The front yard of a house can tell you quite a bit about a person. Do they have a manicured lawn? Cascading rosemary and a Meyer lemon tree? Or perhaps a duck pond, as I once saw in San Jose, with happy ducks waddling freely between the open front doors of the house and their swimming hole.

We are constantly defining ourselves to the world. While the structure of a house might remain fixed, the yard and garden are changing and evolving. Here, many gardeners put their truest selves. In the gardens there is a reflection of the places we come from, the ways we find beauty, what we value.

A term popularized by T.S. Elliot is objective correlative. This refers to creating emotions through external factors. Elliot wrote, "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."

He was discussing what he considered flaws in Hamlet, but in the 1980's the term was applied to contemporary literature by way of defining characters with external elements: the cars they drove, the watches worn, the clothing brands. So pulling up to a house I've never been before, and finding the yard filled with fava beans, a hand-hewn bird bath, willow starts for habitat restoration, and a stunning white wisteria in bloom, with scents of mock orange and roses filling the air, I thought I knew something about these people-- practical, birders, beauty lovers. But I could never have guessed the entirety.

I went by the house of Charles Kennard and Eva Seligman-Kennard to borrow one of his hand woven bee hives, also known as skeps, to use in a bee friendly gardening display at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market. The one he lent me was made of roadside grass and hand-split blackberry stems. But I couldn't get past his front yard, particularly his two wisterias that he was training to grow towards each other.

The lavender one existed when they purchased the house, but the Japanese white had a clandestine beginning; it comes from the Ford Abbey in England. Charles' mother knew the head gardener there, obtained a clipping and smuggled it over here in her underwear.

And this wasn't the only act of plant heroism or deviance, depending on how you look at it. His garden was a worldly delight of pushing the law when it came to acquiring plants, sometimes with serendipitous results. He found a gray willow in the nearby town of Ross--now a rare plant in this area. He "took" a clipping and started new plants. A few years later, the original gray willow died, but he has since been able to propagate it and start replanting the tree along with yellow willow as stream restoration. According to Charles, "These are good for erosion, wildlife, arresting pollution from entering the streams, they create shade for fish. As well, willows are still used by California natives for basket weaving."

As for his hand-woven bee hives, they are not legal to use for beekeeping, according to the state of California, but somehow, I suspect that Charles may have attracted a few to his skeps.

Charles will be teaching a straw beehive (skep) making course at the
Marin Art and Garden Center Saturday, May 23 9:30a to 4:00p at Marin Art & Garden Center, Ross, CA