Of the many pleasures of our garden, the gentle NW spring days are one of the greatest. It rains…but this morning we threw towels onto the fabric seats of our patio set and had breakfast (softboiled egg in spaceman-with-helmet egg cup) on our flower plates with our little fat-kitteh salt shaker and beverage of our choice.
Wabash was in bloom—snow white, blue-veined, with an indigo fall and white beard, my father’s alltime favorite iris, and mine—and the new rhododendron (starts pink, goes peach and white) and the yellow iris and the autumn-orange azalea beside the stone lantern. The tulips are fading now, almost gone, but the English daisy is blooming; the red and the green Japanese maples are lush, close at pond-side, the red hawthorne that shadows the walk is so loaded with rain-soaked rose-colored blooms you have to dodge the drooping branches, the garden sparrows are singing their heads off in the hawthorne, and the sprinkle of rain is just making small rings on the pond.
Perfect temperatures. The koi want their breakfast. The rain picks up a little, and I shelter the salt-shaker while Jane hand-feeds them at pond-side.
We find the rain picking up a little more and we go inside just ahead of a shower that ripples the pond like hammered glass. It lasts, oh, three minutes, then settles back to a steady sort of drizzle, under which the koi swim looking for more breakfast.
We so love the garden!
how lovely!
I love my garden to bits too ….
A little bit of heaven! Here’s pics from this year’s garden(not sure how to make this an actual link, unless it just ‘happens’).
http://www.kodakgallery.com/gallery/creativeapps/slideShow/Main.jsp?albumId=761738050408&ownerId=74003009408
alas, I can’t get it to load.
Hmmmm…I think I know why (Kodak prefers I send you a link via email) and will have to publish pics to flickr. More time spent fiddling with uploads (sigh).
My mother’s and great-grandmother’s favorite rose was the Granada rose, deep pink borders to a lighter pink, gradient through a peach-orange to a yellow center. Very pretty, and therefore my favorite too. Since your garden seems to have all those colors, you might like the rose. 🙂
We don’t have a Granada, but they’re gorgeous. When we get room in the front, we’ll keep our eye open for one. Thanks for the reminder.
Me mum’s fave was the tropicana. A lovely, salmon colored prolific and hardy tea rose with the BEST scent ever. Very strong raspberry scent.
I think my favorite is the World Peace, a rose that came out the year the Berlin Wall came down and a really really rich peace rose with huge blooms and lots of scent.
I have to say, it’s being an exceptionally cold early summer out here! According to weather.com, we are averaging a high of 79 and a low of 45, but this last week has been more like high 60s and low 40s. And there’s nothing like 30 degree temperature swings to make sure you are either hot or cold at some point in the day, or else that you are adding or removing clothes! I’m hoping it warms up some soon, so that I can actually open the windows at night. Right now the heat is still kicking on in the morning so that the place gets up to 69.
The Glory of the Garden by Rudyard Kipling
Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.
For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You will find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all ;
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks:
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.
And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ‘prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.
And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:–“Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives
There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick,
There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick.
But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.
Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!
Lovely! Thank you.
Hey! Where are those cabana boys to keep my garden gorgeous (and run around shirtless when it gets hot!) I feel cheated!!!!! 😀
😀 Here’s the garden that makes me smile every day, even as I ice my elbows and apply Biofreeze!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/?start_tab=one_set72157623805083711
It changes daily – now a couple other roses are blooming like crazy. I’ve dug some ginger and a rumex, also called bloody dock, which is another nice foliage plant but for a sunny spot. Three more weeks!
Oh, and I’m going to ConQuest in KC with Kato-ji so need to print out Closed Circle flyers (scratches head and begins search for those).
The Closed Circle flyers are available for download in the Store over on Closed Circle.
And we thank everyone who distributes them!
Mrs. Cherryh,
Sorry about dumping the big poem on your blog. But that is what all the talk about gardening brought to mind. The poem blends gardening, politics, and religion together. That is significant to me because they are all attempts by humanity to classify, catalog, and control.
My small garden is just for food. But I do have a much bigger one. It is a grove a trees on a rocky bluff that is very hard to reach. When I first discovered it, it was over grown and rife with exotic invaders and disease. The few humans who had made it up left their mark with trash and climbing parifinalia. I hiked back with chainsaw, trash bags, and herbicide sprayer to weed out the plants that either didn’t belong or were choking out the others. Over the next three years I visited and now it is open and full of wildlife, herbs, and edible plants. While weeding one day I found petroglyphs, and realized that once it was special to someone else too.
What else is a blog for? I have giga-megs of storage, and I’m a Kipling fan. 😉
And how neat about the site and the petroglyphs! Do you have any clue what the background of those would be?
My best guess is Late Woodland-emergent Mississippian. They are very faded and full of moss, but I could pick out the segmented circle and some sort of stylized bird, with a big-headed human with shield and spear. As for site use, no clue. If it were me it would probably be a ceremonial site, or a lookout in bad times.
A segmented circle as in a medicine wheel? Of course—difficult to say what evolution symbols have undergone over time. Possibly a lookout or a signal site. Possibly even a weather-lookout, if your area is like Oklahoma, and you can see the weather on the horizon that you’ll have in 3 days. 😉
Not so elaborate. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Crossed_circle.svg
Pretty universal symbol among prehistoric peoples worldwide. I am in what would be considered the Lower Ohio Valley, just where the glaciers stopped, so it’s pretty hilly/ woody around here, very Ozark-like. In this area, the symbol is usually associated with something called the Cult of the Bleeding Eye. Who’s influence was felt here around 8-11AD
Interesting. I know symbology of the Med(iterranean) where V’s and +’s are common, not so many circles—if they’re doing circles, it’s mostly spirals. http://www.greece-athens.com/page.php?page_id=13 Your wheel is there, but definitely in a mechanical application. Spirals often seem to reflect a feminine symbol, sometimes called the birth-maze, sometimes ending in coming through a curtain; there are dances related to same. The navel is viewed (correctly) as the maternal link, particularly revered, (pre-Indoeuropean) and there are ‘navel stones’ which are rounded cones to which offerings are made in the name of Mother Earth, particularly associated with prophecy. Snakes are revered as earth-connected, and a symbol of rebirth, particularly associated with goddess-cults, but later appropriated by Apollo, in his role as a sungod, but probably not too far from an association with the sun and the spring rites. The spiral finally squared up as what we now call the Greek Key design. In this stele it’s been spatted about as a river, as suns (passage of time) or even as clouds; but I think it’s the old fertility spiral, at least in origin, and I don’t think the artist was that organized that he was doing a composition like a picture. I think he was filling space with a symbol of good luck.
I’ve got an entire book on these symbols, reading it randomly a few pages at a time. Who knew there were so many??!!! It is Coopers “An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols” (1992 printing) – have you seen this?
Hrm. An entire book. Most of my books are entire, very few are fragmentary. W00t.
This says it better than I can. Mark W. and I have worked together on and off for many years.
http://virtual.parkland.edu/ias/publications/Illinois_Rock_Art/ISMrockartA.htm
Sounds fabulous! I jeal.