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.

It doesn't seem fair to have laryngitis and bronchitis in the spring.  Just outside my studio, there's a squirrel hanging upside down on the peanut feeder,  where Mr and Mrs Wild Canary (he resplendent in summer yellow) are crunching sunflower seeds,  and a sparrow of some sort is working on the seed mix.  The ratty squirrel, who spent the winter here, is at a decided disadvantage for he is in recovery mode;  he just made a disastrous dismount into the naked deer-chewed euonymus instead of executing the elegant leap he had planned. I watch this carnival through the casement window like the little rich boy in The Secret Garden, if he had reeked of Vicks and descended into paroxysms of coughing fits whenever he laughed.

Tomorrow I plan to break out and even pull a few weeds if I have the strength.  This is the absolutely best time of year if you want to see RESULTS in your garden.  The forested area on the far side of the house is pushing up the dozens of daffodils I have planted and the wood violets I have transplanted;  bloodroot clusters of pure white simple flowers have volunteered here and there.  I can see the leaves of the trout lilies, flowers on the pachysandra and the first hints of squirrel corn (a bleeding heart relative) and wild leeks.

The front garden is far more civilized, more's the pity, but there are swathes of scylla, whose perfect blue flowers never cease to lift my heart in early spring. The patch of bleeding heart, my childhood favourite, survived.  The perennial gardens have also grouped themselves into Great Solomon's Seal and irises and Virginia Bluebells as well as many varieties of true geraniums.

The only thing that all of these plants have in common is the ability to survive in the shade.  The wild garden continues to become more shady as the sugar maples thrive and the red oaks soldier on.   But the front will be different this year. Emerald ash borers, whom I first noticed three years ago, have killed all of the ashes in our area and the devastation is severe. On this street, the old green ashes on the other side of the street are all gone and parts of the front garden will be sunny for the first time in thirty years.  While I welcome the opportunity to grow a tomato or two (although further out of range of a dog's hind leg would be ideal), I would much rather have the ashes back.  When will cities learn to scatter their shot and plant a variety of trees species in every subdivision? Monoculture is a doomed venture.

I will leave you with a spring image, the prairie crocus.  I have to sign off now because I can take a hint:  I can't spell my way out of a paper bag this week; twice I have run through all six vowels before I got a word right.  Fine.  I surrender. 

But tomorrow THE GAME IS ON!  I'm BAACK!

As the snow receded, it became apparent that our cozy "deer yard" had gone to the dark side.  I gravely underestimated the appetite of a deer herd.  The large yew which survived the weight of the 250 year old white oak which collapsed on it fifteen years ago now makes a better window than a door  The hollies, both male and female, are no longer attractive even to one another.  The horse chestnut sapling is missing its buds, as are the euonymus foundation plantings which, to compound the affront, had been stripped of their leaves only a month ago. We were kinda counting on those buds.

To add insult to injury, it seems that NONE of the neighbours near or far has lost a single leaf.  Did we single-handedly support said deer herd???  Granted, they kindly donated loads of fertilizer (as a thank you gift, I suppose), but it's been a bit of a lop-sided relationship. 

I have begun to wonder if there is sign language involved.  My maternal grandmother, a kind and generous person, fed hundreds of homeless men who rode the rails during the Depression and who apparently headed straight for her kitchen when the trains stopped in town.  Years later I read that such men left chalk marks on a gate as shorthand for what one might expect from the householder.  I have to say goodbye now and head for the garden.  That pesky chalk mark must be somewhere out there and IT NEEDS TO GO.

It took a few days, but once the value foundation and the colour foundation were done, I could start to enjoy finishing the painting.  Ironically, it is always some aspect of the original image which had originally drawn me to it which turns out to be a challenge to paint!  This time, for example, the diagonal slant of the sun had set up a lovely contrast between the skin tones in full light and those in shadow, but both sides have to look believable, part of the same colour continuum yet at very different values.  So I have fooled around with the tones,  reminding myself that skin is translucent and that blood, both red and blue, shows, and mumbling to myself, "How did Rubens do it???"  No answer is forthcoming.

I have been mentally compiling a list of the artists I most admire for their handling of skin tones.  Will publish it when I have ten minutes.  That may be a while:  every day I am out in the garden pulling the root shoots from two large black locust trees which failed last year and had to be removed;  they are not going gently into that good night.  I must have pulled close to a thousand foot-high volunteers by now.  The alternative is to live in a dense forest full of thorns in a few years.  

I must go now to bathe my wounds and then back to the easel for finishing touches.  I am trying to post here twice a week, assuming I can stem the black locust blood-letting.  (Reminds me of the time many years ago when I fell into a very tall lilac hedge which I was trimming from a stepladder;  that experience taught me never to wear a bikini when combatting nature.)

This time of the year, the countryside is exploding with day lilies.  They line the roads and show up in gardens that have banished them years ago.  Most of us take them completely for granted.  If there ever was an unloved plant, this is it.

Some years ago I hung a print of a watercolour by Doug Hook in the kitchen.  Painted in watercolour far beyond my abilities at the time, it showcased the grace and transparency of the day lily.  Since then, I have had a greater appreciation of this lily and in fact of all lilies.  They are the forgotten marathoners who put up with a poor base, road salt, freeze-and-thaw cycles, and still succeed.  If you've ever tried to eradicate a naturalized lily, you already know that you are likely to fail in the face of their relentless determination to live.  I think this is something for which we should be thankful.  

There is a long descending path near here which must be in full bloom now, all of the flowers competing to lean furthest out.  I take pictures but sometimes forget to stop and really look.   Aisha presented me with a bloom from their yard this week.  A knowledgeable ten, she was nonetheless surprised to hear that the flowers are edible, but still wanted me to have it as a gift.  I was able to look closely at the elegant curved stamens with their deep orange pollen poised near the pistil. The petals themselves have cadmium yellow throats which deepen to peaches and magentas.  Good gift-givers know exactly what to give.

 

A friend came here for lunch in April and on the way to her car, she stopped and asked me the name of the beautiful blue flower tucked up against the birdbath.  I said "Dollarama Blue" and she asked me to spell it. The jig was up.

In my defence, we had a particularly long winter here.  And our garden is always late to bloom.  What is a girl to do when nothing will do but some colour?  I put real thought into my fraudulent show, too.  In fact, I have quite the little collection of "additions."  (I think of them as the equivalent of hair extensions or glue-on fingernails)    I put away my lovely ersatz geraniums a little too well last season and I still can't find them,  but I must say that the fake rhodos came in awfully handy this year in particular.

As long as I am in a confessional mood, not all of my phalenopsis orchids are in bloom all of the time.

Which raises the question:  does a fake become real if it has been painted?  I certainly hope so.  This painting began with real fruit and was finished with objets en matiere plastique.  Why?  Because Jon came home from work, walked into the kitchen where I had set up, and ate the subject matter.  Surely I can't be the only painter in the world who must keep a supply of fake fruit for just such emergencies.  And I imagine that I shall go on lurking in the dollar store in late winter, watching for worthy kin of the elusive Dollarama Blue.

You may wonder why anyone would even want to turn a lawn into a meadow.  Think butterflies.

A lawn is pretty much a desert painted green.  It has little to offer wildlife other than robins;  even when it is infested with grubs, the flickers and skunks will only come long enough to eat them all.  Then it resumes its limited function.

Now imagine that space unmowed.  It is studded with tall wildflowers and filled with bright butterflies.  That is the current state of a portion of our lawn.  Suddenly it is full of life - a contributing principality of Planet Earth.  The meadow and I are are taking it one step at a time, but here is the general game plan:

I didn't cut it this spring.  Almost immediately forget-me-nots bloomed, as did coltsfoot (handy if you have a cough).  Before the dandelions could bloom, I dug them out.  Then I waited.  The only real work I did was to move paths and to keep them open.

It's July now and the meadow is in full bloom.  Buttercups, oxeye daisies and white must mallow are standing tall above the wild strawberries, bugleweed and clovers.  Call me arbitrary, even shallow, but the pink daisy fleabane (a perennial) had to be pulled because I have decided to focus on primary colours.  Sweet woodruff made the cut, as did cranesbill geranium because its pink blossoms don't last and it has a lovely clumping habit.  Perhaps I shall also leave the yellow hawkweed (an introduced species) but will have to decide before it seeds; a perennial,  it will be doubly hard to remove later and I haven't seen any butterflies on it.  Cinquefoil flower heads are forming and rudbeckia (black-eyed Susan) is almost ready to open;  both are keepers.  And almost hidden at one side I found jewelweed seedings.  Also called "touch-me-not,"  it's a handy antidote to poison ivy and a natural fungicide.  Hummingbirds love it too.

Again and again, I go outside to enjoy the meadow.  I must find my butterfly book because there are at least six species lapping up nectar and flirting with one another.  Whoever they are, all butterflies love summersweet and monadra, both of which I plan to add to the smorgasbord.

The meadow will be finished blooming in several weeks.  Then I shall mow the spent plants, scattering and nicking their seeds for next year's show, leaving a small group of goldenrods to sound the closing notes of Symphony 2014.

Our Amazon parrot, Gussie, would have loved it.  He relished hanging outside in his cage, and welcomed visitors to it.  Once I caught him contentedly studying a chipmunk who was polishing off the sunflowers in his cup.  A small meadow full of fluttering wings would have been heaven.  I too think it is.