Category Archives: Garden Grace

Lantana

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Lantana

Wanting to choose plants for my garden that don’t need constant watering and fertilizing, I  favor native Southeast Texas plants. I didn’t plant the large bushes of Lantana that are showing up this time of year, growing from the roots in a few days of sunshine. The birds did! The plant produces deep purple berries which are poisonous to cattle, sheep and humans,but birds love them and spread the seeds. Bees use the nectar in making honey, and the tube flowers, are excellent food for many butterflies. Lantana thrives in the full summer sun and heat, requiring little water and taking the blistering heat of summer by covering itself with multi-colored flowers shaped like tiny nosegays.

I am realizing that many of the plants I remember in my grandmother’s and mother’s flower beds were volunteer, reseeding or re-emerging each year.

Reseeding. Returning.

Simple, ordinary flowering

of color and beauty

reminding me of Grace,

both perennial and volunteer

Peace

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Pewter skies and gentle rains yesterday gathered into thunder clouds and stormy weather today, so I stay inside, grateful for the morning last week when I took my camera into the morning light to receive the gifts of beauty offered by this climbing Noisette rose, whose name is Crepuscule. I don’t think the name is a lovely one, sounding harsh to my ears, but the word means twilight, that time of day just after sunset, and the flowers hold the memory of sunset in its unfurling petals. The loosely double blooms open nearly orange, fading to a rich apricot, peach, and yellow. The sprawling canes have light green leaves with rosy new growth. This rose has few thorns so reaches for me only with fragrance when I brush past it as I walk through the arbor, bringing me the “peace of wild things.”

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THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry

Reach

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The beginning of a new year is a time to think about what is important, what needs to be done, who I am called to be.  I like to ponder and come to those thoughts over a period of time, rather than my making resolutions on January 1.  A good way for me to do that is to choose a word for focus.This year I choose the word Reach. LIke these tomato seedlings  in my kitchen, I start where I am, break open my comfort zone, shed what is unnecessary for growth, and celebrate new opportunity in the present – all the while reaching toward the Light.

Recalibrating, relinquishing

Embracing this season of enough

Attentive and astonished

Called to this journey

Holy mystery

Winter’s Last Verse

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IMG_0149Our typically mild Texas Gulf Coast Winter has teased us with its wide variety of weather. The past week has been an example of the season’s vagaries. An unseasonably warm few days ended with storm force winds and a cold front – which for us has meant a return to morning temperatures in the upper 30’s warming up considerably as the day moves on. I already see that first hazy blush of green on trees that leaf soonest.  In these last days of winter, Spring is already humming and I look ahead with excitement.  But in a desire to celebrate the now and savor the gifts of this season, I walk in the sunshine and remember…

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand, and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”    ~ Edith Sitwell

The cardinal that perched outside my kitchen window early this morning didn’t linger long enough for me to get his photograph, but just long enough to sing me the last verse of Winter’s Song.

Alchemy of Sorrow

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shattered petals fall

fragrant still

garden gift of grace

“Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmitted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.”

— Pearl S. Buck

How Much is Enough?

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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is  enough        ~ Wendell Ber

In recent years, I enjoyed forcing Paperwhite narcissus in the period after Thanksgiving and before Christmas – the flowering of Advent, if you will.  I never planted just one container, pushing the ugly, papery bulbs into pebbles and keeping them in just the right temperature and light until strong white roots appeared.   It became my habit to prepare at least half a dozen bowls of them to scatter around and share with family and friends.  This year, whether by blatant omission or intentional effort to simplify, I  didn’t buy any Paperwhite bulbs, although I have delighted in watching the green spears poke up and begin to bloom in the past.

This morning,  celebrating a day of sunshine after some long dreary days with pewter skies and everything dripping with rain, I walked around the garden thinking to plan what needed to be dug up, pruned, and cleaned up in the next weeks.  I began to see spots of color where the roses had responded to the rain, little things here and there that survived the frost, a single snapdragon, berries on the holly and hawthorne, and almost buried in wet leaves, one single stem of Narcissus.  It was as if I were being told “You didn’t have to do it, I took care of it for you.”  And one was enough.

Roses on a Rainy Day

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While many of our friends and family are wearing their warmest outdoor gear and shoveling snow, we have had a succession of cold, wet days that seemed to be just what the roses needed to cheer us with round mounds of fragile petals. I brought these inside more for their exquisite fragrance than for their beauty.  I knew they wouldn’t last very long in the dry warm air of my kitchen, and they didn’t.  At least, the blooms didn’t, shattering petals almost as soon as I put them into water.  But their scent remains.  I am grateful for the reminder of beauty experienced in ways other than my eyes and the lingering of joy – the way a phrase of song runs through my mind for days after it has been sung, the warmth of touch remaining after a hug, the smile that stays on my face even though the telephone conversation has ended.    

It’s a Wonderful Life

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November 14, 2012, my 72nd birthday.

I have made it my custom for years now to give myself birthday gifts which no one else can give me.  I cherish the hugs and surprises from my husband and children, love every phone call and email, and smile all over with my granddaughters’  “Happy Birthday, Granmary!”  But no matter how else I spend my time having a happy day, I give myself music – this is the time when I begin playing my favorite Christmas albums, beginning with James Galway’s Christmas Carol and going on to thrill to an English Handbell Choir, Renaissance pieces by the Tallis Scholars, Handel’s Messiah, and John Denver’s Muppet Christmas, which was the one my little boys loved to listen to when they decorated the Christmas tree.  It still makes them laugh and we still play it when the tree is staggering to stand up and be dressed.  but I also play Paul Hillyer’s Home to Thanksgiving.  And in the last couple of years I have added a gift to myself.  I write a list to go along with Hillyer’s music.  This is a list of sacred ordinary things from throughout my year and is a way for me to move toward the celebration of Thanksgiving in our family, which also is the springboard for Advent.  Since I keep a gratitude journal where I record 5 things I am grateful for each morning, I simply make my birthday list from that journal, choosing 2 or 3 entries for each month in the past year.  Just remembering and writing these things is a reminder of hope and joy. What a gift!

 Gratitude

In my 72nd year, these are things for which I give thanks:

greens from our garden on the table with peas and cornbread

time to curl up with a book

walking around the lake on a clear, cold day

pain management for Joe

silent room, dark except for Christmas tree lights

Christ, who came, is come, and will come

warming my aching fingers on my coffee cup

my son taking down the Christmas tree and making our dinner

safety during a storm

winter sunshine after the winds

puttering and pruning in the garden

rainbows on the floor from the prism in leaded glass at our front door

the buttery taste of winter squash

memories of babies and boys

my husband’s gentle spirit

morning quiet time

13 bean soup

settling, being settled

deep colors of roses blooming in January

mockingbird singing on top of our rose arbor

“hope is that thing with feathers that perches on the soul and sings….”

Sabbath heart

a perfectly timed call from a dear friend

hoping in, not for

the poetry of Luci Shaw

my nursing education and experience

books on hold at the library

planting Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato seeds

quiet – no rushing to fill with noise

still – no rushing to “do”

Places to Play and Pray

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Everybody needs beauty, as well as bread

.Places to play in and pray in

Where nature may heal and give strength

to body and soul.

~ John Muir

November

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Autumn leaves go very near the top of my favorite things list.  I grew up a few hundred miles north of where I now live, just far enough away for seasonal change to be much more apparent.  I remember watching for the colors to appear when temperatures dropped.  After the first frost, scarlet Sumac, yellowing Sycamore and Sweet Gum were blazing drifts of foliage that popped out of the evergreen forests of Pine and Cedar along East Texas roadsides. A few years in Oklahoma are remembered as having beautiful fall colors.  Some time living in and near Dallas when our boys were little brought us plenty of pretty leaves and fallen ones to pile up and scuffle through.   My sweet niece sent me pictures of the brilliant confetti of New Jersey leaves just last week before Hurricane Sandy caused so much destruction in their area.  I am grateful she and her family are safe, but know that so many others are ravaged from the brutal storm.  Winds didn’t just blow away the beautiful leaves, whole trees were uprooted.

Swirling in the mix of my concern and prayers, I have thought how glad I am that Jen saw the beauty of those leaves and shared the images with me.  In reality, I have lived a good deal of my life where the autumn colors were little changed, or at most subtle – South Texas, Southern California, Indonesia.  For twenty years now, at home here on the South Texas Gulf Coast, I need to look more closely at the gifts of Autumn.  I love the yellow leaves that swirl from Chinaberry and Elms, the little vermillion flags waving from Hawthorne and Crepe Myrtle. But most of all, I treasure the leaves that fall from my Magnolia tree, bronzed and gilded on one side that is lacquered shiny, and soft sueded brown on the underside.  Magnolia leaves were my playthings when I was a child.  A bank of Magnolia leaves graced our wedding.  I stood in front of a Magnolia tree in Bogor on the island of Java.  As I walk in these days leading to my turning 72, the turning of these magnificent leaves is with me again.  I am thankful.