Every day, the world gets greener. Appalachia in spring is lush. It fills your eyes with emerald and peridot, your ears with birdsong in twirs and twees, your nose with cool crisp mountain air.
To ease stress, I watch my garden grow. I pay attention to the flowers. The catmint is blooming in soft blues, and the salvia in indigo spires. The roses have started opening their deep red blossoms, the columbine shiver in lavenders and pinks, and the poppies have buds the size of a baby’s fist.
I have been watching the snapdragons in my flower baskets out back. They’ve seemed on the verge of opening for over a week. Yesterday, they finally began. Now I get to watch as each of those buds opens into a crimson flower. I hope the bees climb in.
One of my friends at work gets mad at me every time I say this, but I don’t consider myself to be a very technical person, even though I work at a tech company. At least not compared to all the people I work with. I just want technology to work and do the things I need it to do.
I am decent with language, though, and when things start to get technical, as long as I can ask questions and understand words, I can get there. Fortunately I work with a lot of kind and patient people who are usually excited to help someone else understand the work they’re so passionate about. They answer all my newbie questions and I am enlightened.
And fortunately for me, in this wild world of AI, regular old language can now help me build the technology I need to help me design my garden.
I think in words, not images. This makes it really difficult for me to visualize what something is going to look like if I can’t actually see it: a room painted a different color, furniture arranged a different way, arrangement of plants in a bed. Then, layer on top of that sunlight needs, bloom times throughout the year, vulnerability to different critters, plant form (mounding or upright), foliage type and color, bloom type and color. And then on top of that, I have specific dreams for my garden. As I told Claude, I want to “attract pollinators and to have pretty flowers and pretty foliage, in that order.”
For years, for decades, I have struggled with putting plants together in a way that manages all of the complexities of the plants’ needs and my garden desires while also arranging the flowers in the beds, and the beds in the landscape, in a harmonious and pleasing way. It’s really hard! I’ve tried to graph things out manually or annotate photographs, but I still can’t visualize what it’s going to look like when stuff is actually in the ground and blooming (or not), so it’s always a crapshoot. I mostly I just end up with pick stuff I like at the nursery, put it in the ground and hope it works, and then feel frustrated that everything looks hodgepodge.
When I was on a run the other day, thinking about how I need to solve my new problem of the groundhog eating all of my beloved echinacea, it hit me: can I build software that can help me plan my beds and generate images of what they’d look like with different plant arrangements? Thinking in words isn’t good for visualizing, but it is good for working with conversational AI, where I can just tell it what problems I want to solve and then work together to solve them.
So that’s what I’m working on this weekend. Ultimately, I want an app that will help me design my garden, research plants, and track how plants do over time. I want it to do exactly what I want it to do, in the way I want it done, for the preferences and constraints I care about. It will know everything about my specific garden: what my USDA plant hardiness zone is, which plants get mowed down by deer despite “Deer resistant!” on the tags, and what the size, shape, and sunlight are for all of my flower beds so it can help me fill in with plants that will attract butterflies, and so that the beds will have something interesting going on in every season. And won’t have invasives. And, oh yeah, I also want caterpillar hosts.
Before starting on an app that will allow me to repeat the process with each bed, I started with the one problem I want to solve right now: the groundhog in the echinacea. Starting with the real problems I want to address — my struggle with visualizing and the need to plan around so many mammal grazers — grounded the development and gave us a practice session to build a spec for what the final app will need to contain and what output I want from it.
For the back bed, we came up with plants for aesthetics, butterflies, spring, summer, and fall interest, a shopping list for the plants I don’t yet have, schematic plans to help me position the plants, and a funny and also really helpful visual of how the plants will go together.
Schematic plan“Realistic” rendering
We’ve got a long way to go, Claude and me, but I’m delighted by the possibilities. Now it’s using what we did with the back bed — my constraints changed what will go in the database, my excited reaction to the rendering (vs my lukewarm one to the planting plan) bumped up the important of the visual — to execute on the spec. I get to write this post while it does all the technical work of building the software I want.
I recently re-read The Old Man and the Sea. The book I read prior was not very tight in its prose, and I wanted the spare sentences of Hemingway as a palate cleanser.
This book is wonderful. One of the very best. Its simplicity is deceiving: an old man goes out fishing alone and battles himself and nature and catches The Big One and then loses it. How cliché!
But it’s not. The story is stripped down to such bare elements that you can layer meaning on it however you like: it’s a story of a fisherman’s respect for the fish that is his match — the fish he must kill in order to live. It’s a story of a writer struggling with his art. It’s a story of grappling with the thing you can see, that’s maybe in your reach, but maybe its not and what are you willing to do to get it? How far are you willing to go, how deep are you willing to dig? It’s a story that is alive and in the moment. It is a story of dignity. It is a story of reverence.
I love the old man. There is so much I can learn from him.
“I may not be as strong as I think,” the old man said. “But I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
It’s been a few weeks since my husband and I have gotten out to a jazz show in our little Appalachian community, but this weekend we had a real treat. Wynton Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra band came to Roanoke, and after I overstuffed myself with wine and burrata, Brussels sprouts, frites, and a banana trifle at a favorite restaurant nearby, we took our seats in the sold-out concert hall.
When the 15 players came on stage — five saxophones, three trombones, four trumpets, drums, upright bass, and keys — they wore matching suits with tan oxford shoes, pale blue shirts, and silvery blue ties. It’s rare these days to see people dressed up, or musicians outside of a symphony orchestra coordinating their clothes. This choice of dress elevated the show before they played a single note: their uniformity gave the instruments and the music a non-distracting backdrop to stand out against. What class.
One of my favorite things about jazz shows, besides having little idea what I’m in for and the fact that jazz is mutable and improvisational so it’s always different and created right there in the moment, is when the audience is clearly into it, and they shout “yeah!” at random moments — the yeah or go on or that’s right just erupts out of them when they’re moved — and their contribution joins the soundscape as a part of the co-created music. It feels like what I imagine it feels like when people catch the spirit in church and shout Hallelujah, preach!, and thank you, Jesus.
Typically in our little mountain region, where most of the jazz crowd are white haired white folk, the audience is fairly subdued in their REI and Columbia outdoor gear outfits. We do usually get a few yeahs, but it’s pretty tame. The audience Saturday night really turned out though. Many of the men wore sport coats and spiffy shoes, and women wore dresses and shawls and pretty heels. And during the show itself, the audience was super into it, whistling and calling out in all the right places, and Wynton Marsalis loved it, chuckling a deep gravelly chuckle when he’d get on the mic to talk about the next song and someone would shout out “Obed!” (the drummer) or “I love you!” He told us we were a great audience, which he surely says to every audience, but still, I was proud of us when he said it.
The featured image was during the encore, when only a subset of the band came out to play a swinging New Orleans style song to close out the show.
Do you ever read something, or see a piece of art, and feel so deeply affected, that you think, “I want to write! I want to make art!”? This happens to me all the time, every day. I want to spend as much of my life as possible feeling the way I feel when I am moved by art, and so the natural progression is that I should make art myself.
The problem — or, one of the several problems — is that I’m not an artist. I will never be a writer like the writers I admire; I don’t have grand ideas for fictions or essays, nor the patience develop them. I blog and I journal for the pleasure of the act of writing, and that is enough. I have accepted this. I will not be a Donna Tartt or a Zadie Smith or any of the masters of language and storytelling I so admire, and that is okay. To enjoy anything for the act of doing it rather than for the product it creates is a gift.
But I do want to create. I crave it. Over the past few weeks I’ve been edging towards drawing again. There’s more daylight now. I could do it at the end of my workday to unwind. Yet I haven’t. At the end of the day, I want quiet: a quiet brain. At the end of the day, I often feel the most I can do is to stand at the window and look out, or to pick up the deck of cards and play a couple of rounds of solitaire.
It seems it would also be easy to draw, if only I could remember to. I don’t have to be good. Maybe that’s what’s stopping me — it feels like I need energy to draw because it will take effort to be decent at it and not get frustrated.
When I was in Halifax last week for a work meetup, we went to an art museum together. I was struck by the joy in one of the artist’s works, Maud Lewis. When I looked at her paintings, the overwhelming feeling I felt was merriment. This woman felt free when she made this. She had fun with paint. I want to relax and be free and just have fun with pens and pencils and maybe one day paint.
I have a book hangover. This past week, I reread The Secret History by Donna Tartt again. Even though it’s over, I don’t want it to end. The characters are insufferable intellectual snobs. They are not likeable. They drink themselves blind. They murder their friend (and an unsuspecting farmer during their successful Bacchanal).
And yet. I root for them every time I read it. They entertain me. I want to be with them on the page. I — and I’m sure many, or it wouldn’t be such a beloved book — can relate to these seeking college students, though it makes me squirm to say that (I am not murdery!). They’re fascinated by language and books and philosophy, ancient rituals, gods, the mind, belief. They speak Ancient Greek and Latin with each other. They cloister themselves in a world of beauty: the narrator’s fatal flaw is “a morbid longing for the picturesque.” Henry never took the SATs because he had “some kind of aesthetic objection to them.” They’re funny. They understand each other. They are outsiders, and they find belonging together.
In their seeking to go beyond themselves, I recognize the need to release:
“We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people — the ancients no less than us — have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.”
I can relate to being locked in loops inside my own head:
“And how did [the Furies] drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.
Like Richard, the narrator, I am vulnerable to the picturesque, and Tartt’s writing is cinematic, as beautiful an experience as watching Stanley Kubrik’s Barry Lyndon.
It was a beautiful room, not an office at all, and much bigger than it looked from outside — airy and white, with a high ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the starched curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills.
Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, an old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting.
I could go on and on. I don’t want my time in this book to end. I considered going straight into The Goldfinch, chain-smoking Tartt, lighting one novel off another. I should probably take a break in between though, and come up for air.
Butterfly Mind 