The Old Guy in the Garden

The old guy (Hotei) sits in a sunny alcove in the garden under a canopy of old rose canes and buckthorn boughs. Birds serenade him in early morning, and rabbits visit him at nightfall. Bumbles and dragonflies buzz around him, spiders knit him into their webs, and sometimes butterflies land on him. There is a steady rain of maple keys, leaf dust and pine needles from the trees over his head.

He looks as though he is carved from stone, but he is actually made of some kind of polyresin and weighs only a pound or two. I discovered him in the window of a thrift shop many years ago, purchased him for a few coins and carried him home where he presides over a leafy enclave in the garden from early April until late October.

From October to April, the old guy hangs out in the potting shed. He is carried there with great pomp and circumstance when the garden is put to bed in late autumn, and the journey to his winter lodgings is a cherished seasonal ritual.

Sequestered, Week 299 (CCXCIX)

Painted Lady in the Garden

 (Vanessa cardui)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Bumble Girl in the Clover

Friday Ramble - Kingfisher Days

Canadian Tiger Swallowtail

(Papilio canadensis)

In summer, I spend hours photographing dragonflies, butterflies, bumbles and bees, puddles and weeds, wild orchids, lupins gone walkabout and doing their own untrammeled thing in roadside ditches. The eastern Ontario highlands are a treasure trove of earthy abundance in all seasons, and I feel fortunate to be there and taking it all in, especially in summer.

Hours are also spent crawling about in the woods on all fours with a macro lens on the camera “doing” ferns, mosses, lichens and little green frogs. Every tump, stump, leafy alcove and stone has wonders to share. Is it difficult to lurch back to a standing position afterward after getting down on the forest floor? Yes, but worth it.

Still other hours are spent hanging out on the shore at the lake, capturing loons floating on the still water as the sun goes down, great herons standing motionless in the shallows, kingfishers hunting the last small meal of the day. Once in a while, an otter paddles by and peers up at me, displaying the bright red inside of its mouth and a set of wicked teeth. There is always something to see.

River otters are making a comeback in the Lanark highlands, and it is common to see them swimming along the lake and in nearby rivers. They are fabulous creatures, and I call them all "Portly", after the wandering otter child in the seventh chapter of Kenneth Graham's incandescent The Wind in the Willows.

These are kingfisher days, times out of time, full of magic and an elusive something I am always reaching toward and can't quite find, let alone capture with camera and lens. When I arrive home, dusty, sweaty and speckled with leaf dust, the day’s images are uploaded and archived. I look at everything first of course, but my efforts make me groan, so I file the DVD away and think no more of it.

Years later, while searching for the right image for something or other, I pull out a DVD and discover it is full of treasures. Imagine that. I have already taken the swallowtail, cicada, loon, fern, wildflower or rain dappled moss shot I am still hoping to find. I discover them all over again, and I remember when they were taken, my soulmate and Beau (or Cassie or Spencer) and I together in the woods on a glorious summer morning, chewed by bugs and as happy as clams.

Apologies to Susan Coyne for borrowing the title of her memoir Kingfisher Days for this morning's post. I have always loved the book.

Thursday Poem - Directions (Excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon

when the sun strobes through

the columns of trees as you are hiking up,

and when you find an agreeable rock

to sit on, you will be able to see

the light pouring down into the woods

and breaking into the shapes and tones

of things and you will hear nothing

but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy

falling of a cone or nut through the trees,

and if this is your day you might even

spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese

driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things

how the voices of light enter the body

and begin to recite their stories

how the earth holds us painfully against

its breast made of humus and brambles

how we who will soon be gone regard

the entities that continue to return

greener than ever, spring water flowing

through a meadow and the shadows of clouds

passing over the hills and the ground

where we stand in the tremble of thought

taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins, 

(from The Art of Drowning)

Wordless Wednesday - Shining Through

The Jester's Cap and Bells

The delightfully complex shape of columbines always reminds me of a harlequin's chapeau or a medieval court jester's cap. The architecture is splendid stuff, and there is a blithely capering choreography to the columbine's dancing "to and fro" movement on gracefully arching and swaying stems. With sunlight shining through them, the petals and sepals of the flower seem to be made of stained glass.

Their dwelling places are like woodland cathedrals, and the stained glass analogy is apt. The ceilings are up in the sky somewhere, and the nave's soaring green arches disappear into the clouds. The clerestories, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses would make any architect proud, and the leafy chapels seem to go on and on forever.

I am reading John Crowley's fabulous Little, Big for the nth time, and a sentence about the forest at the heart of the book comes to mind: “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.” If you have never read Crowley's novel, make a beeline for your nearest book shop or library and grab a copy. It is one of the most delightful pieces of fiction ever written, and perfect summer reading too.

Columbines often seem to be wearing at least one spider web, along with bits of fluff from nearby cottonwood trees and slender filaments of milkweed silk. I am always astonished and captivated by what my macro lens "sees" and records in its sylvan ramblings. At times, its loving eye seems to linger and caress everything it encounters, and that is particularly so when columbines are in bloom.

As I drifted through the woods on the weekend clicking ecstatically, the first dragonflies of the season whirred around my head and spiraled off into the sunlit trees in search of prey. There were clouds of black flies and mosquitoes, and the little dragons of the air were dining very well indeed.

Another summer of  wildflowers, dragonflies, butterflies and bumbles... There are almost too many wonders for one old hen to take in.

Sequestered, Week 298 (CCXCVIII)

White admiral (Limenitis arthemis)

 

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Cormac McCarthy, from The Road

Seeing Red

Friday Ramble - Aestival

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of all living creatures to be sleepy and slow moving in the heat of summer, and botanists also use the word to describe the arrangement of organs or components in a flower bud.

This week's word comes to us from the Late Latin aestīvālis and earlier Latin aestās, both meaning summer or heat. Both forms are cognate with the Sanskrit इन्द्धे (inddhé) meaning to light or set on fire. Way back in our wordy explorations is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form h₂eydʰ- meaning heat, fire or to burn. The adjective probably came into use during the Middle Ages, some time around 386. 

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of nearly all Indo-European languages and its elements have been assembled from languages known today. There is no record that it ever existed, but if so, it would have been in use from the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. The prehistoric Proto-Indo-Europeans were most likely nomadic tribes from the steppes of eastern Europe and central Asia, and they were a footloose and fancy free lot. There is evidence that they wandered as far as the Aegean, northern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, leaving their language, pastoral culture, patriarchal religious beliefs and customs wherever they went.

I once thought that the word siesta (referring to a leisurely nap after lunch) was related, but I discovered a year or two ago that its roots are in the Latin sexta meaning the sixth hour of the day (midday). The two words sound similar, but as far as I know, they are not related.

This week's word is my favorite adjective for the (all too brief) greening season at the heart of the calendar year. Summery is a fine word too, but it doesn't hold a candle or even a tiny wooden match to the frothy perfumed magnificence of the golden season that reigns so gloriously and so briefly here in the sub-Arctic climes of Canada. Aestival says it all, and I love the shape of the word on my tongue.

I say "aestival" and its sibilance summons up images of alfresco celebrations and farmers' markets, shaggy gardens of scarlet poppies and towering purple lupins, trees filled with singing birds, bees in the orchard, roses sweeter than any vineyard potion, perfect sunsets across the lake shared with herons and loons. The season is filled with light, and every moment should be savoured.

Thursday Poem - To the Rain

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,

falling on fallow, on field and forest,

on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,

downwelling waters all-washing, wider

than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster

than countrysides, calming, recalling:

return to us, teaching our troubled

souls in your ceaseless descent

to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,

to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the seas.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from So Far So Good

Wordless Wednesday - Lupins and Early Light

Let There Be Red

June would not be June without clay pots and cauldrons and planters of red geraniums (cranesbills) blooming on the thresholds of houses in the village, and today is the third day of the quintessential summer month. How can it be? The season has just arrived, but the midsummer solstice is only three weeks away.

Beau and I have noticed on early morning walks that many of this year's geranium offerings are accompanied by purple petunias and marigolds. There are also some splendid coleuses in rainbow shades, and sometimes all four dwell comfortably in the same pot, geraniums, petunias, marigold and coleus. What a riot of aestival color!

My gypsy soul craves coleus strains like "Dragon Heart, "Rainbow Dragon", "Kingswood Torch" and "Chocolate Covered Cherry", and I am looking for other places in the garden to plant them this year. Ditto some of the arty amaranth varieties in local nurseries like "Joseph's Coat", "Molten Fire" and "Early Splendor". Whatever I add this time around, it has to be something the little bee sisters and the hummers will love.

A pot of geraniums on the threshold of the little blue house is a long standing summer tradition. Every year, I remember the specimens that graced the threshold in past years, welcoming everyone who came to the red (Benjamin Moore 2080-10 Raspberry Truffle) front door. I remember their shape, their color, their texture, their green and rather peppery fragrance, their jubilant, unfettered flowering.

May there be geraniums at your door too. May there be blooming in your life.

Sequestered, Week 297 (CCXCVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

There is no mystery in this association of woods and other worlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a stream bed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.

Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

The Purple Eyes of Heaven

Bearded Iris (Iris germanica vulgaris)

This morning's sumptuous blooms are named for the goddess of the rainbow, Iris, messenger of the gods on Mount Olympus. She was charged with carrying their messages along the rainbow bridge between heaven and earth.

Iris also escorted the souls of virtuous dead women to their final resting places in the Elysian fields. In Greece, irises were planted on graves by grieving family members, that the goddess might recognize and guide their departed loved ones home.

Purple is one of my favourite colours, and when bearded irises bloom, they make my heart glad. That is surely what gardens and flowers are all about. A rainbow is a happy thing, and the flower's association with it seems appropriate.

Typing this, I remembered a silky, deep purple ribbon I wore in my hair as a child. The adults in my family thought the colour was not appropriate for someone so young, but I wore it anyway. It seems my love of purple goes back a very long way.

Friday Ramble - Sweet

And so it goes . . . One day, the old crabapple is bare and forlorn, the next day it wears a multitude of tiny leaves. Almost overnight, the tree is covered with blooms and buzzing with throngs of ecstatic, blissed-out bumbles, bees and wasps.

Along comes an early summer breeze, and the crabapple symphony is over, petals drifting through the air like confetti, coming to rest on lawns and hedges and gardens, on fences and birdbaths and pergolas and fountains. The fallen bits of pink float merrily on puddles in the street and flutter across cobblestones in the village like tiny, airborne scraps of vibrantly hued carnival paper. Their presence conveys a festive aspect to the day, and seeing them on our morning walks makes us smile.

Our word traces its roots all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *swād- meaning sweet or pleasant, also the likely source of Old English, Germanic, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin words meaning the same thing.

Lilacs in the village are blooming, and when I stepped outside with Beau last evening around ten, the night air was full of their heady fragrance. For a few minutes, we leaned against the railing on the veranda and breathed in the glorious perfume. Then we were driven indoors by clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. The little blighters were out for blood and no mistake.

Standing out in the darkness, I remembered a long ago garden I planted with purple heliotrope. The color of the blooms was gorgeous, and their sweet, cherry-like scent pulled in hummingbirds, butterflies, bumbles and bees from miles around. The stuff was almost indecently sumptuous, and I shall have to plant it again.

How sweet this season is, how fleeting and poignant, just a little sad too. I sometimes wish that summer lasted a little longer this far north, but if it did, spring and autumn would be truncated slightly. No to that!

Thursday Poem - The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

were born to be.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - Raining, Greenly

Seeing Red (For Mike and Christa)

Red is the color of new maple leaves on the old trees in the garden, the cardinals who visit my feeders, the koi in a nearby pond, the gently swaying birdhouses in a sunlight dappled yard not far from home.

Mike and Christa passed away a while ago, but their red bird houses remain, and I think of my old friends whenever I pass by. So many conversations when I was walking Beau or Spencer or Cassie. So many spirited exchanges about hawks visiting their yard, squirrels stealing their saffron crocus bulbs, the nut yield from their walnut tree. They grew some of the most towering, impressive sunflowers I have ever seen anywhere, and the webs spun by orb weaving spiders in their hedge were often several feet across. There was lots of stuff to talk about when we met, and I miss them.

One of these days, all that will remain of us (Beau and I) is the conversations we had on our morning rambles, all the happy natter about birds, bugs, varmints, weeds and village yard sales. There are worse ways to be remembered.

Sequestered, Week 296 (CCXCVI)

 Common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Sometimes I do the talking. Other times, the camera takes over, and the images it captures prefer to speak for themselves. This was one of those mornings, and I should have bowed to my lens and moved to the edge of the scene.  What on earth can I possibly say about the dandelions in my garden?

Weeds they may be, but bees love dandelions, and that is enough for me. Running the mower over these golden wonders would be heartless, and I keep putting it off. For heaven's sake, the little dears are asters. What would the bees think?

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

And there in the woods...

Trout lily or Dogtooth violet

(Erythronium americanum)

Friday Ramble - Earth/Earthy

Earth is a good word for pondering in this shaggy season as we work in our gardens and tend the sweet beginnings of the harvest to come. All things, or at least most things, arise from the earth and return to it in time, us included.

Our word dates from before 950 CE, and it comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English erthe, the Old English eorthe; German erde, Old Norse jǫrth, and Gothic airtha, thence the Ancient Saxon eard meaning soil or dwelling place. Then there is the Latin aro, meaning to plough or turn over. In the beginning is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form *h₁er- meaning ground, soil, land or place.

When we say "earth", we are usually thinking of the ground under our feet. We may also be thinking of the many millions of roots doing their thing way down deep, of the bones of our little blue planet and the fiery heart beating in its molten core. We almost never think of ourselves as elements in the same story, but blood and bones, root and branch, rivers and rocks, we are all tiny, thoughtless players in a vast elemental process. Endlessly befuddled strands in the web, we are always getting distracted and forgetting that we are part of anything at all. 

Once in a while, the simple fact that we are NOT separate shows up and insists we pay attention. It can happen while dangling on a rock face or seated in a pool of sunlight under a tree in the woods, on a hill somewhere under the summer stars, or on the shore of a favorite lake at dusk. Dazzling sunsets and starry nights do it for me every time, and occasionally it even happens while I am parked in the waiting room of my local cancer clinic. Such moments cannot be predicted, and nor should they, but I have noticed that they often show up right when I need them.

There I was this week, feet planted in the garden and head in the clouds, but not a lofty thought in sight. My soulmate and I gardened together fifty years, and I was missing him more than words can say that morning. Out of the blue, there came a fey scrap of elemental knowing, and I remembered (probably for the millionth time in this long and tatterdemalion life) that I was right where I was supposed to be and doing just what I was meant to be doing. I needed the reminder.

We belong here, roots, branches, star stuff and every dancing particle - we belong here as much as rivers, mountains, acorns, wild salmon and sandpipers do. Dirt, clouds, sky and stardust, it's all good.

Thursday Poem - May

May, and among the miles of leafing,
blossoms storm out of the darkness—
windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees

dive into them and I too, to gather

their spiritual honey. Mute and meek,

yet theirs is the deepest certainty that

this existence too—this sense of

well-being, the flourishing of the

physical body—rides near the hub

of the miracle that everything 
is a part of, is as good as a poem

or a prayer, can also make luminous

any dark place on earth.

Mary Oliver

Thank you to my friend Frances at Beautiful Strangers for reacquainting me with Mary's exquisite poem.

Wordless Wednesday - Heart of Gold

The White Empress in Bloom

Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)

She appears in the woods a little later than her more vibrantly coloured red cousins, but she is just as grand with her three lush white petals, golden heart and three supporting bracts. Her petals are velvety, a little wider than those of the red trillium and they curve delightfully, as if she is trying to compensate for her lack of scarlet pigmentation with a paler but more shapely grandeur.

No compensation needed. She is absolutely gorgeous in her own right, another of the northern wildflowers that Georgia O'Keefe would have loved to paint.

Sequestered, Week 295 (CCXCV)