Postcard from Bainbridge Island, Washington: Land of towering trees and boastful blossoms

Hydrangeas

Dragoons, I tell you the white hydrangeas turn rust and go soon.
Already mid September a line of brown runs over them.
One sunset after another tracks the faces, the petals.
Waiting, they look over the fence for what way they go.

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

They say the blues symbolize frigidity and apology; although it seems a gift of a bouquet of them could be easily misunderstood. Pinks represent heartfelt emotion. Whites boastfulness or bragging, symbolizing the giver or receiver? Victorians considered all hydrangeas as symbolizing boastfulness, because each stalk was covered with so many blooms. There are mopheads, laceheads and panicles, and it seems Bainbridge Island has every kind.

Most of these photographs were snapped in the 150-acre Bloedel Reserve; although towering trees, lush greenery and flowers can be viewed in any direction one wanders on the island until stopped by water frontage.

Virginia (1902-1989) and Prentice (1900-1996) Bloedel accumulated much of their wealth from his family timber business centered in Vancouver. The couple purchased the estate in 1951 and transformed it into a botanical garden showcase. In 1970, the couple gifted the property to the University of Washington, but the university found the costs of upkeep prohibitive. So the Bloedels established a nonprofit, The Arbor Fund to purchase it and open it to the public.

Bloedel Resserve

Bloedel Resserve

Bloedel Resserve

Bloedel Resserve

Bloedel Reserve

Bloedel Reserve

Bloedel Resserve

Bloedel Reserve

Bloedel Resserve

Bloedel Resserve

The Bloedels were known for their art collection and their willingness to let their home and its grounds serve as a retreat for artists and writers. A son donated hundreds of the family’s paintings to the Whitney Museum of American Art and to Williams College Museum of Art.

Along the way, though, one of Bloedels’ paintings was mired in controversy. It turned out to be one of more than 160 paintings Nazis confiscated from a Paris art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, in 1941. According to an article by James R. Warren on History Link:

Most famous (or notorious) of the works of art collected by the Bloedels was Henri Matisse’s Odalisque, which they subsequently donated to the Seattle Art Museum. It was later discovered that, unbeknownst to the Bloedels or to the Museum, the painting had been looted by Nazis from its original Jewish owners. It was returned to their heirs in 1999.

Hosting artists also was not without its ups and downs. Poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), a Pulitzer Prize winner, was found floating face downward in the pool after mixing a batch of mint julips. The former family pool is now filled in to serve as a peaceful sand and rock garden in the Japanese Garden area of the reserve, complete with a Japanese-style guest house.

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

Theodore Roethke

The Recipe for ‘Unchopping a Tree’

But actually, without branches
or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree.
I mean, it would just be a log.

Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre, 1981

Unchopping a Tree.

The title of the book published in 2014 by Trinity University Press immediately conveys the message inside.

Despite the promise of the title and your wish for it to be possible, you know it is not. W.S. Merwin almost could have stopped there – a perfect reduction of words to express concern for the environment.

But your desire to believe a toppled tree could be healed in a magical way that “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” failed to achieve for Humpty Dumpty and the lyrical prose of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer entice you inward:

Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nest that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall….

The soothing silverpoint drawings illuminating the inner cellular life of trees by Liz Ward, a professor of art at Trinity University, lessen the fear of approaching the immensity of the task of righting a tree.

Finally the moment arrives when the last sustaining piece is removed and the tree stands again on its own. It is as though its weight for a moment stood on your heart.

Walking the Mission Reach along the banks of the San Antonio River as it wends its way southward makes one wish all the towering trees that shaded the river for centuries before mid-20th-century bulldozers eradicated them for flood control could be “unchopped.”

Alas, the dictionary fails to include the word in its inventory of things that can be undone for obvious reasons.

So great patience is required as the San Antonio River Authority painstakingly strives to restore the natural habitat, sapling by sapling.

A Chinese proverb reminds us:

One generation plants the trees;

another gets the shade.

For, to heal our environment, as Merwin advises in Unchopping a Tree:

Everything is going to have to be put back.

March 16, 2019, Update:

Mr. Merwin’s ardor for the natural world took frequent root in his poetry….

Stylistically, Mr. Merwin’s mature work was known for metrical promiscuity; stark, sometimes epigrammatic language….

Lawrence Lieberman wrote…. “The poems must be read very slowly, since most of their uncanny power is hidden in overtones that must be listened for in silences between lines, and still stranger silences within lines.”

“W.S. Merwin, Poet of Life’s Evanescence, Dies at 91,” Margalit Fox, The New York Times, March 15, 2019