Hope Immoderately Enjoyed

“Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment.”
- James Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson

This is the time of year I hope. I’ve planted all my summer vegetables: a dozen varieties of tomato, potatoes, leeks, blueberries, blackberries, peppers, several different summer squash, cucumbers, beans and peas. I imagine the pleasures of harvesting, cooking and eating my garden’s bounty. I already have recipes selected. The hope that something will go from seed to feed is easy for me to indulge in these still cool days of spring, before the hot dry winds arrive.

But this afternoon I got the lesson about how hope for my harvest is, apparently, a pleasure “immoderately” enjoyed. This morning, we woke to strong Santa Ana winds from the hot dry deserts to our east, rather than our seasonally cool and foggy winds from the ocean twenty miles to our west. This afternoon, a particularly long and prolonged gust of wind cracked the tallest remaining branch of the elderly pine that lives above the pond.

The branch fell and hangs there still, balanced precariously by a wrist-diameter branch that is cracked, but holding up the broken branch, balancing it upside down behind the waterfall. It took out my entire vegetable garden, smashing the arbor, the wire fences, the tomatoes, the peas, beans, and my hopes.

Boswell, quoting Johnson further, says: “If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire…” Ibid.

My desires for delicious home-grown food have been thwarted. The tree that killed my desires will not remain to dash further hopes. I told the pine tree that was it. It dies now. I’ve watched it let go, branch by branch. It’s taken out previous arbors, it’s smashed into the waterfall and the pond, and taken out ornamental plants by the dozens. Despite surviving pine bore beetle and being permitted to dip its roots into the pond to survive drought, it still, ungratefully, drops branches.

Just last month, I finally cleared up the brush pile left over from the last major branch that broke and fell into the pond last autumn. Although the gardener’s faithful spouse pleads that I should blame the wind, not the tree, I’m past blaming. Something must pay for the loss of my baby vegetables, for the murder of my hopes. When the men with the big saws come to chop up and remove the fallen branch, the entire tree goes. Even the branch that supports the giant wind chimes – that even now ring solemnly, mocking my immoderate desires. The whole tree goes.

Wisdom

"He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the water, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Growing Old in My Garden

“It is not given to every man, when his life’s work is over, to grow old in a garden he has made, to lose in the ocean roll of the seasons little eddies of pain and sickness and weariness, to watch year after year green surging tides of spring and summer break at his feet in a foam of woodland flowers, and the garden is like a faithful retainer growing grey in its master’s service.”
Sir George Sitwell, “On the Making of Gardens” , Robert R. Godine, Boston, MA, 2003, page 115.(first published in 1909)

I’m not sure if it’s me or my garden that is working to death in the “master’s service.” If it’s me, it’s not such a bad way to grow old. This past weekend, I spotted the shy white wisteria, as usual the last of my wisteria to bloom. It purposefully bloomed last to assuage the last of winter’s pain and weariness.

I find that the lavender purple Japanese wisteria (W. floribunda), twines clockwise. Not only that, but the blooms generally fill the leafless plant, and leaves emerge as flowers begin to fall. My Japanese wisteria is my flamboyant leading lady.

This year, my 25-year-old Japanese wisteria, in mostly northern shade, was finished blooming long before taxes were due. And again this year, by the time the white bloomed, the lavender purple’s blooms (and our meager refund) were spent.

The white, Chinese wisteria (W. sinensis ‘Alba’) blooms are usually shorter, and the leaves generally open with or before flowers bloom. It’s also true that Chinese wisteria twines clockwise.

In the younger Chinese wisteria’s white blossoms began to peak out from beneath new leaves (compound pinnate), lime green leaves just within the past week. My Chinese wisteria is my shy, upstaged understudy.

The 8-year-old adolescent white Chinese wisteria lives on the other side of the house, in mostly morning sun.

Observing their similarities and differences, I see other advantages of growing old in one’s garden. I love Sitwell’s lyric description of the grateful rewards and contentment gardeners reap in their gardens, as we mark our dwindling seasons with increasing poignancy and sentiment. Age somehow connects me more with the Victorian gardeners of 100 years ago, or with the Eastern cultures where age is revered. Watching and chronicling my wisteria also connects me to the garden traditions of Italy, so beloved of the Victorians.

Although somewhat different in scale from the gardens of Italy, I am working to cultivate in my own backyard, an atmosphere of benign neglect, where mossy greenness slowly softens edges, where the crumbling ruins are burnished by age…

“But for him who may live to see it, there shall be a wilder beauty than any he has planned. Nature, like a shy wood-nymph, shall steal softly back on summer nights to the silent domain, shading with tenderest pencillings of brown and grey the ripened stone, scattering wood-violets in the grassy alleys, and wreathing in vine and ivy the trellised arbour, painting with cloudy crusts of crumbly gold the long balustrades, inlaying the cornices with lines of emerald moss, planting little ferns within the fountain basin and tiny patches of green velvet upon the Sea-God’s shoulder.” (ibid)

Planting annuals for the colorful, visual, big bang your garden gets before the heat and the drought set in, is like living paycheck-to-paycheck. It's like having to do your banking today – on the first of the month. I don’t have to stand in line at the bank today. Instead, I can admire the parts of my garden that will survive me into the future. Today, I was able to admire the less lush but enduring parts of my garden. I invest today to reap better long term benefits tomorrow. My garden will, I hope, age well.

“As the years pass by and no rude hand disturbs the traces of her presence, Nature becomes more daring. Flower-spangled tapestries of woven tendrils fall from the terrace, strange fleecy mottlings of silver-grey and saffron and orange and greeny-gold make the wall a medley more beautiful than broidered hangings…” (ibid)

Good gardens should be nurtured to outlive their gardener. After nature recycles me, I like to think my ghost will return to gently haunt the wisteria vines in my yard.

Women and Stress

Newsflash: women respond to stress differently than men.

Prior to 1995, the preponderance of stress research was conducted on males (and male rats); and it was thus generally understood that the human stress response was “fight or flight”. This news that women have “a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight” is based on a stress study conducted by Shelley E. Taylor and her colleagues. (Shelley E. Taylor, Laura Cousino Klein, Brian P. Lewis, Tara L. Gruenewald, Regan A. R. Gurung, and John A. Updegraff, University of Calikfornia, Los Angeles, "Biobehavioral responses to Stress in Felales: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight”, Psychological Review, 2000. Vol. 107, No. 3, 411-429).

The study, conducted by neuroscientists, focuses on neuroendocrine (brain chemical) and hormonal differences between females and males. The researchers theorized that “because females have typically borne a greater role in the care of young offspring, responses to threat that were successfully passed on (to future generations) would have been those that protected offspring as well as the self.” Further, because protecting self and offspring can be more complex than fighting or fleeing, researchers also theorized that evolution would select for mothers who “made effective use of the social group would have been more successful against many threats than those who did not”.

As reported in an article about this study, written by Gale Berkowitz:

"'Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible', explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. 'It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by sabre-toothed tigers'. Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight! 'In fact', says Dr. Klein, 'it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress response in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect'."

Berkowitz acknowledges that it may take some time and further research to understand these gender differences in stress responses. Meanwhile however, Berkowitz concludes that the “friend and befriend” thesis developed by the UCLA researchers may explain why women with friends “consistently outlive men'; why “the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life"; and “how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse… (and) were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality.”

Tell a friend.

Looking for a Changed World

“People here expect a revolution. There will be no revolution, none that that deserves to be called so. There may be a scramble for money. But as all the people we see want the things we now have, and not better things, it is very certain they will, under whatever change of forms, keep the old system. When I see changed men I shall look for a changed world. Whoever is skillful in heaping money now will be skillful in heaping money again.”
- Robert Frost, on his trip to England in 1848

Here’s what I learned sweating all day in vegetable gardens on a Spring day heavy with heat and the promise of more to come. Robert Frost explained something to me.

His message still works. It sounds like Reverend Bob thinks we should change ourselves before we try to change the world. It will take changed men to change the world. That’s an old familiar Theology 101 cliché.

But he adds a capitalist twist wherein it’s money that changes and revolutionizes men. If those other guys only want the same crap we want, well then, crap. I love the way Frost insults people as venial as me, while ostensibly disparaging the veniality of those other people.

While I garden, I become entirely responsible for new growth, for seeds to blossom, for perennials to reawaken from their winter’s sleep. By nurturing these fragile seedlings now, I change the world. They grow into nutritious sustenance in consideration for my careful attention.

Which brings me to what I learned from my garden as I contemplated Frost. I learned that gardening is a way for me to change myself for the better.

And as for capitalism, I make no pretense that my vegetable garden saves me grocery money. It’s simply that by wanting more than store-bought tomatoes this summer, I’ve become one of the people who want better food than we now have. I want a sweet tomato. I know that the tomatoes I harvest later – from the two inch seedlings I watered this morning – will taste better and feed me better. And as for capitalism, in my garden, I learn that it’s definitely better for me (and my tomatoes) to heap compost than to heap money.

Growth is change, and nowhere is this more evident than in a garden. As my garden grows, I grow.

Animals Who Eat Vegetables

“It happening to be a very rainy night, I made some common-place observations on the relaxation of nerves and depression of spirits which such weather occasioned; adding, however, that it was good for the vegetable creation. Johnson, who, as we have already seen, denied that the temperature of the air had any influence on the human frame, answered, with a smile of ridicule. 'Why yes, Sir, it is good for vegetables, and for the animals who eat those vegetables, and for the animals who eat those animals.' - Boswell's Life of Johnson by James Boswell,

Rain has been sparse this year. But it rained Friday and again overnight Sunday. The white blur at Dopey's feet is the splash of rain from the roof. By Monday morning, the rain had stopped, but the grateful plants looked clean and green even in the overcast chill. It may be too little, and too late for Southern California. MSNBC/Reuters reported on 4/17/07 “The water content in the Sierra Nevada mountains snowpack was at only 33 percent of normal Monday, down from 46 percent in March and the lowest level since 1988. The last big statewide drought in California was 1987-1992.”

The history of rainfall in San Diego is that our normal annual rainfall, measured in the year beginning 7/1 is only 9.90 inches. So far this year, we have received barely 4 inches.

We are probably at the beginning of another drought; which means drier vegetation; which means another dangerous fire season. A local expert explains in the April San Diego Earth Times what this means: “With one ignition and extreme Santa Ana winds, 380,000 acres of shrub lands and forests were burned in San Diego County in the Cedar, Otay, and Paradise Fires in 2003 – almost one-sixth of the entire county.”

Gardeners pay attention to these matters. Everyone should, particularly those who fall into Johnson’s category of animals who eat vegetables.

Before the rain, I managed to make one final backyard harvest of my cool-season vegetables. I scored a last khol rabi, some stunted turnips, a lovely green onion. and a small red beet. To that I added some nasturtiums and fresh thyme. Once shredded in the food processor and baked into a crust-less quiche with eggs and cheese, the final color was a mouth-watering pink. Anyone who has not nurtured their own vegetables from seed to food might be forgiven for not appreciating what this means.

The taste alone is amazing when compared to store- bought vegetables. Studies are beginning to show that the nutritional value of home-grown produce is superior to mass-produced items bred primarily to look pretty and survive shipping - sometimes from as far away as a different hemisphere. This time of year, all the berries I can buy locally are from Chile. We are just starting to see local strawberries. I know this not only because that’s what I see in the stores, but also because I see that local wildlife harvests my own small crop of strawberries - usually before I get to taste them.

These two surprises awaited me on my return from vacation recently. My succulents too, are taking steps to survive the coming drought. I have never before seen my black aeonium create flowers.

The striking contrast between the dark brown foliage and the lime green growth I assume to be flowers makes a beautiful design statement. Another bold combination is the fuchsia bloom of the calindrina, against the backdrop of the variegated bamboo.

Whatever the hot dry summer has in store for us, my backyard garden has much to offer today.

Savannah: City of Timeless Contrasts

Or: "What I did on my Vacation Sister Trip"

I went to Savannah, Georgia for the first time last week. There, I was reacquainted with my sisters and with Southern hospitality. The seductive smells of Savannah in the spring mingle memories of yesterday with hopes for tomorrow, in a way nothing in California can. It is virtual time travel.

We arrived to some lovely Spring weather. We strolled around the neighborhoods of the old city, where gorgeous townhouses and antebellum mansions were interspersed with park-like squares. The square-block parks have 100-year-old live oaks around their perimeters, and mossy military memorials in their middles.

YESTERDAY

The dappled afternoon sun added a touch of gold to everything, as we crunched through brown fallen oak leaves that smelled like autumn in the neighborhoods of my childhood.

The ever present memorial statues and signs stretch further into the past. These folks take their war history seriously, sometimes too seriously: as when they refer to the War of Northern Aggression during horse-and-buggy afternoon tours.

The past is always present, sloshing underfoot in revisionist flux.

Ghosts whisper of Sadness, Death, Remembrance. Sentimental images of loss and grief softly speaking the lost Victorian language of the flowers.

Strolling through the quiet streets, you spy secret gardens behind fanciful black iron gates. Ageless secrets seem to sleep here in peace.

People decay. and die, and their tombs and memorials do too. That was then.


TOMORROW

This is now. Gardens are immortal.

Turn a corner in Savannah, and you are rewarded with new promise in the smell a fresh breeze. The future beckons seductively. Spring breezes murmur promises of Renewal, Resurrection, Immortality. Images evoke overwrought metaphorical Gardens.

Everywhere, vigorous new growth almost assaults you in a walk through the city. Appearing like rain forest jungle to my parched eyes – baby leaves and blades of grass insisted they would reincarnate into whatever challenging conditions they bloody well wanted.

Nostalgia and rebellion commingle. In Savannah, Spring promise is tinged with a generation gap of irony in the form of rebellious youth. These insistent ferns couldn’t wait to race out and embrace Spring from the doorsteps of a town house.

Gentle and not-so-gentle breezes tease with the new wet smell of grasses beginning to green, and musky fattening buds. Smells of radical change are as intense and as tangy as self-righteous as born-again Christians.

A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

Savannah also reminds us that these are uncertain times for many things gardeners care about. As the past dances with present in Savannah, the weather too, is instantly changeable. Savannah provided a lovely setting for a visit among long-dispersed sisters. As we age, our future peeks over the shoulders of our past like the ugly Hilton looming above this old red brick art college.

After the warm promise of Spring, we were reminded of colder seasons past. The weather turned unseasonably cold toward the end of our visit, as Savannah was hit with the tail end of a major snow storm traveling through the northeast states. Now. In April.

We had some rain showers that lasted only a few hours, then things settled down to a blustery, chilly wind that knocked down heavy branches of live oaks, and pruned dead branches off royal palms. I literally stumbled upon this branch outside an old cemetery. Tangled in the dead fallen royal palm leaf, it’s claws sharp even in death, still cluched the Medusa of the epiphyte Spanish moss.

What does the picture illustrate about a climate temperate enough to grow palm trees, and wet enough to grow Spanish moss, if not uncertainty in all things? Change is the only constant. Nice message Savannah. Inconvenient - but still. It was snowing in Virginia that bloody morning I departed from Savannah, returning to my parched desert where Spring has already begun to pack its bags and move out for Summer...

The Early Morning

The moon on the one hand, the dawn on the other:
The moon is my sister, the dawn is my brother.
The moon on my left and the dawn on my right.
My brother, good morning: my sister, good night.

(Hilaire Belloc - The Early Morning

Sullen Easter

In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth. - Milton

Allowing for some eccentricities of Roman Emperor Constantine, and as amended later by ecclesiastical rules imposed by Pope Gregory XIII, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Easter must occur between March 22 and April 25. If Easter is confused, imagine how my garden feels. Our weather is warm one day, chilly the next.

Today is a chilly day: overcast and quiet. Sometimes, you can feel rain in the air. Not today. The rain, expected by me and my yard, has continued east and become snow, falling on the heads of people who have more right than I to be sullen in this vernal season.
The only constant here is the lack of rain. I planted warm-season seeds like beans and sunflowers too early. The eggplant didn’t even bother to poke their tiny heads above the thin layer pearlite covering the peat pots (to avoid damping-off). I replanted some tomato and eggplant seeds yesterday, and took cuttings of a few fuchsias. I organized my remaining seeds and reassured myself that it's still early. The warm sunny days make me impatient. The cool chilly ones do too. So, that's another constant: my impatience with nature.

On the other hand, pelargoniums don’t mind, nor do aeoniums. Nasturtiums seem to be blooming according to their own rules – operating more on the memory of rain than on any actual wetness. My re-blooming iris are sullen, the lilies stubborn, and even the sweet peas look bleak and forlorn – straggly stems and stingy flowers.

This April may not be exactly cruel – at least we’re not having a “White Easter” like some Midwestern and Northeastern states. But I think Milton would not be amused. Today, my yard seems to reflect Nature’s “injury and sullenness” toward me.

Earlier this week, we drove up to the mountains: Julian, California, famous for pies and lilacs – real lilacs in the Syringa family. Although less than an hour east, Julian is tucked into mountains several thousand feet higher than my desert valley. Sadly, real lilacs were not yet in flower. We were fooled by the signs in local flower shops “Lilacs are Here!”, which clearly referred to lilacs flown in from outside our area.

Here is a brave but fraudulent stand-in: the drought- tolerant “California lilac” that was in bloom. These Ceanothus can look like lilacs, and reportedly are fragrant, but they wouldn’t fool anyone familiar with the overly-sweet scent of lilacs my Mom used to grow.

We'll return to Julian in another week or two and buy bunches of real lilacs. The spring will return to my back yard too. All it takes is patience...

Ghost Flowers

When I look at old pictures of my garden, or when I look in my garden journal at plant labels from purchased flowers, I often see what I consider to be ghost plants: plants and flowers I once bought, or seeds I once sowed, but which have not survived in my garden. Many gardeners prefer not to remember our failures, the living things we have murdered through our own ignorance or lack of proper care. While this happens less frequently as I have learned more about what will and won’t work in my yard, it is precisely this experience that tells me some of the living things in my yard today will not survive the season, the climate change, their inevitable transformation into ghost flowers.

Driving in Jordan has a lovely picture of Jordan’s elegant and endangered flower, the Black Iris, which is enjoying it’s brief blooming season of April – May. Because they are increasingly rare, fragile, and reluctant to bloom when transplanted, the flowers are protected: in Jordan, it is illegal to pick them.

When I visited Petra, Jordan in December, 2005, I was able to recognize black iris plants from their rhizomes, which often were almost completely exposed, barely clinging to the dry, sandy, red soil. Although they were not in bloom, I saw a young Bedouin woman pick and offer them for sale to tourists like me. You might think that tourists would be more knowledgeable about things they shouldn’t buy, such as native flora, or lovely small chips of sandstone from Petra’s ancient carved stone facades, or shards of pottery that were fairly easy to identify as remnants of man-made objects. Sadly, no.

According to ecologist Maher Qishawi, who works with the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), (quoted in an article (18April2005) in First Jordan), there are “about five types whose color shadings can be classified as black.” The two most likely candidates for visitors to see in Jordan today are described by Dawud M. H. AL-Eisawi, in his “Field Guide to Wild Flowers of Jordan and Neighboring Countries”.

The first is the Black Iris (Iris nigricans) Prof. Al-Eisawi describes as 20-30 cm long with underground rhizomes, and notes that the leaves are usually much shorter than the flower stalk. He describes the habitat as “Marginal land and mountains, Amman, Madaba and Karak” and the flowering season as April-May. Jordan Flora advises that this variety “is found roughly from Karak north and has smaller leaves and flowering stems than its southern cousin.”

The “southern cousin” is the closely related Petra Iris (Iris petrana) has longer leaves. Professor AL-Eisawi describes this plant as having leaves 30-50 cm long, and flowers 12-18 cm in diameter. This variety is found south of Kerak, in places like Petra.

You can see the Black Iris pictured on old Jordanian currency. The small picture in the lower right corner, on the obverse of the twenty dinar note (next to King Hussein) may someday be the best reminder of the black iris. A better place to find the real plants may be closer than Kerak or Petra. Jordan flora says that “Professor Dawud Al-Eisawi, has collected variants and has them growing on the University of Jordan campus.”

The Black Iris is threatened by many factors besides greedy tourists, including the deterioration of its natural habitat. My advice to locals: wherever you can find them, see the Black Iris now. Enjoy these endangered flowers in their vanishing native habitat before they become a ghost plants, visible only on old currency and the yellowing pages of botany books.

Tsukubai

Japanese Maples are a vanity plant for gardens in the harsh Zone 9 waterless summers. As the warm weather sets in, the leaves cook slowly and desiccate, struggling even under heavy shade and with wastefully lavish mists to humidify their branches and cool their feet.

Just outside my back door, under shade cloth and watered as often as twice daily in the summer, the two small Japanese maples create a backdrop for the tsukubai or stone water basin that is cool and inviting spot on the hottest days. The basin sits on a reservoir covered with large river stones and housing a small pump that re-circulates the water. Although created to symbolize the Japanese garden concept of inviting guests to humble themselves by kneeling on the center stone, and to purify themselves by washing before entering my garden, the basin now serves the very practical purpose of a conveniently raised water bowl for our aging arthritic dog.

Because it is carefully designed to gather and recycle even irrigation water for the small garden in the middle of a stone-paved patio, the system requires surprisingly little refilling. An occasional capful of bleach keeps the algae from overwhelming and blocking the rubber tube slipped inside the bamboo outlet.

However, the inevitable creep of global warming is making my climate drier and more desert-like than it has been in my 30+ years gardening here. At some point, I will have to forgo the luxury of my Japanese maples, and to replace them with a suitably drought-tolerant small tree – perhaps a Ceanothus or a small Melaleuca with a weeping habit.

Meanwhile however, watching the newly emerged leaves before they shrivel in the coming summer heat and drought, I am enjoying the tsukubai garden. Pictured here, it still serves as a transition from the coarse, harsh dry climate of my back yard into the spiritual cool and verdant oasis of a small Japanese garden.

The Curious Gardener

The Garden Bloggers’ Book Club , has invited posts this month about books that show how gardeners think, assuming optimistically that gardeners actually do think. It so happens I’ve recently finished this winter’s companion garden book – the one I take in small doses when I can’t afford to shop for any more seeds on line, and the weather outside is not yet warm enough for gardening.

The Curious Gardener, is by Jurgen Dahl (1929-2001) a German journalist and environmentalist, who was an eclectic and very curious gardener. He’s an old-fashioned, Old World European, whose well-written essays reflect not only his obvious love for gardening, but also his extensive horticultural and historical knowledge of his subjects. Many of the previously published essays in this volume were taken from his weekly gardening column. His advice to curious gardeners is more of a warning than an invitation: the curious gardener will, he promises, “find many more answers than questions when he says ‘good morning’ to the garden if he is curious and observant enough to perceive the many small changes that occur every hour.”

Dahl's powers of observation and description, and his quirky take on his own garden as a laboratory for endless wonder and experiment is as informative as it is entertaining. Reading Dahl provides a refreshing tonic to counter much of the predominately female-oriented garden writing – particularly in some of our own lovely pastel-hued blogs adorned with flower pictures (including mine).

The Curious Gardener's choice of subject is so eclectic that there is something for every gardener, regardless of gender. He can turn on his Old World charm for the gentle ladies who may prefer to enjoy their gardens wearing white gloves and sipping tea from china cups: “A bud symbolizes a secret and a promise”. Then, like a sudden seasonal change, he lectures us on the fascinating history of oaks.

In other essays, he can gush as exuberantly as a seven-year-old boy - talking about creepy crawly bugs and spiders, and about what plants to cultivate in a “Stinking Garden.” On a more serious note, he reminds us that a harvest is really a murder. “For every harvest, we also have to mutilate, destroy, get rid of, exterminate, or kill something. We just call it by other names so as not to disturb the image of the gardener at peace with nature.”

Because my particular interest is in edible gardening, I found his essays on growing and harvesting food to be especially fresh and new. He daringly eats just about anything that grows, from the “forgotten spice” of Baldmoney (Meum athamanticum) to chickweed, He’s as opinionated as my grandmother (both disliked eggplant) and yet he apparently never met a wild mustard he didn’t like.

Dahl offers some of the best thinking I’ve ever heard about introducing non-organic “things” into our gardens, a subject American gardeners may recognize – except that we use the more sophisticated term “garden whimsy." ”All objects that at first may seem strange in the garden," Dahl advises, "eventually become assimilated." The transience of objects introduced to decorate the garden not only stands "for disappearance, but also for a procedure in which every stage has its own form and its own charm.”

This is good news to me, because my whimsical tastes are a bit on the kitschy side, as these pictures of my yard reveal. I like to think this author would be "charmed" by my small plastic cobra, winding his way between some rocks on a shelf of potted plants.

The Next Solid Gold Investment Opportunity

Are you making long term financial plans? Are you interested in leaving something for your heirs that will appreciate in value with each passing year? I have one word for you: honey. In the future, honey might be as precious as gold, because honey bees are vanishing.

In this article entitled “When honeybees vanish will our food follow?”, by Alexei Barrionuevo, published Februray 27, 2007 in the New York Times, the author reports that beekeepers in 24 states are shocked that “their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.”

Who cares? Suppose you can enjoy a cup of tea quite well without honey to sweeten it? Well, according to Barrionuevo: “California’s almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country’s bee colonies in February. The crop has been both a boon to commercial beekeeping and a burden, as pressure mounts for the industry to fill growing demand. Now spread over 580,000 acres stretched across 300 miles of California’s Central Valley, the crop is expected to grow to 680,000 acres by 2010.”

My spouse recently heard on a science program on TV that honey is the one food that will never spoil. So, what better investment to leave for your descendants who may inhabit a world no longer sweetened with honey?

Garden Spring Cleaning

I did some spring cleaning this past weekend. Swept debris and dead leaves accumulated beneath benches, cleaning up the garden after a season of neglect.

Here is the potato bin where I planted the 'Yukon Gold" seed potatoes received just this week from Abundant Life. This is my first experiment in growing potatoes, so this could be an interesting season.

Here are some of the newly renovated dish gardens that live on the perimeter of the pond.

I finally came to terms with the effects of January’s killing frosts. I put dead potted coleus on the compost pile, but only after a respectful memorial service which consisted of me raising my face and my arms to heaven and promising that, as God is my witness, I will never let frost kill plants again.

After the cleaning, I spent some time rearranging the yard by replanting and moving containers around, trimming dead leaves and branches and feeding and re-mulching. This year will probably be the last without watering restrictions for a while. The source of our water – the snow pack in the Sierras – is substantially lower than previous droughts, and our local rainfall is 4 inches or more short of last year. When you only get about 10 inches a year, that’s a lot. An official from a neighboring water district predicted that while we have enough for this year, serious rationing is in store next year.

Here is my zen frog, newly planted with moss harvested from the north side of the house where nothing else will grow.

My goal for the back yard this year is not to over-plant, even in the containers on the patio outside the door.

In the front yard, my goal is to hand-water drought tolerant natives planted on the steep hill yesterday. Geeze, working on a hill is hard work. It took me hours and hours to dig, plant, water, mulch a total of seven drought-tolerant plants, including leucophyllum (2 varieties), ceanothus, and Malealeuca (2 varieties) and a blue hyacinth. I just have to water them this season to get them to put down roots in their new homes. Once they’re established in their new homes, they should all be pretty content.

The last thing I do after a session in the yard is water. Actually, that's the penultimate thing. I first take pictures in the best light of day: the later afternoon sun.

I particularly enjoy standing with my back to the sun and showering the garden under a rainbow. But because I dare not try to water and photograph at the same time, it's a scene I have captured only in my imagination, Yesterday however, the gardener's spouse managed to catch the rainbow as I watered.

89th Anniversary of Dad’s Birth

Surviving a year to the day after his beloved wife’s death, my Dad died when he was 76. All these years, and I’m sometimes still ambushed by overwhelming sadness that he’s not at the other end of the e-mail or phone. I miss him, and the empty bench in this picture represents the empty place in my life without my Dad.

Dad was my hero, but not in the tired cliché of heroism embodied by the noble courage of the troop member who sells the most Girl Scout cookies. His heroism is better described as anti-heroism. Dad was a classic flawed hero. Larger than life, heroic except for the eponymous tendon in his heel – the flaw of his barely controlled impatience and temper. Dad suffered fools, but only grudgingly, and with great effort.

In his last, lonely year, I believe that Dad finally came to terms with his chronic impatience, and found a sort of peace perhaps barely distinguishable from exhaustion. I also believe it was his faith that allowed him to finally face the conclusion of his life without struggling against what Warren Zevon called the vast indifference of heaven. I think his faith was so strong because it was tempered with intelligent reservations and honest doubt.

As Tennyson said, Jack “beat his music out” to the end, true to his faith, despite any remaining doubts. And for that he will always be my hero.

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds
At least he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Captive

The following poem accurately describes how Patti feels, captive inside on the first day of spring.

The Summer comes, the Summer dies,
Red leaves whirl idly from the tree,
But no more cleaving of the skies,
No southward sunshine waits for me!

You shut me in a gilded cage,
You deck the bars with tropic flowers,
Nor know that freedom’s living rage
Defies you through the listless hours.

What passion fierce, what service true,
Could ever such a wrong requite?
What gift, or clasp, or kiss from you
Where worth an hour of soaring flight?

I beat my wings against the wire,
I pant my trammeled heart away;
The fever of one mad desire
Burns and consumes me all the day.

What care I for your tedious love,
For tender word or fond caress?
I die for one free flight above,
One rapture of the wilderness!

Captive
Rose Terry Cook

April is for Gardeners

In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth. - Milton

We went to Huntington on Friday to have tea and see if the wisteria is out: some is, some isn’t. Standing beneath the arbor and pointing my camera up to catch this view, I was surrounded by the powerful fragrance of the flowers. In a perfume, it would be too cheaply sweet. But in the spring sunshine, the aroma is glorious. I bought two cookbooks by gardeners sharing their culinary successes with home grown food.

Yesterday at the public veggie garden where I volunteer, I picked a beet for an amazingly bent lady who recognized the few remaining beet tops from 50 feet – not many people do. We’re not supposed to give veggies to visitors, so I had to caution her to secret the dusky red globe and it’s lovely red-tinted greens at the bottom of her large canvas handbag. I imagined her eating it for dinner last night, as I read my own new cookbooks and dreamed of my summer harvests to come. April makes gardeners of us all.

Spring: Short but Sweet

A young Apollo, golden haired,

Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,

Magnificently unprepared/ For the long littleness of life.

Frances Macdonald Cornford wrote that about Rupert Brooke. But it also applies to the multi-colored freesia celebrating Spring in my back yard. Live fast and die young. The different colors that make this such a lovely picture appear because part of the bloom is already fading to indigo as it dies. I'm glad I caught it's brief, beautiful show.

Another Day, Another Deadly Sin

The other day, an over-wrought Victorian allegory about vegetable adultery caught my fancy. Strangely, I find myself thinking of another of the seven deadly sins today. How will I ever find homes for all the seeds I bought during those dreamy cold winter afternoons I spent with seed catalogs? I am a seed junkie. Was it simple greed?
I bought just a few seeds each from different vendors, so until I sat down in the spring sunshine yesterday to sort things out, I didn’t realize just how much. About half of the seeds are for edible plants, which I can arguably claim to be for the public demonstration Veggie Garden where I volunteer.

This year, we are experimenting with warm season edible ornamentals. I found two okra varieties from a delightful place: Victory Seeds in Molalla, Oregon. Small staff, but excellent personal service. I got seeds for ‘White Velvet’ okra, recommended in a book, Feast Your Eyes by Susan J. Pennington.The book includes an entire chapter on ornamental vegetables – those grown as much for their lovely appearance as for their bounty.

About okra she says, “Because okra is in the hibiscus family, naturally gardeners first appreciated the showy cream-colored flowers with dark accents. Dried okra pods were also considered ideal for avant-garde flower arrangements”. She recommends, for it’s particular beauty, the ‘White Velvet’ cultivar. While I found that at Victory Seeds, I also ordered another variety called ‘Aunt Hettie’s Red’. Victory seeds says this seed was “raised for us by David Pendergrass of Tennessee and is an old heirloom from his family. He tells us the following about this old red okra: ‘It was passed on to me by a cousin who received it from my Great Aunt Hettie Tidwell in the early 1970s. How far it dates back in our family’s history is not clear but it is known that Aunt Hettie grew it for many, many years’."

Now all I have to do is plant, add water, and wait…

Vegetable Adultery

Yesterday, at the Vegetable Garden where I volunteer, I worked with three volunteers, who are all master composters. They have been reluctant to let me discard my vegetable garden waste in their demonstration compost area at the Garden, because they don’t trust me to cut the greens small enough, or to sort out any diseased or pest-infected waste. So, instead, they helped me set up our very own composter in the veggie garden. It was hot, dirty work, cutting green clippings, chopping an old bale of straw to add as “browns” to contribute carbon, and mixing in some of their donated compost as starter – complete with worms and other creepy crawlies.

So naturally, as we’re all sweating in the hot sun, talk eventually turned to porn, specifically vegetable porn. Sure, compost can evoke noble metaphors of immortality, the cycles of the seasons, and the way garbage can be returned to the soil. But there’s a lot going on inside a living compost pile, so reproduction – and sex – is a big part of the equation. We joked that our spouses would perhaps be more interested in volunteering if they realized the topic of porn was so close to the metaphorical surface of what we do in the Garden.

Which is why, when I later began to pursue the topic on the web, I was so delighted to find the following, from a 1844 short story by Nathanial Hawthorne entitled Rappaccini’s Daughter. It seems to me that the author is pretty sure that gardens appearing too tropical, lush and exotic are bad news. The story doesn’t end well. It’s not exactly plant porn, but the graphic descriptions are still pretty explicit. My garden at home, alas, doesn't give off the same oninous vibe.

“Giovanni stepped forth, and forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance, he stood beneath his own window, in the open area of Doctor Rappacinni’s garden…
“He threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father were present, and perceiving that he was alone, began a critical observation of the plants.
“The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several, also, would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness, indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably the result of experiment, which, in one or two cases, had succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth of the garden.”

Advice

March came in like a lion for most of U.S, and we’re even getting our share of rain here in Southern California. It's sunny today, but cold. Last year at this time, I was out in the sunny yard with my Spring seeds and peat pots, imagining flowers.

Spending this morning indoors while considering the extremes of March weather, I came upon a thought that makes a similar comparison about different ways to give and receive advice.

“A man takes contradiction and advice much more easily than people think, only he will not bear it when violently given, even though it be well founded. Hearts are flowers; they remain open to the softly falling dew, but shut up in the violent downpour of rain.”
Johann Paul Richter