So as luck would have it, the Juniata Valley Audubon Society‘s first lawsuit is happening under my watch as president — this despite the fact that in my personal life I avoid confrontation like the plague. Fortunately I’m not the point-man here, and today I was happy to use my presidential authority merely to insist upon shooting a video of the real heroes of this fight (as well as to record some audio, which I hope to share eventually as a Woodrat Podcast episode).

The video wasn’t very eptly shot, but what the heck. It’s JVAS’s first official video, and I figure we have to start somewhere. It features Mollie Matteson, Conservation Advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, and Stan Kotala, JVAS Conservation Chair, member of the Pennsylvania Biological Survey’s Herpetological Technical Committee, and general bad-ass.

Built 1844-48 by Richard Turner to Decimus Burton’s designs, the Palm House is Kew’s most recognisable building, having gained iconic status as the world’s most important surviving Victorian glass and iron structure. —Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: History and Heritage

The Palm House was created specifically for the exotic palms being collected and introduced to Europe in early Victorian times. The elegant design with its unobstructed space for the spreading crowns of the tall palms was a perfect marriage of form and function.

While the design of the Palm House was Burton’s, the extraordinary engineering and construction work was very much Richard Turner’s. The technology was borrowed from shipbuilding and it can be seen that the design is essentially an upturned hull.

The unprecedented use of light but strong wrought iron ‘ship’s beams’ made the great open span possible, giving room for the unhindered growth of tall specimen palms.

For its tropical plants, the Palm House needed heat. Originally, the boilers were in the basement, heating water pipes under iron gratings on which the plants stood in great teak tubs, or in clay pots on benches.

The smoke from the boilers was led away through pipes in a tunnel under the Palm House Pond to the elegant Italianate Campanile smoke stack 150 m (490 ft) away. The tunnel also housed a small railway which transported coal to the Palm House boilers.

That’s right, kids: the Palm House at Kew is totally steampunk. Or at least steamy. The architecture of the building is such a good match for the architecture of the palms and cycads, at times I had trouble distinguishing trunks from columns and ribbed leaves from ribbed ceiling.

The Palm House contains the oldest potted plant in the entire vast collection at Kew, a venerable cycad from South Africa whose trunk is supported by sturdy metal crutches and worn smooth by the fingers of 22 generations of visitors.

What a vision of paradise this greenhouse must’ve represented in an age when travel was expensive and slow, when winters were colder, and thanks to the Industrial Revolution, when the famous London fog was hazardous to one’s health.

Palm flowers are typically unimpressive, so it’s a real tribute to the British love of plants as plants that Kew’s first great glass house was devoted to the Arecaceae. But of course not everything in it is a palm,

and the palms have many spectacular features that more than make up for their unprepossessing sex organs.

Given the Victorians’ ambivalence about sex and love of conquest, the Palm House with its plethora of sword-shaped leaves seems just about as Victorian as one can get…

though there were a number of hairy palms in evidence, as well.

Click any photo to see a larger version at Flickr (where I’m continuing to upload more photos of the Kew Gardens as I get around to processing them).

I’m still slowly processing photos from last month’s trip. As with the audio podcasts, what took two weeks to record will take at least two months to polish and share. But this is why we travel, isn’t it? And I’ve enjoyed reliving the memories of those few hours in North London’s Highgate Cemetery, a place devoted to memory — and the memory mostly of Victorians and Edwardians, at that. I would have to think the majority of its tenants would be pleased with its Tintern Abbey-esque atmosphere of romantic, ivy-clad ruin. I was certainly charmed myself. Stone angels that probably would’ve struck me as unbearably sentimental when they were new moved me to take photo after photo with their broken limbs and eroded faces. I hate the whole idea of angels, really. But an armless angel fallen face-down in an untended grave is a scene worthy of the cover art for an album by Sepultura or Entombed (bands I happen to like, by the way). So I guess I do have my sentimental side.

Space is of course at a premium in the British Isles; except for Karl Marx and a very few other elite tenants, the dead don’t seem to get any more elbow room than riders on the Tube. The great novelist George Eliot was shoved in there like everyone else, a few yards away from a small new neighborhood of Iraqi and African communists. This chaotic comradeship of the deceased invites alternate histories, the way memories freely associating in the mind find their way into new stories and poems. And the peculiar rituals we engage in to keep memories alive were much in evidence: one grave plot was littered with fresh oranges, another with pieces of dark slate, and still another with rose petals. Note the wash bucket on the recent grave of Iraqi Kurdish poet Buland al-Haidari — no doubt as potent a reference to his life and work as the dolphin figurine on Douglas Adams’ gravestone.

Highgate’s East Cemetery is, as far as I’m concerned, the way a proper cemetery should look. My maternal grandparents, Nanna and Pop-pop, are buried in a cemetery a few miles from here, and I don’t know how typical this is of contemporary American burial grounds, but the management only allows one kind of grave marker: the kind that’s flush with the ground. No plantings or offerings of any kind are permitted; even plastic flowers and grave blankets will be removed immediately. Why? Because such clutter interferes with the central mission of keeping the grass mowed. This is a final resting-place for those who worshipped at the altar of anesthetic cleanliness — which would certainly describe Nanna. She didn’t even like having book shelves in her house, because they were hard to dust! If Nanna knew how much I enjoyed Highgate Cemetery’s rampant ivy and brambles, she would roll over in her grave.

(l-r) Clive points out hart's-tongue fern; Jack on bridge over Ystwyth; sand martin nests in the riverbank; Basil the Shetland pony; Clive in front of his painting "Green George"

The conclusion of our May 5 walk around Clive’s neighborhood in rural Wales, near Aberystwyth. (It should stand on its own, but do listen to Part 1 if you haven’t already.) I’m grateful to Clive for taking the time to show me around in the midst of frantic preparations for the launch of his retrospective exhibition just two days later (for more about which, see the series of posts on his Artlog). We’re also lucky he’s such a great communicator, because as the naive quality of my couple of questions about his painting demonstrate, my general knowledge of art is woefully inadequate. Nevertheless, somehow this walking conversation with Clive has turned into one of my most satisfying podcasts to date, I think. Give a listen.

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Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

As I drank my coffee this morning, an odd, almost repulsive idea occurred to me: wouldn’t it be awesome — or something — to interview people who hate me or my work for an episode of the Woodrat podcast?

This is a seep of acid mine drainage (AMD) in the midst of an otherwise gorgeous boggy wetland that my hiking buddy L. and I explored on Tuesday. It’s just below the Bell Gap Rail Trail in State Gamelands 158 at the top of the Allegheny Front, Central Pennsylvania — the same place I visited last October 31 with a much larger group of people, who were unfortunately more interested in hiking than in dawdling along taking pictures (see The Shining Season).

An artificial wetland uphill from the trail is designed to remove the heavy metals from the water through a series of ponds, so things are much better than they could be. But I was struck by the garish beauty of the AMD, that lurid reddish orange, here with an oily blue sheen from (I think) decomposing plant matter. It may not exactly belong, but it is an almost literal red flag, reminding us that the site is nowhere near as pristine as we might otherwise assume. And this is not irrelevant, since L. was actively considering a return visit in a couple of weeks to harvest some of the abundant mayapples and wild strawberries on the site. Would they be safe to consume?

In the wetland and in other spots along the trail, we were treated to a profusion of late-spring wildflowers: starflowers (above), Canada violets, Canada mayflowers, wild columbine, Jack-in-the-pulpit, dolls’ eyes (below), a pink ladyslipper, toothed rockcress, and more. As usual, I snapped way too many pictures, and when I got home and looked at them on the computer monitor, I was disappointed by how thoroughly conventional most of them were. A too-obvious approach to beauty is one of my real weak points, I think.

It was the foliage of the highly toxic false hellebore (remember the poem?) that offered the most visual interest, I thought, both in the flesh and in the resulting photos. Being toxic often licenses extra showiness in the animal kingdom: think of red efts, monarch butterflies or poison arrow frogs. It’s probably fanciful to attribute the flamboyant style of false hellebore to its unpalatability, but who knows?

So with this idea of interviewing people who hate me: what lurid, painful, grotesquely attractive things might emerge from such a conversation? Would conversation even be possible? How would I find such people, and having found them, how would I convince them to participate? What would I hope to get out of it — just some kind of masochistic pleasure, or genuine insight into my shortcomings as an author or human being? Would the results be at all interesting to other listeners?

Yesterday I read the sad story of the decline and fall of Bill Haley (“Falling Comet” by Michael Hall, Texas Monthly). In a way, it seems, it was the adulation of fans that frightened, confused and ultimately killed him, a great performer beset by extreme social anxiety. He kept returning to the stage, mesmerized, and then to the bottle. He obsessed too much about what his fans might want, Hall claims, and was therefore ultimately unable to evolve as an artist.

I am obviously in no danger of ever receiving the kind of adulation Haley did, but still, any bit of praise can be dangerous if taken the wrong way. A wise writer friend recently wrote (and will I hope tolerate my unattributed quoting): “Hype fogs up the mind. This is not about humility. If you believe the wrong things about your work, you won’t grow.”

But words of censure and detraction too can be crippling, as any abuse victim knows. Pace Nietzsche, what doesn’t kill you hardly ever makes you stronger. Why on earth would I want to invite it into my blog? To feed a perverse sense of self-importance, perhaps, by saying, look, see how great and articulate my enemies are? As an exercise in empathy, to try to see the world through the eyes of those who have absolutely no interest in returning the favor? It’s not a hairshirt thing, I don’t think, but I don’t know. Maybe I should ask them…

Ty Isaf is not merely a postal address and a property of moderate grandeur and repute; it is also a work in progress, a collaboration between Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Peter Wakelin, their team of highly skilled workmen, and the various wild and domesticated beings they share the property with, including a small colony of pipistrelle bats in the attic and a noisy rookery in the treetops adjacent to the house.

I stayed there three of my six nights in Wales, and looking back through my photos of the trip, it’s obvious that Ty Isaf is the only Welsh place I got to know passably well. I’m somewhat ashamed of the photos I took elsewhere, which reveal a superficial engagement with a land and people typical of the tourist experience. The great Welsh poet (and believer in the via negativa) R. S. Thomas fulminated about the effect tourism can have on the betoured:

The serenity of their expression
revolts me, it is a pose
for strangers, a watercolor’s appeal
to the mass, instead of the poem’s
harsher conditions.
—“Reservoirs”

The fact that I chose not to rush about and see still more things while I was in Wales, in favor of (for example) taking naps so I’d better be able to appreciate what I did see, now strikes me as a wise strategy. Almost all the photos in this post were taken after one such afternoon nap.

Through the window in the second floor landing, it’s possible to see at least six different, iconic views of Wales: slate roof, garden, pasture, village, hill and pine.

A stuffed buzzard graces the landing, a former inhabitant of Ty Isaf who came a cropper of a power line.

The danger is clearly spelled out in two languages and a pictograph, but alas, nothing in the language of buzzards.

Horses are a presence inside and out, from the artist’s attic studio to the paddock and beyond.

A Shetland pony named Basil has wild blue eyes and an ungovernable hunger for things like the rear-view mirrors on automobiles. His access to the pasture must be carefully regulated lest he grow obese.

The pasture is guarded by an anthropomorphic horned figure, a gift from the sculptor Meri Wells.

The windows are aligned so that from the back of the house one can see clear through the front. But one may also be startled by the ghostly apparition of one’s own reflection emerging from the garden like some kind of Green Man figure.

Ty Isaf from behind is a complex marriage of angles, styles, and materials. Half hidden by the hill, the house seems nearly chthonic,

in contrast to the impression given by the blank canvasses of its front and side walls — its public face.

As one might expect, the interior spaces are inhabited by beautiful objects and works of art, but everywhere too the windows draw the visitor’s gaze to the world outside. I have no good photos of the extensive gardens, but suffice it to say that the boundary between art and nature at Ty Isaf is exceedingly permeable.