So it’s still sprinter.  I had such hopes before Easter Monday when we awoke to snow cover.  Sure, it melted by the end of the day but the psychological damage was done.  
I started gardening in earnest in February, planting the native seeds I had collected, labelled, and cold stratified over the winter.  We are now seven weeks in.  Feeling expectant, I dreamed that the tiny pots were full of little green sprigs;  and indeed there was a bountiful harvest!   Unfortunately, my abilities lie in mycology.  
Back to the drawing board.  I continue to watch webinars on habitat gardening but they become increasingly bittersweet.  Exterminating the unfortunate toadstools didn’t help.    Next to nothing has replaced them except calla lilies because a corm is hard to screw up unless you plant them facing down.  My overwintered geraniums are blooming but again, not native.
It wouldn’t matter at all if the bioweb weren’t in dire straits.  The sheer magnitude of severe decline, not to mention full extinction, is terrifying.  Insects, of whom the vast majority are beneficial,  are now in scarce supply and you have to look only at similarly plummeting bird species to see one of the results. Our traditional properties are full of pretty but useless non-native species which support no natural life, turf grass - en ecological desert -  being the most egregious.   I will be gone before the full wave hits but it feels like a rotten inheritance to leave to other generations so habitat gardening and charitable support of environmental agencies like the Nature Conservancy of Canada are must-dos for every one of us who has a garden and/or some spare cash.

I do have some excellent news, however.  If you are lucky enough to live in Mississauga, a force of nature named Jeanne McRight  has spearheaded a new organization called Blooming Boulevards whose goal is to reclaim our boulevards for nature by planting species that insects and birds can rely on.  In three years they have established 200 of such gardens, all of them beautiful as well as ecstatically alive with pollinators.   Because our own property is full of old trees, my efforts lean towards  woodland habitats, but most people have full sun out front and the prairie species really shine.  I am envious as hell but too grateful to trees to complain much.  

As I write this, Jon is banding said trees to protect them from lymantra dispar dispar (aka gypsy moth). Last year almost every tree in our heavily wooded neighbourhood was stripped naked and left covered with buffy egg masses just waiting to finish the job this year.  Many years ago, that happened to us and since then we have driven to the States for Sticky Foot, hand-picked the caterpillars and used pheromone traps  - so successfully that last year we  saw only 8 caterpillars and lots of drowned love-sick males.  There was one egg mass this spring and it’s now defunct, an ex-egg-mass, an egg-mass that has gone to meet its maker.  

It IS possible to fight back.  Unfortunately  because so few residents did step up, the City has had to arrange for aerial spraying.  The wasted tax money is one thing:  the important part of the equation is that  the spray will kill all of  the moths and butterflies at the same time.  All because we may like living around trees but are too lazy to fight for them.

Again we are being called upon to expend some effort if we care  about this beautiful world we have inherited.   

Dragging herself determinedly back from the brink of despair, she said, “Wanta know who spent fifteen minutes in our front yard today?”  (We have four or five bird feeders going)  Thanks for asking.  Well, mainly couples - though not always together because there are eggs to incubate - we have  flickers, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, gold-finches, chickadees, red-bellied woodpeckers, red-winged blackbirds, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, and mourning doves.   Jon  says he not only heard but actually saw an oven  bird spouting TEAcher, TEAcher, TEAcher!! Wheeling above are the red-tailed hawks and the turkey  vultures.    We are expecting the orioles to arrive back shortly, and perhaps the wild turkey who roosted in a tree next door last year at a this time.  The brown headed cowbirds also made a brief appearance, although I pray they didn’t stay long enough to parasitize the resident nests.

Best of all, I am in the business of taming a chipmunk!  She wants to be called Sarah. 

Such happiness.  Such worry.  Such a life.

I’m into the home stretch.

The hoarfrost forest is pretty much in hand, I am reasonably satisfied with the composition and palette.  The whole painting is about developing a tension between the complex, dare-I-say lacey, land and the simple opacity of the river.  Now I am finding the white ice too flat, however;  it needs dimensionality  if I want to cast  it as a bridge between land and water.  
​
And there’s one large tree which insists on being given its due.

Thinking, thinking, thinking.   But the sun is about to come out.

Let’s start with that wise mantra:  location, location, location.

My studio is bombing that test as I write this on a lovely sunny day.

Had I been around in the 1920’s when our house was being built, I would rotated the foundation half a turn.  Well, aren’t we precious, you are thinking, but hear me out.  Remember that business about Parisian ateliers with northern exposures?  As a young reader, I always wondered what was so desirable about north light, which is cold and blue-ish.  I decided that north garretts must have been the cheapest and didn't think about it for half a century.  

Turns out that it’s not so much about wanting north light.  Instead, it's all about avoiding south light.

By now you’re guessing that my studio windows are of the southerly persuasion.  All seven of them.  Oh yes.  The result? A veritable deluge of full-spectrum daylight.  So now you are wondering why I would turn my nose up at great light.  Start by imagining a big area covered with fresh oil paint;  you can do this in the basement -- the only important stipulations are that you use oil so this undercoat is shiny.   Immediately set the canvas in front of a strong full-spectrum bulb.  Take a brush with another oil colour and begin painting.  What happens is that all you will see are the brushstrokes reflecting back.  The availability of colour vision has sailed.  

This situation reigns from November to April in my studio unless I am blessed by an overcast day.

Ironically, the reason I love oil paints above all others, like acrylic or gouache, is that same exquisite slowness to dry.*  I can work it for hours almost like finger-paint because it begs to be blended.  And I must admit that May to October make it easy:   once the canopy opens the room is shielded from direct light.  But when once again the leaves drop, I wait for cloud cover.   Christmas is the worst, of course, when the sun’s arc is lowest and reflected glare blinds me.  

So today I will find something else to do.  As the promise of spring whispers, I have begun to hear the siren call of my other passion:  the garden. The native seeds that I collected last year need to be started and surely some will survive this year!


*Speaking of which, the way a finished oil painting dries is worth mentioning.  It may have an ugly duckling stage when the finish is a bit patchy in terms of shine.  However, practise patience.  In about a year, it will have settled into a velvety glow.  Worth the wait.
​

As I painted today, I was privy to a conversation between my right and left hemispheres.


LB:  Well a nice mess you’ve gotten us into this time, Ollie!

RB:  It seemed like a good idea at the time….

LB:  Did it ever occur to you to take a more careful look at reference photos?????

RB:  Well, I’ve looked at it hundreds of times since 2010, when I took it…..

LB:  And what, may I be so bold to ask, did you conclude every bloody time?

RB  It looked like a lot of work.

LB:  And why was that, do you think, in your infinite wisdom??

RB  There is an awful lot going on when you fit it onto a 30 x 40 canvas…..

But I have always wanted to paint a white forest and that was the only picture I have even taken of it.  Besides, the river was so pretty in that winter colour.  I really love that colour, but boy, it was a stinker to mix.

LB:  Focus.  An awful lot of what, exactly?

RB  trees

LB:  And how many trees would you say??

RB:  a lot

LB:  JUST A LOT??????

RB:  Well, an awful lot.  But they are all dead now….

LB:  Wait — what are you yammering about?

RB:  Well, it was your fault.  Remember when we learned Forestry and you made me learn that only two trees were “even” — maples and ashes.  And a lot of these weren't shaped like maples.  Maples are happy and rounded. Ashes are all straight and pointy.  Y's on top of Y's on top of Y's....See?

And you told me how those bad greeny chewers have murdered them all.  I wanted to do something nice for them so they'd know I was sorry..  And they all look like brides in the photo....

LB:  It's called "hoarfrost" you idiot.

sullen silence

So what delight can I expect next:  a pyre of parrots?  a graveyard of  grackles?   a cemetery of sea turtles?????

RB:  Gosh, noooooo!!  Now do I have to worry about them too???

LB:  oh, right  We should do something.

​Neither moves.

​Wow.  Both lobes are streaming Beckett’s two tramps instead of Laurel and Hardy.    They don't normally agree on anything.   Scary, when you think about it.  

I don’t know about you, but over forty years of marriage, I have amassed a pretty damned impressive collection of unmatched socks.  My array fills a bin and is even sub-divided into ‘black wool socks,”  “black cotton socks,” and so on.  Such blind optimism has filled my life, I realize as I look back.

Well, today I broke.  Having commandeered the glass stove-top for the weekly match-up, I started with the usual enthusiasm until the first close-but-no-cigar winked at me seductively.  Sure, one was brown-black and the other leaned more to the blues but it suddenly struck me that no-one with life would even notice my socks, let alone care.  Together these babes would stay!

“Close enough!” was surprisingly liberating. 

With this epiphany came the understanding that Mom was a lifelong practitioner of knowing when to care.      Sure, it could go missing for lack of practise, like the time she was helping us paint the kitchen a lovely rich cream and it came to Jon’s attention that Mom was paying more attention to the conversation than to which which tray she dipped her roller into - sometimes high gloss, sometimes matte.  The splotchy and semi-reflective result was particularly striking at dusk.  But most of the time, it worked just fine and echoed her sunny nature.  Her paintings were happily loose.

Another inspirational woman in my life is my dear friend, Irene, who has claimed successfully since 1975 that her iron had gone missing in a move and it felt disloyal to invest in a new one.  

So at our next art show (which, by the way, has just been re-scheduled yet again - this time to late September), look for the painter with an orange sock, a green sock and a smile which needs ironing.  Assuming there’s just one of us.

Good neighbours are to be prized above rubies.  We had such a neighbour once.   She was a great  mother,  industrious, quiet and neat.  Her flaming red hair was stunning.  She kept her place spotless and well-organized.  What was not to love?


Well, she moved out, even possibly died;  either that or she’s had a personality-changing stroke because whoever’s living next door now is a slob.  We had Marie Kondo;  now it’s Oscar on steroids.


As is our wont, we didn’t catch on for months.  During the late summer when the walnuts were ripe and we walked in the wild back garden wearing hard-hats to stave off concussion, we saw her often, or so we thought.   Over the years, the stone garage has gradually turned into an animal-proof fortress, but she was an original tenant so we had left one small entrance for her and witnessed multiple walnut drop-offs.  All good.

Only in late September did the pungent reek of rotting vegetation in the garage tip us off.  But first we checked for grass clippings inadvertently stored, sniffed the compost container, and looked at each other and shrugged.  Then Jon had occasion to climb up to the storage area and … Oy gevalt!!!!!

It is understood that all tenants are to chew and dispose of every single walnut rind outside before entering the rental apartment.  Everyone knows this, for heaven’s sake.   Had my own mother been a red squirrel, I feel sure that it would have been one of the first rules of civility she taught me.  What sort of idiot squirrel doesn’t know that??  

Well, Oscar, apparently. It is a hard lesson but if you simply leave your garbage where you live, eat, and sleep, you run the risk that your ticked-off landlord hauls away your precious hoard along with that huge garbage heap of what devolved into rotting black permanent dye; Before you know it, there's an eviction notice on the entrance.  And the week before it snows!

Wait!  What if (although I sincerely doubt it) Oscar is a female ?  Unless we get comfortable about issuing a death-by-starvation notice, we may even have to wait until late spring to dispossess “X” (still looking for a gender-neutral  non-binary objective-case pronoun).  But no more Mr. and Mrs. Nice-Guy.   Your moving day is coming, Red-Tail-Honeybun.

                                                                   OR

Maybe we should rethink having six walnut trees - five medium-size black walnuts and an ancient white walnut or butternut. That's lot of nuts, even not counting the people who grew them.
 
As a side-note:  Having grown up in Winnipeg where all squirrels sported delicate frames and flaming red tails, it came as a shock to meet Ontario’s inferior version of the same.  Just now, one of Oscar’s overweight-hulking-grey-second-cousins-once-removed is swaying back and forth on the old rhodo outside studio window,  dimly concluding for the two-hundredth time that the squirrel-proof feeder may in fact be just that.    I can’t ever remember seeing a red squirrel fail to grasp that intuitively.  So while the odd one like Oscar may be a slob  (I blame parenting, don't you?), nobody ever called red squirrels, the REAL CANADIAN SQUIRRELS, stupid.

Autumn is a celebration of leaf and berry - not the soft juicy berries of summer but dense dark blue beauties and pink/orange explosions flirting with the birds and slyly promising, “If not now, you’ll want me later.”  Just like my annual Mlle Poire competition for last year’s best looking pear (the prize being immortalized in oil before being devoured)  I encourage all of the neighbourhood berry shrubs to try out. Last year the winner was an old favourite growing in very own back garden;  the perennially welcome pagoda tree.  If you can time it right, this pretty understory tree has both the berries and the variegated red leave present and accounted for.   I found one such photo.

Once the reference shot was resized to best position the berries, it was full steam ahead.  That kind of ease beginning to end is less frequent than one might guess.  I have more than once put a half-done painting aside for up to a year.  Partly that’s to dry the layers so thoroughly that the surface becomes easier to work on if fine work is to come.  Sometimes I hit a wall about developing the right background or feel unsettled about an overall palette. 

This babe didn’t need a thing and practically painted herself.  It helped that each leaf and berry each functioned like an abstract painting, every one lending itself to individual attention.  I can’t wait  to spend the winter with  the cheery presence of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” in our kitchen.

We didn't even eat the subject matter!

It’s obvious if you look through my  gallery that I love saturated colour.  Though many plants strut their colours, competition dictates that they do not tend to do this at the same time of year.    Every week new shows open, others hit their stride, and some close, striking their sets.  


As consumers of colour, artists are grateful  for this moveable feast.  I take a multitude of pictures each growing season, hoarding them like a squirrel’s walnuts for the cold winter when I will need them in order to survive.  Blue winter shadows on snow are gorgeous, but I need more, especially when it’s so often overcast and the world is robed in gradations of grey and white. I begin to long for spring.

​This is what I found in my stockpile.


The first painting in 2021.   You can see that I am edging back into a Technicolour world.  The reference photo was taken in our front garden last fall before being slightly tweaked to locate the underlying shadow tones.  As I painted, at first I thought that the whole peony would be soft pastels; there are probably four or five transparent glazes on the petals. Eventually, however, the deep golden heart  with its juicy mix of “infinite stamens” and “5-7 pistils” demanded to make its voice heard.  Three more glazes there of  Pebeo’s “Stil de Grain” served to establish the focal point in all of its glory.


By the way, if you have a spot of sun, plant a peony root.  It will faithfully return to bloom magnificently each spring, even after you are gone.  Not a bad legacy.

I spoke too soon about  having staggered intact out of 2020.

Theodore waited until just before Christmas.  His sudden loss of appetite and strength sent us to our vet to be told that his red blood cell count had completely tanked and he was gravely ill. Over the next few days, very conceivable diagnostic test was performed.   Still a diagnosis eluded them.  Covid-19 precautions meant that we couldn’t see Theodore so we sat and waited for phone calls.  The only circumstance which could override that prohibition would have been his euthanasia, so we bore it as best we could.  We saw him again only briefly on Day 4, when he needed a transfusion and we were advised to transport him to the Toronto Emergency Centre.   Our guy was too sick to care that we had dropped him off again.

Perhaps we needn’t have worried that he was so alone.  Word trickled back that he had become the darling of the ICU.  Pictures filtered in (we declined the offer of FaceTime) showing him starting to turn around, eyes brightening,  alertness returning, and what?  with a series updos?  I personally favoured the saucy pigtails in front of his enormous ears, but someone who had the time actually French-braided his topknot.  Jon and I took to referring him as our little milkmaid in this demure portrait.  Clearly,he knows when to turn on the charm, though they admitted later that he had started to issue a preemptory bark when he needed a fresh infusion of attention.  We know that bark.

By Day 6 the doctors had given up finding a cause, settling for a syndrome:  Immune-Mediated Hemolytic Anemia (IMHA).  As a last-ditch hail Mary, they tried Prednisone and suddenly Lazarus began to rise.  The five dollar fix.  Hmmmm.  Next time , if there is one, we're STARTING with that!

On Day 7 he  began to eat again.   "Salmon Delights" cat food.  He improved so quickly that he had started to bark non-stop for attention.  The phone call was brief:   a strangled imperative “Come and get him now!!

Great!  We wanted him back!! And if he had stayed much longer we would have had to re-mortgage the house.

We picked Theodore and his luggage:  five pages of detailed  procedures and charges, his medications and  his blankey  The traumatic nature of a week being poked, transfused, and needled  became evident when he shuddered in the car, fearing that he was being transported to yet another torture chamber.  His complete relief at finding himself in our own driveway took the form of collapse.  We wrapped him in warm blankets and put his cozy bed in front of the fireplace.

He slept.

We slept.

He is almost back to normal if you don’t count a new preference for cat food and a croaky voice which sounds suspiciously like meowing in French.

Now all we have to do is wean him off the prednisone by September…

P.S.
(Did you notice that I opened with two reassurances that no dogs died in this blog?  You’re welcome.)