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.

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!

I do honestly love winter.  I grew up thinking that block heaters and frost shields were standard automotive equipment and was surprised to find other cities where the males at a party did not go out in mass at 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. to run the engines.  I have many a time walked home on numb feet from an outdoor skating rink and thought nothing of it.  I think I am tough.  I have bragged.

Predictably, Mother Nature is punishing me this week for my meteorological over-confidence.    To begin with, it is exceptionally cold, necessitating even the wearing of face protection. While a balaclava may protect your skin from freezing, it also generates up-gusts of hot humid breath which frost sunglasses and render one blind. This weekend we had to turn around quite quickly because Jon judged that I had walked full blast into my full winter quota of trees in about ten minutes.  The next day we tried the river valley.  There are high cliffs on both sides and it always feels remote and wild - a good thing in better weather.  However, walking conditions that day alternated between open water, sheer ice, slush under snow, and thin snow crusts above knee-deep drifts; my yells of surprise each time I crashed through the crust yet again prompted My Beloved to ask me to keep it down.  Apparently his zen contemplation was being violated.

I only cried once. Later, in my utter joy at having survived, I might have given our back door a tiny kiss.  I know what you are thinking and simply ask you to remember that we all can't be troopers all of the time.   On the plus side, I did take some nice digitals in the valley of the shadow, as well as some good ones today. May wait until my stone studio warms up a bit before painting them, however.  And while it was just as cold today, the glorious sunshine distracted me from my frozen bits and for a moment I caught myself thinking, "I LOVE winter!"

On the second page of The Burgess Boys,  the narrator observes  that her mother "didn't like Unitarians; she thought that they were atheists who didn't want to be left out of the fun of Christmas."  Okay.  But even if that were so, who could blame them?  Christmas-time conjures so many happy memories.  And it is always a joy to create new memories for the children in our lives.

When I was very young, we would  often travel to my grandparents' home a province away.  This would involve a train trip on a Pulman car.  The porters were kindly gentlemen who made the whole event feel special.  I have always loved cozy spaces so the best part was watching the transformation of the seats to a cunning double berth made up with crisp white sheets.  The world felt less dangerous then, The War safely in the past, and the rough wool privacy curtains more than enough of a divider.  The parent who drew the short straw would share the lower bunk with me;  apparently it was a dreaded ordeal, as I was an eggbeater with sharp elbows and knees.  But for me, at least, falling asleep to the clickety-clack of the wheels pre-disposed me to a life-long affection for rail travel. 

Wherever we were, Christmas was always a busy time.  There were special projects at school:  for years, my sainted mother kept the Yuletide log I had fashioned in grade two out of flour and water with a sprinkle of sparkle and one sprig of spruce which went bald almost immediately.  She must have clung to the hope that it had a certain lumpen charm.  And every year there would be yet another creation for me to haul home triumphantly and for her to make a fuss about.  She was an exemplary mother.

It seems to me that we sang a great deal -- in the classroom, in the music class, and at church, whether in the pew or in a choir.  Once we had a piano we sang at home too.  To this day I belt out the alto line of the carols and feel the absence of Mom's soprano and Dad's tenor beside me.  The Christmas season ended on New Year's Eve with the singing of Auld Lang Syne;  after that, the prospect of  going back to school was unavoidable.  (I like to think that I've always been someone who always made excellent use of free time....  It wasn't school I disliked so much as having to get up on a cold dark winter morning!)

For a child, it was all about the gifts.  Trying to fall asleep on Christmas Eve was sheer agony.  Sometimes I just crawled over to an air register to eavesdrop on the adult conversation;  that was a guaranteed sleeping pill.  Come morning, there would be my stocking at the end of the bed and I could usually count on a doll or doll clothes to fill in the hours until everybody else woke up.

And we ate.  Christmas was a turkey dinner, a ham graced the table on New Year's Day, and I ate my own weight in Christmas cake and mincemeat tarts.  To this day I cannot understand how anyone might reject a good fruitcake and so I offer the magnificent gesture of allowing those of you who suffer fruitcake surfeit to send me your cake.  Let me eat cake, as Marie said.  You can even send it COD and I'll pay the postage.  While I have my mother's recipe, the year I tried to bake it (at great cost, I might add), the recipe foundered on the reef of assumed knowledge  -- it seems that I needed more guidance than a recipe with no timing for the traditional three nesting cakepans.  The Mama Bear cake was fine, but Papa was too dry and Baby needed changing.

Jon and I have been busy wrapping gifts for all of the little people and finishing the hand-made ones;  he has a pair of hickory walking sticks in progress for the boys next door, for example.  I try to combine book gifts  and art supplies with special things from my own childhood like tiny dolls.  My Aunt Bess always had something of the sort for me and I still treasure them.  

May your Christmas be enriched by those of the past and serve as a joyful future memory for others.

I admit to finding it difficult to say goodbye to autumn.  Of all the seasons, it is certainly the most flamboyant.  The whole world flames and glows.  The pastels of spring are a distant memory, replaced by a palette of deeps in cadmiums and purples.  Autumn is a saucy old tart, dressed to the nines and living it up.  

Marilynne Robinson has a great line in her novel Housekeeping:  "She was an old woman but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease." I think that qualifies as damning with faint praise. Autumn, on the other hand, pulls it off with aplomb, making the lapse into dormancy, even death, look like a celebration.

The problem artists have is that when it's over, it's OVER.  The world becomes muted and quiet very suddenly;  it actually takes me a week or so to adjust my eyes when the spectacle ends.  And then throwing that remembered brilliance of colour onto a canvas invariably looks phony and overdone.  Most will tell you that autumn is by far the most difficult season to paint.

But we do it anyway.