Salvia clevelandii | Gladsome Lights

May is for flowers! The first white echinacea opened today, and many other lovelies are in full bloom, like the Chocolate Cosmos, and a fancy mullein I planted in the fall. I hope it gets tall like the wild ones. Sorry, I can’t seem to get a good picture of it yet.

It’s the time of year when the poppies and nigella begin to look a mess, so I spent quite a while today pulling them out of the area by the front door. The picture above shows the situation “before.” I also removed one of the three salvia clevelandii that live there; you can sort of see one at the back, reaching for the sky with its long branches. The latest landscaper was a hopeless over-planter, I am realizing every day. I love that salvia and its herby scent, but it gets big. One of them to “anchor” the bed would have been plenty. They are casting too much shade, and crowding the Clary Sage that will bloom next month.

I discovered the above thing clinging to the inside of a planter box and a milkweed plant. I pointed my phone’s Seek app at it and it knew immediately what it was. The common name it gave me was too unpleasant for me to want to pass on, but it is a kind of slime mold. Probably some of my readers are familiar with it.

My zucchini, sunflower, and zinnia seeds have sprouted. And I think the amaranth, too, though the leaves I see are such tiny ones, I can’t be sure yet. It’s nice to be home enough that I can go out several times a day, set the hose nozzle to “shower” and moisten the ground for them. Here’s a little poem in praise of seeds.

Seeds

The seeds I sowed –
For week unseen –
Have pushed up pygmy
Shoots of green;
So frail you’d think
The tiniest stone
Would never let
A glimpse be shown.
But no; a pebble
Near them lies,
At least a cherry-stone
In size,
Which that mere sprout
Has heaved away,
To bask in sunshine,
See the Day.

-Walter de la Mare

When I woke today, a multitude of urgent tasks filled my mind and sent me off in the wrong direction. Eventually I was rescued by the Jesus Prayer, by Jesus Himself. As I calmed down I realized that a few of the tasks were not that urgent, and when I began to consolidate my lists, one task fell off altogether, being a completely unnecessary outing, and large project that would have followed. That was a drive to the apple ranch to get Gravenstein apples, a variety that I usually miss out on because they are so early. But it won’t hurt to miss out on them again — why change tradition?

I’d wanted to water the garden early, but it ended up being not-so-early, and what do you know, that was not a disaster. Putting the hose on thirsty plants — or were they plants that merely look dry because it is August? — gave me so much joy, I could hardly bear it. I remember when my current garden went in, ten years ago, with its extensive automatic irrigation, my daughter Pearl was concerned and said, “But Mama, you love watering the garden!” Evidently that is true. It’s a great gift to have such work.

Viburnum coming along after hard pruning.

It seems to me that the irrigation system needs some adjusting; my thought is that as the plants are more in number and greater in size than when we first programmed it, and even since the last changes, I should customize it further. That job is a mental challenge for me, as there are six different valves/lines and three programs, for each of which one has to determine how many days per week and how many minutes of run time. As I have done so often, I will have to study the diagram and how to enter the settings via the dials and buttons, because it never sticks with me. If I just give some areas a little more water by hand, that will relieve my anxiety. It will be easier to tackle the problem if I am confident that nothing is dying of thirst right now.

As I walked around with the hose, noting how many things are alive and obviously growing, happiness filled me. The thoughts of J.R.R. Tolkien that Eugene Terekhin writes about recently in “Why Gardeners Will Save the World” make me think that my garden is helping me while I am tending it:

Quoting a letter Tolkien wrote to a friend: “I think the simple ‘rustic’ love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero’s) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, and the ‘longing for Elves’, and sheer beauty.”

Terekhin: “Mythically speaking, Sam [the character in Lord of the Rings] was ‘down to earth.’ He was a gardener who loved all things that grow — as all hobbits do.”
….
“The most important thing one can do in wartime is to grow a garden. Because when we grow things, they grow us. It takes a long time to grow something, and as we tend our garden we grow together with it.”

I know for sure that just being out there, soaking up the scents and the colors, watching the bees and butterflies drink from the flowers I tend on their behalf, is to me that most essential, ordinary life such as Tolkien shows us. For quite a while I followed this glorious, common swallowtail in all its glory, a creature that was drinking from just about every zinnia in the planter boxes. He and I were of the same mind about Being, and being down to earth.