Rooster, Rhubarb, Rue

I once had a problem with an ugly rooster. He was not proud and tough, but hen-pecked and feather bedraggled. One day he flew the coop and came to roost in the lower barn under my studio. I supplied him with his own food dispenser and water and he seemed happy enough. Day by day, his appearance improved. Around his neck he grew a lush white feather cape and from his tail, long green and blue feathers sprouted. He became so handsome a friend named him the Lone Ranger.

Our relationship developed and the Lone Ranger would come up and visit my studio whenever he heard me arrive. It was summer and I would always throw open the large garage door, so he had easy access. Strutting around among the sculptures, he seemed quite at home, though he never stayed too long. Only long enough to say hello, and check out anything new; and then he was on his way. I loved the sight of him with his white cape and appreciated the liveliness in his step.

The Lone Ranger

He must have missed henhouse life, though, because after his studio visit he would walk over to the chicken fence and peer in. I had, at the time, about thirty hens and two other roosters. He seemed especially conversant with the smallest rooster, a wiry white-and-black one. One day, thinking he really wanted to return to the flock, I opened the gate to give him the choice and I returned to the studio. After a few minutes, bedlam arose.

Those two roosters were at it. Lifting their spurs, each tried to pierce the abdomen of his opponent. They pecked at each other’s necks with their sharp beaks. I knew about the legendary cockfights in Bali, but I’d never seen one. Such brutality! To ward off more bloodshed, I wedged a shovel between them. It worked. The wiry black-and-white rooster retreated and I drove the Lone Ranger back outside the gate. So ended the Lone Ranger’s visitation rights. These two foes continued to do battle through the chicken wire fence, pacing back and forth like soldiers on opposite sides of a wall. But they could do no harm.  It’s not only humans who have a propensity to make war.

As for the rhubarb, the plants grow at the end of one of the raspberry rows. A little like the ratio of roosters to hens — there are very few rhubarb plants compared to the number of raspberry plants. But the rhubarb always makes its presence known with a powerful surge, as it lifts the soil, the balled-up leaf stalk rises, and its umbrella-sized leaves unfurl, not unlike the Lone Ranger developing ornate feathers.

Like the rooster, there’s a ferocity about this plant not only the way it grows, but also in the way the name sounds. Try saying the word, rhu-barb, out loud. Directors in the Elizabethan theater apparently instructed actors in angry crowd scenes to repeat, “rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb” over and over — rhubarbers they were called. The sound of a furious mob filled the theater. My roosters did a lot of rhubarbing around the henhouse.

Rhubarb with a little horseradish and raspberries in the background.

Rhubarb is one of the earliest perennial plants we harvest. The name rhubarb comes from the early Greeks, who must have encountered it and thought it quite the barbarian, because they named it Rha (Greek for Volga, River in Siberia where they first encountered it) and barbarum (barbarian), for foreigner. We are so quick to judge the unfamiliar to be barbarous.

A few months after the cock fight, the Lone Ranger was gone. I found his rooster feathers scattered in the barn, most likely rooed by a coyote or a fisher, that snarly creature of the weasel family. (Rooed, I learned, is the verb for removing the fleece from sheep by hand-plucking the wool.)

The name rooster comes from his habit of roosting, or sitting on a fence post guarding his hens. The Puritans apparently preferred the word rooster to the more common word, cock, taken from the sound of the rooster at daybreak, ‘cock-a- doodle-doo.’ Though the roo in Rooster sounds like rue, the word first used in the 12th century to mean regret, it shares only its sound.

I rue the Lone Ranger’s passing.

Now try saying, Rooster, Rhubarb, Rue  three times quickly . . .

What do Dolphins and Nettles Have in Common?

A reporter was asked to write a story about the intelligence of dolphins, but he had no interest in writing it, and was in fact, resentful of his editor. He reluctantly went to the research lab to talk with the scientists and accompanied them on their morning ritual of greeting the dolphins through the glass of a big aquarium. He asked questions and took down the scientists’ answers, but then he just leaned against the glass and smoked a few cigarettes, while the scientists finished up.

The other dolphins swam away, but a six-week-old youngster stayed behind staring at the man. The little fellow seemed to be interested in this guy leaning against the glass smoking cigarettes. The reporter got so irritated by the inquisitive dolphin; he turned to him, took a large puff on his cigarette, and blew the smoke at the dolphin. It worked. Off the dolphin swam.

Then a few moments later, the little one was back. He swam up to the glass, waited until the man saw him, and blew a puff at him. Of course, he didn’t have smoke, so what had he done? The baby dolphin had gone and sucked in a mouthful of his mother’s milk, swam back holding the milk in his mouth, and when the man turned towards him, the dolphin puffed back at him.

The reporter’s experience with this dolphin changed his notion of animal intelligence and communication; perhaps, his way of relating to the world.

Water at Old Frog Pond Farm

I feel similarly about the intelligence of plants on the farm. Plants can speak, if we can only hear them. Nettles are the ones that call to me the loudest. Growing abundantly in two areas on the farm, they seem to be saying, “Use us. We’re your allies!”

During WWII, the English drank nettle tea when there was little else available. The Tibetans, when they were escaping the Chinese invasion of their country, likewise ate nettles. Stinging nettles provide protein, as well as minerals like iodine, magnesium, potassium, phosphorous, silica and sulfur, and they stimulate the immune system.

Occasionally I will make a nettle pesto, and I always dry some so that we can have nettle tea to drink all winter. But I also know that there are great benefits of nettles applied in the orchard as nettle tea. However, I don’t always get to spray this beneficial tea as early or as often as I like. Last year, I made a batch of nettles but let it steep for too long. The smell was so hideous I dumped it out and never did spray nettle tea all season.

Nettles growing (left) and raspberry rows (right) 

A few days ago, while working in the raspberries I looked over at the nettle patch. It seemed uncanny that there should be so many growing. They called to me. I finished what I was doing, grabbed green rubber gloves so I wouldn’t get stung, scissors and a five gallon bucket, and filled it with a couple of pounds of the young nettle stalks. Then I added a couple of gallons of water.  As I was cutting the nettles I thought, these young tender plants will be the perfect spray for the first green leaves on the apple trees. Later, when the leaves are hardier, I will use the more mature leaves. Nature works that way. While the plants didn’t puff milk at me like the young dolphin, they did let me know that they are there to be used.

The Persian mystic poet, Hafiz, felt similarly about trees. 

An apple tree was concerned
about a late frost and losing its gifts
that would help feed a poor family close by. 

Can't the clouds be generous with what falls from them? 
Can't the sun ration itself with precision? 

They can speak, trees, 
they can say the sweetest things

but it takes special ears to hear them,
ears that have listened to people
with great care. 

The nettles are steeping on the back porch. I occasionally think about that young dolphin and smile.  The apple trees will soon blossom. 

Art Prunings

There is a heap of apple prunings outside my studio door. The size of the pile might make you think that it contains all the pruned branches that came out of the orchard this winter, but it’s only a small portion. We burned a two-story tower in an intense bonfire a month ago. All that remained was a circle of charcoal. Would that it were so easy to release the debris and the clutter that accumulates year to year in our lives. As I spread these residues throughout the orchard, I imagine how it will help the soil: carbon, in the form of biochar. The no-longer-useful provides sustenance. What if our own life prunings supported our future growth? 

The tangled heap outside my studio door waits because I committed to use apple prunings to make sculpture. There is so much wood that comes off the trees every year; it astonishes me every time. I’ve tried before, a few times, making an 8-foot hanging apple ladder and a few smaller mobiles using branches, string, and bronze figures. They are good sculptures, but the branch is still a branch; I didn’t unfasten it from its normal function.

Apple Ladder (LH)

I have in mind something else for all these twigs, but what exactly I am not sure. My own life has become so connected to apples — their seasons and needs, how to grow healthier fruit, the intricacies of bud development — I want my art to also interrelate with the apple tree cycles.

When people ask me, “Are you an artist or an orchardist?” or “What is more important the orchard or your art?” I respond that it is being an artist, because that’s what informs everything I do in the orchard. And so it follows that if my life as an artist is inextricably connected to this orchard, I want to try to use the prunings as a medium. A painter uses paint to create a world of form and space, color and movement, light and dark. I wonder how and if I can do the same with these prunings?

It doesn’t hurt that I am committed to putting up an apple-themed exhibit next January in The Gallery at Villageworks in West Acton. The challenge is that the work has to hang on the walls and not extend out. And I can’t use the floor, because the space serves for movies, concerts, and performances.  So I am limited to a slightly bushy two dimensions.

My art is often following a knotted path that leads to something unknown. There is always a challenge, and moments (many) when I don’t think I can do it. I’m not actually sure I can use these prunings. They are delicate, wispy, all irregular with little side shoots, or long side shoots, buds, or tears in the bark. There are some stronger branches, too. We will see . . . but I have begun. I recognize this gnawing feeling as if the rope I am hanging onto is fraying and I have to do it before I fall.

There is that untenable, unknowable truth in all great art, the driving impetus of the artist that the viewer senses. The artist is trying to express something that is unknown, but very real. One of my favorite paintings is by Paul Gauguin and it is on view at the Museum of Fine art in Boston. 

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Paul Gauguin

The entire cycle of human life is in this painting — old age, youth, middle age, the sacred, the animal, the mundane and the mystery. In the center is an androgynous figure reaching for an apple. Art that inspires me asks for a dialogue. It always leaves me with questions. Maybe that is one of its secrets; while art strives to express the unknown, it can only express a brief moment of truth. There are no definitive answers, only more questions. I’m hoping that working with the apple prunings will push me to explore in ways I haven’t done before as an artist and that working with this new challenge will be yet another gift of the orchard. 

A Few of the First Arrivals

New apple trees arrived last week in a long cardboard box; the skinny trunks tied together like stranded refugees, their bare roots dampened with shredded newspaper. I like to get them into the ground as soon as possible. Gabi White came over last Sunday and helped me dig the holes. This new collection of trees is now planted in three rows at the top of the potato field. The first row is all Honey Crisp, the apples that everyone clamors for, the next one is planted with Golden Russets alternating with red apples, and the third row, has Roxbury Russets interplanted with cider apples: Dabinett, Eliss Bitter, Kingston Black, and Foxwhelp. Blase, who grows potatoes every year in this field, has worked hard on the soil and it is beautiful. I have never planted trees with such ease, digging into actual soil, not into rocks as in the orchard. 

Looking up from our shoveling, I continuously marveled at the surrounding wetlands, the Medicine Wheel in the distance, and nearby, between the ancient willows on the edge of the pond, one of the new beehives that also arrived this week. It’s not white and it’s not square, the traditional Langstroth hive designed by Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth (1810–1895) to facilitate beekeeping with its easily removable frames. Our hive is a Top Bar, made of western cedar, and looks more like a newborn’s cradle. 

There are some 15,000 bees and a Queen in each hive. The Queen arrives in her own little box that is plugged with candy, hardened sugar water. She is segregated from the hive because as a foreigner, the bees would otherwise throw her out. To gain their acceptance will take time. Thus the bees are prevented from getting to her for a few days while they eat through the sweet candy. In this way they get used to her pheromone and, hopefully, will accept her as their queen. 

Our beekeeper is Melissa Ljosa from Maynard, MA. Her yard is too small for her to keep bees so she is delighted to keep two hives at the farm. Melissa is a devotee of Top Bar hives. In a Top Bar hive there are no frames, only a series of wooded slats. The bees build their honeycomb down from these slats determining the shape of the comb and size of the cells, unlike the Langstroth hives with machine-made standardized frames and cells. Melissa feels this system is more natural for the bees.

Her other hive is out in the orchard behind the lightroot boxes. All day Friday with the help of two farm workers, we planted more new trees in the orchard. The hive was out of site, but in the afternoon I said let’s check on the honeybees. We saw them flying in and out of the hive and gathering nectar from dandelions and a flowering groundcover similar to ajuga. 

With all this activity, we can finally say that Spring has arrived and everyday we see new species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians, along with new artwork. On the edge of the potato field is Gabi and my newest collaboration, Temenos, Greek for sacred grove. Seven leaf-filled columns create a small sanctuary. Evoking Greek caryatids and trees, these pillars offer a poem about the sacred and mysterious life of the forest. It will be installed along the Muddy River in Brookline near the Longwood T stop as part of the Studio Without Walls exhibit, opening on April 30. Gabi and I will be there on Saturday from 11-1pm. If you live nearby please come by and say hello.

Temenos by Linda Hoffman and Gabrielle White installed at Old Frog Pond Farm with Medicine Wheel in the distance.

Melissa stopped by again and we inspected the Queen's box together. She had been liberated, a good sign.