Dolce Domum

"Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way...shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work..."
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Home should always be sweet, wherever it is. Here are more pictures from my sister’s garden in Michigan. There are very few things that grow equally well in Southern California and central Michigan. So we often exchange pictures and envy what flourishes in one's garden that languishes in the other's. The only thing we have in common below is iris, although my thirsty and anorexic plants make her iris patch look like a jungle to my eyes. Here are M’s pictures with her captions.

I started a bunch of bicolor violets from seed (looked more red and yellow in the catalog) to live around my mailbox, where I need something short. The first flower opened the day I put them in the ground.

The irises just started to open, at the left front of my house. The viburnum beyond them is now about 8 years old and flowering for the first time (just a little topknot of three). There were so many old roots there from the juniper we'd removed that I ended up planting the poor thing in a narrow little clay hole, where it bare survived. It is finally feeling comfy.

To the right of the viburnum is the white rose I used to have in a patio tub. It looks much happier, although I did just spray it for aphids. I bought it on impulse because of its clove-scented blooms, but the super spiny branches tried to kill me every year when I was surrounding it with a cage filled with leaves for winter insulation. No more of that!

To the right of that is the hole where I butchered a too-large viburnum down to movable size and moved it to the back yard.(When that bed starts to fill out, I'll send photos.) In its place is a sad Little Honey oakleaf hydrangea, still barely recovered from its Fed Ex journey. I really need to buy more locally in the future."

The clematis on the lamp-post is much happier since I gave it an inadequate trellis. Behind it, the stupid peony is in bud (stupid, because it can't hold up its own heavy flowers).

I've been too busy working in my own yard, making the most of the lingering chill on mornings to stop and take pictures and blog. As much as I envy M's peony clematis, my own garden always has the sweet fragrance of home, sweet home.

Loathing and Envious Eyes

“Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye.”
- Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

I’ve tried to plant seeds into the ground. It’s too dry and too hot, or else it’s too cold and wet. Few survive. Also, there are too many predators interested in harvesting tender young shoots. Nothing grows except a few brave sunflowers protected by a fence of chicken wire. So, I’m back to planting seeds in starter packs. The envious eyes of birds, rabbits, and grasshoppers will be able to see what I’m doing, but at least the new sprouts will get sufficient water. Once they sprout, I plan to place a flat piece of chicken wire on top of the trays to preserve them from the envious while they are tiny.

Because I have such a failure rate, I often label my starts with “indelible” pen on popsicle sticks, thus not wasting my cool Brother “Electronic Labeling System” on the expensive metal stakes – those are reserved for survivors who make it into the actual garden. What often happens is that by the time the survivors are ready to transplant, their labels are too faded to read. But yesterday, I discovered a wonderful way to label starts without using the nice metal stakes or wasting non-fading label tape.

This year, Seed Saver’s Exchange packaged their seeds in bright yellow biodegradable plastic seed packets. By inserting the metal stakes into the bottom of the empty seed pack, I can then slide the pack up to the top and close the ziplock seal on top. This secures the pack to a metal stake that I can use as a temporary label. Once the seedlings are ready to transplant, I’ll dispose of the seed package and use the metal stake to hold a real label.

This may also, I hope, prevent me from pulling up enchanted flowers and whatnot by mistaking them for loathsome weeds.

Sacred Spots

“Many women have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity, perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred spot and sank upswept into oblivion.”
George Elliot, Middlemarch

I once had a boss named Skippy, an insecure little martinet, who was every bit as incompetent as his name sounds. Looking back, that job, all two years, three months and eleven days of it, was the worst job I ever had, mainly because it sucked the spiritual grandeur out of my soul like a hyena sucks marrow out of zebra bones somewhere on a parched African plain.

I quit that job about the same time I decided to stop bothering with the upkeep of a saltwater aquarium filled with yellow tang, leaving me with a perfectly good plastic, fish tank sized castle to dispose of. Because my back yard is dominated by some gigantic granite boulders, I had a number of possible mountain passes in which to situate the retired fish tank castle. It will always remind me of Skippy and his ilk who personify the meanness of opportunity afforded to the women George Elliot writes about.

So, there my castle sits, high in the mountains, representing a sacred spot to meditate on, a spot more suited to my lofty spiritual grandeur than Skippy’s corner office. I can imagine that someday I will retreat to my mountain stronghold to write the story of my epic life, detailing all the obstacles I had to overcome, and all the mistakes, like The Skipper, that I survived.

I might even go so far as to say I was saved from oblivion, and from a life of tragic failure, by a plastic aquarium castle.

Gardening the the Land of Earthquakes

Castles built on shifting sand, sink into the sea, eventually.
- Jimi Hendrix

In California, we rarely have basements, preferring to build on land scraped flat and paved with a four inch slab, or built up on stilts if the ground is too hard or steep to grade. Sometimes, instead of explaining that builders are too lazy to excavate basements, we say it's a practice to live with stability in the land of earthquakes. We used to have a big magnolia tree planted so close to the house it cracked the slab. When we had the tree removed, we planned to pave the area with flagstones. Our task was complicated somewhat because we couldn’t level the ground after the tree was gone. The roots had managed to work their way down into the decomposing granite ground. The roots you see here aren’t round. They are 6-8 inches wide, but they stretch beneath the ground for more than 10 inches - which was as deep as I excavated before giving up.

The flagstone path is thus lovely in pictures, but treacherous to walk on because the grade dips over 4 inches from pond to cement patio. An earlier owner built the crooked uneven narrow concrete path at left in first picture. It too, spoils the grade and is almost as hard as the tree roots to remove. Someday before I’m confined to a wheelchair, I’ve got to do something about that. But I have another problem that’s more immediate.

When we built the arbor, we couldn’t seat it on concrete piers buried in the ground because we didn’t want to resort to dynamite (I’m not kidding) to level the ground. When our pond was built, the builder broke TWO rented jackhammers trying to make it below ground level, and thus he had to build up with cinderblocks to get the minimum depth of 2 feet. That’s why we have to have the pond in the background of the first picture covered with a net – the fish can’t dive deep enough to escape the giant herons that see their pond as a buffet.

We have to live with the shallow pond, but now the arbor is leaning because the left-hand leg sits just about on the original trunk - you can see the roots radiating out from where the crooked post now stands. The guys who removed the tree chopped the trunk into sawdust down almost a foot, but the sawdust/remaining root has subsided while the other legs of the arbor seem to be content pretty much where we originally placed them. In the process, the drip irrigation which fed all the plants on/beneath the arbor has stopped working – most probably because of the subsidence of the rock planter which pinched the tiny line. I now have to hand water daily to keep these guys alive. Which leaves me with two choices:

I could prop the arbor up, perhaps on an extended ladder, excavate beneath the crooked leg, find something solid to replace beneath it, and replace it in a more vertical position. That means removing all the plants, and disassembling the planter at the base. That might enable me to fix the drip line while I’m at it.

Or, I could call this my earthquake arbor, tell people the ground is shifting beneath us every day, and the lopsided arbor stands as a metaphor for the impermanence of man amid the giant boulders representing the relative immortality of Nature. My orchids and other delicate plants in this spot would have to be moved, or hand-watered daily, or die, or they might be able to evolve drought tolerance in one season. My limited horticultural knowledge tells me the last option is unlikely, but you never know.

Fear Itself

“Freedom of thought is the only good that is perhaps more precious than peace, for the simple reason that, without it, peace would merely be another name for servitude.”
- Andre Comte-Sponville

Here are some more pictures of stuff I can’t grow in my backyard. The pictures are of my sister’s garden in Michigan. She's too busy gardening to have her own blog.

Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of Freedom of Speech. But recently, I was caught in the ripple of an e-mail message circulating about a new scam thieves use to steal your car and terrorize you. Here’s the heart of the matter, purportedly from “a Pine Bluff, AR Policeman”. In the seductively gravelly whisper of a horror book on tape, the message says, “You walk across the parking lot, unlock your car and get inside. You start the engine and shift into Reverse. When you look into the rearview mirror to back out you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window. So, you shift into Park, unlock your doors, and jump out of your car to remove that paper (or whatever it is) that is obstructing your view…” That’s when the thieves “appear out of nowhere” and jack your car. Walking and talking about fear itself: terror is another name for servitude.

Or, I suppose you could do what I do - and simply not look in your rearview mirror before you shift into “Reverse”. I know what you’re thinking, but this story must be true too, because the chain mail message includes “THIS IS NOT A JOKE” in the subject line. The part about me not looking in my rear view mirror before backing is so true I forgot to laugh.

And now for something seemingly completely different.

I’m thinking of starting an e-mail chain to spread the word that me and my college friends weren’t crazy when we were watching the Wizard of Oz, and at the exact moment the Cowardly Lion roared for the third time, somebody started playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Literate college kids all seem to know that the song TOTALLY goes with the movie at that point, and explains some of life’s greatest mysteries. Rest assured, THIS IS NOT A JOKE EITHER. Movie and song sync perfectly even if you’re NOT stoned and listening to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” when the tornado hits Kansas.

To paraphrase what Bill Murray’s character said in Caddy Shack, about how a swami once told him he’d have universal awareness in the moment before he dies: “So, we’ve got that going for us.” So let’s all just be careful about retrieving messages left on our rear windshields, and we can all get on with our lives.

Me, the Intelligent

“We have met the enemy and he is us, yes, yes, but the fact that we have recognized ourselves as the enemy indicates we still have the ability to rise up and whip our own ass, so to speak: keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself. Turn that Megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible.”
George Saunders, “Braindead Megaphone” Saw this blogged Here.

I miss humane and precise speech as much as the next subscriber of basic cable TV. But more than either of those virtues of discourse, I’ve been missing signs of conversational intelligent life recently. Which has me thinking of creating an application form, to apply to have “…The Intelligent” appended to you name after you die, as in “Abigail the Intelligent” or “Geraldine, The Intelligent. In fact, I should get the title merely for thinking this up. And yes, I’m perfectly aware that one of the seven cardinal sins is pride, Mom. Which is why I want to wait until I die to be referred to as intelligent, thus proving I was also modest and/or unappreciated during my lifetime.

So far, here are some questions on my draft “Application to Posthumously Append ‘…The Intelligent’ to Name” or APAIN, for short.

1) Are you now, or have you ever, blogged about American Idol (other than in a parodic and/or ironic manner?

2) Are you, or do you wish you were, a secret agent with a license to slap stupid people?

3) Did you once have the power to arch your back just right and ask for pretty things from people who wouldn’t say no? Do you honestly miss that?

4) Do you like my pink plastic (now legless) flamingo, perched in her nest in the shade above my potting bench? I couldn’t bear to have her humanely “put down” just because her metal legs rusted and she fell over.

5) Do you work outside in the garden because:
a. you have enjoyed a lifelong pleasure in gardening;
b. you have realized as you age that you need gardening as physical therapy;
c. you have realized as you age that you need gardening as a mental therapy;
d. you are required to perform public service working in a public garden as a condition of your parole while awaiting trial.

6) Did all your friends turn out to be insurance salesmen?

7) Biggest Regret (Chose one or more)
a. Killing an expensively inappropriate rain forest transplant by trying to grow it in Zone 9;
b. Leaving/not leaving that place, at that time, with that person;
c. Quarreling with people who don’t matter enough to warrant it;
d. Realizing that regret itself is always the primary motive for the self-loathing you’ll never outgrow;
e. Declining the homecoming crown at law school graduation;
f. Other: please specify as obliquely and passive-aggressively as possible.

8) Finally, do you sometimes theorize about astrophysics, for example, that in the middle of every black hole out in space, scientists will someday find an old lady stumbling around in the dark and looking for a stepladder to replace the light bulb?

Couple of problems. What are the passing answers? Who will grade them? Oh yeah: and will we be graded on a curve?

Weather and Wisdom

“One has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.”
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

There was I time, I was considered wise for my age. Now, I’m older but no wiser. This could mean, I suppose, that now I’m merely wise. The unfortunate logic of these parallel trends argues that as I keep getting older without increasing my store of wisdom, I’ll soon be stupid for my age. Then, simply stupid.

On Memorial day, J&K came down for the weekend because Lake Arrowhead had 4 inches of snow. Here, we had a big morning downpour. I know I harp on the climate change thing too much, but rain on Memorial Day? Tornadoes last Sunday night in Riverside County, mudslides in Orange County, hail in San Diego County? A forest fire in Santa Cruz, 5,000 acres and counting. It stopped raining here on the Ides of March. Three days before the Memorial Day weekend, temperature outside my back door was 101F. Sunday morning it dipped below 60F in the morning rain. While the downpour tapered off by noon, it settled down for a mildly windy drizzle all afternoon.

While I presume to know exactly nothing about actual climate change, where we’re going, how desperate we are etc. I do observe anecdotal anomalies which I ascribe to Nature’s revenge for Man's hubris. I also observe and interesting effect of these changes: that the natives (and drought tolerant plants from similar Mediterranean climates) seem to go with the flow.

At the Garden, the purple Jacaranda was at its peak in mid-May, together with similar trees all over town. Thriving beneath, a patch of Hooker’s primrose that we permitted to invade the neighboring wildflower area. While I unfailingly prefer purples, I am reminded by sights like these that yellow is a complementary color not to be forgotten in my vision of the backyard I hope to have some day. So, while my dwarf Japanese maples are already burned around their edges, and one of my baby hop vines has already succumbed to weather and the appetites of night visitors, the natives simply wait for the next change in the weather and carry on quietly.

I sometimes feel like a transplanted piece of flora inhabiting a hostile climate, clinging desperately to life in the face of climatic insults, attacks of rabbits, raccoons, possums, and the ubiquitous lizards, zipping in panic across my path as I lumber around the yard lamenting what Nature has wrought. Like Eliot, I find it easier to “use my words” to say what I no longer need to say. Like much that grows in my garden, I seem to use my wisdom to adapt to the climate that no longer prevails.

The Continuum of Belief

“People who believe they have the truth… should know they believe it, rather than believe they know it.”
- Jules Lequier

Ahhh, religion, you old chestnut. Curses and plagues, the fire next time, and whatnot. Conflating believing with knowing. But what if devout faith were mere conjecture, belief mere opinion? The faithful want to transmute their belief into Truth. At what point does speculation solidify into a fact?

I’ve had laryngitis since last Xmas. Curse from god, or blessing from the universe? I suppose that depends on whether I believe in god, or the universe. A godless homeopath would conjecture that my inability to talk is a symptom caused by my belief that no one is listening. And who can prove what a tree sounds like when it falls in an empty forest? It’s all about Hope, which to me is the first of the three great commandments, not Love, and certainly not Faith.

What about hope in political discourse on Truth? A wise woman I know once said, “Finding reasons for hope in the face of … political oppression is perhaps a political response even if it was not originally intended to be so – for it is a form of resistance”. To me, hope means resistance to the tyranny of people passionate about theories they cannot prove, whether they be tyrants, gods of war, or gardens undergoing global warming.

What is the place of Hope in religious discourse on belief and Truth? If it’s true, all must believe. And yet, lots of guys have been killed by a guy with a different God, a different Book, a different Truth. (Which is strange, because if you could prove it was true, you wouldn’t have to kill anybody, would you? Although, come to think of it, I don’t think anybody’s been set aflame because of belief/disbelief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

What about the act of resistance in planting a garden? The first requirement of gardening in a climatological maelstrom is to hope. Here @ Motel California where I garden, we have yet to sink into the sea. I’m on the Pacific Plate side of the State, not on the North American Plate. I’m heading north to San Francisco, due to arrive just about the time the climate warms that many degrees of latitude to make the San Francisco of a thousand years from now like San Diego I remember yesterday. (I’ve lived here 35 years ago this month, making me practically a native. Yet although I’ve spent the majority of my years here, I will always feel like a transplant). Global warming is True: provable fact, not faith or conjecture, not politics. It’s about more than backyard gardens, looming water rationing, plague and pestilence and fires.

Whether the oppression is political, climatological, or spiritual - graceful resistance may be noble, and here’s hoping that devout wishes come true. Hopefully, I’ll plant vegetable and sunflower seeds. (YES! I did it! Used “hopefully” in the previous sentence perfectly grammatically.) Here’s hoping I’ll have enough water to sustain those hopes.

A Stage, a Garden, or a War Zone?

“All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”
Sean O'Casey

We all star in our own show, but I’m not quite ready to perform. Instead, I’m all, like, I need to spend every waking hour in the backyard getting dirt beneath my fingernails, puttering, playing, propagating, potting. It’s not mere gardening – it’s therapy. And it’s just what I need at this stage in life, this season of the year. This is no autumnal time to slow down and take stock. This is the time to throw your arms in a wide embrace, to spin around until you fall down on the grass, and look up and watch the blue sky spin.

I’m perfectly aware that this isn’t a race. There’s no final exam with a prize to the first one who arrives at the solution. Most of the year, I try to teach myself to slow down, and the garden is the place I try to learn this lesson. This is the one time a year however, when I can justify hurrying, there’s so much to do. The show is on!

I’m also perfectly aware that there are bad things out there, lurking in the underbrush to trip me up. Not all the bad things lurk either. Some are right in my face. Like the Eucalyptus Redgum Lerp Psyllids that seem to be everywhere. The lerp (don’t you love that name?) is all over the US Southwest and it’s described as “plant-juice sucking homopterans in the insect family Psyllidae. Redgum lerp psyllid nymphs (immatures) form a cover called a "lerp," which is a small white, hemispherical cap composed of solidified honeydew and wax. Lerps on leaves can be up to about 1/8 inch in diameter and 1/12 inch tall and resemble an armored scale.” I don’t have to go to a website to find a picture. These are from my back yard. Mmmmm, lerps.

And if it’s not lerps, its something else. The second picture is from the front driveway. It turn out that “Adult Eucalyptus trees in California are attacked by at least 14 other introduced insects” and that “drought stress increases damage to trees from both lerp psyllids and eucalyptus longhorned borers”. Mmmmm, borers.

Life is more than a stage, and I’m more than a player. It’s a jungle out here, and I’m the intrepid gardener determined to oppose the forces of villainous Nature aligned against me by wading into the war zone and keeping hope – and plants - alive. I’m also determined to continue mixing metaphors of gardens, stages and wars in this blog. If it’s inside my head, then it ends up here sooner or later, in a big stew of images, thoughts and ideas. Why should my garden and I be any less desperately unrehearsed than the rest of mankind?

Spring Gardening as Collaboration

“He that is in a town in May loseth his spring.”
- George Herbert (1593 – 1633)

Our gardens often provide the interface between our geometrically organized living spaces and the comparatively “wild” undeveloped spaces in the sprawling suburbia many of us inhabit. Man rules the urban environment and the architecture we construct to suit our needs and pleasures. Nature rules what’s left of the wilderness beyond our cities and outside our neatly organized suburban dwellings. My dish garden with the empty chair beneath an arbor of thyme and variegated lemon geranium (or pelargonium if you’re being stuffy) often spends winter near a window where I can be reminded of the empty space I long to occupy outdoors. I hope I never miss Spring by spending it cooped up inside somewhere.

Whether they be small patio or balcony gardens consisting of clusters of flower pots, or rambling back yards planted and nurtured on a grand scale, what we do within the (mostly) fenced enclosures that mark the boundaries of “our” property is make a space to transition between the organized world of man and the seemingly chaotic world of nature.

So it is in our cultivated gardens that most of us encounter nature. And it is there – in the process of cultivating our gardens – that we acquaint ourselves with the need to cooperate, not dominate. Every garden is a collaboration between the gardener and nature. Sometimes nature rejects our attempts, and other times nature improves on them.

When a painter paints a landscape, it captures a moment in time, and a vision the painter saw and interpreted. A painted landscape is static. When a gardener creates a garden, while it is possible to capture it in a moment with a camera, gardens are never static. Even a paved sculpture garden is subject to the play of light and shadow, rain or snow, that re-shapes what we see. As any gardener knows who has watched a treasured plant succumb to the forces of nature, gardens evolve in ways not always within control of the gardener.


Thus, for better or worse, our gardens exemplify our collaboration with nature, and teach us the best way to garden is to establish a friendly co-dependence with the forces of nature – our seasons, our soil, our changing climate. My zen frog, barely visible beneath another small arbor backed by another miniature tree of lemon geranium, seems to be silently meditating on something profound about collaborating with nature.

As I pause during this busy season of cleaning, planting, ordering, and acknowledging my past gardening failures, I once again learn the lessons of patience, acceptance and co-dependence that I seem to forget during winter when my garden is left to itself. My garden brings out the best in me, even though I often fail to return the favor.

My Hop Arbor: Pure Hoppiness

“It is amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.”
- Robert Heinlein

K and I finally erected an arbor so I could plant my hop rhizomes. We found it seats perfectly in the notches in the footbridge that were to hold a crappy railing. The heat is on today, but when we finished the arbor late Monday, it was still in the 70s and pleasant. Tuesday, I planted “Brewer’s Gold” on the right in this pic and “Sunbeam” on the left side. Now, Friday, we’re having a Santa Ana desert breeze knocking around the wind chimes and nudging the temps up ten degrees in the hour before noon. It’s >90F in the shade now, and I have to check the veggie garden and provide some emergency supplemental water to the new sunflowers.

Not to mention that the compost isn’t going to turn itself. I’ve got a kitchen garbage pot full of coffee grounds, rotting banana skins and something else that smells nasty. It has to go outside with the full bin of shredded paper, where they will join and confer with their garbage ancestors and move on to the next spin of the Mandela/spinning compost bin. Ah, the cycle of life!

It took us all day Monday to get the damn arbor up, and attach a trellis at each end to add stability and provide space for hops and sunflowers to climb. Without getting lost in cataloging the miseries of getting old, let me just say, I sure can’t do what I used to do in the time I used to do it. Or as K says, it takes me all night to do what I used to do all night.

So, let’s just call it mature wisdom and leave it at that.

Gardening in North Carolina

See the small sunflowers at the left side of the path leading to the arbor? Planted 3 weeks ago, they are already almost a foot tall.

I recently posted here some news from my sister M about her vegetable garden in Michigan. The following is from my sister-in-law R, who, apart from being an accomplished professional horticulturist, manages to plant a killer veggie garden. Perhaps that's not the right adjective to use when discussing edibles, but you get my drift. R recently moved from rural Maryland to rural Asheville North Carolina, where she is starting all over on a vegetable garden even before the house is ready to occupy. Here's what she's doing these days:

"Yesterday, as an early Mother's Day present, J caged all my tomatoes and expanded the garden by another several square yards--he saw that I was running out of planting space. To accomplish this, he had to move a significant pile of mushroom compost. He roto-tilled a good bit of the compost into our Carolina clay in our continued struggle to improve the heaviest soil I've ever gardened in. When my sister (who does pottery) visited recently, she remarked on the suitability of our clay for making pots.

"I'm growing a couple local tomato varieties--'Granny Smith' and 'Mountain Fresh' as well as two 'Juliet' (a grape type), a few 'Roma II' and 'Beefmaster'--for a total of 14 plants. (with the extra space I may plant a couple more.) My snap peas have started climbing their support fence and my potatoes are up and looking strong. Beans are just coming up as are the squash and chard. Today I need to thin/transplant some lettuce I sowed too thickly. We will have our first picking of sprouting broccoli for dinner tonight and we'll be eating lettuce and spinach from the garden by the end of the week."

Since I don't have pictures of the garden R is planting, here are some of the veggie garden where I volunteer. You can see the "cages" we made from pvc and chicken wire to deter bunnies and other creatures. The grasshoppers can still get in, but the big guys are stumped. Since the pics were taken, the corn is starting to poke above the cages and they'll be removed tomorrow. The critters seem to prefer baby sprouts, so I'm hopeful the corn and other veggies will survive after their protective armor is removed.

What amazes me about R's post or last week's report from M in Michigan is the difference not only in what is planted, but when. Out here in Zone 9, chard (foreground in second picture) is just about the only "cool season" plant remaining in our veggie garden. I am gradually reducing the number of tomatoes I'll plant here, finding that some, like Brandywine, just don't like my soil and/or climate. And mushrooms? Good grief. I thought I was exotic trying potatoes for the first time last year. I have neither the shade nor the water to grow 'shrooms in my yard. And, oh my, lettuce in June? Lettuce has long gone from San Diego home gardens: either harvested by the critters or the gardeners. The the few plants that remain in my yard are bolting beautifully so I can try to salvage some seed for next year. We plant lettuce in November here, to harvest beginning with Christmas dinner salad.

So, what are you growing in your edible garden, and what are you eating at your table now?

Gardening in Michigan

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."
Diane Ackerman

My sister lives in Belleville Michigan, and she is too busy gardening to blog. So, I'm doing it for her, and posting her lovely daffodils. I asked her for pictures of her garden. Here's what she had to say yesterday:

"Okay, so I decided the late afternoon (well, 6:30) sunlight on this glorious 70-degree day would be perfect. Before I could get to the things I wanted most to show you, the batteries in the camera gave out, and I only have 2 of the needed 4 replacements. Then again, I am also out of beer, so a store run is not inconceivable, even though the light will be gone by then.... I'll get back with lilacs and yard improvements!

"I started with my favorite weed: ground ivy, gill- over-the- ground, other names. I adore its tiny orchid-like flowers, which set off my dandelions nicely! Then my lovely new creamy daffodils, still going strong a week after the plainer, smaller, yellow ones. Behind them, the rose hedge is leafing out and it smells like roses even without any flowers. The two tomatoes I put out weeks ago in walls-o-water are no bigger than the two still on my windowsill. The raspberries (from Gary's mother's house, where they had been brought from his grandmother's house in MN decades earlier) are budding.

"We have had such a string of perfect weather as I've never seen here before. I can only attribute it to Alice leaving the state. ;-)"

So much for gardening in Michigan. I was going to take a picture of my tomato plants, now beginning their serious growth, but we had an unexpected rain. I say unexpected because I have missed the weather reports because my tv was broken for more than a week. But the real reason I don't want to include photos of my tomatoes are that I don't need a red bag of water to shelter them like my sister's, and they're now about as high as the red bag in her picture.

My sister's daughter visited San Diego recently and I was reminded of her love of gardening as she enjoyed my backyard garden. My own grown daughter has a number of interests and skills that keep her too busy to garden. Besides, she once pointed to a tomato plant and asked in perfect seriousness, "That's a tomato, right?" So although it may be easier for me to grow tomatoes in my garden, my sister managed to cultivate a love of gardening in her daughter; and it's a mystery to me how I failed to do the same in my own daughter.

My Recursive Morning

“The deeper a man digs for knowledge in his garden the more he realizes that he has only scratched the surface.” Anonymous

Today looks like a mirror facing a mirror with me in the middle. The ever-smaller me is reflected into infinity, vanishing into a distance that bounces back recursively to right now. Looking at the old person in the mirror, I must remind myself that objects in the mirror are funnier than they may appear.

This overcast Monday morning, the flat light illuminates everything evenly, without shadows. The sights make thoughts of gardens past ricochet around inside my head, briefly lighting up old memories – like the porch swing in the house on Dallas Avenue, and the bed of violets and lilies of the valley beneath the screen door leading into the back yard. Was it the shade of a hydrangea or a lilac bush where these modest woodland plants grew? Because I was small, I remember the small flowers better than the bush that was bigger than I. These sparks of memory suddenly appear less than random; taking a direction inside my skull and pointing the path to the future – to the dreadful years to come. What gardens have I yet to design, to plant, to nurture, to inhabit?

My train of thought careens through groves of digression into old memories, garden corners containing undiscovered clues to meaning, and curves back to today – to the overcast sky, and the absence of shadows. The garden this morning is gray and uninviting. I have work to do inside. A quick pass to visit the baby sunflowers, the struggling basil, the flourishing potatoes that need more soil heaped on top of the vines. Thinking about my Mom and her (mostly unfulfilled) gardening visions.

For her I think – and for me too apparently – gardens represented the opportunity to dream, to plan, to recall, and to execute visions only the gardener sees. I wish I could grow lilies of the valley here in San Diego, but they don’t survive. I’ve finally got some dog violets that insist on blooming even though they’d like a lot more water than they’re allotted. Who wouldn’t?

How Dreams End

"Oh, Mr. Done, screen me from their eyes and questions as much as you can! I'm so worn out and nervous, I shall betray myself. You will help me?" And she turned to him with a confiding look, strangely at variance with her usual calm self-possession.

"I'll shield you with my life, if you will tell me why you took the hashish," he said, bent on knowing his fate.

"I hoped it would make me soft and lovable, like other women. I'm tired of being a lonely statue," she faltered, as if the truth was wrung from her by a power stronger than her will.

"And I took it to gain courage to tell my love. Rose, we have been near death together; let us share life together, and neither of us be any more lonely or afraid?"

He stretched his hand to her with his heart in his face, and she gave him hers with a look of tender submission, as he said ardently, "Heaven bless hashish, if its dreams end like this!"

- Louisa May Alcott. "Perilous Play" (1869)

I dreamed I was in a space suit - tethered to a satellite between earth and the moon. I experienced vertigo. Not from looking at the big blue marble and being able to “crush its head” between my thumb and forefinger. But from looking beneath my floating feet and feeling the infinite way to fall. In my dream, I swooned like Rose on hashish.

So I woke this morning to a new season out my back door. Just like we call the year-end in-between season Indian Summer, there’s a sort of Indian Spring happening today. Summer was here last week – a few hot dry days was all it took to shrivel the cool air. But now, we’re getting another taste of the most delicate Spring I recall in years. Cool mornings, sipping my morning coffee on the back patio, while Lily sits in the other chair in the sun.

Lilly gazes up at the bird nest in the eaves with lazy concentration. She’s watching for baby birds. I’m trying to un-focus and re-capture the same dreamy feeling. I’m tired of trying to recognize patterns. I wear my over-coded Western imagination like blinders. The only way I can see the world is if I try to order it. I am trying to make sense of life in the only way I can – by reducing it to a movie playing outside my Spacesuit window, or by deconstructing the garden metaphors I use to describe it. Spring overwhelms my sense of atmosphere: both what I breathe, what surrounds me in the garden. Do it right, and it’s like floating in space, but with your feet on the ground. (How can the cat be so intent while resting? I believe another of her superpowers is the ability to dream with her unfocused eyes wide open.)

Today, I watched with a camera nearby. Yesterday, (without the camera) K and I watched two or three baby birds fledge from the nest tucked into a corner of dry eaves, just above where I’m drinking iced coffee. Yesterday, we didn’t get pictures, but I’m still hopeful I’ll get to know their names. However, today, I snapped a territorial hummingbird, trying to claim our patio bird family’s favorite perch and bathing spot. I caught a nasty big grasshopper in the same spot, doing whatever these evil creatures do between binging on my tender veggie garden starts (particularly the elusive white eggplant). Probably purging – it’s easy to believe that these things have a creepy eating disorder.

K has hung a birdfeeder immediately above the veggie garden. Sure, birds don’t need seed in this season of plenty. My IPM theory here is that if the birds get used to visiting this spot, they’ll keep visiting to eat the grasshoppers before said grasshoppers eat my food. Vegetable gardening has never felt so much like an endless war of attrition where I have to keep changing my tactics instead of fighting the last war.

Last year, I actually harvested some worthy vegetables. This year, I have a premonition that this might be the happiest time to end the dream of a vegetable garden – while It still retains some hope of survival. Heaven bless vegetable gardens if dreams end like this.

Paradise Lost

"Add what lacks... Make me more equal…

"…And thy fair fruit let hang, as to no end
Created; but henceforth my early care,
Not without song each morning and due praise,
Shall tend thee, and the fertile burden ease
Of thy full branches, offered free to all;
Till dieted by thee I grow mature
In knowledge as the gods who all things know,
Though others envy what they cannot give;
For had the gift been theirs, it had not here
Thus Grown...

"... So add to what
Wants In female sex, the more to draw his love,
And render me more equal, and perhaps,
A thing not undesirable, sometime
Superior for inferior who is free?
Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

Summer is here. It’s hot and dry. Strawberries are almost free – big fat ones that are as sweet and juicy as the smaller ones I recall as a child. Three green plastic baskets for $3. Avocados – both the thick and the thin-skinned ones – are going for $2 a bag. The net bags contain up to 2 dozen ripe fruits. (Take an avocado, spread it out on a piece of sourdough bread like butter. Chop and sprinkle a generous handful of fresh basil on top. Top the whole with a drizzle of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Mmmm…) Thy fair fruit, Milton counsels, let it hang.

And yet, somehow, amid all the riotous growth of Spring, I already smell early and violent deaths outside my back door. At the recent public festival at the Garden where I volunteer, I was stationed in the veggie garden where I re-plant two entire annual crops: cool season and warm season. I lost most of the winter veggies – cabbages, broccoli, lettuce and chard to rabbits or ground squirrels, or gophers. Theives in the night. In the four days between when we planted 2 dozen sweet corn starts and the festival, one third are already gone (foreground), and the second third probably won’t be there tomorrow. The remaining 2 rows are safe so far beneath one of our pvc-chicken wire cages in the background of this picture.

All morning at the festival, visitors’ questions involved impending pestilence and Armageddon-ish weather. What’s killing my early tomatoes? What are the ginormous butterflies, and why are there so many of them? (I’m told they are sphinx moths, and they really are the size of hummingbirds when they’re grown.) Is it true their baby caterpillars will hatch into those finger-sized green tomato hornworms that spit stink at you when you threaten to harvest “their” tomatoes? Why so many lizards? I referred people with baggies of diseased tomato plants to the Master Gardeners for diagnosis.

The unspoken worry of global warming, and local firestorms blows the hot wind around us, as we compare war stories. Those of us trying to grow warm-season vegetables near the edges of the burn zone have watched our neighborhood fauna change as rats, gophers, and coyotes move in from their destroyed habit. Our murder of big black gansta crows are gone, as are the blue jays – neighborhood bullies of the air. Instead, we have red-shouldered hawks, another species of hawk I don’t know, and the occasional eagle. With owls in twilight, these birds now have air rights above the back canyon. There are lots of places that have yet to burn, and water is increasingly scarce. Our water provider just sent us a notice of a public hearing to increase our rates by over 8%. Like the days of $2.00/gal gas, we won’t miss the water until the well runs dry. Someday, what we pay today for un-rationed water will seem laughably, quaintly, cheap. Like I feel about the war, I wonder how bad it has to get before we do something to stop it.

Sunday, returning south and turning inland from the North County coast where we spent a pleasant morning tasting beer, we spotted the tell-tale plume of smoke on the horizon – puffing dark gray of solid smoke clouds, cycling to lighter and white steam from the doused fire. As we drew closer, we could observe the fire was in one of the million small canyons running from east to west leading down to the sea from the mesas to their west. Such east-west canyons are veritable chimneys for the hot winds blowing dry desert winds all the way to the ocean. We were also able to see that the fire was a brush fire, not a structure fire. It also explained why the smoke changed from black to white again, and again, as the firefighters on the ground were directed by two hovering helicopters to new hot spots.

The rains stopped in early April, but it’s as dry as October. The fire season doesn’t usually begin until summer has begun to go out in a blaze of glory by October. In 2007 the fires were very close to us in October. In 2003 they burned parts of Scripps Ranch to 2 blocks from J&K’s house in November. To think that the fire season started in May is, let’s say, worrisome.

Today my garden may be the best metaphor for the lost paradise Milton describes. Today is the third day the temps reached triple digits. It’s 98 in my back yard right now, and I’m typing this before noon. There’s a deceptive Santa Ana wind blowing out of the scorching deserts, already strewn with the rusty wreckage of the lovely Spring wildflowers that lived and died so quickly a mere few weeks ago. K was beset with hay fever all day, and they say it’s worse in the Inland Empire. The hot wind is the opposite of a cool breeze: it sucks the moisture right out of your face, like a dry kiss with the breath of hell, and assaults you with pollen from a million short-lived species east of us who have already turned to dust.

Imagination in the Garden

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I’ve rearranged the furniture in the backyard – again. As I clean up from winter, re-plant, re-pot, compost, sow seeds and generally putter, I change arrangements of pots and artifacts. I move whirly gigs, hanging pots, rocks, and even actual furniture. One gardener’s sublime arrangement is another gardener’s kitschy crap.

This Spring cleaning exercise is a way for me to slowly re-tone my muscles after Winter’s idleness, and to become reacquainted with the place I last spent time in during the waning days of Autumn. It’s also a way for me to awaken my imagination from its Winter hibernation. In the process, I re-imagine what I call my 20 Year Plan. I have a vision of a white garden in the back corner, beneath the mature California pepper tree. I’ve got a thunbergia doing quite well where I literally dumped it 20 years ago after digging it up from the front yard. I’ve planted some white creeper, a couple of lavenders and my struggling brunfeslia may have found it’s final resting place.

I will, one day, re-excavate the stairs going down the back slope to the gate that opens onto the unfenced back lot that tilts ever steeply down to the creek at the bottom – no more than a slightly damp dry wash for most of the year. Two tall branches of my rebellious black bamboo are now being trained to bend together into an arch above the top of the stairs. Eventually, I will do a path along the inside of the fence at the bottom of the hill, and heading west, where it will travel beneath the sideways pine tree and back up to a succulent mother garden around the crumbling pig pen. I’m thinking of bringing in DG rock to “pave” the white garden and the proposed path. Nothing else grows there except the Brazilian pepper that won’t die.

So ripe with potential, so many areas to tame and reclaim, I feel refreshed after a long day in the warming afternoons, when I hose things down. My wildflowers are tiny but look like they’ll survive. Safely inside the chicken-wire fence, my parking-space-sized vegetable garden are sunflowers and tomatoes and the remaining basil, hiding nervously between two artichokes. I’ve got a few beans and a sorry specimen of a white eggplant. I must be destined never to grow the elusive white eggplant. Probably prefer the lovely long purple Japanese variety, especially when they’re young and tender.

Would my garden only love me more if I didn’t keep putting kitschy stuff like the pot man all over the place? The pot man, relaxing with his feet up on the far side of the pond, contemplates an answer, but remains silent and inscrutable.

I imagine that the newly trimmed mums, munching out happily on their recent fertilizer feeding, are planning to give me spring blooms. Rarely, they’ll do that, but I think it’s gotten too warm too fast to trick them into blooming twice this year. After waiting patiently without flowering last year, my purple Iris are going to give me at least one stalk of multiple flowers. Apparently, they just needed to take a year off after being dug up and separated from their sibling bulbs. Exercise of tired old muscles in cool Spring afternoons is good. Exercise of imagination is better.

Barbarous Middle Age

"Of all the barbarous middle ages, that
Which is most barbarous is the middle age
Of man; it is -- I really scarce know what;
But when we hover between fool and sage,
And don't know justly what we would be at --
A period something like a printed page,
Black letter upon foolscap, while our hair
Grows grizzled, and we are not what we were; --

"Too old for youth, -- too young, at thirty-five,
To herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore, --
I wonder people should be left alive;
But since they are, that epoch is a bore:
Love lingers still, although 't were late to wive;
And as for other love, the illusion's o'er;
And money, that most pure imagination,
Gleams only through the dawn of its creation."

- Byron, Don Juan, Twelfth Canto

The picture is a yucca recurvifolia at the Garden.

Not to quibble, but middle age is not an age you can specify until the day you die. If I had died when I was 20, my middle age would have been the year I was ten. If I live to be a hundred, middle age would have been 50, and it’s way too late for me to cry over that lost year. It may be true that today I’m older than I’ve ever been before, but once I survive today, it will be slowly buried beneath the sediment of tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping in at a pretty steady pace.

A year ago I was leaving Savannah, after a rejuvenating visit with sisters and a day spa. We each bought one of those flying screaming monkeys and spent our last evening in the B&B finishing all the grocery store wine we’d purchased and shooting our monkeys through the air at one another. Then, we drunk called several nieces and nephews, who each reacted to our calls in various ways befitting their upbringing. I called my favorite nephew and, in my official hospital administrator voice I told him that his mother was in our emergency room raving about her wasted youth and was not for this world. He replied in a calm and gentle voice, and with a wisdom beyond his years: “Then just let her go.”

Good times.

Today, I helped my Tech Support Guy tighten the shade cloth over the fragile Japanese Maples that are already starting to scorch from the four inch sliver of sun that caresses them every day. By tightening the shade cloth, we narrowed the sliver of sunshine to zero, and now not a drop of unfiltered sun can reach their precious little leaves. Now, all I have to do is hand water them every single day without fail, and they’ll survive another summer in a climate they were never meant to inhabit.

If I live to be 70, then like Don Juan, my middle age would have been 35. Sitting beneath my straightened and re-fastened shade cloth, sweating in a climate I was destined to inhabit, I find myself closer to the fools side of the equation than the sage. I try in vain to recall what I did on this date the year I was 35. Perhaps I was just never destined to experience such a long dotage. At least I can still remember last year.

Truly Alive

"A baby's body is soft and gentle.
A corpse is hard and stiff.
Plants and trees are tender
and full of sap.
Dead leaves are brittle and dry.

"If you are rigid and unyielding,
you might as well be dead.
If you are soft and flexible,
you are truly alive."
- I Ching 76

My red basil start is beyond hard and stiff: it is gone!

So young! So tender! So truly dead. So “disappeared” leaving a small divot in the spot where it stood. After I spent my yesterday afternoon strengthening the perimeter, guarding the borders, trying to keep out the goblins in this time of terror. (And so overwrought, the anti-war metaphor!)

So, in an attempt to become softer and more flexible, I spent the afternoon today watering in the wind, listening to the sounds of wind chimes, their voices becoming more shrill as the wind picks up. Sometimes there’s a hysterical clang! The perfect soundtrack to the chore of watering on a windy, sunny, Spring afternoon.

I puttered around and got my hair blown in my face. Did I become softer and/or more flexible? Not so much.

But I was truly alive out there, with the wind tossing around sweet springtime fragrances of orange blossoms, mock orange blossoms, lilacs, wisteria and those endless yellow wildflower species. Their fragrances were being tossed around like an aromatherapy convention in a tornado. The sunshine, hose rainbows, wind and wind chimes - my Springtime Symphony of light, sound, touch and smell. I call it "Truly Alive"

Family

"Baby if you need me,
Like I know I need you,
Then there’s just one thing
I’d ask you to do.
Take my hand and lead me
Through that hole in the garden wall
And pull me through.
Pull me through."
Jackson Browne, Your Bright Baby Blues

There’s more to life than gardening. And no, I’m not trying to persuade myself it’s true. I believe it’s true. There’s family, and I’ve got a big one, radiating out from my dead parents and through their 9 progeny: me and my brothers and sisters. We’re grown now, and dispersed, except for a family e-mail network we call Famnet. We can be as closely in touch with each other as we are at the rare reunions.

For most of us, sarcasm is a natural as the day is long. We’re smart, and we’re edumacated. We read, we write, we think, and, my how we argue. I refer, of course, to elevated discourse about the plight of the migrant farm workers, prescription cures for postmodern cultural angst, metaphorical discourse about overthrowing the hegemony of neighborhood bullies near and far.

And, also, we communicate equally articulately, by resorting frequently to hilarious vulgarity, cruel ad hominim attacks (e.g. “You Suck!” “No YOU suck!” ) overwrought metaphors about being adopted, unloved, and fully deserving of pathetic low self esteem. Before our grown children became immunized by frequent doses, they were surprised to discover the sharp edge to some of the things my generation thinks is funny. They all survived about as well as could be expected.

Then, there, the detailed analysis about each others’ personal shortcomings, insane political positions (especially the un-evolved boys). We feel responsible to advise each other of our various and sundry shortcomings, poor personal hygiene, foolish and deluded beliefs from the previous millennium and lack of intelligence, grace, or a sense of humor. We don’t exactly value the diversity of our lifestyles, and those of our expanding network of children and their children.

Except that – we do.

While the inter-family humor can sometimes seem brutal, especially to the pussies among our ranks, we’ve all been thoroughly inoculated with the love of our family members that we can dish it out as well as we can take it. I love unconditionally every member of my family, even the ones I think are morons, and I’m sure they love me, even though they resent when I’m always right.

Paradise Regained

"What fear I then? Rather, what know to fear
Under this ignorance of good and evil,
Of God or death, of law or penalty?
Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine,
Fair to the eye, Inviting to the taste,
Of virtue to make wise: what hinders then
To reach, and feed at once both body and mind?”

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost. Back to the thicket slunk
The guilty serpent, and well might; for Eve,
Intent now wholly on her taste, nought else
Regarded; such delight till then, as seemed,
In fruit she never tasted, whether true
Or fancied so through expectation high
Of knowledge; nor was godhead from her thought.
Greedily she ingorged without restrainht,
And knew not eating death, Satiate at length,
And heightened as with wine, jocund and boon…"
- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

My garden isn’t exactly Eden, and I’m a bit different from Eve. One of my personal favorite sins is giving vent to my slightly warped sense of humor, particularly on or about April Fools Day, when I’m clearly intent on my own taste, nought else.

Meanwhile, I’m in a much better mood, having recently had some outdoor therapy. I planted a bunch of lavender varieties on the back south-facing bank. This breaks my general rule of planting fragrant plants on the walkway leading up to the spa. I figure I can keep an eye on them in back since it’s near my potting bench, and I can use them as a mother garden to take and propagate more of same. The blue hose is the drain for the sink at the potting bench, and I've pricked holes in it to serve as a drip irrigation to the lavender, sage and other herbs I'll be planting there.

I do sometimes feel like Eve this time of year, when I re-discover how wonderful it feels to create my own personal Eden adjacent to my modest vegetable garden. Although the quote is from Paradise Lost, getting back into the groove of yard work in warm weather, I feel like my back yard is Paradise Found – yet again every Spring.

Blasphemy: In Pretzels and Blogs

“A wretched soul, bruised with adversity,
We bid be quiet when we hear it cry;
But were we burdened with like weight of pain,
As much or more we should ourselves complain.”
- William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors. Act ii. Sc. 1.

One man’s pretzel is another man’s blasphemy. The pretzel pictured here is formed into the word “infidel” in Arabic. The Sub-Sub Baker, who invented this unique combination of food and political statement, calls it The Infidetzel™. It doesn’t smell like anthrax, but rather is as delicious as a regular giant pretzel. In fact, I’m told a batch of freshly-baked Infidetzels exude a pungent fragrance of self-righteous indignation, guaranteed to cure all customers’ righteous indigestion.

Here are the top ten things that annoy me in other peoples’ blogs:

1 Starting overwrought memes about posting, say, your past two grocery lists, your garden journal entry from this day last year, or your descriptions of the best police chase video you’ve ever seen.

2 Stories about boring stuff you did yesterday. (We all had a day yesterday, perhaps just as boring as yours thanks for sharing.)

3 Overuse of a thesaurus, use of exotic and obscure crossword words when simpler words would do, e.g. using the word “meme” when you mean “blogging somebody else’s thought instead of thinking up your own, you lazy bastard”.

4 Unsuccessful attempts to try to make pathetically drab lives interesting that fail even to entertain the smug, let alone rise above the loafers of the listener longing for profound thoughts.

5 Things your mother/father/favorite teacher etc. once solemnly pronounced, and now you totally realize they were SO right. Like, awesome.

6 Pos(t)ing as thoughtful, introspective, wise beyond your years, yet thirsting for blog comments and reassurance from perfect strangers. (Note to self: don’t appear so needy. Nobody likes a complainer, you poor undiscovered artist/struggling writer you.)

7 Describing a visit to/from Dear Old Mom; a cute example of Precocious Toddler grammar; the thing your new kitty did to the ball of yarn - all particularly when accompanied by artless pictures.

8 Explaining how, despite the fact that your hyper-life is bouncing from one hectic crisis to another, you retain a mellow sense of humor and more poise, frankly, than any one person should be allotted in life, you sanctimonious ass. We had a meeting, we sent a memo: self-deprecating head shaking passing for wisdom: it’s no longer cool. Neither is your verbal desperation tarted-up as postmodern angst fooling anybody. Stop embarrassing yourself.

9. Adversity overcome, and illustrated by dumb crap e.g. surviving an acrimonious divorce, the lingering death of a loved one; that horrible haircut at Supercuts; the barely escaped death during a cell phone moment. Remember: at our age, that which does not kill us usually makes us dumber.

10 Lectures on topics I could Google or Wikipede if I wanted, such as iambic pentameter or plant names and epithets, or what the pretty yellow flowers are called. The exercise of initiative is not exclusive to you.

Here are the top ten things I enjoy in other peoples’ blogs:

1 Simple pleasures, articulately described, small beauty beautifully illustrated.

2 Exercises of lively imagination insightfully shared.

3 Life lessons humbly related with a modest sense of irony. Easy on the passive aggression.

4 Descriptions of life in gardens – successes, failures, disasters caused and averted, but make it interesting, dammit! More than: we laughed, we cried, we returned home drunk.

5 Things your mother/father/favorite teacher once solemnly pronounced and you now realize they were SO totally damn wrong.

6 Well-written and exquisitely constructed prose that illustrates an original thought with a drop of daffiness. I also appreciate redundancy (provided its not repetitious) and the creative use of profanity, but that’s a whole ‘nother (sic) story.

7 Adversity, overcome but illustrated by clever metaphors. E.g.: offenses your bridesmaids committed unwittingly at your first wedding, and the scars they left; or, say, why living with your MIL is no longer charming.

8 Lies, dressed up as truth so well that even their own Mother wouldn’t recognize them.

9 Connections magically made between concepts that I thought weren’t related until you connected them. Really? Hummingbirds, Swedish meatballs AND grave robbers?

10 Humor so irreverent it may, at times, seem to stumble across the border into a briar patch of vulgarity - like your old Uncle Andy on St. Patrick’s Day when he started talking about his drunken Pop - but only if you don’t have a grown-up sense of humor, you twit.

BTW, so sorry. Were you offended by the infidel pretzel, aka The Infidetzel™? Then to you I say – Your mama is so fatwa. (How fatwa is she?) When she jihads around the house, she jihads AROUND the fricking House, boy. Were you offended by my list of unpardonable blogging sins, or my list of mad blogging practices that will confer everlasting grace on your blaspheming blog? To you I say, don’t be vain: many are called, but few are chosen.

Gardens of the Imagination

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
Isaac Newton

Grown-ups enjoy childish displays of imagination all the more because as adults, we often sacrifice our own imagination in exchange for what we hoped was wisdom: only to realize not all sad experience increases wisdom. In fact, some of life’s lessons seem to be directed at the slow realization that we aren’t as smart as we once thought we were. Nobody knows this better than the gardener, who has tried, and failed as often as she has succeeded.

Sometimes, childish flights of imagination may enable one to visit fantasy gardens – imaginary places. As adults we often imagine that we have too many real places to go, real people to see, real things to do – for such flights of fancy. So imagination withers like a bush struggling beyond the reach of the Rainbird, while our gardens of the real flourish, and then perish around us unseen.

To have an original thought, to think a new thing into reality, is not as easy as it seems. Sometimes it seems like everything’s been said and done, certainly everything worthwhile, true, meaningful. When I was growing up in suburban Washington DC, we would often go downtown this time of year when the cherry blossoms began to bloom around the reflecting pool. We’d see tourists, carefully framing the lovely white Jefferson Memorial and it’s reflection in the background, beneath sprays of cherry blossoms. We’d smugly walk past and mutter “Been done”. Even if you’ve never been there to see it, you know exactly what I’m talking about: the cherry blossoms against the round white marble edifice and it’s reflection. Lovely perhaps, but a cliché.

But, just as not every tune has already been hummed, not every dream garden has been planted. There is an infinite store of unused melody, unspoken thought, and wisdom. And there are unimagined gardens to dream and plant into reality. Perhaps original thoughts, like classic garden designs, are not lying around waiting for gardeners to trip over them, like when Le Notre designed the gardens at Versailles.

Green leaves on a red stem, or red maples surrounding the top of the stone lantern and casting it into shadow. So much the better that Versailles has "been done". I simply don’t have as much room as Versailles to realize my dream garden. Surely, somebody else has seen delicate maple leaves briefly ignited by a golden sunset.

But my pleasure is not reduced when I imagine things others may have seen – they’re fresh and new to me. Nor is my imagination discouraged by stumbling into giants who have thought my thoughts before. So, I’ll climb up on those giant shoulders and look around some more, letting my imagination take me where nobody has been before. I’ve enjoyed the backlit maple leaves in seasons past, but I still enjoy seeing them anew each Spring.

Have You Heard the Good News?

“Basingstoke today after a local woman claimed to have seen a vision of a piece of toast on a picture of the Virgin Mary at her local church. Betty Tilley, 42, was praying silently at the Sacred Heart Catholic church when she looked up to see a ray of light slanting in through the window, illuminating a reproduction painting of the Virgin Mary and as she moved closer she was amazed by what she saw.
“‘There’s just no question in my mind that it was a miracle. Right there, on the face of the Holy Mary, Mother of God, I could see a nice piece of toasted sliced white bread. The amazing thing is that it was just like the one I had had for breakfast, so clearly this must be some kind of message from God'.”
Source: New Biscuit

I’ve got to get out to the yard. Like Betty Tilley in the above quote, I’ve been inspired by a secret message from God – In my case, a message directing me to sow seeds and pull weeds. I have a mystical and improvable faith that the act of gardening works a sort of miracle on my mental outlook. I mean, I’m crazy at the best of times, but what I aspire to is a sort of goofy/crazy where I develop hyper sensory powers to see the entire world through a sunny haze of verdant growth rather than the edgy, over-caffeinated slightly menacing jitters that, I presume, were the accompaniment (if not the cause of) Betty Tilley’s vision. I’m more comfortable in my skin when my zaniness is tempered with some of the “good” muscle fatigue that results from turning the compost with a pitchfork, and my upper arms are losing their flab and my lower arms are absorbing the sun’s pure energy.

Yesterday, we saw the sun’s rays peeking through clouds and made what my Spousal Unit calls “rapture beams” – those rays that make spotlights of sun through holes in the clouds. One of my crazier sisters used to call it the “Holy Cow” sky after a cartoon that showed one such sunbeam shining down on an isolated cow in a pasture of shadowy cows.

I like to think that the cartoon cow in the spotlight was also receiving a silent message from God traveling on the light beams. Perhaps the silent message was something on the lines of “Don’t follow the rest of the cows when they march into the pen, squeezing into a single file leading to a cattle car. That’s a one-way trip for cows.” I imagine the inspired cow trying to spread the good news to the rest of the herd, and being laughed at, like I’m sure Betty Tilley’s imaginary neighbors laughed at her personal vision.

But unlike these false prophets, I have the real good news:Gardeners awake! Spring is here! Put down your knitting next to the cold ashes in the fireplace. Put on your short-sleeved t-shirt and go outside and soak up some Vitamin D. Stuff is happening in your garden, and you need to be there to see it.

(The pictures are of the Yucca Recurvifolia, Agavaceae Family. It's now in bloom across from my Veggie Garden, but don't get to close, you could lose an eye.)