Wisteria Week

Wherein I reflect on the how this blog came to be...

It’s the 12th day of April,

we’re nearing the end of Wisteria Week, and I have feelings.

A bit of context here: I’ve just returned home from a longish (for me) solo road trip, sans husband, sans dogs. In many ways, it was a trip into the past—back to Durham, North Carolina, where I spent four very happy years as an undergraduate and met the man I at one time called the love of my life.

(Note to future generations: Don’t date the Duke Blue Devil).

But the interstates that lead from my home to Bull City are a desperate stretch of roadway—and I mean stretch as in prison sentence, one you’re not sure you’ll survive. On the South Carolina side, the roads are so potholed and poorly patched as to rattle your teeth in your head. North of the line, it’s a white-knuckle death ride of cars and semis hurtling through space bent, seemingly, on mutual destruction…

I used to love bumper cars at top speed on the highway, but those days are decades gone. These days, I tend to choose the back roads. Sure, it may add an hour to the trip, but at least I arrive with nerves—and bones—intact.

So that’s how I came to have with roughly 12 hours to myself on Easter weekend cruising through towns with names like Whitmire and Cheraw and Siler City, crossing many rivers as I traversed the rolling hills and picturesque farms flanking the Uwharrie National Forest. Between the memories of school days and the business conference that drew me back there, the trip left me with much to remember and much to reflect on, but I couldn’t stop noticing that everywhere I went, north or south of the state line, in city, or small town, or in deep wilderness, I was also surrounded by … wisteria.

And I don’t mean little patches of wisteria, polite little vines reposing prettily on a wishing well or someone’s sturdy arbor. I mean vast rolling expanses of wisteria, acres upon acres of it, mile after mile of it…

Like this.

Wisteria escaped from cultivation in Watts Mill, near my home in Laurens County, South Carolina. Imagine 500 miles of this, along a meandering route into central North Carolina and back again. Not every mile, of course, but nowhere on the route was untouched.

Everywhere.

This is what the horticulturists mean when they stick that dread asterisk next to a botanical name. “Escaped from cultivation.”

Counting on my fingers, I realized my trip had fallen right at the start of “Wisteria Week,” that roughly seven to ten-day period in the spring just as the redbuds are peaking and the creeping phlox is bleeding fuschia and white and purple-blue sweeps across the landscape. Wisteria Week—not an official designation, by any means— is what I call those few days of the year when wisteria vines suddenly become visible in the landscape, rather than a dull green drapery that could be any number of things else.

Is there a word for a beauty that saturates your senses and yet breaks your heart? Probably not in English, but I keep looking…

Because Wisteria Week is beautiful. The sight of the long dangling racemes of lilac-blue blossoms … that sweetest of scents that perfumes the air … the vines literally vibrating with the sight and sound of bees…

It’s lovely. It’s magical. It fools many a gardener into thinking I need some of that in my life. Some of them even get on social media with plaints of I don’t know why folks are being so mean. Wisteria invasive? One little vine couldn’t be invasive…

These folks have never seen a wisteria vine lift the foundation of a house. They’ve somehow remained oblivious to the fact that wisteria long ago escaped from cultivation. They don’t realize that once this fleeting spring beauty sheds its blooms, it will continue its relentless creep … through forest canopy, along roadsides into city center, suburbs, trailer parks… It’s escaped. Whether you notice it or not, it keeps going.

Wisteria Week crystallized something for me…

as a poet, and a scholar, and a pretty obsessed gardener. How did we become so disconnected from source? How can it be that the garden—so central to who we are, at the heart of all our creation stories—is so remote from daily existence that a lawn like a golf course is conceived as the pinnacle of earthly desire and no one even notices the invasive nature of wisteria?

My husband has this catchphrase he pops out with because it’s so apt to so many situations. ”Horticulture—it used to be part of American culture,” he’ll say—and sigh, because, clearly, it’s not any more.

But it’s got to be again. Not to be dramatic or anything, but our survival as a species is going to depend on lots of people getting a working understanding of some pretty important concepts in a hurry. So many good intentions (and bad) have escaped from cultivation in our landscape. We need to convene a conversation about how we got here, how we can escape in a sustainable direction.

So “Escaped from Cultivation” is going to be about a couple of things. No. 1, a place where I can document Bellaflora, the “collector’s garden,” we’re building in South Carolina. We have big ideas and it’s exciting and crazy, the creative destruction of a garden under construction, by two people who’ve waited their whole lives for this chance.

But above and beyond the food and the flowers, we’ll consider the deeper implications of the escape from cultivation. After all, the Founding Farmers who planted this garden had one set of ideas about what should grow here… but from there, things kinda jes’ grew [as Harriet Beecher Stowe said of Topsy] in their own direction.

How have you escaped from cultivation? Were you, like me, planted and trained up in in a rigid topiary frame only to prove wild seed that could not be contained? We’ll talk about that stuff, too.

So, this might be your kind of hang…

…if you’re interested in, in no particular order, in flowers, feminism, and the otherworldly powers of Beyonce

…if you’re interested in people trying to live ethically, and in harmony with nature (I have the coolest friends doing the coolest things and I plan to invite them to the conversation)

…if you’re interested in the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and its power to heal the deep wounds of our traumatic past

If any of that appeals, you’ll find a home here.

Several times a week

I’ll post garden updates. A flower. A bug. A day atop a backhoe. These will (mostly) be available to free subscribers.

Longer posts, i.e., my musings on horticulture, political culture, pop culture, will come once a week, bright and early Monday mornings.

Free subscribers will only have access to one of these per month.

In due course, I’ll be adding podcasts to the mix. Stay tuned for details.

And until next we meet…

… I’ll be in the garden.

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