Photos, Gardens, Birds, Trees: What’s Happening in the Great Outdoors

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/books/review/outdoors-this-land-jack-spencer-and-more.html

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There’s a good deal of world’s-end whimpering in the air these days. May I suggest that we begin with a bang — even if it’s merely to journey into the great outdoors? “Bang!” went my heart when I opened the photographer Jack Spencer’s powerful THIS LAND: An American Portrait (University of Texas Press, $45). There isn’t a garden in it — only the vestige of one, vines creeping up the side of a boarded-up cottage in Xenia, Ill., a sign of irrepressible life. As is the disheveled shrubbery lodged in a corner of Max Yasgur’s barn. (And if you have to ask, you didn’t join, in person or in spirit, that ancient odyssey to Woodstock.) This is a book that sets our sights high and fortifies our spirits, even if we merely journey into our own backyards.

Spencer began driving across the United States with his camera after 9/11; over 13 years he logged 80,000 miles. The book’s epigraph from Wendell Berry best captures his motivation: to “grow humble before the place” that he might “arrive in his place and … want to remain.” Spencer’s work has a magisterial quality; some of it has the feel of photographic painting. Gaze in wonder at the striations of color in Death Valley, feel on your clothes the sopping California fog and on your face the weight of a cloud bank pressing against a lone tree on a South Dakota horizon.

There are few people in these pictures, and most of them are, oddly, standing quietly in shallow water, cooling off in shimmering heat. But people have left their traces: in the otherworldly monumentality of a nuclear plant; in the ramshackle ruins of Bennett College in the Hudson Valley, an acid trip of melting architecture; in a youthful scrawl at the corner of a blackboard — Livie was here. And here we are still. We care enough, on occasion, to minister to our tiny corners of the earth. We don’t seem to care enough to stop the desecration of our larger home. “This Land” is both anthem, worthy of a grand cause (celebrating without sentimentality this gorgeous place we inhabit), and prayer. “To save the Earth,” Spencer writes, “cannot be left to the worst of us.”

Many years ago, I read a description of the Japanese sculptor Fumio Asakura’s home in Tokyo. As I recall, he was being referred to as the “Rodin of Japan,” and he was determined to stave off the egotism that often accompanies fame. So he designed a garden around five boulders, representing the Confucian values known as “the Five Constants,” to ground his daily meditation: Justice. Benevolence. Integrity. Knowledge. Propriety. Just in time to help us understand how the Japanese achieve soul-stirring heights with such economical gestures, Marc Peter Keane gives us JAPANESE GARDEN NOTES: A Visual Guide to Elements and Design (Stone Bridge, $59.95).

I’ve spent hours poring over Keane’s past books; this one presents a distillation of his years of studying and creating gardens in both the United States and Japan. It’s an elegantly soulful interpretation of the essential elements of Japanese garden design.

A Japanese garden, Keane says, is “a powerfully quiet place” in which human society and wild life are “understood to be one and the same.” No one but Keane would take pains to sketch in the concept of Ma, the space between objects, “the breath of the garden.” Even if you aren’t planning to build such a garden — though they have a lot to recommend them, since deer have not yet begun to munch on gravel — many of the principles Keane describes are relevant: placing paths off center to relax formality or creating depth by layering planes or harnessing the expressive strength of stone elements. In my next garden, I plan to include a chiriana, or dust pit. Originally holes in the ground for collecting debris, over time chiriana have taken on a symbolic quality, becoming places to glance at before entering a garden or room, so as to leave behind troubling thoughts and shed “the dust of the mind.”

My fantasies of moving to Kyoto were in full bloom when I picked up an unusual and entertaining memoir by Leslie Buck. Years ago, she left her successful landscape business in Northern California to apprentice herself to some master gardeners in Japan. CUTTING BACK: My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto (Timber Press, $24.95) opens with her anxiously pruning a tree in a “not very old” garden in Kyoto (“only 350 years,” as a co-worker whispers). In this memoir, Buck chronicles three long and difficult seasons.

Her Japanese is weak, so she works in a dazed state of incomprehension; rarely does someone pause to interpret. Her bosses — donning pristine white gloves every day — just yell or are coldly silent. The hours are unrelenting, six days a week. She must wear her jikatabi, two-toed cloth slippers, even in the snow. Her ego suffers as she descends from being among the best of American tree pruners to the status of a beginner in Japan. Sexism abounds. She leaves behind a quasi-committed boyfriend — the only part of the story that feels forced. He might have been pruned.

The dream of this adventure was one thing; what Buck experiences proves “tiresome, mundane and repetitive.” She suffers, complains and cries; she’s lonely and cold and sick. But she works harder than she ever has before. And she learns — about durability and resilience. She learns to prune trees exquisitely. Most of all, she learns that “an apprentice must … be the good student.” Not a bad lesson for any gardener.

Trees take up a lot of our shelf space, and many give their lives in vain; lots of treacle is written about them. Occasionally, though, there are worthy additions to tree literature. THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World (David Suzuki Institute/Greystone, $24.95), by Peter Wohlleben and translated from German by Jane Billinghurst, describes the underground carbon market of what the Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard calls these “gentle, sessile creatures.” Trees bring out Wohlleben’s — and our — poetic nature. He describes how trees communicate using scent; how they experience pain, have memory and make family groups. Trees, he informs us, are able to identify marauding insects by their saliva. Wohlleben describes “fungi that operate like fiber-optic internet cables,” linking many species by sending chemical and electrical signals through fungal networks and root tips. When trees are thirsty, they begin to scream at an ultrasonic level. He makes a case for the interconnectedness of natural systems: Falling leaves near coastlines leach acids into the ocean, stimulating the growth of plankton, which in turn increases the yields of fish and oysters. Can we learn, he asks, to respect the trees enough to spare them “unnecessary suffering”? And might we learn to do the same for ourselves?

The intriguing, and more intimate, WITNESS TREE: Seasons of Change With a Century-Old Oak (Bloomsbury, $27), by Lynda V. Mapes, portrays trees as “scribes, diarists, historians.” They are “among our oldest journalists.” A reporter herself, covering environmental issues for The Seattle Times, Mapes sets out to tell the story of climate change through one tree. But that is, marvelously, the least of it.

She finds her oak in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts and spends a year with it, telling of the farm on which it grew, twisting up out of a stone wall, and drawing forth people devoted to befriending and studying trees. They are the tree’s interpreters. Bob Leverett, a former Air Force engineer and a “committed big-tree hunter,” arrives to take measurements and tells Mapes, “I need trees for my emotional stability and health.” He bemoans all we have lost in the destruction of ancient forests: “We have robbed a species of its dignity.”

Mapes is a graceful writer. She describes “the quiet finesse” of a tree; “the fructifying funk” at the base of an oak; the “wand of time” that is a core sample drilled out to ascertain age; the “choring and the weariness” in the diary of a 19th-century farmer’s wife; a spider that has “rappelled gracefully” off her glasses. She is spending so much time with her tree that it’s becoming a part of her; she sheds it only when she goes indoors at night.

As for the vexing (if not terrifying) prospect of global warming, there’s no question in any gardener or farmer or arborist’s mind: Leaf-out starts earlier than ever before and first frost comes later as average temperatures rise steadily across the land. This isn’t a matter of belief; it’s observable fact. With that change in rhythm, and a weather system on steroids, come a host of problems. As Mapes puts it: “Leaves don’t lie; frost isn’t running for office; frogs don’t fund-raise; pollinators don’t put out press releases.”

The natural world is an unimpeachable witness, and we would be wise to heed its testimony. “We are not separate from nature,” Mapes writes, and in this she echoes what the artists and scientists and gardeners are telling us too. “We are of it, and in it, and we need an ethical framework to match.”

These writers are steadfast in contemplating justice, benevolence, integrity and knowledge. Now for a little propriety. There are correct ways of doing things, ways that respect and honor others, including trees. You aren’t hoisting yourself up three stories to saw off a limb? Then you may be hiring someone to prune your trees — and either way, you should recognize proper technique, so you can help put an end to the savage butchery we see along suburban streets. Two books will protect your arboreal investment. THE TREE DOCTOR: A Guide to Tree Care and Maintenance (Firefly, paper, $19.95), by Daniel Prendergast and Erin Prendergast, offers a survey of all aspects of planting, caring, feeding and cutting. ESSENTIAL PRUNING TECHNIQUES: Trees, Shrubs, and Conifers (Timber Press, $49.95), by George E. Brown, revised and expanded by Tony Kirkham, walks any would-be arborist through a veritable dictionary of trees, from abelias to zenobias. It also tells us what not to prune. The Franklinia, for instance: “Leave it to do what it wants.”

When we’re exhausted after our outdoor chores, beautiful pictures provide cheer. Someone, somewhere, is getting the results we struggle to achieve. That would be Jinny Blom, an English garden designer and author of THE THOUGHTFUL GARDENER (Jacqui Small, $50). Some might argue there’s no such thing; a garden will always make you feel dumb about something. But who cares, if your grounds look as blowzily romantic as hers?

I first became aware of Blom’s work after seeing a sensitive restoration she did in Scotland, included here, around a magnificent lodge designed by Moshe Safdie. Blom is “unmoved by fashion” and acts on an instinctual connection to a place. She was working as a psychologist until she was 36, when, during a visit to the Spanish countryside, she felt mental gears unlocking and clicking into motion. She became a designer — of gardens, furniture and planters — working across Britain, France and Africa. She takes “the pulse of the land” and learns about plants specific to locales, weaving harmonious tapestries of colors. “Gardening,” she reminds us, “is a profound holistic experience.”

I’m told that in Europe the holistic garden now includes bug hotels, which seem to be all the rage among the cognoscenti. With no effort on my part, my entire house becomes a bug stop every spring. But for the more discerning among butterflies, spiders, bees and creepy crawlers, only custom digs will do. On this side of the pond, we’re more obsessed with housing for the fairies. For years, I’ve spared your tender sensibilities, dear readers. Until now. Sally J. Smith’s creations are irresistibly, delightfully weird. FAIRY HOUSES: How to Create Whimsical Homes for Fairy Folk (Cool Springs, $30) may catch the fancy of even the most snobbish among us. I wouldn’t mind moving into a scaled-up “Bellflower House” myself; did a wee Frank Gehry get hold of the drawing pad? Ultimately, though, I’m with William Butler Yeats and would think twice about luring in the fairies. As he hints in “The Stolen Child,” they can be dangerous: “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

And while we’re with the small ones: The Canadian writer Kyo Maclear is the author of charming, offbeat children’s books — a literary genre with which I’m growing familiar as I stash slender treasures away for my grandchild, anticipating the time when he can resist eating them. With the quirky, imaginative BIRDS ART LIFE: A Year of Observation (Scribner, $25) — part memoir, part scrapbook, part meditation — Maclear has flown the coop. I perched with her, happily charmed, for hours.

This is a wondrous little book about “being a little lost.” While she tends to her aging father, ill and frail, she accompanies an amateur bird-watcher for a year, simply for the pleasure of parsing out his love for the “imperfect and struggling.” In the course of learning to still her mind long enough to watch swans, finches and herons, she begins to ponder subjects like regret, roaming, waiting, smallness. She realizes that her sturdy marriage thrives on space, just as the pileated woodpecker needs woodlands in which to roam.

When friends are arrested in Egypt, she reads about Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned in 1916, “clinging to the birds.” Taking little trips into corners of Toronto with her binoculars, Maclear examines “the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny.” Her research is “vigorous but useless,” she writes, though watching grebes she sees that most of us avoid lulls by filling them with “recognizable busyness.” Her book is full of drawings: of people with thick, expressive eyebrows; of humans and birds praised for their smallness; of writers and musicians who wander into detours. Birders might not have much in common, but they share a simple secret: “If you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.”

A stunning book of photographs of birds, TORI (Radius, $60), arrives as a precious gift from Japan’s Yamamoto Masao. A hush hovers over these luminescent, silvery gray, blue-toned or sepia images; I found myself holding my breath as I turned the pages. Each small photograph is its own contained world, its own perfect object — and each one speaks eloquently of regrets, roaming, waiting, smallness. Or speaks of nothing but stillness. Elegiac or joyful? Is there a difference? Yamamoto seems to ask. Shed the dust of your mind; linger in these pages. There’s only the lightest touch of text, with excerpts from Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson and a few other poets — but in the end they’re all the words we need. The world is indeed full of weeping. And so much more.

♦

What book do you recommend for neophyte nature lovers?

“I can’t count the number of times I’ve stopped on the sidewalk and thought, ‘What is that bird doing — and why?’ In ‘The Genius of Birds,’ Jennifer Ackerman answers these and other questions about the intelligence of birds with curiosity and wit. If you’re starting a new relationship with nature, this is the perfect first date.” — Amy Stewart