await at Untermeyer Gardens in Yonkers, New York.
Yes, the famous property — designed in 1916 to be “the finest garden in the world” — now features a Stumpery. The park once boasted sixty greenhouses. It’s still pretty nice.
Just what is a Stumpery? You would be well within your rights to ask the question, since not that many people in the U.S. are familiar with the concept.
The Stumpery is a fad in the U.K., especially among the pinkie-lifting crowd. You’ll find them in gardens at fancy estates, like Biddulph Grange Garden in Staffordshire.
Not so much here.
Perhaps that will change if enough green and other people get behind the idea.
We stroll down along the woodland trail to the Untermeyer Stumpery (say that ten times fast) on a recent fall day. We doddle along talking about lung issues, back issues, heart issues, arthritis, the usual. Nothing works for any of us the way it once did. Life’s not fair! On the other hand, these problems are doled out generally to people with the combination of grit and determination and sometimes wisdom to make the best of a not-so-good thing.
Which brings me to the Stumpery.
But first, the Garden’s other, more conventional features.
Untermeyer is a good place to go in October if you like grand old-old European beeches, so awesome.
Busy bees on ravishing dahlias.
End-of-the-season plants, all as beautiful as anything at peak season.
Newly restored tilework in the reflecting pools, gorgeous.
Rumi-native quotes surrounding it. Mind-blowing mystics.
Photo ops all around.
The usual ho-hum Hudson view.
And the peerless sky above.
But what most amazes us of all the amazing sights, the Stumpery.
Big, gnarly specimens have been hauled to this wooded location and set up all around. Not just one. Dozens. It’s like a fairy tale has been enacted in this forest.
One of us had been to see a stumpery in England and felt impelled to visit this one.
Will these guys eventually be planted with decorative greenery as is done in England? A mystery.
Who cares, actually? The stumps are perfect as they are now.
Which brings me to critter holes, another natural phenomenon sometimes taken for granted.
We notice more than one along the way.
Might I say a word on their behalf? I’ve often admired them, not only at Untermeyer but in so many other locales as well.
From upstate New York.
To Arizona.
And all in between.
Holes in trees are okay, by the way.
They do not mean the tree is going to fall over on a passerby.
Actually, according to experts I know, it’s the tree that appears perfectly healthy that might prove the riskiest in a storm.
When a tree is injured — say it gets hit by lightning or scraped by a truck or develops a cavity for almost any reason — it does something ingenious, protecting itself by slowing the spread of disease and decay, actually forming “walls” around the injured area.
The walls run in every direction and help the tree survive. The process actually makes the tree stronger.
Then the cavity affords a home for an animal, or animals. So critter holes are actually more than just okay.
I’ve often thought my fondest wish — well, one of them, I have so many — would be to crawl into a critter hole. Anybody home?
Hiking up from the stumpery with my friends, we pass a newly restored wall that people have decorated with good-luck cairns.
Somehow I think all those magnificent stumps and critter holes are tokens of good luck as well.
As beautiful as any ho-hum pool blossom.
Jean Zimmerman 