June 21 - June 25 Ferns and Blueberries

2010-The summer solstice marks the widest path of the sun’s travels, rising north of east and setting right into High Point Mountain, seeming just short of ninety degrees north of its winter afternoon couch.  I follow the sunrise and sunset announcements on the radio just  as avidly as I do the weather reports; I became confused when on June 18th the weatherman announced that the sun had set one minute earlier than the day before.  Before the solstice?!  But I made sense of it when I remembered reading that the ancient calendar no longer coincided exactly with the movements of the heavens as observed by the ancients. Embarrassing myself by sharing this news with everyone, it became apparent that he (and I) had made a mistake when the next day, and the next and next, the sun ‘again’ set at its fifteen hours and twenty minutes maximum.  What I was recalling actually referred to the zodiac.  The solstice is an actual event, a measurement of the sun’s position in regard to the earth on its axis.  However, at the core of my falling for his mistake was the knowledge that hidden in the very moment of summers achievement is the seed of its demise. Starting today/tomorrow, the days begin to shorten. I actually feel a frisson of dread at the realization, intuitively sensing what Dalby affirms; that “The shortest night of the year was magical but not necessarily benign.  Bonfires were lit in celebration of summer bounty, but also to keep the fairies and sprites of mid-summer night’s eve at bay.”
The blueberries are ripening, starting with the bush at the southern end that gets the most sun.  My effort to get rid of the shading ash by girdling it will apparently take more than one season to succeed.  In fact it is branching out even more energetically under the cut.  At least I have blueberries, having achieved some expertise at netting them off from marauding birds.  I still need to work at improving the arrangement because, at this point, the netting is so snug and well fastened, I have trouble getting in myself.
2011- Somehow I neglected to repair the netting situation in time and now that the berries are starting (just a day after the strawberries finished), the branches and fruit are all entangled with the netting and the tops of the enclosures I made are open to the sky and the happy birds.  When the rain stops I will try to fix it up, but it is probably too late to do much about it without pulling off clumps of berries and the harvest doesn’t seem that good this year anyway.  Girdling the ash does not seem to have restrained its overshadowing growth at all and I feel like an attempted tree murderer to no purpose.
The ticks seem to have abated somewhat but I had already decided not to kill anymore but just return them to the bushes with their friends.  I felt my karma was suffering.
And speaking of happy birds, I passed two ducks along the road in the rain yesterday that I swear were smiling as they splashed along. 
After reading a book about medicine plants I am attempting to contact a fern outside the back door.  I felt it reach out to me during yoga the other morning and I took notice of it. I made some photos and have just generally been appreciating it.  When the rain stops I will try a meditation next to it.
2012-I was sitting in a chair on the deck next to the ferns when I felt it come into my consciousness. It was like it was saying ‘hello, remember me? ‘There is something so gentle and positive about how it feels- like it means me well.
On the murder front, I’ve continued to set the small live trap though I gave up on the kill trap after it was set off with nothing in it. Too many grisly possibilities. But then I found a small mockingbird dead in the so-called live trap and I can’t set it anymore. I found holes near the fence where something relatively small is tunneling in so I stuffed the holes full of compost bones. Maybe voodoo will work.
Though the long spell of cold wet weather was the worst thing for eggplants, they seem to be recovering and beginning to grow. They have few flea beetles which is astonishing to me given the problem they have been in the past.
2013-A spell of hot humid weather and vegetables that were just hanging out in the cool spring are growing riotously. The kittens made a jailbreak out of the back room, right through the improvised gate. They are racing up and down the hallway riotously. Is the desire for freedom innate in every thing living?

June 16 - June 20 Two Snakes in the Grass

2010-Along the roadsides, orange daylilies have begun to bloom next to blue chicory.  Something about that color combination synthesizes everything about early summer for me.  I once wrote in a poem about chicory foreshadowing fall, but I have lost that feeling, maybe because things seem so early to me this year though I don’t know, factually, that they are.
Sitting here at my mountain view window these past three years, I have begun to sense the whole compass of the year inside me.  There is a physical sensation belonging to every portion of the circle; the internalized withdrawing with the waiting of winter, the tumbling of spring falling over itself, the still but filling feeling of summer aging to ripeness, and the sense of completeness in the rich dying away of fall.  With all this comes a sense of being able to be more present with each stage and at the same time, more aware of the stillness at the center of constant metamorphosis.
2011-I thought I heard a whip-poor-will’s cry yesterday but it was afternoon and not exactly right.  Could it have been a mockingbird’s imitation? If so, where did it learn to sing that song?
One of my favorite sounds is the buzzing of the hummingbirds, zooming in and out of the feeders.  It’s a background constant, sunrise to sunset; the motor of summer’s progress?

Hummingbird scolds while
I refill the empty feeder.
Sips and darts; Away!


2012-I am seriously considering setting mouse-type killer traps in the garden to kill whatever is eating the plants. It’s discouraging. The daylilies are blooming emphatically in the garden this year-haven’t seen any along the road yet. Yesterday I watched a mockingbird drinking out of the ceramic dish. The nectarines have some weird disease/pest/blight causing clear jelly to form all over them. I have to look it up. There weren’t many anyway and I’ve seen no apples at all besides some fallen little ¾ inch aborts. Summer solstice tonight accompanying possible record setting hot and humid weather. Yesterday morning I felt cold as the humid heat came in, the two streams of air mixed and affected me like a mistral. I took an hour getting dressed because my temperature was off- I felt hot and cold at the same time and couldn’t stand the feel of fabric on my skin. And a strange restlessness…
2013- It’s shaping up to be a good fruit year. The nectarine has set so many fruits I think it needs thinning out. They couldn’t possibly all mature. Even the yellow apple is bearing more healthy looking fruit than I’ve seen on it before. Will they drop prematurely as usual?

June 11 - June 15 Summer Arrives

2010-Everything is a hundred shades of green.  After the riot of budding and flowering, there is a sense of natural things having attained the peak of energy that is summer.  Flowers continue to bloom of course but it’s the thick green foliage that threatens to engulf all else. The stage is set for ripening; I notice the blueberries and raspberries are starting to color up.  The days continue to lengthen, but barely, only a minute or less every other day.  The peak, maximum daylight, is here. (The actual peak of 15 hours and twenty minutes happens on June 17 and lasts until the ? when daylight, ever so slowly at first, again begins to decrease). The pendulum, at its height, briefly pauses. 2011- I’m elected to the task of shrub trimming while spending the weekend with J and E.  What is it so satisfying about cutting back the rampant forsythia with an electric saw?  The elemental form of man against nature-satisfying but embarrassing.  What’s next?  Firing off guns?
2012-Another cool, rainy, dark day. The overgrown greenery is feeling out of control, threatening to engulf us in some rampant tidal wave of fecundity, though at the same time it feels strangely sterile. The flowers turn to mush before they seed; there is little fruit this year and blight is incipient in the vegetable garden. It occurs to me that I have been in love with nature-with all the of the romanticizing and overvaluing (not the right word) of the beloved that implies- and now I have fallen out of love. I see the ‘real’ nature-the war for survival and supremacy on all levels. A battleground where I begin to see man’s struggle against nature in a new light, with sympathy of all things! This would be when the couple starts talking about divorce. If that is not possible will there be a third stage of newfound appreciation of the beloved’s real nature and value?
2013- It is evident, looking at the field moving in the breeze, that it is alive, not some clockwork machine set going at the Big Bang. The rabbit surprised in the garden yesterday, flinging itself desperately against the fence having forgotten in its panic where it came in , wanted to live. The spider I caught in the kitchen this morning wants to live. Life itself, moving through forms, is unstoppable. Death doesn’t stop it. The feral cat I am going to catch to neuter and release suffers as much in the trap as the rabbit in the garden and the animal caught for slaughter. One dies, one doesn’t, and one frees itself, but the outcome doesn’t change the nature of their suffering except in our way of thinking.

June 6 - June 10 Harvesting Strawberries

Even two sets of netting can’t keep out whatever is eating the strawberries.  Can it be the thrashers I see constantly back there who are getting underneath and wastefully picking at both ripe and unripe berries, then leaving the rest of it to rot?  I don’t think slugs could pull them off their stems like that.  The other afternoon a chipmunk stood atop the cinder blocks of the melon bed eyeing me with some concern.  When I got closer he slipped between the blocks, but as soon as I turned my head he reappeared.  Was he, with his air of owning the place, the culprit?  I have an idea for next year of building a net covered box that I can lay over the berries which would keep out birds but be no barrier to something burrowing up from underneath.  Meanwhile I have learned to collect the berries as soon as they begin to show color and let them finish ripening inside.  I don’t mind sharing, but I hate the waste.
2011-Can it be possible to live in paradise and not be happy? It may possibly be the most beautiful morning in the history of the world; a soft sun shining, the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses, robins gathering worms for nestlings, bunny hopping through the grass, pleated woodpecker digging in the old apple tree’s bark. Is it paradise for the worm? Is it wiggling in ecstasy in the robin’s beak? And what a year for ticks-I’ve never in 25 years here seen anything like it. Every day I pull a dozen wood ticks off, find them clustering on the wood trim around the doors, crawling on the deck chairs. This morning, still in bed, I pulled one off my scalp a piece of skin between its mandibles. I dispatched him like the rest-sliced in half between my fingernails-but it bothers me. 
Can you practice ahimsa but leave some creatures out? I think it must be universal and that is hard. Meanwhile ants are crawling all over the kitchen counters-am I Saint Francis? Is my joy there? Because, even here in paradise I am not feeling it.
Meanwhile Massey Energy has changed its name thinking that will change its essence though it continues to eat the mountains of West Virginia, spitting out money for its corporate heads and investors and the corpses of its victims.
2013- Finally worked out the strawberries. Better netting is keeping the birds out and slugs have been minimal this year. If it keeps raining I suppose that will change. But it is interesting that in twenty years of gardening in the same spot where slugs have always been a problem to some extent, last year for the first time I noticed snails. This year there is a great increase in snails. Could that affect the slug population? I much prefer snails because they seem to do much less damage. And then there’s always escargot.

June 1 - June 5 Colors

 

2010-This essay will just be a list of all the flowers that are blooming right now, this paradisiacal abundance the very essence of late spring.  In the front garden there is a lily, the false indigo just finishing and the evening primrose just starting, the pelargonium and the budding astilbe.  They are all in the category of local perennials if not natives. Then there are the visitors or annuals just brought in; pansies and a pot of purple petunias, somewhat the worse for wear after falling out of their hanger, but recovering.
In front of the fence there are the pink climbing roses, foxgloves and cosmos. On the houseplant bench are two pots of stock and a lime tree in bloom. All around the yard are the wild roses already mentioned and in the yard blue and yellow flag irises, white and pink peonies, more geraniums, chives, wild lupine, the first daylily, comfrey, the tail end of the bleeding hearts and wisteria, the aggressively spreading angelica, and the two shades of yellow Siberian irises.  In the hidden bed there is a riot of sweet William in many shades and combinations, but only one fragrant orange wallflower came back this year. 
In the garden the bok choy, broccoli rabe and arugula have, to my consternation, all flowered out. The peppers from the garden store have flowers, one has even set a little fruit.
In a nursery box waiting to be planted are heliotrope, more pansies, marigolds, a blood red shade of dianthus and white and red nicotiana. And an eggplant with a bud already formed.
Then there are the ‘weeds’; buttercup, mustard, orange hawkweed, blue flowered chickweed and a last stray dandelion.
PS
And what I didn’t think of yesterday; double begonias, clematis, honeysuckle, wild yarrow. Dutch iris, white and red clover, three kinds of spiderwort, and, yes, all the grasses nodding their heavy, grainy heads.
2011- Down in the forties last night and more predicted for tonight though the days are very pleasant high sixties-this after four days in the nineties and the list of flowers is very different.  The lily in the front garden did not even have an evident bud, the indigo is just beginning.  The wild roses and geraniums are just beginning, the pink rose has a few buds though it did very badly this winter and had to be pruned way back. The peonies, daylilies and lupine are still in bud though all the irises are at peak. The sweet William is just beginning and the wallflower came back.  While mowing I saw just one white clover flower. So even in the repetition of the cycling seasons there is the uniqueness of each individual; never to be repeated in exactly the same way.
2012-The fifth mouse in the trap the other day, and then, mysteriously the body of a newborn baby mouse just lying in the doorway to the back room. I could not imagine how it got there (many scenarios-non plausible) until I went into that closet and found a nest built partly upon the hem of one of my dresses long enough to trail on the floor. In it were three more babies-all dead. So the mother being killed, the babies starved and the one on the floor pathetically venturing out (to find her?) before meeting that fate. This is our world. I would not want a nest of mice in my closet, but…
Against the list of flowers of the past two years this year is very different. Much has bloomed already and as things come out they are turned to mush by extremes of cold, hot or wet. The wild roses, irises, peonies, clematis, wild honeysuckle-all over.  There is much heavy greenery because of the moisture; the effect on me is oppressive. The pink roses are beautiful though and twining all through the fence as I’d hoped. The Sweet William, daylilies just starting, the indigo, the geraniums-all kind of unenthusiastic.
2013- Yesterday in the garden I found a hummingbird who had got his beak inpaled in the screen part of the fence. I guess he had not been there for long because I was able to ease his beak out of the mesh and he flew off. I keep thinking about a video I saw about cicadas (Samuel Orr's beautiful work) that showed how out of the millions that hatch, only a certain amount make it through the whole  hatching, tree-climbing, molting, mating egg-laying, hatching, falling out of the tree, digging underground cycle. Most either get eaten or fail to accomplish some step of the process. The huge numbers are to insure success for the species as a whole, but the individuals seem to be just grist for the mill.

May 27 - May 31 Roses

2010-There is no verb following the word roses because no one verb is adequate.  Roses (the wild ones) not only are blooming but have permeated everything with their perfume.  Even my dreams have been beautifully and romantically affected.  Lucky for them they have this one magical (albeit short-lived) attribute, because without it there would be no reason to tolerate their sprawling, invasive, clothes-grabbing, skin-scratching existence. The pink tinged flowers are not particularly beautiful, except their fragrance makes them so.  Last year I gathered them up and made rose petal wine.  When it was new the rose scent was overpowering, but after aging a year it became pleasantly subtle.  Unfortunately, an unpleasant bitter aftertaste also developed.  Perhaps after another year it will dissipate.
2011-Summer has come all of a sudden; high 80’s hot and humid. But the changeableness still says spring. I was able to finally plant the seedlings I started (tomatoes, melon, cucumber)but they have suffered much from lack of light and I don’t know if they can recover.  I will plant more seeds alongside and they will probably catch up in a short time. The roses are behind this year, looking to need a week still before they open. The wine was not a success, but it did make a nice flowery vinegar.
            Storm
    How the maple tree danced
    With the wind last night!
    I didn’t know the old girl had it in her
    (Suppleness molded to majesty)
    The lightening burst on a wanton self  
    Usually hid in verdant maternal embrace.
    Were the robins shocked
    In their wildly rocking nests?
    Or did they just forget
    When the morning came, soft as May
    And nothing to show for the night but a leaf
    Here and there
    Hanging all askew.

2012-Suddenly I feel at war with nature. A rabbit (I think) is eating much of the garden. After fence fixing, deterrent spraying, trap setting, and milk carton cages something is nibbling plants. After finding a deer tick on my arm I am creepy crawly feeling all the time and slugs are gaining the upper hand, in spite of  conscientious Sluggo applications. Four mice so far dead in the kitchen traps; the weather swinging abruptly back and forth between hot and cold, wet and dry extremes. It’s all so adversarial, not my sweet gardening back to nature fantasy at all. Is every human endeavor on this planet bound to be shown up at some point as just another form of battle? What are we fighting, really? Is existence just struggle after all, or is it a sign that I am not aligned with what is?
2013-The roses seem still at least two weeks away, but; I’d saved one bottle of rose petal wine from the vinegar experiment and was shocked-shocked I tell you-to discover that it had evened itself out, lost the bitterness, and turned delicious with the faintest flower scent. And now that last bottle is gone.

May 22 - May 26 The Force That Through the Green Fuse...

2010-I love the dandelion plant.  Alongside the driveway, left un-mowed, they are now at least a foot high, fully seeded out and gradually releasing their little airships to the wind.  I think it is through their usefulness that I have come to appreciate them, but it is their striking robust vigor I’m appreciating now. Is it the intensity of their energy shining through the form that makes them seem so beautiful?  By the way, dandelion flowers dredged in a mix of corn meal and chili powder, then fried in olive oil, are absolutely delicious. 
I love robins as well. With their plump rusty breasts, hopping gait and beady black eyes, they seem the very emblem of cheerful curiosity as they scrabble around throwing up leaves and uncovering fat worms.  Has anyone ever seen a thin, depressed robin?  How fortunate I feel to take such pleasure in these common things. 
2011- Because of the continuing rain and the scoring job, I was unable to keep up with mowing and things got out of hand; the lawn became a meadow and how beautiful the seeding dandelion stalks looked!  Not to mention the birds enjoyed them immensely. One day I watched a rabbit suck in a dandelion stalk like a strand of spaghetti. Finally able to begin the lawn mower assault, I hesitated at the sight of so many different kinds of wild flowers ready to bloom, but I know from the areas that I have let go to meadow, the grasses, in one season, take over pretty much everything else.
The wet, cloudy, cool weather continues almost without a break day after day. Even when it isn’t actually raining the mist is so thick you end up soaking wet anyway. The plants seem to love it, growing in jungle like thickness but the lilac flowers that bloomed so heavily and profusely quickly rotted on their stems. I can’t put in the hot weather things I started, or even put them outside for more light and they are stunted and pale. it’s a pity and I don’t think they will be able to recover.  I might re-start some directly from seed if it ever warms up, but they will be so far behind.

The distant chainsaw               
And the hummingbirds’ buzz prune            
This May miasma.


Only the tangled shrubbery's
Need of shears motivates me.

2012-The wild roses are beginning but as I walked around the yard burying my face in the opening buds, I realized it was queerly silent. They should be vibrating with the buzzing of bees but I could find only one-a bumblebee. There were some honeybees in the crocuses earlier this spring and I felt hopeful, but today--not one. How can this be? What does it mean? Is it Silent Spring? The ash tree-the centerpiece of the yard, the only shade in summer-appears to be dying as well. Emerald ash borer? A disease it’s seemed to have on and off for years? A hummingbird habitually sits on one of its bare little twigs-today even it is gone.
2013-Amazingly, a few of the pumpkin plants have survived the frost, (after being turned to slime all the way back to the first leaf node) shooting out new leaves with a vengeance. Yesterday one actually produced a flower. The apple trees and the nectarine seem unharmed as well, and covered with tiny green fruits.