DAISIES AND DAHLIAS

So when we married, many years ago, we had very little money, so little money that after paying for a small bakery cake and assembling the ingredients for a wine punch, we had to save what money was left for a brief wedding trip, and could not buy fresh flowers for the cake table.  So the mother of my husband’s best friend picked all the flowers in her flower beds, which were Shasta daisies, and that was what the wife of the best friend used to decorate.  Ever since then, I have been particularly fond of daisies.  Daisies are so cheerful, so sturdy, so encouraging and generous with themselves.  We have always tried to have some daisy plants wherever we have lived; some years they have bloomed profusely, other times not, but this year they are exuberant. 

 

And then there are dahlias.  Dahlias were plants I only heard of once in a funny, silly TV series where one of the characters grew them, but no one I knew grew them, and I never really saw a dahlia in person until the orange dahlia I planted as an experiment bloomed.  I had had a weak and/or wild moment while reading a bulb catalog and spotted this particular dahlia’s photo, and it looked much like a zinnia, and I love zinnias, so I ordered the dahlia.  Since then I have also tried dwarf dahlias and, this year, a miniature heirloom dahlia. 

 

 

Yesterday I was strolling around the garden with some brand new small pruners I recently acquired, deadheading here, pulling a weed there, and there were the daisies and dahlias all abloom.  So I cut some and brought them in for the dining table, just a few in a small budvase.    Looking at them in the vase, it occurred to me that they more or less represented both the real beginning of my life as an adult and the life I’m grateful to have had since the beginning of our marriage.   The daisies represent the innocence and ignorance of my youth; the dahlias could represent a lot about the years since then, the expectations and errors, and ultimately the willingness to accept life as it is and see what beauty I can find.  And there is always so much beauty we can find, if we look.

CHICKADEES AND TITMICE AND FINCHES OH MY

We have been very fortunate to have a bird feeder for the last several years.  Where we live now, we have a back garden and a birdfeeder that is squirrel-proof.  That means that one of the many squirrels who live around us, all of whom we call ‘Sid’ because one squirrel looks pretty much like another to our uneducated eyes, anyway, ‘Sid’ cannot get birdseed from the feeder.  It is cleverly designed so that Sid can climb all around it in a very funny (to us) way, but if he tries to perch on the little bar in the front of the feeder, it drops down and the feeder area is closed.  The squirrel will try sometimes to climb up the pole from the ground, but there’s a baffle there.  The best a squirrel can hope for is to glean seed fragments that the birds drop.

So the little chickadees, which look like little bandits, the titmice which are proudly crested, and the finches which are very cheeky little birds, all enjoy their meals , except of course for not wanting to share with each other.  And when the cardinals and jays come along, they reign supreme and the smaller birds simply move to a nearby tree or bush and wait.

What is such a wonderful luxury is, on mild mornings and mild evenings, and even the occasional mild mid-day, to be able to sit and watch the antic behavior of all the birds, including the doves who come to glean what falls from the feeder, and even, yes, the squirrels, who can defy gravity and fly from the crape myrtle tree to the feeder but who cannot find a meal there.  The feeder is for the birds!

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

There was a time in my life when I knew, just knew, that if and when I had a lemon tree, I would be happier than happy.  As a gardener, I would have arrived.  Because I am a curious gardener, I have grown, or tried to grow, a vast range of plants from ‘A’ (alstroemeria) to ‘Z’ (zephyranthes), with results varying from fabulous to ‘oh, well’.  But a lemon tree – that was the supreme goal.  Of course lemon trees can be expensive, so I waited and waited until I could finally find a lemon tree locally, from a reliable source, and that I could almost afford. 

We brought the lemon tree home, and then I did a massive amount of research, and, yes, only then.  We potted the tree up.  I visited it daily, observing, learning.  Its first year it produced a few lemons; my husband didn’t like the taste.  Rats.  Last year it produced even more lemons.  During the past two winters, we have rolled it in its pot and on a caster thingy into our garden room to protect it from very low and freezing temps.  The first year I even pruned it to make it more balanced, and it responded well, a huge gamble on my part.  This last winter it somehow really liked how we placed it in the unheated garden room, and bloomed all winter, even without bees to pollinate; have no idea how.  Because we had an erratic winter, it was rolled out, back in, and out again from the garden room; because it is thorny, my husband and son were less than thrilled with the efforts. 

Now it is back in its place on the patio, simply covered with tiny lemons and blooms that perfume the whole backyard garden.  It has produced small crops, great fragrance and beauty, frustration on the part of those who move it around, and great delight for the bees, which makes us feel better about the whole experience.

 
Did the lemon tree completely fulfill my gardening dreams and make me a supreme gardener?  Of course not.  Is the lemon tree wonderful?  Of course it is.

WHAT DO SQUIRRELS KNOW

No one would say that squirrels are intellectual  or wise.  But they must know something because they have altered what we recall as previous behavior.  We have had several years where acorn production was amazing, where there were areas where we simply walked on a carpet of acorns but this last fall was not that outstanding in acorn production.  Nevertheless, for the first time in our recent memories, the squirrels seem to have planted every acorn they could get their little paws on, because we have so far found hundreds of new little oak trees sprouting up everywhere. 

We have pulled up little oaks in flower beds, mowed them in the lawn, and found them sprouting up even in the potted plants that summer outside but which winter inside our garden room.  We laugh that if we stopped pulling up the little sprouts, we would very quickly be living in an entire oak grove.

 

Aside from all that, our resident squirrel, who we have named Sid, seems to have lost all fear or inhibition when we are around.  He boldly comes to glean fallen bird seed from the bird feeder.  He cannot access the bird feeder, but there’s all those lovely bits the messy birds drop.  The other day we were sitting on the patio, looked down, and there was Sid, apparently eavesdropping on our conversation.

So what with all this unusually intensive planting of acorns and this lack of caution around us, we cannot help but ask, “What do squirrels know?”

And the wild mustard stalks the land

In this part of the world, there so many wild flowers that, with the right amounts of rain and the right ranges of temperature and the right locations, simply burst upon the landscape in spring, with fall bringing its own varieties.  But what happens in spring is so significant simply because after winter, particularly some difficult winters, all these swaths of color which present themselves absolutely free and glorious. 

Right now the wild mustard seems to be everywhere.  Driving along a freeway access road this morning, I glanced over at the freeway embankment on the other side and there was this glowing yellow from top to bottom for quite a long distance, absolutely startlingly brilliant.  And that same color, that same glory, is showing up everywhere a wildling can go.

 

Sometimes I write because I am overcome with concerns or serious thoughts, but sometimes it just seems necessary to describe something really very ordinary that is simply no less spectacular and welcome just because it’s ‘only wild flowers’.

WHERE STAR TREK WENT

As a young mother, dealing with the demands of a toddler and an infant while their father worked full-time and also went to college, I found so much comfort and pleasure in the stories of the original Star Trek series.  When I had to defend my appreciation for these stories, I simply found the words:  “They explore the human condition.”  Many people looked at the strange aliens and the strange alien environments and the strange alien situations, and did not realize that there were many metaphors for the way that we as humans interact with each other.  Everything was explored in those stories, from religion to lifestyles to gender attitudes, but that exploration was done in a way that taught, for those who would learn.  And one of the most interesting aspects of all the explorations, for me, was Spock’s logic, particularly as he was half-Vulcan and half-human, and therefore had the dubious pleasure of having human emotions and Vulcan requirement for logic.    And over and over, it seemed to me that human emotions were shown to be both blessing and curse and that pure logic was shown to be blessing and curse as well.  As Mr. Spock said many times, “Fascinating.”

 

And here is something that Leonard Nimoy, the wonderful human who gave Mr. Spock a type of reality, said:  “A life is like a garden.  Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.”

TOO MANY POTS

There is a tendency I have to try to grow too many things in pots.  First there are the pots of plants such as crinum that are simply too vigorous to find a place in the garden beds, and the pots help to restrain them.  Then there are the plants which are not winter-hardy in our area:  ixoras and a lemon tree, and wax begonias and pelargoniums, all of which grow happily outside in all but the coldest winter months.   Then there are the agapanthus, plural, which I have found do so much better with winter shelter in our unheated garden room.  And the many (too many) amaryllis for which we do not yet have garden bed space.  Finally there are the small pots of various plants that were looking poorly and were either lifted and potted and kept where they could get special attention, or the bits and pieces that have remained when plants were trimmed back and which were potted because I could not bear to simply discard what would be excellent future plants.

 

Every year I promise myself, and my mate, that there will be fewer pots to winter over, to either move into what is a fairly small garden room or to pull up close to the house on the patio and cover for protection.  That is the promise I make, but the reality is that there seem to be more, not fewer, pots, and it gets more and more exhausting to move plants around, to water and feed the inside pots and to cover and uncover the outside pots when our winter temperatures go down and up and down again.

Ah, but my resolve seems to be strengthening.  I have managed to find homes for four of the five pots of butterfly amaryllis, and already I am looking squinty-eyed at the many small pots of plants, planning to squeeze them in amongst the spring bulbs of daffodils and tulips and crocus.  There’s got to be some more room out there somewhere!