Getting Going

Get out of bed, walk to the kitchen, reach for a coffee mug and fill it with hot coffee. Sit down. Get up again and use bathroom, blow nose, inspect sleep-worn face. Nothing new. Walk back to the kitchen, retrieve coffee mug. Still hot, dear liquid.

Read thin morning paper, growl at sports editor, never prints relevant information about local swimmers, certainly none about the best coaches or team in the area. Whose fault is that? Stare out of window and give the stink eye to the frisky and well-fed crow lining up his rear end over cute little car parked down below on the street. The crow flies away, does not splatter the car this time.

Back to the sports page. Young Irish kid kills the US Open more dead than when Tiger killed it years ago. Phenomenal. Phelps loses 200 Fly by a hundredth. He's tired, not tapered. He'll be a different swimmer in Shanghai. Lots of foreign swimmers at the meet. Aussies, Canadians, Koreans, Mexicans. How many train in the US? Young Canadian team trained here a few weeks ago and then elite group prepping for the meet swam here for three days, long course. Seem to have done well. I want to swim. Can't. Have a cold. Have to get well. Sigh.

Read the weather report.  Sun today, patchy sun tomorrow, decreasing temperatures over the course of the week. Gotta get out into the sun and daylight today. Sun does not make itself known often enough during the summertime on California's central coast.  Read the horoscope:  "Pisces, you may or may not have someone important to deal with today. Best let events unfold before you make any judgements about them. Tonight: Be yourself."  Be myself. Get up and refill coffee mug, get out two pieces of sourdough whole wheat bread. Chew on them, bit by bit. Toast would hurt throat too much. Plain is better. Look for potato chips. Damn, no potato chips. Need salt, need a healthy throat and no more cold. Being sick is the pits.

Make oatmeal. Irish oatmeal, coarse and real. Add honey and a dab of butter. Good with coffee. Nice coffee. Check emails on iPhone. Must answer some soon. Note to self: Remember things.

Clear table, fill sink, squirt dish soap, wash dishes. Grandma did this. Remember the little dish set, a gift as a child, pretending to wash dishes and arranging them this way and that. Bubbles in iridescent mounds that pop softly and reflect the ceiling light, swirling pink and blue glazing them before they explode into exclamation points of wet surprise.

Go out to garden wearing gloves and crocs, carry small trimming clippers. The roses need dead-heading, the alyssum look stressed, and the bougainvillea just will not come into color. Bracts are not forming, looks diseased once again. Time to kill it? Try to revive it again? Stand and water, wipe sweat off face. A horse does not sweat this much; it is not human to resemble a faucet when standing still on a tepid morning.

Pull weeds, haul hose around yard, water all the pots. Riots of color, lots of pruning coming due soon. Plan it, get it done. Sun's overhead, nearly summer solstice. Fine day so far. Sepia memory, dainty curtains over French windows. Willow tree over lawn and sleepy cats stretching, rearranging paws and dusty fur, claws extended and then retracted languidly, sleep overcoming them again. That summer. A brother and three sisters, banging doors, wind chimes tinkling like today. The beginning of something unforeseen and dark.

Kick off crocs, put away gardening tools, squint at sun on flowers, hose snarled in the yard. Fix it later. Fix it later.

Back to the bathroom, use more Kleenex, drink more liquid, time to rest. Small sounds barely heard. Sound is more noticed when it is absent than when it is present, when it is so familiar and so gentle. Open laptop, hear Mac opening chord, read more emails, think about writing. No good. Nothing. Think of exercises learned at writers' retreat. Interrupt own thinking with impulse to get a snack. So that's it. That's the pattern. Fall into the lull, the mental switch from deliberate thinking to free flow.  Or not.  If there's room for writing, writing can happen.

Notice crows cawing outside, glance out window and see crow above cute little car again, aiming. Don't look. Just clean up the mess later, park somewhere else. Devil bird.

Wow, I'm a Gardener

I walked around Cypress Garden Nursery today, drunk on beauty and fragrance.  I feasted my eyes on a froth of flowers and realized the Cypress Garden had simply transferred all their knowledge about growing healthy vibrant plants to me.  I have at last replicated their success, at least a much smaller version, and I am immensely grateful to them for that.

This year, my garden, which is largely a container garden, has sprung from a sad, ratty ugliness born of serious neglect to become the most abundant garden I've ever grown before.  What's my secret?  First of all, I had to pay attention to it more often.  Then, heavy pruning in January, regular feeding with an organic fertilizer and regular watering -- if rain wasn't doing the job -- has turned the tide.  (I have settled on E.B. White organic fertilizer, and I don't get paid to say so.)  My plants are growing abundantly and are producing profuse amounts of flowers.  A couple of plants are very challenging, and I still I need to figure them out, but the majority are dancing on their stems in apparent happiness.  I like to think so anyway.

Pruning is the one area that takes time to master, and I have asked a lot of questions.  If injudicious cuts are made, you can lose a plant, but if you don't prune out dead wood at the beginning of the growing season, the plant is stuck with it and vitality is lost.  Roses, the most vulnerable plants to pests and horrible afflictions, need pruning in January and then constant attention to battle the waves of predators that materialize from nowhere.  So, I remembered that and accomplished my pruning when the yard was still cold and dreary.  Now the roses are popping out all over the plants like nobody's business.

It is said that life happens in seasons not in 30-minute segments, so I am in this for the long haul now.  Sticking with the plants as they go through their life cycle is proving to me that keeping my eyes on the prize (lots of flowers throughout the growing season) takes perseverance and a long-term focus, but wow is it worth it.  If my flowers could sing, I'd hear quite a chorus.

Spring Warmth At Last

It has been chilly here on the Central Coast lately.  The sun comes out, but you still need a sweater. It's kite flying weather. So, it being cool, the growth of my garden flowers has been slowed. That is, until today. Warmth and moisture makes almost anything grow, and when there is finally a series of warm days, flowers burst into bloom and plants go into super-grow mode.

Rosebuds I'd been anticipating opening for a few days are finally unfurling, some at a rate nearly visible to the naked eye.  No time-lapse photography needed.  The roots are warming, the sap is flowing and plants are using energy at a tremendous rate.  After this first flush of blooming, I'll trim them back a bit and fertilize again.

A woman and her husband who got sick of industrial-grade produce went off to the countryside in the midwest and bought 30 acres of land to begin a farm.  She researched the steps she needed to take by scrutinizing every article she could find on the internet and has made a success of the effort so far.  Her kids complained, it is said, about having real chores to do every day, day in and day out, but now they're stronger and have more real skills.  The woman said, "Life doesn't happen in 30-minute increments. It happens in seasons!"

One's gardening and growing effort has to be continuous and driven by the plants themselves. A careful eye must be kept on shoots, suckers, insects, watering, and feeding or the previous 80 or 90 days' work is all for nothing.

Nothing surprises a gardener or farmer more than seeing the immense bounty from the farm or garden once it's in the house.  I have one container of herbs that is producing enough for many families to use, far more than we need.

So, I saw the flowers' blossoms exploding open around me today, the sun bright overhead and then the wind galloping across the open bay in the distance, kicking up whitecaps as it came.  As the days grow longer until June, extended periods of warmth will produce even more flowers and growth than I'm enjoying now.  Hard to imagine since the garden's already flush with color, shape and texture.

Winter Gardening With A Friend

When I was a neophyte gardener a few years ago, I was timid about pruning back older plants.  I thought they'd die of shock if I trimmed them.  Not so.  One friend has been a great sounding board for my gardening questions through the years and she has given me dozens of cuttings and starter plants.  She gave me my gardening gloves and showed me the how-to about nearly everything in my garden.  It's quite a thing to have a mentor, whether they see themselves as one or not.  In this case, we see each other as friends and agree that digging in the dirt to make things grow is a huge pleasure.  She's just been doing it a whole lot longer than I have.  

Thanks to her, I am bolder and more at home in the garden - just like I imagined I would be.  But I needed her guidance, and she has been giving it steadily through the past dozen or more years.

My friend grew up in a family of siblings who all admire a fine garden and who are all resourceful and don't mind rolling up sleeves, donning gloves and getting to work if it's needed.  They cook what they grow and spend time with each other talking and working.  And laughing.  I just listen, lucky me, and join in the work, which never seems like work at all.  

So, two days ago when I had a day off, my friend and I went out into my yard, took a look around and then drove over to Cypress Garden Nursery in Monterey to see what we might see.  One mustn't hurry through a garden center on a fine day with a good friend at one's side.  This is early in the year to be looking for six packs of color spots for a spring garden, but what we did see satisfied us, and I made a few purchases.  Euphorbia was one choice, and I've put it in a fine old terra cotta pot an uncle gave me a few years ago and it has a sunny spot where it will look handsome.

Once I said good-bye to my friend that day, I set to work pruning the abutilon monster that had taken over one whole area.  That bugger just needs a dose of rain and then grows like wild, and it's always blooming. I finally pruned the roses and everything got fertilized and watered.  It felt good to do the work, all preparatory tasks and chores that will ensure a bounty of blossoms later on.

Gardening is satisfying, so much so that a sense of generosity somehow arises as the tasks are undertaken and your hands have been busy with roots, stems, tools and soil.  The earth and plants will do what they do, but to be able to facilitate the life within them to become optimal so that they flourish and thrive can be the most nourishing and calming things a person can ever do.  

They Changed My Mind

Before dawn, the downspouts from the roof gutters were dripping and pinging, the patio was damp and, noticing the wet sounds outside, my heart sank.  I'd heard big stories on the news services the night before.  Floods in Pakistan, extreme heat and wildfires in Russia, the oil disaster in the gulf, worry and threat of war, overpopulation.  Nothing any one person can feel effective against.  Up out of bed, I checked the weather report.  It called for a "heavy marine layer" again, all day.  The whole area was going to be socked in and cold, more than usual.  Awake but off center, I shuffled to the kitchen for coffee and thought about I could do.  

I tried writing.  No luck.  I mumbled to myself about my lack of progress while I deleted everything.  I tried all the other stuff that I usually do when I can't think of anything to write.  Cleaned things, sorted books, sifted through piles of notes and resifted them, rearranged items in the refrigerator.  Browsed online, looked at the sky, tried to imagine sunshine, ate a few snacks.  I got distracted by something and then got distracted from that.  I was not inspired by any of it.  

Exasperated, I made up my mind.  I needed to do something physical, some work, make a little progress so I could have something to show I'd not just been lying in the middle of the floor staring at the ceiling all day. I dressed in a fleece overshirt, thick T-shirt, work pants, gardening shoes, and stepped outside.  A cold wind grabbed me by the ears.

"It's freakin' January!" I heard myself squall.  Snow could fall and it would have been no colder, must have been 40 degrees with the wind chill added in.  How could Russia be burning up?  In all the gloom and gray, I saw hundreds of flowers bobbing and looking preposterously summery.  If I hadn't looked up and seen them, I would have scurried right back into the house.  

Against the logic that says everything should be frostbitten in this dour summer cold, my plants are ignoring the dreary weather and blooming like they live in the tropics.  The little darlings don't mock me.  Instead, their pure beauty wipes away my pessimism, changes my outlook.  Not a word said, and I'm standing a little taller and thinking, "It happens every time."  

I set to work.  Dozens of plants have taken up residence in my yard over the years, including my yellow roses.  They wouldn't really survive in my yard if it weren't for me watering and feeding, true enough.  But, I have been repaid a thousandfold every time I dig my hands in the soil.  

I deadheaded the spent blossoms, weeded, watered, and generally spent time re-examining each of the 40 or so living things in containers in my yard.  The genes of all the plants were telling them to grow, make use of the long summer sunlight hours, thrive, resist extinction.  

Every different flower was flying like a little flag of resilience, bright and simple.  They are out there  renewing themselves, capable of myriad ways to live on in the face of daunting circumstances.  They're adaptable, tenacious and beautiful.  I don't need to be original; nature's original.  I just need to pay attention to what's real, to the natural world, and learn it.

The sun was captured in the colors of the flowers, divided among them, describing light and color with form and dimension that sunlight doesn't have in and of itself.  I had never thought of flowers exactly as heroes before.  They're usually passed off as pretty diversions that give visual pleasure, decorate vistas, surprise one with color, but the exquisite complexity of their structure, the very nature of flowering and the cycle of life is nothing short of profound.  Nice to know I didn't really need sunlight beating down on me today, that a few dozen plants with petals and stems and leaves could teach me about appreciation and humility.   

A Growing Hobby

I spent a pretty good amount of time pruning, trimming, sweeping and transplanting today.  Several hours as a matter of fact.  The yard had begun to look like it was getting ready to take over the whole town.  It was a growing insurrection.  

Gardening is like most hobbies.  You are so innocent at the outset. You start out with a plant, a pot and some dirt.  You have a little bit of success, the plant lives for a while and, if it's edible - an herb, say - you get the idea you can grow something else that's useful. Before too long, you have several plants and a few odds and ends, pots, saucers, a trowel.  It's pretty fun!  Then, you get some gloves, then better gloves, and then a few snippers and some fertilizer.  One thing leads to another.  Seed catalogs, gardening books, hoses and watering cans gradually appear.  It's looking like you're ready to feed the whole family, and the bounty of the garden is becoming life-changing, inspirational.  

Then you meet your nemeses.

Bugs arrive in everyone's garden sooner or later.  Death on six (or more) legs.  One day you have beautiful flowers that bob happily in the spring breeze.  The next, you have a sickly yellowed mess.  En masse, bugs descend on your little beauties like Hells Angels arriving at a violin recital.  And there you are trying to fend them off with nontoxic (wimpy) products that you hope desperately will work.  You don't really want to poison anything, especially the earth you've become so proud of.  Earwigs, snails, slugs, aphids, spittlebugs.  Just their names give you the creeps.

Your gardening book says, "Give your plants a blast with the hose to remove aphids and other clinging pests."  Simple enough.  You blast away and really kind of enjoy it, a Valkyrie dispatching the enemy like the unworthy and sullen beings that they are.  Trouble is, the blasts of water also serve to disperse the bugs to other plants where they cling and thumb their noses at you, blow raspberries and plot certain revenge.

You keep trying, remembering the wonderful array of flowers and herbs you'd managed to grow before the Huns arrived in all their hordes, and you have a little luck.  You learn that beer set out in shallow dishes attracts snails and slugs.  You cheer for ladybugs who are said to eat aphids like candy.

You also learn to get out early in the day to check your plants before the little dears have been beaten down by the heat of the midday sun (well, okay, that doesn't often happen here in the Groove, but it's still wise to get out early even in the fog), check for damage overnight, admire the morning blooms of the day lilies and see the dew on the roses as they open.

The big payoff is always what you reap after the battles have been waged and your patience has been strained to the breaking point.  That is, you have an armful of flowers to set in a vase or you have a handful of food to add to the table for the next meal.  Bringing in a harvest, no matter how small, has few equals.  It's well worth the work, by any measure.

I brought in lemons and roses today.  I am thrilled to say I can pick mint, oregano, thyme, rosemary and lavendar when I need them.  Quite a few plants are budding or blooming.  Life is good and actually pretty simple; you really realize it out in a garden.  Just watch out for bugs on Harleys.

Lucky Stars

The Groove is bustling today and full of energy, although it is a bit cool and breezy.  It's just a good excuse to run indoors every so often and count your lucky stars, protected from the chill.  There are a few key sun-bathed walls you can find downtown where there is total shelter from the cold wind.  You can roast for a bit and then dash for the next one as you go out and about on your errands.

Speaking of lucky stars, I have a friend who's a creative house painter and who paints the sky up there on the overhead plaster.  You feel like you're flying when you wake up in the morning.  I'd like stars on the ceiling, lucky stars.

Spring continues to feel brisk and blowy out on the bay, which translates to layers of clothing during the day and bundling up at night.  Not too far inland, folks are feeling more heat during the day.  In summer, which is a barely noticeable change from winter here, fog will come creeping over us.  But, for now, we have sun and a whole host of flowers blooming wildly everywhere.  Even the most neglected gardens look terrific.

Which reminds me,  my garden is calling my name, in need of much attention for the next few months.  Lemon tree, herbs, flowers, vines and ground cover are all growing fast, so fast you can almost hear them.  It's good work, and I love to do it.

Magic Garden Nursery

I leaped into the chill pool water today and felt like a carrot stick.  Crisped and curled at the ends.

After my near-carrot experience, I thought to myself:  "I need fertilizer!"  

In the general vicinity of El Estero Lake, across busy Fremont Street and behind El Estero Car Wash, lies a serene urban oasis called Cypress Garden Nursery.  It's an island of sorts, a small parallel universe, existing - thriving actually - amidst the din and clatter of street noise and industry all around.  Situating the nursery gardens in a busy commercial district gives them an immense appeal:  They feel much like a protected sanctuary where elfin magic has a much greater probability of existing.  The nursery has been there since 1952 or so and is run by a Japanese family whose charming and delightful aesthetic extends throughout the grounds. 

The appeal of gardening is that it lends itself to the creation of sanctuaries, nooks, walkways and organic beauty.  Almost all nurseries have some appeal, but this particular one really is something special.  So, take a walk with me and I'll show you around.

The Gardens lie in a microclimate "banana belt" formed by sheltering low hills and a bluff that shields cold winds from the bay.  (At the top of the bluff just to the east of the gardens are two of Monterey's oldest historic adobes, worth a walk up into the neighborhood on a sunny day.)  The even-tempered and mild climate is very easy on the plants, so everything looks vigorous and good. 

The grounds feel intimate yet occupy at least two acres, but all areas are easy to access, with outdoor areas arranged to the left of the parking area.  The shed, seedling beds and water fountains are to the right. Flowering plants are everywhere and are grouped according to drought tolerance and predominant colors. 

To the right of the parking area, you approach what looks like a low ranch-style wooden building that houses supplies of organic and ordinary chemical fertilizers, weed control products, tools, potting benches, seed packet displays and serendipitous odds and ends.  You can enter the main building or continue through a breezeway to wander throughout the greenhouse area, explore the furthest reaches of the potting sheds, or take a look at gurgling water features and wind chimes. 

Returning to the main building, you get to the heart of the place.  Chewey, the resident dog, pads around nudging wandering shoppers, hope filling her eyes, keen for morsels of food, quietly licking extended hands. 

The room is meant to display gardening implements.  I like to say it stocks imagination and play.  On table tops and benches are the oddest things, ranging from tiny, plump, winged Japanese angels; mechanical, wind-up toy shrimp; beeswax candles; earrings and jewelry with tiny organza bags; hats, hat racks and scarves; books; seeds; uniquely varied gift cards; sea glass, marbles and parlor games.  The emphasis is on light-hearted, hands-on living.  Here's what they say on their website:

"...we are a place where you can buy a really good sack of dirt, a pruning shear or just ask what could have possibly made that many holes in your coreopsis."

After a good, long, lazy doodling walk around, I assembled a pile of treasures near the checkout register:  Fertilizer (of course), crocs (had to join the nationwide craze sometime, right?), cards, a gardening book, and shears.  Also, a collection of interviews of great writers on CD (Terri Gross from Fresh Air, NPR).  Chewey gazed at my fingers with the look only dogs give, intensely wishing a treat might materialize out of thin air.  I'll try to remember to bring her a little something next time - my excuse to go back again.

I've been to Cypress Garden many times.  I've never felt sour, disappointed or out of sorts once I've crossed the portal there.  Not even close.  Matter of fact, I always feel uplifted, soothed and content after having gone. Definitely, my garden does better after each trip.  It's magic, true and certain.