! No soap?
So he died,
and she very imprudently married the Barber:
and there were present
the Picininnies,
and the Joblillies,
and the Garyulies,
and the great Panjandrum himself,
with the little round button at top;
and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can,
till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

- "The Great Panjandrum", by Samuel Foote


Electric light bathes the gently sloping hills and the asphalt ribbons that carve ridges between, over, through, and around them.. not street lamps, for it is bright as ever a day could be, but electric in the sense artificial, as though… as though… a great fluorescent god were smiling down on the road – the road is where so many find their gods, after all…

This flourishing expanse rolls for miles across the middle of nowhere, forming a landscape of open fields with grass a brittle green, all of it neatly mowed for as far as the eye can see… A closer inspection reveals every blade identical to every other, precisely the same height and breadth, with precisely the same curve, and spaced in exact proportion to one another… clones, standing erect and motionless, with not so much as a breeze to disturb their Stepford tranquility…

An indistinct line of trees smudges the horizon line, and beyond that, there is only sky, so pale a blue that it is almost white, as though a glass of milk had spilled into the clouds, washing them down from the heavens in diluted chalk and gouache puddles…

The road continues to wind, a country lane cutting through the middle of all that artificial meadow (grass so well-trimmed and of such a high-voltage green could not possibly be real), paved with dirt and gravel, but curiously wanting for ruts, and with not so much as a dandelion or a cluster of Queen Anne’s lace to trim the edges… Instead, a block wall, no more than three feet high and with bricks bleached white, flanks the way – Does it exist to keep the sanctity of the too-perfect fields free from man’s contamination, or is it the other way around, that man is best never knowing what crawls between those beautiful, identical blades of grass?

Sterility masquerades as a stretch for pleasant country driving (the bees and birds are notably absent, as is the fresh smell, but there is no shortage of laboratory antiseptic in the air). As the tree line nears, so, too, does the idea that something might be alive on this impotent landscape, for abreast of the wall begin to appear the blooms of toadstools, the likes of which have not been seen elsewhere before, with soda-lime stalks and stained-glass umbrellas, so that the light filters down and casts pools of liquid color in shades of ruby, lemon, and Prussian blue on the lawn…

The road ambles on (even when the traveler chooses to stop and taste the landscape, the road travels still), and the mushrooms journey with it, sparse as wild flowers and in no discernible order, increasing in size and number and hue and sparkle - right up to a line of cherry trees, with tissue blossoms nervously trembling under synthetic sunshine… Everything is visible, but lacking the hazy vibrancy that the sun’s reflection would lend…

As the road creeps towards its last upward slope, the cherry trees give way to thickets and timbers… hordes of moths burst suddenly from the grass… a moment of darkness (frightening shade, and cold, too much like the pitch at the back of the closet, where the monsters hide)… and the country lane opens onto something implied of civilized life. If you’ve ever passed through a small town in the Appalachians, then you know what I mean, the way that evidence of the existence of people sort of skulks along the roadside – an abandoned pick-up truck in a ditch… half a mile down, a rusted swing set, an old cabin with a sagging porch and a gravel driveway, the yard matted with pine needles… the red brick burger stand, with fissured asphalt and a faded banner – "The one that refreshes" in sun-bleached reds and corrosion.

The ground levels out, here, where the local pharmacy and soda fountain pop up out of nowhere, sidling up to a hardware store and a barber shop. Odd, how none of the buildings have corners…

For all the trappings of community, there doesn’t seem to be a single soul about. The only voices are the sighs and whispers of a breeze tracing through empty schoolhouse corridors, and the only faces are the ones with plastered smiles that stare out from the rank and file of the icon lot.

They are statues, each at least eight feet tall, rows and rows of them, with the faces of Elvis and Marilyn, the Pope, Charlie Manson, John, Paul, George, and Ringo… Moshe Dyan is there... so is Jimmy Hoffa… and Barbara Bush and Betty Page and James Dean… all of them with heads bobbing up and down like kitsch dashboard ornaments, and behind them, stretched across the front of the sales office, a neon orange used-car-lot clearance banner declares a half-price sale… going out of business, of course…

The road begins to weave, past another park without children, with a pond that has no ducks, and just where you thought there would be a town square just around the next corner, there is instead a scenic overlook, affording a breathtaking view down into the village green. In the center sits the town hall, white Victorian state building splendor domed in gold, with Swiss lace trims and gingerbread awnings, and a wraparound veranda with rose-colored Italian marble so immaculate and shining that it can be seen from all the way up at the top of the hill.

Four curved paths uncoil at four precisely matched angles from each of the building’s four sides, forming a pinwheel across the landscape that swirls right up to the park’s bordering roads and trees; the green spaces in between are filled, not by civic gardens, but by a geometric playground – irregular rows of glass block statues, squares and circles, rectangles and triangles, stacked in every imaginable arrangement and scattered like seedlings from sidewalk to sidewalk. Something in the frivolity of so many circus reds and blues, pixie-wing greens and tropical yellows, lends the impression that they were meant for climbing and gamboling about, not simply to be admired.

[plink]


Suddenly, the jingle of a crystal chime shatters the silence (oh, yes - with no children about to gambol, this bright haven is silent as the grave). A shadow moves in from the wilderness, leeching the brilliance from every color, and casting the countryside in gloom. Is it imminent rainfall? Or the coming of dusk? No… look up…

Foxglove sits alone in her laboratory, propped on a stool, her elbows resting on the edges of a workbench, gazing down at a town in miniature, a town fashioned beneath the safety of a glass dome… Oh, how she longs to be there, and how she weeps for wishing… but who will take her? Who indeed

°~°~ foxglove ~°~°

Le Jaseroque ... Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux / Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave.
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux / Et le mômerade horsgrave.

«Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils! / La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend!
Garde-toi de l'oiseau Jube, évite / Le frumieux Band-à-prend!»

Son glaive vorpal en main il va- / T-à la recherche du fauve manscant;
Puis arrivé à l'arbre Té-Té, / Il y reste, réfléchissant.

Pendant qu'il pense, tout uffusé, / Le Jaseroque, à l'oeil flambant,
Vient siblant par le bois tullegeais, / Et burbule en venant.

Un deux, un deux, par le milieu, / Le glaive vorpal fait pat-à-pan!
La bête défaite, avec sa tête, / Il rentre gallomphant.

«As-tu tué le Jaseroque? / Viens à mon coeur, fils rayonnais!
Ô Jour frabbejeais! Calleau! Callai!» / Il cortule dans sa joie.

Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux / Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave.
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux / Et le mômerade horsgrave.