The other day I read an interesting opinion piece in USA Today suggesting that the current epidemic of depression in America (suicide rates have increased dramatically over the past 20 years) is largely caused by our culture’s overemphasis on personal accomplishment. Our emotional suffering, the …
Spring is my favorite season. It always has been. When I was a child, spring started, in my opinion, in February, when the wild violets appeared like magic in the little scrap of woods behind our backyard in Tallahassee. My sister Kris and I would …
In my opinion, gardens should be lush, with places for fairies to hide. Yards with nothing but grass make me feel bored and hopeless. I prefer shadowy yards full of secrets, full of surprises. Full of possibilities.
I grew up in the lushest backyard, created by my mom and dad. It fed my imagination and provided my sister Kris and me with endless “ingredients” for our games. Wearing eye shadow concocted from daylily pollen, we strolled about under elephant-ear parasols and fanned ourselves with canna leaves.
My parents never had much money and our house definitely lacked for pretty things, but the yard was different, another world. It was flowery and fancy, lacy with ferns, curtained with Spanish moss, a realm of beauty and abundance.
There were so many “rooms” in the yard (separated by trees or overgrown hedges), including a riotous vegetable garden with peanuts, corn, tomatoes, and okra, and a secret garden containing my dad’s prized hybrid teas. In a woodsy spot, Kris and I built a little cemetery where we buried the poor moles that our cats hunted. The cemetery was landscaped with haircap moss and protected by a delicate fence of toothpicks.
As kids we were never bored, because the yard was an inexhaustible source of entertainment, with climbing trees, a swing set, and a trampoline. There was always something to do in the yard, something to discover. You could find treasures—ripe blackberries, maybe, or wild violets or maybe a peach or a plum. The yard was like a magician’s hat, seemingly bottomless; you could always pull some new delight out of it. Yes, it had rabbits. And it had box turtles and owls and even a Mississippi kite!
As an adult I’ve tried to re-create the yard I grew up in. In other words, I’ve spent a foolish amount of money on plants. For 14 years now, I’ve been cramming my yard here in Quincy with wild azaleas, needle palms, bluestem palmettos, and dozens and dozens of trees, and the place is finally becoming just how I want it to be—green, jungly, tangled, and wildlife-friendly.
I’ve created shade and secluded spots. I’ve set the stage for mystery. Sometimes in the morning, I’ll come outside and find deer or raccoon tracks, or I’ll spy a new nest or an egg, and I’ll get very excited knowing that in my absence there have been secret doings, sacred rituals, that I’ve made a safe place for such things. My arm hair will stand on end. I’ll feel as if I just missed God by a minute.
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| Safrano rose |
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| Perle d’Or rose |
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| Florida azalea |
I had so much fun putting up my Easter tree yesterday. It’s one of my favorite rites of spring! I love having a tree in my living room, even if it’s fake.
The tree itself is kind of weird. It’s made of white-painted rusty metal and really doesn’t look a bit like a tree. But I load it up with silk flowers and glittery glass ladybugs and birds—and when I’m all done, the effect is quite charming, I think.
Making Easter ornaments is how I get through the gray, dreary days of January and February. I like to sit at the dining room table, up to my elbows in pastel felt, ribbon, and seed pearls, and create very poorly sewn bunnies, chicks, lambs, and other baby farm animals. The fact that they all tend to have some sort of deformity—uneven eyes, maybe, or one small leg and one big one—only makes them more endearing to me.
When I’m sewing, I like to listen to audiobooks and run my trusty little space heater as the chandelier makes rainbows on the walls. It’s so cozy listening to somebody read me a story. Buntin, our passionate tortie, likes to nap on the table, on a tuffet of felt scraps, as I work and the tale unfolds around us. She’s very devoted. Sometimes Rob will come by and praise her purity of heart: “Oh, look at sweet little Buntie,” he might say. “All the other cats want treats, but Buntin just wants to be friends.”
On Saturday, Fenna and Claudia Rose had a tea party in the yard, even though spring is still a far-off wish, a dream. They held bouquets of pink camellias, the stems tied with satin ribbons, to add a little cheer to the brown and wintry …
Rob and I are up to our ears these days in homegrown citrus. We’ve got 19 trees, and just about every one is covered in glowing, golden, sunny fruit. We’ve got a Cara Cara orange, a Roble orange, a Hamlin orange, two Ambersweet oranges, two Kimbrough satsumas, two Owari satsumas, a Rangpur lime, two Meyer lemons, a Changsha tangerine, two Ponkan tangerines, a King Mandarin, a Nippon orangequat, a Nagami kumquat, and a Meiwa kumquat. We can’t believe the bounty! We’ve got citrus fruit piling up on our counters, sitting on the breezeway in baskets, weighing down the trees, and riding around in my car.
Our trees seem to produce like magic. They don’t require much maintenance at all. Rob sprays them with neem oil (for whiteflies) sometimes, and I fertilize them three times a year, in March, May, and July, with copious amounts of Holly-tone or Citrus-tone (24 cups for trees over 9 feet tall). But other than that, we just let them be.
We don’t even have our trees planted in really choice spots. No, we’ve got them crammed into weird places around the house, mixed in with our camellias and wax myrtles and such—in shade and clay. I honestly don’t know how they’re doing so well.
Right now, we’ve got so much ripe citrus rolling in that we can’t possibly eat it all. As a result, Rob spends most of his waking hours scheming about how to give it away. See, he’s a very conscientious person, and he would never want any of our delicious citrus to go to waste. Plus, he’s very friendly and kind and enjoys giving bags of homegrown citrus to people he barely knows.
“Next year we should buy some nice brown paper bags with handles so we can hand out our citrus in cute little gift bags,” he said the other day. “When you give your citrus away in old plastic grocery bags, it just seems like trash. But if it comes in a nice gift bag, it seems more like a thing. We can even have a stamp made up so we can personalize the bags.”
“What should the stamp say?” I asked.
“Spruce Pine Cottage Citrus,” Rob suggested.
“How about Spruce Pine Cottage Citrus and Sundries?” I said.
“Hmm,” Rob said. “I’m skeptical about the sundries. What are the sundries?”
I could tell he was worried I might be tempted to quit my full-time job with benefits and start my own small sundries business, so I decided to tease him a little. Rob is always concerned that I’m about to launch an ill-conceived business venture.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I smiled. “Waxed camellias . . . artisan bread . . .” (Rob has recently gotten into bread making, and I would love to learn how to wax camellias.)
“I don’t think I want to get into sundries,” Rob said.
“Citrus and Sundries does have a nice ring to it though, you’ve got to admit,” I said, still teasing. “Maybe we could just tell people the sundries are sold out. . . .”
“Or we could just use plain bags,” Rob said. “Yeah, on second thought, plain bags seems like the safest bet.”
