I relived one of the literally sweetest experiences of my childhood yesterday and I didn’t even have to journey the five hours back “home” to the groves my father used to tend so lovingly. We Glad gardeners visited a local nursery just to get one replacement plant for our project of last fall.
navel oranges in bloom
We were looking for a helianthemum, and they are in the area in back of the store, so we passed through the breezeway and were suddenly enveloped, not in a breeze but in a stillness heavy with fruit and flowers.
Overlapping rows of pots containing various citrus trees, including many oranges and mandarins, lined the alley and were exhaling their essence into that space. For me it was a whiff of the deep past, springtimes slowed down to a dream — orange trees taking their sweet time and confusing the mind, because isn’t springtime when everything and everyone is waking up and getting busy…?… but this air is like a drug that makes me want to lie on the grass and let my eyelids droop.
grapefruit and orange trees side-by-side
Our house was surrounded on all sides by orange trees, so that for many weeks every year we walked around in our own tropical island of scent. Can you imagine living in that house and being allergic to orange blossoms? Two family members were — and I pity them mightily, because orange blossoms are one of the happiest things in the data bank of my senses.
My husband and I had only a few minutes to find our plant, so I couldn’t linger, I quickly pushed on through to the shelves of California native plants and other drought-tolerant species. Our first choice wasn’t there, but we found this:
I had luckily forgotten my Western Garden Book in the car so I had to make two more passes through the little paradise to retrieve it. Then we read a bit together about the above plant and some other offerings.
In the end we did decide on this dear low-growing plant, a newish species of Blue-eyed Grass, developed from a California native, and sufficiently xerophytic for our needs. I remember my friend May showing me one of these wildflowers decades ago as we hiked in the Coast Ranges of our state. They aren’t really grasses but are actually in the Iris family, which seems obvious now that I know it.
new planting last October
Except for the one that died, all the plants of our project shown at right are bigger now, but there’s still a lot of space to be filled in.
I can’t settle on which is more fun as a name, Sisyrinchium or Blue-eyed Grass. This is the first we’ve ever had them in our yard, and as you can see, we bought two, because they are small. I planted them tonight, where a blue penstemon, actually two, one after the other, had died last year. I hope to have nice photos of them and the whole bed to show in the future.
And before the citrus bloom is past I will return to that nursery when I have time enough time to wander. I’ll consider the snapdragons in the back, and then the perennials in the front, and I’ll go back and forth through the citrus tree lane at least a few times. I’ll walk slowly each time past the mandarins and Meyer lemons and orange trees and sip my sweet daydream.
Last week was filled with historical talk and images – even theology. First there was the cemetery where we had buried my father-in-law in January. We checked to make sure that the gravestone had been cut and set properly, and then we visited the graves of Mr. Glad’s great-grandparents and grandparents on both sides of the family, and several aunts and uncles.
Above is a photo of one set of the great-grandparents whose graves we visited, people born in Cornwall in the mid-19th century. They came to California to work in the New Almaden quicksilver (mercury) mines near San Jose, where the wife Eliza gave birth to my husband’s grandmother and several other children.
When I look into the bright eyes of that face I just wish I could hug her. Why do you focus on her and not him, my husband asked? Because she’s a woman and I’m a woman, I answered. I feel strangely connected to her across the years and in spite of the fact that I never knew her nor are we even related by blood. I wonder if she is praying for her descendants, including my children and grandchildren? I can’t see and touch her right now, but (Matthew 22) “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” She is a real living person, not an idea.
New Almaden Englishtown
The novel Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner tells the story of a miner and his wife who lived for a time there in Englishtown, with tales involving Mexican miners in the camp’s “Spanishtown.” The Cornish people attended the Methodist Episcopal Church on the hill and Eliza is remembered as loving to read her Bible.
When her children were grown and the parents had moved into San Jose, she still prepared a large spread every Sunday afternoon and expected all the children and their families to come for Sunday dinner. She was especially fond of her grandsons.
Many of the women those days kept chickens and cows but Eliza was the only one in her family who had the gumption to kill a chicken. When any of the others wanted chicken for dinner they would take their bird to Eliza to chop off its head.
A mother and father not ours
On the first night of our trip to these forbears’ old stomping grounds we had dinner with a dear cousin who also is linked and indebted to them. We came bearing gifts of photographs of some relations who have passed on, and we talked about our family — and of course, our own childhoods.
Next day the Mister and I ate a picnic next to the Felton Covered Bridge in the Santa Cruz mountains. It’s the tallest known covered bridge in the country, built of redwood in 1892 to span the San Lorenzo River. No one knows why the builders made it so high.
I started thinking about bridges as a metaphor, as in “Bridges to the Past”….What would be the thing to be bridged, the gulf over which we can meet on a bridge? If we are on this side of the bridge, what or who is on the other side?
Burned redwoods at Henry Cowell.
The bridge lies near the Mt. Hermon Christian conference center, where my husband from his earliest days enjoyed the creeks and paths, and sleeping on the porch of his grandmother’s cabin.
He and I spent our brief honeymoon in that cabin, and strolled dreamily around the redwoods of Henry Cowell park nearby. It was drizzling that day in March 41 years ago and we had the park to ourselves, no doubt breathing the same woodsy, cold and moist air that we drank up on this trip.
Our marriage has endured to the present; it’s a continuing thing, so the bridge idea doesn’t exactly fit in that case, but it was pressed back into my mind a few more times anyway.
Mr. Glad and “The Giant” redwood tree.Our cabin in the old days.
From the covered bridge and the park we drove up a hill to the neighborhood of the old cabin where we’d spent so many happy times with several generations sleeping in nooks and corners and beds tucked into closets. Another cousin and his wife live around the corner in a cabin that’s been in his family for many decades, too.
We two couples walked up and down all over the place remembering the fun and family going back 60 years. Mr. Glad and I hadn’t visited “his” cabin since 23 years ago it passed from our family. We saw that trees and ferns and birdbath have been taken away, to make space for parking trucks.
That’s too bad. Well, let’s keep going downhill toward the kind of landmarks that don’t change so easily.
Two Cousins on New Swinging Bridge
The natural beauty endures – some of these redwood trees have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. The unnamed tall tree above looked to us as large as The Giant we had seen a few hours before in the state park. We were gazing up at it from the Swinging Bridge, a suspension bridge that still sways when you walk on it, though it has been improved from what it was in Mr. Glad’s younger years.
Cabin Cousin named this scene “Stumphenge.” People are always making structures and arrangements that are symbolic of the most meaningful things in their lives. Some of those structures, as I was to reminded the next morning, are intangible.
It’s obvious I love a good bridge — some of them are majestic works of art, and even the less dramatic show the human need and desire to go from here to there on the earth, to interact with the natural landscape in practical and artistic, and sometimes playful, ways.
I am often more comfortable on a sturdy bridge than I am down in the canyon or river below. Two creeks come together on the Mt. Hermon property. This confluence of Bean and Zayante Creeks is just about The Most Favorite Spot from the Mr. Glad history files. I have waded in the creek here too, with our children, and have sat picnicking on lovely warm summer days. We looked down from the swinging bridge and sighed our contented memories.
At this time of year we didn’t want to be down there in the chilly water. From the bridge, wearing our cozy jackets, we could get a wide view. You feel that you know where you are, and there are no sand or pebbles scratching between your toes.
The next day as we drove home Mr. Glad and I listened to a discussion about a famous theologian who is now acknowledged to be a BRIDGE between East and West, Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals, and other disparate groupings. If I tell you his name many of you will feel an immediate urge to click away to another blog, because the Unitarians have done that to you.
When they controlled the educational system of this nation Unitarians worked hard to steer young people away from the Puritans, and one small tactic in this program was to inoculate them against a man who preached a lot on themes like humility, beauty, and the sweetness of the Love of God. They did this by making sure that schoolchildren had in their curriculum one of his worst and least representative sermons.
In our usual intellectually focused condition we search for these rational bridges to connect us to our roots and to each other. I’m afraid the Unitarians were trying to keep us on a platform without even a good view of the life-giving stream. If I stay in my mind and only think about God, it is like looking down from a bridge at the river, when what I am dying of thirst to do is splash and drink and be refreshed by the Living Water.
But in the presence of God, living our theology by prayer and love to one another, we can be part of a continuum, like the earthly water that over the millennia constantly comes back to us as rain into the streams and snow on the mountains, evaporates from the oceans to make clouds that float inland again….
If Jonathan Edwards and I both live in Christ, who said, “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” then we are in the same vital current. And that’s the important thing.
One of my dearest and most influential friends, Anne, gave me a copy of Edwards’s Religious Affections more than twenty years ago, and I spent a while this morning becoming re-acquainted. But I don’t think it’s likely that I will read much more of the works of this brilliant thinker who is for some people a bridge. I already spend too much time standing on and studying bridges and platforms.
Instead I want to live in communion with God and with His people — including my distant-but-near relations from the 19th century, the 18th century — even the Holy Apostles, and all of that Cloud of Witnesses who (I Corinthians) “did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.”
Normally it takes 15 miles and a half-hour to get back from the dentist, but today I added considerably to the length of the trip what with all the U-flipping I did along the country roads, trying to find a place where I could safely pull over and park, near a good view of the mustard fields.
Mustard is ubiquitous right now, I kept telling myself, so why bother? You should be home pruning your own roses. Acacia trees are also appearing like so many suns along every block and mile, but I like the mustard better, especially when it crowds in among the rows of black and twisty grapevines.
Before I’d started home from Dentist Town I walked around being nostalgic. In times past our family would on Sundays drive down the highway to church, through a valley that in springtime was scattered with old trees in pink or white blooms. We made a game of counting those trees – especially the white ones.
When Mr. Glad and I moved to this area 40 years ago I learned what a quince was, and after that, about this time of year the coral-colored bushes always came out and introduced themselves again, dressed exactly like this one that I found today. And look! Even the bee was with me in my blossom reverie. He is just left of center intent on his business.
Rosemary was in flower (photo near top), and in another shape climbed up the wall alongside juniper. I found an old white tree with Miner’s Lettuce at his foot, looking very like the ones we used to tally up as treasures. The hope that my photos of trees and shrubs might be o.k. comforted me when all the mustard views seemed flat and distant.
But it turned out I had a couple of pictures on the camera worthy of snipping and cropping to show you my loves. Until I saw them in two dimensions on my monitor, I hadn’t lifted my eyes to the hills at all, being so obsessed with the lower stretches of terrain. Now I can glean a little comfort from my pictures on another level.
privet berries
It’s been a dry winter since Christmas, and as a farmer’s daughter I find it a challenge to respond wholeheartedly to the greetings I hear daily now, along the lines of “Isn’t it nice to have this beautiful weather?” and “Don’t you just love that Spring is finally here?!” It feels a little scary to leave what is usually our rainiest season behind without getting soaked.
But just because I’m writing on the topic, I did some research and found an encouraging map that gives me some good news: Some of California’s reservoirs are fuller than average right now; a third of them are full to 80% or more of their capacity. Another chart, though, shows that the water content of the Sierra snow is low. Not the lowest ever, but….Things have always been iffy this way for mankind, since The Flood. Sometimes enough water, sometimes flooding, sometimes drought. At least this year the trees and fields are drawing enough moisture from the soil that they can make flowers. The hills are green now…perhaps we’ll even get rain in March and they won’t turn gold and parched too early. I will thank the Good Lord that by His mercy and faithfulness Spring has come again.
The oaks were of noble bearing: they did not trail their branches on the ground like willows, nor did their leaves have the dishevelled appearance of certain poplars, which can look from close-up as though they have been awoken in the middle of the night and not had time to fix their hair. Instead they gathered their lower branches tightly under themselves while their upper branches grew in small orderly steps, producing a rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle — like an archetypal tree drawn by a child.
It’s surprising how often the subject of trees comes up in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. The description above is from his visit to the Lake District in England, but while he is France he also notices trees with the help of Van Gogh’s paintings. I like the word pictures the artist himself painted when he was working on a series of sketches of cypresses, words that tell us about the trees and about Van Gogh, too:
They are constantly occupying my thoughts….it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them. The cypress is as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has a quality of such distinction. It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly.
Van Gogh was with his cypresses for quite a while, getting to know them. I have felt close to some particular trees over the course of my life, starting with a pear tree outside my back door, which for some reason made enough of an impression on my five-year-old mind that it remained the only thing I remember from that house’s yard.
We moved to another place with a significant tree, a huge oak that grew even bigger till it threatened the house in which I spent the remainder of my youth. So I can’t help loving oaks, and I do think trees in general worth a whole post from this book on travel, even if they aren’t that big a part of the book.
But, see here, Van Gogh couldn’t leave out the trees when he wrote about his house:
My house here is painted the yellow colour of fresh butter on the outside with glaringly green shutters, and it stands in the full sunlight in a square which has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders and acacias. And it is completely whitewashed inside, and the floor is made of red bricks. And over it is the intensely blue sky. In this I can live and breathe, meditate and paint.
De Botton notices some trees by a stream on another occasion in the Lake District, while he sits on a bench enjoying a chocolate bar, “a scene so utterly suited to a human sense of beauty and proportion.” But he didn’t pay attention to them for very long, and seemed to forget them entirely when his trip was over. But one day he was in a traffic jam and mentally stressed by the cares of everyday life, and
…the trees came back to me, pushing aside a raft of meetings and unanswered correspondence, and asserting themselves in consciousness. I was carried away from the traffic and the crowds and returned to trees whose names I didn’t know, but which I could see as clearly as if they stood before me. These trees provided a ledge against which I could rest my thoughts, they protected me from the eddies of anxiety and, in a small way that afternoon, contributed a reason to be alive.
I’m sad to realize that in my travels I’ve not spent enough time alone in one place to take proper note of foreign trees, but I do love them. And when we visited the Bristlecone Pines a year ago, I suppose it was the fact that they were the focal point of the place that enabled me to concentrate on them more than is typical for me. But instead of drawing them, I philosophized about them.
John Ruskin tells us, “Your art is to be the praise of something that you love.” Perhaps my first adult drawing effort will be of a tree.
I relived one of the literally sweetest experiences of my childhood yesterday and I didn’t even have to journey the five hours back “home” to the groves my father used to tend so lovingly. We Glad gardeners visited a local nursery just to get one replacement plant for our project of last fall.
In the end we did decide on this dear low-growing plant, a newish species of Blue-eyed Grass, developed from a California native, and sufficiently xerophytic for our needs. I remember my friend May showing me one of these wildflowers decades ago as we hiked in the Coast Ranges of our state. They aren’t really grasses but are actually in the Iris family, which seems obvious now that I know it.
Van Gogh was with his cypresses for quite a while, getting to know them. I have felt close to some particular trees over the course of my life, starting with a pear tree outside my back door, which for some reason made enough of an impression on my five-year-old mind that it remained the only thing I remember from that house’s yard.
Gladsome Lights 
