Camino Canon - Flowers

It's that time of year when Santa Fe's Canyon Road, which I continue to think of as my Camino Canon, is rampant bloom from the beginning of the street to its distant terminus. Much of this is due, of course, to the commercial art galleries which over the years have fostered extensive plantings in gardens once modest (or bare) when the camino and its adobe structures were primarily residential. I see many tourists with cameras obviously more interested in photographing flowers than the numerous outdoor sculptures and paintings displayed on exterior walls. They're ostensibly here to view the hyped art, but go figure.

Early this morning on the otherwise deserted street when I emerged from the house to fetch the newspaper, a Japanese man had a tripod set up on our terrace fronting the gallery. Intensly studying a Jackmani clematis stretched tall on a climbing rose, he was for long seconds unaware of me. I watched him click shutter time and time again before we acknowledged each other in greeting. In heavily accented English, he told me he'd spent the past three mornings on the Road, beguiled by early light on profuse bloom, thankful that he'd found what he considered among the best of all photo ops on his tour of the United States. He wanted to know the name of the roses in our terrace and driveway hedges, what the ground cover was (creeping phlox), and if the lilacs did well along a western wall. If I leave studio chores to step outdoors for a few minutes in summertime, I nearly always encounter a flower lover loitering on the property.

When my wife and I moved into this house in 1956, it sat on a lot of bare scorched earth, hardly a weed, and certainly no plants, modifying the stark exterior. One of our first tasks was to enclose the small back field with a wall, create a safe play area for our two small children. That barren yard was bordered on the east side by a low rock, mud plastered wall which provided glimpses into a neighbor's extensive gardens and fields. The neighbor was artist Olive Rush, celebrated for her paintings, and the mistress of an historic adobe home which also served as the Friends' Meeting House. Much pleasure to my wife, children and I was to look over the wall and see the little white-haired old lady lovingly tending plants. Often she worked with local young men obviously familiar with Santa Fe soil, who knew which flora did well here, how best to prune trees, divide perennials. I would stand in my bare expanse of dirt and look admiringly on what was afoot next door. And know how ignorant I was of the skills needed for such a garden.

If Olive had accepted the neglect of property by the previous homeowners, she was quick to notice our feeble attempts to introduce color into our drab landscape. Her gardens required frequent divisions, she said, wouldn't we like to have some sedum, a few iris, violets. She would come to the wall with a handful or have one of her handymen bring a container of them to our door. With each year, there were more. "I must thin the Tears of Job," she would say, "or that rambling Yellow Rose of Texas. You could use them." And so our gardens grew. And grew. Now I give away iris when they need division, have gladly welcomed friends who want clumps of the sedum and violets which have spread widely, find it necessary to remove numerous runners from the Yellow Rose of Texas, hope someone will accept them. Olive is long gone (though her lovely home remains the Friends' Meeting House), but with us in gardens owing much of their conception to her.

Camino Canon 1

Lazy June afternoon. The hottest month of the year in Santa Fe, and "the art and soul of Santa Fe," Canyon Road--still known as Camino Canon when I moved here more than half a century ago--is free of tourists, mad dogs and Englishmen under mid-day sun. They'll reappear, some of them that is, once the brilliant light begins to fade and the faithful cool of the evening sets in. The Road will then again be awash with visitors who stop and stare, intrigued by the sights and sounds of our now-renowned thoroughfare in this City Different.

It's pointless to resist change, and most of the time I accept, frequently prefer it to what went before. But one can't help sometimes remembering, when observing the plethora of high-end art galleries, restaurants and boutiques, the family neighborhood the Camino once was, the unpaved road and modest adobe homes, open fields where children played. The field across the unpaved street fronting my house--a vast stretch of land containing little but clusters of indigenous chamisa and a crumbling stable which sheltered two burros; and with an unobstructed vista clear to the Rito de Santa Fe, and beyond to the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. How I used to love that view and the braying (rusty hinges!) of the burros. Wonderments to someone whose youth had been spent in crowded east cost cities from Maryland to Massachusetts. View long gone, I look out now on a wall encircling condominiums within a gated community.

An early riser, there was a time when the only pedestrians I saw on the Road at daybreak were a few neighbors on their way to daily Mass at Cristo Rey Church. Senoras, their heads draped with lovely mantillas, often robed in severe black but occasionally sporting colorful fiesta skirts; the Senors sombreoed and booted. Always a stray dog or two, it was a time when Animal Patrol didn't exist or wasn't enforced. This morning when I stepped onto to the front terrace to fetch The New York Times, subscription gift from a daughter and son-in-law, joggers were coursing both sides of the street under faint eastern light, and there were dogs but not a cur in sight, thoroughbreds all on leash being walked by physically fit owners astride in summer shorts. As the red dawn brightened, more joggers, more dog-walkers, quite a few seasonal residents going to or coming from the neighborhood coffee house, out-of-town newspapers under their arms.

A posted notice in my studio/gallery informs visitors that they're in the oldest commercial establishment on the Road, and offers a brief history of my family's 50+ years occupation of the premises. This to forestall the inevitable questions about the obvious "old Santa Fe" ambiance we maintain compared to the modernization of many structures no longer family homes but chic galleries. Posted notice or not, there are comments and questions about our extended time here. Very often, disappointment in the changes to the city are expressed by tourists who were last here years ago, sometimes by decades. They rhapsodize about an old Santa Fe so much smaller, vehicular traffic not heavy, hotels and inns modest, the Spanish-American and Native-American cultures more dominant than they are today. Everything so simple, pure, free of the elegance and sophistication many of them consider pseudo, affectations. I've had to adopt a stock answer to the question of whether or not I'm bothered by all the changes I've seen on the Road.

No. Everything changes. I see that in the mirror every day when I shave. And many of the changes in Santa Fe make this a better city to live in than when I moved here. Of course, one doesn't like the snarled traffic, the inflated real estate and high-cost-of living, the loss of not knowing practically everyone in town when it was a smaller community, the preponderance of strangers everywhere one goes now. But as an ex-New Yorker, there was much I missed in the old Santa Fe I dearly loved despite its lack of cultural venues. My arrival here predates the Santa Fe Opera, which has afforded countless hours of enrichment since its founding in the hills north of town. In the early 1950s, there were but two movie theaters in Santa Fe, neither of which ever showed foreign films. Touring theater or ballet did not come to the city, nor did art exhibits on loan. There were long stretches when the thirst for good drama, dance, opera or painting and sculpture would demand one leave town if he could afford it, flee to New York or San Francisco for a glimpse, taste of the arts without which life is impoverished. And if you couldn't afford it -- .

With all the change, the landscape of northern New Mexico is constant. Our tierra bendita, our incomparable turquoise sky, those Sangre de Cristo and Nacimiento ranges, the great stretches of valleys and mesas. Adobe homes burnished by fiery sunsets, chamisa and pinon, cottonwoods and aspens. And in this Land of Enchantment, the Spanish-American clings to his fine heritage, his traditions still observed in the homes and churches, in the streets where you hear his musical language and see many of his courtly customs. We gringos love his cuisine, have adopted his architecture, many of his building and maintenance skills and some of his dress codes, revel in his Viva las Fiestas.

As I write, the temperature's lowered and tourists have begun to reappear. With the door open, I hear from the street their Oohs and Aahs about this exceptional Road, my Camino Canon. And not all in English. Or Spanish. No longer a small terminus at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, we're an international must-see in the new millennium. I hear French, Italian, Irish brogue and British twang, German, Slavic tongues which I can't identify. The weak dollar against the Euro undoubtedly partially accounts for so many foreigners in town this year. But those visitors have also heard or read about the exceptional La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis in the foothills of the Sangres, and their gasps of approval tell me they are not disappointed.

Neither am I. It's changed, yes. What hasn't? Santa Fe remains the place where I most want to live in the US.