Garden Diary: All changed, changed utterly

I don't mean to belittle the seriousness of William Butler Yeats' line from his poem Easter 1916, but the violence with which Hurricane Irene's big winds tore our huge mulberry tree from the ground last night, and the thoughts I have looking at its image (sent by a kind tenant), do recall something of the tumultuous event that poem refers to.

We're in New England just starting vacation and now will turn back to deal with this surprise. Just a reminder, this is, of the fragility of the skein of imagination, in this case, insubstantial thoughts about a new city garden for our house in Brooklyn. My post of only three days ago was about the certainty of a new shade garden there.

Now it appears we will have quite a sunny garden, certainly much more sunlight than I ever anticipated. But I get ahead of myself. I won't know until I observe the sunlight for several days, after all the cleanup.