On the last day of freedom before our sheltering-in-place began, Libby and I made our way over to Mount Vernon to soak in some sunshine—both the actual rays on this first spring Saturday of the year and the sunny, yellow fields of daffodils.
Sunny girl.Surrounded by beauty.Ruffly petals.
The farms weren’t open to the public, so we had a socially distant lunch on the dirt in the middle of the daffodil field. Heaven.
We also stopped by Christianson’s, one of the best local nurseries in the area, for some garden inspiration. There we greeted doves, walked lazily through greenhouse after greenhouse and purchased a few tiny pots to plant violets in.
My favorite propagation house.Doves are also sheltering.Inspiration for our violet pots.
The next day, having spent all that time soaking up beauty, we tackled some much needed weeding AND planted seeds—poppies and sweet peas direct-seeded outside, while a host of others, such as yarrow, hollyhocks, snapdragons, foxgloves, started indoors.
Just a few days later and already tiny sprouts are popping out of the soil!
Hollyhocks coming up.
In these days surrounded by deaths—now climbing into the hundreds in Washington state—it’s good to see life unfolding before my eyes.
Perhaps this pandemic will bring about one thing of beauty: everyone’s gardens will be lush this summer after days spent at home, in isolation, working the soil.
Winter is on its way out and I am counting down the days until spring blooms.
Our jardin is steadily being prepped for planting seeds: I’m slowly getting rid of major weeds and an invasive ground cover plant that I hate. After I finish adding compost to the soil next weekend, we are going to plant some of our first seeds of the year: sweet peas, nasturtiums, poppies and zinnias. Inside, we’re going to start some snapdragon seeds.
For now, though, I’m looking for garden inspiration from the small pops of color that surround me. A visit to the butterflies on my birthday, a trip to the Garden Show in Seattle and the unknown buds that are popping up around the garden.
Nothing better than a tropical butterfly room on a cold winter day.
While we plan our flower garden we are also trying to determine natural ways to deal with pests like deer. Hopefully most of our flowers will be deer-resistant—like foxglove, snapdragon, poppies, zinnias, yarrow and hollyhocks—and we’re planning on creating toxic-flower-barriers by planting them around those that might be a bit more vulnerable, like sunflowers.
Color inspiration from the Garden Show.
We recently planted two bare-root roses (one climbing peach-colored and one pale pink) and I’m excited to see them grow, but terrified of how they might get munched on by deer.
According to a recent article in the New York Times (Titled “On Staten Island, Feeling Overrun”) there are an estimated 30 million deer across the country that eat the equivalent of 15 million metric tons of vegetation — greater than the combined weight of all the aircraft carriers in the Navy.
I’m convinced half of those deer live in Port Townsend.
These have since been eaten.
The previous owner of our house planted some tulip bulbs, which started to grow only to be munched on by deer. Despite the sad tulips, I’m staying positive that the deer will leave most of our garden alone. All we can do is stick to toxic flowers and hope for the best!
But this week was one of the worst yet. Day after day of unrelenting rainfall left me feeling like I might drown in the growing mud puddle surrounding my house.
So when the clouds parted Friday afternoon and I saw blue sky for the first time in many, many days, it was like feeling several pounds lighter. Spring will come as it always does.
The first blue day in a long, long time.
On Saturday, Libby and I went for a walk at Chetzemoka park in town, getting inspiration from a tiny daisy that was blooming in the middle of a soggy, grassy knoll. There, a tree has already begun to bloom, making me feel like the pressure is on to get the yard ready for spring planting.
A sunny spot. Blooming already?
On Sunday, I got out in the yard and began assessing our soil. Fallen leaves and tree debris has made for a nice mulchy layer to add nutrients to the soil.
Planter boxes we plan to fill with flowers.
Our winter blooming Hellebores bring a spot of color to the yard—a ray of sunshine to come home to on the days when cloud cover and early sunsets make the entire day seem dark.
Leafy, yellow and bright. New buds joining the blooms.
And signs of the coming spring are all around: I trimmed off last year’s seed pods from the peony tree, where new buds are forming. They look like clasped hands.
What color will the blooms be?
What’s exciting about our new home is we don’t fully know what is out in the garden yet. We know there are peonies, but don’t know what color. We see buds forming on the rhody, but aren’t sure when it will bloom. There’s a bare shrub that could (hopefully!) be a lilac. And shoots are springing from the dark earth that are likely the first stages of some irises and crocosmias.
Slowly, it will reveal itself to us and we hope to add even more color, with a plan to plant sunflowers, snapdragons, sweet peas, foxgloves, Queen Anne’s Lace, dahlias and much much more.
We have already planted a few daffodil bulbs around the yard. I keep looking at the spots where we planted them, imagining them waking up from their dormancy under there. Hopeful that they’ll grow, bloom and bring brightness and color. Waiting, waiting.
We don’t wake up with the sunrise to get out in the garden. It’s still winter, we’re still young and waking up slowly and sweetly is too lovely to give up.
Besides, we know that just as much can be done in the warmth of a setting afternoon sun as in the morning.
In the midst of winter, the earth is still cold but at our seaside home it is damp and soft, making it easy to dig our trowels in, pull up weeds with our bare hands and plant our hopes.
After moving into a new house in Port Townsend last November, Libby and I are spending January planning our flower garden for the summer.
The yard art we decided to keep.
Here are some of the first tasks on a journey which I hope will lead to a blooming paradise this summer:
Figuring out what to do with the yard art left by the home’s previous owner.
Planting what we have brought with us from previous places, like a pot of fever few, a twiggy mint plant and some new birthday hellebores.
Organizing our garden bench
Pulling the weeds, getting rid of the ground cover we hate, mulching and preparing the dirt for planting.
Deciding on our seeds and garden design
Using a sick day to organize seed packets.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how planting things is a bit like telling someone you like them: you’re putting something out there that might get dug up and eaten by a bird. It might just stay there, not doing anything at all but eventually molding back into the earth.
But it might grow, slowly reaching out of the depths of the earth into the spring sun, getting taller and taller and finally blooming into something sweet and beautiful.
It’s a dilemma: wanting to ride a motorcycle to work, but also wanting to wear a sundress because it has finally gone above 65 degrees and I can reasonably have bare legs in that weather (kind of).
My solution: leggings under dress. Jacket on top. Helmet smashing my curls, but that’s ok. Dress flying in the wind on the way to work.
There’s nothing particularly pastoral about this imagery. In fact, there’s nothing particularly pastoral about our world these days. But riding around town reminds me that in my little corner—this tiny edge of our country known as the Quimper Peninsula—the pastoral (the fields, the shepherdess and her sheep, the smell of hay in the warm sun) is the dream. The idealized rural life exists here and in the summer I get to partake: lying on a picnic blanket amidst fields of lavender, petting goats and watching teenage turkeys waddle around a farm. Picking flowers from the county right-of-way and delivering them to someone special, or having them be brought to me in what is now (only in my mind) a Floral Delivery Competition.
My favorite lavender is the light purple variety.
Lying there in the sun I wonder, what is happiness? Is this it? Picking one ripe raspberry and giving it to someone to enjoy? Or is it knowing that out there in the world, someone is writing about you in a three-page letter with perfect handwriting?
I’ve always felt two things about happiness: one is that it doesn’t exist and is something that people strive for, but can never really obtain. The other is that it’s eating a pink cookie.
My former professor (This is Bragging and Name Dropping) Zadie Smith has an excellent essay on the difference between joy and pleasure, parts of which I have always identified with:
“All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.”
For me, replace “pineapple popsicle” with “pink cookie.”
There is anxiety in happiness (joy, pleasure, whatever you want to call it). For example, does the fact that I am happy right now mean that I will be sad later? Should that affect my current state of happiness? When summer ends, when my idealization of the pastoral scene crumbles and is revealed to be a saturated field of mud and a smelly barn, will I suddenly be lost?
A smooch.
Zadie writes it beautifully:
“Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily. This is a new problem. Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life, perhaps six, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.”
My fear is that I have an addiction to summer. The memory of it sometimes destroys the rest of the year, although it does spurn me on to keep living until the next summer. But living just for summer is like living just for the weekend. What about the other five days? I could just move to a tropical location. Or maybe I am actually just missing out on the beauties of fall and winter, which I have recently been told are just as good in their own ways.
July 31 approaches. I am happily riding my motorcycle around town in a dress. I hate that the days get shorter from now on. I want to pick all the flowers off of all the right-of-ways in the entire county. But I am also going to make a small pact with myself, to continue to find beauty, joy and the pastoral perfection in the Dark Days of winter.
Pastoral
Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” is about death for sure. But let me take some of it out of context and fit it to the mood that I am in at this particular moment, where “being too happy in thine happiness” is running through my head on repeat.
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
At 9 a.m. Saturday morning, Bertram Levy, a short, mustachioed sailor wearing the beret he is known to wear got in line at the Northwest Maritime Center to sign up for the annual Shipwrights’ Regatta.
In front of him were two novice sailors — young men from the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, with zero sailing experience besides a love for woodworking and a desire to get out on the water.
Bertram had raced every year since the thing started 28 years ago. Minutes later the veteran sailor and the two newbies were circled up.
“Meet at the end of the D-dock. My boat is called ‘Able,’” Bertram said.
Bertram and Joel
Anyone who shows up to the Skipper’s meeting gets on a boat in the Port Townsend Shipwrights’ Regatta.
This makes for some interesting crews. Old friends, strangers about to become friends.
I nicknamed this crew, “Pink Hat & Old-timer Eating Sandwich”
But the February race isn’t about winning (for some). It’s more of a race for the locals to beat the person who beat them last year.
It’s also a chance to show off your handiwork. Many of the boats in the race were wooden, the sails and rigging done by local artisans.
Emiliano, of The Artful Sailor. At this point I had water on my lens.
On the “Able,” Bertram and his two novices lined up for the race. As the starting horn rang out, the southeast wind blew Bertram’s beret into the water.
No problem. He reached into the sea, and fished it out again.
Maybe next time I’ll join a crew.
(Some of these photos and the story of the race winners were published in the Port Townsend Leader.)
These late night thoughts are sponsored by the colors of autumn
Here’s something I think about a lot: I’m 23 years old. If nothing crazy happens, I might live for another 70 years. What will those 70 years look like?
Smoke-filled skies? Aliens? Lifespans shortening? The rich getting even richer? The poor getting even poorer? The orcas living? Or dying? It’s hard not to imagine the worst. Especially when some things are the worst.
But then… last Sunday. I found the best. In the form of helpers. Tree-planters. Earth-carers.
Otherwise known as a group of Admiralty Audubon members. Some well over the age of 50, and still pulling Scotch broom out of the earth like it was no problem. Bending down, getting dirty, digging holes and planting roses, pines and firs. All so that my fellow young people and I can breathe a little easier in the next 70 years.
At Kah Tai park, which I accidentally spelled as “Quai Tai park” in the paper last week. To much ridicule.
I asked if I could take pictures for the paper.
“You working on a Sunday?” They asked. “Lucky for you, we’ve got an extra shovel!”
She knew it was highly toxic. She picked it up anyway.
“Come over here, get a picture of this Monterey Cypress, it’s going to be huge.”
“Look at this Amanita mushroom, isn’t it beautiful?”
…
A lot of shade gets thrown on baby boomers by my generation. Rightly so, in some respects (hello, housing crisis and 2008 financial recession).
However, I recently moved to the county with the oldest population in Washington State and I keep meeting helpers. Nearly every day, whether in the form of tree planters, green crab finders, creek restorers.
Over and over I also hear similar advice: there are people out there working hard, with new technology, new research, and new energy to help the earth. Instead of getting bogged down in nightmares about the Great Pacific Garbage patch, look at what’s happening.
And go plant a tree. They eat carbon dioxide for breakfast.
Lily Haight 