I have to admit that enjoying gardening as much as I do has surprised me. Is it an age thing? Wait! I'm not
that old. But I don't remember being as "into' gardening in my twenties, (though I did garden - sporadically) and definitely not in my teens.
But now? Well, I'm not ashamed to say that the garden is my favorite place to be. You can have your trendy night clubs and your foreign beach holidays (I was never into those anyway) - nothing makes my heart glow like the emergence of
tender dicotyledons or the first unfolding of a new blossom; better than unveiling any work of art. The garden is natures own gallery.
The first (of many, I hope) Californian Poppy blossomed last Saturday at 2.30pm. How do I know the precise time? One moment it was sitting there in its green Wee Willy Winky hat, then a band of golden orange appeared at the bottom, and whilst I went to get the camera, the hat must have popped off, leaving the petals glowing back at the afternoon sun. And here's the Wee Willy Winky hat. Notice the one still to pop to the right of my pinky finger.
There was another surprise that day in the garden. As I was picking our daily quota of oranges, (boy those things are easy to overdose on!) I found the strangest looking bird's nest. It looked more like an old woolly sock - about 8 inches long and about 2.5 inches wide. What kind of bird lives here? A tiny one but not a humming bird. I refuse to guess as my
last bird guess was so off base! Any suggestions welcome - would that be some good old fashioned tweeting perhaps?
It does look very cozy. In fact, more cozy that the human-built bird-house. It has a resident spider, or at least a web across the front door, waiting as if to be cut like a ribbon at a grand opening ceremony. No inhabitants yet but what can you expect? Cute as it is, it's not quite
real bird-made
estate!
And then, there's just more and more blossoms. Check out this spoon-petaled daisy one of the
Master Gardeners gave me. She brought it in to give away as she had a load of them and had decided to give it to the first person to admire it - and that was yours truly! Not only is it nice to be nice, but sometimes you get free stuff too.
The anemones are a riot of different colors - I'm not good at having a color coordinated garden. My philosophy is that all flower colors are gorgeous - why be selective!
Especially when some flowers are more than one color. Here is a tulip that spent
two months in my fridge before being planted. This is the first, again, I hope, of many.
As the sun dies in the Western Pacific, in its death throes at the end of another day, it cloaks my garden in golden rays . Like a good writer, it promises more good things in the next chapter that tomorrow is.
As I wander round my garden feeling a chill as night steals softly in, I'm reminded of a quote that I found as a teenager, (perhaps I wasn't quite a waster back then after all) but I don't know who the author of the quote was (okay - so maybe I was a waster - but I had fun!) ...someone famous no doubt, whom I should know...
"To see the world in a grain of sand,
And heaven in a wildflower,
To hold infinity in the palm of my hand,
And eternity in an hour..."
Or something like that!
Byddi Lee
