Blog #12: Reflections on the Varied Species of Boxwood and the Creepiness of Stephen King's Brain

12:20 a.m.

What has this backyard project meant to me over the past 15 weeks? Though I've reflected on this idea elsewhere in earlier weeks, I continue to approach these recent outdoor sessions and the effect they have had on me with something approaching wonder. I wrote last week about the "unsayable," and I believe that still holds, for me, in relation to some aspects of nature.  But I have tried my best to put words to the often mysterious forces that accompany me out here in the yard, and will probably continue to do so for quite some time, until I move myself to a new place at the very least. 

Over the past several entries, I've looked at the spiritual bridge offered to those of us who watch closely birds and ladybugs in particular (though the experience could apply to any animal at all, really).  I've thought about the paradox of loneliness one feels when in nature with no one else around to point things out to; I've reflected on how important these twenty minutes have come to be for me each week, as they seem to balance out everything else, somehow. I am not sure how this works, or why this works--only that it does indeed work. 

There are plenty of experiences of "flow," as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls it, in which time disappears and one is left floating in a sea of focused attention and forgetfulness of common everyday worries.  (The technical definition: "the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.")  For me, I experience flow when I am writing, and when I am in nature, once I have settled in--whether this finds me lying under a tree or in a green chair I have dragged outside from my dining room.  Thus, this blog has me on double duty in terms of flow.

As I sit outside with an online field guide, trying to isolate which of the 70 kinds of boxwoods are proliferating in our backyard on either side of the fountain--are they, for instance, of the wedding ring or north star variety? --I realize that I am still as hopeless as ever at identifying plants.  But I suppose that identification hasn't really been my focus, after all, these past 15 weeks. 

According to Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening: The Indispensable Green Resource for Every Gardener (which was edited by Bradley, Ellis, and Phillips and has a ladybug on its cover), "Boxwoods are healthiest when protected from direct sun and wind."  I suppose this is why they survive so well in usually overcast Pittsburgh, in this protected corner of my backyard.  Is my temperament opposite the boxwood's, then, as I relish the natural elements of sunshine and wind?  If I were a plant, I'd be much more likely to be a cherry tree or a daffodil or something colorful that withers easily in poor weather.  Though I, too, wilt in the extreme heat of a July day, so perhaps the boxwood and I are not all that different after all.  (Honestly, who isn't miserable on a 100 degree day during a Pittsburgh August?)

My roommate insists that these boxwoods are either buxus sinica or buxus sempervirens, and I am inclined to believe her.  I continue to read that the boxwood is a favorite of plant enthusiasts when it comes to topiary, as "its slow growth and tolerance of severe pruning allow gardeners to trim it into fantastic shapes."  This knowledge is far from comforting in my case, and gives me the chills, since I lived in Estes Park in the summer of '09 while reading The Shining and regularly hanging out at the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King's book.  I watched the film from inside the Stanley, in fact, and tried not to look at the super-creepy bathtub scene or the super-creepy hallway scene or the... well, any of the other creepy scenes.  It doesn't help that I stayed up late last night, watching the appropriately titled Creepshow, another of this prolific author's film adaptations.

So far, the boxwood and I do not share an easy kinship.

But I read on.  Wikipedia tells me that boxwood can be used to make white chess pieces and stringed instruments, and it is also ideal for woodblock printing. This seems a romantic notion to me, that the musical arts and the thinking man's (and woman's) pursuits could be so closely tied to the earth.  The usefulness and flexibility of this plant begin to seem admirable, in a zen-like way.  I imagine the plant giving way to the gardener's skilled and supple hands, bending to his or her will in a show of cooperation;  I imagine it putting up no fight when the Japanese carved it up to make woodblocks.  I imagine the wrinkled hands of the men in the park who play chess every Sunday, moving their knights and rooks back and forth, as the game demands.  I try not to imagine the boxwood becoming topiaries in the shapes of creepy animals, if I can help it; nonethless, I try to appreciate the many ways it makes itself useful, available, and open to the whims of the human spirit, the way we all should do. 




For more on the positive psychology of "flow," see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
For more on boxwoods, see the guide mentioned above, as well as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buxus