Admiring my garden this afternoon through the picture windows in my bedroom. I use the phrase “my garden” with expansive poetic license. Yes, there are many beautiful and useful plants in my yard, but I had absolutely no hand — or thumb — in their cultivation. Nonetheless, I own the place and direct the staff (my kids, if they’re home and my wife is out of earshot), so it is my garden in a strictly legal sense.
In the distance are blackberry (or black raspberry) bushes that will soon fruit. We have netting to cover them, so we can avoid sating bird appetites in preference to sating ours. We do otherwise feed the birds (and, inevitably, the squirrels), so they aren’t without recourse — to say nothing of the abundance of insects and seeds at this time of year — but I haven’t asked any tweeters how they feel about the “no blackberries for birdies rule.” I suspect they will object and I’ll be the fall guy, because it’s convenient to blame the guy who gets winded saying “hello” and therefore can’t adequately defend himself verbally against the harsh judgement of a tree full of vocally adept birds.
The tree in the center is a cherry tree. It blossomed white a month ago, but I’m not sure if we’re actually getting cherries or if it’s just ornamental. I could ask the birds, some of whom I presume were here last summer, but they read the previous paragraph and so they aren’t chirping to me.
The tree on the right is a crab apple, and on the left is a birch. The crab apple has an interesting, twisting trunk that writhes into three main branches, and there is a large scar at its base. It looks ancient, like an olive tree in Greece. I suspect it had a stressful childhood, from which it never recovered; it’s the tree version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (Norwegian Skrik); in German, Mr. Munch titled his painting Der Schrei der Natur, The Scream of Nature.
There is much to think about when I contemplate the crab apple tree.
I like birch trees. There were none natively where I grew up — in Wisconsin, they’re plentiful, in Texas, not so much. Many of the stories about the “settling” of America by Europeans seemed to revolve around birch bark canoes, and when I was nine or ten years old, I longed for one. I didn’t really know what “birch bark” was, but it sounded interesting. Everyone who was anyone had a birch bark canoe: Stately Native People crossing a lake, a frazzled French-Canadian voyageur struggling to remain upright and furs dry as he shoots a rapid. Now I have a birch tree in my backyard, and once upon a time I owned a canoe, but I’ve still not managed to own a birch bark canoe. I no longer consider this a serious deprivation, although my “failure to own” does put me on the wrong side of the cool kid “Everyone who was anyone” dividing line.
Beneath the birch are evening primroses, hostas, “Empress Wu” hosta hybrids, coral bells, and Christmas ferns. Early the spring, daffodils and forsythia bloomed.
Hostas, I’ve recently discovered, are edible. I wish I had known that when I did the gardening — it would have saved me a trip into the house. I haven’t told my staff the plant is edible, fearing their ravenous appetites. Plus, the dog is occasionally seized by an obscure enthusiasm and rolls around in them, and I suspect dog hair isn’t edible.
Just out of the picture, a begonia is peeking up through the soil in a white hanging planter, and three nearby geraniums are recuperating. The four plants should have been carried inside, but were not, so they’re struggling to recover from the winter. Nonetheless, one of the geraniums is in bloom (red) and another has buds (white). Geraniums are my favorite flower, so I’m … rooting for them. (My favorite plants are ferns, so I’m happy there are so many of them in the various garden beds around the yard.)
These are our raised vegetable beds. Because of the (always time-consuming) Spring move from Madison to Appleton, we planted only a few obvious low maintenance seeds, but they’re doing well. As the saying goes, “Next year, we will …” The raised bed on the far right has perennial herbs and a rhubarb plant (there is another rhubarb beneath the window).
In my decrepitude, I have a personal raised bed. The mattress, on a special frame and box springs, is four feet above the floor. I do a little hop to sit on the ultra-soft mattress (which I quite like!). Once astride and athwart, I can raise my head, raise my feet, and get a massage (sequenced vibrations running up and down the bed or targeted thumps to various body parts). I have a multi-button control panel (call me the Gizmo Kid, because I also have separate controls for the lights, fan, and air conditioner) for these operations that reminds me of the controls of an F-16 fighter I once saw in the toy section of Walmart. If I pressed the buttons in the correct sequence, the fighter dashed around the aisle impressively flashing lights at the enemy (no, my wife was not present). Come to think of it, that’s more like our latest multi-billion dollar technological wonder, the F-35, which the U.S. Air Force has yet to deploy in combat. My bed is a terrible masseuse, and the F-35 is a terrible plane: the latest advisory is for pilots to avoid thunderstorms by at least 25 miles or Bad Things will happen. (Note: The staff have not yet filled my bookcase, the edge of which is visible in the photograph. I’m regularly assured it will be filled “any day now.”)
This is a picture of promiscuity. It’s what happens when asparagus goes “Girl’s Gone Wild!” We did eat some, but we weren’t fast enough (I am, of course, referring to asparagus). There was a time in my life when I would have appreciated a little promiscuity, but now I’m just happy the asparagus is fern-like.
Speaking of promiscuous, there is something hidden in this picture.
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