What's In A Name?

I planted Cardinal Flower for the hummingbirds, thinking nothing more of the name than that the flower was bound to be flaming red, which it is.

The hummingbirds did love it, and I was delighted by seeing the little dudes make their rounds through the garden all summer long. But the hummingbirds made their way South a few weeks ago, and the Cardinal Flower vine has been slowly wrapping up, flowering more slowly and using what energy it has left for setting seed.

This morning I found a line of Cardinal Flower seed pods on the porch railing, torn open, and a female cardinal pecking away at them. She flew off when she saw me and her husband swooped in and took over the feast. There is a whole feeding station set up along the porch rail where they must have been bringing the pods to break open and eat.

I am delighted by this, by my assumption that a flower was named for a bird's color, a surface level nod to the wild world, only to find that it was named for the bird that eats it, a much deeper connection between people, the plants we grow, and the wildlife that flit between the wild and the cultivated.

Old Ben Davis

How many years have I grown apples without ever eating one? I hope this year breaks the curse. I have been watching this apple, from a Ben Davis tree in the espalier around the vegetable garden, for many months. There were two, the only two apples from the new trees, and I picked the first much too early. I have high hopes for its more mature twin.

Other things are blooming in early October: a wonderful perennial sunflower and an unexpected Salvia brought home from an herb fair, labeled simply "sage."

There are lavender and sedum and roses and cosmos too, of course. I forget that October is so full of flowers. I am always focused on the spring, and yet fall has such beauty.

I Finally Find Birds

It isn't like I never liked birds, before. I just didn't find them worth watching, unlike, say, a slowly developing flower bud. But things change. A madman is elected president and I take up bird watching. Perhaps the two are related.

What really started me looking at birds was this new window.

After over a dozen years in our little house we are finally fixing it up - literally fixing the bits that were falling apart, and also making the changes I've dreamed of making but never thought we'd get to. Like having an enormous bay window in an open airy main room. We still need to have dry wall and ceilings put in, but those are details. The important part is sitting in that rocking chair and looking out at the birds as the sun rises each morning.

We've gone through bag after bag of birdseed, and for the trouble we have fed a legion of starlings, a flurry of squirrels, and eight other species of birds that I know of - cardinals, blue jays, tufted titmice, house finches, sparrows, mourning doves, hairy woodpeckers, Carolina wrens. And one rat.


I'm not sure how to think about finding a love of bird watching from the comfort of my rocking chair. If I had found a love of ornithology and field biology I'd be a bit less embarrassed. But perhaps its just that older people know stuff that younger people don't, like that sitting by a window staring out at little creatures with a cup of coffee by your elbow does something good to your brain. So I'm not going to fight it. If I become an eccentric old bird lady, so be it. I could do worse.

Heat

The summer has been hot. Too hot. As I drove home from work yesterday my car's dashboard kindly informed me that it was 104 degrees outside. I'm pretty sure the car exaggerated, but I understand the impulse. It was hot.


The poor garden has been hot, too, and dry. Of all the garden chores in the world watering is my least favorite, but also the chore my garden would most like me to do regularly. Poor garden - dependent on a person who loves it deeply, but cannot provide what it most needs. Tough love, garden, tough love. It seems to be surviving despite me.

I added espalier apples around the vegetable garden this spring. I finally got my Cox's Orange Pippin and a couple other heirloom apples that I've been reading about and wanting for years. I am hoping that they will help add a little structure and screening to the veggie garden, which looks nice in the early spring when the currants bloom and the kale comes up, but then declines into messiness and weeds come summer. I also just like to espalier things.

Milo doesn't seem to mind the heat too much, despite being a bulldog.

But I still blame all the garden destruction - decapitated lilies, yellowed lawn, and dog wallows in the flower beds - on him.

We have another creature I can blame some of the destruction on, perhaps. We have been seeing a rat in the garden, a beautiful sleek creature that frequents the back porch and the ground-level window of Grant's office. I asked Grant if he had seen the rat, and added "And did you notice? He has the most enormous -" and Grant cut in "balls. Yes, I know. Huge." What does it say about us, I wonder, that we both notice rat genitalia? To be fair, it was pretty hard to ignore. So while our well endowed rat is beautiful and I have no real problem with garden rats (aside from plague, of course) I'm not sure our neighbors feel the same, so I'll be working on new, screened compost bins this fall.

Escape into the Garden

It seems there is no end to the ugliness in the news this summer. Police brutalizing and killing black people, crazies murdering police, young men full of hate committing murder with guns on a massive scale, a political season that leaves me wondering how we got to this ugly place, and how we can possibly find our way to a more hopeful, more just country.

I escape the radio and newspapers in the garden. There is plenty of death, destruction, violence, and uncouth behavior in the garden, but at least we humans aren't to blame for it.

One day in June:

One day in July:

New Paths

One warm-ish day in February I decided that what we really needed was a gravel path between the driveway and the front path. The grass was trampled and thin from all of us cutting across rather than going around, and I have been eying the area bound by the house, the driveway, the sidewalk, and the front path for years as potential garden bed. But digging out grass and building paths is no easy task, so I procrastinated. Until that warm-ish day in February.

Wandering Eye

I’ve been looking at houses online. It feels transgressive, a betrayal of my solid and unexciting little house. We’ve been together for so many years, you see, and it really was a perfect match all those years ago, but now I look at other houses and think about what might have been. Or could be.

There is one house for sale I keep looking up. The house itself is nothing special, aside from its spectacular 1960’s ranch house mojo. If we bought it I would spend months ripping out dirty carpet and pink toilets. But it backs up to the Patuxent river, with a half acre of land running down into the parkland at the river’s edge. I can imagine a garden tumbling down that hill, meeting the forest in a shrubby verge, and continuing along a mysterious path through the woods to the river at the bottom of the valley. I imagine Noah spending afternoons playing by the creek with his dogs, rather than playing Minecraft on the iPad.

But I keep circling around the idea that this little house of ours, with all its flaws, is somehow alive. I feel tender toward it, sorry for its hurts and insults, and I would grieve to leave it alone in the neighborhood without us. All of this is ridiculous. And yet I can’t help but feel that the lives lived in a house are connected to that house, that severing the link to a place severs the link to those lives. Maybe I feel this more keenly as someone with a terrible memory. I need the place to trigger the memory of things that happened there. I don’t want to lose the wedding rehearsal dinner in the backyard, the Thanksgivings with now-gone family, the sound of rain on the tree by our bedroom window, the feel of Noah’s skin as I rubbed his back at bedtime. I want to keep the lives I have lived in this house close to me, safe from time.

That nothing is safe from time, especially not a house or a memory, should be clear to me by now. And yet I am reluctant to willfully leave my past selves alone in a discarded house. I hope that when the time comes to go, as it inevitably will someday in the next fifty years, those past selves hold on tight and come along for the ride.

Fairy Tale

Some things only come with time. A pergola hung with roses in June is one of them. And under this pergola with its softly falling rose petals we will celebrate Mom and Dad's fiftieth wedding anniversary this weekend. For just a few weeks this shabby little house looks like a fairy tale cottage, snug and embowered with blooms. No marriage is a fairy tale, but getting to celebrate fifty years of love and life surely is a story worth telling. Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.

More views of summer

A view of summer

Summer in Review

Maybe the best spot from which to view my garden is the upstairs bathroom window, while sitting on the pot. I don't know if it is the angle and perspective down onto the garden, and the particularly nice view of the corner of the vegetable garden where, outside of the fence, there is a mix of plants that somehow looks just right, or if it is the enforced stillness that makes it the best place to actually see the garden. I don't know that I ever really look at it, except from that window. I sometimes wonder what my neighbor sees and thinks if she looks up at dusk and sees my head, back lit, peeking behind the bathroom curtain and down into the garden.

It has been a cool and lovely summer, a nice one for being out in and for looking out at. Last winter's polar vortex blasted many things, including the stink bugs and, I think, some of the Asian tiger mosquitoes. Some of the more wonderful things that were blasted, too, like Noah's fig tree, have come back. The fig's regrowth is now about 6 feet high, with some small green figs just shaping up. The limbs are soft and seem tenuously connected to the ground, but hopefully the tree is really and truly back. Noah won't be climbing it any time soon, but at least his friend is alive and well. The butterfly bushes seem to have enjoyed their bashing by frost, and are blooming beautifully this summer, and the raspberries are large and flavorful. It has been a less friendly year for the annuals, which got a late start and are just now taking off.

Grant and I forgot our wedding anniversary this month, and it occurs to me that our anniversary is also my anniversary with this little plot of land (roughly speaking, anyway, much to my mother-in-law's horror at the time). Eleven years I have gardened this one fifth of an acre. I still remember the warm summer night we had our rehearsal dinner in the backyard, and how wonderful the cosmos and salvias looked in their crescent shaped bed that arced across the back yard. That bed is gone, and new beds have been made and unmade over the years. I don't think, though, that one has ever been as beautiful or hopeful as that first sweep of flowers cut through a scruffy lawn. Happy anniversary, garden. And you, too, Grant.

A Loss

The fig has died, I am afraid. I don't usually get too sentimental or even upset by the death of a plant, even an old large one, because the space it opens up is a space for something new. But this fig tree is Noah's special place to go when he is sad, or happy, or just needing time alone, his "happy place," as he calls it. The winter was too much for it.

It may spring from its roots, I suppose, but it will be years before new shoots are sturdy enough to climb on, and by then Noah will be beyond tree climbing. How can that happen, that a boy's tree climbing years are so fleeting? You cannot grow a tree for a child to climb, you must have one ready for him, or maybe plant one for your grandchild.

I remember the last figs we ate off that tree. Betsy came over with her family, and we picked the figs for her to take home. And now they both are gone, the friend and the fig, done in by a winter that was far too cold.

Rats and Bleeding Hearts

The peas are well up, the lilacs are blooming, and the bleeding hearts are dripping their flowers over drifts of violets. I found today to my surprise that apple blossoms have a powerful, sweet scent. How did I not know that, after all these years in the garden?

While planting those bleeding hearts a few weeks ago I pulled up, in my bare hand, the dry skull of a rat. I knew it was a rat skull because I had put a dying rat under the shade of the rose of sharon last fall, after we found the screaming thing in the back yard, hurt and terrified and dying. I wondered then whether there was anything I could do for it, other than get it away from the dogs and keep it out of the sun. I considered all the grisly ways I could help it into the great beyond, but in the end could do nothing but give it shade and let it be. And so now when I look at the bleeding hearts I also remember a dying rat, and how it made me feel like a coward. There are hellebores and daffodils and hostas in that bed, too, and I like it very much.

The dogs may have been responsible for the rat, or it may have been the feral neighborhood cats. At Noah's suggestion we put in a little fish pond this spring, and stocked it with four little feeder fish from the pet store. They did well and grew madly for a few weeks, and I could see them jumping after food as I looked out the second floor bathroom window. And then one day three of them were gone, and today the last one went. The neighbor over the back fence says there is a heron that has eaten her neighbor's fish, and I suppose it could have also been a raccoon. But I see those cats in my backyard, walking the fence tops, and I blame them for it all, the fish, the rat, all of it.

A friend returns

The bat is back. I hope of course, that it is the bats, plural, that area back. It is the first really warm night of spring, an eighty degree day of sun and a mild night with soft breeze. And so as dark fell I went outside to look up as the stars appeared, and to wait for the bat, though not with much hope as there aren't yet very many bugs. But he arrived, my friend did. I wonder what kind he is, and if he is affected by the bat plague, and whether he is the last sad holdout of his kind, because there used to be multiple bats in the summer night sky, but the last years I have usually only seen the one. He looks to be larger than the little brown bats I've seen in Main, and one of which I removed from a terrified housemate's room in Boston. This guy, this suburban bat, seems of a more substantial kind.

Truly Spring

The daffodils are blooming, as are the camellias. The camellias are more brown than pink this year, due to the cold winter, but they are blooming none the less. The tops of the trees are blasted, though, with a foot or so of each high branch brown and crisp. There is a spray of cheerful forsythia draped over the fence behind the (still leafless) rose of sharon thicket. Below the rose of sharon, where I can see them from the living room window, I have moved the Hellebores that used to live in the shade of the ornamental plum tree by the kitchen. I thought they would thrive there, and that I would admire them when I gazed out the window on a cold day, but they have been ravaged by squirrels that seem to think that patch of ground is their private property. Other plant friends are starting to wake up - the snouts of lilies are poking above ground, the oregano is green and growing, and there are buds on the lilacs, though the flowers are weeks away, I think. I cut the year's first asparagus tonight. It is spring, truly.

I can't recall ever feeling so relieved that winter is over, as if this year winter were some malevolent force that we have suffered through. Like the camellias, I feel blackened by it. We did go sledding, and drink hot chocolate, and celebrate Christmas. And yet I hope there isn't another winter like this last one for a long time.

A Long Winter's End

There are crocuses blooming in the snow, and daffodils in bud. Plants, surely, have some inside information that this long cold winter is done? I have had enough of snow. There are things that have not made it through the winter: the tender buds of pink camellias, now frozen and brown; last year's growth on the figs, and maybe more; a dear friend, gone in a flash and leaving so much she loved behind her. She would have had more patience than I do for the platitudes and schlock about divine purpose. I usually take great comfort in knowing our world recycles life, all life, great and small, but this winter I haven't. Life into death into life is all well and good in the long view, but this winter there is a boy who needed his mom, and I refuse to try to find meaning in it.

But the crocuses are blooming, and perhaps the snow is done. Perhaps.

An old friend

What does it say when a garden blogger hasn't blogged in six months?  Nothing good about the garden, I can tell you. It seems the summer and fall passed without much impact on my gardening mind. Oh, I got out there every once in a while, I dug, I harvested, I moved some plants around. But mostly, this year, I just didn't. Part of that was getting myself into so many gardens that I couldn't care enough about any of them. My home garden, the church farm, my community garden plot...all weedy, all ferrel, all neglected.

But late this afternoon, looking out the window at the bird feeder and thinking that I didn't want to do one more thing that had anything to do with the care and feeding of my family or job, my garden whispered in my ear: I'm still here, you neglectful dolt, it said. It surprised me, like an old friend calling out of the blue.

Espalier Update

The espalier pears are growing, thankfully.  I was worried I had taken off too much, and that they would die. But they are hardy little things, and are putting out growth on their remaining, uncut limbs.  The photos above and below are the line of espalier from the neighbors' driveway (above) and from my front walk (below)

Here is how one little pear looks with its soft little limbs tied down to stakes with kitchen string.  The books said to try a 45 degree angle to start, and then to lower the stakes to horizontal in the fall.

The cicadas are coming (don't you just hear Paul Revere?) and I worry about my little trees.  I have been frantically trying to find out how high cicadas need to climb before they'll lay their eggs.  I am hoping that my little trees are too short still to count as "trees" to those buggers.  I guess we'll find out.

Garden Log

Surprised, Again

Those little white bells along their green stems are perfuming my living room, along with a vase of white and purple lilacs beside them.  When I sit down in my chair to read - every time! - I am surprised by the scent.  

The flowers of this shrub (I've already forgotten its name) have no scent that I can tell, but the flowers surprise me all the same, blooming with their blood red petals under a tree where all else is some shade of green, or maybe a demure white.

There are other surprises in my garden this week - the espalier pears are leafing out, finally, and seem to have survived my surgery on their limbs; last fall's pansies along the front fence are exuberant and lovely, when I never before thought to admire a pansy; and Milo chewed up some unknown plant, now just a root ball and a woody, chewed crown.  Who knows who the victim was?  I'll find out some day when I go to check on a plant in an out of the way spot and find a hole.  But by in large the good surprises outweigh the bad this week, and for that I am grateful.