("In the stillness of the morning")
...Yes, fellow Eurythmics geeks, I am indeed referencing "Your Time Will Come," a track from their wildly obscure (at least in the US) first album In The Garden, the title of which, itself, also references "Your Time Will Come." Thus making "Your Time Will Come" essentially the title track. ("In the garden/[in the stillness of the morning]/Your time will come.")
I got "In the Garden" on vinyl in the 80s. Here's what I can tell you: despite promising tracks like "Take Me To Your Heart" and "Never Gonna Cry Again," this thing would have buried any act starting out today. They were only 70% there as far as sound and image and that secret which every band needs to hold at its core. Annie Lennox hadn't fully inhabited her voice yet. No band, as I said, could survive a debut like that now.
Which is horrible, because look what we're losing. We're losing artists, who need time and experimentation to grow into themselves. This can't totally happen in a garage, it needs to be real-world-tested. But I guess that's too troublesome or unpredictable for today's business models.
Okay! On to today's actual post. Which is supposed to be about gardens.
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As we've discussed, I am a cosmologist in my fantasy other life, which means I sit around contemplating the nature of alternate universes for a living.
Since no one in their right mind would ever want to take a break from such speculation, I always put in a couple of hours after dinner, and I do it in the moon garden that takes up the whole fantasy back yard in my fantasy other life.
Of course, when you think about it, my fantasy other life holds hands with my real one. I already spend a lot of time contemplating the nature of alternate universes. Just in a different way.
Still working on the garden, though. Maybe someday.
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My favorite part of that second moon-garden link is "Let the light climb," where they talk about planting white flowers that can grow up along a trellis. They, like the delightful Manolo At Home of the first link, mention sombreuil roses, which, as you can see, are explosively beautiful--and such a delightful challenge to say.
'Sombreuil,' as you might have guessed, is a French word. I couldn't find it in the online French-English dictionary I consulted (one run by British people too, so you know it's serious), so either it's extremely obscure or it was made up just for the rose. But it's full of good solid French parts and functions like any other French word. Basically, you'd say it "som-BROY." That's the basic idea. But there are subtleties. Despite the fact that you need to emphasize the last syllable--French is a very headlong language, often leaning forward into the ends of its words--you have to handle the actual formation of the sound with great delicacy. The "eui" construction is one of the trickiest ones to say right (along with "ueil" and any word that has both "eu" and "ou" in it).
Take 'feuillet' for example. You have to start out like "FOY-yay," but pull back hard, so the middle of it is gutted and it's more like "FEUH-yay" or "FEYY-yay." Now, because of the "r" in 'sombreuil" and because the "euil" is the final sound and thus needs a bit more authority and follow-through, you can't pull back as far as you do in 'feuillet.' But you have to be intending to. If that makes any sense. So it's like "som-BREUHy." (See that little "y" on the end? You gotta hit that. "Som-BREUHyy.")
Sounds like a lot of trouble, doesn't it? It is. French is hard. I find that the mouth has to be almost unpleasantly tense in order to form French words properly.
Now this is completely different from German. German feels fantastic in your mouth. Speaking German is the most fun you can have with your mouth that you don't need to get a room for.
French, by contrast, sounds gorgeous, but does not give the same pleasure when it comes to forming the words. The pleasure in speaking French comes from actually getting it right, from approximating the sound a native speaker can make. The grim effort pays off!
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That must be what attracts people to gardening. All that mulching in the hot sun. The grim effort pays off.
In the garden, your time will come.
