State of the garden address...

John has started chemo which is no picnic so it has been hard to do anything creative. Mostly I feel paralyzed.  I sat in a wrought iron chair and wrote the other morning, so I will share that picture with you even though it is made of words and not paint or glass. Here is a photo to accompany it.

From my journal:

I am on my front porch, a stoop really, the covered landing at my front door that measures a cozy 5 by 5 feet. I am in my pajamas, turquoise flannel pants dotted with hugging penguin couples and a black sleeveless cotton undershirt since it is really too warm for flannel.   Beneath me is a potted poinsettia, the red so vibrant it fairly warms my behind. Its color creates a happy contrast to the wrought iron garden chair that I spray painted turquoise. The chair and I match.

I brought my breakfast out here in hopes of seeing the morning birds squabble over the bird feeder when they aren’t chewing me out for invading their space. Before they arrived, it was quiet and I looked at my shabby garden which hasn’t been mowed down by freezing temperatures yet. My poor leggy basil plant is covered in some kind of fungus spots that make it look like a bus just hit a pothole and spewed it with mud.  It looks a little pissed off as well as unhealthy, even itchy. There are sunflowers randomly pocked in-between the mums that are going dormant. I hope they get to bloom before we get a freeze.

The birds have arrived, so it’s much more entertaining. A little Carolina wren, all ruddy brown has just tried to light on a two foot tall cosmos plant that could not bear its weight, so the little bird ended up taking a catapult ride down and then springing off when the feathery top of the flower’s stem  brushed the dirt.  The cosmos are completely out of season but I took a chance on them, or the weather, or both.

Creating a garden is a sculptural endeavor for me with an anxious moving about of containers to create varied heights with a sense of balance measured in my gut. I move lanterns, shepherd’s hooks, plants and pots around until they approach some kind of intuitive order. There is no plan. I step away, my back to the garden, then do a quick turn-around-glance, and measure my stomach anxiety. I know it is ‘right’ when I no longer have a stomach ache, when I can live with the layout.

For height, I poured soil into a screen dome-shaped cover I stole from our fire pit. (No worries about unchecked sparks; the fire pit iron bowl is planted with succulents on the back porch.)  I perched the repurposed screen onto an old column resulting in a birdbath shaped planter that teeters, but has settled into a comfortable while tentative balance facilitated by a bulge of soil to the back. A rusty garden angel stands in the middle of the dirt bowl, her brittle skirt buried deep enough to keep her from tipping over. Her wings, the right one lacy from decay, embrace the space. Having dug in her heels, she opens her fractured limbs in praise of morning.

I planted sunflower seeds in my tippy contraption but, in less than time it takes to say ‘scat’, I returned to find hulls opened like Easter eggs in a tidy circle around the angel. Perhaps the pinks and purples on the horizon distracted her from shooing away the squirrel that helped himself to my efforts. Thankfully the squirrel was a sloppy eater or the angel shoed him away before he polished off his snack; four or five cast offs have managed to fight the odds and sprout on the ground below. They are now over a foot tall, one of them almost two feet and leaning a bit precariously under my birdbath/ planter configuration.  I am pleased and amazed that you can identify seedlings from their earliest push into existence, “Every seed after its kind” yields for me a comforting and joy-filled continuity from one season to the next.

 After the squirrel incident, I transplanted some three inch tall cosmos seedlings I had started in a clay pot. They circle the angel, standing upright like members of a choir. They, along with the rest of the garden, tilt slightly to the rising sun, tentative, anticipating, singing.

Everything leans forward a bit. That is what I notice most in my front garden, in my dish of succulents on the back porch,and in the orchids that climb down from the edge of a giant pot then touch the ground like little leaguers stealing second, rebounding into a sharp midair ‘u’. That is where they flower, in midair. Imagine that. With no visible means of support the succulent and the orchid flower spikes reach upward like my whole garden reaches.  Leaning toward the sun, toward who they are, then reaching up and flowering handfuls of confetti that defy gravity.  The trees mirror this activity too, arms up, always reaching.  Reaching in praise, or maybe reaching like little children wanting to be picked up.