May 10, 2021

A Morning in the Garden

   One day this past week, the sun called to me. Its still-cool rays unfolded my peony-flowering tulips’ tissue-paper petals, their first year strutting in my garden. Green daggers shot up from beneath the whirling winter wheat of native grasses; time to trim back the dead to allow for the new. A worm lay in the middle of the brick path. Was she sunbathing? Was she dead? Why was she in the proverbial middle of the street?

    Much happens in the sunshine of a spring morning. I stepped outdoors with my little notebook. The lettuce-green leaves of the Norway maple wiggled in the breeze. A squirrel stood on her hind feet in the driveway, nibbling on an acorn the wind saw fit to blow off the oak across the street. Pine cones, male and female, gathered on the lawn, recently spit from the Eastern white pines that line the borders of the yard. The straight trunks of the pines soar to the skies, their open canopies slipping the sun’s rays onto the scraggles of green stalks that count for grass this year. 

   I said to myself, 15 minutes. There was much else to do inside, but for 15 minutes I pledged to pull on my work gloves and pick through the dead bulb stalks, compost the winter mulch from the roses, trim back the lavender that held on through the frostiest days.

     Committing to 15 minutes in the garden is like pledging to eat one potato chip. 

     In the garden, I measure the intentions of a life. I recite poetry. I talk to the plants. Fifteen minutes slipped into an hour, then two and three. The garden spoke. Be out here with us, it said, where every moment much happens. Inhale that heady, intoxicating scent of the hanging lilacs. Drink in the blood red of the early-blooming rose. Waken your winter-weary fingers on the tulips’ velveteen petals. 

   A garden encourages hope, promise, the understanding that there is more than meets the eye. “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it is going to be a butterfly,” R. Buckminster Fuller said. 

    Discovery is the nature of Mother Nature. Head out and see for yourself.

— Jane

For the purposes of this blog, take extra notice today of an object, a person, a facet of  nature, and write about it. Describe the movement, the smell, the feel, the look of it. Share it with someone. If you’d like to share it with me, please, send it along.