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Chapter Two

Mosquitoes, Stock, Lilac, Magnolia, and Ancient Rome

Above: Bald cypress (Taxodium distichum)

A Lesson in Control

In late autumn of 1962, the family moved from the Mediterranean-like splendor of San Diego County to the cold gray landscape of Alexandria, Virginia. For a year we lived in a development called Hollin Hall. Across the street was a woodland with a brook flowing through it. My brother and sisters and I spent time making low dams across the brook, which in turn created small pools. The fun was in breaking the dams and watching the water rush out of the pools. I discovered frogs which I liked to look at—but not touch. Mosquitoes and gnats were new to me. I would swat at them energetically, which only seemed to make the attacks more vigorous. I learned that if you stay calm and keep your blood flow normal they tend to show interest in some other person nearby who is flailing their arms wildly.

Gardening Badly

In autumn of 1963, we moved to a development named Collingswood and lived there until the summer of 1968. I became involved in a variety of pursuits, none of them the activities of a normal teenager. The backyard of our 1960s contemporary split-level was small and closed in by a four-foot cyclone fence. Our neighbors to the rear lived in a tidy old brick house. The neighbor lady often engaged me in conversation as we stood on our respective sides of the fence. I could see she had a beautiful garden. We had no garden aside from an old gnarled chokecherry. One spring day she gave me a packet of annual stock seed. She explained how to turn over the soil and make it ready to accept the seed. I was amazed how quickly the seedlings grew. Occasionally my neighbor encouraged my efforts, “The most important thing to do to get bushy growth and more flowers is to pinch the terminal growth to cause branching.” Sure enough the plants became bushier. If one pinch was good, a second pinch would be even better. I should have quit while I was ahead. With the second pinch, I managed to systematically remove all the flower buds. My first attempt at “advanced” gardening was a dismal failure.

At around the same time, my mother and I went to one of the local garden centers, just to browse. We happened upon a small lilac shrub, (Syringa vulgaris). My mother waxed on about the beauty and fragrance of the flowers, a memory of her childhood in Rhode Island, and then impulsively bought the shrub. We found a good location for it. We dug into the clayey soil and made a hole the size of the root ball, planted the shrub and then watered it in. Something told me to water the plant everyday, so I did. Every day. With that kind of attention the plant could do only one thing, die. And die it did. My first attempt at growing a woody plant was an outright failure.

Lilacs were among Emily Trexler’s favorite plants.

In 2012 a Lilac Garden was dedicated in her memory at Tower Hill.

One of the most beautiful native trees in northern Virginia is the southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora). A friend had a wooded area adjacent to his home which contained several seedlings and saplings of southern magnolia. I asked if I could have one and his mother said, “Yes.” Early the following Saturday my older sister and I, with shovel in hand, went to the woodland and decided to dig a seven-foot sapling. Needless to say we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. We chopped and dug and managed to get the tree out of the ground with no soil on the roots and only about eighteen inches around the roots. We carried the tree the half-mile back to our house. We dug a hole just big enough to contain the spindly tree. True to form, I watered the tree every day. After a month the leaves began to fall off. Yet again, my efforts at gardening produced another failure.

Building Rome

During the same period, I found a book in my high school library titled Rome and the Romans by Grant Showerman, Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Director of Summer Sessions at the American Academy in Rome. This book had a profound affect on me. I checked it out at least nine times, until I eventually lied and said I lost it. My mother paid the five-dollar fine and the book was mine. (In 2012 I bought another copy on Amazon for twelve dollars.) The book is profusely illustrated with photographs and drawings by two German artists, Bühlmann and Wagner. I was enamored with the drawing of the Roman Forum and I got it into my head to build a model of the Forum based on one of the drawings. I took many quarters out of my mother’s wallet to purchase the building materials: poster board, typing paper, Elmer’s Glue and Scotch Tape. Halfway into the project I rejected the effort due to the scale and started over again. My mother would later comment how I had the “patience of Job,” especially when I sculpted Corinthian capitals out of typing paper. The model took a long time to complete and occupied a large part of our family room. After several weeks, my mother mustered the courage to tell me I had to remove it for the sake of a rearrangement of furniture. I stomped the thing flat then sulked for a day. The model lives on in black and white photos, looking pretty good considering it was done by an immature fourteen-year-old.

John’s model of the Roman Forum, c. 1966

In the same book, I was awed by a drawing of the Temple of Juno Moneta, a detail from a larger drawing by Bühlmann and Wagner. I asked a friend, Ronald Lyle, if he would copy it. I paid him twenty-five dollars from my paper route savings and supplied the material, poster board and No. 2 pencils. It took him weeks to do it but the end result was extraordinary considering he was sixteen. I had the picture framed and it remains a treasured possession.

Busted

My fascination with Rome inspired an interest in classical art. I was particularly drawn to statuary. In Hollin Hall Plaza there was a gift shop run by a pleasant fussy man who wore glasses attached with a chain around his neck—something clicked in my head that he was somehow “different.” The merchandise and overwhelming fragrances of candles and potpourri intrigued me. Among the clutter of items were two twelve inch busts of composers Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. I was enamored with classical music and especially Mozart and Beethoven. I asked the shop owner if he had busts of them and he said, “No.” Drawn more to the busts themselves than to the subjects, I paid the five dollars each and carried them home in the basket of my bike. My parents were puzzled as to why their sixteen-year-old son made such a purchase but I ignored their questions, went to my bedroom and positioned the busts on my bureau. Satisfied with the effect, I now owned a little bit of faux art to appease my burgeoning obsession with all things classical.

College days, 1970