The fountain is dry, but not I.

bees, bread, my garden, travel, , , , , ,

This morning the fountain-cleaner Bill did his good work scrubbing and flushing out my fountain, and then left it empty and turned off. I am traveling a lot in the next month and don’t want it to become a swamp while I’m gone.

Out my bedroom window.

The garden is looking pretty good right now because it’s entering the flowery time of year, and because I’ve had several days to focus on it, to be out there noticing not just little weeds that are easily pulled out of mulch, but this and that glorious scent and sight.

On my neighborhood walks, too, I’m spying perfection of Japanese maples…

…and at church, just look at the wisteria! I could only fit about half of its span in the frame:

Springtime is downright boggling, to the mind and the heart.

During the few days that were cloudy and gloomy, I washed the dirt from my hands and put them into the sourdough. My recent loaf is very tasty, but it would not rise — well, not much. After several hours I gave up and hoped for oven spring, which did not happen. So I got this stunted result, shown after I had sliced it to store in the freezer, so I can take out one slice (2 1/4 inch tall) at a time.

Soon I was back outside again, planting three butternut squash starts and a Juliet tomato plant in the planter boxes. There is no frost in the forecast, and I will soon be gone to Wisconsin for a while, for the first of the grandchild weddings. My original plan was to just wait until mid-May this year to plant summer vegetables, but it seems worth the risk at this point to get them in sooner.

We Orthodox are entering Holy Week on Sunday. I will be away from my parish for most of it, and through Bright Week, and away from my home and garden, so any real-time reports I might have time for will be field reports, or travelogues. For now, I’m soaking up all the familiar and beloved elements of my world to fortify myself against the asphalt and airports that lie between me and daughter Pearl’s garden. Once I arrive there, I will be well nourished by hugs and kisses from a dozen or more family members, and won’t even think of my lemon tree or coral bells back here.

But not quite yet! When I noticed the bee with its head in the lithodora (picture at top), I was mostly looking at the Blue-eyed Grass nearby. It is so sweet it breaks my heart.

The olive gets refreshed.

my garden, quotes, trees,
September 2016

Back in 2016 I removed my two olive trees from their pots, trimmed their roots, and installed them in larger, matching white (and lightweight) fiberglass pots. I seem to have never written about the process here or posted photos; I wish I had, because I couldn’t remember the specifics, and had to consult YouTube when yesterday I decided to tackle the root-trimming job again.

Olive Junior, June 2020

The landscape designer who advised me back then not to plant an olive tree in the ground, because it would grow out of scale and become overbearing in my little garden, suggested I keep the ones I already had and just put them in larger containers; she added that I would need to trim the roots every couple of years to keep them healthy in the confined space.

That was eight years ago this month, and one of the trees by its yellowing leaves has been signalling me that my procrastinating was costing it its health. The task had become more daunting with every year added to my age. Those pots may be easy to move around when they are empty, but with all that moist dirt and biomass in them, I could barely tip one over on to a tarp.

When I did, I found a couple dozen salamanders of all sizes under there. They weren’t happy to feel the sun on their cool and moist bodies, and they writhed and slithered away into the mulch.

Getting the root ball out of the pot was the hardest part of the whole job. My back didn’t suffer any lasting effects, but my arm muscles are complaining. We were stuck in the situation pictured above no matter how I yanked and rolled things around; I really could have used a helper (with long arms) at this point just to pull on the pot while I pulled on the tree. But inch by slow inch — and it was finally out.

After I loosened the snarled roots, and shook off the old soil, it dawned on me that I didn’t have enough new soil to replace it, so I covered the root ball against the sun and took a half hour to go to the store for a few bags of potting soil.

Olive Senior, May 2020

After trimming the roots I put the pot back in place and leveled it using two flat stones from the mountains, then put the tree back in, with the new dirt, and a little fruit tree food. I trimmed the branches a bit, too. I think this tree, whom I’ll call “Olive Junior,” will be happier now.

What about the other one? It seems pretty healthy, so I’m putting off dealing with it for now. The two trees have different history. Olive Senior was given to me as a birthday present by my son “Pathfinder” and his family more than ten years ago. I kept it in a roomy pot but didn’t water it very much; its form was lacking but it didn’t occur to me to try to improve on it.

A few years later I saw little olive saplings at the grocery store half-off, that is, $7.50. They were very healthy and more shapely than my olive tree, and I brought one home. I began to shape Olive Senior with my pruners. When it came time to put them in matching pots, O.S.’s roots weren’t crowded in the pot and there wasn’t much to trim off. Olive Junior’s roots were extensive and needed a lot of trimming, even though it was much younger. So… I’m guessing each is still following its pattern, and I can wait a bit, and tackle Olive Senior with a little more forethought, and with a helper.

It’s a great blessing to own not just one, but two olive trees, even if I do have to give them the bonsai treatment. They like the Mediterranean climate. I will close my olive report with this Bible verse that I took many years ago as a poem-prayer expressing my heart’s vision:

But as for me,
I am like a fruitful olive tree
in the house of the Lord;
I have hoped in the mercy of God
for ever, and unto the ages of ages.

Psalm 51:8

Beyond lullabies: the mother’s music.

nature, quotes, senses, , , , , , , ,
Marianne Stokes, Mother and Child at Menguszfalva

“After birth, the child further develops this primal resonance. This doesn’t happen haphazardly. The child achieves a kind of symbiosis with the mother through its creative imitations of her sounds and facial expressions; in this way, it will feel what she feels. As it takes on its mother’s happy expression, it also feels her joy; if it takes on her sad expression, it shares in her unhappiness.

“Something similar applies to the exchange of sounds: In the clinking and clanging of the mother’s language trembles the well and woe of her being, and the child who imitates that language resonates with it on the same psychological wavelength. This early resonance between child and its (social) environment leads to a unique phenomenon: The young child’s body gets ‘loaded’ with a series of vibrations and tensions that become embedded in the deepest and finest fibers of its body. They form a kind of ‘body memory’ that not only programs the function of the musculature, glands, nerves, and organs, but also predisposes the child to certain psychological conditions, or disorders.

“The human body is, in the most literal sense, a stringed instrument. The muscles that span the skeleton, and the body’s other fibers, are put on a certain tension in early childhood through imitative language exchanges. This tension determines with which (social) phenomena one will resonate; it determines the frequencies to which one will be sensitive in later life. That’s why certain people and certain events can literally strike a chord; they touch the body and, as such, touch the soul. It is for this reason that the voice can make the body ill. Or, conversely, heal it. That is why the voice is of vital importance, especially at an early age. Lack of a voice is fatal to the young child.”

–Mattias Desmet

Dmitri Petrovs

That sweet monotony.

love, nature, quotes, , , ,

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”

-George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Henri Baptiste Lebasque, Le Repos sous les arbres