Christmas Day, 2005
Quiet today. During the past few days family and friends have come and gone. It was the usual delicious
holiday hubbub. They're with in-laws now and other places. So, satisfied, peaceful and alone,
I go for a solitary walk.
The wind has come up, but the sun is warm. The brown, crisp leaves of oak and hickory and dogwood,
those that were so recently golden, red, and yellow, float down now, drifting toward earth, adding
to the crackling carpet already underfoot.
Time to prune the peach tree and the rose bushes, I guess. They've gone sprawling all over the place.
Indeed, the whole flower garden, so recently lush with blooms and color, dense with butterflies and
hummingbirds, is now, after the several freezes we've had, looking shabby and forlorn. How could it all
change so much so fast?
Time to go to work on it, I guess. Time to pull up the dried stalks of wildflowers. I'll take them someplace
different and fling them around, scattering the seeds in new places. That's how I've spread this undisciplined
little garden around so much over the past few years.
And I guess it's time for mulching again. This year I'm going to try using mulch from the
mushroom farm in Madisonville. I've heard it's rich and good for the plants. I have to be careful though,
not to put too much too deep, lest I bury the seeds of the wild flowers--blue bonnets, red poppies,
salvia, sensitive plant, and all the rest.
I love the way they all take turns. First the narcissus, daffodills, irises and that lot, and then the
bluebonnets, followed by azaleas and that yellow thing the bees love, then poppies, gardenias,
and then it's stand back, because here they all come through the whole summer. Yellow and red
and purple and blue and white. Then in the fall the camelias, toad lilies, mums... I couldn't
begin to name them all, but what a joy to watch them come and go, come and go, season after season,
many all sharing the same space, a few at a time, taking turns.
My friend says I'm a lineage keeper, even of the plants, and it's true. I walk through the garden and think
"there's Dick Doncheski's iris," or "grandmother's milk and honey lily," or "the rose bush that Seth brought me."
I've scattered offspring of my mother's day lilies over three states in the past forty years. By now, not only my
grandchildren but many friends point to those golden beauties when they bloom and remark on "Glenda's
mother's day lilies." They are all hardy lilies, more than sixty years in my family, and of course, older than
that from before they came to us.
All of them, that is, except the new one, the prize day lily, that special one that was hybridized just a few years ago
by Rebecca's dad, the horticulturist, in memory of Sheila and Rich's son, Kenneth. Some of Ken's ashes
are scattered in the woods not too far from the new "Ken of Arlington" day lily that blooms so beautifully
in my garden.
Nurturing all these adventurous and flambouyant and unpredictable plants, thinking about where they came
from, sharing a little space with them, a space carved out of the dense forest all around, gives me great joy.
To touch the earth, to watch through rain and drought, through winter's freeze and summer heat,
to add my little bit of enthusaistic and sometimes careless touch in this grand, ongoing cycle of
beauty and abundance, of rich diversity... Ahhh. How blessed and how grateful I am.
But ... I wonder, now, how did my mind get itself off onto all those blooming flowers, while I'm walking here
in the winter's stripped down stage, only brown dry leaves, however beautiful, underfoot, and so little blooming?
I guess the flowers have tamed me, as it says in "The Little Prince." I love them, so I'm theirs. I think of them, even
in winter.
Time to get out the garden catalogues, shop for a couple of new bulbs here and another pack of seeds there.
However cold the weather next week, it's not long until spring. It'll be too late to mulch then, heaven knows!
The cycle of life, the turn of seasons.
I think today, on this solitary walk, also of all the people in my life and in my lineage. Blooming in their own ways.
May they all be blessed, as they too move through cycles of chage and renewal.
May we all--people and plants--be blessed, peaceful, and free from harm in the new year. That's my prayer
on this quiet walk today.
Glenda Taylor
Earthsprings
Christmas Day, 2005
