cycle of flowers

It's like a bike ride through seasonal change. A long bike ride. Every few days we come to a new destination. The starting point? Crocus land. Soon after -- daffodils, with side spins to the villages of helleborus and hyacinth. We passed many Syberian squill. Blue with cold and envy as towering tulips overshadowed them. And speaking of blue, remember our pause along Virginia Bluebell lane? 

Then came the big ones: the orchard blooms, followed by the megalopolis herself -- the crab apple. We weren't quite out of her territory before we reached the lilacs.

 

 

We're still with the lilacs now, but it wont be for long. I see allium heads everywhere and peonies on the horizon. And yes, the occasional iris has cropped up along the way. And today, I saw the early Clematis: white, gorgeous, huge.

We leave one behind only to face the abundance of another. And so it continues, until the last aster fades in October, the white flowers of Calamintha have said goodbye to the once hovering bees, the tall spider lily has won the race with the almost as tall phlox.

Yes, there is a wistfulness in gardening. You have to say a lot of goodbyes. It will be hard, for example, to wake up to the last full lilac presentation. Maybe it's today, maybe it's on the weekend. You can't tell for sure. Yet you're always looking forward to the next pause with the next flower species. Perhaps this is the best part of perennial gardening: you strive to live in the moment, but you know damn well that there's excitement ahead too. Goodbye asparagus, hello strawberries! (Actually we have just entered asparagus season. A big yay to one of my very favorite vegetables which, like corn, tastes best when it's freshly harvested.)

It was a very early morning for me. A dental appointment. Nothing consequential. We mostly chatted about knee replacements (my dentist just had his second one). Still, it meant that I had to do the morning walk very early. The good of it -- the garden is magnificent in the morning light!

Breakfast is late, but on the porch. Beautiful and indulgent. When Ed says -- let's go take a look at the vegetable patch, I retort -- please, let's just sit here for a while. It's so rare that I am not in a rush!

We then do go out to look at the veggie fields. Once upon a time I tried planting a fuller vegetable garden here, but the soil was so darn awful that it was, I felt, a waste of time. Yes, tomatoes do well, with added compost, but the lettuces (so hard to save from visiting animals), the radishes, the carrots? Forget it. Still, this year Ed convinced me to try again. The soil is much improved after years of chipping and covering with fabric. The weeds aren't gone, but they're on the retreat. He's already planted the baby artichokes and melons and cukes. He showed me spaces between strips of fabric for my lettuce and carrot seeds.

I'm not convinced that any of it will thrive. We don't have fencing. We don't have raised beds. We don't have great soil (it's better, but it's not great). It's a distance from the farmhouse so I don't have an eye on its progress, its watering needs. 

And yet.

Gardening, as I have said before, is for the optimists among us. The planting wont be even and neat and compact and pretty, but I can give it a try -- in the crooked rows between pieces of fabric. I mean, why not. Three carrot varieties, a radish, a romaine and two radicchios.

Because we did get rain yesterday, the weeds are again trying to push through in the flower fields, so I try to stay on top of that as well. All that belongs to my morning and early afternoon.

 

Afterwards, I have to attend to my mother, who is being moved from the hospital where she was being treated for some muscle pain, to the rehab center where the hope is she will regain some of her strength so that she can return to her Assisted Living unit. I have no more to add to this (for now). It's a process and it's something I need to work on because, well, that's the way it is. My mother is not a happy camper in the best of times and she is certainly not one at the moment and though I have no illusion that she will magically take on happy camper traits in the week ahead, the goal for her has to be to reach the same state that she was in before she pulled a muscle.

Because of this, I had to bow out of helping with the kids this afternoon. The parents took over while I concentrated on the job of signing papers and fetching stuff she wanted from her apartment.

 

Evening. I make my way to the grocery store. I'm trying to keep this down to once a week and it's sort of working. It's a perfect thing to do after taking care of things over at the Rehab Center. I find the aisles of my grocery store to be happy places. Cheerfully full of fresh produce, flowers even. 

And then home. Ed is biking, so the normally quiet farmette lands are extra quiet. [We have noticed that because the new development lots are small, no one uses power mowers. In the suburbs, their roar is a weekend constant. Here, we never hear them. Well, except for our one neighbor. He's old school. That's fine. He tries to keep his space tidy and has great patience with the likes of us, who rarely mow and do not use weed control chemicals or fertilizers on our grasses.]

Evenings are beautiful here, especially now, before we start fretting about mosquitoes. I stay on the porch for a long while and just listen. To the birds (so many! This is what my app tells me -- in the space of two minutes, the following visited our farmette lands: the American Robin, Northern Cardinal, Red-winged Balckbird, Tree Swallow, American Crow, House Sparrow, Chimney Swift, Song Sparrow, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Chipping Sparrow, Common Grackle, Brown-headed Cowbird, Black-capped Chickadee, Cedar Waxwing, European Starling, and the House Wren). And in between all that music, there is that beautiful silence. Because birds do that to you -- they quiet all that's within your head.

Dusk. Ed's back. Can I get you some watermelon?

with love...