The Problem With Groundhog Day

On Thursday of this week - February 2 - you will hear on the radio or see on television that Punxsutawney Phil climbed out of his cage and either did or did not see his shadow which means there either will or will not be six more weeks of winter.  Amazingly, this will be the 126^th year in a row that the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, has re-enacted this bit of municipal schmaltz.  Even more amazing, Punxsutawney is just one of nearly a hundred towns in the U.S. and Canada that will hold such early morning stunts.

Before I go further, let me first say that I think the film, Groundhog Day, is one of the most original stories every told by the American cinema.  For that 1993 film, Bill Murray can be forgiven all manner of duds (The Royal Tennenbaums, Charlie’s Angels) and Andie MacDowell will forever remain in my mind as one of the sweetest actresses to grace the screen.

Know thy enemy... many names, same varmit

But, to the best of my knowledge, we do not celebrate Benedict Arnold’s birthday in this country (I cannot speak for Canada), not do we set aside a day to honor, say, the Japanese Beetle.  Why on earth do we have a day that commemorates a rodent whose sole purpose in life, I fervently believe, is to destroy vegetable gardens?

To begin with, ‘groundhog’ is simply one of the many aliases for a nemesis we know well in New England – the woodchuck.  Elsewhere in the country, this creature has set up shop using the monikers ‘whistle-pig’, ‘land-beaver’ and ‘marmot’.  The woodchuck currently sleeping in a burrow just outside your garden likely has ID cards from many states, including one issued by the Algonquins for its original name, wuchak.

Woodchucks gravitate to gardens the way Red Sox fans seek out Fenway Park.  As the Cornell Extension Service rather dryly states it, “Woodchucks can become a nuisance when their feeding and burrowing habits conflict with human interests. They frequently damage vegetable and flower gardens, agricultural crops, orchards, nurseries, and areas around buildings. Damage to crops can be costly…”

Last year, my wife, Betty, designed a massive, 6,000-square-foot Chef’s Garden at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  Prior to its new incarnation, it was the Society's Vegetable Trial Garden, and it was a veritable Sunday brunch at Cafe Fleuri for the indigenous Elm Bank woodchuck population.  In 2010, the site's last year as a trial garden, I helped Gardens Curator David Fiske pull plastic for and plant a large site for a new hybrid watermelon Mass Hort had been asked to evaluate.  As the melons ripened, woodchucks would choose several to sample, leaving behind well-gnawed produce.  On the day before the melons were to be harvested, the Groundhog Gourmet Society invaded en masse and functionally destroyed the plot, not even leaving the seeds behind.  The new garden incorporates a fence that goes down a full foot into the soil.

I might feel differently about Groundhog Day if I suspected that the rodent involved actually had some prognostication ability. However, no less an authority than the Canadian Encyclopedia, using data from 13 cities gathered over a 30 to 40-year span, puts the prediction success level at just 37%.  In other words, you can do better flipping a coin.

So, on Thursday, please excuse me if I’m not glued to the live, 7:20 a.m. webcast from Pennsylvania.  Looking out at my green lawn this year, I can’t help but feel that winter was over before it began.

Would You Like a Townhouse to Go Along With That Garden?

The Boston Flower & Garden Show opens on March 14 - eight weeks and two days from today.   I know this because, in the next 58 days, I have to pull a gigantic rabbit out of a hat: to wit, a townhouse.  Perhaps I should explain.

My wife, Betty, is a superb horticulturalist and gardening lecturer.  She also dabbles in gardening as evidenced by our two acres of dazzling perennials, containers and specimen beds.  She knows garden design though she does not practice as a professional.  For the past five years, she has created exhibits for, first, the New England Spring Flower Show and, for the past two years, the Boston Flower & Garden Show.

A few weeks back, I was looking over her shoulder as she sketched the elements of a garden for the upcoming show, the theme of which is ‘First Impressions’.  Her problem wasn’t so much the garden as it was the backdrop.  The garden she was creating won’t be one of the lucky ones surrounded by other landscape displays.  Instead, it will back up to the ‘commercial’ part of the show – the vendors that pay the show’s bills.  She was thinking in terms of tall evergreens to block the view of the vendors so that people viewing the garden wouldn’t be distracted by someone hawking shovels or statuary.

My bright idea: add the facade of
a 20-foot-wide, two-story
townhouse to the rear of an
entry garden.

“Too back you can’t just put up a house in back of the garden,” I joked. “That would certainly block the view of the vendors.”

She kissed me.  Normally, this is a very good thing.  When she kisses me after she has been growling in frustration, bad things can follow.

To make a long story short, my job became to build a regulation-size, twenty-foot-wide, two-story townhouse.  Fortunately, the townhouse has to be only a foot deep.  Also fortunately, the ceiling of the Seaport World Trade Center is sixteen feet high so the townhouse I need to build is just a story and a half.  It will kind of disappear into the ceiling.  I hope.

I should also note that my budget for this house of very close to zero because the organization sponsoring the garden is a non-profit.

This is what I found at the warehouse
(no, that's not me in the photo)

Last week, I got very dirty crawling through a warehouse where various staging for the old New England Spring Flower Show is stored.  The first thing I found was a door in a frame.  Then, miracle of miracles, I found an 8’x8’ clapboard panel with a window in it.  Then I found another.  I also found a plethora of 4’x’8’ framed plywood panels.  I recognized one of the clapboard panels because I nearly got killed installing it at the 2007 show for another of Betty’s gardens.

Having these pieces of lumber is a far cry from having a townhouse façade, but it is a start.  It will take the services of a couple of very good carpenters (volunteers, of course, like me) to turn it into a Beacon Hill townhouse.

This weekend, Betty found a perfect, half-round granite doorstep for it, plus a heptacodium that will be the 420-square-foot garden’s centerpiece.  She is now working with greenhouses to get forced plant material sufficient to fill the garden to appear like it is mid-May in the middle of March.  She has the hard part of this assignment.

And all I have to do is make a townhouse appear.

Now Is the Winter of My Discontent

On the second day of this new year, I plunged into the woods that make up part of our property and sawed a very large tree limb into roughly a dozen pieces.  The limb – more accurately, about a third of a tree – fell during our brush with Irene back in late August, and we have a policy that “what falls in the woods stays in the woods” unless it interferes with the sight lines from one of our windows.

I will freely admit that when we first noticed the limb, I made some kind of vague commitment that I would “do something about it, eventually”, which is commonly understood to mean that it will still be on my “to do” list in 2030. 

That's me, a year ago today, clearing away the newest
foot of snow.  This morning, there's nothing but lawn.

For me, the saving grace of most such promises is the advent of winter.  Once there’s a foot of snow on the ground, outdoor chores are reduced to one or two bouts of cutting firewood.  The wonderful thing about a good, old-fashioned New England winter is that five months of Mother Nature acting on something as ephemeral as a tree limb eliminates the problem without me having to break a sweat.  Come next spring, the problem would have mostly solved itself.

But this is – at least so far – the snowless winter, except for a cruel October storm that raised all sorts of false hopes about record snowfalls (and left much of New England without power for a week).  All the autumn chores that I put off with the full expectation of getting a pardon once the snow pack was knee deep are still out there, beckoning me.  Instead of curling up with a book on New Year’s Day, I spent an hour cutting down the ornamental grasses that should, by all rights, have been flattened by now.  This is patently unfair.

And, if you remember back just one year, we all spent the week between Christmas and New Years digging out from a pair of back-to-back storms that dumped nearly three feet of the white stuff across the region.  Once that snow was in the record books, all I had to do was point to the snow banks and wince a little bit about having pulled a muscle wielding our snow blower, and I was excused from all chores.  I got a lot of reading (and writing) done last winter.

This year I walk out to the mailbox and see the pile of branches that really needs to get taken to the town dump.  Out back, there is a mat of leaves on walkways that ought to get raked so that moisture can better seep down into the ground.  The list of uncompleted autumn chores is endless.

Somewhere out there is an Alberta Clipper that is going to merge with some warm, muggy moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.  They’re going to collide somewhere over Pennsylvania and shoot northeast.  When that happens, we’re going to get buried.  I, for one, can’t wait.

High Maintenance Houseplants

Let me state at the outset:  I love White Flower Farm.  They are the class act of mail-order gardening and their Litchfield, Connecticut headquarters contains, without question, some of the finest display gardens I have ever seen – and I have seen a lot of them.  So, when White Flower Farm sends me catalogs and emails, I read them.  I do so as much for the writing style (both friendly and learned) as well as for the breadth of uncommon plants being offered.

This is what our jasmine should look
like in January (photo from
White Flower Farm)

Two weeks ago, I received an emailed offer from them that was too good to pass up:  a jasmine plant (Jasminum polyanthum), with buds already set, that was both attractively priced and the purchase of which would support the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  I pushed the ‘buy’ button.

The plant arrived a few days later.  White Flower Farm knows how to package a live plant for shipment: an oblong box held the pot in such a way that, irrespective of whether UPS acknowledged the ‘this side up’ plea, the potting mix would stay in place and the plant would be undamaged.  The plant’s tendrils were cushioned (though one arrived broken, which is still a very good survival rate).  Best of all, the plant had hundreds of tiny buds that will lead to a beautiful and fragrant display in January and February.

And, inside was a complete booklet of care instructions.  This is where things began to get complicated.

According to the booklet, in order to promote blooming, the jasmine plant needs to spend the next month in a very unusual environment.  It needs a) “a cool place” with b) and c) “bright, indirect light”.  We are fortunate to live in a home with 64 windows, and that excludes skylights.  But finding a location that met all three criteria was going to be tricky.  According to the video on the WFF website, our jasmine should be kept in a room “between 50 and 60 degrees”.  We tend to keep most parts of our house at 65 degrees in the winter, which is cool by most homeowners’ standards, but above the level specified.  Some exposures get bright sun, but we eschew curtains in those rooms specifically because we want the solar heating benefits. 

We finally settled on our master bathroom, which drops to 62 degrees during the day, has a large, triple window, and which faces northwest and so gets no direct sunlight between November and March.  Of course, we’re only in that room for a brief period each day, but we’ll cross that particular bridge when the plant starts flowering.

If finding a proper place for the plant while it’s getting ready to flower is problematic, the real high-maintenance part of its ownership comes once the blooming cycle is done.

“After bloom, give your plant at least six hours of direct sun and normal room temperatures.”  Check.  We can definitely do that.  We have lots of windows with direct sunlight.

“When the danger of frost has passed, set the plant outdoors for the summer, shifting it gradually from a shady spot to full sun.”  OK, we’ll put it in our screened porch in May.  Sometime in June, we’ll let it spend a few hours a day on the back deck. Maybe I’ll set a timer.  In July, it moves to the deck full time.  Maybe.

“To encourage the formation of flower buds for next winter, be sure your plant experiences the cooler temperatures and shorter days of early autumn.  The plant needs 4-5 weeks of nighttime temperatures between 40° and 50°F, plenty of sunlight and the complete absence of artificial light after sundown.”

Next spring, the jasmine goes out on
our screened porch with the
rest of the houseplants.  No special
treatment thereafter!

The jasmine wants what?  Our cat requires less maintenance than this plant.  We have very little control over the nighttime temperatures around here.  We can get a frost in September.  “Plenty of sunlight” rules out the screened porch which provides some retained heat but fails the sunlight test.  As to the ban on artificial light, I’m at a complete loss. Maybe one of those birdcage covers at sundown?

Because I have an investment in it and I happen to love the smell of jasmine, I’m going to pamper this plant for the next month.  With luck and a little TLC, January and February will include a sweet, heavenly scent around our house.  Come May, we’ll pop the jasmine out onto the screened porch with our other houseplants for a spring and summer of leisure.

But after that, it gets no special treatment.  It lives by the house rules.

(December 2012 update:  To bring the story full circle, we kept the jasmine on our screened porch until mid-September; then put it in our basement, which gets low light through a bank of windows and stays at a relatively constant 55 degrees. The jasmine is covered in buds as this is written and is coming 'upstairs' for the holidays.)

The Big Bright Green....

If you are reading this from a subtropical climate, be prepared to scratch your head for the next few minutes.  You see, I have a problem.  One of my shrubs refuses to acknowledge that it is winter.

Our spirea Ogden Mellow Yellow,
still hanging on, with a yucca in
the foreground.

Here in New England, we cherish a group of shrubs that hold out against the end of autumn.  There is a spirea Ogden Mellow Yellow that is still a golden brown-yellow, and it is framed against a yellow-green yucca.  It’s a pleasure to look at, as is an itea ‘Henry Garnet’ with mottled golden leaves that cling tenaciously in mid-December.  Ultimately, of course, they will drop the last of their leaves, but they will have earned my appreciation for their providing a memory of summer as we approach the shortest day of the year.

And, of course, we have our evergreens up here.  Our property is studded with rhododendron; wonderfully dark green shrubs with waxy leaves that brighten up the winter.  There is also multiple forms of ilex – holly to the rest of the world – and boxwood.  We do not lack for greenery and, if we do, there are always the white pines, framed against a chalk-white sky.

Why is this buddleia
still green on December 15?

And so I am at a loss to explain a yellow buddleia that, for reasons known only to itself, is still in full leaf – full green leaf.  Green leaf as though it is still July.

There is rule around here: deciduous trees and shrubs lose their leaves in the autumn.  This butterfly bush seemed to have forgotten the lesson.

Next summer, it should look like this...

There is science at work: less sunlight (and we are down to eight hours a day right now) means an end to production of chlorophyll.  During the growing season, chlorophyll is continually being produced and broken down and leaves appear green. As the days shorten, chlorophyll production slows down and then stops and eventually all the chlorophyll is destroyed. The carotenoids and anthocyanins that are present in the leaf are then unmasked and show their colors.  This buddleia seems to have skipped that class.

The reason I’m not rejoicing at having a green shrub is that – well, it’s wrong.  Leaves fall and we get bare branches around here.  I’m used to it.

So, do your thing, buddleia.  Join your compatriots on the property and shed those leaves.  Winter starts in a week, for crying out loud. 

All the Leaves Are Brown...

Possibly the worst comic strip running in America today is ‘Pluggers’, a treacly concoction populated by characters who are almost universally morbidly obese.   In the Plugger world, being a cheeseburger away from a stroke is OK if one has a kind heart.  I generally scan right past it in the morning but, one day last month, the phrase ‘leaf blower’ caught my eye.

This is the way our neighbors remove
the leaves from their lawn.  The next
day, it's as though the lawn service
had never been there.

I have a thing about leaf blowers.  And it’s not a good thing. Leaf blowers are the single most unnecessary invention ever foisted off on the gardening public.  They are a way for lawn care firms to hit up homeowners for the expense of multiple visits at what would otherwise be the winding-down part of the season.

Leaves fall from trees for roughly eight weeks in New England.  For that period of time – mid-September through mid-November - every morning brings a fresh crop of leaves, culminating in a cascade of brown from oaks.  Lawn care companies come out weekly (why not daily?) and blow their customers’ leaves into a pile where they are then sucked via a giant vacuum hose into a truck, then hauled away to a landfill.  Twenty minutes after the truck departs, the winds pick up and blow newly fallen leaves onto the formerly pristine lawn.  To those leaves are added a bonanza of additional leaves from neighbors’ lawns.  By the next morning, it is as though nothing was ever done.



This is an aerial photo of our home.
The lawn is relatively small, but it is
surrounded by deciduous trees.

There is just one sane thing to do with the leaves that fall on your lawn:  run a lawn mower over them periodically.

We have been doing this with our own lawn for more than a decade.  Every week, we spend 45 minutes with our lawnmower set at two-and-a-half inches, and we chop whatever leaves are on our lawn into a fine mulch.

What we have discovered is a simple, elegant truth:  leaves left undisturbed on a lawn will form an impenetrable mat that prevents winter moisture from getting through to the soil and promotes the growth of mold.  Leaves chopped up by a lawnmower and left on a lawn decompose in a few weeks and become… fertilizer.  No matter how deep the leaves, the lawnmower minces them. 

This our lawn this afternoon,
December 4, 2011.  It has not been
raked this autumn, just moved weekly.

Best of all, every spring, we watch the snow melt to reveal a clean, green lawn that has already received its first dose of fertilizer.

So, why do our neighbors put themselves through this?  Asking the question would just annoy them.  And, of course, it’s their money.  They pay to have their leaves hauled away and then pay again to fertilize their lawn in the spring to make up for the nutrients that the decaying leaves would have otherwise provided.

Which brings me back to ‘Pluggers’.  In last month’s cartoon, an anthropomorphized (and, naturally, obese) bear mows over his leaves with the caption, “A Plugger’s Leaf Blower”.  I still don’t condone the it’s-OK-to-be-fat mentality, but at least they got the gardening right.

"Of Course You Know, This Means War"

Until a decade ago, the notion of composting our kitchen waste was an alien idea; the kind of ritual practiced by people living on communes.  Then, Betty read an article on the subject and saw a demonstration.  The next thing I knew, we had a black, trash-can-sized object near our garage that consumed a steady stream of stale bread, egg shells, grapefruit rinds, tea bags and the other detritus that once went into the garbage or down the disposal.  We leavened the waste with leaves and, every few weeks, extracted the richest, blackest compost we had ever seen which made our garden thrive.

We didn’t keep the secret to ourselves.  Betty tried to get our town into the business of selling discounted composters to residents.  The town lacked the infrastructure but a state program encouraging their sale didn’t specify that towns must be involved, just non-profit organizations. 

And so, every spring for the next seven years, we sold composters out of our driveway under the banner of our town’s garden club.  Over the course of that time, we ‘placed’ more than 700 composters in a town with about 11,000 residents.  It is quite possible that Medfield has the highest concentration of composter ownership in Massachusetts.

A squirrel gnawed a hole in
our new composter...

I offer this background because, until about a month ago, composting was for us basically as painless as it was morally uplifting.  Then, one morning, I noticed that a hole had been gnawed through the air grates in our Earth Machine composter.  Something – probably a squirrel – had set about gaining entry and we were left with a trail of debris leading out of the cavity.  The solution was a new composter.  The old one was, I imagined, getting elderly and brittle.  The new one was installed and the contents transferred. 



...so I attempted a fix...



That should have been the end of the story.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t.  A week before Thanksgiving, I went out one morning and found a hole gnawed through one of the air vents.  When I opened the composter lid, a gray blur streaked out of it.  We had squirrels.

I figured out a quick and easy fix:  a metal pot to cover the hole and a brick to hold the pot in place.  To the mechanical solution was added a chemical one: a daily spritz of, ummm, an organic, uric-acid-based liquid.  That would be the end of the never-ending Sunday brunch at the Sanders home.  For a week, things were swell.  The pot stayed in place and the spritz dampened interest on the part of other, would-be intruders. 

...which led to a coordinated,
nighttime assault.

Then, three days after Thanksgiving I found we had been the victims of a daring, coordinated nighttime raid.  Not only had the pot been pushed out of the way, but two new holes had been gnawed through the plastic air vents.  The ground around the composter was littered with the remnants of meals past.  Nearby, I thought I heard the sound of belching as squirrels digested the contents of our composter.

As I stared at the three holes, all I could think of was a sputtering Daffy Duck saying to his nemesis, “Of course you know, this means war.”  I was not going to be defeated by a gang of marauding squirrels.

The wire mesh includes lots of
nasty spikes to deter
inquiring paws.

I found what I hope is the solution at my local hardware store.  When you go to a big-box store, all solutions are nuclear.  At Will’s Hardware, the questions were gentle but probing; the solution inspired  Instead of squirrel traps or poison, I walked out with an eight-dollar, five-foot length of hardware cloth, which I placed inside the perimeter of the composter.  Nasty spikes of wire affixed the wire mesh to the remnants of the plastic grates, the better to impale inquiring paws.

I don’t know if the solution is permanent.  I hope it is.  We’ve put a lot of composters in a lot of yards in town, and our reputation is on the line.

Getting Wet for a Good Cause

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems that working around Paul Miskovsky is an invitation to get wet.  Very wet. 

You may remember that back in July, I helped Paul build an exhibit for the Newport Flower Show.  On the last day of the 'build', it rained so hard that I squished all the way home.  I eventually ended up with a cold that lasted two weeks.  But I digress.

Paul's original whiteboard sketch

Three months ago, I watched with fascination as Paul sketched on a whiteboard in a classroom at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Wellesley.  He had just come from a non-descript parcel of land between the Society's main parking lot and its entry gate, where he had wielded two cans of orange spray-paint on the scraggly grass, pines and scrub oaks that were the principal occupants of the site. 

He was sketching out a new, 800-square-foot garden to serve as the entryway to the Society's Elm Bank complex and, as part of a weekly lecture series, was now soliciting ideas as to what this new garden ought to look like from the 40 or so people assembled .  He drew circles and ovals and reeled off the Latin names of plants as easily as if he were an emissary of the Holy Roman Empire.  The room full of people watched, alternately transfixed and shouting out plant names that Paul accepted or countered.

Two and a half months went by and Paul’s landscaping business on Cape Cod took front and center stage.  Yes, it mostly rained in Wellesley during August and September, but at least it was warm rain.  I circled tentative work dates on my calendar and the dates were wiped out because some kettle hole in Wellfleet or estate in Weston cried out for a transformation.

Paul Miskovsky at the
site of the new garden

Then, a month ago, Paul called and said he would be at Elm Bank with a back hoe and some rocks and could I stop by to help?  I did, and three massive rocks went into place.  Fifty cubic yards of premium topsoil quickly followed. 

Two weeks later, Paul again called and said he had some plants for the site.  A group of us – primarily Betty's Master Gardener pals - shoved and nudged a half-dozen massive specimen trees into place and planted 30 hydrangeas.  For many gardens, the work would have been deemed to be done.  For Paul, of course, it was just beginning.  Ten days later, a 36-foot box truck rolled up, this one crammed with two additional varieties of hydrangea, boxwood and forsythia, plus fifteen flats of Japanese forest grass.  This time, of course, it was pouring rain.

Some of the volunteers who helped
build the garden.  Double-click on
the inage to get a better sense of
the cultivars being used.

When it rains and the temperature is, say, 45 degrees, an army of volunteers can shrink to a handful.  In this case, the corps of workers consisted of three very dedicated Master Gardeners, Betty, and me, plus Mike Falzone, a member of Paul’s full-time crew.  In the course of four hours, we planted at least four dozen full-sized shrubs and three topiary trees, re-contoured the site and made it look attractive for an evening event.  Paul dug holes with a Bobcat, then pitched in to complete the plantings.  Having forgotten his rain slicker, Paul did his work wearing a pair of fetching, black trash bags.

The garden is still not finished.  There remains a slate walk to be laid and small shrubs to be integrated into the site.  But the vision created on a whiteboard in July has been turned into a reality.  Now, as people approach the gates of the Elm Bank gardens, they’ll have had a foretaste of what is to come.  It is a garden that will be rich in color and texture and one that has appeal twelve months of the year.  It won’t have the size of the 'name' gardens inside the Society's gates, but it will tell the visitor that there are more treasures inside. 

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Jasiecki

2016 update:  Dorothy Jasiecki lost a long battle to disease in 2015.  Today, she would have turned 91.  While her years on this earth may have ended, she is in the hearts of thousands of students whose lives she touched.

This is my 100^th entry to this blog since it originated in June 2009.  Like its predecessors, this will be a post about growing, nurturing, caring and cultivation.  But it will not be about gardening.  Instead, it will be about a remarkable woman named Dorothy Jasiecki, who turns 86 on October 30.

I am by trade a writer, and I say that with pride.  For 35 years, I plied a very different craft that occasionally required me to put words to paper, but which I can say with complete honesty never gave me anything like the personal and professional satisfaction I have felt for the past six years.  The reason this blog exists is because writers, like (for example) pianists, need to practice.  Just as a pianist does not sit down at a concert grand and begin playing ‘The Appassionata’, so a writer does not go to his or her keyboard and begin writing that Great American Novel.  The pianist begins with ‘etudes’ – literally, study pieces - that stretch the fingers and make the mind warm up. 

This blog is my equivalent of an etude.  It is about gardening because I am married to a virtuoso gardener and I am her helper, and also because writing about gardening is considerably more interesting than opining about, say, politics or wine.  Each entry is as carefully thought through as a short story and is polished to fit within a prescribed length.

Dorothy Jasiecki, circa 1967

I am a writer because, from September 1964 until June 1967, Dorothy Jasiecki taught me to love language, literature and words.  She had been recruited by a young principal named John M. Jenkins to teach at a brand new school, Miami Springs Senior High School.  I was in one of her classes that first year strictly by happenstance.  The following two years, I made certain I had her as my English teacher.

Miss Jasiecki (the notion of calling teachers by anything other than ‘Mister’, ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ lay many years in the future) created and followed a lesson plan that ensured we read and mastered the material that would appear on tests.  What made her so extraordinary was how she conveyed that information and that she demanded we go far beyond what was required by the Dade County Board of Public Instruction.  She effectively had a second syllabus, one of her own devising, that was intended to stretch – and open - our minds. 

Part of her methodology was to reach deep into her own knowledge of literature to awaken our own senses.  She spent much of one class session reading Beowulf in a way that I felt I was gathered around a hearth fire, listening to oral tradition being made.  We delved into poetry far beyond Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost and spent several days dissecting The Wasteland and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; titles that almost certainly were not sanctioned by the bureaucrats at Lindsey Hopkins.

At the 2007 40th reunion of the
Class of 1967.  That's fellow classmate
Jane Greer on the right.

The balance of her teaching style was to challenge us to think about what we were reading.  To be in her class meant you came to school prepared, and ‘prepared’ meant you had not only read the assigned book but that you had understood it.  And God forbid you came into class spouting something from Cliff’s Notes.  (I tried that once and was found out almost immediately.)

All of this was leavened with philosophy and humor.  The final five minutes of class could comprise a discourse on the importance of shaking hands or a treatise on elbows.  These ‘sermonettes’ as we called them stretched us further still, if for no other reason than because we had no idea of what was coming next.

Miss Jasiecki was a tough grader.  I made very few ‘A’s’ in her class.  But I tried harder than I did in any other subject both because she expected it and I knew it pleased her. 

She was recognized for her skills.  Florida named her a ‘Star Teacher’ and sent her on a statewide tour with a similarly high achieving student from my class.  My great hope is that she inspired other educators as much as she inspired us.

Today, Dorothy Jasiecki lives in Arizona.  Time has taken its toll on her body, though not on her mind.  She has been to two class reunions that I have also attended and I had the pleasure of spending several hours with her at the one in 2007.

Dorothy Jasiecki today

We did not all become writers or poets.  We went into computer science, engineering or education; we raised families or went into the military.  But we all learned how to think and, regardless of future occupation, that skill made us better individuals.

Principal Jenkins attracted a pool of talent in those first years that made Miami Springs a school unlike any other.  I had many teachers – Jack Gonzalez, Agustin Ramirez, and Phil Giberson come immediately to mind – who were outstanding and committed to quality education.  But I can draw a direct line back to Dorothy Jasiecki and say, without hesitation, that she was the teacher who most inspired me.  I would not be the person I am today were it not for her.

Happy birthday, Dorothy Jasiecki.

And in the End...

The gardening season drew to an abrupt close last evening as snow began falling in Medfield.  Through this strange autumn of never-ending rain, we had escaped without a frost – something that can happen as early as mid-September and that almost always occurs before Columbus Day. 

This year, though we’re down to under ten hours a day of sunlight, nighttime temperatures stayed mostly in the 40s.  The result was scraggly annuals that were too tired and light-deprived to bloom, but green nonetheless.  But because they had not been hit by frost, we left in place several containers that were foliage-centric, including one I highlighted in September.

The first snow of the 2011-2012
season spelled the end of this
container.  That's New England.

Well, all that’s over.  The photo at left is of the same container, taken last evening as wet, heavy snow overspread the area.  And, naturally, there’s a forecast of a couple of inches of additional accumulation for the weekend.

We’ve spent the past three weeks preparing the gardens for this event.  The perennials have been cut down and, in some cases, divided (or given the heave-ho as in the case of bearded iris).  The compost bins are overflowing and barrels of diseased plant material have gone to the dump.  With the exception of some beds in the rear gardens, we’re ready.

This morning, though, I realize that I’m never fully prepared for the onset of winter.  Even though November is just a few days off, I keep expecting to eke out another week of pleasant temperatures; or at least to not have to bundle up just to go out and get the newspapers in the morning.  Last evening was a reality check.  This is New England.  Get used to it!