Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Meeting at the intersection of landscape, poetry
When Charlie and I were in Vermont early last month we discovered that while fall was nowhere yet to be seen in southeastern Pennsylvania, it had come to northern New England. We reveled in the brightly colored foliage as we explored the 20 miles of Route 125 that threads through the Green Mountains between the towns of Middlebury and Hancock.
We also discovered the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, a surprising gem of a nature walk named for this American poet. Over the years, I’ve hiked many trails in many states and am used to “interpretive” being either an overall description or specific points along a trail, or in some cases trees, shrubs, and wildflowers are identified and tagged. In this case, interpretive had an entirely different, completely unexpected meaning.
It’s well known that nature has inspired artists through the centuries. For instance, Beethoven’s country rambles are legendary as is the time that Thoreau spent at his cabin on Walden Pond. Here, though, it is an artist’s work that is used to inspire the landscape. At intervals on the roughly mile-long path, there are posts on which are mounted individual works by the iconic New England poet. If you didn’t already feel something at a particular area, each poem would take you deeper, invite you to experience the landscape with your psyche as well as with your eyes and ears.
Along with the familiar “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” we found many poems neither of us had read before. Each one made us stop for a while longer and look at the landscape with different eyes. Spontaneously, Charlie (a high-school English teacher) and I began reading the poems out loud, each of us taking different stanzas.
Near a beaver pond/bog, we found the poem, “A Winter Eden,” which reflects on wildlife love in an alder swamp. At a clump
of white-barked trees we found the poem, “A Young Birch.” This is a sort of ode to a tree spared during brush-cutting and left to grow and flourish over the years. The poem prompted us to consider the choices we make as we go through life. What do we cut out? What things do we leave in, to tend and cultivate or simply leave to grow on their own?
At the edge of a blueberry meadow, “The Last Mowing” hints at how things change over time; made us think about how it’s sometimes appropriate to stop a certain practice, to let things go back to what they once were. As a gardener, I wondered when will be the last time I plant seeds?
“Something for Hope” describes the cycle of growth from meadow to woods and back again after lumbering. And “The Quest of the PurpleFringed” brought us to the end of summer, as Frost describes searching for latesummer-blooming purple asters: “I felt the chill of the meadow underfoot / But the sun overhead . . ./ Then I arose and silently wandered home, / And I for one / Said that the fall might come and whirl of leaves, / For summer was done.”
And finally, we found “In Hardwood Groves,” which speaks to the necessity of the autumn leaf-fall:
“The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above,
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.
“Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed…”
We wandered happily through this little sanctuary on a crisp, New England October morning, with trees of all colors around us and poem after poem to mark our way—a lovely, unexpected experience on a lovely fall day.
Pam Baxter is an avid organic vegetable gardener who lives in Kimberton. Direct e-mail to pamelacbaxter@gmail. com, or send mail to P.O. Box 80, Kimberton, PA 19442. Share your gardening stories on Facebook at “Chester County Roots.” And check out Pam’s book for children and families: Big Life Lessons from Nature’s Little Secrets. Available at amazon.com.