I want the faith a vine has
when it grows up to the height of its trellis
and reaches up toward the sun.
Growing past all support.
Its only mission is to get to the light
which gives it life.
No turning back.
Follow the Light.
We humans like our symbols. It allows us to make the complicated simple.
An icon conjures up more than just an image.
It’s bad enough that we have done this with flags and rainbows, but leave the flowers out of it.
Poppies are just poppies.
Lovely and tall with nodding buds
and fancy fringe petals
and shaker-top seed pods.
Let them be just poppies;
Not a source of opium or the cause of an addiction.
Not the crop of desperate farmers in a war-torn land far away,
Not a field of lost souls from a foreign war long ago,
Or a magical cause of sleep sent by a wicked witch.
They are just poppies.
Beautiful poppies.
Nothing more.
Here in North Carolina, the bearded iris show off in April and early May.
The daylilies don’t swing in to action until late May.
To fill the gap are the Asiatic Lilies.
May is their month to shine.
These are my daughter’s lilies. She’s a flower, too.
Follow the FLOWERS.
I love tiny plants.
I love fairies.
I think tree roots are fascinating.
Put them together. It’s magic!
The fairies like their new hang out.
Even a toad dropped by while I was working. (Not pictured) Was he really a prince?
We shall see. One never knows what may happen. When there is magic in the garden.
Even if it is just a little magic.
Follow the Fairies!
Danger has come to the bunny yard.
I blame it on the oaks.
They dropped too many acorns this year. Millions of acorns.
The vermin feasted and propagated. No foraging necessary.
Now, there are too many little squirrels and baby chipmunks and mice.
The snakes come for lunch. The hawks come for dinner. The owls come for a midnight snatch.
Whoooo else came in the night?
Something big and strong. Something that bends wire and tears fences from their posts.
I am mending my fences and locking my low windows.
Afraid of this danger that has smelled my bunnies’ scent and wants to join the feast.
I blame it on the oaks.
Follow the FLOWER to the root cause.
UPDATE: Tracks photo from inside the bunny yard today.
Coyote?
I don’t have to look to know who is Busy and who is Not Busy in the bunny yard.
Where ever I hear noise, I know I will see a blur of black fur.
Then I must peer under things to find my barley brown bunny,
quietly napping or watching the trees.
Charlotte is usually on the move or moving dirt.
Barley can be found quietly meditating.
Usually, they only spend time together while eating
or snuggling.
But one day Not Busy made the mistake of napping too close to Busy during an excavation.
Busy dug dirt and kicked it behind her. Not Busy got dirty.
Busy bulldozed dirt away from the excavation site.
Not Busy began to disappear under the soil.
Busy disappeared into the hole.
Busy continues working. Not Busy continues meditating.
They both stopped to pose for a picture. I think he’s smiling.
FLOWER fills in lots of holes.
The flowers are delicate and complex.
The seed pods resemble green jesters’ hats.
The leaves…ugly, whitish and sickly.
I hate leafminers. I got so disgusted with them that I chopped down the infected plants.
No use feeding the enemy! Leaf miners are larvae of a tiny fly.
The fly lays its eggs on the leaves. The hatched larvae eat their way through the middle of the leaf’s layers.
The flowers are so beautiful,
but the leaves look ravaged.
No pesticides for this gardener,
so chop chop chop.
I’ll just take photos of the blooms this spring.
Almost thirty years ago, we were given a young Bigleaf Magnolia (Magnolia macrophylla) tree from the yard of some friends.
We admired a larger one of these trees through a sky-light in their dining room. It looked like big green umbrellas.
The Cunninghams dug up a small one for us that evening.
The tree is now over twenty feet tall.
Last year it had its first ever bloom.
This spring it has eleven.
Worth the wait?
You tell me.
Wait for the FLOWER.
