Category Archives: my garden

Today’s Cats and Flowers

my garden,

Giant and lovely snapdragon

Reasons these cat pictures are bad: 1) I took them through a dirty window  2) I had to zoom in so as not to scare away the cats, so they are blurry  3) The glare made streaks in some photos 4) my garden hose is always lying around cluttering up the background.

I wasn’t prepared for having so many cat visitors in one day. The first one to arrive was the one I will name Boots. He was so interested in my clogs. I decided to put some food out for Boots, because, I’m very sad to report, Jim hasn’t been around for a month. I might as well try to make new friends by means of my leftover cat food, because I’m afraid he won’t ever come back.

Boots

The next picture shows Boots eating, and looking nicer. Except for the white feet, he isn’t the prettiest. But then, Jim wasn’t very good-looking until he had eaten regularly at my step for a few months.

Pincushion

I watered the yard thoroughly this morning, and will again Friday before we leave for Oregon to visit kids and grandkids. So I had to take pictures of flowers. I love my garden, even if it is pretty messy. If I loved it better I’d coil up the hose every evening.

Boots didn’t eat all the food, so there was still some later on when Girlfriend came by.

Girlfriend

Last of all, just at dusk, came this odd-looking feline whom I’ll call Two-Tone….

Two-Tone

Oh, I take that back. It’s almost dark now, and Cow Cat is here — I can see through the window as I type — and what do you know, there is still food in the bowl. Cow Cat visits several times a day, usually, and always looks in the window and in the bowl, even though we have shooed him away many times.

Cow Cat a year ago

We didn’t like him because he’s ugly. But Goldilocks questioned the morality of that opinion….at least, that’s the challenge I felt in my heart when she said, “Why won’t you feed him?”

Calendula with oregano

Last year when I wrote about the cat visitors, I had chosen Jim, the black cat at the bottom of this post, as my favorite. So we discriminated against Cow Cat. Pippin said he may have a classic deformity of the face that makes him look the way he does. It’s not his fault. So perhaps I will take pity on him after all. Will he forgive me my past unkindness?

This yellow California poppy is very beloved, because it is unusual. The bright orange are much more vigorous and easy to grow, but I managed to get this one established, and it comes back most years.

Cow Cat is unusual, and he keeps coming back. Maybe I could learn to love him, too.

The day started with callas.

church, my garden, , , , ,
This morning I went out in the fog to cut as many nice calla lilies as I could find in my three patches, to contribute to what our Flower Lady and her team would use to decorate the church for Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

Mr. Glad came out with me and found a snail on the slab of schist that Soldier brought me from the mountains a while back.

Today was Lazarus Saturday, which is like a foretaste of Christ’s own resurrection. It marks the end of Lent, and helps us remember Christ’s power over death and hell which He demonstrated at The Event of all history, which will come to us at Pascha whether we are ready or not.

I dropped off the bucket of blooms right before Divine Liturgy (Holy Communion service) in the morning. In the afternoon, people cleaned and decorated the church.

In the evening was the Vigil for Palm Sunday, a gloriously rich beginning of the feast. The callas had been added to other flowers, including something that looked like campanula, and some unusual orange woody stems with berries (?) on them.

The palm fronds were all laid out at the ready.

In the middle of the service, while the sun was still up, we processed outside and stood singing and praying for a while; I was next to the wisteria and noticed the bees buzzing and the sweetness of the flowers adding to the flavor of the Holy Spirit.

Not long after that — I am leaving out so much that was wonderful, like the flower-covered chandelier set to swinging, and special breads, but You Had to Be There — the palm fronds were given out, and once they had a branch to hold, the children found it easier to last another while.

 Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord!

Essential Aromas

my garden, philosophy, , ,


When Debbie at Artful Aspirations posted about her sweet-smelling bush, I suspected a near relation, perhaps even a twin, to my Osmanthus fragrans. She said she bought her plant because of its common name Tea Olive; I had only known mine as Sweet Olive.

Not many days later M.K. at Through a Glass, Darkly, who was not a follower of Debbie’s blog, posted photos of her “holly bush,” with descriptions of its “heady and rich” scent reminiscent of gardenia.

The challenge of describing various scents is always of interest to me. I wonder if an individual flower is easier to pin down than a whole rain forest. We usually have to say that any given smell is something like another. Having grown up in an orange grove, I didn’t confuse osmanthus with orange blossoms, but upon my first encounter I did envision some woman along the route of our neighborhood stroll setting an apricot pie to cool by the window.

Surely osmanthus is its own heady aroma that nothing else is quite like. Last year, at the end of a post about how various other scents link to my grandmother, I tried to describe its effect on me.

One website that sells many essential oils for their aromatherapy benefits describes Osmanthus fragrans as “Friendly, lively, intriguing, what’s new, what’s next, early morning excitement, setting out on a whole new journey.”

Peet’s has blended a black tea with osmanthus blossoms, which might add some extra excitement to those mornings when I choose it over plain black or green.They say “its pleasant aroma could be described as a combination of apricot, chamomile, and orange flower.” They don’t make it all year long; stocking up would be necessary if you want to be assured of having it when you want.

After she heard about osmanthus, M.K. began to wonder if her hollies might actually be Tea Olives. In the meantime I had been reading about fragrant holly bushes and found that there are hundreds of types of holly, and some of them do look a bit like osmanthus. One osmanthus looks so much like holly that its common name is False Holly. Wikipedia mentions that osmanthus flowers can be various colors, even dark orange, and that in China it is traditional to mix some osmanthus jam into millet gruel.

You can see on that page a photo of an orange-flowered osmanthus taken in Japan. All of the photos here on my blog were taken just this week in my yard.  B. and I planted the bush about 20 years ago on the advice of  horticulturist friend. If we had known how big they get, we’d have started it out farther from the house.

Wikimedia also has this whole page of related photos.

Some of my other favorite botanical scents are lemongrass and rose geranium. I have a big bush of the geranium in a pot on the patio, and in my cupboard some essential oil of lemongrass to add by drops to hand soap. So far I’ve only enjoyed my osmanthus when it happens to fill the air with its essence, and that occasion always takes me by surprise and humbles me by the extravagant gift. “The osmanthus is blooming!”  I will announce, if someone is around. This happens at least twice a year; do I really need the oil extraction at other times?

The people on the planet of Perelandra in C.S. Lewis’s novel by that name had an admirable way of making the most of every experience. They considered an actual event in time to be only the smallest part of anything that they did or that happened to them. The anticipation was also to be enjoyed for all it was worth, and the memory of the incident or act would be savored into the future. In this way even the most lovely and desirable events were completely satisfying whether or not they took place more than once in a lifetime.

When one comes upon a strong aroma, say, walking into a house where bread is baking, or walking out one’s front door to the scent of osmanthus, if the stimulus continues for a time the olfactory receptors get desensitized or something; in any case, you stop noticing, until you go out and come back again. So I don’t know, if I had only smelled osmanthus once, if I could have made much of the experience. I’m not too good at paying attention, if that’s what’s necessary.

But I’ve had decades of being enveloped by the sweetness and the love that the Sweet Olive aroma signifies to me. I think I’ll just try to bask in it for a few seconds longer next time I pass by, or sit on the step and drink it in as long as my nose will keep sending the message to my brain. And if we move to a colder climate I’m sure I’ll be busy enough sniffing the air in that place without trying to import gifts that belong to the memorable past.