Category Archives: my garden

Tiny things grow great and mighty.

May 16, 2026my garden, poetrycolumbine, Fuligo septica, nigella, Salvia clevelandii, seeds, Walter de la MareGretchenJoanna

May is for flowers! The first white echinacea opened today, and many other lovelies are in full bloom, like the Chocolate Cosmos, and a fancy mullein I planted in the fall. I hope it gets tall like the wild ones. Sorry, I can’t seem to get a good picture of it yet.

It’s the time of year when the poppies and nigella begin to look a mess, so I spent quite a while today pulling them out of the area by the front door. The picture above shows the situation “before.” I also removed one of the three salvia clevelandii that live there; you can sort of see one at the back, reaching for the sky with its long branches. The latest landscaper was a hopeless over-planter, I am realizing every day. I love that salvia and its herby scent, but it gets big. One of them to “anchor” the bed would have been plenty. They are casting too much shade, and crowding the Clary Sage that will bloom next month.

I discovered the above thing clinging to the inside of a planter box and a milkweed plant. I pointed my phone’s Seek app at it and it knew immediately what it was. The common name it gave me was too unpleasant for me to want to pass on, but it is a kind of slime mold. Probably some of my readers are familiar with it.

My zucchini, sunflower, and zinnia seeds have sprouted. And I think the amaranth, too, though the leaves I see are such tiny ones, I can’t be sure yet. It’s nice to be home enough that I can go out several times a day, set the hose nozzle to “shower” and moisten the ground for them. Here’s a little poem in praise of seeds.

Seeds

The seeds I sowed –
For week unseen –
Have pushed up pygmy
Shoots of green;
So frail you’d think
The tiniest stone
Would never let
A glimpse be shown.
But no; a pebble
Near them lies,
At least a cherry-stone
In size,
Which that mere sprout
Has heaved away,
To bask in sunshine,
See the Day.

-Walter de la Mare

Bitter and sweet, and three favorites.

May 8, 2026bees, my gardenAfrican violets, borage, feverfew, milkweed, nasturtiumsGretchenJoanna

It’s been a lovely afternoon in the garden, a day warm enough that my body can relax, and allow my mind to focus and Get Things Done. I planted all my zinnia seeds left over from the last couple of years, everything that remained in six packets. Also two types of sunflowers, and nasturtiums.

Three of my favorite plants have popped up very healthy this spring. I especially appreciate these because they volunteer to sprout on their own, and bloom over a long period. They don’t always grow in the same place, but I figure they know what is best, so I’m trying to be accommodating. The thing is, the spots they choose might feel good to them in winter and spring, but be uncomfortable in our rainless summers.

Nasturtiums used to grow enthusiastically and unbidden out of a crack in the concrete near our pool pump, but that situation is long gone, and I’m forever trying to find another good place for them. Right now a trailing one grows in a pot, a “mounding” type in a planter box, and one in the ground.

Borage is wonderful, the bees adore it, and it grows best in the planter box where it gets regular water. But then it tries to take over…. Two plants came up this spring where they often do, near the fig tree, and I am hoping that this summer I can give them a squirt more often, and help them to survive. I usually have the hose right there for filling the fountain.

My friend Bella gave me a little feverfew plant a year or two ago, and some leaves freshly cut from the mother plant, with instructions to make a tea with it, to drink and to splash on my face to heal my rosacea. I drank the very bitter tea once; I can’t remember if I did the splashing. That plant loves my garden more than anything, and if I gave it free rein it would take over the whole planter box.

This afternoon I cut it way back, and filled a vase with its daisies, but I left them on the patio because the plant is actually pretty stinky. My fingers are holding on to the bitter taste even after several washings. Feverfew is not one of my favorites, only because of this bitterness — and I do understand that bitter herbs are good for us, but I am content to do without. I don’t know how feverfew might do out of the box in the wider garden; I’ve only ever had it in the one place, where it spreads to become a larger and larger clump. It blooms beautifully over most of the year.

The third plant I appreciate is Showy Milkweed, which is native to this area of California. I guess last summer the wind was blowing strongly to the east when its seeds were flying, because for the first time I have lots of little milkweeds coming up in the nearest planter. I haven’t removed all of them. We’ll see how crowded it gets in there, after the zinnias are going strong — but as they haven’t sprouted yet, it’s all theoretical.

At left are some young Narrow-Leaf Milkweeds, whose seeds also sowed themselves last fall, way across the garden from their usual place.

A sweet planting of flowers I saw this week was not in a garden but at Trader Joe’s: For Mother’s Day they were offering lots of different flower items, and when I saw the African violets in mugs I immediately thought of my godmother and got one for her. I got one for myself, too. To all of you who are mothers or were born of mothers, Happy Mother’s Day! ❤

Singing in the garden.

April 28, 2026my gardenborage, design, happiness, landscaping, milkweed, nigella, olive, pineapple guavaGretchenJoanna

A finch was singing an exuberant evening song, as I gathered my trowel and gloves and empty plastic pots into the garage, planning to call it a day. It was 7:00, after all. But then I remembered I had wanted to take a picture of the rudbeckia, even though it is far from blooming; it’s huge, and so robust — much bigger than I imagined it would get, when I planted it last fall. I didn’t take its picture after all, but I did notice that my eight butternut squash plants nearby looked a little dry, so I dragged the hose over and gave them all a long drink. The pansies needed deadheading, so I did that as well….

Today was warm enough that I could comfortably spend a few hours in my garden, and the whole time feel that I was floating from one blessed task from another, in my little piece of Paradise. Many of the plans I made in the fall are coming to fruition; the plants that I transplanted to and from the front and back gardens, and the new ones I installed, are thriving and starting to bloom. I am so thankful.

The area by the front door is still somewhat of a hodgepodge, at least while the California poppies and nigella are doing their thing. When they are done it will be a little less crowded, the clary sage (three plants!) will bloom, and that scent will quicken soul and body.

More and more, I realize that with home and garden things, the only one I need to please is myself — and I am trying to be easier to please. Last summer when I asked my old gardening friend to look at my garden with me, I thought she would be be wise about helping me with decisions, as she has known and helped me at various times since we were neighbors, decades ago. But back then we were similarly limited in what we could do with our gardens.

This time I was surprised and disillusioned. She scrutinized and judged my garden according to the principles she goes by in her own garden, which covers a couple of acres, and for which she has a full-time gardener to execute her designs. She told me I need more “white space.” After she went home I thought long and hard about that; I knew that what I really wanted was less white space.

This afternoon I planted two of the four tomato plants I bought recently. I am so excited about growing tomatoes again, now that I am using the sunnier front yard for things that need full sun. I also set out into my planter boxes the parsley and basil that looked like one plant each, in 4-inch pots. In the last few years these are so often actually several plants that are growing all crowded together. In this case I separated out eight tiny parsley plants and eleven basil plants! Of course, so tightly packed like that, many of them have minimal root systems, so they don’t usually all survive. I wish I could buy a six-pack instead, but such a thing isn’t to be had.

There are too many things I want to tell about, having to do with my beloved garden. They will have to spill over into another post, soon. I do want to say that I often think about how much my late husband would have liked this garden. I’m pretty sure he would be, or is, very happy that I took out the swimming pool and managed, with a lot of help, to create this special place. My heart is singing — and the olive trees are in bloom.

A belated letter from Lent.

April 17, 2026church, food and cooking, homemaking, Lent, my garden40 Martyrs of Sebaste, cake, lark buns, Lazarus buns, Lazarus Saturday, Pacific Coast Iris, prosphora, Tasmanian Flax, trilliumGretchenJoanna

I’d like to catch up here about a few of the things that happened, and that I did, during the several weeks I was absent from the blogging world. These are the kinds of things you can take pictures of, so they are not many, considering all the hours and days we are talking about. It often happened that I would think to take a picture somewhere, but then I would think, “I’m not blogging, so I don’t really need a picture of that.” And it was nice. Life is full. Here are some of the ways my days were full of life:

Birthdays: I cooked for two of the birthday parties that I attended. One of my accomplishments in this department was a batch of vegan gluten-free chocolate cupcakes, which the party-goers thought wonderful; I ate two of them myself. The picture is from before they went into the oven. You might guess that there were beets in the batter!

Later I drove north for grandson Jamie’s 11th birthday, and took the job of baking the cake he remembers always being the tradition for his day, a “Black Forest Cake” made with a box mix, whipped cream, and canned cherry pie filling. The top layer of my version was so domed, I had to create a lake from the whipped cream to hold the cherries. No one should be surprised to find a lake in the Black Forest, right?

Up there, spring was early, and when we took walks in the woods we encountered dogwood flowers a month before they’d normally be seen. And a trillium. I am rarely in a place to see trilliums when they are newly opened, so that was wonderful.

Other cooking: A bigger project than the birthday baking was for church. I took a whole day to experiment at home in an effort to figure out how to get a consistently good imprint on the tops of our altar bread that we call prosphora.

And I learned a lot, though the huge batch of dough (it used 20+ cups of flour) from which I made four sizes of breads, overwhelmed my kitchen — or more precisely, my mind, as I scrambled to keep track of timers and squeeze everything into my oven.

It seemed pretty chaotic for a while, but the end result was quite satisfactory, Glory to God! It was on St. Patrick’s Day, and I had been to church that morning so as to start my project off right. Thank you, Saint Patrick!

Reading: You can see from the sidebar that I read several books, but the one I most wanted to read for “lenten reading” I haven’t finished yet. It’s Transfiguring Time by Olivier Clément, and is a beautiful complement to the joy of Pascha, as the author’s own joy at the Christian message shines through every page. Clément was born in 1921 in France, and spent his 20’s exploring the religions of the East, in particular India. He became somewhat of an expert on ancient cosmologies and their concept of time, and when he discovered the Christian faith as elucidated by Vladimir Lossky, he saw the huge contrast. I’m sure I’ll share some quotes from Clément later.

Little breads for church feasts: For the feast of the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste I decided to bake Lark Buns for my church school class.

40 Martyrs Sebaste

The symbolism has to do with larks in springtime, but also the spirits of the martyrs flying up to heaven. You have to bake 40 of them, of course, so quite a few were left over to pass around to a few people at the agape meal. That was fun.

At the very end of Lent, on Palm Sunday, to commemorate Lazarus Saturday which was the day before, the cooks who prepared the agape meal made a batch of Lazarus Buns. They are just as cute!

In the garden: We had a couple of very warm weeks in March, and around the date of the equinox, when weather returned to normal, it was as though summer had ended and spring had arrived. It was easy to be out of doors during that special time. I had organized my seeds…

…and planted several 3″ pots with winter squash: kabocha, butternut and Delicata. Because of there being so much sunshine and high temps, I was able to leave them outdoors much of the time. Just before recent rains I set them out into the garden, and if we don’t get any killing frosts I should end up with a good supply of squash in the fall.

I harvested plenty of greens and they were delicious. The Chinese Broccoli towered over the garden bed and swayed prettily, scattering its flower petals around, but I didn’t get very much in the way of the broccoli part from it, and the larger leaves were bitter.

The Tasmanian Flax is blooming this spring, after readying itself for three years, and I am thrilled. Each flower is exquisite and dainty, and there are hundreds of them, so we can expect a slew of berries in a few months.