Pencil Brook
When I talk to my parents in New York during the summertime, I often gather that at some point in the day they’ve been sitting with their feet in the brook. It is the most refreshing, shady place to be on a hot day and it is right by their house, visible from inside and audible even with the windows closed. There is an elegantly over-built, covered footbridge over the brook where you can sit in the faint breeze made by the moving water, looking up or down the stream at the prettiest view of layered leaves and tiny cascades. While our original log-and-plank footbridge allowed for dangling legs over the sides, the new bridge is enclosed with old, red barn siding and there are benches built into the sides. It is my father’s homage to the covered bridges of Washington County in upstate New York, which he researched and documented in a book a while ago.
Our brook is called Pencil Brook on the map, and it was the soundtrack to my childhood. We waded and caught water skaters, arranged flotillas of petals and leaves, ground soft chunks of slate into clay to paint our bodies, built dams, watched for the first coltsfoot blooms, floated “Pooh Sticks” off the foot bridge, and daydreamed with our minds following the water all the way downstream to New York City. We watched it rise and fall with the rains and droughts, and I have distinct memories of its babbling through open windows on hot summer evenings so humid that we stuck to our sheets.
I often tell my daughter long, whispered bedtime stories about where the stream begins, where it ends up, and what it passes on the way in such detail as to wear her out and bore her to sleep… but I never run out of details because the water cycle is a perfect system that I hope she comes to revere as I do.
We have much to learn from rivers and streams.
Pencil Brook really was the spine along which my earliest universe was organized; the tempo to which my awareness of cycles and patterns was synched. My appreciation of flow and interconnectedness in natural systems and my dedication to creating magical, meaningful natural spaces for children (and adults) to play and investigate — I can trace it all to my years of play and observation along this tiny brook.
Naming my business has been a torturous process for me, accompanied with the fear that I might not get it right and it wouldn’t encapsulate my work’s essence and story in a nutshell. I’ve been on the edge of changing my business name to honor Pencil Brook for years, and even registered a business name with the State. Despite the temptation to “re-brand” I’ve stuck with the name Hazel so far, and while it’s often mistaken for my name and holds no personal or local significance, I decided this winter that it probably doesn’t matter as much as just doing my work. But here’s a little back story on Hazel, in case you’ve ever wondered:
When my sister and I started this little company to design edible gardens in Seattle, we wanted to choose a plant mascot, so we finally landed on “hazel” because (1) beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) is a beautiful understory tree in the Pacific Northwest with dangly winter catkins and edible nuts; (2) witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) trees are winter bloomers in the eastern United States with understated, firework-shaped flowers that send wafts of fragrance into the air in late fall or winter when it’s least expected; (3) we both have hazel eyes; and (4) we couldn’t agree on a smart botanical name that didn’t sound too obscure or just plain nasty in Latin. It was a good-enough-for-now decision that I held onto for the sake of consistency. But I recently read that witch hazel was so named for its forked branches that can be used to douse for water — also called divining or water witching. Both my sister and I have this capability, which we discovered a few summers ago while locating old pipes and wires on either side of that footbridge over Pencil Brook with our Uncle Richard. So that’s one more point for the “Hazel” name, indirectly -- I can embrace the role of witch, diviner and garden guide.