Native Americans use this word to describe a tactic of absurd contrariness that conveys a ground level wisdom.  For instance, if a husband offends his wife, she may become “heyoka”.  When he’s hungry, she serves him a bowl of dirt; when he wishes to sleep, she noisily cleans the house; when he finally awakes, she falls asleep.  If the husband doesn’t substantially repent, it goes on indefinitely.  An episode of “heyoka” is vividly conveyed in Frederick Manfred’s fine novel, Lord Grizzly.

In fact, “heyoka” works to get out of ruts of all types, especially post-summer-garden funks.  We’re having intense tropical depressions lately, which doesn’t help the mild human kind.  So “heyoka” comes in handy.  If you wish to try something new to alleviate extreme boredom, try it out.

Want to sleep in?  Get up early.
Want to stay up late?  Go to bed early.
Hungry?  Don’t eat.
Feel tired?  Keep working.
Rested?  Don’t go to work.
Want to stay in?  Go out.
Want to go out?  Stay in.
Don’t want to clean up?  Clean up.
Want to clean up?  Don’t bother.
Want to go to the Bahamas?  Go to Anchorage.

Perhaps the medical community has a better idea. Plus, this may be related to the previous post about the “changeling garden”. Maybe my “heyoka” blues cure is, for once, not to tear out the gardens and start anew every year.  Off to Anchorage!

Steve Tobin has been my friend for almost 20 years, during which time I’ve watched his work change from glass to metal, and from large to enormous. We decided to exhibit some of his latest sculpture for the next 18 months on our lawns and meadows here at Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The following photos show a small sample. We display also works by Densaburo Oku, Daisuke Shintani and Eric Finnerty.

The exhibit is viewable on our Garden Conservancy Open Days and other Heronswood, The Cook’s Garden and Burpee events, or by appointment. We welcome tour groups as well. Please call 215-345-1766 or leave a message.

“Sunflower” in mist	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Bronze Root” on Main House lawn	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
Monumental group on Great Lawn:	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Steel Roots” left and center, “Weeds” in distance right and “Iron Shoots” at right.
“Bamboo” near the Springhouse Garden	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Syntax” near Happiness Garden	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Syntax”	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Steel Root” with “Iron Shoots”	Photo by Kenneth Ek

I just spent a long weekend attending a wedding in San Francisco at the Embarcadero Hyatt down near the water, the old Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge. The city rises up from there so I walked a lot—up to Chinatown, North Beach and over to the old Tenderloin, as well as along the Embarcadero, a bayfront parkway that resembles the Croisette in Cannes. San Francisco is scenic, with high hills and water on three sides. A center of transience, it is rooted in a colorful past, from its military origin to its boomtown days and perpetual status as a busy port. Even the bridges seem to point elsewhere.

The wedding party was small enough – about 150 – that conversations moved beyond the surface. The main topic of out-of-towners was the street people. Several of us saw people in horrifying condition talking on cell phones. I saw a man in chino pants and a blue button-down shirt rummaging through trash cans, as if he had been fired, moments before, from a software firm and needed food or stuff to turn in for cash. Someone said that California is in a crisis due to having downsized its state mental hospitals and outpatient clinics a few years ago. The feds have stepped in because the streets and the prisons are overflowing with disturbed people. Now San Francisco is a boomtown for clinical psychiatrists. I hadn’t spent time in a city center for many years, so I was shocked by the misery. My heart went out to these folks.

Some street people performed music. At the corner of Drumm and California, there was a man in his 60’s with a CD player, speakers on the sides and a stage mic on a stand plugged into the system. He not only sang along with James Brown, he performed all the dances and mic stand tosses. He was in great shape and had JB’s voice down perfectly. I enjoyed it, dropping dollars after every song in the black hat he had sitting on the sidewalk.

A few of us strolled several hours every day talking about old times and looking for street scenes from the “Dirty Harry” movies, “Bullitt” and “The Killer Elite”. We always had lunch at Crepes and Curry, a takeout stand run by an immigrant Chinese couple next to the Hyatt. It was delicious and cheap. The couple spoke perfect English. We talked about the Hakka.

The wedding ceremony was in Tiburon at St. Hilary’s, a lovely little chapel on a steep hill overlooking the ocean. The pew cushions were embroidered with California wildflowers – mine was Castilleja neglecta, or Sierra Paintbrush. The ceremony was a Lutheran-Jewish-Confucian affair. The Chinese family blessings were exquisite. The Chinese bride’s mother hoped that the couple’s love for each other would be like that between a mother and child, while the father similarly asked that they love each other in the same way that he loved his daughter. The women cried, the girls giggled.

After church the bride kept reappearing in different gowns all afternoon and evening. The finale was a gorgeous scarlet red sheath with gold embroidery. Reception banquet games included the groom standing motionless on a chair in the spotlight while the bride passed a raw egg under one pant cuff, up the leg, across the crotch, down the other leg and out the cuff unbroken. A degree in psychiatry is required to figure it out. Another had him blindfolded and passed along a line of all the young ladies, including the bride, to brush each pair of hands with his fingertips and pick out his beloved. Of course, he chose a 12-year-old ingénue to everyone’s delight and laughter. Strangely, almost no one danced. Since most of the guests were immigrant Chinese, I attributed it to their lack of an informal dance tradition. In Costa Rica, the dancing would have started before the food was served, and lasted all night. Alas, this was a sit-down affair that broke up at 10. I was one of a few who danced, and there was a game Chinese woman who broke with tradition and we cut the rug for half an hour. She works at a beauty salon in Millbrae. Later, I showered the newlyweds with a hundred one dollar bills as they slow danced. This went over big with the Chinese, who told me of their old custom of the wedding couple crossing “the golden door”, a ceremonial threshold festooned with gold coins and jewelry. One guy said that this is why so many Chinese restaurants have “golden” in their names. The groom is a sous-chef at Quince, an upscale restaurant, while the bride, a real estate broker, teaches ESL and deals blackjack at a local casino until the market picks back up.

San Francisco offers enjoyable visual scenes, surprisingly good modern skyscraper architecture, a small garden at Golden Gate Park featuring stunning dahlias, and great bookstores. Stacey’s, on Market Street just a mile or so up from the Embarcadero, has an excellent selection. There’s an art museum called “deYoung” in Golden Gate Park which has fine paintings of California. The new Dale Chihuly show was by tour only and we had no time to wait. Too bad, I’m a big fan. The 100 foot tower atop the already high-perched museum offers great 360 views, except that tall people look at the bottom edge of a grated awning that drops over the upper quarter of the floor to ceiling glass windows. It was okay for folks under 6’, but a drag for the rest of us. I had to stoop to see the horizon, Mount Tam, the Golden Gate and the pretty hills. The deYoung is not far from a charming neighborhood, “the Richmond”, where a friend gave a party. It is prosperous, but not wealthy, and sits high on a mesa, with wide streets and two-story apartment buildings that resemble vacation homes at an old-fashioned beach resort. It includes a small Russian community, as well as many Asian ethnic groups. Great light in the area too, probably due to the continuous thin cloud cover blowing overhead, rather like western Holland. San Francisco neighborhoods have wide streets by design, due to the many earthquakes requiring good access for rescue and clean-up operations.

Monday was spent with friends going up to Muir Woods, which is an indescribably magical experience. We drove on northward and westward to find the fenced-off section of the San Andreas Fault. Even with a good map, we didn’t find it. We stopped for coffee in Olema, population 55. The landscape northwest of San Rafael features high watery meadows brushed with fog, like a deep green Italian coast, with little mountains and petite rocky cliffs.

Finally, a word about the awe-inspiring Golden Gate Bridge. It’s brown colored, not golden. I thought the “golden” referred to the Gold Rush, but someone said it was named before, and probably due to the spectacular light at sunset. I fancied for a moment that it was named for all the Chinese weddings.

With about 10 million customers, Burpee draws data from a wide cross-section of avid gardeners: high, medium and low income; urban, suburban and rural; old and young; male and female.  The US conforms to the UK and Europe in nearly all categories.  Most gardeners are about 40 or older; just over half are women; home ownership is the single greatest factor; yard size is an obvious key variable, right up there with age. (You don’t see throngs of middle-aged people night clubbing.)  These similarities are neither controversial nor even arguable.  They’re as plain as the dirt on your shoes.

However, there is one big difference in the gardening activities between us and the UK and Europe—gender.  Take the customary associations of flowers and vegetables and reverse them. European, and especially British, men grow ornamentals in roughly the same proportion that US men grow vegetables.  Similarly, European women overwhelmingly dominate the kitchen garden and leave the flowers and shrubbery to the men.  They expect to be given flowers—not to grow them.  On the European continent, there is a bit more sharing, but only on the vegetable side.

For example, all the notable European flower breeders of the last century were men, including many amateurs, blunting the argument that institutional sexism was the main cause.  Granted, middle-class “career women”, outside politics and professions like medicine and law, remain a curiosity in Europe and the UK.  Left to the routine of domestic life, the sexes segregate distinctly from the front of the home, where men grow ornamentals, to the back, where the women grow the vegetables and herbs.  From a design standpoint, this traditional layout is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also practical in the densely populated towns and cities typical of Europe.  By contrast, in the countryside, especially in France and Switzerland, unprotected vegetable gardens dot the roadside next to the sides of homes as well as the backs.  Yet even there the gender tradition holds firm.  I’ll never forget some male French friends who laughed at my idea of adding vegetables to their ornamental gardening routine.

In the UK, where garden preferences are nearly opposite those of the traditional US, most homes are located in dense urban areas.  The model British row houses—which we imitated in eastern US cities—have, in effect, two gardens, front and back.  The men dominate the front, the women the back.  In the US it’s almost exactly the reverse, with the exception of the heavily British areas of the east coast, such as around Boston, where men’s garden clubs still thrive as mainly ornamental-oriented societies.

However, both Burpee statistics as well as anecdotal evidence indicate that US men grow most—but not all—the vegetables, especially the vine crops where fencing is involved, and large plantings of root crops where much physical labor is involved.  For one droll example, cucumbers are grown almost entirely by men. On the other hand, lower maintenance veggies, such as lettuce, are split more evenly 50-50.  Upper body strength has something to do with US garden preferences, as does the agrarian—versus industrial—origin of American life. More of us were peasants and farmers for a much longer period of time than our counterparts in heavily industrialized Europe, especially the UK and Germany.

Also, I speculate that the promotion of flower growing to women in the early 20th century reflected the early phase of the modern women’s movement that led ultimately to feminism. Why should men be the only ones growing the flowers?  Indeed, even today flower growing remains a bit of a men’s club, particularly in high-end shrubs and trees.

The only place in Europe where the men share the vegetable garden is Southern Italy and Greece.  This must be related to the important place they have in the kitchen, especially in Greece, where men prepare most family meals, with the women handling the table and shopping the markets where no home garden is possible.  Of course, the men run the flour mills, oil presses, vineyards and wineries, which remain extraordinarily decentralized, or on a village level, to a degree unknown elsewhere.  In the US one can still see this Greek tradition in the preponderance of restaurants and diners owned and run exclusively by men.

It is also interesting to see the male-dominated flower breeding traditions of Europe carried on, to this day, by amateur flower breeders in the US.  Personally, I find this quite odd.  Even US native plants, such as Rudbeckia and Echinacea, were bred by European men in the late 20th century—’Goldsturm’ by a German estate gardener and ‘Magnus’ by a Swedish amateur, respectively, each the classic of their type. Today, few women in the US are carrying forward the early feminist project of ornamental horticulture, except in the non-profit world of public gardens and trade associations, where they are better represented.  My sister, Anna, of Ball Seed fame (an entirely separate company) is an extraordinary exception in the world of commercial horticulture.  However, I guarantee she became President due to her ability rather than her gender.  Perhaps US women shy away from flowers due to the conventional imagery of the “flower lady” and the nuptial bouquet.  Too bad.  The field is wide open to qualified American women.

A hybrid of “get rich quick”, but with social responsibility and a sense of flair.  I’m itching to do these projects.  Anyone want to help?