Things Are Happening Every Day

The absolute best thing about this month is that things change literally every day. The blue grape hyacinth which I planted a few years ago have begun to flourish in some difficult places to grow anything – directly underneath a large shade tree, and in the curbside strip.
I have put a little bit of everything that was doing well elsewhere underneath the maple tree in the front yard, a patch of thin earth utterly hemmed in by pavement and eaten up by tree roots. The ajuga has actually flourished here, producing a solid purple month of May last year, though so far it has not come back so strongly this spring. Where the ajuga doesn’t grow, and the soil is particularly thin or non-existent – between roots and parking area – I throw turf, old mulch, weeded dandelions, and anything else I think might turn into soil, and one year I dropped bulbs into the mix. I’m happy to see some color here this year. On the other side of the tree, the low phlox hangs over the sidewalk, a little spot of rare street-level color.
The sidewalk strip, which I have resolutely planted with something or another for five years, has been through a lot. It gets sanded, salted, assaulted, snow-piled, shovel-shocked, gravel-strewn, tree-rooted, and dogged.
A couple years ago, after I had started some speedwell going there, it had a ditch dug through it when our sewer pipe clogged (another gift of the maple tree) and the city came with big trucks and armed men (and women) to tunnel out the old pipe and replace it with a new one made of plastic. Apparently, tree roots don’t like PVC, an evolutionary oversight I expect will be remedied in time.
Whatever disappeared then I replaced with sedum, the one constant star in that section which shines in all seasons, making fat bright-green leaves in early April and waiting till September, or later, to flower, thus living up to its “autumn joy” varietal name. Some violet are catching on in this strip too, so I was happy to see the grape hyacinth unfurl their little blue, bell-like flowers this week, playing on the blue-violet end of the spectrum.
Also showing this week, a light pink hyacinth; an eccentric reddish tulip whose origins escape me; some splashes of deep blue vinca flowers; more violets here and there.
In the back garden, I am finally figuring out Lenten rose. The flower color is as green as the plant’s leaf on the outside, but white on the inside. I think they bloom in March. Who knows when I would have noticed them if I wasn’t cleaning out the old leaves in that spot.
The white blossoms of the cherry tree are flying off in the breezy weekend days following Friday’s all-day rain. Still beautiful against Saturday’s cool, dry-blue sky. Vinca blue and violets spackling through the fresh green groundcovers. Some shrubs, lilac, Japanese maple, unveiling new leaves.
New leaves for everybody. And something new for me to notice every day.

April 7: Too Beautiful, Too Soon

The shock and awe day which I have been predicting.. In the eighties this afternoon, and still climbing. When I open windows, the temperature in the house goes up about 15 degrees immediately.
Later, the kitchen thermometer registers 91. Eighty-nine in Boston, the radio tells me, a record. Guys shoot at a basketball hoop and board on Exeter Street, at an increasingly dilatory space as the day wears on.
New flowers today: the first violet blossoms, absolutely not there yesterday. About 20 blossoms in a couple of locations in the front.
Many more vinca blossoms in the back.
Some new vinca, not there yesterday, blooming in the front near the rose bushes.
Things done: Dug up the raised-bed garden area for peas, scooped out the high-smelling compost, too much bending, from the bin and pitch-forked it in. Not broken up enough when I worked the ground today.
Put down metal climbing cones and planted pea seeds around them.
I plant morning glory seeds in the glass-roofed seedbed, using decay-able seed pots, the sort of product that looks like chewed cardboard. Way too hot to put the glass cover on top of them.
Dug out the plants in the corner of the back garden where sump pump pipe trench will run, and moved to safety. Will I remember them all? What will the collateral damage be?

Perfect Days

We had beautiful, unusually mild Easter weekend weather. Mild, room-temperature weather continued Monday and Tuesday with a prediction of eighty degrees tomorrow. Suddenly, though it won’t last – it can’t: that’s the definition of April – we’re in the Other Place. You wake up in full sunlight, you get out of bed without turning the heat up, you look out the window right away. You find some reason why you have to go out of doors before breakfast; possibly before anything.
The Other Place has its own routines in the garden. You step outside without looking at the thermometer first, without thinking what to wear, and you go not to get the paper but to see what news the earth has warmed up. You check to see if anything new is blooming. Or if the light is doing something different when it brings out the color of the scattering of bluets (little sky-blue bulb growers), which appear to have done some work spreading themselves around without much assistance from humankind. The grape hyacinth had grown shapelier and may even be preparing to open in some unpromising territory under the maple tree before too long.
The green spears of the day lilies – those woodsy New England leaves of grass – have grown greener, richer, more prosperous looking every day. They don’t bloom for months, but they begin to be a presence in March, long before many of the spring bloomers have any appearance.
So in the last few days, taking advantage of the weekend, we have undressed the garden of its brown winter wear – all those dried brown tree leaves which the garden wears like a shabby brown coat, worn out by the weather. The garden has been sleeping rough, under rags on a bench. The rags kept it warn. Now it wriggles out; stretches fingers and toes in the smiling air.
Tabulations: About a dozen to fifteen big brown leaf bags filled up and scattered around the yard, some lined up against the front porch, some stationed near collection areas in the back and side.
New blossoms: The weeping cherry tree bloomed full-white today. It was halfway there yesterday. You could see the blossoms, unopened, on the branches a few days before Thursday when I was looking at it with Anne’s parents. Stay a few more days, I said, and you’ll see it bloom.
A few more vinca flowers, looking purple along the blue granite flagstone walk.
A few bluets – that’s what I’m calling them; tiny bulbs making light blue flowers with thin, star-like petals, in the side yard.
A couple of photos: the cherry tree, the day lilies, the first round of purple vinca in front of the Adirondack chairs.

Poetry in flower

My Plymouth Library friends are reminding everyone that April is poetry month. They’ve got the right month – the poets have put April in the language. One of the few passages I was ever asked to memorize, the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, puts April in the first line: “Whan that Aprill with its shoures soute/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote/ And bathed every veyne in swich licour/ of which vertu engendred is the flour…”
I remember how to say the Middle English, but not how to spell it, so I looked up the spellings. The modern English goes something like: When April with its sweet showers, the drought of March has pierced to the root, and bathed every leaf in the liquid whose goodness makes the flowers…
I also remember our professor calling our attention to Chaucer’s evocation of the “droghte”of March, an ironical notion in view of recent circumstances. But ironical to Chaucer, too. There is no meteorological drought in March, then or now. Chaucer was talking about the spiritual dryness that comes from too much winter – April puts an end to that, on its better days at least.
“So,” Chaucer concludes that first passage, “piketh hem Nature in hir corages/ Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…”
When nature awakens our hearts, that’s when we go on pilgrimages.
April brings a new season, spring – time for us to go on our pilgrimages.
People change their wardrobe and get outdoors any way possible, walking the dog, shooting hoops, flooding Boston Common. Anne and I spend all Saturday clearing dead leaves and last year’s growth off the back garden, revealing a whole lot of green, some purple vinca flowers, a few hidden bulbs, and the first green shoots of scores of other plants that will unfold their nature over time.
After Chaucer, April shows up all over the map. Eliot famously called it “the cruelest month.” Cummings (“April is a perhaps hand”) and Frost approach the month’s changeability: “You know how it is on an April day/ When the sun is out and the wind is still/ You’re one month on in the middle of May./But if you so much as dare to speak,/ A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,/A wind comes off a frozen peak/, And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
But in April even raw, rainy spells make us think of flowers. And flowers make us think of the mixed blessings of our own nature.
In the “Immortality Ode,” which is really about reconciling ourselves to mortality, Wordsworth saves his finest bloom for the great nature-loving poem’s last lines:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears.
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

After the Flood

We had a new season this year – flood month. The Great Spring Flood of 2010 came March 13 to15. We struggled through the rain to go to a Sunday afternoon concert in Boston, walking the rain-splattered streets and thinking that wearing wet clothes was the worst of it. We came back to find six inches of water in the basement. We spend a week clearing soaked stuff out of the basement.
I lay the pages of damp photo albums on newspaper on the living room floor in a flood reclamation project that is still going on by fits and starts. I worry about sorting through the hundreds of pics from our Lebanon trip to get them in some condition to share with friends. I suffer from a stomach bug for weeks, watching what I eat (a rarity for me) and husbanding my energy for work.
I try to love the spring.
The day after the rain finally stops, the sun comes out, the temperature warms, and spring fever breaks out in the Massachusetts masses. Shortsleeves; shorts. Smiles. Our crocuses break through the brown leaf and muck crust, but the back garden – my daily companion because I stare at it, at least a sliver of it, from my desk – still looks like the Lower Ninth Ward after Katrina.
So I’m still not in tune with the universe, and am disappointed with myself because early spring has been a favorite part of the garden experience in other years. Because it changes every day.
This week we wrap up our second major rain event (less dramatically for us, thank-you weather gods) and when the sun comes out on Thursday peace and harmony once more rule the land. Anne’s parents and I step outdoors for a walk at Wollaston Beach. They’ve been unable to go home to New York City for two days because the rain washed out the train tracks in Rhode Island. (Oh, did I forget to mention that other little change the flood season made in our schedule?)
As we go to the car, I glance at a little spot of bare earth in front of the 50-year rhododendron bush and see the round hats of the first violet leaves emerging. The leaves are actually heart-shaped, but when small and newly out of the ground they look round – little green mouths drinking up the sun. They were not there – nothing was there – the last time I looked at this spot last – if not the day before, no more than two or three. And here they are.
This is what I have been missing.
Other plants are up, of course. The crocuses have already blown and dropped. The lavender is drawing the color back into its leaves. Sedum leaves look green and plump already. But I had forgotten about that bare piece of ground where I introduced the violets a year or two ago: violets, this is ground. Ground, violets.
The things you forget about in order, so it seems, to discover them again. That’s the best part of spring.

Balcony Garden

The Lebanese are shocked if someone builds a dwelling place without a balcony. In warm weather, most of the year, people live on their balcony, and all year round they leave their plants out. Many buildings in Beirut have deep dirt-filled planters built into the balconies. The result is thick vines of purple bougainvillea, jasmine and verbena grown all over the city.
Our daughter Sonya’s apartment in Beirut, where we camped out on her life for two weeks, has two balconies. The “big one,” with its wide, dense, busy viewspace offering close perspectives on several construction projects and lots of smaller, older Mediterranean style buildings, is also home to a dozen or so flowering plants. Planted in large pots from which vines emerge, climb walls on homemade lattices and twist around one another, bougainvillea and jasmine offer the biggest shows. Since it was February when we were there, the bougainvillea was beginning to offer a few cheerful blossoms. Herbs, annuals and other perennials were still awaiting their hour.
The neighbors in the lower house across a narrow street but more or less in front and center from the balcony where we sat and watched the world were already preparing for the new growing season. Their garden occupied much of a broad, flat rooftop, consisting of maybe thirty large pots and a few small trees. Many of the pots had severely pruned rootstock with short stems of what could only be rose bushes protruding above the soil. We watch them walk among their plants, conferring.
They see us.
Both parties wave.
A day later a huge conical pile of yellowish dirt appears on an unoccupied piece of the fourth-story roof. Since we were not out of bed early enough to be in good balcony-spying position whenever this dirt arrived, we can only speculate on its source and means of arrival. Helicopter? Considerable huffing and puffing up the stairs by poorly paid sherpas? Family members from “the village” (all Beruitis have a village, where growing is practiced) arriving with a truckful of this precious ultimate source of new life? Magic?
Howsoever it got there, the appearance of the yellow dirt ushered in a new era of re-potting, the shaking of old dirt off old roots, the summary disposal of unwanted plant material and other stuff over the side of the building, and the reinstallation of the fortunate neighbors’ balcony garden in its new soil.
Inspired, some days later we took action on our own front.
Owning to an unfortunate water shortage last summer (when you leave home in August you are relying on a substitute plant attendant, who in this instance did not attend well or faithfully), one of Sonya’s large, many-branched plants had died. So it was that Anne and I were pressed into service as visiting workers. We tracked down the dead branches, disentangled them from the living neighbors, and cut off about two garbage bags worth of dead vines.
The neighboring climbing plants shed a lot of deadwood also. The jasmine lost most of its upper stories, and I put in some time tying up and styling the low, new-growth green shoots, borrowing twine from the lattice work to wrap up these young branches and encourage them upward. Onward and upward with the art of balcony gardening!
Many other potted plants – from old ferns to new sweet alyssum – need repotting. Later that day, then, we tackled the challenge of finding garden soil in a densely built city. The obstacles: we didn’t have a car. Friends having a car were too far away, or had valid excuses: jobs, babies, lives of their own. We wanted to sight-see around the city on foot, but not carry bags of dirt while we did it. Nobody in the neighborhood sold dirt. In fact even by Lebanese standards, it was too early to sell plants.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we took a cab ride to a “department store,” an usual establishment in a distant neighborhood, whose Dubai owners had recently taken over from local owners, meaning that the store’s fabulous French food service had been replaced by an American fast-food franchise (people in Dubai apparently not knowing any better). Just as in a Wal-Mart there was a gardening section, where we bought a couple of manageable bags of potting soil, a bottle of water soluble fertilizer, and a metal fork for poking at compacted soil in the pots of balcony gardens. We took them home in a taxi. Taxi fare in Beirut is sixty-seven cents per person. Bags of soil ride free.
We held our own little happy, messy re-potting party a few days later. Sonya’s housecleaner cleaned up. Anne and I await news updates on the success of our efforts.

Walking Shoes

Bring your walking shoes to Beirut. The city is better than a movie. All of the natives walk the Corniche, the seaside promenade that runs from commercial port downtown all along the harbor, past cafes, yacht clubs, military posts, an amusement park, beach clubs built into rocks, and the gigantic weather-carved boulders known as the Pigeon Rocks. Locals climb out on the rocks to fish or swim. Visitors are wise to stay on the broad pavement of the Corniche and watch the action. Cyclists, couples, women in loose headscarfs, girls who wear the more fully covering “conservative” head-and-neck scarf over form-fitting sheath dresses and jeans. Men exulting over fast-played backgammon contests. One evening’s two-minute Hezbollah vehicle caravan demonstration – people drive slowly, wave flags and yell out of car windows. (This in response to the recent memorial for Rafik Harriri.) Pushcart food sellers, including some selling roasted ears of corn on sticks – an outdoor treat here the way pretzels are in America.
Beirut is bustling with a building boom, but below the yellow construction cranes people still live the Mediterranean lifestyle on the sidewalks, the cafes and the restaurants. A personal, highly interactive, down-to-earth city with busy streets, steady pedestrian traffic, and an endless variety of little stores, fashion boutiques, and upscale galleries. In Lebanon, the owners of the mom and pop groceries want to meet your mother, and your daughter’s Palestinian refugee friend brings you a “welcome” gift. In Lebanon, your boss invites your parents to her home for dinner, and in this country there is no such thing as a quick, easy (or early) dinner. In Lebanon, the bus always waits for you. In fact drivers stop on the odd chance that pedestrians might want to hop on and go back to Beirut. You don’t have to look for a taxi, taxis look for you, prowling the busy streets and beeping at people who look like foreigners. Somehow they can tell.
Attractions that might be hard to get close to, too crowded or expensive in other countries are cheap and accessible – probably too accessible – in Lebanon. Spectacular Roman and Byzantine ruins can be visited in the coastal cities of Tyre and Byblos. Touch the columns, sit on the stones, climb through the weathered remains of amphitheatres and extensive Roman baths. No fences keep you from climbing down into the burial caverns. When you walk the battlements and towers of the Crusader fortresses in Sidon and Tripoli no railings tell you how far to go. Nothing keeps you from climbing out to stare at the spectacular rooftop views of the hillsides of Tripoli where every inch has been built on. In Lebanon, they’ve never heard of liability.
In Beirut, neighborhood store owners without much English go out of their way to serve you. People stop you in the street if you’re looking at a map: “Do you want Hamra?” Gathering point for the city’s intellectuals in the years before the civil war, Hamra has become newly fashionably – the hot district for clubs, bars and late night life. The bars serve freshly squeezed blood orange juice and vodka cocktails.
There are no morality police in Lebanon.
The high standards of food preparation in restaurants and shops – even the fast food is good – is based on fresh produce picked that morning in the country’s fertile regions and trucked to the cities. An array of citrus varieties (six kinds of oranges) were ripe in February; also bananas grown along the coastal road south to Tyre; avocadoes, mangoes, snap beans, egg plant, zucchinis with their blossoms still one them, potatoes, tomatoes.
In Lebanon there are lots of cars, everyone drives as fast as they can, honks frequently, pulls into traffic without a second thought, and yet somehow watches out for all the other drivers, knowing they operate by the same rules, which are no rules by American standards.
I have vowed never to get behind the wheel of a car in Lebanon. Besides, walking is too much fun.