The Parable of the Potted Tree

We have a South American tree--never mind what sort--in a halved wine barrel out back. We've been growing the tree from a timy seedling, and now it has a nice trunk and stands a little taller than me.

It's a deciduous species. But this spring, the leaves came bursting out...and died, looking as though the sun had fried them. Again and again.

Finally we discovered the poor thing was rootbound (or root-bound, or perhaps root bound)--all roots, but unable to absorb water. Although it was late in the season, we dragged it out of its huge pot and laid it on its side. I took a saw and cut away the bottom third of its roots, resulting in a woven woody mat about the diameter of an automobile tire, though not quite as thick. Then I cut some big triangular wedges out of the rootball in parallel with the trunk.

We pruned back the branches--pruned it back hard--and replanted it in the barrel with loads of new soil. We figured we might have killed it, but it was clearly dying anyhow.

The tree has burst out in new buds, buds now invincible to the sun, and more energetic than ever before. Which probably goes to demonstrate a profound concept, and probably has deep applicability to writing, or editing, or your hair or your family or something.

Or it might demonstrate that I'm a crappy horticulturist and that trees are incredibly resilient even if they are badly mistreated by incompetent owners.

Sometimes it can be hard to tell parables from screw-ups.

Giger in the Garden

Okay, I've been remiss in posting about writing lately. Mostly because I haven't been doing much writing; instead, I've been slaving over a hot computer, and then taking out my frustrations in the garden while I wait for various software vendors to figure out why their third-party widgets don't seem to be working in my (admittedly offbeat) application.

And, though I've been remiss, I'm afraid it's botany once again today.

Our back yard (or backyard, or back-yard) has a huge Ficus repens (vining fig) growing along the walls. These are the sorts of things that take over whole temple complexes in Southeast Asia, giving Indiana Jones something to clamber up or slash away at. They are extraordinary plants, but apparently sterile without their specific pollinating wasp (figs are generally pollinated by a species-specific wasp). As an act of bioterrorism, you could import that wasp to California. If these figs could propagate by seed, the whole of coastal California south of San Francisco would soon be swallowed up by these vines. The only solution would be to import orangutans (from that Bahasa orang "people" and hutan forest--forest people) who are big on chomping down figs. As it is, the fruits simply form hard, inedible little knots that dig into your feet when you step on them.

Our house--which had been left in great disrepair when we bought it--had vining figs leaning out as much as ten feet from the walls at the back of the property. I assaulted them and cut them back, but not far enough. Every so often, they rush out and try to overwhelm our house.


For those who can't quite envision this, here is Ficus repens over one of the benches on our deck. To get a sense of scale, the top of this seeming hedge is about ten feet from the ground.

Trimming never really worked on the more aggressive sections: they had branches thrusting out that were thick as your forearm. So this time, we decided to cut them all the way back to the wall, and henceforth attempt to keep them within a foot of the wall.

The result was something like this:


Well, okay, not really. But it might have been. If you were on acid. But my point is: it's really weird underneath there. These arm-thick vines wrap around one another, and where they cross they actually merge together; where once there were two thick vines, there is a unified "X".

In another twenty years, this will be a block wall encased in a solid wall of living wood.

In Thailand they are prone to play with the various ficus species in the ruins. In the ancient capital Ayutthaya, which was abandoned after the Burmese sacked it centuries ago, the locals are fond of picking up the decapitated heads of the thousands of Buddha statues and sticking them into ficus vines. After a decade or two, they appear to be part of the tree. Very picturesque (and in fact I have a picture or two of them).

A picture can't really do our back wall justice, especially since pictures need to be taken in the daytime. (At least if you have my camera, and my questionable level of skill.) But it's at night that the true, writhing, Hans-Rudi-Gigeresque, biomechanical force of these vines is apparent. I wish I could do better. But here's a mid-day photo of a portion of our back wall.

Too sunny, too bright, too Southern California. But trust me: after dark, it's one-third Giger, one-third Poe, and one-third HP Lovecraft.

I only feel safe at all because I'm the guy who waters them. They need me, right? (And is "they" the right term? I'm not sure how many plants there are. Maybe only one.)

On the other hand, once they are this well-established, they don't need much water...

I'm a Lumberjack, and I'm Okay...

While fighting to get Visual Studio to incorporate a new linear-programming optimizer routine (the vendors are busy trying to figure out why it doesn't work right), I've been taking time to, ahem, do a bit of gardening.

Specifically, I cut down two 40-foot-high trees.

Now, I don't much like cutting down trees, and these were exemplars of their type: Australian Brush Cherries (Syzigium paniculatum or Eugenia myrtifolia), variety Monterey Bay, which some references say reach a masimum height of 15 meters. So our pair was nearing their full genetic potential.

They were also uprooting a brick wall and wreaking all manner of other havoc. Whoever planted them didn't think things through. Brush cherries seem like innocent little things: they are popular as bonsais, they can be trimmed into topiaries, and the the hedge along our walkway is a long sequence of well-trimmed brush cherries. But if left to their natural inclinations, they become tall, pavement-heaving, pipe-crushing monsters.

And these weren't in a spot where you could attack the base of the trunk, cry "Timber!" and stand back. They could easily topple onto our house, our neighbor's house, fences, walls...

So it was a process of climbing up into the trees and cutting down the high branches first--toppling then carefully toward the few safe fall zones. It took a day of working down the trees to get to two heavy-trunked, branchless stubs about twelve feet high. Back on solid ground, I brought these down with a chainsaw. And I've spent much of the rest of the day chainsawing branches and treetrunks into bits that can be carried without hiring in trained logging elephants from Thailand.

The whole process has left me with mixed emotions. I always feel guilty about felling trees, and expect furious Ents to descend upon me with their powerful fists. But destroying large examples of God's handiwork with loud power tools is one of those satisfyingly testosterone-laden acts that guys have to perform every so often. I tell myself chopping down problem trees is better than, say, setting cars on fire, or shooting lions, or invading Poland. (Though I suppose to invade Poland with much effect really requires a large military apparatus. If you invade Poland on your own, you probably seem like just another tourist.)

The real problem is that now I have to clean up after myself. It's quite a mess. But, then, most guy things seem to leave a big mess, which may be why invading other countries has always been so popular. At least then the mess isn't in your own yard.

More On Hyphens from Me Mum

From my mother comes a link to a BBC news story about hyphens. (Count on the BBC for all your cutting-edge news.) Fear not; they don't endorse any position, but simply report on trends.

The fact my mother is doing scanning British news sources is, in itself, news to me. Perhaps I'll have to start referring to her as 'Mum,' a word reserved over here for 'silent' or as a nickname for chrysanthemums.

Or perhaps I'll start referring to her as 'Moo,' as in the wonderful 1950s John Updike poem:

ooooooooDUE RESPECT

oooooThey [members of teenage gangs] are respectful
oooooof their parents and particularly of their mothers
ooooo--known as "moo" in their jargon.
oooooooooo--The New York Times Magazine

oooooCome moo, dear moo, let's you and me
oooooSit down a while and talk togee;
oooooMy broo's at school and faa's away
oooooA-gaaing rosebuds while he may.

oooooOf whence we come and whii we go
oooooMost moos nee know nor care to know.
oooooBut you are not like any oo:
oooooYou're always getting in a poo

oooooOr working up a dreadful laa
oooooOver nothing--nothing. Bah!
oooooRelax. You love me, I love you
oooooAnd that's the way it shapes up, moo.


(And thanks for the link, Moo.)

Walking, Drifting, and Staying Lost

Alis has a recent post where she talks about walking and thinking about theme, and layering, and fabric--all the big issues. She calls this "helicoptering" over the book. But then she bemoans the narrowing of vision that comes when one arrives back at the keyboard.

I too love walking to think about writing, and it's nice to get the big picture. But I don't come home and sit down until I've narrowed back in on the scene I need to write. It's good to see the forest, but to write I have to get back down to the trees, and then to the leaves, and then to the pumping osmotic pressure in the veins in the leaves, and I don't sit at the keyboard until the big picture has been replaced by the twitchy obsession to write a particular bit.

I don't even try to remember why I'm writing the scene--I just remember the general idea and the atmosphere and effect I'm striving for. I don't try to remember the big picture while I'm writing. I just trust that it made sense while I was out walking, and that now I have to sit down and do the little task at hand...and pray that my subconscious, instead of wandering out into the yard and snapping at flying insects, hangs around to furnish me with the thematic underpinnings, symbols, subtext, and all that jazz.

I'm sure some people can be deep into a scene and also be consciously aware of all the subtle interconnections of the elements of the scene with all the levels of the book as a whole. There are also people who can tap dance while playing a musical instrument and simultaneously juggling plates. More power to them, but I am not in the ranks of either of those groups.

When I'm writing, I am deep down in my burrow, working in the dark in a very small space on some tiny little problem, and I fear to pop my head up into the sunshine because I'm certain some predator's claws or jaws are waiting for me. For me, while at the keyboard, the big picture is sure death.

So I walk to look at the big picture, but zoom in before I get back to my desk. The only problem comes when I can't zoom in on the scene that needs to happen next. This can result in what Pooh would call Some Very Long Walks.

You know those people who walk or jog across continents, or around the world? I'd guess some of them are novelists who can't pin down the next scene.

Of course, lately I can't do the big picture or the small. So I haven't been walking.

I've done some whacking at plants with garden shears, though. I think of it as editing the botany in our yard.

To Hyphenate, Or To Hyphen-hate?

I'm trying to fit in final editing of Tomorrowville (the novel, not the blog) between extended bouts of programming, and it doesn't fit well. The programming is complicated, and you need to breathe it during all your waking hours, and dream about it a bit, too. The program I'm writing has to call a commercial optimization routine. Here's a sample of the instructions for the data arrays I need to pass to that product:

If matbeg, matcnt, and matind are non-empty, the array matval contains the nonzero coefficients grouped by column (ie all coefficients for the same variable are consecutive). matbeg(i) contains the index in matval of the first coefficient for column i. matcnt contains the number of coefficients in column i. Note that the indices in matbeg must be in ascending order. Each entry matind(i) is the row number of the corresponding coefficient in matval(i).

There. About as clear as a passage in one of John Hawkes' early novels--and yet dull. You might think that impenetrable and boring are hard to achieve at the same time, and you might be right. But they sure aren't fun together.

Anyhow, I've stolen a little time for my editing. And my editor is great. But we seem to disagree on one topic: Hyphens.

Now, I don't care for them. I use them when they are required to form a compound adjective from two erstwhile nouns, as in "dirt-bike riders", and I can appreciate that they are needed in Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. But, in truth, I prefer to collapse them into a single word when possible.

For instance, I prefer "crosslegged" to "cross-legged." At one time, "cross-legged" was preferred; now, dictionaries are neutral on the subject. I suspect that in the near future, "crosslegged" will be the preferred form. English is a Germanic tongue, and the tendency is to smunch words together. We have even generally gone from "co-operation" to "cooperation," despite the weird-looking and unphonetic "coop" at the start.

Moreover, I think hyphens are most appropriate when you are putting together an unlikely combination of words. When they occur together so frequently as to be a single word, they should consider losing the hyphen. For example, everyone writes "bullheaded" rather than "bull-headed." "Dim-wit" and "dim-witted" have undergone the same gradual compaction.

And I write "hamhanded" rather than "ham-handed." Writing "ham-handed" not only looks cluttered to me, but seems as if I am suggesting that I've arrived at an enchanting new phrase, when in fact I'm deploying it as a single, obvious word.

My editor disagrees. She thinks that "narcoterrorist" is confusing to the reader. while "narco-terrorist" isn't. (Ironic note: "Narcoterrorist" entered English as a single, unhyphenated word; it was coined in the early 1980s by the President of Peru.)

Hyphens. What say you, dear readers?

Minor Victory for the Humanities

No, I'm not done with this silly programming project yet.

I did, however, manage to write a subroutine that pleased me. There is a place where I needed to invent this subroutine:

Public Sub BedOfProcrustes(ByRef strCurrentLine As String)

It's a subroutine that looks at a line, and if it's shorter than n characters it stretches it out to n characters; if it's longer than n characters, it chops it off to n characters.

I thought it was sort of clever. (Hey, I'm hard up for amusement.) But as it turns out, the idea of a Procrustian String variable was already introduced by Sinclair (remember them?) back at the dawn of the PC age. It just never caught on.

As the Barenaked Ladies song laments, It's All Been Done Before.