Dogwood Victory Garden

 

Even as I write, the dogwoods are greening, the leaves are growing each day, covering the aging white bracts that so enchanted me for weeks. I am hurrying, hurrying this spring. It's all so rich and there's so much to be seen and listened to and learned. In April and May, life itself is a race, sometimes thoroughly exhausting, just trying to take in all the wonder. Add house and grounds maintenance to that, and I feel I am in constant motion. Someone said I'm like a shark, have to keep swimming to stay alive. Yes. Like a shark. 

I have to share these photos before the dogwoods drop all their bracts. I went out the evening of April 20 to shoot--the sky had just cleared and the cumulus clouds mimicked the floating clouds of dogwood blossoms. 

Curtis Loew loves taking these several times daily peregrinations out the orchard. He moseys along, usually in front of me, taking in the third dimension of smells as well as the sights and sounds I am able to enjoy. 

It was a most perfect evening--in the 70's, with a soft, gentle breeze. We meandered through the best dogwood passages slowly, spinning around to take them in from every angle. The cloud shapes echoed the puffs and platters of dogwood blossoms. It was like walking into a Maxfield Parrish painting.

This is what I've worked for, this is what I continue to work for--free dogwoods, floating. Dogwood waves breaking in the air, with nothing to stop their curling fall.

As much as I anticipated dogwood bloom this spring, it was so much more wonderful than I'd ever hoped. It was a visual spectacle, all the sweeter because I had freed almost every tree from piles of strangling honeysuckle and rose canes. I'd personally twisted those vines off their scarred trunks and limbs, gritting my teeth and smiling as I did it, thinking of what it would feel like to take in these sights. But still, they were so much lovelier than I had imagined.

In the morning, a sherbert like mix with blooming redbud and I am swooning with delight.

The peek of redbud at the end of the path...

Free open passages to walk without ducking or struggling; free trees with the breeze blowing in between them. My summer office, almost ready for occupancy. 

Phoebe and Liam got to be here for the start of the bloom, and for that I'll always be grateful. We resolved that they should try to be home each spring for this. Dogwood Bloom, our sacred family holiday.

For this, I cut the olive and rose; for this, I make the giant brushpiles; for this, I burn them. 

For this, I learned to wield a chainsaw, and that feels like a big thing to me. I feel powerful, indomitable, strong. I don't need to wait for anyone to help me now. For a woman alone in the world, that's big.

There is so much more to do. I will always be doing this, for as long as always may be for me. I know it isn't nearly long enough.

I so wish I'd started earlier, so I could have been living out here all this time.

But we start when we are ready, and not before.

If Bill were still here, I'd doubtless still be hoping that he'd come over and do a little chainsawing now and then. I'd never have hired the Amish crew to clear out the deadfalls and open the paths so I could get through to attack the work myself, never would have bought my own saw. I'd have been hoping, and none of this would have or could have happened. Life and death are strange that way. Sometimes it takes the death of someone you love to force you to realize you are capable. 

April is strange, too. This was my wakeup on April 21, the morning after I wandered the orchard in a T-shirt, smiling ear to ear. 

I realized that snow on white dogwoods just looks like more snow.

I knew the dogwoods would shrug it off. And they did, with not a mark or a wilt.

Everything came back just fine. I enjoyed the snow overlay on green for as long as it lasted, which was about six hours. Well, "enjoyed" isn't exactly the right word, but I took it in, even as I was dealing with the consequences of a late April snow event in other bluebirdy realms of my life.

Ain't it wonderful? Here:

 and gone:

The poison ivy has finally leafed out, which means I must stop for the season my mano-a-mano fight with invasive vegetation. I'm spot-spraying it in the interest of free access, as I continue to spot-spray the stumps of Russian olive and carpets of honeysuckle, and the small but countless tufts of multiflora rose re-growth. If I don't, all this hateful crap will simply come back, and after a year and a half of intensive clearing work, that would be a crying shame. Much as I hate to use any chemicals, I'm thrilled to say it looks for the moment like I'm winning this war, at least in one old ridgetop orchard somewhere in Ohio.

 Rather, the dogwoods are winning, and all native plants are winning. I keep finding amazing things coming up that I've never seen out there before. Onward we go, beating a path, ever beating a path, making strikes for the good and native against the horrid and invasive. 

 

Spring Fever. Cute Dog Photos.

It's a late spring, but it is a ravishingly beautiful one. Thanks to cold temperatures, the redbud has stayed abloom for what seems like weeks. Forsythia hung around forever, too, but now it's done in southern Ohio. A couple of times my rhubarb froze solid and dark, then thawed out and went on growing as if nothing had ever happened.   

I love it when the redbud hangs around until the dogwood comes out. Doesn't always work that way.

A haiku couplet from April 21:

Can rhubarb freeze dark

The leaves all crispy and still

Give up a nice pie?

The answer lies here

In the blue drooping lilac

The rime in the grass

Riddle of cruel Frost.

And the answer was yes. Though I'm more of a cobbler person. I throw it in with some apples nobody wants to eat, some strawberries, top it all with crumble, and then they fight over the last bit.

So we waited and waited for the hummingbirds, which usually arrive April 17. And when she settled on the front porch, managed to get a portrait of this little female, who looks as happy to see me as I am to see her. She was seven days late by my calendar, right on time by hers. If birds stuck to the calendar, they'd be dead. Better late than dead, right, Hum?

Thank you for the fresh nectar, Big Human. It is a nice substitute for honeysuckle in a pinch.

We have a blue jay thinking about nesting around our yard (psst: try the blue spruce!). He has a low rattling call that sounds like Paul doing the telephone on "Uncle Albert." Bill figured that out. Perfect. Bill caught him at it deep in a thicket and I got him in the telephoto. He makes us laugh. 

Brrrp brrp.  Brrrrp brrrp.

Hunting morels, with no success the first two times and a feast the second time,

 we came up on a pair of ovenbirds at the end of what used to be our orchard. I like the way they skulk softly over the leaves. If you listen closely you can hear their light footfalls. You can find them that way, by listening for their tracks.

While I was shooting this I was quietly asking Chet Baker to stay back so he wouldn't flush the bird. All I have to do is whisper "Stick around." 

So he whiled away the time by browsing. He'd eaten some bones the possums dragged out of the compost pit, and needed to clean out his guts. I've never seen him browse leaves off underbrush before. Like a goat, he was. Later he left the bone fragments, wrapped in leaves, on the forest floor. Dogs know how to fix what ails them. 

It also helps to upchuck on the bedspreads. I do that too.

Yes, you do. Twice, two beds. Way to go.

I like photographing this dog. If you haven't already figured it out, he likes it when I photograph him. 

He is Bulldog. He is Terrier. He is Invincible.

And very, very sweet.

We got spring fever here. Nothing for it but to keep going outside.

Bill and I will be immersed in spring at the New River Birding and Nature Festival this coming week, so if you don't hear from me, it's because I'm goin' all Zick on a bunch of festivalgoers. The Rain Crows will play on Saturday night. And our brand new CD, "Dream of Flying Dream," will be arriving in big boxes in Fayetteville, West Birdginia, and we'll get our first look at it. It's all a bit much, but it's exactly how we like it.