Category Archives: other gardens

Flowers of Matins

church, Lent, other gardens, trees,

One lovely thing about attending more Matins services during Lent is being able to see the flowers in the early morning light. When I walk out the church door to my car, I reach for my camera, and –more often than not, it’s missing!

This morning I found it in the pocket, and walked around a while snapping pictures.

This first one of a camellia has a stray redwood twig hanging on. We have a lot of those cluttering up the garden beds, as there is at least one tall Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) on the property. Check out the link if you are unclear about the different types of redwood trees.

Long ago when I was in labor of childbirth with my Valentine baby, a friend brought me a bouquet of daphne for my bedside; that was my introduction to the heady scent of this plant. I never realized until this month that I’ve been looking at it growing at church for several years.

  

This afternoon I had another photo opportunity and my camera was home on the computer table where I’d been uploading these pics. So now, I’ve put it back in my purse, and I’m considering an outing tomorrow for the sole purpose of photo-shooting, to catch more glimpses of early spring in my neighborhood.

Watering the Garden and the Soul

church, other gardens, quotes, ,

I’m sharing some pictures from my church’s garden, where I am privileged to work a few hours a week. All these I took just this afternoon.

Garden soil tends to dry out when we get this far into summer. Maybe it’s because we gardeners get lax, after the super-scorching days have passed, and don’t water deeply enough. But when the earth gets to a certain degree of dryness, it sheds water, rather than absorbing what it needs. You can stand there with a hose for ten minutes, and then put your finger down into the dirt and discover that one inch down it’s bone-dry.

This water-repelling phenomenon happened to me at church today. Last week I planted lots of violas and stocks. The weather is still borderline too warm for them, but we are getting the property ready for our big food festival coming up, and I thought they would do o.k. if they were kept moist.

(Two plants–the large green leaves are the Burning Bush, from the Holy Land. And the red berries are hips on a Nootka Rose.)

There are several of us who irrigate the plants that aren’t on automatic watering, and sometime in the last week someone of us let the ground dry out. Today some stocks were languishing so much that I knew they wouldn’t look good in a week, so I drove down the road to the nursery and bought some more stocks, and some more violas. Came back and soaked the ground, and mashed the water into the baked soil with my trowel, and re-planted.

I often think, at such times, how much extra time it takes to re-do and fix things, that if I had just done them right, wouldn’t need fixing. And immediately I thought of the spiritual counterpart. Lately I had let things dry out, just when the cares of this world were making me more thirsty than usual.

Most likely the soil of my soul was not able to take up the moisture needed from the showers of blessing I was getting. If only I had been more constant in feeding and watering my soul…but I hadn’t. And it got to the point where extra attention was needed—more time and labor, to overcome the effects of the stress of drought. I don’t want to look like some of those Johnny Jump-Ups that I saw splayed on the ground! But even they, after their soil was moistened up so that they could drink, quickly revived and stood up straight.

Repentance is not self-flagellation; it is an opening flower.
-Fr. Kallistos Ware

Crazy About Roses

my garden, other gardens,

This week I spent a good while pruning roses at church, which reminded me how much I love those flowers, and I decided to prolong the feeling by writing about it a little and looking at pictures with you. The photo above is of our two climbing roses we have at home, Cécile Brunner and Golden Showers, taken last spring, which I think was the first season after being pruned properly.Here they are this year. The C.B. at least is a little bigger. It’s quite a bit younger, and is the first plant that has worked to sort of fill up that corner of the yard visually. Note in the second picture the change in the background–the neighbors’ messy palms! Oh, well, I usually have my nose in the blossoms or am looking the other direction trying not to get poked in the face while I cut dead blooms, so that I don’t see what’s over the fence.

Here is a close-up of the Golden Showers, a rose I bought with a Jackson & Perkins gift certificate that my fellow-gardener sister K. so thoughtfully gave me for my birthday one year. Now it always makes me think of her.

This lovely flower that the Japanese beetle is enjoying is a tea rose in the front yard; its name is Pristine. (We have another rose bush out there for which I can’t find a photo at present, but I’ll show you in the future.) Pristine is a gem.

At church we have about 50 rosebushes. When I was tending them earlier in the week, deadheading, pruning a bit, watering, I didn’t want to stop, though I didn’t finish the job. I never do finish at church, because there is enough work there for at least one full-time gardener, and we don’t have any. It is a challenge to stay focused and enjoy the task of the moment; the mind wants to race ahead and dwell in the problems of the future–as in, How will I ever get half of this work done?

But somehow, that day, I was able to take a few minutes of the many and think how marvelous it is that I can do such sweet-smelling and satisfying work, loving Creation by ministering to the needs of these beauties. They can’t help it if they poke and scratch me, and the aromas and velvety petals and rainbows of colors make up for the pain.

Who would have thought I would like an orange rose? The two at church are on either side of a sidewalk intersection, and not being the same variety, they complement each other in their different tones of orangeness. This one is Ginger Snap, and the one I have pictured at the top of the sidebar, in two tones, is About Face. I am very fond of both.This is “merely” a gorgeous red rose that gives glory to God there on the church property.

My favorite at church is this pink climber that is also my special pet. It is at a spot where a lot of people see it, next to the parking lot. Last fall Mr. Glad helped me to drive a large redwood stake into the ground between it and the pillar that is concrete on the bottom. Then I wired the stake/post to the pillar, so that when I anchor the rosebush to the stake it won’t get pulled over, and the trunk of the rose will be closer to the redwood part of the pillar, where I hope to train it. A long process. But it is a climbing rose, and last year it kept reaching out away from the pillar. It’s doing better now with some discipline.

Now that May is past, many of the roses will have finished their biggest show. There will be plenty of rose work to be done, or left undone, all summer long. But let me not miss the immediate and rich rewards.

Joanna and the Beanstalk

crafts, my garden, other gardens, , , ,

About this time in the last couple of years I was planting seeds of these large pole beans called Painted Lady. It all started one springtime when my friend L. asked me to come to her house and see the puzzling beans that had been growing there after having arrived from she-knew-not-where.

When I saw them, there was new spring growth of runner beans with large leaves and gorgeous flowers, and there were a few pods left on the vines from the previous fall. Inside the pods were large speckled dry beans. I had never seen anything quite like them.

I went home with a few of the beans for seeds, and searched online garden sites for plants that matched the description.

It didn’t take long before I found identifying pictures and information stating that these are the only pole beans with a bi-color flower. They are called Painted Lady after Queen Elizabeth I, who earned that nickname for wearing a lot of makeup. There were sites where one could buy seeds. One woman was selling a packet of five beans for a tidy sum. But I got mine for free! I planted them pretty soon, but it was too late in the season for them to do anything but make a few flowers before they were cut down by the frost.

L. had more beans again that summer, though, and she gave me more, which I planted earlier and more successfully, as you can see by the photos.

Not only did my second planting grow well, but the plants I had started too late the previous year sprouted again–they are perennials! These beans are too good to believe. Who ever heard of a perennial runner bean?

Everything about Painted Ladies is large. The flowers, the leaves, the pods, and the beans. The vines want to grow to the sky. I strung jute twine vertically along the fence, tied loosely at the base of each plant, for them to hang on to as they twisted upwards.

We never solved the mystery of how they got started. The seeds seem a bit large for a bird to drop in, and L.’s neighbors don’t garden. In any case, It felt magic. The fairy-tale seeds grew vigorously and rewarded me with the harvest in the top photo. I wanted to share the bounty and the adventure with my gardening friends, so before I cooked any of my pile I measured a bit more than five beans into packets to give away. I saw too late that I had accidentally named Queen Victoria instead of Queen Elizabeth on the packet. 😦

The beans when cooked have a typically mealy texture, and not a strong flavor. The skins are somewhat chewy. I’ve only used them in soup.

This week the rain or drizzle has been constant, and forcing us to put off planting the garden. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much work there will be when the ground dries out just a bit. But just writing about this happy gift makes me remember the surprises that make me glad to be out there doing my part to be ready for heavenly blessings.