Moving to WordPress

After six years with Blogger, I'm having serious technical problems and I'm no techie. Perhaps Blogger bogs down after several years of use?

I've decided to move View from Federal Twist to WordPress.

I'll provide a new address within the next few weeks. Meanwhile, posts will continue here, and the old blog will remain accessible.

Now for some diversion:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

  - Wallace Stevens

From Wikipedia:  'This famous, much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations ... Helen Vendler ... asserts that the poem is incomprehensible except as understood as a commentary on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", alluding to it as a way of discussing the predicament of the American artist, "who cannot feel confidently the possessor, as Keats felt, of the Western cultural tradition." Shall he use language imported from Europe ("of a port in air", "to give of"), or "plain American that cats and dogs can read" (as Marianne Moore put it), like "The jar was round upon the ground"? [He vows] "to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness."'

Has American gardening also been in the same predicament? Should we continue to use models "imported from Europe" (oh, how many times have I read that Americans want English gardens!), or "seek a native American [garden] that will not take the wild out of the wilderness"? 

Noel Kingsbury and many others have noted that many American gardens are surrounded by woodlands, and this is one distinguishing characteristic.

I don't mean to be abstruse (though I'm doing just that) but when I stumbled upon Helen Vendler's comments on this old favorite poem, I was struck by a parallel concern in American gardening.