Miriam Wexler interview

              Van Houten's Landing Oral History Project

Miriam Haagens Wexler 

(Views of Miriam's yard and house at 314 North Broadway, and then her south porch where this interview took place.)

My name is Miriam Haagens Wexler.  I was born in Holland - the Netherlands.  I came here when I was 22.  It was just before Holland was occupied by the Germans.  We came in December 7, 1939 - it's rather a red letter day, because it also was Pearl Harbor Day - later on.  I remember that it snowed.  I was very anxious to see the Statue of Liberty.  We came on a ship - it was called the Veendam, which was later torpedoed.  (There's a new Veendam which is made by the same line - Dutch Holland).  But it snowed and the Statue of Liberty was totally obscured by the snow, so I never saw the Statue of Liberty that day.
	We first lived in Nyack - my father and mother and 3 brothers and sisters - at that time.  I now have only 2 brothers and sisters - or 1 brother and 1 sister I should say.  My eldest brother - I'm the eldest, but he was the older brother of the 2 brothers - died when he was 55.  
	Anyhow, we first lived in New York for 2 weeks, and then somebody we knew in Holland - a musician - she was the director of the New York Street Music Settlement on Henry Street.  She lived in New City and frequently stayed over in Nyack at the Clarkstown Country Club, which is now the Nyack College.  Before that it was called the Missionary College.  The Country Club was bought by the Nyack College and is now part of the Nyack school system.  They had rooms, and when the weather was bad - snowy - she didn't want to drive to South Mountain Road where she lived in New City - that road was a lot narrower than it is today.  So she stayed overnight at the Clarkstown Country Club.  She was an old friend of ours from Holland and she introduced us to Nyack.  
	So we lived in South Nyack until I was married - which was in 1942.  I met my husband at the musicale evening that she had at her house.  That's kind of a funny story also.  A musicale is a musical evening.  People came and played and sang and so on - a soiree, if you want to call it that.  She had it occasionally because she knew a lot of people in the music world.  
	What happened was that one cold February night I was invited to this.  The minister of the Reformed Church in Nyack - which was then called the Dutch Reformed Church - asked if he could take me.  He was also invited, and Mrs. Katz (that was her name) said, "Why don't you take Miriam Wexler, because she's from Holland - he had already visited us, thinking that we would be Dutch Reform, but we were not - we were Jewish.  But he took me anyway - I can't remember his name.  He was about 40 and a widower.  He took me to Heddy Katz's house, and at about 9:30 that evening it started to snow, and he got a little panicky - because the roads were really very hilly and bad.  He said to me, "I think we should leave."  My husband, who was there by himself, said (we had been conversing and listening to the music), "The evening has barely started.  If you don't want to drive, I'll take Miss Haagens home."  I never saw this minister again.  And he became my husband - the other one - Jacob Wexler.  
	He lived in Spring Valley - he was a lawyer in Pearl River.  He lived in his mother's house in Spring Valley, which had several apartments, and for the first few years of my marriage I lived there.  His mother died and he sold the house, he and his sister, and we moved to Pearl River - this was during the war.  We fixed up an old house with 30 acres.  We lived there 17 years 'til we moved here.  
	I decided to move here from Pearl River where I had lived for 17 years because my eldest son needed a better school than was provided for him in the Pearl River district.  For a year I transported my son and his friends who also wanted to come, to Nyack - in the morning - and another mother transported them back in the afternoon.
	It took us a year to find a house - and that was this house.  It's kind of a funny story, how we found this house.  An old resident called Margaret Anderson was a friend and was in real estate.  She lived in Palisades.  She drove around with me, and when we got to this house she said, "This is going to come up for sale some time soon."  I said, "Okay."  We were not able to get into it.  I forgot about it and she forgot about it - until about 6 months later.  Another friend of mine, also a real estate agent, her name was Mary Ann Potter - who now lives in Texas - said, as we were driving, "This house is for sale."  I said, "Oh, that's nice - I would like to see it."  I saw it - it was a terrible mess, but I saw the possibilities.
	There's a long story about this - in the meantime, somebody else had put a binder down on it, and that person was named Harold Ryan.  He lived on North Broadway and he was sort of a real estate person.  At that time the house belonged to the estate of Mr. Buckley who worked for the Erie railroad.  I never met him, because he died, but his two sisters had inherited the house.  They lived upstate somewhere - near Glens Falls.  I met them once; they were elderly ladies and they gave Harold Ryan an option to buy this house.  
	Harold Ryan wanted to buy this house because he wanted to knock it down.  He had also put a binder on the school lot where the old school had been.  It was an acre and a half and this was 5/8th of an acre.  So between the 2 properties he wanted to put up a professional building, but the village board nixed that, thank goodness.
	In the meanwhile, as soon as this was done, he pulled out of it.  Another Upper Nyack resident who lived on Lexow Avenue, Alonzo Conklin, put a binder on the house.  This all happened in a 6-month period - he tried to raise money by selling his house on Lexow Avenue, so he could finance the mortgage on this house.  He was not successful.  Then we came in - finally.  All these things happened, and I was up in the air about everything.  And we were able to buy the house.  Would you like to know the price?  $25,000.  
	We put in $25,000 - it needed all that much work.  That was 1959 - the sale was in the summer of 1958, we moved in in 1959.  We had a little to-do with the school district who would not allow my children to go to this school  - I wanted them to go in September - we bought the house in July - but they felt that unless we were living in the house we had to pay tuition.  My husband was a lawyer - he fought that and he won.  The date of the deed was the essential date, said the court. 
	As I was living in this house I wasn't working yet.  I was going to school and fixing up the inside with various workmen - taking down the wall paper and old stuff and painting and so on.  I was going to library school part-time at Rutgers University, but I worked in the garden a lot.  There was a driveway around the house - all the way around - which we closed up because it made a lot of dust.  Mr. Pitt, the uncle of Win Perry, who lived across the street in Win Perry's house, frequently - actually, every day - would walk up to his sister, who lived up there, which is Win Perry's mother.  I don't really know if that was his sister or another relative - Win can straighten that out.  (Note: Charles Pitt adopted his wife's nephew, Winston Perry Sr. when he was orphaned as a boy - so he was Win Perry's great uncle, and it was Win's mother who lived up Highmount Avenue and gave Charles Pitt his dinner each day.) 
	 He was an old man, and he would stop and we would have a little conversation because he was catching his breath as I was digging around in the garden. So I got to know him.  I got to know that he got his mid-day meal at Mrs. Perry's house.  She was like his Meals on Wheels except he had to walk to get it.  I found out that he had built the addition to this house in 1906 - the wooden part.  This house (the south part) was just a brick square building before that. 
	As a matter of fact, there's a building very much like this on Sickletown Road in what is called - Van Houten Fields - have you ever been there?  That building has no addition - it has an upstairs porch on columns and so on, which was put on later - because I remember the house without the addition - and it was just like the picture of this house.
	That addition was built in 1906, and the house itself was built originally, I think in 1855 - but the deed to the land was earlier.  The first owner was Fellows - after that a Mr. Coe - after that Mr. Buckbee - and after that, us - except Mr. Ryan, in-between, and he didn't really own it, for more than a few weeks.  So we are the 4th owner of this house.  
	It doesn't have bay windows, it really isn't a Victorian house - I would call it Empire period house.  Late Colonial, early Empire.  What is most interesting was the woodwork - inside and around the windows - rather ununsual - I don't know if you noticed it.  You may want to take a picture of it.  That's why I have never put drapes in the house - just curtains.  The fact is that it has plaster walls all throughout, and that it had the basement kitchen which apparently had been used.  It had the gas plate on top of the counter, and in the basement there was a soapstone sink and there must have been a maid at one time.  Also there was a toilet in the basement where the heating furnace is.
	Mr. Buckbee, who had very bad arthritis, according to Dr. Rooney who lived across the street, and who is long dead, and his wife, - who was apparently his physician, although he was an anesthesiologist - maybe he became that later, I'm not sure.  He said, "Oh, Mr. Buckbee would have so much loved the bathroom you put in on this floor."  We put in a bathroom between the kitchen and what was then the dining room.  He either had to go down in the basement to go to the bathroom, or upstairs.
	We had a very nice garden in Pearl River also.  I have always been interested in gardening.  We had a very large piece of property - 30 acres - which we sold in 1955 and we moved here.  We went to Europe in 1956 with the money we got for it.  We didn't get all that much, and we spent it all - we spent 8 weeks in Europe, visiting family and friends.  
	I had a very large garden up to the edge of the woods and we had deer there also.  My husband almost once shot a buck that wandered into our garden one November.  But the children prevented him.  
	My children?  My daughter, my youngest, lives in New York - West Village, on West Street, in one of the Jane Jacobs houses - buildings.  My middle son - I'm going from the bottom up - lives near Albuquerque in a small town called Tijuaras, in New Mexico, and he is a high school teacher and writer - an unpublished writer, but that's his avocation.  But his vocation is teaching high school to children who have difficulty in an alternative high school in New Mexico - in Albuquerque.  And my elder son is at the moment  - the last 20 years - a dentist.  But he was really a PHD in physical chemistry, and he couldn't get enough of a job - that would pay him enough.  He was a graduate of Washington University at St. Louis, and he lives at the moment in Dunlap, which is a suburb of Peoria, Illinois, and he runs a dental clinic there.  He's unmarried, but he has a girlfriend.  My middle son is married with a Mexican woman - her name is Lupe.  And Jessica is married, for the second time.  Steven, also, is married for the second time.  And David is divorced - so he's single.  
	(I was a librarian) in the East Ramapo School District.  I was an elementary school librarian.  On my time off in the summer I worked in various public libraries - sometimes Nyack, Nyack High School sometime during the summer.
	I wrote a book.  It's a book about libraries - it's a book about… I had the very first elementary school media center - in the county, anyway.  I got a grant in the middle or late '60s, from New York State University in Albany and there was a library program there.  They were running a summer program about 8 weeks long to give people who wanted to start a media program in their elementary schools hints and so on - so I took that class and I had already written the book I think - I can't remember now what the timing of that was.  I think I had already written the book - I can't remember exactly.  
	The book came out in '72, but it took about 2 years for that book to be actually published.  After we handed in the manuscript it took forever to get it done.  That book was not just written by me alone - my principal wrote the introductory chapter and another friend of hers who was in another school, who was assistant principal in another school district on Long Island, wrote a chapter on media materials - like film and tape and everything else having to do with media that could be used in an elementary school.  
	I write mostly poetry.  I have tried to write a children's book, but I broke my wrist in the middle of it.  I illustrated it also - and I never got back to it for that reason.  Maybe it was just a good thing that I didn't.  I wrote a story about Cinderella - about the pumpkin of Cinderella - the Cinderella story from the point of view of the pumpkin.  The children really loved it - this was when I was a school librarian.  I told them the story, then I wrote it down, and so on.  The children really liked it, but I never got to publish it.  I sent the manuscript around to several people without illustrations, and I got a lot of critical comments - but they were mostly rejection slips.  
	I also sent it to several other children writers, like Jane Yolen - she's quite well known, and others - Barbara Brenner - do you know her?  She used to live in West Nyack - she doesn't any longer.  They had various comments to make - discouraged me.
	The Deyrups?  Alvin Johnson was Felicia's father, and he was the founder of the New School of Social Research - which attracted a lot of Jewish humanists, professors from Germany, who were fleeing - all humanities people, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, etc.  Felicia was an Economics professor at that school, and in her later life she had the job of dissertations.  She vetted or critiqued the dissertations that the students that were graduating wrote.  This was a graduate school only.  It's not a college.  I think it still is only a graduate school.  
	Some very famous people were there - Heilbron, for example - the famous economist - and I can't remember the other names.  But my sister went to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis through the good offices of Alvin Johnson.  His idea was - and I think perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Katz, whom I mentioned before - connected my parents with him - because his idea was that all these immigrants, like us, and others, should not stay on the East coast.  They should spread themselves out, throughout the country.  He got her a scholarship at the University of Minnesota - that's where she got her degree and met her husband.  
	In 1956 when we sold that property and we were ready to move to Nyack after that, we took a European trip - we went to every country, including Denmark.  I have a long-standing friendship with a Danish man, whom I met in 1938 - no, in 1937 when he came on his bicycle to Holland.  We had been pen pals for 3 years, since I was 17 and he was 18.  I got his address from an international youth organization to which I belonged, and he apparently did too.  His ad said, "Young Danish man by the name of Niels Alsted want to correspond with a Dutch girl."  I answered the ad, and we have been corresponding ever since.  
	After corresponding for 3 years, while I was living in Holland, he came in 1937 on his bicycle from Denmark to Holland.  It took him 7 days; he stayed with us for 7 days.  He went back on the train, I must admit -but we got to like each other and we continued to correspond.  In 1938 I went to Denmark and stayed with his people.  His father was a country doctor in the north of Denmark and so I stayed with them and I stayed in Copenhagen.  Niels had a job in Copenhagen.  After that the war broke out, and though we really liked each other - we might have gotten married if the war hadn't broken out - we went to the United States.  We just corresponded from there on in.
	Then I met my husband, and I thought, "Nothing will ever come from this Danish connection," but now it has come.  Since 1996 we go regularly to visit each other.  There's something better than e-mail - written letters.  Neither of us have a computer, so we don't use e-mail.  

Part II (At a later date Betty Perry from across the street joins Miriam in her living room)

BP:  I moved here in 1960.

MW:  I was here already a year and a half.  We didn't know each other very well at the beginning.

BP:  She was off doing her library things, and I was taking care of my 4 children.  I saw Jessica rather more for baby-sitting.

MW:  Yes.  I saw a lot of her uncle - before you moved in - Mr. Pitt.

BP:  Great Uncle Charlie.

MW:  He lived there before he died.

BP:  We shared the house with him when we first came.  We had no place to live.  And one little 89-year-old man didn't take up much space - so

MW:  Yes. He would walk up every day to

BP: Win's parents' house is just up a couple house here (on Highmount).

MW:  I would be in the garden trying to make something here.  I would get tired and he would pass by.  He walked very slowly up the hill.  You know, Win's mother was his Meals on Wheels - his mid-day meal.  So we had conversations - that was how I found out that the part of the house that is the wooden part was built by him in 1906.  That's how I know the date.

BP: And the porch he added too - because it's just like our porch.

MW: Yes.  This house was just a square box before that - a 4-room square box.

BP:  Her 2 parents lived for a while in the neighborhood, the last years of their lives.  He was a book dealer.

MW: That was when he was here.  But when he was in New York he had an office in the Scribner Building, and he also represented a Dutch newspaper - for the Dutch community in New York.  It was called the Haas Post.  And my mother, as a matter of fact, in her youth, was a correspondent for that paper.  She was an early feminist - that was before she was married.  And she wrote a woman's page, so-called, and other things.  One time she had to report on a submarine that had burst in Rotterdam.  She lived in the Hague - not far - and she went there to report on this submarine.  It was a Greek submarine - and it was quite an unusual thing for a submarine to be in Rotterdam.  This must have been right after World War I - it was before I was born - oh, or during World War I - who knows - Holland was neutral.  
	So in those days they wore these hopsack dresses - it was a linen-like material, all the way down to the floor - no waist.  It was a very feminist outfit - you did not show your figure - a sack, a chemise-type thing.  Anyhow it was very long, but you could show an ankle, I believe - a little peek.  She went on this submarine - she had to - somebody came to get her in a little boat and then she had to walk a small gangplank - and she stepped on the hem of her dress and it ripped.  She got a big rip on the side.  There must have been a seam there - and it's like that movie where what's her name - Katherine Hepburn - goes to a party and Cary Grant steps on her dress and it showed all her under things.  I don't know if my mother had a slip on or anything, but anyhow as she came to the captain's cabin, he was very polite.  He said, "If you will go behind this screen, I will mend your dress."  And he did.  

BP:  I didn't grow up here.  I've heard the stories from Miriam and Win and all about the neighborhood.  Miriam lived in South Nyack before she was married.

MW:  I lived in South Nyack at what is called Voorhis Point.  My parents rented a house on Voorhis Point.  I was married from that house.  And before we rented the house at Voorhis point, for 6 months we lived in a little cottage on the Pierre Bernard estate, which was called The Music Box.  It was a small house - it's still there, behind the very big house which is now part of the college - I think it's part of the recreation department.

BP:  You know that's up on the hill where the junior high is.

MW:  Next to where the junior high is now.  He sold that property to the junior high school.  The cottage, or the house which was called The Farm, which was the house of the wife of Bernard - her name was Blanche De Vries - a Dutch name.  She divorced him - or he divorced her - I don't know which.  She later moved to Upper Nyack, to the Moorings - the center house of the Moorings.  You know there are 2 cottages and the main houses where Mrs. Beck now lives.  Do you know the Becks?  Well, you're better off not to know them.

BP:  You probably know Florence Katzenstein …

MW:  Florence and Walter live in the south cottage, and Mrs. Altman's daughter lives in the north cottage.  But Pierre Bernard built all these houses, and he built houses up on the hill also, up on  - what do you call it?

BP:  You don't mean where the Harings are…

MW:  No, behind the Nyack College there are a number of houses built by Pierre Bernard.  He had a kind of a real estate business.  He enticed rich people to come.  He had what you might call a cult going - a yoga cult - yoga and meditation philosophical cult.  This was - we came here in 1939, so it was 1940 until the time that he died and they sold the property to the college.

BP:  Remember they owned where Waldron Terrace now is - the low-income housing.  It was a race track for dogs.

MW:  But that was, I think, outlawed by the state.

BP:  Also he ran out of money, so he began selling things at a great rate.  

Jane:  What was your experience of this cult and Pierre Bernard?

MW:  We lived there only 6 months.  He had not only animals - which were in stables, at the back of the property.  You had to walk quite a distance to get to the stables.  They were closer to Central Nyack, the stables.  The stables were adjoining Central Nyack, near where the middle school is now.

BP:  It was.  Now, actually it's the administration building.

MW:  They had elephants, and he also boarded tigers.  He had a certain kind of connection with circus people, and when the circus was not traveling with these animals, - it was a German guy, I don't remember his name- Kurt something, I think - he boarded the animals there.  I think there were 2 tigers.  You could hear them - it was a lion, because you would hear that roar.  And with the elephants you could hear them trumpet.  Then there were peacocks - you could hear them scream.

Jane: What was it like for you living amongst these animals?

MW:  Well I didn't really live amongst them - you didn't see them, but occasionally they would take the elephants for a walk on a kind of a leash.  They had an elephant trainer or something, and somebody fed them.  Pierre Bernard loved parties - his wife loved parties.  I remember one party was a fiesta.  We only lived there 6 months, but lots of things happened.  He had lectures - there was a yoga person who came from India and lectured.  I think I went to one of those lectures.  It was very boring to me - I was maybe 22.

(Now Miriam walks about in her yard.)

MW:  I see that the deer have not yet discovered my hosta.  In a few days all the lilies will be blooming.

Jane: Miriam, is there a name you have for the house?

MW:  For the garden I have a name, not for the house:  Cornuscopia, meaning - it's a pun on cornucopia - cornus is the Latin name for dogwood - cornus florida.  The s makes a difference.  Gardeners would understand that.

(Sitting on benches in the back garden)

MW:  We planted every darn tree on this property.  This is one of my dogwood trees that we took from Pearl River.  There was another dogwood tree there which died - where this border is now.  All these dogwood trees that are here now - there are 20 or more, in this garden - were planted by birds.  And then I took the small ones and I put them somewhere else.  So the first dogwood tree I planted was next to the neighbors' house - so you would have a shield.  When we first bought the house, there was absolutely nothing here, except the spruces on Highmount Avenue, and some dead oak trees in the front of the house.  One of them was already cut down, and we had the other cut down.  

And there was a driveway running all the way through where the hedge is now to the back.  It was a pebble driveway.  It made a lot of dust, so that's the first thing.  I had a bulldozer - maybe people did it by hand.  We dug it out and we planted grass.  The whole back yard was grass.  The first flower bed I made was on the other side of the driveway.  It was a bulb flower bed - and it still is my main spring flower bed.  It went only up to where there's a white pine tree - from the garage, which at that time was wood, and smaller - a 2-car garage with a wooden floor - sort of a barn or coach house - it was called that by the real estate agent.  

That was my first garden.  I was working all the time, so I really didn't have much time to do things until later.  In 1981 I really started to expand.  After I had these 2 straight, rectangular flower beds, I put the extra stuff around the edges.  In the front I dug 2 island beds.  What I did was I went upstairs and I looked out of the windows to see what it would look like.  I laid out the beds in the shapes I thought I would like.  I was running up and down, changing the holes, doing this at least 10 times. 
I'm not a master gardener.

BP:  She's a mistress of gardens.

MW:  I've never gone to the Extension Service to take courses to become a Master Gardener.  I just didn't want to spend the time doing the community service - you have to do 100 hours of community gardening.

BP:  She's got her own community to help.  When Jonathan Demme and Joanne moved in, they wanted to know what to plant out front in the border, so Miriam advised them - and others - all ad hoc.

Miriam, what about how this piece was developed?

MW:  Jacob was very interested in making privacy, so we put all these pine trees in here.  They were all small things when we put them in, and those shrubs in-between.  Nothing would grow under those pine trees, so I made a wild flower garden - that will grow - but  the grass would not grow.  That was the second thing.

Then I started to plant things in front of the hemlock hedge.  In '96, just before Jacot died - while he was dying, actually - Bob Roach took down the hemlocks because they were getting totally out of hand.  I was standing on ladders trying to prune them, and all of a sudden wooly adelgids came about - 10 or 15 years ago.  They were not affected by it.

BP:  They would have been.

MW:  Yes, they would have been.  So then I developed the beds in front and also the beds in the front of the house.  About in '81 I started.  The hydrangeas here came from a client of Jacob who moved away - an Italian client - and he offered us whatever we wanted from his garden.  This was in the '60s - I remember because I had a Camaro, an open convertible, and I remember very well I took all these hydrangeas and I put them in the Camaro, on a tarp, and I couldn't close the top of course, and it started to rain on the Thruway.  Everybody was looking at me with these plants, in the rain.  They all survived and they're really fantastic.  I often think of Nick Pucera  - that was his name.  So, many of my plants have come from people.  

For example I have an interesting, very old-fashioned daylily that blooms very early.  It's called dormitiegri, and I got it from a friend in Pearl River who moved to Puerto Rico.  Then later I saw it in a White Flower Farm catalog that they featured as a new find/

Jane:  Did Felicia also share plants a lot?

MW:  We did that.  Felicia gave me things and I gave things to her.

BP:  And they both gave things to us.

MW:  Between Felicia and me, if something would not grow in my garden, it might grow better in her garden.  It's like a plant insurance system.  That did work out.  Felicia was very helpful.  Whenever I needed some help to dig up a big shrub or something, she was there to help me.

BP:  She was so strong!

MW:  The only problem with her was that she would never let me help her.  She was a very stubborn person.  She could do it all herself, she thought - even when she couldn't.  I'm always willing to accept help.  I never say no.  

BP:  Did Jacob ever get involved in the garden at all?

MW:  No!  He liked to admire it - that was all.  Well, he would help prune something that was too tall or too difficult.  He'd take his saw, he liked to take that saw…

BP:  He liked sawing.

MW:  He like sawing and chopping wood for the fireplace.  Whenever a tree came down, even if we had them taken down professionally, he would chop up the wood.

BP:  The children never really got involved.

MW:  Believe it or not, Jessica - I could not get her involved, but she's a gardener now.  She lives in an apartment, but she calls herself a guerilla gardener.   

My philosophy of gardening is not to get too exotic - to use what grows well here and to expand on it.  Lately I'm interested mostly in having large areas of a particularly flower, rather than a bit here and there. So that's what I'm working toward.  It's like moving furniture in the house - you play with it.  You can't play with it as much as when you move furniture - it's harder, because it takes time before you know what's going to happen.  But I do get a pattern in my head, and when I look out of the window I can sort of figure it out. 

From most windows I have a view - even though I don't have very big windows.  From the porch of course I look at this.  From the kitchen I look at my bulb garden.  From the bedrooms I see the front.  One interesting thing that's happening since I have these new beds there, legions of digitalis seedlings, which I'm moving around, to group together.

This little tree you are standing under is a Japanese double cherry tree.  I got the original one from Felicia.  The violets are standing on the stump of the original one.  When it died - it went kaput, you might say - a shoot came up from the side, so I have been nourishing that for 3 or 4 years now, and it grew up to what it is now, and it bloomed this spring for the first time.  This is really a spring garden - it had all kinds of interesting spring flowers in it.  Now this sort of wild geranium has taken over, and I'm going to leave it alone.  All the rhododendrons are just finished, but there are interesting leaf shapes here.  

I have a lot of things from Felicia - hellebores - they all came from Felicia.  Toad lily, epimedium, all this blooms very early in the spring.  I don't know what kind of a weed tree this is.  It looks interesting.  I have some rhubarb here too.  I have already had 3 desserts from rhubarb.  This is called Japanese anemone - the variety is called robustissima, and it is robust.  

When we had the open day of the Garden Conservancy, they were so impressed by this (the climbing hydrangea) and my mahonia.  But right now these bug banes are beginning to bloom - semicifuga  is their Latin name.  I'm not a very neat gardener.  I like things more or less wild.  I don't care for exotic things - more what grows well in the wild in the neighborhood - that's what I stick with.  

I'm very sorry that my rhododendrons aren't blooming well - I don't know what's the matter.  They're just making new growth and not many buds - just a few buds here and there.  When we moved into this house, one of my husband's clients was a warden in the state parks and he provided us with all these rhododendrons.  I'm sure he dug them out of the state parks, but they are the natural ones - the catawbiensis.  And this just flew in - I don't know where it came from - and I see I have a lot of Virginia Creeper that I have to get rid of.  

This is mahonia - it's also called Oregon Grape.  It has a yellow flower very early in the spring - a cluster.  It's not too beautiful.  The ones in Denmark are much better looking.  The climate is better - it's more like Oregon.  But the birds love those berries and eat them.  It took a long time - it has taken 25 years since 1981 to do all these things.  And I'm finished now - I really am.  I plant very few new things.  I just move them from place to place.  I would say it's an editing job more than anything else.

Recorded June 2004 and July 2005