Hey, GGG! Thanks for coming by. What a great idea for a topic. And a story! For a magazine maybe!

I think my musical garden theme is turning out to be Mardi Gras songs. Every day is Mardi Gras in my garden, woohoo! Right now I have a lot of embarrassing "Show me something, Mister!" stuff going on, and kind of an Iko Iko overgrown jungle beat in the background. You practically expect to see the Wild Tchoupitoulas in full regalia come dancing out of the weeds any minute.

I'm in the process of changing my whole color scheme. When I first moved in two years ago, I was intimidated by the purple Victorian and the fancy neighborhood, so I went with a demure (safe & sedate) pink theme. It was kind of awful, like Barbie's grandmother was rooming with the Mary Kay and the Queen Mum. But then I discovered the heartbreak of Louisiana's firece flower thrips, which turn all pale pink flowers into soggy brown toilet paper over night. So I switched to hot pinks, crimson reds, and as much purple as I can muster. This is more festive, and while not exactly the Mardi Gras colors (green purple & gold), it's a lot closer to the MG Mambo.

The giant dinnerplate hibiscuses are in the front line right now, exposing everything they've got, while they're drunkenly swaying in the breeze singing "Last Night! I Got Loaded!" at the tops of their lungs. Or calyxs or whatever they sing out of. The bright gaudy clashy Crape Myrtles are in full swing, tossing petals to the crowds. The Knockout roses are carrying on like a Dixieland brass band in hot pink drag, leading the parade. It's coming along.

Well this will date me!
The Beatles: Octopus's Garden. I'd like to be, beneath the sea, in an octopus's garden in the shade....I often hum this as I weed by the creek. And will no doubt be humming it "when I'm 64."
Also I sing "Just a little rain..." one of the first environmental songs of long ago, sung by Joan Baez and others.
My husband builds foot bridges across the creek which wash out during rain storms...so we often talk about "Like a Bridge over Troubled Waters..."
And I'm sure there are many more oldies I can't think of at the moment.

I feel extremely lucky to live where I do and have my tiny slice of american pie.
So my garden theme song is from "The Talking Heads" ,
A few of the lyrics go : this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, How did I get here ??

On a completely other musical note , When I am feeling all too quirky and apathetic towards my professional image, I tape this little ditty on my answering machine.

Wild Thing
do do do doodoo do
You make my phone ring
do do do doodoo do
Wild Thing
do do do doodoo do
Leave a Message
( then comes the funky little Janis Joplin laugh at the end )

I've used this message on and off for about 10 years or so, when ever it goes back on the phone I get the best messages left on my machine, especially from those who consider themselves "Wild Things"
do do do doodoo do

My garden isn't exactly inspired by music however I do listen to a lot of Jimmy Buffet while outside. But I do find myself getting the strangest songs stuck in my head when in the garden. "Green Acres" in a common one for me-why?I have no idea! I also get the Hee Haw song, the one the girls sing about spreading rumors so you better be sure and listen close the first time. Maybe it's a sign I have been in the sun too long or smelled a little too much dill. By the way I am not a Hee Haw fan. I also have a lot of Joni Mitchell in my head in my garden too. mary d

For me, it's instrumental music that most inspires me. As a saxophonist who performs in a jazz trio, a big band, a wind symphony, and a saxophone quartet, I always have jazz, blues or classical pieces running through my head. And since my husband is a composer and guitarist, my gardening inspiration often comes in the form of live, original music.

However, I listen to a wide range of music, and lately I find my mind going back again and again to music by folk artists Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer...especially their song ,"Annie's Lover," about a woman who meets her medicine man lover each night.

"They go down to the meadow at night
There they dance by the firefly light
Dip and spin and skate the wind
Like feathers...."

Every time I walk past the rose, Lyda Rose, I have to sing the song from the Music Man, and then there's Leonard Bernstein's take on Voltaire's "Candide," with the closing thought that "we must make our gardens grow." And I can't forget Sting's "Fields of Gold."

Music has inspired our garden design/landscaping plan in many ways. We named our 1/2 acre, with its tiny cabin and tall firs, "Woodwinds," and plan eventually to host garden concerts here. We also are adding as garden accoutrements outdoor musical instruments...a gong and other mallet instruments, hand percussion, chimes, stone ocarinas, and even a gourd wind flute to take advantage of the east winds that blow through.

Susanne! Woodwinds sounds enchanting. Sounds like material for a magazine to me!

I grow a few kinds of rushes and can't resist subvocalizing "Green grow the rushes, all!" over and over when I'm putzing around with them.

Mich - Thanks for reminding me of Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime;" I've absorbed the song so thoroughly that I'd forgotten how it lies there in my subconscious, waiting to be roused by the absurdity of the moment.

Here is a link that might be useful: Family Man lyrics

Thanks, gardenug... I do have to add that Woodwinds is still very much a work in progress and more of a before picture, but we've been enchanted since day one when it was nothing but weeds!

...oops...I meant, Thanks, gardenbug!

Garden(h)ug sounds good to me

Oh my, you all are dredging up a lot of memories! My jazz piano playing DH puts in about three hours of practice a day. I swear the garden sulks on days when they do not have a treatment of jazz, blues and Dixieland. When I see a red rose I am always reminded of trumpeter Wild Bill Davidson who was visiting. When we lowered the flag (around which red roses grew)at dusk Bill played taps and then launched into a ten minute concert of patriotic songs. As Sussane can tell you, a solo instrument played against a backdrop of garden and trees takes on a third dimensional sound that is wonderful! Sussane, drop everything and figure out (or find someone) how to make a gourd wind flute. I had one made for a operatic star's garden I was landscaping. You will love it, although it takes some time to tune it. Leonard Bernstein was mentioned. I happened to live across the street from the house he rented to write Candide. While there was great hollering and music pouring out of his house for weeks his boys decided the posh neighborhood needed landscaping. They found some cans of red and blue paint in the cellar and painted the sidewalks of a number of houses before any one noticed what they were doing.

As I sit on the back porch at night looking across the lighted gardens and trees and the full moon rising over the lake all I can hear in my mind is the best tune Cole Porter ever wrote, Moon Dancing. The garden looks beautiful in the moonlight and all is right with my world.

Today it is "gardenslug". Sooo hot and humid!

...and I guess I was Slowsanne -- and it wasn't all that hot here, but then I never need an excuse to be lazy! (Actually, I had to work all day...the downside of working in a home studio is the beautiful summer days when my garden calls for me to come out and play.)

Nandina, I'm so jealous of your former proximity to Bernstein...and while he wrote Candide! I performed that with the Pacific Crest Wind Symphony a few years back...what a wonderful piece...

As for the gourd wind flute, I just need to find the right gourd (since you all know I'm out of mine).

Susanne,
Well, now I will really wander off topic and make you even more jealous. During Bernstein's early days in Boston he became interested in volunteering at a local settlement house that had a perfect acoustic theatre seating about 150. Sadly, the building was removed during Boston's Urban Renewal project. He wanted to stage the Pirates of Pensanze and I worked with him on stage design and jack-of-all trades. The performers were from the 'neighborhood' and I will tell you that it may have been the best production ever of the P of P. He went into the streets and located two rival gangs that hated each other to be the pirates. Somehow he rehearsed them and got them through the production without any bloodshed. They all loved him and cooperated with his strict discipline. And, you never saw a more swaggering, fierce pirate crew. Yep, they hated each other and resumed their battles after the show. Bernstein was really proud of his efforts, as well he should have been.
Sorry for interrupting the thread. It was too hot to garden today......

Don't apologize, that was a very interesting story.

"And in the demon's hut, discolored flowers grew,
And they had fleshy stems and fleshy petals too.

"Vibrating" by Robyn Hitchcock

The flora takes on a fauna-like sensuality in these lyrics. In Hitchcock's songs things organic mate and hybridize in a fleshy fantasmagoria that imitates the prodigality of vegatation

Springcherry

I would contribute that music doesn't influence my garden but does influence my gardening. I weed much quicker with the Gypsy Kings singing Bamboleo or Bem Bem Maria in the background. In the evening while relaxing and swatting mosquitos I choose latin swing/big band or Texas Swing. My musical memory moment is from years ago (in my mid twenties) as a kid from the Oklahoma prairie I went with a friends family to their summer home/mansion on Lake George, New York. One of the other guests was a harpist for some big city-east coast symphony. I'll never forget the cool evenings on that beautiful lake putzing around the gardens and forest, with her incredible harp playing as a backdrop.

A Morning with the Roses (Richard Dworsky, Piano Sampler, Windham Hill) is my inspiration for creating a pergola'd porch engulfed in roses (new dawn and golden showers so far) ...i envision my favorite rocker, facing the garden, being warmed by a shaft of golden morning sunlight, just waiting for me and my cuppa tea...

I enjoy my tradition of playing Beethoven's "Pastorale Symphony" during planting time!!

I learned today that Dave Carter, whose song "Annie's Lover" I quoted up above, died the other day of a heart attack at the age of 49. If you get a chance, listen to his music...this is a sad loss.

Saint Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes,
Country garden in the wind and the rain,
Wherever he goes the people all complain.

...

Lady finger, dipped in moonlight, writing "What for?" across the morning sky.
Sunlight splatters, dawn with answer, darkness shrugs and bids the day goodbye.

...

I especially like the line that says: One man gathers what another man spills.

Which to me is a fundamental truth of what is important/valued to one person, may not be to someone else... we are all different - with different likes, tastes, passions. This is what creates a beautiful world.

-shannan

"oh you'll never catch one of us repeating gossip/so you'd better be sure and listen close the first time"? Mary D, I was singing that yesterday!

I am a constant free-associative garden singer, back and forth between jingles and Guillaume de Machaut, "the Yellow Rose of Texas" (to my Graham Thomas rose) and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" (to my tomatoe/tomahtoes.) No corn planted yet.... :-)

Since G&S have already come up, here's for Mich:

The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la
Have nothing to do with your call:
But if you don't tell me a thing, tra la,
Pray how can I give you a ring, tra la,
Or answer your message at all?
Your name and your number, or any such thing,
Would be welcome as flowers that bloom in the spring...

This is best done in a Sweet Young Victorienne voice. Don't know if it did anything for my professional image. I used to get dozens of blank-tape calls (this was before answering machines learned to cut off) so I gave it up. Don't know if I could work up the voice anymore!

Good luck Susanne on Woodwinds. We hope to have a performance space/garden here too. We don't get quite so much summer in Zone 5 but we are designing with a lot of glass and natural light.

Oh, we'll have no trouble singing this month, "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head". With over 20 inches of rain in June the garden doesn't know whether to sink or swim. Some of the plants have gotten "too big for the bed" and some have withered on the vine. Good ole Louisiana in the summertime.

Free association is my trademark.
"A Cowboy's (Gardener's) Work Is Never Done."
There's also a Biblical quote:
"The wicked will spring up like grass and evildoers flourish..."
It goes through my mid constantly. Just substitute the word "beebalm," or "globemaster lamium." If the evildoers are springing up like THAT, we have a real problem on our hands.

Can someone figure out a way for me to get "Tiptoe through the Tulips" out of my head when I'm gardening??? - it's driving me crazy.....I think I've been doing it for years...I guess it's just easier to keep on walking when I sing it...no time to stop, just bend down, pull out that weed and keep on ....sort of like...a ritual...and I sing it out loud too.

hmmmm....

Instead of "Tiptoe....." try singing "It's a Small World After All". It's been going through my head for three months, since the ice cream man went through the neighborhood playing it while I was gardening.

Tee Hee!....hi live oak lady, that song's even worse!

Here's my song:

"Tiptoe to the window, by the window that is where I'll be

Come tiptoe through the tulips with me!....

Tiptoe from your pillow, to the shadow of a willow tree
And tiptoe through the tulips with me!....

Knee deep in flowers will stray, we'll keep the showers away.

And if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight, will you pardon me?

Come tiptoe through the tulips with me!"

Of course, I get all the words ass-backwards and it sounds nothing like the above...but it sure gets me weedin, feedin', snippin' and a snappin'...guess I could always imagine (dare I insinuate) a romantic tryst with a fellow in a top hat and tails tripping along with me - that would get the old adrenalin moving - but it's all in the imagination, and I don't even have one single tulip IN the garden...I'll think of another....

elaine

I always find this little ditty by Genesis to be inspirational:

"Long ago in the Russian hills,
A Victorian explorer found the regal Hogweed by a marsh,
He captured it and brought it home.
Botanical creature stirs, seeking revenge.
Royal beast did not forget.
He came home to London,
And made a present of the Hogweed to the Royal Gardens at Kew.

Waste no time!
They are approaching.
Hurry now, we must protect ourselves and find some shelter
Strike by night!
They are defenceless.
They all need the sun to photosensitize their venom.

Still they're invincible,
Still they're immune to all our herbicidal battering.

Fashionable country gentlemen had some cultivated wild gardens,
In which they innocently planted the Giant Hogweed throughout the land.
Botanical creature stirs, seeking revenge.
Royal beast did not forget.
Soon they escaped, spreading their seed,
Preparing for an onslaught, threatening the human race.

Mighty Hogweed is avenged.
Human bodies soon will know our anger.
Kill them with your Hogweed hairs
HERACLEUM MANTEGAZZIANI "

From "Return of the Giant Hogweed" by Genesis.

Look, fellas, pruning is good for you. Don't look at me like that...

After the weather we've had in Scotland recently I find myself singing The Move's 'I'm just sitting watching flowers in the rain'! Incidentally, the first ever record played on BBC's Radio One.

It's not often I have to ask, like Dr Hook, 'Who's gonna water my plants'! The follow up is usually 'If not me'!

Maurice.

Kind of sad, but there's a Mellencamp verse that inspires me when I'm out in my beds and fields:

"Got an interstate
runnin through his front yard,
but thinks that he's
got it so good"

We have a farm on a busy highway (not an interstate...but our driveway's on it), and I'm occaisionally annoyed by the captive audiences watching me work when traffic's slow. But then I gust get that refrain in my head: "Ain't that America..."

If it is early Spring then it's Seeger's "inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow, gonna mulch it deep & low..." and also Cat Stevens "morning has broken" when summer hits I am less enamoured by the gardening "experience" and more into results...and not shriveling under the sun so I go for more current stuff

Isn't it reassuring? Watching the buds appear?
Isn't it great? Spring to await!
Watchin' the landscape rejuvanate! Oh,
Doesn't it lift your spirit? Doesn't make you glad?
Isn't it keen? Viewin' the scene!
Watchin' the grass turn green!
The winter's gone now and the snow!
Seeds burstin' below!
Cold's over at last!
And everything's starting to grow!

Doesn't it make you happy? Doesn't it make you see?
Part of the plan, given to man,
ever since time began?

But nevertheless, I can confess, just between you and me,
That it's good to see it happening, so nice to see it happening
So great to see it happening

Anew! Anew!
And reassuring toooooo!

*takes a bow*

Question for clumsygrdner:
Where did you find those lyrics? I've been looking for them for years! I sang that song in choir in the third grade and cannot remember the name or who wrote it. Do you know? Do you know where I could find the complete song?

THANKS!

WEll of course there's the song by David Mallet song "Inch by inch, row by row - gonna make this garden grow - all it takes is a rake and a hoe and a bit of fertile ground." . . .

But, I also make up my own songs while I am out in the garden. Here's one I wrote last year after finding deer tracks everywhere.

A Song to Sing While Working in the Garden

Stay out of my garden you mangey ole deer
Your presence is definitely not wanted here
I see your footprints in the early morning light
So I know you visited my garden last nite.

YouÂve been biting my beans and chompin my corn
Your destruction is leavin me oh so forlorn!
I planted this garden for me  not for you
So you mangey ole deer  just stay outta here!

Stay out of my garden you ole woodchuck you
I definitely donÂt want what you came here to do
YouÂve left holes in the rows I so neatly have sown
Your destruction is making me we-ep and moan
I planted this garden for me not for you
So stay out of my garden you ol groundhog you.

Stay out of my garden dear bunnies so sweet
Go somewhere else to find something to eat
I planted this garden for me not for you
So stay out of my garden you little bunnies you.

Stay out of my garden you ugly ol bugs
My gardenÂs off limits to you thieves and thugs
DonÂt want your destruction in my garden so dear
So you ugly ol bugs  just stay out of here.

If IÂve failed to mention all you culprits by name
The message is still just one and the same
I planted this garden for me not for you
So stay out of my garden  yes that includes you!

© May 23, 2007 Sherrieflower

And sometimes I sing another I made up:

Guardian angels guard my garden
keep it safe from all that would destroy
Guardian angels guard my garden
so abundant harvests I'll enjoy.
:)

Only 16 years after you posted this but I got here in the end!

That's a great story and all the more amazing as I was in The Nerve!

Found this post by randomly search the Web.

Do you still have your Electric Garden?