Gratitude and Goodbyes

You will remember, in the last post, that I turned up a box turtle nest when I was weeding  Bill's grave. I could not have been more dumbfounded to uncover those perfect leathern eggs in the loamy clay, just behind his head (he wanted to face East, to see the sun rise). Or more delighted (although there was a certain shiver to my spine, to think how close I'd come to driving my spade through them).

It felt like a gift from Bill. A little precious thank-you for the gravetending for him and his parents, which takes time and gasoline, shovels and tractors and effort, and not just one-time effort. For good, or as long as I can do it. It's not trivial.

 I am writing this up in the tower room so I can watch the sun rise. It is a doozy of a sunrise. I can hear rubythroats chittering, cardinals chipping, a brown thrasher skidding** and smacking, a catbird whucking, and a distant crow hollering. Now a peewee, now a blue-winged warbler with its dry chickering trill. A yellow-billed cuckoo whoops softly. A hooded warbler gives a melodic chip.  The oranges and salmons just get more and more intense and this morning I feel like the luckiest person alive. I get to sit up in this tower, listen to the birds wake up, watch the sunrise, and write a little. My daughter's asleep in her bed below for one more blessed morning.

 

 Today we start our journeys: she back to the Canary Islands to teach and hike and cook and  love and figure out what the next few years of her life might look like; me to Colorado with my best friend Shila to launch Saving Jemima at the Yampa Valley Crane Festival in Steamboat Springs. I'll give a talk that, if I do it right, no one is gonna dream took me months to put together. First, to mow the lawn, haul a 5-gallon jug of water out to the new tree, take Curtis to the kennel for the first time (I'm trying to be as chill as he probably will be about that). Anyway, lucky.

He was cool enough about the kennel to eat his dunner in the office while we waited for his placement. Do I love leaving him at a kennel, even a fabulous one? Nope.  I'm looking for someone in the Marietta, Ohio area who a. doesn't travel all the time like me
b. doesn't have cats or, preferably, other dogs and c. would love Curtis' companionship while I flak my new book all over the place. Curtis came to me with a zero-tolerance policy on cats, and there's no changing that.

 

Now, back to our story. We've just planted the Memorial Maple and are sending Liam off. 

 

I had to hurry back to the house as soon as we got the tree watered in,
because Liam was taking off in a few minutes for Morgantown, to start another school year at WVU.

Liam's pretty used to saying goodbye to me and Phoebe. I'd be lying if I said he's gotten used to saying goodbye to Curtis. There's something about a dog that lets your love come flowing out, unfettered. It's a simple, uncomplicated, but very deep love. It has to do with the satiny feel and warm popcorn smell of a dog, too, and in that it's quite primitive and all the more piercing.

 

When Liam thought this was the last kiss he'd go in for just one more. Gosh he looks like my brother here.

This is one sweet, sweet cur-dog.

And one sweet, sweet young man.

Funny thing about Curtis. He didn't quite get this kissing thing when he first came to us in February. It was a rare, rare thing to see that pink tongue come out. He always looked a little puzzled when we'd land a smooch on his muzzle. We figure it wasn't part of his upbringing with his first family. Now? It's like Chet Baker has been tiptoeing in and giving him kissing lessons at night. He's shameless. He responds to, "Give me a kiss!" with a sweet smackeroo. Good dog, Curtis! Curs go where they're needed, and we need a lot of kisses around here.

 

One of Phoebe's 700 good-bye kisses to the sweetest curdoggie.  

Phoebe drove Liam into town to meet his cousin Gus. They'd drive to Morgantown together. Grateful, once again, not to make that three-hour trek, grateful that Liam and Gus have each other as they face all the challenges of life and college. I kissed them goodbye and looked around the front gardens.

This is the time of year the Achimenes stands up to be counted. Some little bits of rhizome snuck into the soil I used to pot my bargain gardenia last fall, and oh!! look at them now!

 

I'm getting photos from all kinds of people to whom I've given Achimenes rhizomes. So delightful! You put up with a straggly bunch of plants for what seems like forever, until they do THIS in mid-August. I wish I knew on what mysterious timer these plants run; why they wait and wait and wait to bloom, but they do.  Honestly I think they need shorter days to trigger blooming. I used to think they needed heat, so I tried that, growing them in the tower room well into June, baking them in hope of buds. Nope. They are worth every month of waiting.

I turned to the golden raspberries Connie Toops gave me years ago and did a little shirt picking. What a gift! They had a big first crop in June, and then the coons found them and busted down most of the canes. The raspberries sent up more canes and we are keeping them as closely picked as we can, every day, and I get to put THIS in my yogurt every morning!

I cut some spearmint and lemon verbena for Runner's Tea.

I stopped and marveled at what a couple of handfuls of Osmocote and Ironite can do for a very tired planter of flowers. Why hadn't I fed them earlier??

 

My pomegranate bonsai, which is in no danger of ever being planted on anyone's grave, is full of miniature fruit this summer. Oh how I love this willing little tree.

The tuberoses are just of the charts wonderful this year. They perfume the entire yard at dusk. The big sphinx moths come zooming in to feed. Grateful.

 

Then, before I forgot to do it, I went to the garage and fetched a big wire bike basket and three stakes. I positioned it over the turtle nest. Carefully, I drove them in, and replaced the fencing.  No skunk or coon would make dinner of this turtle nest.

I'll keep watering the turtle nest, when I water the new tree. Box turtle eggs incubate for three months, and these were probably laid in late May or early June. I'll keep my fingers crossed that one day I'll find a neat round hole, dug out from the inside (no tailings mounded beside it) where some newly minted turtlets have made their way out.

A mighty fortress is this grave. 








**The brown thrasher's mild alarm call sounds to me like a bike skidding to a halt on gravel, a muted, low ksssshhhh; while its higher intensity alarm call is like two marbles smacking together.

The Enchanted Garden

This is a post I wrote in August, before a lot of other stuff happened. I stuffed it away and saved it for a time when I wouldn't feel like writing. Which turns out to be now. I keep checking: still got nothing.

I took the enchanted basil forest down in early August. 

Best basil I've ever grown. I had little to do with it. It was the rain that made the leaves big and tender. Wow, what beautiful basil. And for once I harvested it in the height of its growth, not in October when most of the leaves have fallen off and the rest are yellowing. Beautiful!!

After the cutting. The plants are still there, and may well send up just that much growth again before frost. Yikes!

All that basil reduced down to this many leaves, which Liam helped me strip off the stems.

And all these leaves, with some pine nuts and parmesan and a lot of olive oil, made 13 jars of delicious pesto. Just finished my dinner, 3 cheese ravioli drenched in fresh pesto. Mmmmm! Good thing I ran today, and am going to rake the yard again.

Amazingly, the manure-fed rhubarb is still going pretty strong, and I've made some bitchin' cobblers lately. Oh I love that stuff sooo  much. Just looking at this photo makes me feel thankful.

I so vastly prefer shopping in my garden to shopping in the produce aisle. I love summer cooking. It's so easy and fast, with all this organic produce flowing into the kitchen.

Speaking of happy, here's the first big crop of golden raspberries we've had. Yes, that's young asparagus curling around, from the seeds I planted in the greenhouse two springs ago. It'll probably be five more years before I can harvest any, but that's OK. I'm waiting anyway.

My dear friend Connie Toops has given me a couple of batches of raspberry plants from her amazing mountainside garden in North Carolina over the last five years or so. Cutting all the trees that were shading them, liberal applications of cow manure, and a rainy summer were apparently what they required to really take off, spread and give us enough to carry some in from the garden. I.E. enough so that they aren't all gut-picked right there in the patch. Ahhhh!! sooo good.

Best of all, there have were still some on the plants for Phoebe. It's been lovely for Phoebe to have a little time here rolling around with me in August's glorious bounty.  She had a beautiful two weeks with Chet Baker. She went back to school August 26, and, goodbye kisses given and received, he very quickly got on with the business of leaving this world. Bless his little soul. A gentleman to the end. As I think about it, it was best that way, a perfect visit, with him feeling pretty good, even able to go on hikes, and Phoebe able to remember him that way. I brought him to her arms when she woke up each morning. 

Sweet puppy kisses and golden raspberries. Life was good for Phoebs. Right next to them, the last naked lady finishes her bloom.

They're softly fragrant and so divine with that ethereal cerulean-violet on their petal ends. Ahhhh. 

Once again, there's South Africa to credit for this wonderful plant, Lycoris squamigera, often called the Surprise Lily for the way its broad strappy leaves come up in spring, wither away by June, and then boom! there are multiple tall spikes of fabulous pink "naked ladies," i.e. without any leaves, popping up as a surprise in August! I'm thrilled that these transplants from an old home site down Dean's Fork have taken hold in my heirloom garden, right in front of the peony I harvested there. Home again. The naked ladies don't bloom in the woods. I should get serious, take a shovel and dig some more of them next spring. 

Buddleia is adding its sweet perfume to the powerful scent of tuberose come evening.

I'm really pleased with this combo, more thought out than most of mine, on the corner of the old garage. I'm breaking the rules by planting 4'  tuberoses in front of shorter things, but they're there to smell! No stepping over other plants to get to them. This is a hedon's garden, after all.

And the tuberoses are almost as tall as I am this year. I don't even have to lean over to bury my nose in them. I made a sweet little bundle this spring selling off most of my tuberose bulbs at two gardening talks I gave here in Ohio. I had too darn many to plant, and no place to put them. Sold a bunch of Achimenes rhizomes, too, which took a little more salesmanship. The tuberoses were snapped up immediately. They were beautiful--enormous bulb clusters, manure-fed, and I sold them for $4 apiece. I hope to rebuild my stocks and offer them in coming years. What I sold was about a decade's worth of propagation. Man, I love being able to produce something people really want and sell it in person (as opposed to online). No postage, no hassle, just grab, gimme some cash, and go. 

I've put in a bed of annuals--Salvia farinosa "Victoria," Angelonia and zinnias--behind the tuberoses. I tried to keep it all purple, pink and white. Succeeded. Sometimes it works out.

Garden Gifts

The birthday post goes on. All this stuff happened on my birthday. I'm counting blessings. I think I hit 14 in the last post, and they were things I saw out my window as I worked. Toward evening, I headed to the garden to pick some dinner, and it hit me how many gifts it's pumping out, at last, after all the weeding and mulching, the staking and coddling and the minimal watering I've done. 

It is truly amazing how fast a tomato can grow when it decides to take off. Remember, they were all frosted to sticks on May 10 and 11. Amazing! Helps to support them well, with cages and heavy-duty stakes. Dang, that's a good plant. The Sungolds are in, and the Cherokee Purples and Mr. Stripeys have already blessed us with about six BLT's. MMMMM. Mmm, mmmm! #15. My favorite sandwich anywhere, ever, is a homegrown tomato BLT.

The peppers didn't like the mid-May frost much, either. I had to go out and buy plants after all my seedlings, tenderly grown in the greenhouse, died. Waah. But here comes a golden Baby Bell! I like Bonnie Plants. They get results fast, and they're well-grown, with a nice selection. All hail Bonnie!especially when frost takes yours. Gift #16.

Tendergreen beans are in and they are sooo delicious. #17.  I had to pick again right before I left for Arizona. I finally got smart and planted only two rows at once this time, with the third row (foreground) planted a couple weeks afterward. That way I'll get more tender young beans just as the first two rows peter out. Last spring I went nuts, planted four rows at the same time. And I remember declaring, "I will be buried in my own beans." A bean is a wonderful thing.

Every year, things volunteer in the garden. Cherry tomatoes, of course, but most of those get pulled up, because none are as good as my Sungold hybrids. I had a mystery plant come up right where my tomatillos were last year. I was suspicious of it, because it looked so much like a nightshade, but I let it grow, as there was something tomatilloey about its leaves and flowers. Still wasn't sure about it...

It got bigger and bigger.  Ye gods! If this isn't a tomatillo, what is it? I kept checking to see if it was fruiting. Nope. I decided to let it continue to eat real estate and cow manure until I figured out what it was. Maybe it was a wild ground cherry, and I hear they're edible, too.

Finally got my answer on my birthday! They're tomatillos!!! Inside that husk is a marble-sized green fruit, and when they get big and burst the papery husk, I'll be throwing those into quiches, stir-fries, salads and soups all summer long. Not to mention eating them right off the plant. A little green tomato with firm flesh and a citrusy tang! Love tomatillos! If you've never tried growing them, you must. Vital ingredient in salsa too. To have one of these hot-weather plants volunteer in my garden seems a very extravagant gift. And it's JUST HUUUUGE. #18!! with a bullet.

In a sweet bit of irony, the most valued volunteers in the garden actually germinated just outside it. I started growing tomatillos and cucamelons in the spring of 2013, when a friend sent me seeds for both. Look at these four cucamelon plants, which took root in the soil at the base of the garden planks. I found them as I was hand-pulling crabgrass along the boards. The tags and terra cotta are to protect them from the occasional weed whacking.  Funny how plants make you remember people. Cucamelons and tomatillos come unbidden, spring up like thoughts, volunteering, popping into my garden just as thoughts of my friend pop into my mind.

Unlike random thoughts, these unbidden visitors bear fruit. A tiny cucamelon forms, its yellow blossom about to drop off. If you're curious about cucamelons, type it into the search box in the upper left corner of this page. You'll get several posts about these tiny crunchy wonders, by far the crunchiest thing I've ever grown. Also called "mouse melon."  #19.

Gift # 20:

Tuberoses!

It's going to be an incredible tuberose year. I've been dividing the bulb clusters and planting them singly in rows for about a decade now, and they've responded by multiplying like bunnies, like my friend Gordon says. He gave them to me ages ago, just a brown paper bag of them, after I swooned when he put some in a vase by my bedside when I visited. And now I give them away.

I have enough to plant absolute windrows of them--this one by the heirloom bed of asparagus, of  rhubarb from North Dakota and golden raspberries from Connie Toops. It looks like every one of these plants is going to spike up and bloom this year. August and September are going to be something, my friends.

This year, we cut a bunch of sumac that was shading the heirloom bed, and I dumped two top-dressings of cow manure on it, and oh my. Stand back! I dug a little trench, put cow manure in it, added tuberoses...

Come August, this lovely member of the agave family will start pumping out the tubular white blossoms and their intoxicating evening scent. One blossom will perfume a bedroom.

More tuberoses, by the garage, and a Thunbergia (black-eyed Susan) vine that couldn't live in a pot any longer. Cow manure, cow manure. It's the new drug in my happy sanctuary.

Another testimony to cow manure: this gardenia. As of late April, this plant had barely a leaf on it, thanks to a non-watering event combined with a red spider mite invasion. I apologized to it, gave it a bigger pot half-filled with aged manure, and am now reaping the rewards.

It's so incredibly beautiful, with four-inch flowers, that I brought it into the studio for perfume, and to escape the 98 degree heat outside. It's thankful, and so am I.  That's Gift #21, and they're still coming.

I'm in Arizona right now, speaking this weekend at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival. Took Shila along, tacked on three days for exploring, and we're having the time of our lives. Needless to say, this "working" trip feels like a great big vacation.  This is one of the most glorious places I've ever seen.  Thankful.

photo by Shila Wilson

Never Can Say Goodbye

As I write, there is snain coming down, kind of a sloppy mix of snow and rain, too big to be rain and too wet to be snow. Snain. Chet Baker talks about sneet but I've never seen it. It's 40, going for the mid-30's tonight, and I really don't like it much. What I like is autumn. And summer. 

So what I do is dig summer up and cram it into my little greenhouse. It's the hardest working 64 square feet in Ohio.

The red center support pole is new. The greenhouse had a sag in its spine. The floorjack fixed it. Tools told me what to get. This is the east corner.

 Bill's ancient crown of thorns is in the east corner. I keep trying to cut it back and it has never once stopped blooming since I took it from his office. It's as if it thinks it'll get its multiple heads cut off if it ever stops blooming. I kind of like it tall and lanky, like an ocotillo. It can stay.

 Here's the west corner. Mmm. Looking floriferous.

I absolutely adore Salvia greggii "Desert Blaze." It has such an airy, icy look about it with those white-edged leaves. I know it would die over the winter, being a tender plant to start with. Add variegation and you have a really tender plant. Can't let that happen. Dug two up, brought them in.

I tried something this fall that I've never done. I brought my tuberoses inside. The only reason I did it is that there were about 10 plants just starting to bloom in late October! I think it was the cool, rainy summer we had. I planted them in April, but the plants just kind of lolled around in the wet soil, enjoying making more and more leaves, and they remembered why I planted them a bit too late to make good on their promise to get it done before frost. 

It was really too cold at night for them to put out much in the way of fragrance. What a waste! So I dug them up. Plopped them in planters and put them in the cart and brought them in. 

Now that was a fine sight, tuberoses going to their reward...another month of summer!

The heat of the greenhouse brings out the most exquisite fragrance, and it absolutely fills the little room with heaven when night falls.

They're delighted to keep growing and blooming. I'll have a month more of fragrance and beauty.

Some are still in spike! My darling you will never know 20 degrees.

Joining the tuberoses is my night-blooming jessamine, Cestrum nocturnum. Another jewel of the Solanaceae, or nightshade family. What a family. Potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, tomatillos, Cestrum, to name just a few.

The New Guinea impatiens is so happy to come in out of the cold and unfurl its blazing perfect orange blossoms in welcome heat.

As is the mammilaria cactus, which has bloomed for me for 22 years.

And you have to love a mandevilla that's such a bright red it boggles the camera.

Color. Blazes and bushels of color. That's how we fight old man Winter here on Indigo Hill.