Category: Gardening

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Who In the Internet Universe Doesn’t Want Me Talking About My Garden?

I’ve been away from home again, and this time I was at David’s family house on the Jersey shore.  Knowing internet access would be sketchy there (one spot on the railing at the southwest corner of the deck picks up a faint signal sometimes), I downloaded a WordPress app for my iPhone.  I wanted to write about the paradox of the garden, about a conversation I had with my friend Kay about that, how we love our gardens and want them to be a source of joy and relaxation, and how often gardening instead ends up being a tortuous series of unachievable visions of bounty and perfection.

So I began the post on my new app on the drive down, then caught enough internet off the corner of the deck on Saturday morning to finish the post.  Later that night I checked it online and all looked fine.  Yesterday morning I was trying to look at it on my iPhone app and it was still the original few sentences of the first draft.  I tapped update, watched the whirling circle at the top of my screen, and there was the same beginning of the draft.  Tap, whirl, draft.  Over and over.

Then I looked online.  What had been the fully realized post was now the few sentence draft.  So I quickly wrote a sketchy replacement post, figured it had changed because of some iPhone app interface, and deleted the app.  I’m back at Adrienne and Matt’s this evening, where there is abundant internet, and checked my blog.  My sketchy post seemed to have gotten even sketchier — did I really post something that unfinished, or is there someone in the internet universe who doesn’t want me posting about how wonderful but agonizing gardening can be?

So, I took down the post.  Now the big gardening questions are how many kazillibillion peas will I have when I get home tomorrow, will my cole crop refugees from the woodchucked garden bed be flourishing or gnawed stumps, and will the carrots have finally germinated?  And how much will I torture myself to get done in the garden before leaving on Friday for our walk across England.  Yes, Friday!  Adventure awaits.

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Peonies

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Peonies in the garden, nodding their heavy heads towards the grass as I walk to the house from the car.   A grand bouquet of peonies on my kitchen table and a small globe of peonies aflame with western light on the coffee table, scenting the house, greeting me as I walk from room to room.  Peonies poking through the railings on my porch as I sit here, in late afternoon sun after a long day in the yard and garden.  The birds are quarreling, a cricket is whirring and I am awash in the deliciousness of peonies.

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Early Crocuses

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The crocuses are up early across the Northeast this year, the year with more or less no winter.  I saw crocuses weeks ago in New York, and now they’re here in New Hampshire. Helen’s crocuses, a carpet of spring  color on a neighbor’s lawn, planted decades ago by Helen Johnson when she was still alive, most likely long before I knew her when she was young, are blooming.  I wrote about the crocuses on this blog last year, including the poem about Helen and her flowers that was published in my chapbook of poetry, Fever of Unknown Origin.

Here’s another poem from Fever of Unknown Origin, this one about Norm Johnson, Helen’s husband.  Norm was a wonderful neighbor and a good friend.  He would pull his jeep over to the side of the road when he saw me in my garden and I’d go stand at his window and we’d chat.  Helen and Norman both died many years ago, but I think of them often as I look around my neighborhood, a lovely farm landscape they helped create and maintain throughout their lives.

And one interesting note, you can buy a copy of Fever of Unknown Origin on Amazon, for $3.00, or $66.00 or for $161.62.  If you want the $166.62 copy, let me know and I’ll make a deal with you.

Some Days

Stakes sawed raw at the point
slit the earth, hitting frost
only once all day, a good day,
for a body yanked by years
to this stiff heave from the cart
to help hold the barbed wire taut.

Most days are spent in a seat –
bucket loader, tractor, dump truck, mower,
these days mostly the jeep –
chatting with neighbors, napping, watching
one day as the milk herd is loaded into trailers
strangers drive away.

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Jardin Botanique de Montréal

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The botanical garden in Montreal is spectacular.  It’s considered one of the most important botanical gardens in the world, due to the extent of its gardens and plant collections, and is also one of the largest.  With over 181 acres, 10 greenhouses, more than 26,000 species of plants, arranged in stunning thematic gardens, it’s a mind-boggling treasure.  Every path David and I followed took us to another visual delight.

While we were taking photographs of the trumpet like seed heads of water lilies in the Chinese garden pool, a man came up behind us and said, “It’s so beautiful.  You could go all the way to China and not see anything as beautiful as this.”  As I agreed he asked if we’d seen the bonsai collection around the corner, which we hadn’t.  We followed a path around another corner, and there was miniature grandeur, perfectly shaped and sculpted tiny trees, some older than 100 years.  The living art of plants exemplified by the bonsai trees spoke for all that this botanical garden represents — finding and holding beauty so that it can speak its own language.

 

 

 

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Summer Flowers

It’s quiet on the back deck this morning.  I’m the first one up and enjoying the extra moments of ease and the brilliant fuchsia flowers in the big pot.  Potted summer flowers on my deck and porch are among my favorite parts of summers, and this pot is self-watering so I can leave it where it is, even when I’m away.

The real marker of what’s going on for me right now is that all the potted flowers for the front of the house and the two lobelia I keep on tables on the back deck have stayed tucked into a corner of the porch all weekend.  They make a lovely mass of pinks and purples and white, but ideally they’d be spread on tables and the steps and front entrance, welcoming people to the house.

When we got home from the shore a week and a half ago, I moved all the potted petunias and begonias and coleus and lobelia out into the sun.  I’d put them back in a corner of the porch when I went away, because otherwise they need to be watered every day.  Three days later, I was carrying them all back into the shaded corner, getting ready to go to Puerto Rico for a meeting of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center Advisory Council, one of the boards I’m staying on.

When I got home from Puerto Rico on Friday, I knew I’d be leaving again in a few days, and decided to skip the spreading of the flowers, knowing I’d just be gathering them all into the corner again, and I have enough to do as it is.  David and I are headed to Lancaster, to help pick up the pieces of the wreck from his family “falling off a cliff” as he describes it.  It’s no worse than what many friends of ours have managed with aging parents, but now that’s it’s here for us to manage, it feels like a lot.

So for now the flowers will continue to bloom, face out towards the west where the late sun angles in under the porch roof to reach them.  Not enough to dry out the pots, but enough to keep the blossoms bright.