One of the glories of an old garden is that it is filled with memories of relationships.  Everywhere I look, there they are.

The blue-grey giant hostas and the expanse of pachysandra came from Myrna.  Together we dug them out of her garden and together we planted them here, where they have thrived.  Although she lives in West Van now, I think her whenever I see them.  Frannie, who also moved west, contributed the dead nettle, a lovely spring plant with yellow flowers, deserving of a better name.  Like Myrna, she had a glorious garden herself. I miss them both but celebrate their presence in these living gifts.

The yellow irises are just about to bloom.  They, like the sedum and the white bleeding heart, were the gift of Marilyn, who thankfully hasn't moved away.  Nor has Mute, who contributed the peonies and the purple dwarf irises which bloomed several weeks ago.  Lilliana's Canada anemones survived the winter and have established themselves here and there like shining beacons.  Again, all of these gifts came from my friends' own truly lovely gardens.  Donna, Jon's Mom, who performs floral embroidery on her garden's small canvas, is represented everywhere as well.

When my eye lights on the rhododendrons and the hydrangeas it is Jon I thank.  He build such perfect acid garden beds that their inhabitants have survived much longer than we might have expected.  Ironically, it is the 25-year-old pink rhododendron which was planted in a completely inauspicious spot which will win this year's Darwin award:  it wintered the cold and cheerfully blooms now outside the studio window.  But, as I have said earlier, not every acid-loving shrub made it.  This watercolour feels sad to me although I am glad I painted this rhodo's youth and vigor,  because we lost it this winter.

For the overall inspiration of our garden, however, it is my beloved father I remember.  He was an intelligent and dignified man who was a bit shy and who left sentimental transactions to my mother.  The year before his death, however, he had gone out and chosen a gift for me by himself;  it was a copy of The Secret Garden and his inscription told me something I had not known:  it had been his favourite book as a child.  He did this without knowing that it had been my favourite book as well.  Both of us as children had fallen in love with the idea of a somewhat overgrown but lush and beloved grove where animals were welcome and hope could flourish.  It remains my favourite gift from my father.

Spending so much time on my hands and knees in the garden provides me with time to think, a commodity too often in short supply.  For example, while digging out tiny persistent volunteers in the grass, I can't escape remembering that I am actively promoting a population explosion;  many non-native seeds require no more than a scratch in order to germinate.  That is why botanical field guides use the phrase "disturbed ground" to describe the habitat of weeds.  Classic double bind --  either leave the weeds to grow or become the vector for a thousand new ones!

For me, the lesson to  be drawn is to postpone beginning  a job until I can commit to completing it.  In gardening, of course, this might take some time.  When I decided thirty years ago not to use herbicides it didn't strike me that the fallout might last quite this long.  

On the other hand,  spring weeding helps me feel less impatient with my slow and careful painting;  by comparison with gardening, it is a product-oriented flight of fancy with quicksilver feedback loop!  There.  I feel better already.

I am also slightly comforted by the observation that lawn weeds do have tiny beautiful flowers;  many belong to the mint family, with zygomorphic flowers and square stems.  In a week or two the biggest plants on the property, the ancient black locust trees (who are legumes), will be covered with similarly-shaped fragrant white flowers.  "Zygomorphic" is simply a faster way of saying "bilaterally symmetrical," which tells you that you can draw only one line through the flower shape to find a mirror reflection;  think of snapdragons.    "Actinomorphic" flowers are perfectly symmetrical In that you can cut them in half anywhere through the centre.  Members of the rose family, which includes apple, peach, pear, plum and apricot trees,  produce bowers of these simple round flowers.  

I can never decide on a favourite flower shape or colour or perfume.  My Beloved has been known to refer to me as a botanical slut and I'm no more choosy with animals or china patterns.  I find even dandelions admirable in many ways.  They are robust, edible and herbally useful;  their French common name - pissenlit - alludes to their efficacy as a diuretic.  Unfortunately, they are not only perennials but members of the compositae family.  Each sunny head is made up of hundreds of individual flowers,  all intent on floating to a new world, there to build a kingdom.

Trees may be my favourite plants because of their capacities for great age.  While my family has been in Toronto since 1842, the white oak here which finally succumbed was at least seventy-five years older;  the endangered and ancient butternut in the back garden remains a treasure celebrated by squirrels, birds and neighbours.  I like to think of them as history made manifest.

In living memory, this street been defined by a its line of graceful black locust trees.  As you can see from this monoprint, their search for light has rendered them dramatic and somewhat oriental.    Decidedly post-mature, these wonderful creatures are battered by each storm, shrinking limb by limb, and we fear their imminent deaths.   

Or ours:  Several years ago Jewell and I were canoodling on the grass near the tree line.  We eventually tired of pleasuring one another and wandered off, she to check her peemail and I to do something marginally more useful.  There was a huge crash and the ground shook.  Just where we had been lying, a branch the size of PEI had crashed, creating a crater 8" deep.    Yes, I still weed near the tree line.  But only on windless days.

My friend and neighbour, Monica, and I do a long walk along the river every week;  today in the two hours between the beginning of our walk and its end, the trilliums began opening in the ravine.  The trout lilies are almost finished blooming here, in our late garden which is always a week or ten days behind everyone else, and the weather is unseasonably cool and windy.  Nonetheless, even here the trilliums are opening their sweet faces to the sun.  All of these spring members of the lily family take years to build up enough strength to bloom;  removing the flower undoes years of patient growth so I've had to learn to lie down beside them and take pictures of anyone I wish to paint. Their pure white captures and reflects the colours around them just as snow does. Trilliums even die back gracefully, blushing deep pink before their three petals drop.

I'm a fool for blue too, of course.  The scylla has finished now; its Mary's blue drifts throughout the garden are spent, but the Virginia bluebells thrive in their place, often in the company of panicles of pink bleeding hearts.  When the neighbourhood kids drop by to see who is in bloom,  we often select particularly splendid specimans for them to take home to their mothers. It has taken a few years, however,  for them to adjust to the idea of seasonal blooms.  After seeing the rhododendrons in full bloom one spring, every subsequent visit began with the complaint "Where are the flowers???"  I began to feel quite guilty about being unable to produce a big floral show on demand.  This year we're going to work on developing an appreciation of tiny exquisite flowers;  mouse-eared chickweed might be a place to start.
 

I am posting the big painting to remind myself to get back to it next week.  It is barely into the final glazes and still has far to go;  I am playing with the notion of aerial overview and have already decided that the sharpest focus will be in the upper right quadrant. Beyond that, the canvas is on hold while I tackle the green wave in our garden.   Until Wednesday I was too sick to even think about standing in front of an easel again, and suddenly the garden is a far bigger emergency than this painting.  


Gardening does provide time to muse.  I realized today  that my goal as a gardener is "simply" to follow nature's lead while stemming the tide of non-native species.  Having lived on this quarter-acre for over thirty years has taught me what likes to grow where, a lesson certainly learned the hard way;  its corollary is learning what won't grow either.  We are on a sandy edge of a valley scoured by the glaciers;  biologists refer to it as an oak moraine.   Many of the oaks and all of the white oaks are gone now, felled by age, periods of drought and multitudinous defoliators.  A maple forest is springing up in its wake, a particularly lovely sight in the autumn and maples can tolerate the dry sandy soil.


Spring is the time to deal with the non-native volunteers.  Missing a spring means at least another ten springs of digging offspring and the non-natives definitely have the advantage.  This means, of course, that lots of invisible work is always needed if the garden is to be "natural."  I love the old gardening joke about the exhausted gardener whose neighbour weighed in with "You and God have certainly created a beautiful garden."  Rubbing his sore back, the gardener replied, "You should have seen it when God was doing it by Himself." 

One of the wonders of life is of course the miracle of the seed. Did you ever read about the experiment at Cornell, which involved storing seeds of various species in glass jars underground and testing one seed each year for viability?  What knocked me dead was that even now seeds from the 1870's will sprout.  I have almost eradicated garlic mustard and dandelion but vigilance remains necessary.  Moreover, there's always that chance that something terrific will show up, so every year I weed with care;  I think that blue cohosh might be trying to move in.  Hooray.  And today I found a blooming trillium which I know I did not plant. 

Thankfully, I don't mind weeding because it keeps me in touch with every exciting square inch of this quarter-acre.  I do shake my head, however,  when I think of the division of duties Jon and I seem to have tacitly agreed upon some decades ago. He's The Talent:  brilliant at creating stunning gardens;  I am Crew, who looks after them for the rest of their lives.  Even so, it's been a sad spring for Jon, however, because his prized rhododendron garden has almost completely perished over the last two winters.  We knew, of course,  that they are a Carolinian species and we realized that it was a gamble because our property is exactly on the most northernly tip of that zone.  How do we know that?  Because the ravine directly behind us boasts the most northerly sassafras trees in Peel!!  Jon calls me a cheap date because it takes so little to amuse me.


I know you are dying to ask how you would recognize a sassafras if you tripped over one.  Easy.  Their leaves are either right- or left- or double-thumbed mittens.  Hope you find some.

I might have been a teensy bit optimistic about the state of my health recovery .  Bragging was my mistake, one which I will not make again.  Don't take that to mean that I am now well and too superstitious to say so.  I might admit to  a few drops of Irish blood though. 

Red Alert:  there is a Mack truck out there careening around;  it is disguised as a common cold. There is no comfort in knowing that apparently every second person has this.  Stay indoors and eat canned food.

Sainted martyr that I am, I sent Jon fishing.  Then I considered my options:  

A.  Spend yet another day in bed.  This has serious attraction had the bed not been devolving into a bunker filled with kleenex boxes, ear plugs, eye masks, and books.  Apparently all of the portable phones were in there too but so far down that the locator buzzer was inaudible.  I found them only when I noticed the comforter vibrating.  So I went in search of a Better Option.

B.  Watch a video.  I chose Amour, which I have been meaning to see and which I knew Jon had no wish to see. Double plus ungood.  Do not watch this film unless you are feeling immortal.

C.  Weed the lawn.  Before you scoff, think about the pluses:  I would be in the sun, sitting down, and if I fell over, there was not too far to go.  C it was.

Great decision!  Who showed up but Mr. Chips!   He had dug out his bolt-hole and finally emerged, so I tossed him a handful of sunflower seeds to remind him that I am The Hand That Feeds. Now chipmunks are excellent friends to generous humans, but rotters to other chippies. They are notoriously solitary.  Mid-peanut, Mr. Chips suddenly took after Chips 2 (whom I hadn't met before);  before I could tell if Chips 2 had sacrificed his tail, they disappeared behind the garage.  Makes you wonder how chipmunks manage to preserve the species.  For all I know or perhaps even he knows, that was the mother of his kids.   Just a minute - could  Mr. Chips be the girl??  This way lies madness so let's just say that you will never see a group of chipmunks at the pub.  


I found another bolt hole in the front perennial garden 150 feet away in the other direction, so there might be a Chips 3 unless Mr. Chips saw The Great Escape.

More good news followed.  As I weeded my way through the garlic mustard along the fence in the back, I heard a sleepy quack.  (As you know, I have always loved ducks and even as a toddler had perfected my quack.)  When I looked up, there were Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, snoozing pool-side at the neighbours.'  To my relief, they have since left because surely the Missus should be thinking about a nest by now and the domesticated tigers, Mea and Culpa, still live in the next house.  Perhaps it was the couple's last Happy Hour before the Long Sit.

Daffodils everywhere.  Thank heavens there's something that neither deer nor squirrels will eat. This tiny detail of "Daffies" was of course painted on yupo in watercolour -- always a wild ride, always fun.