What Paul Gilding Told Me to Tell My Children

The garden is still producing images of beauty.

Observe, these trees have been yellowing for the past few months and now are almost uniformly bare.

I planted these sunflowers late in the season, at Sophie's behest, and finally they are huge, and blooming!

As mentioned in earlier posts, fruit trees are producing flowers, in totally opposite season. They are desperate to reproduce, no wonder, this is their condition.


NO idea where this luminous flower came from!

The magnolia is also blooming out of season, and the leaves reveal irrefutable evidence of chloroscopy. (Can't make chlorophyl, thanks to pollutants in the air from burning fossil fuels)

This pretty groundcover shows the same symptoms.

As does this leaf from a Japanese Fringe Tree.

People are piling dead branches on the roadside, they are falling at the least provocation.

Another perfect depiction of damage, in a climbing hydrangea.

Once, I came across a school assignment middle daughter had written, a story that asked for a description of a remembered experience. She wrote the sweetest recollection about how she and her big sister would take their little black pony, Licorice, out riding bareback together in the summer heat, into the creek along our land and into a deep hole of water, where the pony would swim around with them on his back.

I was so moved when I read her story, so proud and happy I had adorable little girls who could share such a wondrous experience in life.

When I moved here, to Oldwick, almost 30 years ago, I was enraptured with its charms. We moved to a home dating from the Revolutionary War, a short walk to an idyllic village preserved almost perfectly, surrounded by rolling hills of fields, farms, and woodlands, sheltered by large estates owned by family trusts the likes of Forbes', Whitman's, Brady's, and Johnson's.

Now, I am torn between the agonizing knowledge that this paradise I took for granted has become an obsolete dream.

That time is fast coming to an end and my thoughts are filled with the knowledge of that imminent disaster, and how I can hold on to rationality myself, and how I can provide my children with any hope, any stability, any comfort in the face of what is surely going to transform their world.

I love you, Alice, Sophie and Maxine. If only I could wave a magic wand and give you everything I expected you would inherit, up to only very recently, I would.

But the fact-based science says, that is not to be. You are not going to have the future I wish for you.

I know what I think you should do, to prepare. But that's only my opinion, and of course, it doesn't sit well with your plans.