Giant Cat Lady Action Figure Attacks Doll House!

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.
- Emily Dickinson, No. 1333

I remember running three-legged races with Grandma, at my cousins’ house in the country, balancing eggs in teaspoons. I remember how Grandma wasn’t very good at it, and my twelve-year-old speed and balance kicked ass. These days, I can barely carry a full cup of coffee across the room without spilling some. I recently did the math, and realize that I’m older now than Grandma was when we last teamed up to race.

In recent years, my cover story about slowing down was that I’ve been stopping to smell the flowers. It was a good excuse for a while, but eventually, I’ve had to admit I’ve slowed down because I’m growing older.

As gardeners, we learn the seasons and the promise of renewal after winter’s slumber. The smell of the rich but not-quite-ready living compost reminds us that nothing is lost, and that everything comes back. But the fact is, that all these garden metaphors are yet another cover story for playing in the dirt. Gardens patiently remind us we don’t have to outgrow what we love, no matter how much we may slow down.

Spring arrives this month, and if you are impatient for Spring, here’s some good news, This year, we spring ahead earlier into Daylight Savings Time, changing our clocks on March 11, instead of waiting until the last Sunday of March. This means that we lose and hour BEFORE the equinox marking the first day of Spring (around March 20), instead of AFTER winter ends.

And this means that Spring will arrive an hour earlier this year than it did last year. Madness indeed.

This is What I Do

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

One thing I do is appreciate my climate. It’s been a week of rain and blustery cold. The thermometer on the north side porch read 45F yesterday when I made my morning coffee. Today it reads 50. For many, this is paradise, but for Southern Californians, this is winter.

Another thing I often do this time of year is spend a few minutes in the back yard with a camera, Although the slanting late afternoon winter light is inviting and photogenic, I’m no longer acclimated to the chill of what we call winter here. I prefer to work outdoors on sunny days, when I can feel the vitamin D soak into my skin as the warmth soaks into my bones.

This is a small cotoneaster that I bought last autumn, to console myself after my 20 year old ginkgo bonsai died of thirst last summer. The silhouette against the neighboring blue pot caught my eye. It seems to be weaving a pattern with its shadow. I have no pretensions of creating bonsai, but I enjoy trying. Problem is, I haven’t the heart to trim this beauty, because instead of politely dropping its leaves to display its bones for shaping, this plant dressed itself up in its very own Christmas decorations. It was telling me that this is simply what the cotoneaster does.

Disconcerting Garden History

“I was one day admiring one of the falls of the Clyde; and ruminating upon what descriptive term could be most fitly applied to it, I came to the conclusion that the epithet ‘majestic’ was the most appropriate. While I was still contemplating the scene, a gentleman and a lady came up, neither of whose faces bore much of the stamp of superior intelligence, and the first words the gentleman uttered were ‘It is very majestic.’ I was pleased to find such a confirmation of my opinion, and I complimented the spectator upon the choice of his epithet, saying that he had used the best word that could have been selected from our language ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the gentleman, ‘I say it is very majestic: it is sublime, It is beautiful, it is grand, it is picturesque.’ ‘Ay (added the lady), it is the prettiest thing I ever saw.’ I own that I was not a little disconcerted.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London and New York, 1960), II, 37.

Whoa, there Big Fella. Is Sam skewered with the irony of being caught in the act of being smug and self-congratulatory about the Lavaterish stamps of superior freakin’ intelligence on his own freakin’ face? Aspiring to pompous superiority over the great unwashed masses, his pretentious sense of the sublime was just upstaged by the real thing? And, but, he’s man enough to enjoy the irony? Have we moved from the sublime to the ridiculous? Or, is that just me?

I’m studying the history of gardens, which frequently leaves an unpleasant Eurocentric aftertaste of how England brought together the three sister arts thereby elevating formerly modest tilling of the soil into a sublime art. Sadly, once landscape gardening started hanging around with Landscape Painting and Poetry, the utilitarian vegetable garden was left behind like the kid that doesn’t get picked in a schoolyard game of dodge ball. Roses are beautiful. Radishes are functional.

Well, not in my backyard. By the end of this summer, if you come to my garden, I want you to say, without a trace of disconcertion, that it’s the prettiest thing you ever saw. Then, without apology to Sam, we’ll make a tasty fresh salad and sit in the afternoon sun admiring the waterfall while we marvel at our refined good taste.

Choosing the Ground

In olden days, book titles used to be informative, descriptive, and more flowery than a host of heavenly winged cherubs, tipping baskets of fragrant Valentine’s Day flowers, over the heads of naked pink, modestly entwined, Rubenesque lovers. This applied to books of fiction, e.g. “The Tragic Tale of the Kidnap, Violent Deflowering and Eventual Rescue of Rose Red: or, How Princess Red Learned to Close Her Eyes and Think of England”. This also applied to non-fiction.

In 1855, Kerby & Son, 190 Oxford St, London, published a book by MRS. LOUDON, AUTHOR OF: “THE LADIES’ COMPANION TO THE FLOWER GARDEN;” “GARDENING FOR LADIES,” ETC, with the descriptive title: “My Own Garden - THE YOUNG GARDENER’S YEARBOOK.”

Things seem to run on idyllically well at first:
“Almost all young people are fond of a garden; and as gardening is a fine healthy exercise, it is desirable to encourage a taste for it as much as possible: consequently there are few persons, I believe, who have a family, who, if they have any quantity of garden ground to themselves, do not set aside a small portion of it for their children….”

But very soon, it takes a darker turn. The author veers down into the exhaustively outlined ”, Book I: “January, February, and March.” Chapter 1: “Choosing the Ground; and Selecting Implements and Instruments” and her suddenly sinister voice regretfully informs us:
“The months of January and February count for very little in a garden. It is expecially (sic) quite impossible for any boy or girl to work in the open air when the ground is hard with frost, as it generally is in the month of January, or covered with snow as it often is in February.”

Now, it would be a relatively cheap shot to compare-and-contrast her distractingly exhaustive titles, and to conclude her message was an allegory-free fairy tale. But consider: she was intentionally sowing her moral lesson just short of too shallowly to germinate in her readers’ collective subconscious minds. Reread the sentence above and see it suddenly blossom into a metaphor of the trials and tribulations of the Young Gardeners’ coming lives as a brief metaphorical season.

But I believe Mrs. Loudon was much more crafty and subtle than one might credit her for. After all, she begins – rather than ends – with winter.

It’s almost as if those crafty titles are red herrings delicately pitched to fly beneath the radar of Victorian Manhood. Specifically: he that compelled her to sacrifice her given name, and sublimate it under her husband’s family name. All for the privilege of writing seemingly superficial gardening books to train her doomed successors.

In a book entitled rosily enough to deter even the gayest of their male contemporaries, Mrs. Loudon whispers this secret to the little girls – delivering it like a punch to the gut when they were expecting a gentle kiss:
"Philosophers say that there is no pleasure so great as that of conquering difficulties; but then the difficulties should be such as can be conquered without too great a waste of physical strength, or without bringing on that hopeless despondency which is the consequence of a constant struggle against difficulties which are too great to be surmounted”.

Be afraid, little girls. Perhaps you can cultivate a garden of sufficient interest to offset the torpor of life. Good luck with that. But, my lovelies, it’s a very dark ride. Kappy’s detachment might save you from the hopeless despondency. Women in my family who have inherited or cultivated detachment, seem able to stay on their feet, swaying and bending like young trees in a thunderstorm, but remaining upright. There’s nobility in the struggle.

Readers of today may find the parable hauntingly reminiscent of another oxymoronical rule: the one about trying not to dirty your soul with sin, while knowing it’s already incurably muddied by the sin committed by the Original Girl in the Original Garden. But if Mom and Mrs. Louden didn’t tell us, girls know that all gardeners get dirty. It’s some rule of the universe about how entropy corrupts every one and every thing. Grown Women don't just know about the dirt, we cultivate it.

Mrs. Loudon’s book at: http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC15181661&id=WFEDAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PR4-IA1&lpg=RA1-PR4-IA1&dq=gardens+in+February#PPP11,M1 .

Kids These Days

I enjoy using my backyard garden as a metaphor for my life. Not only does this make me feel wise and clever (i.e. both sides of the “smart” coin), it lets me use pictures of my yard to illustrate my metaphor du jour. Lately however, current events have overtaken my horticultural pretensions and made me realize that despite what Voltaire said, we can’t always be about cultivating our own gardens and communing with Mother Nature. Sooner or later, we must venture forth to commune with our fellow man. At which point: yikes!

I am already suffering from a sort of culture shock with Kids-These-Days, that, truth be told, has reached proportions that make the generation gap of my own Nixonian youth seem quaintly, sweetly, naively, shallow. Where we had Elvis, and later his squalid death and post-death sightings, young people now have the Dead James Brown Traveling Road Show. While both have left this world, neither, sadly, has left the building. But somehow, the Godfather of Soul’s sorry and to-be-continued end has left the King of Rock and Roll’s post-death narrative in the dustbin of history.

A more recent celebrity death draws even more striking parallels and contrasts. Marilyn Monroe died alone in a sleazy hotel, under mysterious circumstances. By the standards of Marilyn’s mysterious death, Anna Nicole’s public departure from another sleazy hotel room, replete with fighting over the dead body and complicated by questions of paternity, maternity, and sanity make Marilyn’s one-note drug overdose seem disappointingly flat. We never had TMZ to show us pictures of Marilyn’s “death fridge” containing little more than canned diet drinks and methadone. And now, we never will.

As these celebrity death comparisons darkly portend, changes are afoot in our culture big enough to make a constant resident herein reel, not to mention their potential effect on somebody who has been away for a while.

By the standards of internet profiles of KTD’s, this modest blog is archaic and low tech. I will never publicly muse on whether my period is late, my sex partner has an STD, or my ex-BFF is a pathetic loser. I will never post an embarrassing phone video to the humiliation of friends and family. I will cling to a vanishing sense of privacy that KTDs already seem to know is only an illusion. KTSs don’t seem to shrink from the likelihood that their obsessive and public documentation of their lives may one day be a source of amusement to their own children. They have developed skins thick enough that they might not mind, someday, if their grandchildren ask them to explain why their youthful digital ghosts appear like lost waifs in a Girls Gone Wild video, documenting their unresolved Daddy Issues for all to see.

So, I’ll retreat to my garden while KTDs perform for a public audience. It is my hope that all the cleverness and wisdom I seek there will someday reconcile me to the cultural shock I experience when I try to understand Kids These Days.

Investment

Tom Robbins said when people tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking; and when they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. I want to be a growing person for my entire life. Working in my yard helps me embrace the constant state of change that a living garden embodies and that growth requires.

In my yard, I recently spent some time tending my compost piles. I emptied compost from one of the bottomless green trash cans into a similarly-sized wire basket (in the rear of this picture), layering the decaying compost with dead leaves and brush. Then I emptied the tumbler (in foreground) into the trash cans, layering older compost, dead leaves and fresher compost from the tumbler. Nothing is lost forever. That helps me to understand how to let go of past seasons.

When I finished my work with the compost, I planted some bulbs. To maintain my garden and to enjoy its rebirth each spring, I have to plant now. That helps me to understand how to invest in the garden’s future.

In the square blue pot, I planted one glory lily (Gloriosa Rothschildiana), two red and white spotted lilies (Tricyrtis Hirta) and three orange and black spotted tiger lilies (Triginum Splendens). I also added four Walla Walla onion sets left over from the vegetable garden. This is the closest I can get to sweet Vidalia onions. The black bamboo tripod is from my own black bamboo, and will be necessary to hold up the glory lily. It will be months before this investment pays off. That helps me learn patience.
The design concept, if I may be so presumptuous, is to have a pot brimming with odd flowers. Even the onions will produce fat round sprays of flowers in some shade of blue to purple, even though they probably won’t flower until the lilies are long gone. But one of the best parts of dreaming up fanciful arrangements is that I always am surprised at the difference between my dream and the eventual reality. That helps me learn to live with change and accept the unknown future.

Moments in Time

Pictures show what a piece of the world looks like at that moment in time. The world doesn’t care one way or the other. It’s not holding it’s breath taking in the wonders of being alive, and it’s not worrying about the certain future when everything alive in that snapshot will be dead.

Yesterday was the first day I’ve spent working in the backyard for months. Last week it was rainy and cool, and the rain washed away dry winter dust and uncovered the promise of spring. Yesterday was sunny and warm. I tossed around the compost piles to aerate them so I’ll have priceless “black gold” compost for my vegetable garden this spring. Because of our unusual and prolonged freezes last month, I had assumed all the worms had frozen to death. But yesterday, there, amid the rich and decaying garbage, I found worms by the pitchfork full. I should have more faith in the world.

The back yard is a good place to go when winter cooped indoors makes thoughts of dying and loss fill my head. The smell of the rich but not-quite-ready living compost reminded me that nothing is lost and that everything comes back.

The dead coleus in the large round pot, and the dead salvia in the blue pots all left seeds behind that I carefully tossed into the struggling herb garden. The dead plants went into the compost pile. The pots will be emptied, washed, filled with new compost, and replanted within a few months. It felt good to be part of the eternal cycle yesterday, working in the sunshine, smelling the warm compost and thinking about the way life goes on even though our lives may be no more than a snapshot of our moment in that cycle.

Ornamental Kale

You can eat kale, but it’s hardly worth the effort. Kale and rhubarb look similar, particularly since there’s hybrid kale with red stems like rhubarb. Both have long gangly stems, like an unkempt celery, with sprawling branches and too-big leafy greens. But between the two I am confused: one you only eat the leaves, not stem, and the other you only eat the stems, not leaves. There’s something about poison. And I can never remember which is which. I think it’s kale/leaves and rhubarb/stems. But in the end, who cares? Nasty dark green leaves, cooked into mush like canned spinach, don’t appeal to me, no matter how you try to add color and seasoning. And don’t even try to explain how nice red rhubarb looks and tastes when added to a strawberry pie. Vegetable-fruit combinations always leave me with a nagging suspicion I’ve been the victim of a bait and switch.

While I’ve managed to acquire a taste for many vegetables as an adult, it’s a taste I’ve had to cultivate very carefully. For example, I’ll never get those green olives with red pimento peppers inside them. My Dad used to order his martini “without the fruit” because he too, fund that the not-quite-bitter taste didn’t add a thing to the martini except perhaps a little latent Vitamin C. Kale is like that, but without the fun of a martini.

But ornamental kale, now that’s a different story. We didn’t plant kale or rhubarb in the veggie garden this year. And we didn’t buy ornamental kale in six-pack pony packs from a local nursery. We planted seeds in October. And here’s the result. The ornamental kale “Victoria Pigeon” adds color and survives the frosty nights without a trace of wilt or frostbite. It looks almost pretty enough to eat.

Where the Back Yard Meets the Canyon

Hidden at the very back of the back yard, unseen from the house and most of the yard, is the remnant of an old pig sty – seen in the left rear of this picture. The giant bamboo I planted years ago (in the right rear corner of picture), is now visible from the yard, peeking over the small rock mountain behind the spa. Over the years, I’ve moved rocks, stumps, and recycled old wooden decking to make some crude steps up the rocks to the right.

One autumn, I dumped a trash-can load of good mulch here – in the spot between foreground to the sunny flat rock in the rear. Then I transplanted succulents who had outgrown their 2 inch pots. No artificial irrigation other than the careless spill from operating the nearby faucet and hose. Our climate – and this location in particular - favors such plump thrifty succulents who can hold water better than a fat girl in a prom dress.

Their south-facing location gets cooked to a crisp in the dry summer, so this is the best season for the succulents living there. The red spikes of the small pencil plant, silhouetted against the white rock in the middle left, have doubled in size. The jade in the foreground doesn’t care if anybody catches its show.

Someday my Frog will Come

Called to early morning prayer by a warming sun, the Wooden Frog abides respectfully, facing east. Mr. Frog sits in the early morning sun dreaming froggy dreams, where once a lovely Japanese princess stood. Behind him, the silent gold koi, slowed to immobility by the previous night’s freeze, make the still-dark surface of the pond sparkle with flecks of gold.

Seems like frogs are a recurring theme in my back yard. Is it because of the metaphor of being rescued by a prince is the defining theme of my life? Nah, I’m already a princess. It’s because frogs occupy a rather unscientifically categorized rung between lizards and fish. Beasts of the earth and beasts of the water: frogs are both. They transform themselves completely from cold-blooded reptiles (again, unscientifically, ok?) to something that looks enough like a mammal to become a prince. That’s more than some people grow up to become.

Seeing

A nasturtium shows off with virtually no frost damage. Living at the base of the waterfall of the large pond, it may benefit from the higher humidity.

But there’s a better picture here. Squint at the small white blossoms of the alyssum at left. Then take in the larger white rock above the nasturtium, wearing the spiky leaves of the ginger plant draped above it like a bad toupee. I see the alyssum a group of tiny single-celled organisms, gathered before a benevolently smiling full-grown blob. The blob is wearing the orange nasturtium like a bowtie.

Then again, perhaps I should post in the morning, with a cup of coffee beside me, rather than in the evening with a glass of wine.

A Study in Sun and Shade

Winder light, fragrantly laden with Vitamin D and warmth, back-lights the small stone lantern. Last night, temperatures were below freezing. This morning, the crisp air invigorates the waking garden. A aeonium, wilted from frost, leans into the lantern, seeking that warmth. The shadowed stone bamboo of the lantern evokes the chilled old bones of an aging gardener.

While I don’t suffer from seasonal light deprivation, dark days of winter can occasion sudden melancholy attacks. But I’ve found a cure.

Today is the day I spend the morning volunteering in the veggie garden: and it warmed me to my bones. The cold stone bones of the lantern will soon be warmed by the sun too, and will share that warmth with its neighbor.

My favorite part of this picture though, is the blurred path leading east into the sun, beckoning in the background. A promise of longer, warmer days.

Three Friends of Winter – and Other Friends of Theirs

In Chinese art symbolism, the three friends are pine, plum, and bamboo, often depicted in Chinese porcelain, paintings, and garden poetry. Years ago, I happened on this motif and it opened up an entire world of plant symbolism to me. Plant groupings, whether in pictures, vases, or in the ground, can convey specific concepts, but only to those schooled in the mysteries of such symbolic groupings. In this particular case, since these three abide in harsh winters, they present an instant metaphor for strength and endurance in the face of age and adversity.

The concept of planting gardens like secret decoder rings made me feel sophisticated and wise. I decided to replicate the three friends at the top of an embankment bordering the back of my yard. Sadly, being initiated in the esoteric Chinese symbolic meaning of these plants didn’t make me an accomplished garden designer. Here is my arrangement in 2004, with the dignified three friends being upstaged by Jesse's pink plastic flamingo in the foreground.

I started with a pine tree, knowing it would be the slowest to grow. I transplanted a tiny seedling from a 2-inch pot – a free gift of the local family Christmas Tree Farm to all customers buying full-sized Christmas trees. Because I didn’t transplant it very well, over the years, it has leaned further downhill to the point where it now grows almost horizontally. This may be just as well, because the embankment sits beneath some primary transmission lines for the local electric company, and they periodically send crews to chop the heads off any trees that threaten to trespass on their wires’ right-of-way. When you pause to consider it however, this is the perfect environment for a pine tree that is supposed to symbolize endurance in the face of adversity. By growing horizontally, the pine tree has escaped the fate of its neighbors who routinely have their heads chopped off in the electric company’s annual pogrom.

I planted a purple-leaved ornamental plum adjacent to the pine, and some black bamboo next to the plum. The plum is pretty ugly, because even if I knew how to prune it sensibly to obtain the beautiful open shapes in Chinese calligraphy, I couldn’t reach it because it perches inaccessibly on the steep embankment.

The bamboo, true to it’s nature, is vigorous. Scholarly students of subtle symbolism say the hollow stalk of the bamboo signifies open-minded tolerance. In my yard, a more apt metaphor would be rampant and uncontrolled imperialism attempting to conquer the entire world, beginning with the embankment and creeping annually further into the small level open yard.

As seen in the picture taken today, the three friends in my yard have been joined by a bunch of metaphorically rowdy companions. Instead of standing lonely vigil on some windswept and inhospitable mountaintop, my pine/plum/bamboo are crowded by jostling eucalyptus, a mallow bush that fully intends to become a mallow tree, a native chemise plant, and an undergrowth of rosemary, jade, and other native weeds.

Instead of conceding that I have failed in my attempt to create a secret symbol of strength in my yard, I choose to consider my effort (like an official of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security referring to our failure to capture Osama actually said) a “success that has not happened yet”.

My bamboo, plum and pine, symbolizing the strength, purity and endurance of cultivated Chinese gentlemen, are surrounded by a bunch of young upstarts crowding out their gentle poetry, and reminding me that we were all young, rampant and loudly distracting once. And that these qualities too, are worth remembering in winter when we have become old and wise.

Mad Gardener's Song: Addendum

Garden gnomes and plastic sprites are tiresome and predictable. But the bare bones of the gingko in winter make a perfect home for my plastic cobra. There he spits, lurking in front of the gingko’s rock. Any garden fairy who ventures into my garden, endeavoring to impart an unseen but magical and mysterious presence, will encounter the red tooth and claw of nature.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Mad Gardener’s Song” by Lewis Carroll:
He thought he saw an Elephant,
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
'At length I realise,' he said,
The bitterness of Life!'

Here’s my addendum:
She though she saw a cobra spit,
Then eat the garden fairy
She looked again, and found it was
A plastic snake so merry.
‘Were gnomes to turn up here’
She said, ‘they’d surely never tarry!’

Magic Seeds

Last spring, I found a packet of seeds in a local nursery. The seeds were from Renee’s Garden. I’ve always liked Renee’s Garden seeds because the information included is so thorough and well written, but mostly because the illustrations are generally done like botanical drawings.

We planted a few of the magic black bean seeds in one of the raised beds in the veggie garden, next to seeds of a tried-and-true purple Japanese eggplant that tastes as good as it looks, and purple sweet peppers – a purple garden. Sadly, the unseasonably dry heat and the pests that thrived in it deterred the eggplant and nibbled the peppers to an untimely end. But the bean vine put on a show that lasted from March 2006 through the this past week, when I finally pulled out the remaining vines that had succumbed to an unusual frost.

Before I discovered Renee’s seeds last spring, I had never heard of these magic beans or the plant they produce. The description from the Renee’s Garden seed packet says: “Exotic and tropical-looking Hyacinth Bean vines flaunt gorgeious sprays of amethyst and violet blossoms, borne on striking purple stems throughout warm summer weather. The rich hued flowers mature into shiny, flat 3 inch pods that hand like purple patent leater ornaments against the dense canopy of twining foliage. These show-stopping climbers win the admiring attention of all our garden visitors.”

The plant was intended as an ornamental, and it lived up to the description above. At first, we didn’t identify it with a sign. However, it upstaged even the giant sunflowers and rambling and productive summer squash vines, and so many visitors asked about it that we made a sign using the seed packet description, and a scanned image from the seed packet. Although we identified it as ornamental, a visitor from the Philippines told one garden volunteer that he had eaten it as a child, picked when the beans were young and tender and stir-fried with other vegetables – as you would with snow peas.

January is the dream and plan time of the year, when I spend winter afternoons with seed catalogs. Although I’d never heard of this plant before last year, I have noticed it several different catalogs this year, under several different names. I salvaged the last of the dried bean pods and the worn out and weathered sign just this week.

Burpee calls it Dolichos Lablab Violet and identifies it as a heirloom. Together with Renee’s Garden, Park Seeds identifies the seeds as Hyacinth Bean or Dolichos lablab. Furthermore, Park says it is “An Edible Ornamental!“ Select Seeds helpfully provides pronunciation: DOLL-ee-kos, and says it was introduced from Egypt in the early 19th century. Dave’s Garden says the seed is poisonous if ingested, and provides a more complete naming convention: “Family: Papilionaceae (puh-pil-ee-uh-NAY-see-ay) (Info), Genus: Lablab (LAB-lab) (Info), Species: purpureus (pur-PUR-ee-us) (Info).”

Whether or not it is edible, and whether or not you would describe its multicolokred flowers as violet, lavender or lilac, it’s not a plant to use where you want it to blend in unobtrusively. We have carefully harvested dried beans, shelled them and preserved the seeds. It will be back in our veggie garden this summer – together with a new sign. Apart from it’s non-stop show of beauty, who can resist a plant whose names sounds like “blab blab”?

Garden Whimsy vs. Kitsch

The lanterns are hanging from a bamboo pole, mounted in front of a wooden screen leaning against a south-facing wall. When scattered about my back yard, these cheap, faux Asian lanterns failed to convey the Zen-like quality I was going for. Instead, isolated from each other, individual lanterns imparted a forlorn failed ambience and showcased instead my yard’s intrinsic lack of design coherence.

But, taken together they transcend trash. By grouping the lanterns together, I have raised the individual elements above their humble stations to the level of garden whimsy.

And garden whimsy is something people are writing expensive coffee-table books about. Apparently, you can spend a lot of money at garage sales and flea markets to find old garden implements, buckets, birdhouses. You can plant flowers in your old wheelbarrow. You can paint old chairs in bright colors and plant trailing ivy on their seats. If you don’t have the creative talent to recognize the whimsical potential of such hidden treasures at junk stores, you can go to shops in gentrified parts of old urban downtowns and spend even more money for the same used resale items, displayed with a quirky eye, a bit of old lace and some silk flowers. Why didn’t you think of that?

I have to wonder however, if these attempts to achieve the wa of garden whimsy today, risk sinking to the level of clutter and trash tomorrow. Will today’s attempts to create cottage garden informality and country charm, despite being costly, clever and oh-so-current, end up becoming trite? The lesson to consider here is the way our grandparents would take old tires, cut them in half, paint them white, and stand them end-to-end like upside-down Us to border their driveways. Or stack them and plant strawberries in their centers.

Once upon a time, painting old tires white was the height of garden whimsy, although we hadn’t even invented the concept in those days. Today, it is pre-packaged for the modern whimsical gardener-on-the-go, who is looking for instant harmony, peace and balance befitting their busy contemporary lifestyle. Besides, I too have a wheelbarrow planted with flowers, and I like it just fine.

In Winter Enjoy

The rains have come, and the gardener has not. Yesterday, strong winds coaxed piles of pine needles and dead leaves to venture from their dark corners and onto open paths and benches - lending an untidy beauty to familiar sights. Today, there is sun, but winter has finally arrived. The disheveled back yard is best enjoyed through the window from the cozy warmth of the house. And this got me to thinking of a picture I took last summer of a small serpentine line in my garden.

William Hogarth was an 18th century painter and printmaker, partial to landscapes and pictures chock-full of allegories. He also considered himself an arbiter of good taste. His 1753 treatise on aesthetics “The Analysis of Beauty” was his definitive contribution on finding beauty not only in classical art and English landscapes, but in everyday objects. Although he did not invent the English landscape garden style which incorporated the free-flowing “line of grace” also known as the serpentine line, he is generally credited with giving it a name. Here’s what he had to say about the curving lines reminiscent of a serpent:

“…The serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety, if I may be allowed the expression; and which by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to inclose (tho' but a single line) varied contents…”

My garden’s serpentine line is not a grand winding path, guiding visitors toward visionary realms of sublimely cultivated gardens. Instead, as shown in this picture, it is part of a small, heart-shaped stone with a shallow bowl for water in the center.

During wintertime, there is still much to enjoy in the serpentine lines of my garden. And although he was no fan of the “sneaking serpent” and all the symbolism serpents evoke, William Blake had some advice for gardeners to ponder during winter: “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”

Christmas Past

In 2005, Christmas Eve was on a Saturday. Because today is the Saturday before Christmas, I am thinking of where I was last year at this time. This is from my journal:

Madaba, Jordan
Saturday, 24 Dec 2005

“We’re all back in our hotel. I bought a small rug and before we finished the complementary cup of tea, I was persuaded to buy another. As I’m writing this, I hear out the window of our room in the Black Iris Hotel, the unmistakable sounds of what we’ll call the Madaba Bagpipe Santa Band and Percussion Group. This has to be the same group of men dressed in variations of Santa Clause that was marching down the street outside the Maaia brothers’ rug shop when we were there earlier.

“No sooner had the Santa Band piled back into their Santa Tour Bus, our gracious Innkeeper, Asna, called to inquire about A, who is starting to come down with a cold. Earlier we had walked down to the lobby to ask for a cup of tea. Of course, I was given a tray with 3 china cups and saucers and a small bowl of sugar.

“When I mentioned we planned to get some take-out soup to bring A, when we went out to get our own dinner, our Innkeeper insisted over my objections that she would make soup, “When you are here, you are my family." J and K insist I was right, after profusely refusing twice, to finally concede and say A would be grateful to have some hot soup.”

This is from M's Journal:

"We stopped in a shop where young head-scarved women were making mosaics. Some are unmounted so that tourists can roll them up and take them home. We might have bought one, but we could not ask the price - they spoke no English. Most people do, to my surprise.

"The rug dealers fed us mint tea in lovely glasses, by the ubiquitous propane heater. It was about 50 degrees (F) and sunny today, a lovely spring day to me, and our hotel hostess assured us we would freeze."

Later that evening, on Christmas Eve, leaving A resting comfortably after her hot soup, J, K, M and I went out to dinner at the restaurant across the street from the Christian church with the ancient Roman mosaic map of the middle east. We had too much delicious food, three or four bottles of absolutely terrible local wine, and a hubbly bubbly filled with good cheer. I will never forget the music looping endlessly in the background during dinner: Jose Feliciano’s incongruous Felice Navidad.

A truly memorable Christmas eve.

Someday My Prince Will Come

Once upon a time, I bought a solar light shaped like a very large frog. He lived among the rocks in full sunlight, collecting and storing energy by day. By night, he emitted a pale green, un-froglike glow.

For over a year, he has watched silently over a family of feral cats and some skunks who live there - under and among the boulders and the dry brush I pile around them.

As he aged, and the plastic clouded over, and his green color was bleached out by the sun, his light grew softer, paler, yet somehow even stranger. By the end of summer, he had taken on a sinister patina and his evening light seemed to hint at some mysterious secret. As autumn faded, he looked like an exiled Russian dying in a British hospital, silently and malevolently radioactive.

Then, one recent night, the cats, or the skunks, knocked the frog off his rock perch and smashed the plastic base housing his solar collector. Separated from the source of his power, I thought he would never glow again. He seemed, finally, to be at peace.

But then, I noticed him recently, and he’d been transformed. As the western sun slanted low over the rocks late one winter afternoon, the enchanted frog was backlit in a glorious reincarnation of his former self. That’s him between the rocks, as seen from the twilight down below in the back yard. There he sits patiently, and with every sunset he regains his former glory for a few moments, waiting only for or a maiden’s kiss to transform into a handsome prince. And then, they will live happily ever after.

Before the world was made

Second cup of morning coffee, spiced with cardamom seeds and coriander. Unseasonably warm, mild and sunny out the window in the back yard. Cat purring on the desk by my side. Called doctor to request home health care services, and called Medicare to request a replacement Medicare card. The Medicare card has gone missing, along with her grocery store discount membership card - the later causing more anguish since she’s long since disengaged from insurance and health care matters.

When we age, it is not only our minds that get smoother and more simple. Our entire field of metaphysical vision narrows into a lovely tunnel vision. Then, like babies, our ego expands to fill the limited field of vision. Like my cat who craves nothing more than attention, the world narrows to revolve around old people. In the mirror, they see the face they had before the world was made.

Called my health insurance group plan, and then carrier to confirm who gets what forms for spouse. Because everyone is “experience high demand,” I put the phone on speaker and rinsed the dishes waiting for an operator. Awake enough to shake off the dreary grey mood that I sometimes find sitting on my chest when I awake. That itchy sense that everybody’s life is nothing more than a small splash made by a single drop of rain in a muddy puddle: drop plop and gone. The entire parade of man’s history is nothing more than a spring shower into a puddle.

What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.
William Butler Yeats, Before The World Was Made