Tag Archives: lavender

A gardener’s work and prayer.

humor, my garden, poetry, , , , , , , ,

I’ve been in the garden every day, at least a little, and often a lot. When I come downstairs in the morning and realize that it’s already warm enough that I can slide the glass door open, without thinking about it I slide open the screen door, too, and go out to have a look.

The bluebird parents can be seen flying back and forth to feed the peeping infants. Finches, sparrows, hummingbirds and even the flirty Bewick’s Wren fill the space with their songs. Oh, and crows. It is a new thing the last few years to have crows in my yard. I prefer the old way, and I politely ask them to leave. They leave but they come back.

Often in the morning I will put water in the fountain, and trim a little here or pull a weed there. Most days I seem to spend quite a while picking sweet peas.

The sweet peas have become very intimate with the perennial runner beans. The sweet peas were up on the trellis months earlier, and were covered with flowers when the bean stems emerged at three corners of the planter boxes and started climbing. They mostly twist their stems around the pea vines as they climb, and quickly they have outclimbed the peas.

The pea vines responded in kind, continuing their reach for the sky by holding on to the beans. This relationship has to end, though, because the peas are expiring while the beans are only now putting out a few flowers. So, the last couple of days when I pick the flowers, I’m also going to a lot of trouble to break up this love affair without breaking the bean stems. Let’s hope I can plan better and not let this situation develop next spring.

When the sun gets too high and I start to droop, I go indoors and do housework. Or read poems. I’ve been bingeing on them in the last week, and hope to share my favorites here eventually. Maybe in the fall when I have finished my Big Sort, the organizing of all my Stuff: rooms, closets, cabinets, drawers and belongings to throw, give or put away. I hope the Big Sort will be done long before that, but there is the garden…

Acanthus
Lemon
Lavender

I mixed up some fish emulsion and fed the lemon tree today. I wanted to give it more iron, too, but I read on the bottle that you should not apply that until late evening. It was time for a break, anyway, so here I am. And here is a poem I read last night, which I hope you like:

GARDENER’S PRAYER

O Lord, grant that in some way
it may rain every day,
Say from about midnight until three o’clock
in the morning,
But, You see, it must be gentle and warm
so that it can soak in;
Grant that at the same time it would not rain on
campion, alyssum, helianthus, lavendar, and others which
You in Your infinite wisdom know
are drought-loving plants-
I will write their names on a bit of paper
if you like-
And grant that the sun may shine
the whole day long,
But not everywhere (not, for instance, on the
gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron)
and not too much;
That there may be plenty of dew and little wind,
enough worms, no lice and snails, or mildew,
and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano
may fall from heaven.
Amen.

-Karel Matej Capek Chod
(1860 -1927) Czech Republic

Bees dive into purple flowers.

my garden, nature, , ,

What I have is a small lavender-and-bee gallery for you. My 26 lavender plants in the back garden are all blooming now, and the bees have arrived by the scores to drink from those flowers, and teucrium in the front. Mostly the teucrium – goodness, that stuff is popular! I’m glad I have two long hedges of it. But we’ll start in the back:

Those are new olive leaves with lavender in the background.

Now we’ll just meander out to the front yard…

I whittled my teucrium-crazy bees down to three favorites. That’s the best I could do!

Lavender and little scythes.

nature, other gardens, work, ,

The nuns at a nearby monastery harvest lavender every summer at various neighbors’ properties up in the hills and mostly at the end of long unpaved and/or winding roads. They had asked the young people from parishes in the area to help them today, and when some families had to back out at the last minute, several adults including me pitched in.

I had to get up before 5:00 to get fueled up and make the drive to arrive early enough for the sisters to give us a hearty breakfast. But even before that, we learned that Mother Anna who recently fell asleep in death had still not been buried, and we might go into the church and say good-bye to her. Mother Angelina was reading Psalms at the head of the casket when we went in; we all filed past and kissed the little icons that were next to her, and the Gospel. It was sweet to have this opportunity.

After breakfast and chatting we caravaned to the first and most scenic spot, where we picked from a big clump of lavender bushes stuck in a low spot among olive trees at a vineyard. We were given little scythes, which seem the perfect tool for any bush you want to grab hunks of and slice off, to shear it. I plan to get one for my own garden right away, so I can give a break to my finger joints.

As we were packing tools and water, and applying sunscreen and bug spray — the sisters said they had been “chewed up” by chiggers one year — Mother Tabitha was on the phone a lot trying to arrange for Mother Anna to be buried this afternoon.

One of the lavender friends, with the most to pick, cancelled our visit because they didn’t think their insurance covered children on the property, and they had seen a few rattlesnakes lately. But the monastery had already this season delivered 200 pounds of lavender flowers to the distiller, so they were not worried. Some of what we were tackling was past its prime and too dried out to use. We sheared it off anyway but put it in the discard pile.

We eventually filled the back of a pickup truck with the blooms. Bees were thicker on them in the truck than they had been in the field. The farmer lady gave us plums and peaches for a snack, and insisted that the sisters take buckets of dahlias and gladiolas for the burial of Mother Anna.

The second, smaller harvest was at a house that had barely missed destruction in the fires of 2017. Most of their lavender bushes, which had formerly lined the long driveway, had burned and not been replaced. To the south and to the north, close to the front and back of the house, were patches of blackened trees where the wildfire had swept through erratically.

Soon we were headed back to the monastery, hot and dusty, and again they fed us very well! But Mother Macrina drove the pickup load straight to the distiller, to have its essential oil extracted. The by-product hydrosol, the lavender water that is left over, they also use, to make sprays good for cleaning and dusting, and deodorizing. Next time I have a chance, I’ll buy some lavender products from them. And maybe tomorrow I’ll look at my own lavender bushes and see if they are ready to harvest!

Clouds and bees and international beans.

my garden, nature, , , , , ,

The clouds were beautiful this morning,
perhaps mainly in their strangeness for midsummer,
but in themselves, too.

I saw a bird flying in the light shining through, and then it “flew away” and was gone. A few raindrops fell on my head, but soon all cleared and it was sunny and warm, the kind of summer day that brought a blanket of sleepiness to lay over me, and pretty much forced me to lie on my bed, to fall asleep after reading Wendell Berry.

But before that, I was in the garden pushing around among the leaves of the pole beans to discover that the Spanish Musica are getting big! They are flattish green beans. A friend and I ate raw the only two that seemed too big to leave hanging… but afterward I thought that perhaps I should have let them go a little longer, to see just how big they might get.

My bean project has become an international event, what with Oregon Blue Lakes, Spanish Musica, and now Japanese beetles arriving on the scene. 😦

I find it the hardest thing to be in the garden and not try to take more pictures of bees! I never think about the time it will take to sort and crop and organize all those shots… I will never be known for my clean floors, but maybe someone will appreciate my legacy of bee photos.

I kneeled on the walkway in front to get close to the humming action, and marveled at the number of bees working close together. They are camouflaged among the blooms that have faded, so in the photo below I zoomed in and circled the ones I could make out.

And here is a wider view of where I sat, between the hedges of germander that is the species Teucrium chamaedrys. If total strangers weren’t walking by to see me, I would be tempted to stretch out on the warm pavers to revel at leisure and more intimately in all the sweet and flowery humming!

In the back garden, they are at the lavender, yarrow, lambs ears…

And on the oregano!

 

When the bees are happy in my garden, I feel that at least something is right in the world, and I’m humbled to be a participant.

The day is done now, it’s actually cold, and dark. The honeymakers have stopped working for a few hours. I will sleep, too, and be glad to see you again tomorrow, my little bee friends.