Sunday, September 21, 2014

Of Iceberg roses and more...

“Sometimes since I've been in the garden 
I've looked up through the trees at the sky 
and I have had a strange feeling of being happy 
as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest 
 and making me breathe fast.

Magic is always pushing and drawing 
and making things out of nothing.
Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, 
badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. 


 So it must be all around us. 
In this garden --in all the places.” 
 ― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden


And we're back home after what it had seemed three seas and a world of a time.  There’s an island in my heart, and I’m thinking that people build too many walls and not enough bridges… I want to build bridges; be a channel, a conduit between people, between races, between cultures, between families and friends; always building, always trying to find common ground through love.  But sometimes you just have to wonder what kind of things may be waiting for you and those you love on the other side of those bridges… what motives, goodness or wickedness awaits in that dark end to stalk you; to haunt you beyond your fears?  Bridges can certainly be destroyed in a moments notice to no fault of your own.  I’m just praying my little heart out that the only and truest thing awaiting at that dark end of our bridges is true love...


The garden is a little oasis of joy and delight these days. 

The Iceberg roses in the front flowerbeds are blooming wonderfully again after some necessary ruthless cutting at the beginning of summer.   


They bloom but did not produced much foliage, and only spindly, thin branches.  They had to be cut almost to the ground. 


Now... lovely little miracles...
 What great gifts roses bestow unto our souls…
endless expanding, wonderful gifts.


They look lovely on our table too...



One little piece of advice to pass along about Iceberg roses... if you want more blooms and less scraggy thin limps, don’t just deadhead them.  Cut far back with long stems. If you cut the blossoms with very little stem, they tend to throw very spindley new growth.


Is it already getting autumnally in your neck of the woods? 


It is here… slowly and inconspicuously, but Autumn is around the corner for sure. How can I tell? You see, the other day…. the woods drew around me while out weeding early one morning… something spectral moved between the trees… a white shadow, a rushing wind among the trees.  I stopped what I was doing and stood up still, very still... listening, my heart pounding. 


What was it, I couldn’t tell.  Except perhaps, that nothing should surprise us, really… why, the season of enchantment is upon us and anything of the spooky variety can surely happen at any given time.  I’m sure if you listen and pay close attention you too would hear it—the cackles, the songs, the music of dragonfly charms and beads of ankle bracelets of witches as they trot the sun-warmed earth almost in a hurry.


What else do you see around you 
that’s foretelling the soon arrival of autumn
in your little world? 
Do share!



Thursday, September 18, 2014

The gypsy room...

Autumn has not shown its full-true face around here yet, but days have that sleepy, golden look they get just before summer slips over the edge of the world.  I am excitedly waiting for those magical October days.  So many unsettling things going on around the world, so much pain and hurt.  And why can't us humans make peace instead of hate?  Haven't we tasted enough of that already?  I feel cold inside at times. But My Heavenly Father is a golden fountain, splashing me inside and out with warm shining love. Wishing I could go hide away in my little gypsy room and be enfolded in peaceful thoughts.

I'm leaving you here some of the images floating in my mind right now... My lovely gypsy room. Enjoy!



Sunday, September 14, 2014

Home for a few days...



Beyond the mossy trees there resides a little white cottage… full of charm, cozy, and peacefully nested in a magical forest of privets.  I am so glad to be here.  So thankful to be back and delighted like a little girl full of wonder.  For I have missed our home immensely…  

Wisconsin, with fields and fields of Queen Ann’s lace last month, then it was Idaho, San Diego, this weekend Tennessee with its lovely rolling hills and green green country roads and little white houses… then on Tuesday, NY and then North Carolina.  I’ve been traveling so much this summer I’ve almost lost my sense of time… where has summer gone?


Ephemeral, evanescent, vanishing, volatile—that’s how I describe my little world these days, and a garden surrounded by vaporous sunlit woods that some how it appears to be a different place than it once was, just a few weeks ago. 


We don’t have the extreme season changes that typically belong to those September days of the North, but I can already see the quiet changes taking place in the southern season; changes in the wind shifting directions, changes in the sounds in Nature; somewhat muffled, quieter, subdued if you may, and I can read the secrets trees hold in leaves that are already starting to lose their youthful zest… and how the natural world, too, watches us in return committing our progress and the season of our lives to wild and fragrant memories.


What surprises me more than anything is this sense of rush growing inside me… this need of preparedness, of bringing in little treasures to the protection of the insides... 


Potted flowers, the gentle geraniums and sensible ferns and to begin the accustomed task of pruning and protecting… oh this strange and deep-rooted sense of  impending doom the winter gifts us with up North… 


To get the garden and oneself ready for the despondent long months ahead, as if winter here would come crashing upon our heels, when in fact we still have a few more months of delight… 


And such delight it is right now… for how wonderful the change in climate, and how wonderful the cooler breezes as the intense heat succumbs and the garden gets fill again with birds of every color…  how delightful it feels working out there again. 



From my voyages I’d brought a few new friends to the pond...


But today I saw the first live resident—a brown medium sized frog whom upon sensing my presence leaped away to hide behind the Mandeville vine. 
  

And then there are the goldfish… 15 goldfish have been let free to make our pond their home.  They scattered away the minute we put them in the water and went to hide amidst the Pickerel Rush, and Water lettuce roots.  We were told they will not keep the small size they are right now for too long.  They will grow, and grow fast.  So I’m hoping to be able to see them again soon some day.  


Oh it is so good to see you again, 
even if you’re kind of invisible behind my screen.  
And I hope you’d remember that out there 
within the grasp of our imagination there is a magical forest...  


 I'll meet you there.









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