Glitter and Aromatherapy

‘I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No.’
Craig T. Nelson, telling Glen Beck, with a perfectly straight face, why he’d like to stop paying his taxes.

The real world is pretty crazy these days. Nelson personifies the un-contemplative mindset so much in evidence these days. He makes as much sense as those opposing government healthcare while on Medicare. In order for me to hold on to the shreds of sanity that I have left, I sometimes have to retreat inside.

If you read about the history of gardens, you’ll find that one of the oldest forms of garden: the hortus conclusis, or enclosed garden, was created by religious people provide a peaceful quiet place to retreat from the noise and stupidity of the outside world.

Perhaps this began as an attempt to recreate the original garden, since once in the garden you couldn’t take two steps without tripping over some religious icon or symbolic plant – like the white rose which everyone knew stood for the purity of the BVM. I find that when it’s too hot to retreat from the political news to my own backyard garden, the world inside my head works just as well.

Whenever watching the news or reading the paper gives me a headache, I can always undergo my own aromatherapy cure. There’s nothing that beats the smell of roasting tomatoes with plenty of garlic and onions.

While the oven performs the miracle of caramel-ization, I entertain myself with clip art and make creative labels. Whether it’s Dirty Girl or Green Monster, I always finish off a label with glitter.

Glitter makes the dirty girl’s bathwater or the dragon’s scales sparkle. There’s no therapy like the aroma of garlic, Photoshop, and a glitter pen to make things right in my world.

Choosey Beggars

“The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can superseded the necessity of being forever on the alert.” Hank Thorough (sic), Walden

Gardeners always want it all in the garden. Both perpetual spring, the lovely labor of summer, and still we want to welcome the harvest of fall and light the first fire in the fireplace. Whether you are rich in worldly wealth, health and happiness, or a beggar beneath a bridge scratching a lettuce garden . Forget those rays of summer sunshine, coming through the west-facing bedroom window. Stretch across the bed at 14:00, turn on the fan and nestle with your cat for a last summer afternoon nap.

Soon, with the tilt of the globe, the sun will depart earlier, the weak winter sun will permit the blinds to be completely open for the first time since last Winter. Mail order catalog season is upon us. No more summer sunshine naps, feeling the warmth of cat and sun mingle on my skin.

Henry David Thoreau seems to be saying that if we just pay attention, we will be rewarded. He goes on to elaborate that more valuable than the most prestigious advanced education, just learn to see what there is to be seen.

Here’s what he wrote about he learned in his first summer at Walden:

“Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, admist the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.”

If all you have is one window that faces west, this is the moment to sit or stand there and watch the garden one late September afternoon. Pay attention as the golden sun fades into the trees across the canyon, and dusk creeps in. Even beggars don’t have to chose our favorite season, we can savor them all.

Mother Nature’s Spa Day

“…
For lying broad awake, long ere the dawn,
Staring against the dark, the blank of space
Opens immeasurably, and thy face
Wavers and glimmers there and is withdrawn.
And many days, when all one’s works is vain,
And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,
With even the short mirage of morning gone,
No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nigh
Where a weary man might lay him down and die,

Lo! Thou are there before me suddenly
With shade as if a summer cloud did pass,
And spray of fountains whispering to the grass.
Oh, save me from the haste and noise and heat
That spoil life’s music sweet:
And from that lesser Aphrodite there –
Even now she stands
Close as I turn, and O my soul, how fair!”
- E. R. Sill, Venus of Milo

Thank You for Not Gardening

“Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.” – Homer Simpson

Now, I don’t claim to have a perfect marriage to Tech Support Guy. We like to joke with the cops replying to the 911 call that we’re one restraining order away from a perfect marriage. But lately, I love the guy.

Because late into the night last night he photoshopped >100 photos so I could open them w/o crashing the computer and do my monthly newsletter. Which is just as well because it’s once again so freaking hot outside that the potted plants are becoming mummified and the plastic flower pots are melting.

So, it’s back to the newsletter for me. And just because I have a short attention span doesn’t mean

Roasted Tomatoes and Red Wine

“Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat history class”.
- Some Guy

So, one thing I have learned is that it’s too bleeding hot to grow anything outside besides fennel vulgaris that seems to invade every empty lot, roadside and unplanted corner, incidentally making brush fires burn hotter and longer. Thank god for farmer’s market tomatoes.

I quartered 6 pounds of very ripe tomatoes, added a whole yellow onion and a whole head of garlic. I toss them in a bowl with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and a little sugar to jump start the magic of caramelization. I add whatever fresh herbs look good: in this case, some oregano, red basil and some fennel seeds. My daughter taught me that you can spread this in a cookie sheet, put it in a 250F oven for FOUR HOURS, and they taste like heaven. Okay, this doesn’t help the ambient indoor temp, but boy, does the house smell delicious!

After the pan cools, I shovel the lovely muck into a food mill, using the middle blade. Some tomato seeds get through, but the peel is left behind. It takes about 4 batches in the mill, turning until the only thing left in the top is dry-ish peel. Between batches, I wash the food mill to clean out the holes and remove the skin. (I can’t compost what’s left because of the oil, and I’ve learned that the coyotes don’t care for it if left in a bowl outdoors overnight, so I grind up the peel etc in the garbage disposal.)

The longer you roast, the darker the sauce. Plus, I’ve learned that the difference between a juicy tomato sauce and a thicker tomato paste depends on roasting time.

I put the sauce in a saucepan and simmer it while I’m sterilizing the glass jars, and depending on what I want, I might add some red wine to thin and darken the mix.

I’m getting better and more organized about the actual canning process. I always clean more jars than I think I’ll need – better to have too many than not enough. Notice the glass of red wine, which I sip while working. I’m pretty sure this enhances the sauce.

The filled jars are left in the canner for 20 minutes. I want to be sure this stuff keeps until the gloom of winter when a zesty fresh tomato is mostly a figment of my fevered imagination.

We couldn’t resist the lure of the dark red paste however, and made some of the best pizza in the world with a whole wheat dough in the bread-maker, grated fresh mozzarella and Romano cheese. I also add some of the sweet onion and thyme relish and more fresh herbs.

How Hot is It?

"Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
Saul Alinsky

If the enemy is heat, petrifying, mummifying, melting your eyeballs, triple-digit Fahrenheit heat, then the power to conquer is my air conditioner.

There was a time, in the misty past of my youth, when I scoffed at wussies who needed their air conditioned. I’m talking to you, Gramma. That was when I lived in the swamp that Washington D.C. was built on. Humidity in the high 90s, and it would cool off to a mere double-digit night, when you’d try to fall asleep in a position in which none of your skin touched any other part of your skin. If you so much as moved your elbow into a 45-degree angle, water would drip from the fold in the skin after about 30 seconds. Nighttime was as hot as daytime, just darker. But I was a young teen then, and I was immortal.

That was then. This is now in Southern California, the edges of the Sonoran desert, expanding like bloated roadkill in the sun, into the coastal climate after six years of hard drought. The good news is, there’s virtually no humidity. The bad news is that there’s virtually no humidity, plus I’m not an immortal teen now.

You have to drink about 23 gallons of water a day just to be able to sweat. And sweat – that manages to ooze through your pores – sizzles as it drips down the sides of your face. It’s the same as the way the snot in your nose used to freeze and crackle when you were a kid out sledding down the suburban streets, only different.

So, I managed to get outside today, primarily to take a picture of the thermometer reading 108 in the freaking shade. Then I retreated inside. Perhaps too over-exposed to see, are some drops of water on the thermometer. They are from me wiping the display with water to get a clearer picture, but they make it seem like the thermometer itself is sweating.

There are two climate zones inside. The computer room and adjacent kitchen, where my tomatoes and garlic have been roasting in a 250 oven for just about 4 hours, where I had to close the kitchen window because the breeze blowing in was hotter than the oven-heated ambient air.

Past the closed doors is the living/dining room, cooled by a ginormous room air conditioner that will blow the pollen off a silk plant 20 feet downwind.

So far, we have been spared the winds out of the dry basins to the east of the mountains that separate El Cajon from the Anza Borrego desert in El Centro. Such summer winds often accompany such high temps: the legendary Santa Ana wind that blows from the east, pushing the city’s smog out over the ocean and replacing it with furnace breath on your neck if you venture outside. We have also been spared the back country fires that are raging 100 miles northeast of my house and roaring down the rich canyons leading to Malibu. It’s always a form of entertainment for the masses when movie star houses burn down in metro LA, but still. But still, there’s plenty of regular summer and Native American Summer left to come before the theoretical rainy season begins in November.

The enemy is the hot weather, and huddled here inside my air conditioned cocoon, I hope it doesn’t call my bluff: I don’t have the power to survive on my own out here in the daytime.

Our nights however, are mercifully different from my teenage years. Because there is no coastal cloud cover blowing in from the west, as soon as the sun goes down, the heat rises visibly into the empty sky. If you pick just the right moment to open the windows and doors, reverse the fans to blow in the cooling evening air, you can go outside, water the parched patio, you can moisten the cool evening air the fans are sucking in. Sleeping with the windows open and the fan on is actually a rather pleasant alternative to snuggling under sheets because the bedroom is air-conditioned.

Tropes – A Discovery!

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
- United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his decision in Jacobellis v. Ohio.

My big brother in real life told me about this awesome site called TV Tropes that seeks to catalog tropes, as a sort of instruction list to write any work of fiction, drama, television, etc. “We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart's content.” This is made to order for the wanna-be creative writer without a creative bone in their bodies. Like me. They even have a one-push button for a random trope if I'm too lazy to surf the index.

Here's how they 'splain: “Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries.”

Clearly, they’re more interested in quirky and interesting at the expense of trying for Wikipedia or other higher academic standards. This is another plus in my mind because I've always been a sloppy researcher and typing topics into Google isn't terribly productive these days. (Note to self: if Wikipedia is considered a high academic threshold for legitimate research, I'm not alone in my sloppy research style.) Their Main topic index lists categories by genre, by narrative style, media or topics.

Some examples of particular tropes:

Applied Phlebotinum is summarized: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device" — David Langford, as a corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's third law

or:

As Long As There Is One Man says:
When you fall, my friend,
Another friend will emerge
From the shadows
To take your place.
— French Resistance Song (partial)
Parodied in The Simpsons, during a standoff between Homer, head of "Springshield", and Fat Tony. Homer: You can kill me, but someone will take my place. And if you kill him, then someone will take his place. And if you kill him... well, that's pretty much the end of it, the town will be yours.

A couple of other topics:

small town boredom
For which examples include: Luke Skywalker in Star Wars; This is a good portion of JJ's backstory on Criminal Minds, and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters.

Finaly, Olive Garden about which: Maybe we could have dinner! Perhaps the Olive Garden! It's like dining in the private kitchen of a delightful Italian stereotype! Cinnamon J. Scudworth: Clone High

My one complaint? Two actually. Too many of the people on forums have id pics like Japanese animae characters. Also, their main site says, “We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.” Ok, I get it about overdosing on irony, but you sound a little teeny bit like Sister Alice Maureen.

Words and Pictures

The words are from Francis Bacon, Friar Bacon His Discovery of the Miracles of Art Nature and Magick. The pictures are from this summer in and around San Diego.

“As for words, they are hatched within, by the thoughts and desires of the mind, sent abroad by heat, Vocale arteries, and motion of the Spirits…”

Or, the words could be conveyed by cell phone. Just be careful you don’t let a pelican grab your cell phone or a lego man might have to try to recover it. Legoland, about 20 minutes north of San Diego, is typically a destination of families with children. Visiting the place with a group of senior is a bit creepy, but creepy has never stopped us before.

“…The places of their generation are in open passages, by which there is a great efflux of such spirits, heat, vapours, virtues, and Species, as are made by the soul and heart. And therefore words may so farre cause alterations by these parts or passages, as their Nature will extend….”

Or, the words could be used to describe new species of food at the county fair - for the soul, heart, and ultimately, the backside. There's no entertainment that cannot be enhanced by combining it with the consumption of unhealthy food.

“…For it's evident, That breathings, yawnings, several resolutions of Spirits and heat come thorow these open passages from the heart and inward parts: Now if these words come from an infirm and evil complexionated body, they are constantly obnoxious…”

Now, I’m not saying cellulite equates with evil complex- ionated bodies, but there have to be some parallels there. It may be a cheap shot to observe fat people these days, but still. I don't expect everyone at the beach to look like they just stepped out of a Pepsi commercial, but there is way too much information about these women in this picture.

“…But if from a pure sound and wholsome constitution, they are very beneficial and comfortable.”

Seriously. If words are from a pure sound and wholsome (sic) constitution, we can benefit as much as the next person. We may not be great readers here in So Cal, but we do like our art. What a perfectly beneficial and comfortable category of book: "coffee table books". Here in So Cal, Thomas Kinkaid is to art, what coffee whitener is to cream.

Pay Attention

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you”. - Annie Dillard

Never Follow A Terrible Gardener on Twitter

"Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks"
- Raymond Chandler, talking about the “murderous summer heat”

I’ve been out of sorts lately. Also out of Cool Ranch Doritos, and energy to work out in the yard. It’s not you. It’s me. It feels like there are little bugs crawling around on the inside of my skull, leaving tiny footprints on the gooey surfaces of the curly pink glial cells. I think this intracranial bug traffic may have somehow re-written some of my short term memories. All I can think of is how lovely my melmac dishes would look in a table-setting for 4 on my new dinette set.

Yet somehow, this feels wrong. I have neither melmac dishes, nor a dinette, and I certainly don’t have four people to entertain. Further, my dishes are made from a space-age polymer extruded from an industrial syringe and stamped with brown roses. Finally, the dining room table is never used for eating family meals. That’s what TV tables are for. The dinning room table’s used to leave things on that you don’t feel like putting away until later, much later.

In a sort of dramatic foreshadowing of my eventual death of pneumonia, Tech Support Guy reports that last night in my sleep my breathing sounded like I was underwater – with burbling and wet snuffling. Charming. While my bronchial compromise has made it harder to perform any task requiring more aerobic stamina than making expresso, it has made it easier for me to sit and think. This is not generally a good tradeoff, since too much thinking often makes me angry about something. The focus of my anger is completely irrelevant. I find myself musing sadly about how, when DFW tried to write sober, he stopped taking his antidepressants and alcohol, and killed himself. Note to self: don’t stop taking medications. Self-medication is the key to the devil’s workshop.

So, what have I been thinking about?

Shall I compare gardening to particle physics experiments conducted in those big cyclotrons like the one in CERN in Switzerland or the slightly smaller one beneath Sanford University? Researchers speed up tiny things inside the merry-go-round tunnel, and then crash them into each other to see whether the universe ends in a tiny pop, or in the alternative, whether a new and more effective mouthwash springs magically into being when the particles collide. Various parts of my garden often have that particle colliding surprise outcome - like Dopey on the steps, musing over the water lilies in the pond below. Nah, probably straining that metaphor beyond its design parameters – catastrophic and destructive testing proves only that my metaphors are a weak as I’ve been.

Sleeping like the dead for 10 hours helps my pulmonary functions to improve. However, dreamless sleep provides no new insights into the dim and shifting shadows lurking at the edges of my awareness. Trying to think straight is like asking my cat to promise not to leave the litter box until the poop disconnects from her butt. This is either one of the warning signs of a psychotic break or my blood sugar is low and I should stop for lunch.

By the time I’m finishing the third bowl of puffed rice, I’ve created this lovely milk and sugar reduction in the bottom of the cereal bowl with the consistency of gritty molasses. Instead of creative or inspired writing, I tackle one of today’s biggest quandaries. I ask myself why I should follow anyone on Twitter.

Upon serious reflection, in order to induce me to follow you on twitter, I’d have to have one of the following reasons:

I find myself on the open sea in a lifeboat with a cannibal and Methodist (and Internet access).
I foolishly stop taking my meds, and find myself alone in a closet one quiet afternoon with a noose and a stool.
I find a dead body in the woods and now I’m lost and trekking across a railroad bridge to get back to civilization, and a train is approaching from behind. Quick – twitter me to run like hell.
My one remaining ambition is to die doing what I love, but can’t for the life of me think of what that might be. Twittering?
I find myself watching 2.5 Men on tv and thinking it’s funny. Twitter to remind me it’s not funny.
I find myself considering self-trepanation to stop the crawling bugs inside my head from leaving sticky footprints in my short term memory.
The best free advice in the world isn’t as good as my mom and her inchoate threats on a bad day. E.g. if you misbehave while I’m out, I swear to god.
You know the difference between allegory and metaphor. You explain in twit.
You neither attempt to talk like a cool urban hipster yo, nor do you succeed.
You promise never to do jello shots at my new ex-friend’s party and proclaim a fatwa on blogging while under the influence of Nyquil.
Somebody twits: It’s quiet outside. Too quiet. Let’s split up and investigate.

Upsetting the Rabbits

No air is sweet that is silent; it is only sweet when full of low currents of under sound—triplets of birds, and murmur and chirp of insects, and deep-toned words of men, and wayward trebles of childhood.
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1862).

I’ve had the flu, perhaps even the swine flu. Felt more like a goat than a pig, braying and hacking. And the sound effects don’t stop with coughing. On each inhale, I made a noise like a rusty metal door hinge, and upon each exhale my lungs crackled like cellophane. Yesterday, I spent the day in my recliner, next to the strategically placed vaporizer, sipping that nasty licorice-tasting tea to sooth my throat and watching a marathon of Bridezilla on basic cable.

There is simply nothing like watching Americans behaving badly to each other to sooth a fevered sick mind. Somehow, watching spoiled narcissistic trailer trash with their French-manicured acrylic claws and those knife-thin eyebrows that look like you drew them on with a Sharpie made me feel smug and superior, which was at least some comfort in my time of sickness. Which teaches us, children, that no matter how bad we are, we can take comfort in realizing that there is probably somebody else out there somewhere who is worse.

Watching with me, Tech Support Guy theorized that perhaps it’s only the fat chicks who manage to look so small-minded and so badly raised. Unfortunately, I couldn’t agree with his fat chick theory. I explained that when you have reality TV, you have reality-shaped women. Alas! It came as a complete surprise to him that there are so many fat people out there in America.

My favorite remembered line was the one spoken by the bride-to-be as friends separated her from another drunken guest at her “bachelorette party” the night before the wedding: “Hey, you’re upsetting my rabbits!” who, sure enough, in their wire cages on the floor of the living room, appeared to be agitated by all the profanity-laced hair-pulling goings-on before order was finally restored and the gals made up over Marlboros and Bud Lites.

Meanwhile, while I’ve been hacking up a lung indoors, the weather outside has been amazing, even for paradise. Imagine if you got a weather menu each evening and selected the weather for the following day. Sunny, with temperatures in the mid 70f range, with puffy white clouds skidding around the sky and light breezes blowing the leaves around like they were applauding the weather. And the smells. Unlike a hot dry summer in the desert, there has been marine moisture in the air. I had simply forgotten about how good growing things smell, and how all it takes is a bit of humidity to make those smells of fresh life fill the air. Eucalyptus trees with their menthol always in the background, the foliage of a tomato plant, with its smell that somehow encapsulates every childhood garden memory, the fennel seeds smelling like Italian sausage. Even the mint underfoot everywhere in back smelled somehow fresher and more grateful this morning than I recall.

Although it’s not like I was on my deathbed or anything, I feel that magical second-chance feeling an invalid gets upon returning to the world of the living. The birds are singing sweeter, the air is smelling fresher, the sunshine is glowing softer, and my metaphorical rabbits are all calm and snuggly in their cages.

True Genius v. Truly Stupid

He whose genius appears deepest and truest, excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out, occasionally, a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly, though unutterably, conscious.
Natianiel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse

As a gift to you, I’m throwing out some profoundly truthful stuff that you might not be conscious of. My allergy report says I’m allergic to psychedelic mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), stale fruitcake, Maybelline Blatantly Bold Brown nail polish (taken internally), monstrous apparitions in the night, and that white cheesy stuff that develops in skin folds of obese, incontinent, hygienically challenged old ladies.

Here we have two stupid birds, perched on the sunflower. The highest one is trying to decide if it’s seeds are ready to harvest. They’re not. He’s patient, which is a sort of shame because if he was impatient and hungry, perhaps he and his buddy would eat the damn pests who are turning the sunflower leaves into worn-out lace antimacassars.

Now, I’ve recently spent time with some stupid people who can charitably be described as suffering from the lack of the knack of expression. Here’s a hint about the best way to deal with stupid people. Slap them. Should you find yourself confronted by somebody who needs to be slapped in the face, or heaven forbid, shot in the face, you should stop, breathe, and count slowly to any two-digit number. Then, if you still think they should be slapped, go ahead and then slap them. Don’t shoot them. It’s not nice and it’s almost certainly not legal. As a retired lawyer, I could probably make a case for self-defense if you shot somebody who was so stupid you were harmed psychically just by conversing with them. But, I’m retired, so I won’t.

Besides, where I live things are a bit different. Here, it’s legal to shoot people who demonstrate an inability to reason and/or who profess to believe in fairies, the intrinsic value of collectibles, the innocence of puppies, and/or who believe too much carbon dioxide in the air can’t be bad because it’s “natural”. Now that I think of it, we should all slap people who reason that antifreeze tastes sweet, so what can be the harm in using it as a martini cocktail mixer. If you are of a non-violent bent and find slapping too confrontational, consider making them an antifreeze martini instead.

Of course, upon consideration, don’t (shoot/serve antifreeze-tinis, or slap stupid strangers); because it’s probably as illegal to poison stupid people as it is to shoot them. See, this is what happens when it’s too hot for me to get outside enough…

Something Like That

“I don’t see why our coffee pot won’t work. They perfected them back in the twentieth century. What’s left to know that we don’t know already?”

“Think of it as being like Newton’s color theory. Everything about color that could be know was known by 1800. And then Land came along with his two-light source and intensity theory, and what had seemed a closed field was busted all over.”

“You mean that there may be things about self-regulating coffee pots that we don’t know. That we just think we know?”

”Something like that.”

- Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death.

Ok, this has no connection whatever to gardening. But it suggests there may be wisdom in continuing to study garden design, cultural anthropology, connections between fundamentalism and unquestioning blind obedience, and even coffee pot technology. You never know, you might stumble on some new knowledge that will make this world a better place.

Nobel Prize in Garden Blogging Nominations Now Being Accepted

My alphabetized list of suggested categories.

1. Chacun a Son Gout Award – for blogging about your personal taste in gardens that, until you explained, would have been likely to strike others as bizarre, or even disturbing. Also known as the “strawberries grown in tires painted white award.”

2. First Degree Plantslaughter Award – for a post about the most inadvertently cruel murder of nursery starts. Simple neglect doesn’t count – go for creativity.

3. Freestyle Pruning Award – for blogging pictures of topiary that might have been trimmed by a striking longshoreman with delirium tremens. No gum-drop shrubs EVER.

4. Gilding the Lily Award – for blogging about not leaving well enough alone in the garden. You know who you are.

5. I’m Just Saying Award – for a garden post that seemed to make sense at the time, but in retrospect manifests at best the blogger’s twisted sense of humor, and at worst his/her clinical insanity.

6. I’m Special and You’re Banal Award – for a post about the most pretentious groin-grabingly transcendent garden design ever. Extra points for smugness and passive aggression.

7. Moral of the Story Award – for a post that succeeds in refreshing a garden cliché, thereby teaching the rest of us lessons about wildlife survival, beauty school drop-outs, grave robbing, or other obscure topics whose connection to gardens and blogging would have otherwise seemed tenuous or contrived.

8. My Grass Is Greener Award – for blogging about executing a garden idea plagiarized from someone else. Extra points awarded for cloaking your envy with sophisticated disdain.

9. Not My Fault Award – for a garden-related blog post that incorporates a self-deprecating critique of the gardener’s failures, but without including self-pity or homicidal rage.

10. Pride Goeth Before a Fall Award – for a post about a garden ambitiously planted in Spring that turns out by Summer to be more than the gardener could possibly maintain.

11. Squint and It’s Lovely Award – for a post describing a garden that incorporates otherwise offensive elements which, at a proper distance, acquire a degree of sublime beauty.

12. Swing and A Miss Award – for blogging about a boldly attempted, but poorly executed garden vision.

13. That’s Not What I Meant Award – For blogging about the unintended consequences of a specific garden design idea, preferably positive, but consideration given to results that created a mutant strain of Japanese Beetles impervious to any pesticide including napalm.

14. What Were You Thinking Award – for blogging about the gardener’s worst implementation of what seemed like a good idea at the time, but which turned out to be as inviting as cupcakes topped with grease that congealed in the frying pan after Sunday breakfast.

15. Zone Maps Be Dammed Award – for blogging about successfully cultivating an unsustainable garden or plant that has no business trying to survive in your climate zone. (Note this is a high bar to pass because I’ve tried for >20 years to cultivate lilacs (syringa) in Zone 22, and my current attempt still has a few leaves on it’s stunted branches.)

Escape from the City

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
- William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or the Growth of a Poet’s Mind

As tempting as the hip urban loft life sometimes seems, I cannot imagine being happy in a high-rise. Even if I had a large south-facing balcony filled with containers and pots of every description, I just don’t see a balcony of potted plants providing any sort of bucolic peaceful oasis of my back yard. Life in an asphalt jungle, no matter how hip or idealized, no matter how good the sushi, how seductive the nightlife, seems to me to be too hard. I’d prefer to spend an afternoon pruning rose bushes or clearing brush, earning the scrapes and bruises and the dirt under my fingernails, instead of earning bruises from bumping into the harsh edges and hazards in the city.

Being somewhat hearing challenged in recent years, I find nothing sinister about the silence of suburbia. The unintended consequence of playing music too loudly back in the day is that I have adapted to the muffled sounds of the real world today, punctuated by the nonsense babbling of a senile person who lives in our house. The background noise of passing traffic on the busy thoroughfare a short block from my backyard provides a sort of background of white noise, punctuated by the noisy birds conspiring to spread the birdseed as far from the feeders as possible. I sometimes hear owls at night, much softer than the sound of car alarms on city streets.

There’s nothing better than smelling the nighttime air this time of year. I live in a Mediterranean climate, 20 miles east of the Pacific Ocean. This time of year we’re getting a bit of cloud cover during the day – they call it a marine layer, but I prefer to call it smog – that moves onshore at night, but not far enough inland as my house. Without cloud cover, the land cools off substantially as soon as the sun goes down – the heat of the day is not held on the ground by clouds – leaving clear chilly nights where the fragrance of eucalyptus trees and night-blooming jasmine permeate the air. I’ve even come to appreciate the occasional earthy smell of skunk as the night critters jostle each other for the water left strategically about the garden.

In contrast, I presume that those city lofts are left sealed against the auto exhaust and car alarms, their inhabitants left with aromatic candles and air fresheners Americans seem so addicted to these days.

The other night, in a major national franchise restaurant, we noted that the small print on the menu warned about food-borne illness eaters risked in ordering dishes with eggs, lettuce, and even antibiotic-saturated beef. Yummy. Even the sushi may be tainted with mercury and other heavy metals meant to be enjoyed best via music, not food. There’s even poison on the night breezes wafting through city lofts – auto exhaust, industrial pollution. Now more than ever, all my senses appreciate my timely escape from the city.

Skirmishes in the Cultural War

“Suddenly, something was slipping away so fast that we had not had time quite to register what it might be. All we knew was that it was irreplaceable. The way ahead seemed dark. Somewhere along the line optimism seems to have perished. Neither of us could identify this feeling of apprehensive melancholy.” Germaine Greer

I’m old enough to revisit my old haunts and realize that was another life, another person. I’m just back from such a vacation with Tech Support Guy, and “apprehensive melancholy” is a fair description of what we brought with us as we returned home.

Once upon a time, I lived in the perfect suburb where all the mommies dressed in matching velour jogging suits and tennis shoes, and enrolled their children to private dance lessons. I once hosted a wedding shower for a neighbor. Invitees included a number of neighboring mommies who brought their inherent superiority along with their gifts. My friend, who was getting married for the second time. also invited a few of the waitresses who worked at one of the local bars owned by an enterprising hippy where she was employed as chief accounting officer. There was a bit of tension between the color-coordinated mommies and the skinny waitresses who were the prototype of women who go out in packs for girls night out, drink a few too many appletinis and yell whoohoo a little to loudly.

One of the skinny waitresses excused herself to secretly do cocaine in the bathroom. When she returned, she did a wonderful impersonation of Julia Child. In an uneven falsetto, this is more or less what she said: “Today we’re going to make toast. First you pour and drink a glass of a crisp white wine. Then, you put two slices of Wonder bread in the toaster, have another glass of white wine, push the toast down, and have another glass of white wine. When the toaster starts smoking, you take a fork and carefully tease the toast up with one hand while drinking a glass of white wine with the other hand.” The impersonation ended in an imitation of a drunken Julie, her speech slurred beyond comprehension, passed out on the floor.

The waitress did a really good Julie Child. By this time, me and my friend both realized there were controlled substances involved. The mommies realized there were aliens in the midst of their private suburb and began to squirm uncomfortably.

Fortunately, the party began to break up about then. The mommies it seemed, all had carpools to pick up from Montessori school, or bridge club, or yoga.

And don’t get me started on the baby shower another neighbor gave my friend later that year. We played that game where each player got a small handful of raisins. Taking turns, we each told of some experience we’d had, such as riding a cable car in San Francisco. As I vaguely recall, players who shared said experience had to give up one of their raisins. The object was apparently to earn the most raisins. So, one player said she’d cheated on her husband. One of the skinny waitresses then proceeded to admit she’d cheated on her first husband. Tossing raisins across the circle one at a time, she continued that she’d cheated on her second husband, her third husband, and her current husband. Good times.

Family Jam

"It was the wise remark of some sagacious observer, that familiarity is for the most part productive of contempt. Graceless offspring of so amiable a parent! Unfortunate beings that we are, whose enjoyments must be either checked, or prove destructive of themselves. Our passions are permitted to sip a little pleasure; but are extinguished by indulgence, like a lamp overwhelmed with oil."
William Shenstone, ‘Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening’ (1764)
Edited and introduced by Stephen Bending & Andrew McRae

My graceful offspring made fresh, organic white peach and saffron jam. Within an hour of her departure the following day, I had opened my jar and enjoyed it for lunch. I put some blue stilton cheese on top and toasted it long enough to melt the cheese and warm the jam.

Here’s the recipe – from Christine Ferber, Mes Confitures:

A scant 3 pounds white peaches. Pr 2 ¼ pounds net
3 ¾ cups granulated sugar
Juice of 1 small lemon
15 threads saffron

Blanch the white peaches for 1 minute in a pan of boiling water. Refresh them in ice water. Peel and halve them. Remove the pits and slice the peach halves. In a preserving pan, combine the peach slices, sugar, lemon juice, and saffron. Bring to a simmer and then turn into a bowl. Cover the fruit with a sheet of parchment paper and refrigerate overnight.
Next day, pour this mixture through a sieve. Bring the collected syrup to a boil in a preserving pan, skim, and continue cooking on high heat. The syrup should be sufficiently concentrated at 221F on a candy thermometer. Add the sliced peaches and bring to a boil on high heat, boiling for about 5 minutes, stirring gently. Skim again if need be. Check the set. Put the jam into jars immediately and seal.

Ok, that’s the recipe. Here’s what we had to do. First, we used a large lemon and doubled the saffron. Next, we had to cook it at least twice as long to get a pretty syrupy set – something we’ve had to do with all Ferber’s recipes. I don’t think she’s lying so much as that she may use jam sugar that has pectin in it - and we can’t get that in the States. Progeny put about half the final mix through a food mill to facilitate spreadability on toast. Finally, Ferber assumes you know all about boiling the jars etc to sterilize them first. We put the jam into the jars and then boil the jars about 15 minutes.

The jam was delicious, and the taste was not extinguished by my indulgence.

Guest posting from SE Michigan

Your volunteer sunflowers reminded me of a photo I had been meaning to share of my own garden volunteers. When I returned from a trip in late June, my vegetable garden (indeed, my entire yard) had become a miniature maple grove. Other than the basil and tomato plants, everything else growing in this photo is a tiny maple tree. (Note the jury-rigged but so far effective anti-bunny fencing, too.) I murdered them by the thousands when I mowed the lawn.

Over the years, I have allowed one or two to shelter and grow strong in the raised garden beds (i.e., in the decent soil I have built above my native clay) for a year before transplanting elsewhere. Successive Arbor Day plantings by kids at the local elementary school had produced a respectable grove of them — before the parking lot was enlarged, alas. Still, a 60-footer remains in the court median in front of my house. The satellite shot shows its form via its shadow. Imagine what our lawns would look like if we did not murder these eager and vigorous multitudes regularly.

Walnuts and Wine

Some writers make their readers feel
Provided with a good square meal,
While others – such a task is mine –
Supply the walnuts and the wine.
A sip of truth – the merest smack,
A pinch of salt, a nut to crack.
- Charles E. Benham, Jottings

The perfect recipe includes a mere sip of truth, the balance of the ingredients being forms of craziness, and various spices. That’s exactly the kind of blogging I aspire to. Why limit yourself to truth when you can blog about alien invasion conspiracies, or spilled birdseed sprouting among the balls?

I’ve been gently moving trowel-fuls of black sunflower birdseed sprouts to sunnier spots in the backyard, and then carefully mulching them against the blistering sun. They began life as sprouts among the decorative garden balls, including the non-reflective repurposed bowling ball trying to look inconspicuous among them.

This is not particularly lovely corner of my yard, but where better to illustrate how well a sip of food fight goes with a sunflower seed to crack? The feeder itself (the white house hanging above in this picture) provides not only opportunistic flowers, but is also the source of loud and messy al fresco bird parties all day long. Birds have poor table (or, feeder) manners.

But my greedy birds go together with sunflowers as well as walnuts with wine.

Serene and Bright

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
William Wordsworth, “To a Young Lady Who had Been Reproached for Taking Long Walks in the Country”

Melancholy is easy. Serenity seems to be a bit harder, perhaps more so as pale grey hairs begin to outnumber the dark ones. Things fade, as do people, flowers, draperies in the sunny windows, and bones of beached whales bleached by the sun and smoothed by the tide.

So, my hypertufa Pequod is poised on the side of the pond, ready to hunt the elusive white whale. The fish fountain at right only spouts water when the sun shines serenely and brightly on its small solar panel. Apart from the fact that he’s hardly white, he spouts from his mouth rather than his blowhole. So, Melville would probably not appreciate my horticultural tribute to Moby Dick.

Mr. Mosshead has been moved farther into the shade as the summer sun closes in everywhere. I’m not sure if he’ll survive in the south-facing side of the house. While he evokes serenity, he doesn’t do bright. Perhaps I should return him to the spot out front where I harvested the moss. The spot in perpetual shade also gets the direct runoff from a sprinkler head that creates the ideal conditions for moss. Not exactly the lingering summer twilight in Lapland, but perhaps more appropriate to his needs.

Bacovegetarian

"The soul may be a mere pretense
The mind makes very little sense
So let us value the appeal
Of that which we can taste and feel."
Piet Hein, A Toast

Yep, that’s right. I'm a bacovegetarian. You’ve probably heard of the lacto- and ovo- kinds of vegetarians who also eat, respectively milk products and eggs. Me too. I couldn’t live without cheese, and on my weekly trips to the local egg lady I obtain the most wonderful fresh delicious eggs. Recently Tech Support Guy ordered an egg dish at a local restaurant and we barely recognized the anemic tasteless egg-shaped thing on his plate. He reported that it had a vaguely egg-like flavor, but had hardly any taste at all.

But bacon is, well bacon. Now, don’t judge me. I won't ever eat deep fried Snickers. I can’t stand the things big agriculture does to pigs. Shooting them full of antibiotics within days after they’re born, cutting their curlicue tales off because they pack them so tightly together that they’ll eat each other’s tails otherwise. Feeding them nasty muck and making them stand in their own poop.

We recently saw the movie Food, Inc. which doesn’t talk so much about pigs but will make you cut beef out of your diet unless you’re a soul-dead consumer seeking a slow death from nutritional deficiency and obesity-related diseases. The local county fair is a positive hotbed of irresistible bad food seemingly designed to make you sick and fat at the same time. I particularly love that all the trash cans wore patriotic dress and reminded the overweight customers to keep America beautiful.

So, I pay more to get organic bacon, certified as cage-free or humanely treated. I’ll eat bacon on/in anything: tomato sauce, potatoes sautéed in garlic and bacon grease, buttered toast. I haven’t sunk to coating my bacon with chocolate as they do at the fair, but I’m not saying it couldn’t happen someday. If only I could figure out how to get bacon into my morning coffee, I think I would have invented the perfect food.

The Moral of the Story – Making Existential Jam

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
- Albert Camus, the Myth of Sisyphus

I won’t pretend to understand existentialism. I don’t have to articulate the philosophy however, to like what Camus offers. I just love that in the final sentence above, he argues that hope that can be found at the end of Sisyphus’ rainbow. No pot of gold, no pie in the sky, no pretending we have immortal souls. But, instead of despair, we find reason to hope.

My latest obsession is making jam, which I apparently understand as well as existentialism. I’m experiencing some problems there, mostly involved with the last part where the jam is supposed to set up and get jammy. Mine is more soupy. When, despite carefully following the recipe, the stuff doesn’t gel, I begin to despair. I then add pectin, and end up with something rubbery that would make a better hose gasket than toast topping.

While my jam jars boil in the big pot on the stove, I experiment with making labels, which is almost as much fun as making the jam, because at least I can control the result. Someone used to say that if you were an atheist you might as well murder your neighbors in cold blood because the only thing stopping the rest of us from doing that was our fear of eternal damnation. Yeah, that was my Mom, whose faith sustained her, but mostly puzzled me.

The moral of this story? Why, simply that the godless can’t possibly fuck things up worse than the religious fundamentalists who have conflicting Divine Causes to kill and die for. For me at least, it’s easy to imagine us happier without god than to imagine that some day my jam will set.