Category Archives: nature

Spring Plants Come Home

housework, my garden, nature,

It was a bit of a drive this morning, to get to the spring organic plant sale at an “ecology center” I’d never visited before. My main reason for going was to get tomato plants that are grown and tested in a place that is of a similar climate to us; I don’t want another Pitiful Tomato Summer. Oh, our tri-color cherry tomatoes saved us last year, but all the space and attention we gave to the regular tomatoes was not equal to the reward.

I was a little puzzled as to why they were having their sale so early; we never plant tomatoes until the first of May. But I thought I could just keep the plants under cover for another couple of weeks. As it turns out, I won’t have to do that, because when I arrived at the sale right after it started at 9 a.m., I couldn’t find what should have been a giant collection of tomato plants. “We will sell those at our next sale, May 1st,” a staff person told me. Aha! I hadn’t nosed around long enough on the website to learn all I needed to know.

My trip was not for nought, however. I’m glad for my error; otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered going there. I’d have missed the lovely drive under clouds, along fields spotted with Spanish Broom. This plant always reminds me of a time when Pippin was a toddler and I’d pack her on the back of my bicycle in the mornings to ride for a few miles along banks of broom in bloom, our heads filling with the sweet scent as we breezed by.

Today I also saw one of the remaining fields of fava beans. I love how these grow almost secretly all winter, and then when we emerge from our winter dens they are already tall and robust. Along with asparagus and artichokes, they used to keep my former (bigger) garden busy until we were ready to plant more tender things. I forgot to take my camera, so I found the fava pic on the Internet.

Even though there were no tomatoes, I found several enticing items to spend my money on, what with so many healthy looking young specimens spread out on tables under trees.

As long as we’ve lived in our current place, I have been unsuccessful at growing New Zealand Spinach from seed. Though it’s not a true spinach, I really appreciated it in the past for the way it grows all the hot summer long and is handy to toss into any dish where you want the flavor of spinach. As I recall, I mostly used it in Creamy Green Soup, a Laurel’s Kitchen cookbook recipe. My gardener-heart rejoiced to see a six-pack of my old friends, so I snatched that up first thing.

After a friend gave me a cutting once, I had rose geraniums propagating all over the yard for several years. But they had all died; I brought this one home to parent a new generation.

I bought some bachelor’s buttons, which I don’t recall growing before, and a Hummingbird Sage, which I might plant at church instead of home.

And three little pots each holding a different type of flat-leafed parsley! In the picture you can see a fourth little pot on the left, of Copper Fennel. Don’t know what I’ll do with that, other than chew on the feathery leaves if there are enough of them.

To get back to my car, I had to hike up a steep hill, carrying my box of plants. That was a good thing; I knew at the outset not to choose too big a box, or I’d have to make two trips.

Close to the plant sale is a nursery that I don’t get to very often, so I had to stop in there, to see if they had snapdragons and stock in the colors I wanted. They did! And they had several other things that begged to go with me, which I was kind enough to arrange.

When I got home I took a picture of the whole caboodle. Oh, but that was after I stopped at another nursery closer by, just to see if they had any taller snapdragons yet, which they didn’t.

Rain was beginning to fall, so I decided to just go home and write my report on my morning. I’ve been up since Mr. Glad’s alarm went off at 5:20, and before I went plant shopping I swam at the gym. So I’m almost worn out already.

Yesterday my young church friend C. worked with me in the garden here for almost two hours, and it helped me tremendously to have a willing and diligent companion as I broke through the months-long growth of mammoth weeds.

C. carried dozens of loads of pulled weeds to the garbage can, and cleared layers of pine needles from the path and off the cyclamen and manzanita. He never stopped moving, even while he told me all about his favorite books and movies, and about cartoon characters he has created. I’m going to try to have him at least twice a month, as a concession to my aging body that hurts and slows down when I abuse it by stooping, pulling, hauling and pruning for more than a couple of hours at a time. He might help me with housework, too. But this week we stuck to the garden and even planted some lilies.

An Olive Tree is More Than Interesting

art, church, history, nature, Pascha, travel, trees

In a recent post I said that my birthday olive tree was “an interesting gift.” I suppose it was because I was dead tired that I couldn’t think of a more telling word. I’m embarrassed to use such an uninteresting word as interesting. Ugh. The truth is, to receive the gift of an olive tree on the occasion of getting older made a huge impression on me. If I hadn’t needed to finish that post quickly and make dinner…well, enough of the excuses.

I love to look at these trees, so as I was browsing them on the Internet I pasted some pictures here. Vincent Van Gogh painted several scenes of olives.

A post about olive trees was one of the first in my string of blogs. And recently on my tree-rich trip I saw old California orchards. My childhood was near the groves that made Lindsay Ripe Olives famous, though as I have mentioned, I don’t like the fruits, and my family never had an olive tree on our property. Olive oil gelato? Very West-Coast, and I would be willing to give that a try.

You can adopt an olive tree growing in Italy, like the one at top, and then receive its produce for a year. I suppose you have to adopt it, or a different one, again the next year. Not very good parenting.

Montenegro is the home of this pocked giant, which is reputed to be 2000 years old. The longevity intrigues me, along with all the Biblical references, which I haven’t even begun to think about. Mention of them often goes along with general descriptions of abundance and productivity of gardens, and with pomegranates and figs and vineyards.

There’s a story of the olive tree who was asked to be king, and the olive branch in the dove’s mouth after The Flood. Doors for the Temple were carved in olive wood. Many people make reference to it being the tree of Peace, and God knows I need that–I need Him.

What does it mean, “I am like a green olive plant in the house of my God.” ?  It means alive, if it is green. Let me flourish in Your House, O Lord. Let me live in You.

Getting back to the trees themselves, the grove I would most like to visit is this idyllic one in Turkey , the fifth-largest seller of olive oil in the world– but trying to get to second place. Olive oil I do much appreciate, and can imagine having a picnic on the warm yellow grass, of bread dipped in oil, sitting on a blanket under the sun. Once during my sojourns in that very country, I helped women in shalvar* gather olives from the ground where they’d fallen. I even sampled one of the wrinkly brined olives they cured in flat pans spread around under the trees, and had to restrain myself from immediately spitting it out.

*(I tried in vain to find a picture of these baggy pants that so many women still wore in Turkey in the 60’s and 70’s. These days a version has become high fashion, and the ones worn by chic models are not the ones I saw and wore. Perhaps this will be be the subject of a future post.)


The Garden of Gethsemane figures prominently in the events of our salvation history, into which we entered last week through the services and events leading up to Pascha. And this tree lives there. What if it is also 2,000 years old?

I planned to post this blog before Pascha, but now here we are post-Gethsemane, post-Golgotha. Wherever olive trees, any trees, are living, this week they are dancing.

North Coast Beauty

nature, quotes, travel, wildflowers,

To celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary, B. and I spent a whole day on an outing to coastal places.

We stopped at this spot by the Navarro River and wondered at the water color.

It was chilly under the ramrod-tall redwoods there, but on the whole, the day was unseasonably warm for the coast, and we thanked God for that extra gift. After a long drive through spectacular landscapes we reached the little artsy town of Mendocino. First we ate lunch, which provided respite for the visual senses, while we indulged our taste buds.

There’s lots of nice driftwood on display in the town –see the faces?

One of the first shops we visited was full of kaleidoscopes that were amazing works of art and engineering, some priced at well over $1000. Looking through just one kaleidoscope gives the aesthetic mind a lot to ponder.

In other art galleries we feasted our eyes and fingers on wooden bowls and buffets, ceramic platters and sculptures, quilts, and paintings of the landscapes that are beloved by us after living in Northern California for most of our adulthood.

To think of all the craftsmen making these lovely things, it made me glad. I snapped this hand-carved wooden Noah’s ark in one window…

…mostly because I loved the sea otters,
in a characteristic pose with little “abalone” shells on their chests.

We wanted to go out on the bluffs to look at the flat ocean, because by then we were experiencing Art Beauty Overload.

Maybe it is because we aren’t used to protracted active examination of the visually sublime. I usually have lots of work to do and break it up by occasional joy in one flower or tree.

 

Any one of these objects might be more satisfying if you could sit and hold it a while, or put it on your wall to befriend slowly. The whirlwind tour of so much creativity makes for too much to actually “take in.”

Outside again, I did have work to do, trying to get good pictures of the world around me, adding my own sub-creative endeavors to my Father’s.

Anatole France said that “Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.”

Studying is a kind of work, and I already know more about the plant world than the art world, providing some foundation for further study and making it easier on my brain to examine the flora of Mendocino than the things in galleries.

Mustard trees like these above could easily hold birds, as mentioned in the Gospels. Their “trunks” are sturdy enough to survive the blustery winters out there above the surf, and in the spring they scatter their yellow cheer all over the rough brownness.

Surely the dark bushy stuff can’t be broom….wish I could get closer to look better. It would be a lot shorter and denser than what we see inland. But so many plants on the coast do seem to squat down close to the ground to brace themselves against the wind.

Lupine plants are spread all over the fields, not blooming yet. I think they will be blue when they come out. The giant yellow lupines we often see on the coast stand three feet tall. They haven’t flowered yet, either, but on our way out we passed large patches of purple lupines along the road–a medium-sized variety.

 

A little iris nestled into the tangle.

We took the long way home, which included hours of driving along the cliffs, with repeated vistas of cattle grazing below a backdrop of dark forests and clear blue sky, and redwood stake fences running along the highway intermingled with stands of spreading cypress trees.

These sights became familiar enough after a while that they were comforting and not so overwhelming. Look at the steers–they are doing their work, so they can bear the view without it tiring them out.

During part of the car trip, we listened to a whole disk of George Gershwin, which was another relaxed intake of beauty and appreciation of artistry, this time through the ear gate. At home, I never give my full attention to the music that might be playing, because I have too much else to think about. Sometimes we were in silence, just enjoying the sights. And for some hours B. played many of his iPod songs that I like, and we even sang along together with tunes that have accompanied us through our married years.

It was a splendid day!

Meeting on the Bike Path

history, nature, people

A brisk walk before 7:00 a.m. was just what I needed, I thought as I pulled on my clothes and quietly left the house yesterday morning. There was frost on the rooftops as I headed down the street to the bike/walking path a block away.

No sooner had I reached it but I overtook my neighbor and his dog, whom I’ve seen walking these paths for over a decade. Our relationship demonstrates the way friendship sometimes develops by baby steps, or maybe I could call them old-man-walking-old-dog-steps.

I don’t remember him from the first five years that we lived about six houses down from his, though I spent a lot of time on our wonderful paths that run along all the creeks through town. We were both busier, I suspect, and moving faster.

Ten or fifteen years ago I started noticing him with his dog. The dog was never in a hurry, and the man hunched a bit and shuffled, stopping and starting to avoid stumbling over his companion. He didn’t often look up at me when I drove past or when I met them strolling the other direction, but if he did, we would smile at each other.

A few years later I got a chance to speak to him a couple of times, and I told him that I lived just down the street. I didn’t say anything about how his yard was always neglected and full of tall weeds. Earlier on I had thought of bringing him cookies or offering to do some yard work, but once or twice I did see a woman there who I thought to be his daughter. Maybe it was she who planted some petunias one spring.

On this day, I had my perfect opportunity. Our relationship had progressed through the smile stage, into the speaking stage, and now, it seemed natural to slow my pace to theirs and say, “Good morning!” We started talking about his dog with the beautiful champagne-colored coat, a French sheepdog he’d gotten at the pound 14 years ago. “His name was Ben when we got him, but I changed it to Spunky.”

Somehow the conversation turned to politics–it wasn’t my doing! I walked alongside and followed their route, across this bridge, at which point Spunky stopped, changed direction, and was ready to go back more in the direction of home. That was as far as was his usual, his owner said. The whole hour I was with them I had to watch out for the leash and dog as they kept crisscrossing the path.

My friend told me about his childhood in Pittsburgh, PA, how he realized that if he didn’t leave shortly after high school, he’d be working in the factory forever. So he left, and he joined the Army, and traveled, but didn’t fight in Korea after all. His traveling gave him a different and broader perspective on the world from the average person, he believed. He recommended that I read The Economist, and told me about the three periodicals he reads to help him decide what companies to invest in.

Old men are often fun to talk to, especially if they like to talk about their lives and will carry the conversation. Then I can just show my interest and listen. Often they have a refreshingly old-fashioned outlook that I rarely encounter anymore. My neighbor doesn’t care that his jeans have a hole in the knee, or that his jacket is dirty. He had enough manners to pause in his story and ask a question about me or what I thought, but he wasn’t pushy if I didn’t talk much.

Eventually we got back to his house, and stood in the driveway for another ten minutes chatting about the Middle East and other places he had visited, and about how he has lived in that house for 38 years. I pointed out my house. He looked at Spunky, who had settled down to rest on the pavement, and said, “I have to get him inside,” but just before that I had introduced myself and found out that the man’s name is Ray.

My time was used up, it was nearly 8 o’clock, so I just walked quickly around the block and went home to tell B. about my new friend.