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  • Hoping for Bats

    ByElizabeth

    It was, I think, after having been eaten nearly alive when painting the exterior of my house, that my handyman asked me whether I wanted him to put up a bat house.  “Oh yes,” was my enthusiastic response.  “I love bats.”  The bat house is up.  I hope against hope that some bats will make their way into my little yard in an inner city alley and come to feast on the mosquitoes.  I am not holding my breath, but anything can happen.  One day, a couple of years ago, a hummingbird appeared out of no where to hover in my garden.

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    Robert’s Dendrobium

    ByElizabeth

    roberts-dendrobium2A number of years ago, when he was moving from Capitol Hill to Denver, my friend and former neighbor Robert gave me this dendrobium orchid, which bloomed this year for me for the first time.  The dendrobium was just an extra.  If you know orchids, you can see that it is planted with a vanda.  These orchids came from Robert’s mother’s garden in Florida.  When she had to give up her place in Florida, Robert brought home some of the orchids, including the vanda.  If I know Robert, he just saw a baby dendrobium in the garden and stuck it in with the vanda when he carried it back north to Capitol Hill.  When Robert moved to Colorado, he left the vanda with me because he did not expect it to tolerate the Colorado climate.  Even here, the vanda is not likely to bloom.  Not enough heat, light, or humidity in DC (really!!!).  But after five or six years of steady care, the dendrobium flourished and finally bloomed.  Robert inspired my affection for orchids; he had a greenhouse and knew each one of his tropical plants intimately.  We would go to an orchid show or nursery, and he would look with love on each and every plant, cherishing their individual traits, no matter how small or large.  At the botanical gardens, he had different plants he visited and enjoyed.  Now his yard has cactii and peppers.  He has a few of his most faithful orchids, which are flourishing and which were delightful to visit, and I have this lovely reminder of a time when Robert was one of my local gardening buddies.  This, I think is one of the extra joys of gardening, especially with houseplants that come from cuttings.  They have a history with our family and friends that is passed on, cherished, and shared.  I also have a night-blooming cereus that was a baby from a plant that started as a baby of one in his mother’s garden.  The night mine first bloomed (just a single night in the year), the parent plant with Robert in Denver also bloomed.

    Bonus love from this particular dendrobium; it is scented!

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    Fine Day in the Garden

    ByElizabeth

    Yesterday I went out into the garden first thing and fed and deadheaded and trimmed and harvested and pulled seedlings and rearranged and swept for several hours.  One of the most delightful things about planting decoratively with herbs and greens is that trimming and pulling things back transforms directly into meals and gifts for neighbors and friends.  My visitor to the garden walked away with bunches of oregano, lemon balm, and mint and lemon balm with roots to plant in her own garden.  We drank a cool lemon-mint infusion (mixture of spearmint, peppermint, lemon balm, and lemon verbena) and ate a few strawberries (some from the garden, some from the farmers’ market).  Later in the day, my lunch included a salad with lettuce, radishes, baby spinach and chard, spring onions, and various herbs.  For dinner, I used chard, beets, and green onions to make a stew of chickpeas and greens.

    With today’s rain, everything will keep flourishing, and I’ll be out there doing the same later in the week.  My morning visitor and I agreed that one of the great delights of gardening is that the garden always welcomes more attention.  The garden never asks to be left alone; it drinks in whatever attention and nourishment we are able to offer and returns it with grace.  There are few things that both are comfortable with steady attention and fully nurture us the more attention we give.  I find that meditation, too, always gives and receives graciously steady attention, which is one of its great gifts and joys.

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    Aphids (and limitations)

    ByElizabeth

    Even though we had real, hard frosts this winter, there are already aphids on my roses.  I went out this morning and picked the aphids off of the new buds — yes, my roses are budding.  It was too cold to stay out long, but I did a little weeding and planted a couple of pots of pansies.

    I was thinking about how I garden in my tiny space — using my fingers to take the aphids off of each rose bud, pulling up individual weeds between new plants in containers, choosing to let some volunteers come up between bricks because it expands my planting area.  How different it would be if I even had a small yard by suburban standards.  It would not be possible to attend to all the detail that I see, unless I were to spend every waking hour in the garden.  If I had an acre, it would take three full-time gardeners to attend without tools and sprays the small things I touch by hand.

    It seems we make our world as big or as small as we want it.  My tiny garden is as much a universe for me as a gardener as would be an acre garden — though of course I cannot grow sprawling things like melons and potatoes and fruit trees.

    But the fullness of how much I see and experience, how much calls out for love and attention, how much I am enriched by tending and observing what is there,  is not diminished by what I do not have.  Rather, I am called to expand to the greatest what I have within my limits.  This is true, too, in our yoga and meditation practice, and our lives.  We can choose to live expansively no matter what our limits or we can choose to feel bound and diminished by our limits.  The garden, this morning, helped me remind myself of that choice.  It helped me turn towards possibilities for growth instead of towards constriction.

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