Lake Hall
The other day I went back to Lake Hall, a place that was my home away from home when I was a kid. I brought my camera and walked around and took pictures and thought about old times. Lake Hall is a small freshwater lake …
Tag: nature
A New Birdbath
For years I’d been bothered by a certain little spot in the yard, a weedy, unkempt area at the base of the giant spruce pine that grows by the living room windows. Every time I’d walk past it, I’d say to myself, “Boy, that looks …
Another Look at the Pond Garden
I wanted to show you a few more pictures of my pond garden. This is a garden I’ve really struggled to get right. Rob and I built the pond in 2010, and I’ve been working on the surrounding garden ever since.
The garden is contained inside a picket fence painted dark green to blend in with the foliage. In the early morning you’ll often see fresh dainty sandy footprints running up the pickets—evidence that raccoons have been to the pond for a moonlight visit.
A stone path encircles the pond. The path is homemade (made by me) and has something of the scrap quilt about it since I used bits of stone left over from other paths to complete it. I cobbled it together from small, mismatched pieces in various colors—silver, gray, brown, white, tan, and orange. Very recently I outlined the path with chunks of field stone, which gave it a fancy look that reminds me of dribble decorations on a sandcastle.
The plants in the pond garden are plentiful and include all my usual favorites: ferns, Indian pinks, golden ragwort, camellias, sasanquas, coonties, beautyberry, and needle palm. The garden is shaded by water oaks, a white oak, some pawpaws, and a big leucothoe.
I have quite a collection of garden ornaments—small statues, birdhouses, birdbaths, seashells, and other doodads. I think it’s fun to hide these neat things in nooks and crannies and corners, like treasures for you to find. Tucked under the fern fronds and among the tree roots are a concrete squirrel, two elves, a couple of gnomes, a lamb, two bunnies (one life-size and the other quite gigantic), a duck, and four owls. Real creatures mingle with the fake ones. I often see a mockingbird perched on the tall ears of the giant bunny statue.
The pond garden is a peaceful, quiet place—a refuge. When you open the gate, you’re entering into a separate, secret little world. Lush plants block the view of everything outside. You can’t see anything ugly—not the nearby road or the passing cars or the power lines. The other day I was sitting in the pond garden, hidden by ferns, drinking a blackberry smoothie. The frogs were croaking, and the goldfish were glistening and glowing in the sun. A squirrel poked her head out of the tin-roofed birdhouse, then hopped out and ran up a nearby water oak tree. I’d been working from home and was on my lunch break, and it really was a break—not just from work but from all the craziness of the human world.
Brick Project Update
For the past year, I’ve been working on outlining all my garden beds with bricks. I dig a trench around each bed, sink the bricks about halfway into the soil, and arrange them in a sawtooth pattern. The bricks add a nice, tidy edge to …
The Night Before My Day Off
On Tuesday, I took the day off from work. I really needed it. Tuesday was my day off, but I’m not going to tell you about Tuesday. I’m going to tell you about Monday night because it was even better than Tuesday. On Monday night, …
A Very Time-Consuming Painting
For the last half of January, all of February, and most of March, I was working obsessively (in the evenings and on weekends) on a small painting of our backyard. The painting was very hard for me to finish because the scene I was trying to capture included about a billion leaves. I’m a beginner in acrylics and don’t know how to suggest leaves the way a more skilled painter would do. No, instead I have to sit there and paint every leaf individually, one by one, because I haven’t mastered any advanced techniques yet. Oh my gosh, painting all those leaves was so laborious. I kept complaining (jokingly) to Rob that I was “in a hell of leaves.”
But to be honest, I loved being in that hell of leaves. I loved working on my dumb painting every evening as Buntin sat in my lap doing “crabby cuddles” (purring and snuggling and then growling softly whenever I had the gall to move). I fell into the habit of listening to old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries on my phone as I worked. Unsolved Mysteries was such a great show, especially the “Lost Loves” segments, in which family members or old friends would be reunited after long years of searching for one another. Almost every night as I listened I’d get Buntin’s fur wet with tears.
When I finally finished my painting on March 21, I felt relieved but also a tiny bit lost. What fun little project would I work on next? Luckily, spring had sprung while I was painting, so there were lots of fresh possibilities. I could take pictures of our beautiful white plum tree that I like to call the Snow Queen . . . or plant more purple coneflowers for the butterflies to enjoy . . . or I could make a cake for Rob and garnish it with wild violets. Winter was over, and maybe the pandemic would be over soon too. It was a whole new world with so much to look forward to.
Tabitha and Julie Belle among the ferns:
Golden ragwort galore:
The wild azaleas in bloom:
American plum blossoms:
Habitat for the Soul
One of the biggest reasons I spend so much time in my garden is the hope that I find there. Whenever I feel myself losing faith, I go outside and I can find it again. It’s been like that for as long as I can …
Trees
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| Giant sequoia, Sequoia National Park |
When I was a little kid, probably about nine, my father, one day, brought out a leaf collection he had made when he was about my age, about nine. I saw it only once, that one time, but I never forgot it. It was beautiful, a whole album filled with leaves neatly mounted on heavy, yellowing pages, each carefully labeled in my father’s looping, flawless handwriting (perfect, apparently, even when he was a child).
The leaves were North Carolina leaves (my father was from Winston-Salem). There were lots of lobed, fancy ones, the kind you saw in storybooks but not where we lived, not in a suburb in Florida.
I was sick with admiration for the leaf collection. I asked my father how he had even found so many leaves (our own neighborhood was new and bare), and he said it was easy, that he had just picked them up, that fancy leaves fell like snow, like manna, all over the neighborhoods in Winston-Salem, and lay in lush, tempting drifts on the sidewalks, just waiting for children to collect the best ones.
That was the impression I got, at least. You see, when my father talked about North Carolina, he spoke so fondly and with such nostalgia that it seemed like the greatest place in the world, like paradise. It seemed so much better than Florida, where we had no extended family and no family history, where we had no leaves to watch turn red and gold in fall.
The leaves in Dad’s collection were labeled, like I said, and I was so impressed by that, by my father’s boyhood knowledge of his surroundings, of his close connection to the place where he lived.
“How did you know the names of the trees, Daddy?” I asked, dizzy with wonder and reverence and envy. “How did you find out?”
He said he wasn’t sure, that he guessed he “just knew.”
The day Dad showed me his leaf collection, I tried to start my own. It was a pretty frustrating project because our young neighborhood consisted mostly of open, grassy lawns, a fact that made interesting leaves quite difficult to come by. Even worse, when I did find a good leaf, I didn’t know its name or how on earth I could ever discover it. I remember my little collection, my little bouquet of three or four leaves, and how quickly I gave up on it.
I think because both my parents were from far away and were often (I’m guessing) homesick, I grew up with a strange sense of displacement. For a long time I thought we’d “move back” to Winston-Salem, end our self-imposed exile. But we didn’t . . .
And gradually I came to understand that I didn’t need to move away in order to find a home, that I could make my home right where I was. I figured out that I could read books and learn the names of the trees, that I could plant trees where there had been none, and, most important, that I could make the commitment to stay and nurture those trees and watch them grow.
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| General Grant Tree, Sequoia National Park |
