Rudyard Kipling | Gladsome Lights

In a way, my gardens have been too successful. I planted tomatoes where they didn’t have gl berries P1040889 room to grow, and have had to drastically prune them back so that I could get in there to pick them as they ripen. No pretty picture to show you there.

The fennel grew so lovely – now I realize it was overgrown and woody before I picked it. I’m eating it anyway, and the edible parts are yummy. Next year will be my third growing fennel and it should be the charm.

Rudyard Kipling said,

“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”

That goes for harvesting, too! But the making I need to do today and next week concerns seeds…. Before my next trip to see grandchildren, I have a few weeks to get seeds planted in flats in the greenhouse, and to water them once or more daily until they are big enough to set out in the garden where they will get automatic watering from then on. P1050162

What seeds? I don’t even know yet. But perhaps these that I received from Prairie Moon. I saw a picture on a blog post, of unidentified coneflowers growing wild on the prairie, and researched to find out what variety it might be, and where to buy seeds. It turns out they are Echinacea pallida. The company sent me milkweed seeds also, as a gift, and I dug out my own milkweed I had collected a couple of years ago. P1050165 I’m not even sure that I can successfully plant them now to have plants to set out in the spring. Probably I should be reading up on that instead of writing and speculating!

My front yard is taking a lot of attention. In July we laid cardboard and mulch thickly all over the lawn (this is called “sheet mulching”) to kill it, and now that that has been done stonemasons are beginning work on a walkway and a wall. gl P1050150

Later we’ll landscape with some plants about which I am still deciding. I had two rosemary bushes in the front, one of which was about 25 years old. Landscape Lady said it looked like a Bristlecone Pine, and at first we were going to keep it around for its venerableness. But it wasn’t that worthy, and would scratch and poke me twice a year when I took the pruners to it, over the years shaping it into its crotchety self. I didn’t want to go through that one more time….so I took parting pictures.

gl P1040918

Now that I have great soil and many options for growing various things, I don’t know if I will ever have a chance of “keeping up” with my garden. But I plan to go on enjoying it, and reporting about it here. Perhaps even while sitting in the shade.

gl bee on rosemary — bee on rosemary in its younger years

Rudyard Kipling turned me against monkeys long ago, when I was reading The Jungle Book to the children. As I recall, all the other animals of the jungle despised the monkeys for being foolish and emptyheaded chatterboxes. Add to that the rumors (as I’ve never known a monkey firsthand) that they are in real life dirty and infested with vermin, and the result was my assignment of them somewhere around the level of cockroaches.

Perhaps 15 years ago I took one of the first of the quizzes that have since become ubiquitous on the Internet. This one had you rate animals according to how much you liked them, and at the end you were told in turn something about your character or personality. I think it was based on some Oriental tradition and valuation. My results came back with the assessment that I disliked children. Oh, I’m sure there were some other points to my identity, probably equally misread, but all I remember is my horror at being so unfairly pegged in regard to that one aspect, I who was joyfully homeschooling my several children and praying for more. I figured out eventually that it was the dismissive attitude toward monkeys that did me in.

You know how children behave like little monkeys much of the time? I guess I never thought of mine as resembling monkeys, but if I had, I’d still think that educating them, training them to be grown-ups with good manners and character, would transform them from monkeys into human beings.

In my last post I shared “A Psalm of the Forest” with you, with its descriptions of trees and monkeys honoring and delighting in the Lord with whatever gifts and personality they have. In the scene described, the monkeys can’t be considered foolish, as they are giving glory to their Lord. The fool says in his heart that there is no God, and lives as though he were the center of everything. But the monkeys of this forest are all consumed with excitement over God. They are more like innocent and lively children who have no fear of offending Him.

My heart is softened nowadays toward monkeys, not that I think of them very much. I think the change was happening even before I discovered these lines from Paton, but he in his forest psalm has helped by reminding me how much every creature plays a part in bringing praise to the Creator.

We have the redwoods that amazed Alan Paton growing in our backyard, and have often camped near where he wrote these lines. The same feeling of awe and reverence has come over us in these forests, but nothing so playful and raucous as in the scene he describes. I love the fig tree, the waterfalls, the leaves showering down on their Maker, and the monkeys standing in for all of us children of our Father.