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?

Fog Attraction

On a recent early morning, the fog called me powerfully to come outside and feel it, experience its enveloping chill, and see the transformed world it created. Feeling a rush of excited anticipation, I bundled up quickly and grabbed my little camera and notebook.

The distant jagged Olympic Mountain range had vanished. Towering Douglas fir, hemlock and cedar appeared insubstantial as spectral wraiths. Mist swirled enticing tendrils around chimneys and rooftops. Soft and dreamy, icy cold, it drifted along the ridge top where I walked.

In the pre-dawn half-light while I slept, Nature transformed gardens into mystical Tiffany’s diamond displays. With a wave of the frost fairy’s wand, the smoke tree’s fluffy summer puffs became crystalline threads set against velvet burgundy, silver-edged leaves.

Cotinus, Smoke Tree

Heart-breakingly sweet, partially opened pink rosebuds offered petals dipped in sugar crystals. Ephemeral whiteness edged each bloom and leaf. Violet coral bell leaves looked to have been bedding for sugar plum fairies.

Heuchera, Coral Bells

This world will vanish soon, an early morning dream, an enchantment that will vaporize as daily human endeavors resume. But I will carry the memory, a blessing.

Pining

Trunk of an old pine tree halts me. The way it leans – not just leans, but twists and leans like a thickly muscled human body, strong, massive – captivates me. 

Deeply striated bark, like sinew, two limbs outreaching, an old knot where a branch once grew, so very like an eye, chunky gaps in bark form a nose and a vertical, open mouth in profile on the right – the pine appears in motion. Yet I am rooted to the spot, feeling a powerful sense of presence in this tree. I think of Tolkien’s Ents, and of ancient druids who worshipped tree spirits. Twice I begin to walk away, and twice I return. An almost gravitational force holds me in place, in awe.

 

Autumn Siren

'Brocade' Japanese maple and variegated hosta in autumn colors

Scarlet translucency of delicately fingered maple leaves enchant me. Form and color contrast against jungle of hosta. Giant foliage senescing in watercolor striations lures my eyes from tactile foreground focus to impressionist distance. Light and depth hold me as captive as Odysseus tied to the mast, lost in song. I cannot tear my eyes from this magical moment in autumn sun.