Here she is gathering the threads.
Here’s the finished weaving.
Wondrous work!
Salsify Weaves the Sun
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Big Game Hunting in the Okanagan
Note the tidy landing gear package, the side saddles and the lovely fur coat!
Now, with all that camping gear unfolded just half a second before:
Isn’t she a beautiful one!
Big Yellow Bear in the Sagebrush
Up the hill we go.
Butterflies in the mock orange. How nice!
CRASH! CRACK! BANG! A scurry of activity. One second later:
Then everyone is calm again. Now it’s time to hunker down and wait for Harold to go.
Lots of waiting.
Lots and lots of waiting. Sigh.
But the time to move on eventually comes. Yeah, OK, motorcycle on the road to the golf course up above. People, use a muffler, hey, if you don’t mind.
Harold moves on, too. Well, sorta. His spirit is still there.
What a beautiful morning.
Every day is a great day to meet a grassland bear. This is my fifth. Two were in the dark. I don’t do that anymore!
Such a handsome one, especially!
Thank you, Bear.
Applied Mathematics in the Garden
Elders do math best.
A living calculus.
The spiders of the fruiting world!
For them, life is a spray of electrons.
Why not plant one today? Also great for keeping away sorceresses, who get lost in the pretty embroidery.
Shelter From the Rain
You may not be planting your garden for yourself. Good on ya.
Dragonfly and Pine
Gardens Old and New
Old Style Rock Garden.
New owners, New Style Rock Garden:
You can’t cheat at art.
Water at Work and Play
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, tensed like a bow against the wind, waiting to be knocked loose by the deer of the sky.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, lying like wind on the face of the water.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, waiting to be carried on the face of the wind.
Water + Carbon + Air + Sun, aka Poplar Cotton, catching in splashing waves of green.
Out of a few simple elements, untold complexity and immeasurable delight. The word for that? Why, life.
We are the children of the sun.
The Japanese Okanagan
During World War II, most British Columbians of Japanese Ancestry were robbed of their belongings, their homes and their liberty and interred in concentration camps in the B.C. Interior. In Vernon, a few remained free, and married into families from the camps, who could never go home again to the sea. Alongside their old orchards, the flowers still bloom.
They are showing us the way.
The way to beauty and the simple joys that are the strongest.
Words of forgiveness are not enough. Words of thanks and love are more fitting. Thank you. We love you. Let’s build the land you dreamed of.
Plastic, Gardens and Drought
The replacement of lawn with gravel to save a rain shadow valley from drought is based on the principle of laying plastic down over the living earth and smothering it so that its natural creative energy is killed.
Or so it seems. After only two or three years, the earth reasserts herself and begins to bury the stones.
Any decorative appeal, which was gained at great expense, is soon lost.
Things begin to look like hell.
What a lot of work it is to kill the earth. Sometimes it’s just easier to give up and grow a garden.
Dang, but a few years will nix that, too. Whew.
Best to give that up to and relax by the lake. A cool brewsky. Kids playing in the sand. Corn on the cob. Nature, you know? Nice. Here’s the corn, coming along.
Oh, crap. Of course, you don’t have to kill the earth. You can use plastic to bring her to life, too. Water, you know.
A society gardens in its own image. That’s the thing. If you want to know your country, look to its gardens.
Ouch.
Who is the Gardener?
I have learned this week what I already knew but had no words for. I am not the gardener in this land, but the garden that the land makes. Needle-and-thread grass makes me, with its sprays of delicate light in the wind and its way of drilling its seeds into the soil using the heating and cooling of days and nights. It is a beautiful plant that connects me to childhood and mystery. It also thrives in this dry climate.
In comparison, the weed-choked land, the gift of bad cattle management, and the orchard land it was developed into a little over a century ago, create different selves. I follow their paths, often unknowingly, and thus am created by them in their image. It is often an ugly image.
It replaces eternal ones, such as this doe and her year-old fawn, who watch me out of the last snow, in sagebrush that has turned weedy from overgrazing by cattle. There is little for them here now, but her gaze tends me, and make me in her image. I am gardened.
Many of the old orchards are weeds of mustard now. The idea of chopping the land into small spaces did not produce people with the ability to develop a culture other than to develop into the weeds that speak most clearly of the introduction of foreign crops in this ancient space. These weeds, and the people who buy and sell the land they grow on, are gardened not by the land and its water but by sets of laws imposed upon them.
But they are still gardened. To say that we, humans, have a garden is to say that we stand in the place of the earth and try to recreate that relationship to our own benefit. Here’s a glimpse into my garden this morning.
It, of course, also gardens me, if I let it. I do. I’m not the only one. A woman down the road has sown poppies in the cheatgrass and rescued a barren, scarred hill into a delight that can recreate the land for thousands.
We make ourselves by tending the land, so that it can tend to us. If we cover it with black plastic to kill that relationship, our children will grow up in a zone of death. It will take time, but it will come. That is not gardening.
This is gardening:
This is respect.
