April 26, 2009 @ 7:55 pm | Filed under:
Gardening This post is for me, just so I’ll know what was blooming when. Also I think my mother will like to hear how fruitful her labors were this winter and spring.
I’m laughing at the bare mulch behind the children in the pictures on my last two posts. That’s the only part of the yard where things aren’t awash in flowers, but it’s where we sit in the afternoons because that’s the only bit of grass with shade. And the mulch bed is bare for the same reason there’s shade: the neighbor’s pepper trees tower over the fence, blocking all afternoon sun. I’ve tried some (shade-loving) impatiens there but they didn’t amount to much.
The rest of the yard, though, oh my. An abundance of bloom.
Currently in flower:
scabiosa
sunflower
jasmine
ice plant
cranesbill
salvia (red and purple)
columbine (fading)
moss roses
Mexican sage
um, those little white flowers
African daisies
yellow daisies
nasturtium
thyme
freesia
lavender
snapdragons
petunias
geranium
stock (not looking good though)
those purple things, nemesia maybe? pink ones too
strawberries
alyssum
bougainvillea
cape honeysuckle
cosmos
the pansies are on their last legs
oh the lovely poppies!
March 21, 2009 @ 7:04 am | Filed under:
Gardening In Virginia, we always used to plant our peas around St. Patrick’s Day. Here in San Diego, we’re harvesting them. My mother helped the girls put in a small vegetable garden during her visit in January: lettuce, tomatoes, basil, beans, peas, cucumbers, carrots. Which, now that I see the list written out, doesn’t sound small at all.
The peas—they planted just a few starts—are ready now, affording the children the singular delight of picking and eating them warm in the sun, impossibly sweet, crisp, perfect. Or so I’m told. I wouldn’t have dreamed of depriving Rilla of one single magical pea; this may be the first time she has voluntarily eaten a vegetable.
The lettuce is ready too; we’ll be having a big green salad for dinner tonight.
The pole beans are about a foot high. Tomatoes ripening, and desperately in need of staking. (I forgot to buy the cages for them, Mom.) That’s on my Saturday to-do list.
We’ve got a few carrots sending up their feathery greens. The cucumbers are spreading. Uncle Ray’s bean seeds haven’t sprouted yet but it shouldn’t be long now.
Jasmine is blooming along the back fence, and the bougainvillea too. The bird-spilled sunflowers under the feeder are half as tall as the fence now. The ice plant is thick, lush, unabashedly magenta. The tall graceful spires of lavender and salvia nod at each other from their opposite corners of the garden. The Oriental poppies are are shedding bright orange tissue-paper petals onto the dark soil beneath their fat, fuzzy buds; they look like the day after a party.
Hordes of brown aphids are encamped on the stalks of our pincushion flowers. We watched one valiant ladybug wearily do her part to combat the sapthirsty squadrons. I fear ’tis a losing battle.
By the front stoop: pansies, petunias, snapdragons, rosemary with its tiny blue flowers like the scraps left after someone stitched a sky-quilt. Yesterday I read the perfectly beautiful picture book A River of Words about William Carlos Williams, and I had to laugh because all week I’ve been hearing an echo of his red wheelbarrow poem whenever I pass the front step, where purple velvet petunias are tumbling over the rim of their green glazed pot: so much, indeed, depends upon this, these blossoms, this gray stair, the merry pansies below.
The signs are subtler here than on the East Coast; we’re still, after two and a half years here, learning to see. I never loved the snow except as a pretty picture outside my window, and the slush and bone-chill of a long Virginia February used to make me crazy. But oh how I loved that first glimpse of spring: the soft tips of crocuses pushing through soggy mulch, the yellow haze over a bare forsythia bush the day before it bursts into golden bloom. The return of robins. A feeling in the air, it was, that always quickened my pulse, gave me a soaring feeling. And then suddenly the grape hyacinths and daffodils would be blooming intermingled along my friend Sarah’s front steps, and my perennial bed would wake up, and the bluebirds would get busy cleaning house in the nesting box below our deck, right outside my office window where I’d be writing Martha and wishing I could push the deadline back and take a month off for spring.
It’s so different here. I don’t miss the frigid weather—haven’t worn my big red coat since we moved—but I do miss March, April, May, the gorgeous reawakening. San Diego is sharpening our senses, though. We do have seasons here, a blue one, a gray one, a gold one, a brown one, all of them bright with gorgeous bloom.
Last week we noticed the hillside along our route to piano lessons was covered, once more, with riotous orange and yellow wildflowers. I don’t know their names and last year I didn’t take note of how long they lasted. (We’re going to drive back with a camera, maybe this morning even, and pull into the Park-and-Ride parking lot to snap a few pictures so you, the Internet, can help us identify them.) Yesterday, just one week later, we saw that the grape soda lupine has joined them in bloom. That one I remember from last year. I told the girls, this year I’m going to pull over and sniff some to see if it really does smell like grape soda, and they said, Mom, you did that last year, don’t you remember?
The orange and lemon trees in our neighbors’ yards have been fruit-heavy for weeks. Yesterday I passed a table loaded with lemons in someone’s driveway, with a hopeful sign offering them five for a dollar. The orange poppies in our back yard are big clumps of feathery leaves, no buds yet. Nearby, I have an amaryllis whose shiny leaves had grown tall, promising a fat flower stalk not far behind, but Rilla and Wonderboy picked them all and turned them into leaf soup, spiced with sidewalk chalk.
There is a yard in town that looks weedchoked nine months of the year, and then for three months it’s a stunning tapestry of wildflowers. I saw the orange-and-yellow blooms there, too, yesterday. The sunflowers are tall in the schoolyard behind us. We’ve got a smaller crop coming up beneath our birdfeeder. Nobody but sparrows and house finches visit the feeder, and mourning doves picking fallen seeds out of the mulch below. Crows drop in to steal the peanuts we put out for the scrub jays. A phoebe perches on the back fence, bright-eyed, observant. I haven’t heard the noisy parrots in a while nor seen their green flutter above the neighbors’ treetops.
Our pole beans and peas are beginning to grope for their stakes; the grape tomatoes are green and Rilla is under strict orders to let them turn red this time before she picks them as presents for me. The lettuce is tender and ragged because the girls pinch bits of it all day long to nibble on. My Uncle Ray sent butterbean and White Acre pea seeds from Georgia and we are very excited about this.
I still need to find a milkweed source so we can lure some monarchs to the neighborhood. And it’s been too long since we visited the nature center; I wonder what spring is doing over there.
