Practicing 'Bird'-fullness

It’ll likely come as no surprise to you that I’ve been seeing a therapist to process the feelings I’m having about my child’s recent trauma and recovery. One of the assignments my therapist gave me this past week was to take ten minutes every day in the garden to sit and do nothing.

If you know me at all, you know that ‘do nothing’ is not a typical phrase in my vocabulary. I’m a do-er. Always have been. My body is rarely at rest. If I do happen to sit in the garden, my body may look relaxed, but my mind is racing - I notice everything that needs doing, I think about the work emails piling up in my inbox, I wonder about next week’s meal plan - basically anything to keep my mind busy. Of course, keeping the mind occupied with everyday ‘busyness’ means that it doesn’t have to deal with pesky emotions. Brilliant plan. Except that, of course, I do need to deal with those pesky emotions.

I decided that I can create a ten minute period in between letting the chickens out and taking Tom to BART. I have a cushy outdoor chair and a chunky knitted throw to keep me warm on chilly mornings. So I’ve been sitting there, trying to calm my mind and do nothing. If a thought comes in, I tell myself just to think about it later. I take deep breaths and I watch the sun rise and start to shine through the leaves.

Did you ever see a show called “Sunrise Earth?” When the kids were little, we used to put it on every morning while we were eating breakfast, getting dressed, etc. Each episode showed, over the course of 30 minutes, a sunrise somewhere on earth. It was slow, it was silent (except for nature sounds), and it was beautiful.

What I realized this past week is that I have my own personal sunrise earth right outside my back door.

We’ve had a bird feeder hanging on the chicken coop for years, and it’s been a constant source of pleasure for us to see who’s visiting or living in our yard. Because of the feeder, and our water fountain, birds know that they’ll have a regular supply of food and drink here, and so we tend to have a great variety of visitors. Watching the morning activity is basically just pure joy. The trees are full of birds; there’s birds on the feeder and below the feeder; there’s birds on the fountain and birds on the twinkly-light wires. And the conversation! Chattering, calling, singing - the sky is full of music.

Since it’s hard for me to do absolutely nothing, I have been opening the ‘Merlin’ app on my phone and setting it to record the birdsong. Over the course of ten minutes, it ‘hears’ about 15 different birds. Every morning there’s the regular customers: finches, titmice, chickadees, sparrows, crows, jays, doves, and woodpeckers. But some mornings the app will record a cedar waxwing, or a western bluebird, or a warbler, or a vireo. This is very exciting!

In this way, I am able to practice mindfulness (‘bird’-fulness!) without letting other thoughts intrude into my head. It’s a tool to get me to the place my therapist was aiming for - a place where my body and mind are both calm and relaxed, so that I can let go of some of the anxiety, worry, grief and fear that I’ve been experiencing since we’ve returned home from Georgia. It’s yet another way my garden is providing for me; it’s giving me a place to learn a new skill, one that will have positive repercussions for the rest of my life.

Maintenance

It’s about 80 degrees at Poppy Corners, and it’s that exact time when, every April, we say to ourselves, “Is the neighborhood pool open yet?” The season of flip flops and tank tops signals also that it’s time to do some much-needed maintenance at home. Tom and I always keep a running list, inspired by Monty Don and Gardener’s World, called ‘jobs for the weekend.’ We add to it all week and then begin to tackle it as soon as we’ve finished our coffee Saturday morning. Our list this week was literally as long as my forearm - typical for this time of year.

Luckily, I’ve already planted most of our summer veg, which I normally wouldn’t do until the temp is consistently over 50 degrees at night. But I’m scheduled to have knee surgery on May 8, so I thought it would be good to get all that done before then, and luckily everything has survived. Since we removed all the raised beds from the North Garden (to make the orchard), I used that wood to make the raised beds in the South Garden taller. We’re not getting any younger around here and taller beds will be helpful in that regard. I ordered three cubic yards of planting mix from a local nursery, and added that to the beds before planting. It’s good to have all that done.

But today, the first thing on our list was the irrigation system. Now that we’ve had the last of our (prodigious!) winter storms, it’s time to begin a regular irrigation schedule. It’s important to start out with 100% saturation in your soil; if you do that, you’ll just be topping it off every time you water, instead of playing catch-up. But the irrigation system hasn’t been used all winter, so it’s not as simple as just turning it on. Inevitably there will be some problems - breaches in the lines, clogged drips, broken micro-sprayers. Tom and I turn on one ‘zone’ at a time and go around watching what happens and making notes. Often, I’ll see an area that needs coverage, and we’ll add some lines. Sometimes an area is too wet and we’ll adjust that too. Tom always has a lot of repair work to do. It’s really good to get all that done before irrigation becomes crucial.

Can you see the swarm?

After that, Tom opened our top-bar bee hive. Two days ago, I was out running errands when I got texts from two different neighbors: “Your bees are swarming!” So I rushed home in order not to miss it and to see if I could capture it for my dad, who always wants our swarms. Alas, it was too high to reach with our ladder. I’m not even sure if they were our bees (there are many beekeepers in the neighborhood), but it was a good reminder to spend some time looking through the hive and adding bars for new brood and honey. Everything looked as it should, and Tom took a full bar of honey out for us. Opening the hive is now Tom’s job since I’ve become allergic over time; he’s gotten really good at it and never gets stung anymore. I hang back and look on longingly, peppering him with questions which I’m sure he just loves. At least I can handle the messy job of cutting up the comb and extracting the honey, though gravity does most of the work.

I also spent a good deal of time today cleaning out our enormous passionvine. It’s a Passiflora ‘Blue Horizon,’ and has gorgeous flowers and small black sour fruits. It supports a huge number of gulf fritillary butterflies every year, and is a stopping place for every curious neighborhood child in summer. I bought it as a living deer fence, assuming that it would die back every winter with our frosts (and therefore remain manageable). It’s never done that, only gotten more and more enormous each year. It’s extremely promiscuous and shows up in all sorts of places I don’t want it to, so I’m always pruning the thing. However this year, we had so many nights of truly cold weather that the vine died back, leaving a hedge of dead leaves and flowers a foot thick. That was fun to hack through and remove. Now it looks quite bare, with just foundation vines on the trellis, but it won’t be long before that monster puts out new growth and begins the cycle all over again.

Tomorrow, we plan to wash the windows and screens, a once-a-year job that we loathe but that always makes such a difference in the way the light comes in our windows, so is totally worth it.

We also have reserved time for hiking both days. After all this rain, the hills are simply covered in wildflowers. This morning, we walked up to Shell Ridge where a guy named Phil (a volunteer with the Walnut Creek Open Space) has been working for ten years to restore a giant hillside with native flowers. This year it is simply spectacular, with every kind of California native annual you can imagine. Below you can see a very small section of the hillside, covered with poppies and chia. Tomorrow, I’m hoping we will have time to go a little further afield and hike in a place where we can ford some streams, which never gets old in our normally-arid Bay Area, and see nature-planted flowers.

Groupings

I don’t know about you, but one of the things that is making me so happy right now is walking out into the garden and watching everything waking up. The fresh new green leaves, the various flowers, the birds mating and building nests, the bumblebee queens making their first foraging flights - it’s all very exciting, and it’s changing every day.

And as I’ve been observing, I’ve also noticed specific groupings of plants that are particularly pleasing. None of these was created on purpose; it’s either happened completely by accident or because the plants have migrated or seeded themselves into this position.

For instance, take the group at the top of this page. It’s mostly native plants. In the center on the wooden tripod, there’s Garrya elliptica ‘James Roof;’ behind that on both sides is a Ribes sanguenium which is quite happy and growing larger every year; in the back on a green trellis is Pacific Ninebark (Physocarpus capitatus) which will get big as the season goes on; and on the other side is a towering white ceanothus. In the front on one side you see the feathery leaves of Artemisia palmieri (San Diego mugwort) and on the other side are narcissus leaves, with columbine starting to reach up behind. It’s such a pleasing grouping, and all these plants are thriving in this shady, protected spot by Adam’s train shed.

Near the driveway gate, a white ceanothus is positively groaning with blossom; the light purple spikes of black sage (Salvia mellifera) are poking up through it while the chubby cones of Pride of Madiera (Echium candicans) are just starting to bloom. You can see the leafy branches of Caryopteris clandonensis ‘Dark Knight’ jutting up - these will eventually be covered with purple inflorescences that the bees adore. To the left are some gladiolas that a friend gave to me years ago, which bloom spectacularly pink every summer. Since this is at the top of our driveway, every time I pull the car in, it feels like the plants are welcoming me home.

Just inside the driveway gate, there’s this little grouping behind some hurdles Dad made for me out of invasive French broom: Self-seeded Nigella damascena (Love-in-a-Mist) in the foreground, then a striking plant with white blooms that I was given at school and never recorded the name of (don’t do this!), a Japanese maple with dark red foliage in the middle (Acer palmatum ‘Crimson Queen’), and a sweet autumn clematis (Clematis paniculata) growing up the fence and on the trellis over the gate (which blooms an abundant and dramatic white every fall). Ajuga repens ‘Burgandy Glow’ (carpet bugle) runs under everything and common plantain is scattered throughout. In May, Geum chiloense ‘Sunrise’ bursts out and adds an orange glow, along with some purple-blue true geraniums and some native white yarrow.

Here, I particularly like the view of the pinky purple chive blossoms against the purple blue rosemary flowers, which then leads your eye to the pink Montana clematis growing up the side of the house. (A pair of house finches have decided to make their nest behind the clematis this year, which delights us.) Delicious, fragrant oregano carpets the ground to the left of the rosemary. The handsome form and the smooth gray-white bark of a southern magnolia tree completes the picture.

Under that same magnolia, self-seeded Stachys bullata (CA hedge nettle) is taking over, and will soon have tall purple blossoms, which mirror the purple-blue of the Geranium pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallace’ just behind. And behind that, you can see the new dark leaves of Psycocarpus opulifolius ‘Monlo’ (a variety of Pacific Ninebark) starting to emerge. This ninebark gets tall and the dark leaves get very large, and that foliage is very striking against the green and purple below.

In the South Garden near the gate, I like the garish combination of the magenta California redbud (Cercis occidentalis) against the bright orange California poppies, and the deeper oranges and reds of the Sparaxis ‘tricolor’ (Harlequin flower). You can also see this year’s crop of garlic, looking wonderful. That will be ready to harvest at the end of May!

Finally, near the front porch there is a spectacularly green Acer palmatum ‘Lemon Lime Lace’ which arches over the delicate blue of self-seeded Chinese forget-me-nots and some freesia that perfumes the air every spring. The silvery-grey foliage on the right is a butterfly bush, and the spiky bulb beneath that is our California Douglas iris, which will bloom a little later in the season.

I wanted to share these groupings with you because it just proves that you don’t have to know what you are doing, or make big and complicated plans, to make an interesting-looking garden. Just pick some flowers that you like and give them a try! The results will likely surprise and delight you.

I’d love to know what’s happening in your garden this spring!

Guest Speaking Event

I’ll be speaking about Resilience in our Urban Gardens on Tuesday, April 11, at 8 pm (PDT) via zoom. It’s a free event through the Albany Healthy Garden Talks series, if you’d like to participate. If you heard me speak for the Landscape Horticulture Design Forum back in August, this is a very similar talk with very few changes.

Here’s the link to sign up. This series (and particular talk) is sponsored by the City of Albany. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with a wider audience about my favorite subject, resilience! Many thanks to Patricia St. John for the invitation.