Visibility

or The Spirit of Rosemary Present

Cleaning out a garden bed in late winter reminds me of cleaning out the garage, if cleaning out the garage were fun.  At some point in your efforts you reach the bottom of a pile of something or other and make a discovery: "So that's where (something or other else) ended up!"  Long-lost treasures emerge from the forgotten recesses of time, kind of thing.

Like the occasional rosemary bush.  I certainly wouldn't claim to have forgotten that one was growing in the bed with the 'Wild Thing' autumn sage; after all, I've been pillaging it for soups and stews all winter long.  It's small enough, however, that it normally has the added charm of invisibility.  When I'm looking by fading daylight for some rosemary for a recipe, I find it by feel and smell as much as anything.  I seldom actually see it, and never in its full glory.  Pruning 'Wild Thing' away revealed the rosemary in its visible form.  After all these months it's a little startling to remember that it has one.

The Arp rosemary is supposed to be (and in another couple of years will be) one of the anchors of this bed, along with a Mormon tea (Ephedra viridis) and the three autumn sage.  I'd found the combination in the Curandera Garden at the Albuquerque Botanic Garden.  Horsetail reeds were growing there in a water feature across the path from a shaggy beast of a rosemary, their twiggy and feathery forms making an intriguing counterpoint; the hot, neon pink flowers of 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) offset the other plants' muted greens; and the whole color scheme was sent soaring by containers of orange and yellow French marigolds.  The hot colors may have been a little...vivid, but in the equally hot September sunshine they radiated New Mexico flair at its most exciting and alive.  In my own garden I substituted Ephedra for the horsetail, and 'Mersea Yellow' pineleaf penstemon (Penstemon pinifolius) for the marigolds.  Then I added in some wine cups, a couple of gaura,  a Mojave sage, a Lady Banks rose, some marguerites...  But other than that, the combination is the same.

One reason that the rosemary startled me when it turned visible again is that in my head, it is already the four foot tall anchor of that bed.  I have a vision of Rosemary Yet to Come, and in some small, subconscious way I forget that it is, indeed, yet to come.   In addition to seeing some futuristic rosemary, I'm also recalling stems and greenery that are no longer there, and all the dinners they gave me:  the truly delicious chicken and barley soup on a blustery evening; the safe stand-by dish of baked lentils and rice; the uninspired but edible pasta sauce (it's hard to go too far wrong with pasta sauce).  The Ghost of Rosemary Past still glimmers happily in the present.

The parts that you don't see were really tasty.

I didn't exactly use a recipe to create any of those meals, unless you count the lentils and rice, which in their original form featured ginger and Thai red curry paste instead of rosemary, bay leaf, and garlic.  (I still think that at heart they're the same recipe:  lentils, rice, water, and flavorings.  It's just that the flavorings have been tweaked a bit.)  But you know how it is.  You substitute one thing here and another there; you find some sort of equivalent; and it all kind of works out, more or less, at the end.  Or so you hope.  The first taste of the finished dish once you're seated at the table is the moment of truth.  Then you discover whether what you thought you were cooking resembles what you actually cooked.  Visions of an ideal future dissolve in present reality.

The rosemary is still caught in that creative time warp, where its present is all wrapped up in an ideal future.    Its bed is in the "cooking" phase, its moment of truth Yet to Come.  In the meantime, until it winks back into invisibility behind the autumn sage, the Spirit of Rosemary Present isn't really about the present.  It's about creativity, possibility, hope—all kinds of things.

Just not about the small, evergreen plant that it is.

Nestling

or Wild

Artsy-craftsy little towns seem to breed in the Finger Lakes area of New York.  Walk into a shop along any Main Street, and you'll find yourself up to the eyebrows in artisan-made glass paper-weights and figurines, pottery mugs with iridescent glazes, hand-dyed silk scarves, and warmly glowing, inlaid woods.  In those stores you move slowly and keep your hand-bag close, lest you knock something breakable to the floor.

I lived in one of those little towns during my mid-20's.  Sometimes after a stressful day I would make a beeline for its row of boutiques, that hushed world where slowness and gentleness reigned, and beautiful things murmured from every shelf and corner.  I would pick up a delicate objet d'art and hold it nestled in the palm of my hand as if it were a wild bird until the stress subsided.

I'm not sure why it worked.  Perhaps it called up deep memories of wonder, of being six and standing rigid and breathless with awe as a ladybug or inchworm or roly poly tickled its way across my palm.  Or maybe the hush reminded me of childhood excursions in the mountains, and Dad whispering "Don't move" in my ear, his hand on my shoulder to still me, while a mule deer crossed the path in front of us.  For whatever reason, in treating things gingerly and holding still, my more grown-up self would remember that hush of wonder for a moment.  I'd walk back out of the store comforted to know that not all problems have to be conquered—some of them really can be tamed instead.

I've never been a huge fan of gravel mulch, which is a pity out here in The Land of Gravel Mulch.  It is an improvement over thirsty lawns and mowing, but still—in most situations gravel is hot and harsh and full of edges in a climate that can be all of those things on its own, without any help from the peanut gallery.  Plants don't care about my preferences, though.  Most of the things that thrive here prefer poor, rocky soils.  I've ended up mulching a couple of the beds in the garden with various sizes of flat, rounded river pebbles, the kind I dig out of the garden anyway.  In late winter, when I've trimmed back the autumn sage and gaura so that the crocuses beneath them can get some sunlight, the long bed beside the patio is very gravelly indeed, in the southwest's characteristic "dry riverbed" sort of way. 

I dream of (and plant) swaths of crocuses in all the beds but get little dots of them instead.  From a distance the individual flowers are kind of disappointing (though up close they're as lovely as anyone could wish).  In the gravel beds, however, I've begun to find those dots of bloom enchanting.  They've nestled in among the larger pebbles, where they look fragile and shy and wild, as if they've blown in on the wind and are taking shelter.  Their translucent petals remind me of moth wings, and I almost expect them to flutter off if I startle them. They're so very ephemeral, especially next to the solidity of stone.  I find myself moving slowly, gently around them, as if they were birds to be coaxed to the palm of my hand, and touching them with feathery light fingers.

The crocuses are no more wild than the artisan-made figurines I used to cherish against inner storms.  But they, too, make me think of that sudden hush when something wild and beautiful crosses your path, of the child's wide-eyed wonder when some small, six-legged creature makes its way across the landscape of your hand.  Suddenly I'm less interested in conquering the garden beds to impose my vision of glorious drifts of color, and more content to have my desires tamed by those little dots of bloom. 

Perhaps I've been tamed and conquered both...

_________________________

I'm continuing with the Thirteen (or Fewer) Ways of Looking at a Crocus (or Some Equivalent) Challenge I set myself a couple of posts ago.  Some of my favorite bloggers have responded to the invitation, too.  Please pop over to Experiments with Plants, where b-a-g revels in the color saffron and posts a tasty-looking recipe to boot.  And HolleyGarden at Roses and Other Gardening Joys writes beautifully about small things in A Bloom of Significance.

A Change of Clothing

or Autumn Slips Away

I wonder sometimes whether hummingbirds recognize people.  My guess is that they don't—I'm not sure whether they even recognize people as people, let alone have the ability to recognize individuals.  If I wear pink or orange out in the garden, the hummingbirds are much differently aware of me than if I'm in green or blue.  Pink and orange qualify me as Potential Dinner.  Yellow might let me be Worth a Shot.  But blue and green?  They just make me blue Not-a-Dinner or green Not-a-Dinner, equally uninteresting in either case.  A change of clothes is worth a whole new role in the ecosystem.  It's practically an existential makeover, in hummingbird terms.

__________________________________

The 'Wild Thing' autumn sage looks thoroughly chastened.  Winter stalked through the garden this week in a grumpy-neighbor "Some of us have to work tomorrow" sort of way and shut down the party, slam!  Now the riotous blooming by the patio is at an end, and the loud outbursts of color have gone quiet.  Let's hope 'Wild Thing' doesn't look in the mirror until it's gotten some rest.

'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) when it's at home

Winter really did let us have it, at least in the Albuquerque scale of things.  On Monday the temperatures reached record lows for that date, dropping to the single digits F; some parts of town (though not mine) had several inches of snow.  The unusual cold pushed the garden forward into winter by about three weeks, if not into a whole different growing zone altogether.  The Jupiter's beard and 'Goldflame' honeysuckle, usually green through December, are blackened mush.  The ipheion, which comes up in fall and was beginning to make a bright, grassy (if somewhat threadbare) carpet under the sand cherries, is limp and flattened.  Even the more or less evergreen 'Lady Banks' rose has lost most of its leaves.

The changes are a little disappointing this early in the season—I was hoping for more life in the garden this winter and am sorry to lose it before winter even starts.  The changes are also a signal, though, that it's time to reframe my idea of beauty, to reset it to winter's standards and let autumn's slip away.

Crocus speciosus, on a bed of cotula and cat hair

The days of leaves and seed pods are yielding to the days of stems and trunks, stalks and buds, to the play of light and shadow, to grass seeds backlit against a low, white sun.  A new wardrobe, a new role in the ecosystem, an existential makeover.  The new clothes may well turn out to be striking, shapely, and chic.

But they won't be party clothes any more.

Late Arrivals

or The Last Hurrah

When the hummingbirds leave around the first of October, the party goes kind of flat.  Your favorite guests have gone—not that you don't care for the others, too, of course.  But the goldfinches, housefinches, sparrows, and mourning doves are the mixed nuts of the party, while the hummingbirds are the champagne.  You can count on them to add zest and a touch of magic to anything they do.  And with their explosive tempers, you never know when sparks will fly, or when a high-speed chase will ensue.  You wouldn't enjoy the party nearly as much without the other birds, but when the hummingbirds leave, they take a lot of the fizz with them.

When the sandhill cranes return near the end of the month, then, they are doubly welcome.  You hear their creaky purr sounding long before you see them, and when you first catch sight of them gliding down the Rio Grande valley,  the sun glinting off their silvery, upturned wings against an azure sky... Oh, they do know how to make an entrance.  Late arrivals though they are, they breathe new, dramatic life back into the party.  They bring a new character to it, too, a touch of elegance and dignity.

The cranes arrive about when the first of the fall-blooming crocuses opens.  In the garden, 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) may still be partying hard—if anything, blooming even more raucously than usual—but everything else is getting sleepy and quiet.  The agastache is winding down, the gaura looking tired, the West Texas grass sage ready to call it a day.  When the crocuses suddenly appear from nowhere, you welcome them with delight.  They bring a bright presence with them as they sound the last hurrah of the growing season.

Over by the patio, 'Wild Thing' is getting to the "wearing a lampshade and dancing on the table" stage—although really, it arrived in that condition and has kept up the rumpus ever since.  When the crocuses call you away from the action, inviting you over to their corner for some intense conversation, you're happy to go.  You appreciate 'Wild Thing,' you really do.  Its high-spirited loudness gives it a special place in your heart.  It's been blooming enthusiastically since April and is just as ready to spread a good time around now.  It will even still be cheerful tomorrow morning, with no (apparent) regrets. 

The crocuses, though—they'll be gone before you know it.  (Actually, last year one crocus or another bloomed through to December.  But each particular crocus is only around for a short while.)  For all their glowing color, they are fragile, ephemeral.  They remind you to make the most of every shining moment, and to enjoy their company while you can.

But don't get despondent about the passing of autumn or the fleeting nature of time or anything.


'Wild Thing' will still be partying hard tomorrow.

To the Hilt

or When More Is More

Sometimes restraint is a fine thing—in the use of cayenne pepper, say, or the wearing of day-glo paisley.  No doubt there is a time and place for going over the top with both, but the tricky part is knowing just when and where that might be.

I can't remember where I saw the advice to flower photographers not to "overdew it," but it has stuck in my mind as something to remember in case I ever see dew again.  (It doesn't feature much in desert life.)  With rain or dew, restraint is generally a photographer's friend.  Two or three drops of water to adorn a perfect bloom and evoke the freshness of morning, or perhaps one large, precariously balanced droplet to catch the sunlight, ting! and reflect the sky in a beautifully distorted, fish-eye lens kind of way—that usually says everything that needs saying, and says it eloquently.  In other words, less is more.

Water practically gushing from a canale during a thunderstorm

Yes, well, that advice went out the window when we had a second thunderstorm this week.*  The official measurement was "a trace," but my neighborhood had good, drenching rain for about half an hour and probably received at least a quarter of an inch.  As I was wandering around the garden afterward, camera in hand, looking at a world dripping with water, I thought, why on earth would I want to be restrained when we've just had rain?  Why capture one droplet when the whole excitement is that we've just been doused by hundreds and hundreds—no, thousands and thousands, or maybe (gasp) even more of them?  Why adorn a plant with restraint when it is glorying in saturation?

Admittedly, a quarter inch of rain isn't that much, but that's precisely why it deserves some over-the-top revelry.  It may not be a lot, but our alternative to "not much" isn't "plenty," it's none at all.  When an enjoyment—a necessity—is scarce, you live it to the hilt when it comes along and thumb your nose at good taste.  Restraint is for those with a better range of choices, who can minimize a pleasure and still have plenty left.

Right now, we in the southwest are delighting in all the raindrops we can, because there's no knowing when we'll see them again.  This is our day-glo paisley moment, our time to relish a hair-raising, eye-watering, smoke-coming-out-the-ears mouthful of hot pepper intensity.  "Overdew" it?  You'd better believe it.  We've done "less."  It wasn't all it's cracked up to be.

The tasteful, restrained flowers of 'Wild Thing' autumn sage

Right now, more is more.


________________________
* I promise to stop talking about the weather soon.

From the Patio

or Days of Rest

Yesterday the clouds were big and little dots, paw-prints racing ahead of today's cold front.  The wind set the aspen leaves next door to rattling; if your eyes were closed, they sounded almost like a mountain stream chuckling over pebbles.  The desert olive trees hissed softly.  Big and little bees that for some reason reminded me of the clouds scudding overhead buzzed around the catmint.  I watched one bee struggling against a sudden gust to reach its flower—any flower—and then bury itself in a world of pollen once it had succeeded.

It has been another weary week—a week where the tiredness is so strong it hurts—and thus also a week of being grateful for Adirondack chairs, footstools, patios, and spring weather.  And cameras with zoom lenses.

It's not the way I would have chosen to spend these afternoons, but I have enjoyed the hours of tracing the wind's passage through my neighbors' differently tuned sets of wind chimes; of hearing the trill of hummingbird wings rushing by (the birds are apparently still sneering at the autumn sage, since they go right past).  I have enjoyed the small tableaux that appear unexpectedly when you limit your field of vision; the scent of a neighbor's honeysuckle wafting over the wall; a lunch-time nibble on a bit of garlic leaf; the splashes of color here and there—the first of the wine cups in what seems to have become a "dry riverbed" sort of bed without my quite intending it to,

Callirhoe involucrata

and the autumn sage beginning to get serious;

Salvia greggii 'Wild Thing'

the breath-takingly gentle contrast between silver betony's calyx and corolla;

Stachys inflata

the slow opening of daisies.

Anthemis tinctoria 'Susanna Mitchell'

Generally in Microcosm I am looking for some connection between my garden and the wider world, but sometimes there is no obvious or necessary connection—just an experience to be enjoyed on its own, a moment—or an hour, or an afternoon—to be lived, without meaning anything beyond its own beauty.

I'm beginning to realize that that is the essence of rest.

Tilt!

or Micro-Mastery

One of the feverfew plants in my garden has decided to bloom a second time this year—not an entirely unexpected event, although I didn't exactly plan any parties around it, either.  Whereas the stalk that bloomed in June stood up properly, the fall-blooming stalk isn't so lucky.  The sun has shifted, and now the plant has to lean over to reach the light.  The flowers have tilted at an angle to the almost horizontal stem.

A lot of my garden plants end up tilting at sunlight.  A small townhouse garden surrounded by walls is essentially a checkerboard of micro-climates with the added trick that the squares morph spontaneously from one climate to another as the seasons change.  In a place with a short growing season, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but in an environment where I can reasonably expect some plants to continue blooming into December (go, Wild Thing autumn sage!), it really kind of is.  Light is the biggest issue.  Areas that receive full sun all summer might be in full shade all winter; flowers that bloom happily while the sun shines from the north begin leaning desperately toward the light when it heads back south again.  I'm not sure whether I'm learning to garden so much as learning my garden—learning which incredibly specific needs each square foot of ground has and finding what will thrive in that one tiny, idiosyncratic space.

It's a lot like doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.  (Really.)  I've finished book after book of the collected puzzles over the last few years—enough that now I can generally finish the Sunday puzzle in about 30 minutes, or maybe more if the Sunday morning pancakes are especially tasty and distracting.  It's not as if I actually know the answers, though—for the most part I've just learned what to expect from the New York Times crossword.  I feel like I could meet Will Shortz, the puzzle editor, and be in comfortable mental territory.  We would have a fascinating conversation about French needle cases (a four-letter word starting with E:  etui), and I would be able to supply every third word or so in his sentences; one of those words, I can tell you now, would be Esso; chances are good that another one would be snee.  I am familiar with Shortz's style, his editing, the bent of the clues he approves from his different puzzle authors.  But give me an older puzzle edited by Eugene Maleska and I'll be sneaking peeks at the answer key in short order.  I haven't mastered puzzles in general, just (more or less) the New York Times crossword as edited by Will Shortz.

Similarly, an elderly friend (who would be most upset with me if she knew I was calling her elderly) recently moved house for the first time in about 50 years.   For weeks she complained that the new house was confusing—the light switches were in the wrong places, the drawers weren't where they ought to be, the dishes weren't in the right cupboards.  While those of us who have been more nomadic have learned that you just have to keep opening (different) cupboard doors and eventually dishes will appear, it was a shock to my friend to learn that she hadn't mastered the art of living in Houses in General but just of living in one particular house.   

One of my favorite lessons from gardening is how limited mastery is.  You learn to work with a particular location, to enhance the gifts of your little plot of earth, but you don't necessarily master gardening at large, any more than you ever master living:  you just master (if you're lucky) the art of living within your own set of circumstances for right now.  A well-suited plant adapts to new demands with remarkable grace.  The feverfew may be leaning and twisting and growing in strange directions, none of which will show up in a botany text or plant catalog or internet database, yet it is every inch a feverfew, fulfilling its genetic destiny, living out its feverfewhood, no matter at what angle.  It has mastered the art of blooming in October, 2010, in a tiny little corner of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And that's all anyone could expect it to do.

Cranking Up the Volume

or Wild Thing, I Think You Move Me

Weddings don't seem to be for the faint of heart.   Even simple weddings in one's own family home with a frighteningly competent mother in charge have truckloads of small details that can't be pulled together until the last minute, frazzling brides who are normally calm and ultra-together.   I attended a wedding like that many years ago now (and, if anyone knows where all those years have gone, by all means let me know).   One of my dearest friends, whom we shall call S, was marrying an easy-going sweetheart of a gentleman out of her parents' home in California.

S is such a sensible person that, if she weren't also warm and generous and impulsive and loving, she would drive you insane by being sane all the time.   As a mutual friend put it, "She is the kind of person who sees that something is bad for her and so doesn't want it."   She considers eating small amounts of dark chocolate to be a vice; she has no other.   She doesn't procrastinate; she accepts criticism well; she runs five miles a day.   Even with all those strikes against her, however, somehow she's still quite lovable, but like the rest of us, S has her moments of human frailty.  Everything on the day of her wedding was going well and under control, but there were enough extra thises and thats demanding her attention—just extra, extra, EXTRA—that she began to fray around the edges.

In the midst of all the activity, S's 4-year-old niece had gotten wound up to bursting point and was racing around making a world-class racket.   The noise set S's teeth on edge, but when she asked her niece to be quiet, the little girl plumped down on a bench in a swirl of flouncing skirts, and with the wickedest twinkle in her eye that it has ever been my privilege to see, began chanting, "BE LOUD!   BE LOUD!   BE LOUD!" at the top of her lungs.

A part of me understood my friend's irritation and was pretty irritated myself;  the rest of me was filled with awe and envy:   awe that a 4-year-old should have such fearless confidence, should be so certain of her right to make a noise in the world; envy that she should feel so gleeful about being herself in the face of disapproval from every adult in the room.   Yes, I concurred, she needed to be sent to her room and put on bread and water for—well, for years; but secretly I was cheering her on.   While I hope she's learned better timing and a little consideration for others since then (now that she's starting college and all), I hope she still has the capacity to live at the top of her bent.   I don't know that I've ever been loud like that in my life, and I think it's a mighty fine thing for a girl to be.   Especially when she lives thousands of miles away from me.

We wind up our celebration of botanical vulgarity this week with a look at the loudest plant in my garden, one that puts even orange marigolds to shame—Wild Thing autumn sage (Salvia greggii Wild Thing).

It really is that color.

The funny thing is that, since being saddled with CFS and fibromyalgia, I can't handle noise at all, whether aural, mental, or visual; whatever mechanism we have to sort through stimuli and prioritize them seems to have gone awry.   All the useful "how to cope" materials, which the better kinds of physicians give you, offer tips for dealing with a broad range of situations, but when it comes to noise, they just say, "AVOID THIS."   (Oops—but not in block caps, because that's the online equivalent of shouting, which is very noisy.   Sorry.)   I generally seek out peace, quiet, tranquility; cool watery blues, gentle forest greens, pale buttery yellows.   Calm colors.   Serene colors.   But there are always exceptions that I can't explain, like orange marigolds and Wild Thing autumn sage.

I fell in love with this plant the first time I saw it, and I don't even like pink.   Yet now I have an entire baby hedgelet of astonishingly noisy flowers blooming in the garden.   Even at noon in mid-summer, when paler colors look faded and washed out under the New Mexico sun, Wild Thing is gleefully shouting, "Pink!   Pink!   Pink!"   It is the equivalent of a noisy little girl who, yes, was way too loud, but by golly, was loud with a vengeance.

I wouldn't call its contrast with the garden walls a subtle one.

Is loudness vulgarity, or is it vividness?   Garishness or glee?   Misbehavior or joie de vivre?   None of those options is mutually exclusive; the admirable qualities live side by side with those we turn our noses up at.   (So sorry—with those at which we turn up our noses.)   Do you really want to forgo the glee to avoid the garish?   Lose vividness to whatever passes for today's good taste?   Stifle joie de vivre in the name of good behavior?   If everyone is equally loud, of course, you can't hear anyone over the clamor; I suspect Wild Thing makes me so happy because it takes all the solos, while the greens and buttery yellows croon a chorus of "oohs" and "aahs" in the background.   So by all means be smart in your timing, and definitely be considerate of others.

But go live loud today.   Make a noise in the world.

For what it's worth, I promise not to send you to your room.

Vision Quest

or Where Is M. C. Escher When We Need Him?

I've been spending many evenings on the patio lately, and have made it a point to be there in time to see the stars come out.   It’s not exactly a hardship.   The evenings have been delightful, with glowing sunsets, cool breezes, and no—count them, no—mosquitoes.   I like twilight, the way colors and shapes stand out differently than they do in full sun.   The disks of coronation gold yarrow turn into pale spaceships hovering around the birdbath; the hot pink of Wild Thing autumn sage, the diva of daytime, gives way to the white starlets of apple-blossom grass, bowing on their invisible stems.   I love the moment—it always seems to come suddenly—when it becomes clear that I can no longer see to read my book, and that I may as well give myself to sensory pleasure.   At that moment, I lean back in my Adirondack chair and watch the sky, waiting for the moment when the first star appears.

“Appears.”   What a misleading word—as if the star hasn’t been there all along.   More accurately, it is only once the interfering rays of sunlight have faded that our eyes can penetrate the distance and see another take on reality.

It reminds me of the annual road trips I used to take each May from Ithaca, New York, where I was a student, back home to Colorado.   I was always so eager for my first glimpse of the Rockies—emblems of home to anyone who grew up along the front range.   You'd think that they would first appear on the horizon as small bumps, growing slowly larger as you drew nearer.   Instead, they materialize all at once.   One minute you’re traversing unbroken prairie; the next your eye can finally penetrate the haze of distance, and the mountains are there—fully, gloriously, spectacularly there, the peak of Mount Evans glimmering with snow, all 14,264 feet of it towering above the plains.   You realize that the mountains have been there right in front of you for miles, but your eye was too limited to see them.

I could draw the obvious inferences here—“through a mirror darkly” and all that—but I’ll leave you to do that for yourself, if you're so inclined.   I simply want to return to the sense of startlement that can lie buried in the quotidian:  in the setting of the sun, the shining of the stars; the shift in perspective that transition brings.

The moment you realize that what you’ve been looking at and what you’ve been seeing are two completely different things.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

Agastache rupestris

or Okay, okay, mea maxissima culpa!

The guilt-inducing power of many of the world's religions is impressive, indeed; almost as impressive as the power of certain mothers I have known (though fortunately not mine).   But if you want to experience real sackcloth-and-ashes, chest-pounding, gnashing-and-wailing self-recrimination, try pulling up a gardenful of Agastache rupestris, otherwise known as licorice mint.

Also known as hummingbird mint.

Hummingbirds love it.   A lot.   It turns out that in addition to being beautiful, feisty, and territorial, black-chinned hummingbirds are astonishingly good at making a grown woman feel very, very small.

Agastache rupestris

In my defense, let me say that I, too, love licorice mint.   A sturdy, drought-tolerant native of the American Southwest, it has airy, sage-green leaves, salmon-colored bloom spikes that last from mid-June to November, and a clean, anise-y scent.   It is one of my favorite plants of all time.   At one point, I had seven of them in my little garden, and if they had stayed the 24-30 inches tall and 18 inches wide that my garden books and catalogs promised me, I would have kept them all.   Instead, they grew to be five feet tall and 3 feet wide.   The hummingbirds were thrilled, but I could not find the garden beds, the paths, or Luther T. Dog.   And these were just immature plantings.   So this year, out they came, to be replaced by mild-mannered and above all short plants.   I still have two of them, which are suffering in containers but may survive the summer; the rest I gave to a friend.

For the record, I did not neglect the hummingbirds.   Theoretically, they are supposed to adore the blooms of autumn sage (Salvia greggii) and pineleaf penstemon (Penstemon pinifolius).   They do adore them—I have observed them in the very act of adoring them in other people's gardens—and so I planted a number of both.

"Wild Thing" Autumn Sage

Which the hummingbirds ignore magnificently.   (And ignoring "Wild Thing" autumn sage isn't easy.)   Instead of sampling the new plantings, the hummingbirds go to every place where an agastache used to be.   They hover.   They waste calories you know they can't afford.   (Don't you realize that they will have to migrate hundreds of miles south in just a few short months?   And in the meantime, they have mouths to feed—young, helpless nestlings to strengthen for the long flight!)   They find you in your comfy patio chair and hover in front of you, just to be sure they have your attention, and then return to the former homes of the agastache.  Each plant.   In turn.  (They remind you of Lassie trying to catch the attention of the obtuse parent while little Timmy is in danger.   Only Lassie is starving, and it is you who have stolen her favorite food dish.   Because you didn't like it.) 

They come back to hover in front of you a little more.   (Don't you know that hummingbirds have to consume more than their own weight in nectar every day??   Their 1,000 beats-per-minute heartrate doesn't just maintain itself, you know!)   They test the drumstick allium blossoms and turn away in disgust.   (They can literally starve overnight!   To death!   If they don't get enough nectar!)   Weary, they perch in a tree branch and look at where the agastache should be.   And then at you.   (So what if your neighbors—twenty feet away—have feeders that could keep every hummingbird in town fat and sassy all summer?   Sugar water is just Not the Same.)   They fly over to the finch feeder, a decorative jobby that happens to be their favorite shade of red.   (Ooh—sorrysorrysorry.)   They tap on it.   (And if the starving Lassie had risked her own life to rescue Timmy from the collapsed mine, you would have rewarded her with a rubber bone.)   They hover at you some more.  (Have you no shame?!)   Repeat daily.

Lately when they hover at me, I gesture at the autumn sage, which is blooming its little head off.   "Look here," I tell them,  "Just because you're used to eating prime rib, that doesn't make filet mignon a bad thing."   They feed at last.  One sip from one bloom on each plant.   One.  And then they return to where the agastache used to be and hover.   (Sigh.)

Guilty as charged, little ones.

The Little Foxes

or

About This Blog

Solomon once complained that "The little foxes are ruining the vines." That statement has always puzzled me in a way--do the big foxes leave them alone?--but the gist of it rings true. It's not earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or plagues of frogs that we generally have to worry about at harvest time. No, it's the little pests that we never notice the rest of the year, small beings whose lives have nothing to do with ours (but who appreciate our planting all of those grape vines for them), that destroy the careful labor of months.

Little things have a way of eating into our lives, whether for good or ill. Mosquitoes drive us in from the yard, paper cuts make us howl--and one ripe grape fresh from the vine can send us to straight to heaven. And, like those punch-drunk little foxes, small things have a way of putting larger issues in perspective. The Song of Solomon is not, after all, primarily a book of agricultural advice.

This blog, Microcosm, explores the minutiae of everyday life and their occasional relationship to things in general. Literally, of course, a microcosm is just a "small world," and sometimes a small world is exactly that--a tiny, self-contained sphere of activity. But in its greater sense, the diminutive world of the microcosm represents something in the world at large, and it is that sense of nesting worlds, nesting meanings, that I'm interested in exploring.

I'm prompted to write by my own small world, especially by two aspects of it. The first is the small, courtyard garden in my townhome. In it I'm attempting--however haphazardly--to create a miniature ecosystem that will harbor a healthy complement of plant and animal life, feeding us all in the process. The chain reactions set in motion by one small change--the addition of a small water dish at ground level, or the placement of an "ornamental" rock to provide shade and shelter--have astonishingly (disturbingly?) far-reaching results. And if anything was tailor-made for someone hunting for symbolic meaning, a garden would have to be it.

The second factor prompting this blog is the presence in my life of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). This illness has reduced the external part of my life to a fraction of its former size and focused my attention more intensely on those things right in front of my nose. While I would vastly prefer to be well, I do appreciate the gift of focus that illness has taught me--the deep enjoyment of small pleasures.

So I am writing to share some of that enjoyment, especially as it pertains to that greatest of all pleasures, gardening, together with any musings and speculations that might come along for the ride. I am also writing to explore the beauty that can reside in smallness--the ways in which small lives, small worlds, can yet have great meaning. Welcome to my microcosm. I hope that you, too, will find enjoyment, interest, and meaning in the small pleasures unfolded here.