Category Archives: my garden

Gardening Notebook

my garden,

As long as I’ve been trying to grow things I’ve been using pencil and paper in my planning and sometimes to record how long seeds took to sprout, or what date the tomatoes got ripe. I had a box in which I kept articles from Sunset and Organic Gardening, and that box still is overflowing into a closet somewhere, full of ideas I mostly did not use.

A few years ago for my birthday a friend set us both up with pretty binders and colorful pages to go inside, all ready for garden-type information. At first I used lined pages to write lists of plantings and dates, but lately things have degenerated to the point where I just put my tags and labels under the clear sticky page-covers.

This has turned out to be the most successful way to keep track of what is what in the garden, and how long it’s been growing there.The pockets can hold those articles I’ve clipped, or a few seed packets.

It’s still a bit messy and chaotic, which seems increasingly to be my style. If I try to do things neatly and orderly they never get done. Even the creating of this notebook was a little too much like Kindergarten and I felt rushed and inept while we were putting the pages together, but now that I’ve figured out how to make it mine, it works!

 

Stages of Flowers

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This evening I brought in a few stems of Cécile Brunner roses to decorate my windowsill. I notice that a couple of the roses have buds sprouting from the center of the flower, and I don’t think I’ve seen that phenomenon before.

 
Actually, this one seems to have two buds coming out.

My godmother is collecting rose petals for throwing at some point in her daughter’s upcoming wedding. As I have to be out of town and will miss the event, it made me happy to be able to contribute some petals, which I acquired by picking spent blooms from another friend’s prodigiously blooming bushes. It took me about a half hour to collect a couple of grocery bags full, and another hour to sift through and take out insects and stems. I set them to drying in an ice chest and a big tub, and while they sat in the sun the remainder of bugs seem to have departed. A few times a day I am stirring them.

The Patty’s Plum poppy that Pearl gave me years ago has three blooms this year! I may have already put up a photo of one. But this third flower is the prettiest yet. The plants stand about a yard tall.

Kate sent me a pot of Lily of the Valley bulbs for Mother’s Day. Less than a week later they are already a couple of inches high. I have Miss Grenadine keeping me company on the windowsill above the sink these days; she can help keep an eye on the shoots.

All over the garden I’ve been digging holes and putting in various other flowers: zinnias, mimulus, mixed colors of California poppies, African daisies, lobelia, morning glory. In a few weeks I should have more flowery pictures to show. I’ve been putting my tools away every night and have swept the patio. Everything is ready for you to come and visit my garden!

little goats now in the spring

church, my garden, Pascha, quotes

The hymns of Pascha and Bright Monday are playing themselves in my mind every day, all day long, like heavenly prayers. Christ is risen indeed! And my house is filled with honeysuckle scent, as a consequence of a long gardening party I’ve been having with myself.

I’ve been on my hands and knees in the dirt quite a bit this week. Above you can see one perennial bed I’ve been thinning and re-planting. Eleven tomato plants have been tucked into various places all over the yard, and in order to make a sunny home for one of them it was necessary to severely prune the honeysuckle vine that was starting to bloom profusely. Beforehand, as I walked past it several times, the sweetness almost made me woozy, and reminded me of the lilies in church on Holy Friday, as at a funeral.

I couldn’t bear to throw all the prunings into the yard waste bin, so I cut carefully and put the trimmings in three vases to enjoy indoors. There were still so many left, I filled another jarful to give to a neighbor, but it’s still here, too. Even though the petals are drying and starting to fall on the table, all of this flowery flavor is still permeating my days.

A wonderful story was passed on to us on the blog Mystagogy, of the Athonite monk Elder Porphyrios (1906-1991) who on a Bright Tuesday visited his cardiologist, overflowing with Easter brightness and quoting a hymn:

What happiness is in the Resurrection! “And leaping for joy, we celebrate the Cause.” Have you ever seen the little goats now in the spring who jump on the grass? They eat a little from their mother and begin to jump again? This is what it means to leap – to jump. This is how we should also jump for unspeakable joy at the Resurrection of our Lord and our own.

It is a sweet and not long anecdote you can read here.

There is this lightness and heavenly singing, but pressing in on all sides, sorrow and pain. In the lives of extended family, and friends near and far, things happen even in Bright Week that reek of death. A husband commits suicide, a child dies suddenly and mysteriously, a sweet woman becomes incapacitated with irrational fears….

How to make sense of it all? How to carry the joy along with the burdens of the people you love? It probably requires a measure of the Holy Spirit I haven’t acquired in order to do a good job of it. My joy is often a shallow emotionality, and certainly my burden-bearing is hampered by laziness and the distraction of my own burdens that I needlessly carry.

Or is it needlessly? It was only a short time ago I was ruminating on the yoke of Christ — and He did say His burden is light. He was exhorting us to take up His yoke. I want to “be there” for people who are hurting, and often the only thing to do, and it’s not minor, is to bring them to God’s throne in my heart and prayers. If I will just stay there I should be able to hold on to this sweetness and Light as well. 

Christ is risen!

Lazarus

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Tonight was the service of Matins for Lazarus Saturday. It made me so happy. About a week before Pascha we experience this foretaste of Paschal joy, witnessing the raising of Lazarus after he had lain in the tomb for four days. But first, picture the scene when Jesus came into town: Lazarus’s sisters were grieving and seemed to blame Jesus for their brother’s death, saying, “If you had been here, he wouldn’t have died.” Jesus wept. The sisters made mention of the fact that their brother’s corpse was at the point of stinking. It was kind of a downer all around.

I know Lent is a time of drawing close to God, and learning of His tender love for us, and looking eagerly toward The Resurrection. But it’s also characterized as a time of bright sadness. This year I have felt the sadness part more than the bright part, as a burden-bearing, until these last few days.

Since December I’d had bright white lights still up around my kitchen window, and for many weeks I left them on night and day, to help my mood. Sometime in March I unplugged the string, but I was still reluctant to untape and untack them. I pondered leaving them all year, unlit but ready to come to my aid with the next dreary day in the Fall, but it was an idea stemming wholly from weariness.

Suddenly one morning during a short spell of sunshine, I knew I needed to wash the window and the sill, so of course the lights could not stay there. I washed and swept and scrubbed all kinds of things around the house and the yard for two or three days, and prepared myself to be resurrected. I took away the candlesticks and put fresh flowers instead on the windowsill.

And the brightness has taken over. Pascha is so late this year, Spring also in many places, but Lent seems to have passed quickly. Perhaps during Holy Week I can finish my housecleaning and make the place look properly freshened up for Christ’s glorious Resurrection.

But first Lazarus will walk — alive! — out of the tomb and be unbound. If he can be raised after his body was rotting, so can I be relieved of my burdens and my stinking sins and put on Christ.  As he said,

Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.

I will try to pay attention and learn and find that rest through the next week as we are on our way to Calvary, and I’m really looking forward to being there at the empty tomb!