Laura's Garden

     On May 8 and 9 the Atlanta Botanical Garden will sponsor its traditional Mother's Day tour of gardens in Atlanta. My mother would be so proud to know that my sister Laura was asked to have her garden on this year's tour. What an enormous honor for Laura and what a tribute to the garden she has created at her home.

    In fact, it was even Laura's home that was the featured photo on the poster.

She told me even weeks ago that people were beginning to stop in front of her house to admire her garden and, if she's there working in the yard, to tell her how beautiful it is. Maybe at the time of the photo the front yard was "finished," but I know Laura has worked and worked in the back yard, the main garden, even since then. She worked, she said, six hours a day for weeks. Like her granddaughter, I wondered what she could be doing all day long in the garden. Weeding and planting I understand. Working on drip irrigation is a huge chore in my garden, but she doesn't need that in Georgia. 

What she said was, "There's the digging and the soil amending, the planting and pruning, the feeding and watering, the moving and moving back. To say nothing of the dreaming, planning, fussing, and cajoling that goes on."

    She loves having become intimately familiar with every inch of ground in her yard. She loves having the close association with her working partner, Nature. When the night temperature suddenly plunged into the twenties, she despaired of losing flowers she had thought would be ready for the Mother's Day tour, but she knew it was up to Nature. The damage was less than she had feared; the garden recovered as though there had been no killing frost, and Nature smiled at her efforts again.

    I am sure there will be other gorgeous gardens on the tour, but I am also certain that hers will be the talk of the town because it isn't just the flowers in bloom and the graceful arrangements of trees, ferns, and bushes that make her garden a joy. It's the special imaginative touches that make the difference. Many gardeners might have a garden gnome keeping watch somewhere, as she does, but I doubt that anywhere else will you find a fairy house, built for the third partner in what Laura calls the triumvirate of her garden: herself, Nature, and the fairy godmother. It is made of sticks and pine bark, with a moss roof, tiny windows, and a chimney of red pebbles caulked with lichen. In front of it is a tiny piano for the fairy to play music to the bees and butterflies and a badminton court for a game when her fairy friends come over. The walkway from the gate to the house is lined with crystals and blue and purple shiny rocks.

    Any garden is beautiful. Laura's garden is also an enchantment.

    Laura has gardened this year with May 8 and 9 in mind, that all flowers—iris, foxglove, peonies (from our grandmother's garden), snapdragons, roses, zinnias—

will be in full bloom on those days, given cooperation from the other two parts of the triumvirate, of course. (The fairy godmother is sure to help. Nature is the finicky partner.) Laura has assured me that a host of other flowers will be in bloom when I come to visit in June—black-eyed Susans, summer phlox, alstroemeria, Japanese asters.

    What I look forward to most is the new "sisters' nook" she created at the back of the garden in a spot previously left on its own.

She had planned to put in all woodland natives but, she told me, when $100 worth of plants only filled a tiny space, she pulled stuff out of the compost (lenten roses and Japanese painted ferns) and transplanted ferns from her house on Lake Lanier. Adding a chair and small table turned it into her favorite place to sit with a cup of tea when she finally takes a break from hauling, planting, composting, digging, and weeding. With a second chair at the table, I dream of having a cup of tea with my sister in her gorgeous garden when I come to visit. And if we are quiet after our excited chatter and my exclamations about how beautiful her garden is, maybe we can hear the fairy godmother playing Chopin at her piano.

To read Laura's own words about her garden, go to her post, "Sprucing up the Garden," on naturebasedblog.com.

Considering the Counsel of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Forget the blunders and absurdities of yesterday,
Emerson advises; tomorrow is a new day for doing better.
His counsel is not suited to everyone.
Putin, I think, goes to bed enraged at being thwarted 
and awakes inflamed by renewed vengeance.
Hitler must have faced each new day buoyed with pride
at the cleansing of jews from Aryan Germany.
I can see Mladic at the mirror twirling his mustache with 

            satisfaction
the day after he commanded a Muslim genocide.
I think the Idaho logger who kills wolves because, he says,
"It's so much fun to shoot 'em,"
wakes up still chuckling at yesterday's fun.
And did the crowds who witnessed lynchings in the American 

                South
arise the next morning repulsed by racial hatred?
Thanks, Emerson, for the advice to consider each day
an opportunity to do better than we did yesterday
but I fear it's based on a false assumption:
that we are trying to do good in the first place.

Moving the Maple—Again

    One year, when I was a child, my siblings and I gave our mother, for Mother's Day, a Japanese red maple. She planted it at the bottom of the hill on the front lawn, where it spread its wine-red, delicately pointed leaves over the grass. After my parents died, my sister Laura dug up some shoots at the foot of the tree and cultivated them into tiny saplings she gave to each of her siblings.

    When I brought my little tree from Georgia to Oregon, I stuck it temporarily in a pot on the deck with my flower boxes. It did well there for the first couple of years. Then it must have outgrown its pot because it stopped growing. I think the deer might have stripped it of its tiny leaves more than once, too. After several years—I'm embarrassed to say how many—when Mike had become part of my life, he dug a deep hole on the hill below my house, where I envisioned my Japanese maple spreading its arms over my yard the way its mother had done at my childhood home. Mike built a hogwire cage around it to keep it safe from deer.

    However, now I had a problem keeping it watered. Every year it put out leaves, but it remained a pygmy.

    Last fall I visited a friend on a farm near Portland. Kelly has an astonishing garden, and I noticed a maple tree in a large pot in her yard, growing luxuriously. Maybe what I needed was to put my maple tree in a massive pot on the deck, where I could keep it watered. Kelly said, "I have a pot you can have" and brought out a beautiful and very large ceramic pot.

She and her teen-age sons managed to get it in my car, and when I got home, a helper friend lugged it to the end of my deck. Then I filled it with dirt, dug up the maple tree, planted it there, and waited for spring leaves.

    But no. When I proudly showed another gardening friend my newly planted maple tree, she said, "Oh, but it's too hot in that place." It was easier to replant the tree in another pot than to move this big one, now full of dirt, so I bought an oak wine half-barrel, filled it with dirt, and replanted the Japanese maple under a madrone tree, next to my rhododendron. The ceramic pot, still in its spot at the corner of the deck, now sports a beautiful flowering plant.

    My father used to quote a poem: "I had a wooden whistle. But it would'n whistle. I had a steel whistle. But it steel would'n whistle. I had a lead whistle. But it steel would'n lead me whistle. I had a tin whistle. Now I tin whistle!"

    That's the way I feel with my maple. I tried it on the deck, and it would'n whistle. I tried it in the yard, and it steel would'n whistle. I put it in a big pot on the deck, and it steel would'n lead me whistle. Now that it's in a shady spot just off the deck where I can water it frequently, will it grow and put out lovely lacy burgundy-red leaves? Now tin I whistle?

I will, of course, put the hogwire cage around it again to keep the deer out.

Laura also dug up the mother tree and replanted it in her yard. Today it looks like this:

Love Your Library!

    Years ago, when Josephine County libraries closed for lack of funds, the news went national. At that time it was unthinkable for a community not to have a library.

    Forbes (which, we should note, is an economics, not a humanities, publication) recently printed an article to the effect that libraries are no longer needed and that Amazon, of all things, should replace them with retail outlets.

    Preposterous! This suggestion obviously comes from someone who is either wealthy enough to buy all their books (doubtful—not the wealth part; the desire for books part) or so device-reliant they don't read books (probable) and certainly someone out of touch with their not-virtual community. Librarians, public officials, and ordinary citizens responded with such outrage that Forbes tucked its tail between its legs and deleted the article from its web site.

    I hope they learned their lesson.

    When Josephine County had a levy in an attempt to keep the libraries open, one of my students said she wasn't going to vote for it. When I asked why, she shrugged and said, "I don't use the library. Why should I pay for it?"

    That's something of the attitude of the Forbes writer. Neither person had a notion about what libraries do for our communities. Libraries are community centers in many places, not least in the Applegate. They provide internet access in rural areas, like mine, where internet service is unreliable and in many cases unattainable. They offer tech help, ebooks, audio books, a library of things, book club packets, and interesting, entertaining, informative, and often important programs. In times of climate crisis, libraries serve as cooling centers. And they have books! Real books, books you can hold in your hand, whose pages you can turn, whose shelves you can browse. If you think libraries aren't worth your taxes, check out the one in your neighborhood.

    In past centuries innovative architecture went into cathedrals. Today, the architectural beauties are often our libraries, which I think is a wonderful commentary on what we feel is important. The Seattle Library, for instance, is a Rem Koolhaas creation and is stunningly beautiful. Other libraries around the world have brilliant architecture. Google "best library architecture" and take a look. 

    I am proud of our libraries. I do use my library—I am on the board of its Friends group—but even people who don't use them should be proud of them.