Sheep Vs. Roses

"For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers?... Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, even without realizing what he's doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?'"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

The war between the sheep and the flowers has been going on a while, and there is no clear winner so far. So far, nobody has eaten the last rose. Meanwhile, I’m slow roasting a rack of lamb today, but it’s not the last lamb.

Today, there is a rose in the backyard, and the house smells like rosemary. So for today, the roses are winning, and the stars are still shining. Life is good.

Remembering and Forgetting

“One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.”

― Agatha Christie

"Learn to forget, learn to forget

Learn to forget, learn to forget"

― The Doors, Soul Kitchen

Ever wonder if you have a tapeworm in your brain? Me neither. But we should, apparently. At some point in every life, one has to start cleaning out the top hard-to-reach shelves of the old memory bank. Otherwise, all we’re likely to remember is the danger of tapeworms, the needless mnemonic for how to spell Arithmetic, and simple gardening information, like say, distinguishing a rose from a daisy. I probably won't remember the hard gardening stuff like whether it’s aloe or agave that dies after it blooms. Look it up, you’re more likely to remember it that way.

Apart from potential worms in my brain, I worry that if I don’t clean cobwebs from my memory store (like the names of the brothers on Bonanza, and don’t say Little Joe because everybody remembers him. And Hoss. It’s that other guy, what's his name...) that I won’t have room to store new knowledge like the names of the current Idol finalists (not!) or the difference between a daisy and a rose. 

When a loved one dies, I grieve about the one-of-a-kind memories they took with them. Sometime it may be merely delightful and within living memory: like a particular game of hide and seek on a childhood summer evening like this. Sometimes it is generations old: like that the tiny enamel pin in my jewelry box that says “AHS ’03” that is my maternal grandmother’s pin from her 1903 Ayersville (Ohio) High School graduation class that Mom gave me. Sometimes it’s more than recent or fond; it’s ancient and essential. To give you an idea, think about what would happen if the last guy that knows how to brew good beer dies. Ok, then think of something that actually might happen.

I’d like to remember happy things, and not sad ones. I know life includes both, but see no reason why this should require that the shelves in my personal memory must be stacked that way. But, not withstanding Jim Morrison, learning to forget is the easy part. The hard part is learning what to forget, because it turns out that the mere act of revisiting a particular memory tends to strengthen it. It’s, like, counterintuitive. And it's hard: like counting to ten without thinking of elephants. (Which reminds me of my all-time favorite riddle: why do elephants drink?)

So, here’s my trick for learning to forget. The first step is to identify the memory you want to forget - say tape worms, or that if you are a gardener who likes to eat what you grow you may be a murderer. 

Then spend twice as much time thinking of something good to remember.  And if you can’t tap into happy memories to wipe out bad memories like bleach on bloodstains, then you should create some. Happy memories, not bloodstains. Like today’s NASA Astronomy Picture of The Day. Today, it’s the Annular Solar Eclipse I will see tomorrow night from here in SoCal, even though I won’t be in the path for the full eclipse pictured, but will see a small bite out of one side (i.e. a partial annular solar eclipse.

Don't forget that last step for heaven’s sake. Learn how to remember it. The happy memory, not the brain worms.

An Apple A Day?

"And then I thought, 'Wouldn't breakfast be healthier if my waffle were made of salad?'"
-Scott, on morning meal alternatives 

This article, “Gross Intredients in Processed Foods” in today’s Huffpo breathlessly breaks the “news” that some of the stuff in processed foods would gross us all out, if only we knew. So they tell us,  and the answers are "gross", which is a precise scientific term of art meaning Eight on a 1-10 scale from cringeworthy, to vomit inducing scrotum punch. Ok, I made that last part up. But in fairness to the author, she's an idiot.

Here’s what’s in an international orange bottle of Cheeze Whiz Squeeze: Whey, milk, milkfat, dried corn syrup, water, sodium phosphate, contains less than 2 percent of: Food starch-modified, salt, maltodextrin, lactic acid, mustard flour, Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, water, salt, caramel color, garlic powder, sugar, spices, tamarind, natural flavor), sorbic acid as a preservative, oleoresin paprika (color), cheese culture, annatto (color), enzymes. Yikes, right?

But not only is the science in this story rather squishy, they bury the lead. Turns out foodie bloggers are right: not only does real slow food taste better than fast food; it’s better for you! This scientific fact was cleverly deduced by Dr. David Katz, who knows what's best. “An overhaul of food labeling is most likely still a while off. In the meantime, consumers' increased curiosity into food production could result in a return to cleaner eating. 'What I know best is that the foods best for health are generally not prone to any such adulterations,' writes Katz, who suggests eating foods made from ingredients you have heard of, recognize as either a plant or animal and can pronounce.”

Seriously? Whether I can pronounce ingredients? Then again... Digest pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, phytosterols, alanine. Consider the lowly monosaccharide and it’s greasy cousin oligosaccharide. To me, these sound like pretty gross and unpronounceable ingredients. Hence, I conclude they are clearly not better for my health.  I mean, Dr. Katz might point out that monosaccharides totally sounds like a social disease; or it might if I could pronounce it. In case your curiosity has been aroused, these are the ingredients in apples. Moreover, even if consumers’ curiosity into apple production remains unaroused, these are still the ingredients in apples. 

The Huffpo article is to science as Cheese Whiz Squeeze (“Now with more Trademarks!”) is to cheese. But thanks, Sara Klein, Associate Editor, Healthy Living, for this amazing factoid stuffed taste of the science of healthy living.

In the event that you’re interested in an important issue to all who prefer their apples from trees and not GMO test tubes, check this out: GM Food: Don't Ask, Don't Tell? in the Utne Reader. There will be an initiative on labeling GMO foods on the upcoming CA ballot and this article gives a good, if biased*, background on the topic, along with a number of references. 

* Of course the GMO article and all of it's references have a bias. That is, if you want to consider facts capable of being biased. To paraphrase Respectful Insolence, facts can neither be biased, nor insolent. OBTW, evolution is true.

Fools and Liars

“As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.”

Jonathan Swift

If modesty makes a fool seem like a man of sense, does immodesty make a fool seem even more foolish? Or does he merely remain a shameless whore who also seems a fool?

I'lll take a lot of credit for giving Swift the inspiration for the above quote. I spun him over in his grave a few times by playing Mitt Romney’s recent radio interview taking credit for the bailout that insured General Motors’ survival.

Responsible Vegetable Gardening - Brussels Sprouts

"You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of."

Jim Rohn

Vegetable gardeners who cultivate year-round vegetable gardens - as we can here in Zone 9 - must learn to embrace the mysteries; and by that I don’t mean mysteries like why someone would want to grow Brussels sprouts in the first place. I don’t judge. For the purpose of classifying the vegetables we cultivate at any given moment, I refer to the mysteries of seasonal transitions: when can I stop growing cool season veggies like cole crops (cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts); and when can I put the tender tomato starts in? Especially, when do I get to give up on the languishing Brussels sprouts and sew the watermelon seed?

Mother Nature doesn’t simply flip a switch at the spring equinox and declare that those languishing cabbages won’t ever get around to making heads, or that the world is now safe to grow eggplants. Around here, she tends to tease the gardener with a week or two of lovely warm weather and then circle back around and ambush us with a whack of winter weather. (And, what the hell do those anorexic, inappropriately dressed weather “gals” mean when they say well, we’re in for some unseasonable weather? Before weather can become unseasonable, you have to have discernable seasonal transitions, or at least discernable seasons, i.e. seasonable seasons. We don’t.)

Which gets me to my real subject here: those deadbeat losers of the vegetable kingdom - Brussels sprouts. We have only left the malingering Brussels sprouts in our vegetable garden for the upcoming Spring Garden Festival. It’s not just that we don’t want a patch of bare ground, or that we’re reluctant to expose tender vegetable to “unseasonable” weather. It’s certainly not that we expect to actually see a respectable ROI on our Brussels sprouts venture.

Speaking only for myself and not my fellow veggie gardeners, my reason for permitting the Brussels sprouts to remain in the garden is that they are a harsh lesson in responsible vegetable cultivation. If not damning evidence of their worthlessness, their unproductively is surely the harbinger of doom for our Brussels sprouts. These pretentious celebrities of the vegetable kingdom that spell their first name with a capital letter are as worthless as any Hollywood celebrity. 

When we were kids, we used to call them Mighty Mouse Cabbage, but that didn’t mean we liked eating them. I have met exactly one adult in my entire life that claims to like eating Brussels sprouts. Cooking the fruit of the Brussels sprouts makes your house smell like the unventilated hallway of a cheap boarding house at dinnertime, even down to the finishing notes of unwashed sweat socks lingering in the kitchen the next morning.

I conclude my case against Brussels sprouts by somewhat redundantly concluding that any annual vegetable that takes more than 90 days to ripen (or not to even bother to ripen) isn’t going to work in the microclimate of our garden. I should admit here that I have seen a vegetable garden about 5 miles away grow these plants taller than I, and so thickly productive that their stalks look like cylindrical cobblestone roads. In fairness to me, a professional master gardener who lavishly feeds them her homemade compost tends that garden. That said, I maintain that it is not a responsible use our sparse water and precious compost, not to mention my meager unpaid amateur gardening talents, for some stupid vegetable that ends up being an open invitation to several generations of short-lived white flies to enjoy themselves at leisure.

But wait until next week, after the Festival. Then, look out.

Imagine mama whitefly, who today gathers her fledgling babies around their whitefly hearth and tells them about the rich feeding grounds in plot #10. There, my darlings, you will find yummy, leggy Brussels sprouts, with lush leaves and anemic fruit that have nurtured generations of our ancestor flies, making us the mightiest whitefly kingdom on the block. Now imagine how, come next week, the kids will find a figurative scorched bare ground. Hah! It will be like global warming for our whitefly population; or 100-year drought, right? This leads me to admit that another reason to leave the sprouts in is to lull the whiteflies into complacency and indulge my vengeful fantasy. Surely, one of the perks of being a vegetable gardener is the totally godlike power to change the environment of pests. Apocalypse next Tuesday! Citizens of entire whitefly nations will rise up and turn upon their failed leaders as their world descends into the chaos, and as whitefly civilization breaks down, and as entire whitefly cultures are lost in nightmares of starvation and deprivation. (Disclaimer: I could be less than accurate about whitefly biology and ethnography here, but I’m probably not. I’m not a botanist or a fortuneteller. Based on this post, one might even say that I’m not much of a gardener either.) 

It is a challenge to garden responsibly, particularly as our seasonal circumstances are so mercurial. One of the changes we can control is what we plant and don’t plant. As god is my witness, I’ll never plant Brussels sprouts again.

Not Such a Long Way After All, Baby

 “The courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman’s lies in obeying.”

-       Aristotle

“Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy and certain forms of artistic production. ... Women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.” 

-       Hegel

Women are being threatened. Again. At first I was surprised that we seemed to be moving backwards in this seemingly endless American election season. Then I was outraged. Now I’ve come to accept that men have always felt this way about women.  This journey from denial to acceptance is neither more remarkable than the taste of bitter ashes; nor more puzzling than the long history of man’s inhumanity to women. But there’s still the question of why women continue to passively accept or even actively collude in their domination by men.

I think I’ve found a big answer to part of this question - by recently learning about the plight of a typical Afghan woman who passively accepts her lot in life. This girl was married off at age 11 to a husband who expects his wife to wait on him hand and foot until she dies young, probably in childbirth. Why doesn’t she strangle the man in bed or poison his dinner?

Despite the risk of having my head explode from the cognitive dissonance of attempting to equate the horrific fate of an 11-year old Afghan bride to that of a “working mom” like Ann Romney (after all, neither of them have every been “gainfully" employed) I have developed a theory about why. Women everywhere accept our various fates because we have no expectation of any alternative choice.

The young Afghan woman who flees from an abusive husband is guilty of committing a “moral crime” for which she can be indefinitely imprisoned. Her “choice” is to return to her father’s house where she will be murdered for bringing dishonor; to live as a beggar and never see her children again; or to return to the abusive husband. For very similar reasons, American women will watch as American men move us in pretty much the same direction as the customs prevailing in Afghanistan. Apart from the feeble power of our vote in an electoral system increasingly corrupted by corporations and politicians, what choice do we have?

I was not only a working mom, I was a single mom with a full time job who attended law school at night. I was fortunate. I had the choice to leave a bad marriage, to find an underpaying job, to attend school to improve my income potential. But I didn’t have a choice about making 77% of a man’s salary; of paying for birth control if I chose to engage in intercourse; of leaving my young child in the care of someone else while I worked and attended school; of paying 20% of my salary for such day care; or of being exhausted every day and every night for years.

Generally speaking, the sexes are different. Men are generally larger and have stronger muscles. Women are generally smaller and possess less physical strength (although my own experience is that women have more endurance).  When survival depended on physical prowess, men had a clear advantage and could even be considered superior – again, generally speaking.  Thus evolved a rule that made perfect sense: because women generally aren’t able to kick the shit out of men, men got to kick the shit out of women. A perfectly reasonable rule. To. A. Caveman. To cavemen like Aristotle and Hegel, or many American politicians. The kicking can be literal, as it is to the young mother in Afghanistan; or metaphorical as it was in the workplace and marketplace to me.

But that was then. I might have belonged to the first generation of feminists who had access to reliable birth control, but I was also part of a generation of women who still wanted to become mothers, even though many of us couldn’t be stay-at-home moms. But today, many daughters of my generation of moms are choosing to postpone motherhood for a professional career; and even to forgo motherhood entirely.

So, my theory about why women often permit men to kick the shit out of them is that they allow it for the sake of their children. I suspect some men realize this dirty little secret and hence the “war on woman’s health” which is actually more of a war on a woman’s choice about whether or not to bear children.  While many mothers of my generation probably consider the greatest accomplishment in their lives to be their children, I now understand why more and more of our daughters do not see motherhood as their greatest potential achievement.  In this regard, our daughters are smarter than we were. They exercised a very fundamental choice. They have found a way to break the cycle of passive acceptance of generations of unfair and cruel treatment at the hands of their male relatives.

These days, survival no longer depends on relative brute strength, at least in America. Women have brains every bit as capable of men; many would argue more capable. Once no longer hampered by the imposed long term "weaknesses" of childbearing, women may no longer passively permit men to kick the shit out of them. I hope I live to see the day men figure this out. Maybe I already have.

Flowers Resembling Wisteria

"Among all plants, vines are the most vivid examples of nature's playful spontaneity. When they decide to grow, they grow without knowing where to grow to. They never miss an opportunity to engage themselves in a playful act with whomever they meet.The movement of the vine dutifully records the memory of its adventures."

 - Living Arts Originals

Although my wisteria is stunningly lovely this year, I have posted enough about wisteria. So, instead, I thought I’d use this post not so much as an excuse to show off my white wisteria, but to write about flowers that look like wisteria. Clever how I did that, eh?

Have you ever thought you saw a large white wisteria tree? I have. We were both wrong. What we saw was a black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia). The flowers bear a remarkable resemblance to white wisteria, especially from a distance. Upon closer inspection, they are clearly not wisteria.

The picture on left below is wisteria. The picture on the right is a black locust. Close resemblance, but clearly not the same.

An intriguing fact is that all three plants - the black locust, the mescal and the wisteria - are not only drought tolerant, they all have similar foliage: pinnately compounded leaves. My personal theory about these similarities is that this is simply further evidence of  a conspiracy by Mother Nature to keep me from ever learning any serious botany.


A more intriging flower, for me, is found on a tidy bush, intriguingly called Mescal bean (Sophora secundiflora, or Calia secundiflora), also known as the Texas Mountain Laurel. All three pictures on the left are of the mescal flower, bush and seed pods. The seeds inside are bright orange-red.

It surprised me to learn here that mescal beans “are also not related to the highly intoxicating beverage called ‘mescal’ or ‘mezcal’, made from the fermented and distilled juices of several North American species of Agave, including A. americana and A. atrovirens. Incidentally, the fermented juice is called pulque, and the highly-alcoholic distilled products include Mezcal and Tequila.” Good to know.

It also surprised me to read that that the mescal bean is not related to the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii), although  “The poisonous seeds contain the alkaloid cytisine, and were once used in the intoxicating, vision-seeking ‘red bean dance’ prior to the widespread use of the "less-life-threatening" peyote cactus.” So, peyote is less deadly than mescal. Also good to know.

The politically incorrect plant sign on the mescal bean in the LA Arboratum where I took these photos this month explains, “The wood yields a yellow dye. The bright orange-red seeds were sacred to Indians and placed in burials. Now they are made into jewelry.” A depressingly succinct summary of how native culture has been misunderstood and corrupted by descendants of European settlers.

We may no longer do the red bean dance, but at least we can now buy our intoxicants in clearly labeled bottles at the Booze Barn; and we don’t have to keep all the details straight about what might kill us. More importantly, we can simply enjoy these beautiful flowers for their appearance and not their chemical make up.

Ask a Terrible Gardener

"We've left our future largely in the hands of people whose single greatest characteristic is that they are bewildered by the present." Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
 

If I find a buried treasure in the backyard when I’m digging a hole to plant a tree, do I have to share it with my deadbeat grown children?

Only if you don’t kill them immediately after you tell them about the treasure.

Is time travel possible?

I answered that question tomorrow. 

Why must I be a teenager in love?

You should really be asking a lawyer about this; preferably, one who specializes in estate planning.

Is the war in Afghanistan futile?

Some say so: “I say futile as (we) have 100,000 men in theater to engage in a fantastically unrealistic nation-building effort amidst a Pashtun population who largely detest our presence, simply to ferret out perhaps 50-100 residual al-Qaeda operatives, and with their leader already felled long ago in Abbottabad.” Gregory Djerejian

 

Can the Supreme Court force me to grow broccoli?

That remains to be seen. But if they do, you can always smother it with melted cheese.

Was Hunter S. Thompson an admirer of Spiro Agnew?

Probably not: “Hunter S. Thompson once characterized Agnew as a ‘flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed.' But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.’  This was absolutely untrue.  As any undergraduate zoology major knows, weasels on speed behave very differently." Brainstorm 

Does anybody here speak jive?

Beaver’s mom, but she’s dead.

Twenty-four Hours in Four Words

Moved piano. Slept well.

Experience vs. Dreams

“Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.” Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.

“People always think something's all true.”
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The other day, I arranged more than one terrarium on the table outside by my mural. The small terraria are real; the view from the painted window is not real. But the overall effect is pleasing.

The other day, a person I know described a vivid experience involving a train passing outside her bedroom window. In passing, the noisy train had woken her from a nice nap. She recounted that there was a neighboring lady who was going to buy the train, which was clearly frivolous and impractical.

The person recounting this experience is a dementia patient confined to a wheelchair and living in the midst of suburban houses where the nearest passing train is more than ten miles away. Her days are so routine as to be mind-numbingly boring, and I figure her dream-life is compensating by giving her something interesting to experience.

I am not the first person to speculate that if something does happen but only inside one’s own head such events are as real as experience as far as our brains are concerned. But what about the flip side of the question: can my brain insist that something I saw while awake was merely a dream, to be kicked to the curb of memory lane? There are more things these days that I’d rather forget than remember. At least, things that I can recall at the moment. For example, I’d rather remember the lovely blooming white iris, and forget the small crocodile lurking in the background.

It is sobering for me to consider that the foundation of my cognitive functions in the future rests on the shaky structure being constructed of my present experiences. Perhaps it’s time for me to research the whole lucid dreaming thing, so I can attempt to establish a less bewildering muddle of experiences to remember.

Then again, perhaps not. I do like trains.

Seize the Vicodin

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
- - Gilmour, Water, Wright, Shine on You Crazy Diamond

It’s poppy season in Afghanistan: beautiful but deadly, and not just for those who grow and consume the harvest.

Meanwhile, back in America, it’s April Fool’s Day. The news stories about New York school officials censoring words from performance tests to avoid upsetting children are, regrettably, not a joke. After all, it’s not just New York where, for example, censoring words that might make kids feel bad like “poverty” and “divorce” are not the only example of such attempts to cocoon children from the really, really bad old world. It’s also no joke that California apparently bans the word “weed” from tests. Of course, as a gardener, I too, am upset by weeds…

In honor of poppy season/April Fools Day, I am hereby instituting a dress code for my blog. Please don’t read or post here if you’re not tastefully and modestly clothed. A bit of cleavage or a glimpse of a bulging codpiece is upsetting enough to your friends and family. Please spare the rest of us.

On a related note, there’s another line from the Pink Floyd song quoted above that has always mystified me: “… you wore out your welcome with random precision…” Does anybody know what that means?

Once again, I have achieved a world record in labels that will never be seen together again.

Tea Gardens

“Tea is nought but this.
First you make the water boil,
Then infuse the tea.
Then you drink it properly.
That is all you need to know.”
Sen Rikyu

It may be hard to believe, but back in the day, many people in my generation were loud, opinionated, and ready to protest anything that offended our sensibilities. It was exhausting work being so passionate and ideological, particularly about stuff I understood so little. Some of us educated hippies who survived mellowed down as we aged. Many of us came late to discover the appeal of Asian arts and philosophies. Something about Eastern arts are particularly peaceful and refreshing to Western eyes, particularly when it comes to gardens. Pictured first is a portion of the zen garden at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park, San Diego.

Like Chinese scholars striving to master the four art forms we cultivated various oriental arts. Some of us got tattoos of Chinese characters. Some of us took calligraphy classes in adult ed. Some of us took up yoga or tai chi or some more clearly martial arts. Some of us became Buddhists, as sincere and innocent as Lisa Simpson. Some - in denial about their OCD - learned to practice the strictly choreographed formal art of tea, or Cha-no-yu, which literally means hot water for tea in Japanese.

I fell in love with the Japanese Tea Garden, a supreme expression in gardening of a style of spare but not austere rusticity. Japanese tea gardens are subtle with muted lights and colors, never flashy with banks of colorful flowers and foliage. Like the tea and the ceremony, Japanese gardens originated in China, a place known for their own unique gardening style that is both substantially different from and similar to what evolved into the Japanese Tea Garden style. My backyard has become what a polite and charitable observer might call a fusion of Japanese Tea Garden and the kind of small scale Chinese Garden designed to permit many small vignettes for “’in position viewing’ i.e. lingering observation from fixed angles” as Chen Congzhou calls them.

Pictured here is the tsukubai arrangement at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park. Close outside the door onto the small sheltered patio (the fourth picture, below) is my attempt to create an authentic tsukubai water basin with a stone lantern. Apart from a struggling carpet of thyme which is the closest I can get to moss, there are three small trees: a black pine that will be another 20 years before it even begins to take the shape I intend, a small clumping bamboo, and struggling weeping cherry that I happen to love it despite it’s inappropriateness for this style and for this climate zone. These three – pine, plum, and bamboo – are known as the three friends of winter, which is a story for another post.

Because my backyard is not conveniently located Japanese mountain stream my water basin filled from a small bamboo pipe flows over into a basin with a pump to re-circulates the water. The basin itself is from a local Chinese importer: a grey granite-colored carved stone basin that has been worn shiny and black over the years.

The stone lantern pictured here is a Japanese s style named after a famous tea master Furuta Oribe. An Oribe doro is distinguished by its cleaner line, its secular lack of carvings religious iconography, and its lack of pedestal stone. This one is in the Japanese Friendship Garden has a tiny slice of new moon that would glow when lit in the long summer twilight. A.L. Sadler says (in Cha-No-You: The Japanese Tea Ceremony (1933)), “Where a stone lantern has a ‘New Moon’ shaped opening in its top this should always be turned toward the west, while a Full Moon shaped one should be turned toward the east, but others consider this of no great importance and prefer to turn the lantern so that the light looks best in the garden.” The one pictured here has been placed with the tiny moon facing west.

The partly obscured lantern pictured here in my tsukubai garden is clearly Japanese, with 8-petaled lotus the Buddhist symbol of purity comprising the heavy pedestal, and the top finial shaped like a lotus bud. Called the Kasuga lantern, this style takes its name from the famous Kasuga shrine in Nara.

Apart from the technicalities, there is another deeper layer of understanding tea gardens that appeals to me. Imitating style is relatively easy to learn. Mastering design is difficult. The reasons for this have something to do with the way experts teach. I’m used to the Western approach where it’s all outlined in books with footnotes and exhausting detail. It was relatively easy for me to compose and execute my tsukubai based on a bit of research, a few really nice local rocks, and some plant substitutions: like drought-tolerant creeping thyme in lieu of dew-drenched moss.

Much of what we consider inscrutably mysterious teachings in Japanese expertise - from designing and building tea gardens, to conducting proper tea ceremonies, to that thing about the white cat statues that wave hello - is simply due to the unfamiliar Eastern way of teaching. Asian teachers teach by silence, instead simply doing. The student learns by watching, over and over again, sometimes for years and years, until the student learns how to see and to understand the subtle language of the art. “For it is a rule of this art that its experts do not explain the reason and cause of the things they do in this matter by words but by deeds only, for they leave everything to the consideration and reasoning of their pupils.” (Jao Rodrigues, Account of Sixteenth-Century Japan, quoted in Marc Peter Keane’s The Japanese Tea Garden).

Rikyu’s entire spoken words on teaching the tea ceremony he is largely credited with formalizing is quoted at the top of this post. Simplicity itself. Thus, a wise man once said, the student becomes the master.

All this is to report that we went to a few genuine Japanese gardens last week, notably the Huntington Garden’s Japanese Garden (pictured immediately above) and the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park in San Diego. The more I learn about tea gardens and Asian gardens in general, the more there is to learn, and the more pleasure I derive from the study. Although I love reading and copying and probably corrupting authentic Asian garden styles, I learn more from the pleasure of seeing the real things.

Nutritional Tomatoes

“Homegrown tomatoes ripened all the way on the vine have about 1/3 more vitamin C than artificially ripened supermarket varieties; and organic tomatoes – those that get their nitrogen fro manure and compost – are higher in antioxidants than conventionally grown tomatoes fed on commercial fertilizers... A study conducted at UC, Davis found that organic tomatoes contained nearly twice as much quercetin and kaempferol – flavonoids with potent antioxidant activity – as their conventionally grown cousins.”
Rebecca, Rupp, How Carrots Won the Trojan War

Our last frost date in So Cal is 3/31, so we have already selected and started our warm season seeds for the Veggie Garden. I happened to be reading Rupp’s book a month ago when we began planning our summer veggie garden.

Rupp’s book goes on to mention that some tomato varieties have been specially bred for high nutrient content. So, I went online searching for nutritious tomatoes, and particularly the P20 Blue tomato and the Health Kick. Solana Seeds in Quebec had the P20 seeds (pricey at $0.30 each), and we got the Health Kick seeds from Burpee.

Since this is the first season we’ve selected tomatoes to plant based on nutritional recommendations, I also made up an informational sign with the part of Rupp's book quoted above that will be posted next to our nutritious tomatoes.

A bit more research on the P20 reveals it’s a challenge to get the tomatoes to stay purple because the color is "light-sensitive" i.e. the more sun, the better. The Oregon State University FAQ was written a few years before the seed became commercially available, but it includes the interesting information that OSU bred this seed from a rare that is one of the few that has not only blue skin but blue meat in the center. I'm not sure if I'm ready for purple tomato sauce.

We have bought a few heirloom starts from local nurseries to get us up and running as soon as the rain stops. But we are trying to start most of our tomato crop from seed this year, something we’ve not done for the last few years. Since last summer’s weather worked against a bountiful tomato crop, we have high hopes for this year. Let’s hope the weather cooperates.

Spring Cleaning

“Come spring
You can find me rolling in fields
That are exploding in
Holy battles

Of scents, of sounds—everything is
A brilliant colored nova on a stem.”
- Hafiz

Spring cleaning is at least spring something, right? Now I don’t want to say anything bad about hoarders, but… Oops, just did. So I might as well.

It’s not like I’ve been denial about the hoarders I live with. But this seriously surpassed my worst-case scenarios by several orders of magnitude. Ok, there is no reason for a reasonable person to keep empty househould appliance boxes. But empty blisterpaks trump empty blender boxes, my friend. Thankfully, I have a friend with a pickup truck and some strong helpers. She even brought me boxes!

A lifetime of greeting cards filling two big filing boxes. Three generations of photographs filling approx 6 big filing cartons, but spread out into rubber-banded bundles stuffed absolutely everywhere. And a carton of tin film canisters for movie film, plus cameras, splicing supplies and snippets of film. Another carton of obsolete cameras. Some of the kitchen household products like corn starch are suitable to grace an “Antique” (sic) store kitchen filled with obsolete kitchen crap. Several decorative oil lamps in addition to an appalling number of even more appalling ceramic figurines about which the less said the better. (I've said too much).

Tech Support Guy: Some of the cameras are worth a lot.
Weeping Sore: Not to me. The 78 rpm records? The LPs?
TSG: (Crickets)

There was a DAV Auxiliary rulebook from 1934. But the logic of keeping this must have been the update from 1959. Drawer after drawer of junk drawers. Anybody a Firesign Theater fan? Remember the game show where the contestant, handed her prize, complained loudly "Why this is a bag of shit?" The announcer said, "But it's GOOD shit" which the shit in these drawers is not.

New rule: no household may have any more than one single junk drawer, preferably in the kitchen. Corollary: no saving broken crayons, unused yellowing address books, calendars for 1983, broken screw drivers. And for god’s sake – no empty packages for household products that were then stored separately and never used. That’s not three rules by the way, it’s a compound Junk Drawer Rule worthy of this situation.

To date Tech Support Guy has mailed 8 big cartons of primo crap to family members, like a small sample of the lifetime’s worth of mothers day cards and including the photos I’d put into albums years ago until I realized the Stygian nature of this effort. There are five large cartons on the closet shelf of loose photographs in no particular order for TSG to review. Fat chance: medical science has conclusively proven hoarding is an inheritable disorder. I've left several notes among my cartons of my own crap apologizing to my descendants.

But it's not all old stuff. Some stuff is from my lifetime. To date I’ve emptied over a dozen large garbage cans of ordinary crap – dragging the laden cans down the hill and the empty ones back up. We have 5 garbage cans and only three lids, but that’s another story). And it’s been raining. And you don’t want to get on of those red tags stuck to an overloaded can full of water soaked greeting cards so all your neighbors can see you don’t have an experienced gardener to take care of these chores. (Then there’s the recycle bin full of empty wine bottles: yet another story.)

The frickin’ ray of sunshine to brighten my life is having an up-to-date reference if I step on a tetnus-infected needle amid the clutter. Yeah. 1933. That, and knowing that ALL of the drawers are now empty. The boxes are almost all packed up. The pickup comes tomorrow for the rest of the boxes and much of the furniture. And this just in: my marmalade not only gelled, it kicks ass!

So, in case I was in denial about the hoarders before, I have been rolling around in a dusty closet amid overstuffed boxes about to explode, and I have seen the light from brilliant colored novas in packing boxes. Close enough, Hafiz?

So, I made Meyer Lemon Marmalade

“THERE HAD BEEN earlier drinking than usual in the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge… This had been the third morning in succession, on which there had been early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge.”
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It takes three days for Rachel Saunders’ Blue Chair Jam Cookbook recipe entitled Meyer Lemon Marmalade with Mandarins & Lavender. My only prior jam/jelly experience has been decidedly “small batch” compared to this undertaking, and the mystery of how to make the stuff gel has sometimes escaped me. This is a big recipe and I opted not to reduce it in the hopes that my gelling problem would be avoided. I ended up with about 8 cups. The success of this adventure remains a bit of a cliffhanger. I am not supposed to move the filled jars until tomorrow morning when they’re cooled. To move them before they cool overnight is to risk un-gelling.

I encountered problems.

The first problem was mandarins; specifically, there are none. I got fat California tangerines, not tiny Clementines, but orange-sized fruits a lovely golden red orange instead. All fruit, including the 4 ounces of Eureka lemon juice from lemons I picked myself, is organic. The sugar is not, regrettably. Since they are a bit more tart than oranges – one might even say bitter, if one was inclined to dramatic foreshadowing - I increased the sugar. So, I actually attempted to make Meyer Lemon with Tangerines & Lavender Jam. The tangerines are discarded after cooking down to a sticky broth and draining overnight, but their juice is a redder gold than oranges and imparts a deeper color to my final product.

The second problem was finding what Saunders optimistically calls “doneness.” She says that will take boiling the lovely ingredients “at least 30 minutes” but neglects to specify an outside time. She also has a doneness test more complex than learning to fly a B737 that involves taking a “representative half-spoonful” with pre-chilled spoons chilled and returning the sample to the freezer for a somewhat imprecise “three or four minutes”. She instructs you to freeze five spoons for this purpose. Two and a half hours of rapid cooking and about 12 spoons later, the gloop was still dripping off the spoon, albeit more slowly. Perhaps I’m unskilled in selecting a truly representative half spoon consisting of a jury of my peers; which is ironic because some of my best friends are slow drips.

Instead of using a lavender sprig, I put some culinary (French) lavender in a muslin bag and moistened it with about 4 drops of lavender extract. Then I put the bag in instead, as the recipe instructed, when the mix was removed from the heat.

By this time, my blood glucose level was probably in the low thousands from continued tasting of the delicious gloop drips. You don’t expect me to let the stuff drip off the spoon and down the sink do you? It’s delicious. And the payoff for risking a blood sugar spike that might leave me comatose, was that I learned something that, let’s say, justifies the tasting. The volume of my jam was reduced by more than ¼, and as water was lost in steam, the remaining liquid got heavier and sweeter. So while I offset the bitter tangerine taste by adding an extra half-pound of sugar to the 2.5 pounds of sugar specified in the recipe, I’m glad I didn’t add more because the mix gets much sweeter as it evaporates water and thickens.

In addition to the specific challenges enumerated above, and not even counting probably even more I’ve blissfully already forgotten, I overcame a number of general problems.

First of all, for some reason possibly related to all my bad karma coming home to roost, everybody called on the phone today – each call arriving at the perfectly awful time when I had sticky hands. Tech Support Guy was out shopping. He called. The cooking store has my new slow cooker, aka crock pot. They called. The furnace filter guy is going to be late, is that ok? Ok? I didn’t even know he was scheduled. But interruptions derail my train of thought, as well as my jam procedures and I had to wash my hands about 100 times because of interruptions. And this floor isn’t going to get itself sticky, you know.

Then there is the stipulation of the parties that I’m a klutz. I’m what you’d politely call “clumsy,” and working with sticky stuff in spoons being carried back and forth from stove to freezer to sink, was a Challenge that defeated my pathetic attempts at Poise with one hand tied behind it’s back. Turns out however, the floor took on a delicate non-skid sticky quality that actually steadied me. Finally, I used some delightfully shaped jars that hold 4 ounces, and filling them without a proper funnel is an exercise in making a sticky mess. The small sized jars enable me to give samples to friends – assuming I’m not ashamed of the final product tomorrow. Counter tops are also sticky enough that I believe my cat would be stuck like a fly to a flystrip had she attempted to traverse them. My stovetop is a mess worthy of the witches scene in Macbeth.

But there are rewards already, even though the final mission is yet to be accomplished. First, the house smells yummy with lemon and garlic. And no. I was roasting some garlic and onion to add to the fresh asparagus and broccoli and bok choy harvested from the Veggie Garden this morning. I was caramelizing the garlic and onion tossed in garlic olive oil and balsamic vinegar and roasting in the tiny toaster oven. The roasted onion garlic mix is now marinating with the green vegetables and will be returned to the toaster oven for dinner. Surprisingly, lemon and garlic work on an olfactory level.

And here’s the real payoff. Figuring my blood sugar was pretty much toast anyway from all the tasting, I found a way to use the leftover jam that wouldn’t fit in the jars I’d sterilized - about 1/3 of a cup: 3 parts vodka, 2 parts runny lemon lavender marmalade, and a dash of lavender bitters. I’m having the first martooni I’ve had in months. So, like that flyer I got in this afternoon’s mail, I may already be a winner.

Calla Lily “Green Goddess”

"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess."
- William Shakespeare, King John Act IV, Scene 2

Calla lillies (Zantedeschia aethiopica) are grown from rhizomes and bloom late in the spring. Callas are native to South Africa, where they thrive in the humidity of places like Madagascar, often blooming throughout winter. Its African origins probably account for one of calla lily’s common names, Varkoor, which means pig’s ear in Afrikaans. Other common names for this magnificent plant are arum lily, trumpet lily and pig lily.

The calla lily is not a true lily at all. Typically, this misnomer was the fault of Carolus Linneaus, who, in the mid 18th century messed up a lot of botanical stuff in his attempt to classify everything that moved. Linnaeus called it Calla aethiopica. It wasn’t until 1826 when it was placed in a genus of its own: Zantedeschia.

Like many ancient flowers, lilies carry a lot of symbolic baggage. The ancient Greek myth held that the lily grew from Hera’s (Roman: Juno) milk, which was spilled when she was nursing Heracles (Roman: Hercules). The Romans associated the calla lily with lust and sexuality because of the phallic flower stalk and the yellow pistil. Strangely, despite its decidedly male shape, the pistil is the female sexual organ of the plant.

Before the Victorians invented the Language of Flowers based mostly on appearance, the symbolic meaning of the lily had been overtaken by the hegemony of Christian iconography. Christian myth has it that lilies used to be yellow. When picked by the Virgin, they became white. It’s also said that the lily grew where Eve’s tears fell when she was expelled from Paradise, but that myth might just be the first recorded instance of seasonal allergies.

In Roman times, lilies were associated with death and symbolized sympathy. Now days despite (or perhaps because of?) its toxicity, calla lily is associated with marriage. It contains calcium oxalic crystals that can be toxic if ingested.

Lilies are associated with the Virgin Mary, often painted in the hand of the Angel Gabriel when he announced that her pregnancy test was positive. Because of its associations with virginal purity and chastity, one of my favorite legends is associated with a test for virginity involving the lily. According to Ruth Binney, Natures’s Ways: lore, legend, fact and fiction:“Following witch lore, parents anxious that a daughter might have lost her virginity would feed her powdered yellow lily. If still a virgin she would at once experience the urge to urinate”.

It’s a mystery to me what the urge to pee has to do with virginity, but I do love the evolution of meanings assigned to flowers. I particularly like the “Green Goddess” variety that grows in the bog end of my pond. The green stains look just like the knees of pants worn by a gardener who should have known better than to wear white pants while gardening. Then again, it might just be that I'm rebelling from the whole virginal purity thing and I prefer this variety in my garden because the Green Goddess is stained.

The botanic illustration at the top of this post is from Fragmenta botanica, figuris coloratis illustrata : ab anno 1800 ad annum 1809 per sex fasciculos edita / opera et sumptibus Nicolai Josephi Jacquin.