Catching up #3: The garden

 

I can manage one garden area at a time it seems. The one that I attend to blooms and shines and the others seem to languish, weedy and sad looking, needing attention and loving care.

This year, I've focused on the back terrace/retaining wall garden, which is my favorite simply because I see it the most. I come in and out the door above the terrace so look down on it every time I come and go. I walk on the brick walk at its edge when I go down to the pool or take out the compost. I see it from the kitchen window, my reading chair, the porch, the deck. We put a whole lot of work into this area several years ago. It was the summer of 2007 when we dug into the collapsing hillside and built a retaining wall. A few years before that, we had terraced the hillside using busted up concrete slabs. My boys put a lot of muscle and sweat into this garden, so it's no surprise it's my favorite. I'm glad that it is finally really coming into its own.

I've planted several day lily cultivars in the past couple of years. This year they were so lovely.

The lemon thyme, rosemary, sage, lavender, and comfrey are well established. Parsley and basils of various types fill in the gaps. A couple of tomato plants find sun in the top terrace and volunteer butternut squashes are winding their way through the lower beds.

The knock-out, Julia Child, and other roses and the purple salvia were at their peak a few weeks back.

The white phlox and shasta daisies are starting to bloom. The pixie hydrangea has filled out nicely and the hostas are multiplying. I'd like a few more annual flowers for cutting. I did start seeds this spring, but they were old and the germination rate was poor. So, few or no bachelor buttons, cosmos, or zinnias.

Up next, some garden before and after pics ...

To my northern readers ...

... my sympathy and apologies. I am about to tell you things you may not want to hear.  If you would rather not know of daffodils already well on their way to blooming, stop reading now.  You have snow on the ground and probably more to come.  Then it will be mud season.  I remember.  I lived in New England for 13 years.  I loved the snow and cold of December and January, but past Valentine's Day, as February drew to a dreary close, I began to long for spring.  But I knew it would still be a long time coming.  So, if you are tired of the snow, dreading the mud, and longing for an earthy whiff of warming leaf mold or the fragrance of lilacs, you have my sympathy.  And my apologies for what I am about to tell you.

Yesterday afternoon, it was 75 degrees. Sometimes this week, when the sun hasn't been shining, a gentle rain has fallen.  This morning, we're having a booming thunderstorm.  But it's warm enough to sit out on the porch take it all in.  Who doesn't love a good thunderstorm?

One afternoon earlier in the week, I sat on the porch, in short sleeves, reading. The cat, who loves the warmth just as much as I do and had spent most of the day exploring outside, jumped up on the chair beside me.  The very damp earth, soggy with snow melt and rain, warmed, and the stream out back flowed. The chorus frogs were singing. The breeze caressed.  I took a deep breath and spring filled my nostrils and lungs.

This time last week, we'd just had a "historic" snow storm.  Weather-caster hyperbole.  8 inches of snow and three days school vacation hardly seem worthy of that designation.  Perhaps our years in the Berkshires, when 8 inches was an inconvenience and the plows might take just a little longer to get the roads cleared, makes me skeptical of all the hype, and gives me a certain nonchalance about what my local weatherman declares to be historic. But, historic or not, it's all behind us now.  The tiny patches of snow lingering in shady spots have all melted away and I am hunting, hunting, hunting for more signs of spring.

 the very last little patch of last week's snow and one brave daffodil

Oh, the cold will be back.  The temperatures will drop and it may even snow again, and we will worry about our early flowers.  But spring is announcing her arrival ... and I am ready.

We fed chickadees ...

out of our hands today.

"Simple Aliveness"

"Things have changed greatly and still are changing, can they change much more? ...

And yet I wonder sometimes whether we are progressing.  In my childhood days life was different, in many ways, we were slower, still we had a good and happy life, I think, people enjoyed life more in their way, at least they seemed to be happier, they don't take time to be happy nowadays."   

-Grandma Moses from her autobiography, published in 1952 (she was then 92)

Hoosick Falls in Winter, painted in 1944

Phillips Collection

"For all who suffer from what might be called living strain - and many do complain about the malady - a few minutes' exposure to the presence of Grandma Moses is powerful therapy.  On Tuesday this ninety-three-year-old lady made one of her rare trips from her up-state home in Eagle Bridge, NY, to appear at the annual Herald Tribune Forum.  Some said that she stole the show.  Others were impressed with her astonishing vitality, her mental alertness, her humor, simplicity, graciousness, enjoyment of the occasion, and so on.  The plain fact is, everybody felt reinvigorated while in her presence. ...

While many distinguished persons were appearing before the Forum, a little old lady of ninety-three stepped into their midst and endeared herself to all by her simple aliveness ..."

-New York Herald Tribune, October 22, 1953

This part of the country, this area of eastern New York, just near the Vermont border, is sometimes called Grandma Moses Country.   She began painting here when she was in her late 70's.  She lived to be 101.

I've driven these roads over the last four weeks - over the pass from Bennington looking down across snowy hillsides and rolling pastures toward the ice rimmed Hoosick River, passing old farms with their colonial era houses (white, with dark green shutters, very like my own house in North Carolina!) and red barns and weathered out buildings.  I've watched the colors of the sky change with the weather, brilliant azure on clear days with the sun casting long, undulating shadows across the snow, and gunmetal gray on days when the sun barely manages to pierce the overspreading haze of low, snow-laden clouds.  I've listened to the train that follows tracks right along the Hoosick and watched it slow to a crawl through the village, little boys waiting on the sidewalk to cross the tracks, counting the cars as they waved their arms and stamped their feet to keep warm.  I've noticed birches and sugar maples and old, old oaks.

On a beautiful walk in the woods and then over tea with Mary in front of the woodstove, I felt the sweetness of simple aliveness.  I think a few minutes exposure to the presence of my dear friend is pretty powerful therapy.  She doesn't paint, but she walks and knows the woods and trees and especially the birds, and hand feeds the chickadees as they follow her around the yard and down the driveway.  Anybody that comes to visit can hold out a hand with sunflower seeds and it's not long before a chickadee alights to snatch a seed. That's enough to reinvigorate anybody!

Driving home down the mountain late in the afternoon, the beauty caught me and held me. I imagined Grandma Moses looking at scenes so much like the one spread out in front of me.  The low rounded mountains, the foreground dotted with farm houses and fields and woods, and a winding river. I could understood her love of this place.  I'm very glad she picked up her brushes at 78 and started to paint.


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I'm also grateful to Alicia Paulson for mentioning this book, a used copy of which I promptly purchased and have just finished reading.

The fall colors I love

I am not an orange, rust, burgundy kind of girl.  I do appreciate those colors splashed across a hillside, lit by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun on a glorious fall day.  But they aren't really my colors.

These are my fall colors ...

Beauty berry purple 

Callicarpa americana

and the airy, delicate pink of the muhly grass, 

with sunny yellow helianthus in the background.

Taken at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill last weekend, while on a walk with these delightful people ...

Montana #3: Owls

I stepped out onto the front porch this morning, coffee, Bible, and book in hand. Luke had left early for the ranch and Erin and Clara were still sleeping. Across the ravine in front of the cabin about 100 yards away, stand two pine snags. As I glanced that direction this morning, I noticed a large buff-colored shape on one of the branches. Without my contacts in, I couldn't tell what it was, so I set my mug and books down and stepped back inside for the binoculars on the table by the door.

The buff-colored shape turned out to be a juvenile Great Horned owl and a couple of branches below it, perched an adult owl

I love owls. The frequent hooting and caterwauling of the Barred Owls in the woods around home is one of the reasons I love where we live. But I seldom see the owls. Today, in a very different habitat from our piedmont woodland, I stood riveted to my spot, watching in wonder.

An hour later when Erin and Clara awoke, the owls were still there ... and I was still watching.   The only thing that makes a sighting like that more thrilling is sharing it!