The wildflower table at the Fairbanks Museum, St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in August. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
On the second floor of a small Victorian museum in northeastern Vermont, there is an exhibit that’s been running in some form for 123 years. The Wildflower Table, at St. Johnsbury’s Fairbanks Museum, features fresh wild plants from within about 30 miles of the building, each placed in a small glass vase and neatly labeled. When I visited this week I saw heather and raspberry (complete with a perfect red fruit), asters and amaranth and goldenrod, high bush cranberry and the amazingly named viper’s bugloss.
Volunteers have maintained this exhibit since 1903, refreshing the vases and labels twice a week through the growing season as they cycle in the new wild plants blooming outside. “After a final display of brilliant autumn leaf colors, the Wildflower Table is removed, and the gallery is occupied by other exhibits through the winter,” the wall text says.
Heather, viper’s bugloss, Solomon’s seal. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
There are many more impressive things you can pay to see than a gallery of the same weeds you passed to get to the museum. But in practice, the exhibit is somehow both peaceful and stimulating. On the day I was there, the sun filtered through clouds and the windows to make the mismatched vases shine. Small kids passed through to say funny names out loud, sniff the plants, or point out something they recognized from their yards. Simply seeing each plant showcased on its own highlighted beauties that are easy to miss when plants proliferate in a field – the variegated colors of a spray of berries, the sculptural shape of the Solomon’s seal. Each one was granted a little dignity, treated as worthy to be displayed, named, admired.
A visitor examining the common yellow wood sorrel, a lemony backyard favorite. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
School starts next week in Washington, DC, and many of us are suspended in these last few days of summer before everything swings into action. In a room of wild plants—green, tangible, fragrant, each treasured in its particularity—one can feel far from both the city and the hideous cauldron of news available online, full of tales of dehumanization and destruction of both our national institutions and the natural world. It’s been useful to get out of DC at points this summer, and to be reminded that the effects of redirecting the federal government are felt more acutely there, in what is still largely a one-industry town, than elsewhere in our diverse, many-splendored country.
In or out of DC, the effects also depend on who you are. M. Gessen wrote for the New York Times last week about Kansas, a state where under laws effective this year trans people can no longer access the same civil rights, public accommodations, or basic quality of life as their cis peers. By way of analysis, Gessen mentions the concept, developed in 1930s Germany, of “a dual state. It is a state in which some people are subjected to increasingly restrictive laws that are applied arbitrarily while others continue to live in a regular, rules-based society.” That notion sticks in my mind when things seem mostly okay within my line of vision, while the Springfield, Ohio, parents stripped of temporary protected status desperately look for backup adults to care for their children if they are deported. At the same time, some of what the Trump administration is doing—adding random tariffs, undermining vaccines, recklessly using up military reserves, opening the nation’s treasured natural lands to commercial exploitation, working against climate-change mitigation—seem liable to screw everyone, including the guys making the rules and their children and communities. I don’t even really understand the objective.
A photo showing the Wildflower Table circa 1910, at the Fairbanks Museum. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
Even the Wildflower Table project, lovely oasis that it is, has through its meticulous records registered some of the recent human toll on the world. “From 1900 to 2020, average temperatures increased by over 3 degrees Fahrenheit, with 9 of the 10 warmest years occurring in the past 20 years,” the museum’s website notes. “Average annual precipitation has increased 5 inches over the same 120 year period…Fifty-seven out of 60 spring blooming species (95%) are responding to spring temperatures by blooming significantly earlier in warmer years. While plants are responding to warming temperatures by shifting when they bloom, migratory birds are not consistently shifting their migration timing…This means some migratory birds may be out of sync with their food sources.”
As the apple orchard opens its early-harvest trees for picking this week, I’m grateful for these last few days where my kids are getting to learn from the plants and stones and sticks around them. But it’s bittersweet to know they can focus on that because of which half of that dual society I find myself in—for now. We head into fall with work ahead of us: namely, to redirect our self-governed nation back toward the spirit of those volunteers, treating each wild plant that grows here with the attention and care that it deserves.
In short
When I started Porch Party, it was partly because at cookouts or school drop-off or whatever in DC I kept hearing tales of life under this administration that were so wild they begged to be more widely told. Even by that metric, though, Julia Curlee’s experience pretty much takes the cake. She wrote for the Atlantic this week about how she ended up briefing both President Trump and Mike Pence as a CIA officer despite being an out trans woman—something that is hard to even imagine given their relentless scapegoating of queer people, and trans women in particular. And yet, Curlee writes semi-seriously, “No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence.”
Eventually, after a stint in national security for President Joe Biden and Trump’s return to office, Curlee ended up being pushed out of the White House and sent back to the CIA, ultimately concluding she had to leave her home agency, too. Today, she says, “I cannot in good conscience advise LGBTQ Americans to join the CIA—and that sentence is the hardest thing I have ever written.”404 Media dug deeper on their earlier reporting about what appeared to be at least one AI company stealthily buying up rare books to throw into the maw of its large language model, destroying them in the process, and learned that: Surprise. It’s Amazon, running an operation whose logo shows a dinosaur ripping through a book. This is excellent and ballsy reporting from this tiny outlet. I also kind of can’t believe that the same company destroying indie stores when I was a book editor twenty years ago is now up to this—ha, just kidding, of course I can. Chomp chomp.
The publisher of the military’s venerable Stars and Stripes newspaper suddenly announced his retirement, “because it had become clear that his philosophy of leadership and ‘understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes’ differed in ‘fundamental ways’ from plans the Defense Department has for the organization,” the paper writes. The reporter goes on to note: “Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said in January that the Pentagon intended to ‘refocus’ the organization from ‘woke distractions that syphon morale.’ Sounds like that’s going great.
Recommended
New Bedford, Massachusetts, has everything: killer Portuguese food, whale skeletons that still smell like whale, and now a hot Herman Melville statue?? My former Boston Globe colleague Meredith Goldstein is exactly who I want on this story, getting sure-did-boss-just-like-you-asked quotes from the sculptor like “He’s on a granite base too. It’s large, 18 inches thick. It’s solid.” Please go to New Bedford and check ol’ Herman out, in a non-objectifying way, of course, and report back.
Wildflowers in their element. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
If you’ve read this far, thanks for your support. Got ideas for topics or people Porch Party should cover this fall, or pitches for a guest piece? Drop me a line. And if you haven’t done so already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which will allow you to comment and get invites to future in-person events. (Yearly subscription is 10% off through the rest of this month!)
Enjoy these last days of summer, and see you next time.