A Balancing Act

or The Earth Day Reading Project

As I was walking the circle path around the garden the other day, I was dismayed to discover this:

Leaf-curl plum aphids had invaded my biggest, shaggiest monster of a sand cherry—one of the inner branches was pretty well lost to the world by the time I discovered it.  These are tricky aphids (for me) to get rid of—they curl the leaves around them and become impervious to sharp sprays of water.  Even if I were to use pesticides (which I don't), it's doubtful whether the pesticide would reach them.  Thinking back to my first year here, when the garden was decimated by the nastier types of insects, and worried about a repetition, I took hasty action and clipped the two worst branches off, hoping to nip the the problem (as it were) in the bud.

I should have trusted my garden, trusted the effect of the last few years spent filling the bug-bath with water twice a day, providing sheltering mulches and ground-covers, and planting nectar-rich flowers to ensure constant bloom—all the things needed by the beneficial insects that keep the pests in check.  Because look at what was on the undersides of the leaves:

Lady beetle eggs.  Half a dozen leaves with clusters at the bases.  The natural process had worked; the aphids would have been brought under control without my intervention (and boy, was I disgusted with myself for having gotten in the way).  Fortunately, more lady beetles are ready to replace the ones I pruned away—I spotted eight of them, including two mating pairs, in a one-foot area yesterday.  It looks as if the process is still working in spite of me.  In fact, if you're not squeamish, look at what this lady beetle is munching on  (as always, you can click to enlarge) (if you're into that kind of thing):

Death and destruction come to the aphids.  Bwahahahaha.

I've written more about the ways I've learned to protect my garden elsewhere.  For now, I want to pay tribute again to Sally Jean Cunningham's Great Garden Companions, the book that taught me that organic gardening isn't about gardening "normally," only using wimpy pesticides and fertilizers instead of the chemical kind; rather, it's about creating ecosystems that can be self-balancing, about creating a place where all kinds of lives (including pests', and including yours) have their needs met.

_______________________________

Jean Potuchek, who writes Jean's Garden, invited me to take part in the Earth Day Reading Project organized by The Sage Butterfly, to "list at least three books that inspired you to perform any sustainable living act or inspired you to live green, and then tell us why they inspired you."  In addition to sharing her gardens in Maine and Pennsylvania, Jean writes regular book reviews.  Her discussion of Doug Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home made me wish that it had been one of my inspirations.  Alas, it hasn't yet, but only because I am behind the game.  Instead I would like to point the inquiring reader to:

1)  Cunningham's Great Garden Companions.  Cunningham gardens in Tompkins County, New York, with acidic soil, 180+ cloudy days per year, 35 inches annual rainfall, and frequent sub-zero F winter temperatures.  I garden in the high desert of New Mexico, with 300+ days of sunshine annually, 8 inches of rain, "soil" (ahaha) so alkaline that it bubbles if you pour vinegar on it, and baking summer heat.  Cunningham's ideas work just as beautifully here as they (apparently) do in New York.

2) Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop.*  A fictionalized account of the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy.  I don't know that this book has pointed me to a particular action, but its appreciation for the southwest has reminded me what a fierce love for a landscape is like.  Perhaps the strongest urge to protect the land comes not from those who are most idealistic about it but from those who understand it best, who love it the most passionately.

3) Amy Dacyczyn's Tightwad Gazette.  Dacyczyn (pronounced like "decision") is the voice of radical frugality, but she also makes (what should be but apparently isn't) the obvious point that consuming less takes less energy and produces less waste.  Dacyczyn essentially opts out of the capitalist credo that more is more.  She lives abundantly by being creative and working hard—and by thinking for herself about what she does or doesn't need, rather than letting Madison Avenue do the thinking for her.** 


I encourage you to visit some other blogs as well where the authors take different approaches to sustainable and/or green living.  B_a_g at Experiments with Plants chooses to grow extra plants for the slugs rather than put out slug pellets.  Diana and Jurg at Elephant's Eye give thoughtful homes to wounded sparrows and provide bathing ponds for wagtails and dragonflies.  Nate at The Scholar's Garden is currently swamped with scholarly work, but he is also busy creating homes for bees and embracing a green growing lifestyle at an age when I was perfectly happy with mega-stores and "big ag," and ready to use pesticides if they just got rid of the bugs.

Even if they got rid of all of the bugs.
_________
*  Spoiler alert:  The archbishop dies in the end.

**In a roundabout way she reminds me of Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, a mystery novel written in the 1930's, whose amateur sleuth, Peter Wimsey, goes under cover in an advertising agency.  He has a horrible time finding paper evidence of a crime, because all of the paper in the office is recycled.  In the 1930's.  When people thought that being frugal was a virtue, and that re-using things was common sense. 

A Study in Scarlet

or A Conundrum

(After a brief derailment last Wednesday, I am back on track today, ready to remember that when we struggle to find beauty in our circumstances, looking at them more closely often helps—as does counting our blessings.) 


In the very first of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, A Study in Scarlet, the great detective tells Watson, "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."  Then, in what one can't help but feel is an anti-climax, he adds, "And now for lunch..."

I'm afraid I don't have anything quite as racy as revenge or poison pills to offer with the toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato-cumin soup, but really, that's probably for the best.   We shall content ourselves with enjoying the more benign scarlet threads that run through the colorless skein of winter, savor our meal with perhaps a cup of tea afterward, and go on from there.  (And we will not wax rhapsodical about some violinist's transcription of a "little thing of Chopin's," chirping "Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay" and "caroling away like a lark," as Holmes apparently did, so you can all relax.)

Or are the scarlet threads benign?  I find myself tugging at a moral thread these days.  (You can all tense up again.)  It is tied to Nandina domestica or "Heavenly bamboo," an ornamental shrub introduced from east Asia.  I love this species for its winter color in many shades of red—a color that enlivens stems, leaves, and berries—as well as for its delicacy and for its translucent glow in sunshine.  But as with so many introduced species, it is invasive in the right circumstances.  While I don't think that the dry climate of Albuquerque counts as the right circumstance, I can't be sure.  It doesn't seem to invade in people's yards, but birds do eat the berries and spread the seeds elsewhere, where vigorously growing seedlings might disturb the balance of an already fragile ecosystem.  And yet those gorgeous scarlet stems and tangerine-orange leaves...I'm almost willing to be immoral and grow an invasive species for their sake.

Well, really, I am willing.  I do grow it.  I have it growing in a large container, which is one of those compromises that pleases no one, including the Nandina domestica.  On the one hand, in a pot its root system can't possibly spread out of bounds and invade; on the other, it requires extra water in order to thrive.  It hasn't flowered and produced berries yet, but surely it is only a matter of time until it does.  Once it does bear fruit and the birds find it, then the seeds will be dispersed far and wide.  And yet, without delving too deeply into the mysteries of birds' digestive systems, birds do seem to function in an, um, "easy in, easy out" sort of way.  "Far and wide" can be that far and wide:  I can't imagine that the birds will carry the seeds far enough to deposit them in any damper, more congenial climate.  Common sense and mildly deductive reasoning would indicate as much, but I don't know whether that's the case.

I'm not actually losing sleep over this (I expect I'll just trim any berries before they ripen—another compromise that pleases no one), but it does illustrate in a way that never fails to disconcert me how small choices can have broad effects—effects for which we are responsible.  It's a conundrum, but one, frankly, that I care about more in June than I do in January, when Nandina domestica casts a glow over the landscape.  During the dead season it's a pleasure to unravel the scarlet threads, isolate them, and expose every inch of them—a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. And now for dinner.

(It's still anti-climactic.)

One Step Ahead

or A Rake's Progress

The earnest, much-pierced young stock clerk at the natural foods co-op was doing his best to persuade me that spending $26 for the 32-oz. bottle of certified organic maple syrup was a good idea.  The ex-Vermonter in me, on the other hand, was doing her best to convince the clerk that all maple syrup is produced organically, and that spending an extra $10 for the label was just plain wrong.  The conversation went something like this:

Clerk:  Organic producers can't use pesticides.
Me:  Sugar maples grow in forests.  The trees aren't sprayed.
Clerk:  Then how do they keep the insects under control?
Me:  Well, the trees grow in forests, where there are natural predators.  Besides, the sap starts running in early spring, before the insects are out, and anyway, it comes from deep underground, where insects aren't a problem. 
Clerk (sceptically):  Sap?
Me:  Uh-huh.
Clerk (visibly debates calling security and changes his mind):  And the land has to have been chemical-free for three years.
Me:  The syrup comes from trees.  Trees take a lot longer than three years to grow.  And they're growing in a forest, not in an orchard or on farmland.
Clerk (confused):  How can they grow in a forest?
Me (confused):  They're trees.  Trees do that.
Clerk (sceptically):  What, on their own?
Me:  Well, you know, with ferns and brambles and birds and deer and stuff.
Clerk:  But that sounds like one of those Eastern forests.
Me (confused):  Yes.
Clerk:  How do they harvest a forest?
Me:  They go around and tap the trees.
Clerk (possibly suspecting a conspiracy):  "They?"  Who are "they?"
Me:  Guys.  Just, you know, guys.
Clerk:  You mean farmers.
Me:  No, just a bunch of guys in the woods.  They get permits to tap trees on state or national forest land, and maybe ask if they can tap their neighbors' trees.  You know, guys. 
Clerk (startled):  You make them sound like the guys around here who harvest piñon nuts.
Me (startled):  Yeah, I guess so.
Clerk:  But that's, just, like, some guys in the woods.
Me:  Yeah.
Clerk (desperately):  OK, but for maple syrup to be organic they have to use organic fertilizer, too.
Me (blank confusion):  It's a forest.
Clerk (blank confusion).

(Light dawns:  the clerk is young, maybe 20, and a local—he's probably never seen a deciduous forest.  He knows pine and juniper woods, with the occasional deciduous tree thrown in as make-weight, but nothing that would support large-scale commercial production.  The orchards he's encountered have been heavily managed apple or pecan orchards; his experience of "soil," if any, is mineral-rich, nutrient-poor "decomposed granite."  Deciduous forests occupy a theoretical place in his awareness, but he hasn't had a reason to think them through.)

Me:  When the leaves fall every year they just stay there on the ground and get covered by rain and snow.  They pretty well decompose by spring.  It's like the trees are self-mulching and self-composting.
Clerk (light also dawning):  Oh, like in an eco-system or something.
Me (beaming):  Exactly!

With that little misunderstanding cleared away, we both go about our business feeling pleased with each other, as if we are mutual converts to...well, we don't know what, but we're both pleased.

All to say, I'm not planning to rake the garden this winter.  The sand cherries and desert olives have never shed enough leaves for raking to be an issue before, so this is the first time I've actually faced the choice.  Whether to rake can actually be a rather heated issue in the gardening world—the impulse to tidy the garden for winter is deeply ingrained (and yes, some of us are just getting around to that now here in Albuquerque), and many of the reasons for doing so are good.  On the other hand, my garden doesn't exemplify any of the good reasons:  it doesn't have lawn or easily smotherable, delicate perennials; it's in the high desert where crown rot and slugs are ogres we frighten badly behaved children with, not things we ever expect to encounter in real life; and garden-magazine tidiness is not really an issue.

I did consider gathering all the leaves into a pile, putting them in a corner to compost, and then replacing them on the garden beds come March, but besides not having the energy to do any of that, something about the process struck me as...redundant.  The whole sense that raking is something I "ought" to do was making me feel like the serious young stock clerk, whose ideals were perhaps one step ahead of his information.  Like most of us when we're in a fundamentalist mode, he just wanted to do the right thing.  Yes, zeal and a pure heart do count for a lot, but weighing circumstances correctly is even better; the right choice doesn't always have to be the most difficult one.

The sand cherries and desert olives are native plants; somehow they manage just fine in the wild without having someone come along to rake the leaves and compost them specially before returning them to the soil.  A tiny, urban garden may create different growing conditions than, say, the vast expanse of the Gila Wilderness, but I don't see any reason why these plants shouldn't be as self-mulching and self-composting as they would be in the wild. 

Ooh—like in an eco-system or something!

Meddlers

or Hastening the Inevitable, Part II

In my last post I wrote about letting go, especially of the care and upkeep of the micro-garden.  To let go was a relief, a pleasure, a grace—and not just any old grace at that, but a lovely, lovely one.  By relinquishing the remaining plants in the micro-garden to their fates, I was simply yielding to the inevitable; rather than trying to elbow autumn out of the way, I was going to curtsy politely to it, extend an ushering hand, and say graciously, "After you."  Death would come decorously to the micro-garden, and all would be peaceful and sweet, perhaps even a little soulful, as I practiced the virtue of non-attachment and allowed nature to pursue its course unimpeded.

But when I wrote of hastening the inevitable, that did not mean that I wanted any help.

Now that all of the flat-blossomed flowers elsewhere in the garden—the yarrow, feverfew, and marguerite daisies so beloved by beneficial insects—have more or less stopped blooming, and the bugbath isn't filled so assiduously, and the pest-eaters have grown sleepy and slow, aphids have moved in to the micro-garden in droves.  Ironically, the plants they are attacking are the perennial bunching onions, which I planted in part to deter pestilential insects, the entire allium family supposedly being anathema to all that goes on more than two legs.  Ha.  The onions are covered.

I know these aphids of old, and nasty little blighters they are.  A few winters ago they obliterated every "Powis Castle" artemisia in the neighborhood.  (Which ought to be a lesson to landscapers not to plant the front and side yards of an entire neighborhood with the same five species, thus creating easily destructible monocultures, but probably won't be.)  They are impervious to frost; the sharp spray of water from a hose that is supposed to wash them away and kill them only allows them to take a little exercise while incidentally making a royal mess of the kitchen window; insecticidal soap just gives them a fresh, clean scent.  Where are all of those praying mantises that were peeking in my windows a few short weeks ago?  Where are the lady beetles, the lacewings, the hoverflies?

Gosh darn it, I like the onions.  I was planning on continuing to  harvest them enthusiastically through at least November.  Aphids, why can't you just munch on the sweet potato vine?  I'm done with that.  Or the amaranth?  Help yourselves—there's plenty for all and sundry.  The basil? marigolds?  Go for it.  But why the onions, you perverse little pests?

Grrrr.

(Do people who have let go usually growl this much?)

Seeing the Forest and the Trees

or Mountains:  A Good Idea

No matter how much I enjoy Albuquerque, I also like leaving it now and then.  After spending a lovely weekend with my parents, who were down during the Balloon Fiesta, I went holidaying last week, wandering down to the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico for a few days.  Just to be outside again, not just out on the patio but really outside in The Great Outdoors, has "filled the well" in ways that have me purring with contentment.  Cities are all fine and good, what with the modern conveniences and all, but fresh air, sunshine, and dazzling landscapes are even better.

One thing New Mexico doesn't have a shortage of is dazzling landscapes.  (Fresh air and sunshine are fairly plentiful, too, now that I think about it.)  Many of them are best appreciated from afar, and it has been pleasant to be focused on the distance rather than close-in, looking upward and outward more than is my wont and marveling at vast expanses, wide open spaces, and big hunks of mountainside.  Vistas.  Drama.  Rugged cragginess.  Scenery in general.  Geography may not offer the action and intensity of, say, a football game, but it's a perfectly satisfying spectator sport on its own.

As a participatory sport, of course, it's even more rewarding, and I enjoyed getting up close and personal with a fair amount of geography on hikes at the Catwalk National Scenic Trail, the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, and the Fort Bayard National Recreation Trail.  When I say "hike," though, I want it to be clear that I have never been a capital-H Hiker in big boots and a big hurry.  I certainly admire those who can clamber over rough terrain at three miles per hour, but I don't understand them.  I go to the opposite extreme, and if I make it through a mile in less than three hours, I get irritated at myself for rushing.  If anything I'm a naturalist, though even that's still a bit grandiose.  I just like being in the mountains looking at things.

And "looking" is far too small a word for the attempt to experience a landscape—to absorb the "stilliness," as a much-loved aunt likes to call it, to take part in the quietness and vibrancy, the simply lovely and the jaw-droppingly sublime, to follow the contours of a land and delight in (most of) the lives that dwell in it.  To me the joy of hiking through a stand of ponderosa pines is not actually hiking through it but stopping to catch a whiff of its vanilla-scented sap.  (A good hiking trip demands that you spend at least part of it rubbing sap off your nose.)  And as long as you're there with your nose in a tree, why not pause to admire the rich variety of its colors, the canyons and mesas that age has carved into its bark?

In fact, I think that the entire point of hiking is actually to pause—to listen to the chuckle of water on stones, to mourn the death of a butterfly, to wonder at a sapling growing in an unlikely place.

The thing is that when you get up close and personal with geography, it turns into a microcosm again—you just see a lot of miniature worlds in sequence that add up to the world in general.  Each seed head and flower has its own self-contained beauty; each fallen log and rock is its own little ecosystem, even while it is part of the larger system of the forest.  Its existence means life to some small creature; its loss would be catastrophic to the insects and lizards and lichens and birds that depend on that particular rock, that particular trunk, for sustenance and shelter.

Every so often the obvious up and hits you and makes you wonder why you're so slow to catch on.  It really shouldn't surprise me that a lot of microcosms create the world, but I've been wandering around anyway saying, "Wow!  The forest is the trees!" as if I'd just discovered something profound.  In any case, it's been wonderful to see both this week.

And I still have a little smudge of sap on my nose.
________________

A post-script to a previous post:  Look what my parents brought me last weekend...

Mi jardín es su jardín

or
Share and Share Alike

I expected gardening to be about plants; I didn’t expect it to be quite so much about morality.  Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice describes morality as the struggle to balance the needs of the self against the needs of others.  A variant on the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, it brings the occasional (frequent?) tension between the two into the foreground in a way that I find rather a relief.

I had originally planned my garden as something approaching a potager, with native fruiting bushes and Mediterranean herbs in a semi-formal design, and vegetables grown in containers.  I live in a new, urban infill development which, when I moved in, was still surrounded by vacant, weed-infested land.  I was the first of my neighbors to plant anything, and that first summer, every leaf-roller, aphid, potato leaf-hopper, flea beetle, and cabbage moth in the neighborhood descended gleefully on my fledgling garden.  My infant trees were leafless by July, every tomato had withered with curly top virus, and the vegetable greens were all eaten away to the midrib.  Only the native plants and herbs survived.  (You can pretty well bet that any plant native to New Mexico does not need a lot of coddling.)

I read more widely about organic forms of pest control and, at my sister’s recommendation, came across Sally Jean Cunningham’s Great Garden Companions.  Cunningham suggests creating a welcoming environment for garden beneficials by including habitat plants, introducing water at ground and (human) waist height, and interspersing nectar-rich flowering plants among your edibles.  This attracts beneficial insects (and other wildlife like toads and birds), which will then keep the pests down to manageable proportions.

Since then, I've tried to apply Cunningham's principles, which are partly about attracting, but essentially about sharing.  The bird and bugbaths are always filled.  The portion of my garden given to flowers and habitat plants has grown, and the part devoted to edibles has shrunk.  I grow vegetables primarily in a 2’ x 4’ “micro-garden” (the main planting area is about 15' x 15'), and while I still have fruit bushes and herbs, the rest of the garden is “beneficial” planting.  The air hums with honeybees and bumblebees.  Mr. Jackson overwinters in my potted mint.  Finches maintain a running commentary from the tree branches.  And I have seen hoverflies, orb weavers, lace wings, praying mantises, lady beetles, and parasitic wasps enjoying the flowers, the water, and the aphids.  The pests are minor irritations rather than plagues (though the leaf hoppers still get to my tomatoes every year, confound them!).

In “sacrificing” growing space to foster an ecosystem, the ecosystem has given back to me.  In giving more of my garden over to nurturing the urban wildlife, the part I have reserved for myself has flourished.  My harvests have increased (and the headaches have decreased) as I have learned to balance my own needs against the needs of the creatures in my environment—even the pests among them.

Is this morality?  Enlightened self-interest?  Good karma?

Or is it just the way things are supposed to work?

Toad Hall

or

A Place for Everything,

and Everything in A Place

What I love about toads is the way they ignore me. They're useful bug-eaters, of course, and I appreciate that. But I love the way they go about their business as if--well, as if I didn't particularly matter to them.

My garden has a toad--a chubby, unflappable, cool cat of a toad--that has made itself at home in a potted mint plant. In my ongoing quest to encourage murder and mayhem in the garden (but only the good kind of murder and mayhem), I've tried to create a toad-friendly habitat. I've provided a "bug bath," a shallow dish filled with pebbles and water at ground level; and I've created toad houses from broken pots and cinder blocks, hoping that the shaded hollows would appeal to a cold-blooded creature during the heat of the day. And instead of these cool, private shelters, "Mr. Jackson" prefers the potted mint that sits in the sunshine on the patio. Every morning while I sip my tea, I watch him hop over from some other part of the garden and clamber awkwardly into the pot. I harvest the mint regularly; he blinks at me. I water it daily; he blinks at me. I occasionally whap him with the hose by accident; he blinks really quickly at me.

It's not even a pretty pot.

In its own mild way, the situation radiates a whole "the best laid plans" thing that I regard with wry amusement. (I'm reminded of how I originally designed my garden around Luther's habits. He always used one area as his privy, so I made a clear pathway to it and left it unplanted. He never went there again. That area is still an odd, empty space that nothing seems to fill properly.) In another way, it's eloquent of the best spirit of gift-giving--that a gift, once given, takes on a new life, new meanings, in the hands of the recipient.

The real gift in this case was water--as good as gold in a region that gets eight inches annual rainfall, and much more interesting to a toad in any case. The "bug bath" is what drew him and what encourages him to stay. One morning when I had forgotten to refill it, I found him looking at it (blinkingly) and watched him stretch out a foot to the basin and rest his chin on one of the dry pebbles. He stayed that way until I had filled the dish with water (he didn't bother to move), and after a good soak he went merrily about his business (which was to climb into the mint pot).

Of course, the water wasn't a real gift if I was hoping to get something out of giving it--a toad at my beck and call, ready to eat ants and flies on demand. I did get a toad, yes, but beck and call? Not noticeably. And I find his complete obliviousness to the choices I had pre-made for him so beautiful that it almost takes my breath away. The sense of interaction--of creative give-and-take with an alien species--fills me with delight, and that is far more wonderful than the smug satisfaction I would have felt had he moved into those concrete blocks. Above all, I can't help wondering now what he will do next, and what pleasure I might have in responding to his new choice.

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.