Dreaming of magnolias

Pittsburgh's magnolias are nowhere near close to bloom... but I am already starting to fantasize... maybe three weeks from now? Here is one magnolia whose buds I captured for posterity a year ago... it's on the way to work... I nearly drove off the road when I saw it. Please ignore the yewball right beside it. I would like to hurl a Molotov cocktail at these horrible foundation plantings... they're magnets for bugs and mice and peeing dogs... and ugly to boot. But oh, those magnolias!!!!

dreams of summer gardens

I have finally finished Shirley Hazzard's "Graham on Capri" and by the end, of course. was completely beguiled ... less by Graham Greene (what a grouch) than by Capri and Hazzard herself... she writes very sweetly about Harold Acton which makes me remember when my friend Wistar and I, eager teenagers, incongrously served the great Florentine aesthete spinach hors d'oeuvres on the back deck of her parent's house in Princeton. (Here father, Alan Williams, was Acton's editor for his book "Memoirs of an Aesthete" which, sadly seems out of print but you can buy it here for about a gajillion dollars.)

Here is a gorgeous passage about the garden of an abandoned cliffside villa on Capri Hazzard and her husband used to wander through which made me want to go there immediately... I did visit the island in September of 1975 during my senior year in college and I've never forgotten its extravagant beauty. I must go back before I die...

For the moment, though, this passage makes me long for green shade and warmth and damp earth smells...

"Inexpressibly romantic in its solitude and decline, it was cared for by a custodial Caprese family who for years intrepidly occupied the kitchen quarters at the landward rear of the building, while the haunted drawing rooms, shedding stucco and gold leaf, teetered ever closer to the limestone brink. The damp garden, tended by the housekeeper, was ravishing: suitably overgrown, encroached on by a cloud of ferns, creepers, acanthus, agapanthus, amaryllis; shadowed by umbrella pine, and by cypress and ilex; lit from within by massed colors of fuschia, hortensia, azalea and all manner of trailing mauves, blues, purples -- wisteria and iris in spring, solanum and "stella Italia" in high summer; in autumn, plumbago and belladonna lilies. Geraniums were the size of shrubs, and of every red and coral gradation. The different jasmines flowered there, on walls and trellises, in relays throughout the year.

"In September and October, great crowds of wild cyclamen, small fragrant flower of the Italian woods, sprang from crevices... a garden of mossy textures and dark dense greens, with impasto of luminous flowers: a place of birdsong and long silence; of green lizards and shadowy cats, and decadent Swinburnean beauty."

aaauurrghhhh!!!!
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