Epic Beautification 3: Hobbit House

 One brushpile, I don't burn. Two reasons: It's out at the end of the orchard, and burning it would certainly start a forest fire. Second, it is made up of dead wood and fallen limbs, with no brushy invasives or vines laden with seeds. Those all get hauled to the burn piles.

The orchard is very long, as long as the oil road, and I need someplace to put the limbs and logs that fall across the lanes and keep the brushhog from doing its job of keeping the rose and honeysuckle cut down. So here it is, and here it has been for many years. Lately it has begun to look intentional, beautiful, even. I didn't mean to do that. It just happened, when the logs I cut this fall were too big and heavy for me to hoist, when the pile got so tall I could no longer throw things like that up onto it. Just a couple of good windstorms will bring down enough limbs and logs to do that.

While the guys were mowing and cutting dead trees, I was unearthing and cutting up logs that my Amish crew cut and pushed aside in 2019. The logs were keeping the Massey from getting into some rose thickets. 

I'm hoping this becomes a home for bobcats or turkey vultures (who will nest on the ground under good shelter), foxes and skunks, groundhogs, rabbits, coyotes...maybe it already is. They might be using a back entrance. 

Maybe hobbits or gnomes are living there. Something. I should put a trailcam on it!

Over time, it will melt down until I can again throw logs on top. That's how such things go.

There was a lot more to go on the giant meadow brushpile. Three of the Russian prunes that had held a thorny throne along my driveway for probably 50 years died in the ongoing drought. If there's anything worse than a Russian prune alive, it's a dead one. Their wood is hard, dense, unyielding. Their twigs are heavily thorned, stiff, springy. You cannot load a cart with Russian prune. It's like loading a cart with box springs. You have to drag it to its destination. And so I asked Walter and Timmy to cut the dead prunes down so they could use the Massey 135 to drag them down to the meadow brushpile.

Kevin, the tractor magician, secures a chain around the massive trunk of a 44-year-old Russian prune, then drags it to the brushpile, saving me literally days of work trying to top and process the stupid things. I know it was 44 years old because I counted the rings.

 Magic! 

Just like that, it's GONE! 

Timmy went down to the pile and cut it into pieces he could hoist atop the mess. That was a heroic deed.

The shadows were getting long by the time he got that done.

OK. 

Back to the brushpile du jour. Here it is after the meadow was mown on Nov. 9, the cut logs of the prune trees showing. (No, they never made prunes. They even stopped blooming as they got senescent in the last few years.)

It is almost the size, if not the height, of my house.  It's going to be one hell of a fire. We're going to wait for exactly the right conditions, which will be calm conditions or a light wind from the south, to move the flames from the end near the woods up the hill toward the open meadow. It will need to have rained a lot within the last few days, and the ground should be damp. And we will have probably four people with shovels in a ring around the pile, waiting to catch any sparks. 

While Kevin was mowing, some goldenrod seed-fluff built up on the hot manifold of the tractor and caught fire. He shut the tractor down and brushed the burning fluff to the ground. Where, of course, it took off. He stomped it all out and we had a good, if nervous, laugh about it. This is how wildfires happen! I am so grateful for this careful crew of men. I wouldn't think of trying to burn without them here.

We'll take no chances with this forest and my home. If we have to wait until February to burn, so be it.

My Apple Watch told the story of the Big Mow of November 9. I would sleep for ten hours that night.

Sunset on a clean field; great horned owl hooting out at the end. Ahhhh.

And the next morning Curtis and I would start our walk on a newly clean road.

Destination: Hobbit House. 

Dogwood Victory Garden

 

Even as I write, the dogwoods are greening, the leaves are growing each day, covering the aging white bracts that so enchanted me for weeks. I am hurrying, hurrying this spring. It's all so rich and there's so much to be seen and listened to and learned. In April and May, life itself is a race, sometimes thoroughly exhausting, just trying to take in all the wonder. Add house and grounds maintenance to that, and I feel I am in constant motion. Someone said I'm like a shark, have to keep swimming to stay alive. Yes. Like a shark. 

I have to share these photos before the dogwoods drop all their bracts. I went out the evening of April 20 to shoot--the sky had just cleared and the cumulus clouds mimicked the floating clouds of dogwood blossoms. 

Curtis Loew loves taking these several times daily peregrinations out the orchard. He moseys along, usually in front of me, taking in the third dimension of smells as well as the sights and sounds I am able to enjoy. 

It was a most perfect evening--in the 70's, with a soft, gentle breeze. We meandered through the best dogwood passages slowly, spinning around to take them in from every angle. The cloud shapes echoed the puffs and platters of dogwood blossoms. It was like walking into a Maxfield Parrish painting.

This is what I've worked for, this is what I continue to work for--free dogwoods, floating. Dogwood waves breaking in the air, with nothing to stop their curling fall.

As much as I anticipated dogwood bloom this spring, it was so much more wonderful than I'd ever hoped. It was a visual spectacle, all the sweeter because I had freed almost every tree from piles of strangling honeysuckle and rose canes. I'd personally twisted those vines off their scarred trunks and limbs, gritting my teeth and smiling as I did it, thinking of what it would feel like to take in these sights. But still, they were so much lovelier than I had imagined.

In the morning, a sherbert like mix with blooming redbud and I am swooning with delight.

The peek of redbud at the end of the path...

Free open passages to walk without ducking or struggling; free trees with the breeze blowing in between them. My summer office, almost ready for occupancy. 

Phoebe and Liam got to be here for the start of the bloom, and for that I'll always be grateful. We resolved that they should try to be home each spring for this. Dogwood Bloom, our sacred family holiday.

For this, I cut the olive and rose; for this, I make the giant brushpiles; for this, I burn them. 

For this, I learned to wield a chainsaw, and that feels like a big thing to me. I feel powerful, indomitable, strong. I don't need to wait for anyone to help me now. For a woman alone in the world, that's big.

There is so much more to do. I will always be doing this, for as long as always may be for me. I know it isn't nearly long enough.

I so wish I'd started earlier, so I could have been living out here all this time.

But we start when we are ready, and not before.

If Bill were still here, I'd doubtless still be hoping that he'd come over and do a little chainsawing now and then. I'd never have hired the Amish crew to clear out the deadfalls and open the paths so I could get through to attack the work myself, never would have bought my own saw. I'd have been hoping, and none of this would have or could have happened. Life and death are strange that way. Sometimes it takes the death of someone you love to force you to realize you are capable. 

April is strange, too. This was my wakeup on April 21, the morning after I wandered the orchard in a T-shirt, smiling ear to ear. 

I realized that snow on white dogwoods just looks like more snow.

I knew the dogwoods would shrug it off. And they did, with not a mark or a wilt.

Everything came back just fine. I enjoyed the snow overlay on green for as long as it lasted, which was about six hours. Well, "enjoyed" isn't exactly the right word, but I took it in, even as I was dealing with the consequences of a late April snow event in other bluebirdy realms of my life.

Ain't it wonderful? Here:

 and gone:

The poison ivy has finally leafed out, which means I must stop for the season my mano-a-mano fight with invasive vegetation. I'm spot-spraying it in the interest of free access, as I continue to spot-spray the stumps of Russian olive and carpets of honeysuckle, and the small but countless tufts of multiflora rose re-growth. If I don't, all this hateful crap will simply come back, and after a year and a half of intensive clearing work, that would be a crying shame. Much as I hate to use any chemicals, I'm thrilled to say it looks for the moment like I'm winning this war, at least in one old ridgetop orchard somewhere in Ohio.

 Rather, the dogwoods are winning, and all native plants are winning. I keep finding amazing things coming up that I've never seen out there before. Onward we go, beating a path, ever beating a path, making strikes for the good and native against the horrid and invasive. 

 

A Dream of Dogwoods

I have a dream, and it is all about dogwoods. It's a dream of building a gallery of dogwoods, a place you can walk and meanwhile drown in their white blossoms. 

I always gave Bill all the credit for having the vision and chasing it down to make it real, but I have vision, too. This vision, this dream, has crept up on me in the last few years. As many dreams do, it started with what I didn't want. And what I didn't want was a mess, a horrible overgrown orchard barricaded by dozens of fallen trees, nothing anyone could stroll through or take joy in. That's what I had in 2018, when a derecho wrecked the place (which wasn't very nice to start with). 

The orchard had fallen into great neglect. It had fallen in on itself and exotics had taken over, as they will when you turn your back for a couple decades. Everything took precedence over cleaning it up, and we didn't really notice the inroads the rose and honeysuckle had made until it was too late to do anything about it. It was overwhelming. And once the trees came down, the overgrowth went wild, and you couldn't get a tractor through to even cut the paths. That wasn't my dream. That was my nightmare. 

I set about rectifying that in the winter of 2019. I hired a small team of Amish chainsaw artisans, who rented a Bobcat, and they made it possible to get through the paths, to see where my vision could lead me.

In this panorama, you can see a brushpile, backed by blooming dogwoods. This is my backyard. This is the second such pile I have built since fall of 2020. I burned one, and it went up with a roar that lasted all day and into the night. And then I made another that's even bigger. The first pile I made with hand pruners. It was very hard won. This second pile I made with a chainsaw. It was hard-won, too, but my hands and arms feel a lot better this time. There is another massive pile twice its size up on the east hill. Some of that one was made with a bulldozer. Both will be burned soon. 

I owe what you're about to see to these piles of brush, to the grit and utterly driven fervor that have possessed me to clean this place up. I had to uncover the dogwoods.

I had to dig these floating white butterflies out of walls and mountains of horrible multiflora, to take the jabs and hooks to my arms and legs, neck and torso. I got a thorn in my scalp today. That was cool. Truly, you couldn't even see the form of these two dogwoods for thorns and vines. I was sick of it, sick of staring  at drowning trees, wondering what they might look like under all that overgrowth. 

This is what they look like. Having been buried, they were forced to make incredible outward growth, as they strove to reach past the tangle and toward the sun. And stripping all that junk away leaves these impossibly graceful cantilevered limbs. I love them desperately, all the more because they tell a story of having been imprisoned, and now living free. Every dogwood in this place has deep spiral scars on its trunk and limbs, from the honeysuckle that strangled it. These dogwoods have wabi-sabi. They're grateful survivors, and they are past worrying about cosmetics. They're just glad to be alive.

Their blossoms look like cabbage white butterflies, floating on the breeze. No visible means of support. Just flying. 

The first tree I freed was the one I call The Dogwood God. It deserved to have the vines and thorny canes cut off it first. The Dogwood God is so huge and old it is impossible to photograph well. You have to be in its presence to appreciate it. 

It's so tall that its flowers float high above, and you can't really appreciate them from the ground! 

But I do, I do. 

Curtis is slipping through a patch of spring sun here, and you can see how big the tree is relative to him.

It's down at the far end of the old orchard, where the paths are wide and the maples are dominant. I love that part. 

I keep on photographing this tree, trying to capture its majesty. It really helps to have a dog for scale. It really helps to have a dog at all.

It's the tree's spread that makes it so special. I remember noticing it when we bought the place back in 1992, and remarking on how long its branches were. But somehow I didn't revere it the way I do now. Things like old trees get more precious the older one gets.

There's that reach, that spread I was telling you about. 

Before it rotted and fell off, it had a low branch that was even longer than this one. It was ridiculous.

Dogwoods aren't normally very large trees. Most of the trees I love are on the small, gracile side. I thought birches were my favorite tree until I became obsessed with freeing dogwoods. 

Now, when I walk through the orchard, I assess it all in relation to the dogwoods. What compliments them, and what detracts? I remove that which detracts, and it is always something invasive. I removed a huge Russian olive here, and the sinuous dance of the happy dogwoods thus revealed was a sight to behold. I've made several such openings, little dogwood groves, in the orchard rows. 

And so I've come to know this place, by carving it out tree by tree. There are still messes, but they are fewer and farther between now, and they are shrinking. The native beauty that has been buried for years upon years is emerging. Beauty is winning. 

I'm writing this hanging in my Air Chair by the greenhouse. The purple Moonstruck petunia is pumping out its evening fragrance, trolling for moths. I note with some amusement that it smells just like the Russian olives, which I sniff out and saw down as fast as I find them. I spray their cut stumps and order them to stay dead, but it rarely works. 

Last night, I got up in the wee hours and went to the back patio slider to look out at the almost full moon as it sank toward the west. The moonlight on the bank of white dogwoods almost brought me to my knees. I think that was the first time I'd really seen dogwoods in strong moonlight. God, it was like drinking a glass of brandy all in one gulp. And if that weren't enough, there was a big doe nibbling at the fresh-cut stuff on the brushpile, and she leapt sideways when she saw me at the window, disappearing under one of those banks of white moon blossoms. Honestly, it was all enough without a large mammal levitating sideways. 

Tonight I'm going to try to stay up late enough to take a moonlit walk through the orchard, with no flashlight. The glowing dogwoods will show me the paths. A barred owl is hooting down in Orchid Holler, as if cheering me on. Oh, now the whip-poor-will has started singing! It's flown so close I can hear the hollow cluck it makes right after the "will!" Spring is just too sweet and beautiful! Still, even with a singing whip and moonlight on dogwood flowers, it's hard to stay awake very long when you've been cutting and hauling brush all day. 

I have more photos of the dogwoods in full bloom, but I figure you're overloaded by now. Next post. And the coyotes begin to wail. It's a good spring night on Indigo Hill. 

Tearing it Out

 On clearing....

If you are looking for satisfaction, choose a battle you have a prayer of winning.

One where you can see your progress. 

Preferably, one where you can pile stuff up and burn it.

 Since the world stopped turning and wobbled on its axis in March, there have been far more things in the world that I can't control than I could handle. The book tour I had worked for months to arrange was canceled, lock, stock and barrel. The book I was so proud of, that had been out only a few months, that I believed was the most compellingly readable and best-realized thing I'd done, tanked in sales. Not because it wasn't good, but because I was prevented from promoting it. My publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, had shown great faith in ordering a jaw-dropping first printing of 14,000 copies, and last I checked perhaps 3,900 of those had sold. I have had to stand on the shore and watch it vanish into the void with barely a ripple, and that was hard. It is nothing to what 430,000 Americans and all their  loved ones have suffered since, I know, but still I mourned and ground my teeth. Bad timing for Jemima Jay, all around.

 Like everyone else, I went into isolation, stopped giving talks, stopped seeing any friends but Shila, stopped shopping for anything but food, stopped getting haircuts, stopped driving my car. I've stopped going anywhere. I played a game with myself: How long could I go without shopping for food? 9 days? Two weeks? How long could I go without cleaning the house? What was the point? Who'd ever see it but me and the dog? 

  Though I didn't much enjoy it, I was pre-adapted to deal with all that. It wasn't all that different from my life before, if you ignored the fact that I used to travel a lot.  But I was worried about my kids, making their way in work and college where I couldn't see them or hug them. Neither one was getting any hugs at all, and that continues to bother me. I was hoping masks would protect them, hoping masks would protect me. What would happen to them if something happened to me?  There's nobody else on this watch, so pardon me if I drive slowly now and continue a lifelong practice of eschewing rock-climbing, hang-gliding and scuba diving. If this virus got hold of me, what would become of them?

A mess of multiflora rose, choking the trees. 

I was sick about the state of the country. Corruption and lies had become the standard from the top down. Mercy, empathy, gentleness, humor, integrity, truth, science: all these things were utterly gone, devalued in the regime in control. The country was in absolute turmoil, chaos and agony. The pandemic was a "hoax" and masks were for "libs" and "individual freedom" was more important than protecting each other from a deadly disease. Somehow this horrific stew of hatred, misinformation and lies was "great;" was keeping and making us "great." The world was upside down and inside out. Though I was certainly not alone in feeling this way, I was definitely lonely, and from what I could see from the lawn art in my red rural area, those who felt as I did were a distinct minority, and/or keeping their heads as far down as possible. I was terrified about the upcoming election. If I'd known what would unfold around the election, I'd have been in even worse shape.  It could all come right back in four years. Not gonna fix that up too easy.

So I got myself outside, to rip out invasive plants. I have been ripping out vines and multiflora rose since late winter 2019. Something has taken ahold of me. I know it's not normal; that it's excessive, but it's what I do. I get up around 8, suit up and head out into the orchard, usually without eating breakfast. I don't care what the weather is doing; I go. 30's, 20's, snow, rain, whatever. It's just weather, and I have work to do. I guess I learned that from the Amish. I carry large boltcutter style pruners and wear my 30-year-old LL Bean barn coat and heavy steerhide gloves. I almost never know where I'll start or what I'll end up doing, but I rarely come in before four hours of heavy labor have flown by. Bending, cutting, squatting, pulling, hauling, tearing. I'll cut a multiflora cane at ground level, then break off a section of the wicked hooked thorns at the base and commence to pulling. Usually I pull down  20' long multi-branched canes and a whole lot of honeysuckle with it. 

Before one four-hour session

After. I have reclaimed a lot of real estate this way. Look at that view of the meadow!

I have noticed that the invasives work in cahoots. Just like humans, they step on each other's heads to get to the top.  Multiflora rose sends up its obscenely long arching canes into the lower branches of trees. And Japanese honeysuckle twines around those canes and gets a fast track to the top. Both of them horrible, shading out the rightful native vegetation; both of them, aiding and abetting the other in the race to strangle and choke out everything in their path. Barbarians on the stage.

The mess on the left? Gone now. It's in the photos above.

So I cut and pull, cut and pull in a purifying, cleansing effort that might never stop.  I make great piles of thorn and vine in the clear aisles of the old orchard. 

The other day was typical. I was delighted that the temperature had gone up from the low 30's to a balmy 43. So what if it was raining a bit?  I grabbed the new telescoping Fiskars pruners and walked out to the orchard. 

I had cleared the way to some heavy multiflora growth yesterday and I meant to put it to death today. I didn't even look up or feel weary until 1:30 pm. Didn't eat, didn't drink, just cut, hacked, smashed and pulled. I made six huge stacks of thorny canes, with skeins of honeysuckle on top for padding for when I roll it up. 

When I have eight or more piles, I have a hauling day. I couldn't figure out at first how to transport the piles to the burn sites, so I opened YouTube, searched "How to haul brush" and found a nice video of a man bundling brush. First he lays a strap flat on the ground. He piles the brush on top, then stomps it down while cinching the strap around it. Wow! I can do that!

I'll roll this pile onto the strap I've laid out. Then I'll cinch the strap around the mess as tightly as I can. To do this, I have to stomp on the pile.

 Climbing onto a huge pile of multiflora canes is like walking on a very soft, very springy mattress, except for the 1/2" recurved thorns, which are not usually found in soft mattresses. It's dangerous. You teeter and totter. I use the pruner for support, and carefully stomp the canes down to compress the stack. The only good thing about multiflora is that when you stomp on it, it sticks together, hooking into itself. It's tricky to cinch the strap around it without getting hooked, but so what? I heal fast and well. I've learned that when a thorn gets deeply embedded and breaks off, I have to cut an X over it with a razor, then wait a few days for it to work its way out. You don't panic, you just let your body eject it, and give it a way out.

  After one attempt to hand-pull the first pile, I hooked the strap to the back of my John Deere lawn tractor and dragged it, and I've never looked back. That pile was the first of dozens thus moved. It works smashingly well. I've never had a pile come apart. Most of the ones with rose in them flip completely over when I put traction on them, but they never come apart. I guess I have the thorns to thank for that. I also have thorns to thank for the puncture wounds all up and down my legs; for the rips and runs in my good jeans. Badges of honor. People pay a lot of money for jeans that look like mine. Nobody's going to see them, anyway.

 Some people learned to make sourdough; some people cleaned closets; some got deeply into cooking or physical fitness or training their dogs to push button boards and compose English phrases. Who knows what all people did in isolation? Me? I tore out invasives and made enormous piles for burning. 

This is the small pile. Wait 'til you see the big one.

 The beauty of this work is several-fold.  I'm now pulling vines and canes that I cut way back in late winter and early spring of 2020. They're ever so much easier and lighter to pull out or down from the trees when they're dead and snappy, rather than green and pliant. That winter, I cut so many thick stems that I ruined the ring finger of my right hand, giving myself a bad case of trigger finger. This winter, my work has been more varied. Yes, there's a lot of cutting, but there's more pulling, and so far that is kinder to my body than cutting. 

Cantilevered dogwood, buried for 20 years in invasives, now uncovered.

What's beautiful about clearing?  Revealing what is supposed to be there. Uncovering new, expansive views where there was only a green wall of tangled invasive crap before. There is nothing quite so satisfying as walking up to a slumping hummock of tangled honeysuckle, making several dozen strategic cuts, and pulling the mess, bit by bit, from the smothered tree beneath. In most cases, that tree will be a dogwood, and over the years it's been smothered, its branches have grown ever outward, in a vain attempt to outpace the vines. So when it is finally revealed, the tree has long, sinuous, cantilevered branches of great and unexpected beauty, tipped by the tight onion-shaped buds that will be white flowers come April. 

This dogwood is crying to be released. I can hear it every time I walk by. 

This is your lucky morning, little tree. Even under all that sh-t, you're making buds for May. Good for you. 

Before...And after...a waist-high pile of waste--thorn and bramble and vine. And a tree, breathing again.

To free a dogwood...it's one of my favorite things in the world to do. I talk to the tree as I make the last cuts, when I tenderly unwrap the big vines from its trunk and limbs. I see the deep white scars the vines leave, the ruckled lips of tree-flesh around the constricting vine. Those will remain to tell the story of when it was a prisoner. And I can feel the tree begin to breathe again. I can feel its gratitude, and that spurs me on to the next, and the next. The orchard is practically solid dogwood now, just like it was solid honeysuckle and multiflora before.

Do this enough, and you begin to be able to see through the forest again. There are about a dozen dogwoods here, now cleared of their burden, and I can see a bluebird box through them, and that is how it should be.

 In addition to de-vining the tree itself, I  pull up as many honeysuckle crowns as I can, some of them coming up for yards, like a thread-run pull in a huge carpet. Then I remove any vertical growth in the tree's vicinity, eliminating anything the vines could use to climb again. Honeysuckle, when it's young, must have slender saplings and grasses and rose canes to climb; it can't climb a proper-sized tree without a thin ladder. And honeysuckle, I've learned, will only bloom and fruit when it's well off the ground. Robbed of its ladders and supports, it will run over the ground, looking for something to climb. Bad enough, to be sure, but at least it's not producing drupes. 

Before-the end of an orchard row

In progress--the piles are growing

After...Curtis is proud of his ma.  The junk is gone. The trees are free. And we can see clear through to the meadow!

 Judging from what happened last winter, the only thing that's going to stop me is leafout. When the poison ivy sends out its tiny shiny red leaves, I'll have to quit. Until then, look out multiflora. Look out Japanese honeysuckle. Look out hawthorn and Russian olive; look out Japanese barberry and Amur honeysuckle. I am coming for you, and I hate your guts. I will rip you out and I will burn you. And when you send out shoots, I will spray them.  I will have no mercy, for you are bad for my land, for my trees and wildflowers, bad for my spirit. Just as killing you is good for it. At least I think it has been. I am stronger than I've ever been, even as I'm older than I've ever been.

I know that, while my soul is grim and determined and obsessed, my motivation is pure. I'm fighting as hard as I can for truth--what is supposed to be here--and beauty--which has been smothered under ugly overgrowth. Truth IS beauty. Lies are poison. I kill the lies when I cut the canes. It's very simple when you work like this. It all becomes so clear in your mind. 

As I cut and pull, I look for buds on the dogwoods. I envision them floating in the clear blue sky of May. With each mass of vegetation I remove, I gaze across the new vista and exhale. It's good work.

That pile in the foreground? All poison ivy. Not going to burn that one. Going to let it rot in place. 

Here's a shoutout to my constant companion in all this, who makes me his sun, and orbits around me like Pluto, spinning joy. 

When he sees me grab the pruners, he turns on a dime and heads for the orchard.

I guess a part of me loves clearing vines, killing invasives.

Good thing, that. Because my work will never be done.