On May Day, my brother and I used to sneak around our neighborhood with our mom, secretly delivering flowers to unsuspecting neighbors. Here are some May Day flowers for you. In spring 2020, I wasn’t sure how to use Instagram. I mean, I technically knew how to use it. When I logged on, it was […]
garden
Last week I read a delightful story about seed catalogs that made me remember this 2012 post. And my seed catalogs! Somewhere along the way, I must have gotten off the catalog lists because not a single one has arrived this winter to help me dream of spring. (Where did I go wrong?!) For now, […]
It is still January, but the plants here don’t seem to know it. The evergreen pear trees along my street burst into flurries of cloud-colored blossoms last weekend. Along my neighbor’s garage, the hedgehog aloe shows off its orange flowers. Elsewhere, there are fingerprints of the recent storms’ destruction: beaches scoured of sand, roads crumbling […]
In spring 2021, I wrote about my pandemic obsession with my echium plant. I realized how happy this plant made me, so now I’ve got several all over the yard, in different stages of their spiky lives. A few days ago, I noticed that one of them was starting to make that skyward move that […]
It’s fig season again! This post first ran in October 2019. Now we have a squirrel who I’m competing with to get the ripe ones off our bigger tree. And our little tree? It’s still little, with about six figs and two leafy branches. Maybe I’m imagining it, but the branches seem a little stronger […]
There’s an unclaimed patch of ground right next to our driveway, the planting strip between the sidewalk and the street. Over the years it’s been filled with many things. Weeds, mostly. Orange poppies. Maroon-colored amaranth that toss confetti seeds across the sidewalk. Weeds, again. This year, my husband and our youngest son planted sunflowers in […]
So, here’s a weird thing that happened. It began when I bought some new plants for my “garden” in Virginia. (I put “garden” in quotes because most of what grows in this spot are weeds, which I’ve taken to calling “native plants” to make myself feel less inept.) These were the kinds of plants […]