I tried typing “spy tree” into DALL-E, but this watercolor by Arthur Dove I found in the Met collection is so much better and more appropriate than anything the AI came up with.
Welcome to tiny gardens. I start out with a little horticultural essay for you, and then get into what I’ve been reading and working on this month.
This month I read a book about Virginia Hall, an American women who helped organize the French resistance against Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. I’ve watched my share of James Bond movies and they’re not nearly as suspenseful and moving as Hall’s real-life story.
Hall had to endure physically grueling adventures, made more difficult because she accidentally shot herself in 1933 and had to have part of her leg amputated way before her fieldwork even got started. Not only did this make her less mobile, it meant she was more easily identifiable to the Gestapo hunting her.
A dramatic escape over the Pyrenees from France to Spain and other thriller-worthy scenes were part of her story. But the most productive work that she did was slow, cautious relationship building. She had to figure out which French people were sympathetic to the Allied cause and how far they would go to support her. She was working with a British organization and, as one of the first secret agents in her area, had to establish a safe house for all the other operatives to land (literally land, with parachutes). She had to help these newcomers establish some sort of safety and cover. She distributed soap, food rations, money and messages. She was consistently available and ready to help.
Hall lived in France for more than a year, which must have felt like decades under the threat of the infamous Klaus Barbie, nicknamed “The Butcher of Lyon,” the Gestapo leader in the area where Hall worked. She had to maintain the strictest codes of deception to protect herself and the people who relied on her. She sent one British agent back to England because that woman had permed her hair right before leaving, a luxury that was not available in wartime France.
While other British and French agents swept in and immediately wanted to carry out dramatic missions, Virginia Hall did the hard work of staying still. Like a tree, she seemed motionless as she grew roots, gathered information about her surroundings, communicated with others and redistributed energy.
Her self-discipline is inspiring. I faced a difficult creative rejection this week. Not even a rejection; a post-rejection blow in which an industry gatekeeper decided to support a project similar to mine after rejecting my proposal. Hall’s story both helps put my own struggles in perspective and reinforces the stupid, trite truth that the work has to be its own reward.
For the rest of the year, I am turning my attention to some projects that I would have considered too boring and repetitive to bear three years ago. Now I find joy and comfort in them, and I don’t care if I finish. In the beginning of 2020 I read John McPhee’s piece about “old-man projects” and did not understand what he was talking about (honestly not an unusual experience when I read John McPhee). Old-man projects are monotonous and ideally never-ending. In McPhee’s words: “Old-people projects keep old people old. You’re no longer old when you’re dead.” Some examples that McPhee gives: cataloguing the 1,800 plays of a prolific and obscure (to me) playwright, writing an unstructured and chaotic autobiography or following up on every writing project you have ever abandoned. I just finished River of the Gods, which was my least favorite Candice Millard book, mostly because the main characters are remarkably terrible people. But it has a perfect example of an old-man project. The book follows Richard Burton, an energetic polyglot, as he leads an expedition to try to discover the source of the Nile River (this has the hubris of a young-man project). Much death and suffering ensues. Spoiler: Burton survives to the near-end of the book and takes on his last project: a translation of a piece of erotic literature, The Perfumed Garden.
It’s pointless to rush your old-man or 35-year-old-woman-spy project, since you’re not going to work on anything more exciting afterwards. The nature of the work itself is arbitrary, since every old man, tree and secret agent worth their salt knows it’s all temporary. It’s much easier and expedient to destroy, to chop down or report members of a resistance network (which tragically happened to Hall’s allies when she left), than to build. For example, one man seems to be quickly dissolving the social media platform that connects me to the professional network I have been building for ten years. Burton’s wife burned his last translation to save his immortal soul, since she was Catholic (although he was not). The end product is so fragile that it’s almost meaningless.
Old men don’t have a monopoly on old-man projects. I plan to be working on mine for at least the rest of the year. I would love for you to email me about yours if you have one.
Things I wrote in September and October
I am so dang proud of my guide to plant ID apps.
I have had so much fun building up my cleaning beat in the last two months. Peruse to learn how to clean Crocs, how to remove blood stains and how to get mold out of dishwashers. After the pig’s blood and the dog poop, I have become infamous in the Wirecutter office.
Relatedly, I did a piece for Popular Science on houseplant mold.
Things I liked in September and October
I threw a party in my community garden and we painted tiny terracotta pots with my Posca pens. We drank mocktails made from Seedlip and Trader Joe’s version of ginger ale. I endorse all of these items.
May your old-man projects last forever,
Ellen