Fog Horn Dreams

Last Day of Summer, 9-21-2012

Yesterday, slowly emerging from my dream fog to an awareness of early morning gray, I heard a deep fog horn. An auditory weather report. The clouds mist low on this next-to-last morning of official summer.

Even after 25 years in this house, the rare sound of a fog horn still puzzles and delights me. Puzzles because the nearest water, the Lake Washington Ship Canal through the Montlake Cut, is not so near, and delights me because it sounds like I’m living near the sea.

On the second floor of my home, only one window faces east. A tall, narrow, casement window, its pointed leaded-glass arches suggest gothic fantasies and fairy tales.

After hearing the ship’s horn, I swung the window wide open to view my front garden in the cottony wisps of filtered morning light. As I gazed, a ghostly sun rose above the uphill trees and was framed fleetingly in a narrow gap between a broad mountain ash and a sky-reaching Douglas fir. In less than a minute, the sun’s rising arc carried it behind the fir, chased by the thickening fog.

I love the bird’s-eye view of my garden from up here. It looks so much more designed, more intentional from above. The way the row of shaggy Carex comans ‘Frosted Curls’ tickle the path edges with their disheveled grassy mops looks perfect from my aerie rather than messy. Under the arching branches of the amethyst-berried Callicarpa, an accidental grouping of two different Heucheras, ‘Caramel’ and ‘Mahogany’, and a Heucherella ‘Sweet Tea’ harmonize in russet and amber tones. Hidden is the black nursery pot the Heucherella still sits in, as is the fact that I had placed it there just to shade it until I could figure out what to do with it. I can now see that’s been figured out!

Slowing Down to See

Traffic leaving the freeway at my exit was unusually heavy and slow on a recent Sunday as I drove home from the airport. I’d just returned from sunny southern California and was comforted by a perfect spring day in Seattle. Creeping slowly down the exit ramp, I noticed something I would otherwise have missed. A wisteria had climbed into the upper branches of a tall mountain ash and thoroughly mingled itself to create a mélange of lavender and white blooms.

Wisteria twining through Mountain Ash

I returned two days later with my camera, parking a couple of blocks away in the adjacent neighborhood and walked up the informal asphalt path beside the exit ramp. It was too windy to get really sharp photos, but you can get the sense of it. As I returned to my car, I saw a stunning pairing of contrasting colors, which I had missed on arrival because I was so focused on getting to my destination.

Golden Chain Tree and Smoke Tree

 

Across the street from where I parked, a Golden Chain Tree (Laburnum) danced its bright yellow hanging racemes in the sunshine beside a deep purple-leaved Smoke Tree (Cotinus). 

Close up of Golden Chain and Smoke Trees

I'm going to sit quietly in my own garden on the next non-rainy day and see what I've been missing right here.

Birthday Tulips

My birthday - and it’s a glorious sunny day! Hooray!

I couple of days ago I was gazing at my little species tulips, Tulipa battalini ‘Bright Gem’. I find it enormously satisfying that the original five bulbs have multiplied into a robust cluster over the years.

Standing back and taking in the cluster as a whole, I love the way their pale apricot contrasts with the deep purple Heuchera ‘Obsidian’ and with their own strappy green leaves. But looking deep into their open cups hypnotizes me with their complex perfection.

Six pointed petals have fine, deep, orange-red whisker lines, like dry brush strokes from the center out. Six points of apricot anthers form a star around the pale apricot stigma. A small pool of soft umber in the bottom of the cup forms a soft hexagon shape and its darkness makes the pale anthers glow. At first, I see just the umber that contrasts so delightfully with the apricot. It takes a longer look before I notice the starburst of six chartreuse lines that divides the umber into triangles.

  

 

 

What a perfect birthday gift to have blooming in my own garden!

Musing about the Muse in May

I power up my laptop while sitting in bed. Six o’clock, Sunday morning. A computer thought balloon appears at the bottom of the screen. It says “Wireless Network Connection is now connected. Signal Strength: Excellent.”

I smile, remembering the interview I heard yesterday with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love”. She was asked about the phenomenon of artist inspiration. She told the interviewers what many other artists and writers and musicians have said through the ages: One must be available regularly, daily is best, for the Muse to trust one as a dependable recipient.

I woke today with excited anticipation. Last night, I went to bed knowing that the weather would be beautiful, I have the whole day free, and I can work in the garden. The part I’m especially excited about is sprucing up the ragged containers in front of my home. Yesterday evening, as the light was beginning to fade, I studied the pots most in need and envisioned today’s transformation. Thinking about the juicy-colored annuals stashed on my deck since Tuesday, I can’t wait to “bibbety bobbety boo” with my magic hori-hori.

I soaked up some inspiration yesterday evening. About 6:30, after leaving a neighbor’s home a few blocks away, I strolled along some streets that I haven’t walked before. The western light angled bright and warm, the air was still and gentle. Gardens I’d never seen before beckoned me to study their charms. Two hardy palm trees, ten feet or more tall, shouted out in front of a small bungalow. Surrounding them, and oddly juxtaposed with the palms, bright gold leaves and large, dangling pink and white hearts of Dicentra ‘Gold Heart’ sang amid a sweep of rich purple barberry. Beneath one of the palms, a few rich notes of orange-red flowering quince blossoms winked beneath their green veil of newly-leaved, arching branches. But the plant that most bewitched me was Euphorbia polychroma. Its extra-large, bright yellow flowers trumpeted amid the purple mounds of barberry and heuchera and fountains of striped yellow grasses. I rarely see this particular Euphorbia.

Seattle skies were clear enough last night to view the much trumpeted, extra-large full moon. And today is, indeed, a beautiful day for gardening! I’m off to it!

Speeding through Spring

I feel the Earth is hurtling through the seasons much too fast. Wasn’t it just a week ago that the Western Dogwood revealed its white arraignment, the Camellia and Italian Plum bloomed riotously and the Lilac buds first showed their color? Today, the dogwood’s bracts are browning and shriveling. The Camellia’s glory fell to a slimy, suffocating mess on the perennial bed below. And the Lilac is fully open, moments from its descent. Of all the flowering shrubs, I find the lilac’s decline the saddest. Perhaps because its fragrance brings me such joy, I feel its passing with greatest poignancy. 

Among people, our oldest friends often remain our closest and dearest regardless of how many years pass. Perhaps so, too, with garden “friends”. Lilacs grew outside the window next to the kitchen table of my childhood home. Their fragrance arrived just as the days became warm enough to open the windows at lunch time, and drifted in to sweeten our meals and our lives.

Raining dreams and cherry blossoms

When I spend the night at my aunt and uncle’s home in the San Fernando Valley, I hear what sounds like rain gently falling. More than once in the middle of the night, I’ve fallen for this California dreamin’ of rain and looked out the window. Then I smile at the remembrance of their fountain that sprinkles into a small, tropically landscaped pool.

After last weekend’s glorious Seattle spring sunshine, days that stirred the primal urge to stick one’s hands in the soil, to plant and grow sustenance, I was aching to get out in my garden today. But last night I woke from a dream in which I was visiting someone in California, and heard the sound of gentle rain. In my half sleep, I briefly imagined I was visiting my aunt and uncle, lulled by the sound of simulated rain. A double illusion. And double disappointment.

Here in Seattle, I do not find the sound of rain on the roof to be comforting. Instead, I lie awake imagining water seeping into my basement and feel anxious.

Not only will I not be planting my pea starts and mixed salad seeds today, but my Kwanzan cherry trees, which were at their breathtaking peak the past two days, will suffer a hastened demise of their beauty. Below is the view from my upstairs window.

Kwanzan flowering cherry before the rain

 Already this morning, their branches, thickly covered with bunchy-double, very pink flowers, bend low with the weight of their wet blossoms. Soon that wet weight will drag the blooms off their stems to carpet the ground.

Drooping after the rain

Recognizing that memory is notoriously unfaithful, still, I do believe the Kwanzans achieved a new height of astonishing beauty this year.

Mustards and Plums

6:00 am. Sunday, March 26.

Tweeee-chirp-chirp-chirp. Tweeee-chirp-chirp-chirp. Over and over and over in the early morning dark. More insistent than the alarm clock I set for 7:30 this morning, the call for a mate in the tree outside my window evaporates all hope for sleeping in.

I bought some little vegetable starts at the early-spring plant sale last weekend. Now I need to make room to plant them. Yesterday, taking advantage of a warm, sunny afternoon, I harvested the last of the overwintered purple peacock kale, just the smallest, most tender leaves, some new dark red beet greens and a bag full young mustard leaves. Last fall’s mustard crop is growing so robustly now, I couldn’t bring myself to cut it all down just yet. But I did pull out all the old kale stems to make room for the new starts. Very soon I will have to harvest the rest of the mustards. I harvested the last of the bok choi and pulled out the roots. I now have three good-sized pots available for planting. Later this morning, I’ll refresh the soil in the pots and add some balanced organic fertilizer, and plant the new vegetables.

For dinner, I sautéed all the greens with just a splash of tamari soy sauce. Fresh, tender mustards taste like an antidote – sharp, cleansing, refreshing, curative. And delicious.

Their resemblance to store-bought mustard greens is merely that of family members. From the garden, they are not as sharp, and more complex in flavor. I eat them slowly, wanting to know their taste intimately, lingering, observing, trying to name and fix it in memory. 

Flowering Plum

Today, we are blessed with another beautiful spring day. The snowy Olympic Mountains gleam in the morning sun. A crow outside my window shakes still leafless branches of the tall western dogwood as it yanks something invisible to me off the bare stems. Is it gathering little twigs for a nest? Avenues of pink blossoms line the streets as flowering plum and cherry rejoice.

First day of spring?

This morning wind whips the tree tops around with enough force and range of motion to whisk the very air into a foamy froth. Spring arrives today with a flat sky, so uniformly gray it might have been spray-painted on. How can the sky be so expressionless above such wild motion?

February 1^st felt like spring! I could feel it flowing in my blood and bones. I delighted in the sun gleaming on wet Skimmia berries and Viburnum buds showing color. 

But the planet stepped back from this threshold of Eden. At least here in the Northwest, cold, rain, wind, even snow prevailed through the weeks since, even on this first day of spring. However, friends have been telling me that in the Midwest and on the East coast, the mercury has soared to summer-time 70's. What mystery is this?