The Fairy Campground

The "Big" campground in progress...build it, and they will come.

A real campground is developing in my garden.  Last year when I had a big fir tree felled, I had a tremendous amount of wood to make use of.  After having cords and cords split and stacked, there were still many many rounds of wood to find purpose for.  I did, however, know what I wanted to do with the base of this huge tree, about 4 ft in diameter.  I had the arborist leave the trunk 3ft tall...then cut at ground level.  I knew it would live again in my instantly conceived campground as the "Giant's Picnic Table".  Getting it rolled down the slope to the newly cleared area by the creek was quite an undertaking, but once there, on a prepared site, overlooking the fire pit, the creek and the imagined rustic gazebo, the place took on a life of its own.
When I walk down there now, still a work in progress, I can "feel" the space as another magical place I can travel to on a whim.

This campground thing has deep roots in my childhood, too, another element to "plant" in mon paradis.  Camping in the big tree woods in California (Yosemite, San Bernardino Mountains, Sequoia National Park) remain vivid in my memory.  Girl Scout camp, scavenger hunts, pancakes and bacon in a cast iron skillet over an open campfire, STARS by the kabillions, the scent and crunch of pine needles underfoot...bliss.  Sadly, my first husband found camping repugnant, having had a bad first experience,  so I never got to share my wonder of the woods with my kids.  Now... now, Gramma, you get to share it with your granddaughter!  Yea!
Kali loves to tromp down there with me, or with her friends to show them "our campground".  We discuss where the swing will hang next summer, how to position the tent for the "view" (she doesn't know it yet, but if I have my way, it all be a rustic gazebo), and how big the fire pit should be.  We consider how to get enough stones down there to make a pebble "beach".  The look on her face while we discuss these things tops my "Life's Satisfactions List".

 We watch and wait for fairies...

Sometimes what seems like a bright idea can turn into a quite an undertaking.  Ignorance and innocence can partner up ("I had no idea"), clash and bang about for a while, and then serendipitously become something wonderful.  This little project is hardly a pimple on the great thinker's brain, but for me, this holiday season, I was taken by pleasant surprise on a ride I hadn't anticipated.  I decided to create a miniature fairy campground for Kali to play "in" during the winter when we couldn't go outside.  The idea seemed so perfect for all the reasons revealed here...what I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I would meld so completely into the project, that I would spend countless hours and dollars gathering the perfect elements for the thing, and that it would become an important recollection of the feeling of wonder and delight I experienced so many years ago.

The real campground is about 40 ft by 30ft, the miniature is 2ft by 2ft.  Somehow, I managed to include "The Big Wood Lookout"  (a long-deceased wild clematis root), "The Mossy Wood" (birch "trunks" and lichen), "The Log Footbridge" (another clematis vine), "The Golden Butterfly Tree" (An old tree ivy branch), and "The Dream Arbor" (Cornus sericea from the creek).  I embellished the landscape with bits of bark, pebbles and mosses from our big garden, too.  "The Potager of the Impossibles" (Of course fairies can grow cockles, and polka-dotted red mushrooms and pumpkins the size of gumdrops...)  This turned out to be quite a Christmas gift...for me and my granddaughter ("It's awesome, Gramma!")

The Fairy Campground...build it and they will come.

cat nap

It's cold enough now to send me shivering inside...fingers and toes numb, unable and unwilling to touch the clammy mud and muck out there.  Wonderfully, however, there is a winter garden to enjoy, and a lovely sense that the scene will grow and expand over the years as my sensibilities sink deeper and deeper into this earth.

The cornus sericea 'midwinter fire' which I boldly coppiced for the first time last March, sprang up beautifully and is now a lovely presence in the third terrace, blushing deeper as the cold increases, having already illuminated the space with a clear golden crown a month ago.  She begs for company.

The red clover cover crop tossed in the potager has sprung up into a lovely emerald carpet, surrounded by the bay topiaries, the parsley ruff, the alpine strawberries and my under-construction wattle borders.  The chartreuse urns, though empty of their summer abundance now, help give the place the permanent presence I wanted for this important part of my world.  It looks grand from all the windows into the rear gardens.

I have strung the cornus alternifolia with tiny white lights and Queen Katsura 'pendula' as well.  Suddenly the black hole outside the windows at night have become a magical fairyland.  My neighbors across the creek have lighted a tree in answer.  The dark wood now sings.

I still have a few chores outside, a few vulnerable plants to heel in or haul in or tuck in...tools that need attention...yet things have slowed down so much, nothing seems urgent anymore.  The moles who wreaked  havoc in my lawn last month have finally settled down in their burrows, hopefully not amongst some vulnerable roots. The garden is snuggled in for a long winter's nap.

cacophony in color

Good heavens, what have I unleashed?  Last fall I was so worked up about the changing colors I was experiencing in my garden and all over town (it was hard to cross the Fremont Bridge without ogling the hillsides of Forest Park and Northeast Portland...jumping glorious), I now have twice as many (no maybe three times as many) amazing players to wiggle over with visual joy (and the katsuras smell good too!).  And then there's the dancers still in pots, moving around the dance floor, looking for the right partner to show off their dresses (scintillating, somber, vibrating, sunny, amethyst, amber, ruby, ochre, ruddy, merlot, incendiary, infernal, smoldering, glowing, HOT).
Everyone is saying the confluences of weather conditions is making this a particularly brilliant Fall...okay, lovely...but as I continue to furnish my garden with color and maximize dancing partners, I am astounded at the party going on outside my windows right now. The 80 ft ash trees down garden at the creek are still fluttering golden beyond the firs and spruce.  Cornus sericea and bird plums, lend orange-reds and burgundy.  In my neighbor's otherwise junkyard, an old green gage plum gives up a chartreuse backlight to the dark green fig (and in the foreground of this scene, my queen katsura pendula elegantly anchors the Long Bed).
I painted my shed chartreuse, ochre and gold...it always makes me smile.  Right now, this moment, the shed looks like a castle in a Crayola wood...cornus kousa chinensis is appropriately chinese lacquer red.  Viburnum plicatum and cornus circinatum embrace like an amber shawl the west facing window of the structure.  Acer palmatum 'Matsu Kaze' and 'Utsu Semi' play at their feet.  'Crimson Queen' cozys up behind 'Matsu Kaze', making the both of them well-dressed celebrities.  Out of view but not far from mind a.p. aconitifolium is dancing (peacocks!) outside the dining room window, every day a new shade, a new mood, leaf by leaf, to enthrall me.

Cornus kousa chinensis

Cercidiphyllum japonicum pendula

The shed castle

The west-facing border

Acer japonicum aconitifolium

acer rufinerve 'Winter Gold' ?

acer palmatum 'Matsu Kaze', 'Crimson Queen' and viburnum plicatum in the foreground

One can only live in the moment in the garden.  The bulbs I planted last week are only distant hum in the background, quietly waiting for the crazy love I'll no doubt write about them in a few months...but now, glorious now, c'est automne!

a mission

I have started several "essays" that get my juices flowing.  I am eager to continue, but the threads of thought tend to weave amongst these writings, and want to intermingle.  I apparently cannot write separately about "why I must garden" from "what I must grow" or "what I cook" or "who taught me or inspired me" or by the way, why it's important to share this.

Today's realization is that there are lots of folks like me, who take supreme pleasure in nurturing the earth, reaping her bounty, and sharing with others.  It occurs to me that many more would achieve awesome satisfaction when an impluse (gardening just because you enjoy it) becomes a tangible manifestation of who you are.  (This takes me back to an earlier note that identifies one's garden as autobiographical).

I've been cruising the web for people who garden with such intent.  It's not so easy to describe.  I'd like to document the influences that motivate us to grow what we do.  I have begun to focus squarely on African American gardeners, since this is what I am viscerally connected to.  What I've found so far are interesting papers and blogs on the historical connections we have to our heritage in broad terms, mostly food or medicinals, scholarly and interesting, but not the individual stories that make up the whole.  I suspect that the places I want to go in my mission is directly connected to personal experiences...not only the fact that crowder peas came on the slave ships, but which crowder pea cultivar did my Gramma Annis plant on her farm in North Carolina, when did she plant it, harvest it and cook it, and...whether or not I can find the seed, grow it, and make jambalaya with it all the way out here in Portland Oregon!

My granddaughter requested my gumbo for her birthday party.  Thirty people got to taste it, and marvel at the complexity and savory experience.  Then we recorded the recipe together for her Mother's Day cookbook gift to her mother.   There is so much more in that pot than the ingredients...although the thyme, bay leaves, parsley and sassafras will come from my garden, my mission is to record the essence of the pot, not only the ingredients.  The history that made it, as well as the hands that prepare it.  

There are many African American cookbooks out there, but I want to write from the gardener's perspective...and not just about edibles.  Mama Prince's mother had some amazing dutch iris beds...what did she do to make them so fine?  Mama Prince is still here to tell me.

preparing for company

At this point in my life, I regularly council myself, and anyone else who will listen, that I have removed stress from my life.  This includes giving a care about what others may think about me...after all, if my standards are met, by implication, I've done my best and can do no more.  The problem with this idea, is that my standards are often higher than my resources and capabilities permit.  I can make my plan and work my plan until the cows come home, but if it rains, or my garden help can't come, or my back gives out, my plans are laid to waste, like so much detritus on the compost heap.  All of these things occurred as I prepared for my first garden group meeting and design workshop in my garden this week.

We as a group preach the same sermon...we're old enough to do whatever we want, and bold enough to do it.  Cool.  We can break the rules, we made them.  We can "just say no" to social impositions or babysitting with unruly grandchildren we cannot spank.  We can glory in our new-found freedom from timecards and alarm clocks.  But what the hell do we do about the weeds that torment our paths when we cannot bend down to pluck them?  What about the slug-eaten ligularia leaves we meant to cut?  And then there's that pile of gravel in the driveway that will be there until the end of days if Pedro doesn't come to move it for you.

I was mortified that the north path was lined with all the potted plants that I pulled from the north border to figure out their final planting place...and didn't plant them.  I wrung my hands because I didn't move the experimental baobab trees back to the garden hot spot where I could attempt to give them away to my parting guests.  I was distressed that my "workshop" and garden tour was completely unmanageable with twenty avid gardeners asking questions all at once.

But, you know, I am ecstatic that the common rudbeckias and asters and cosmos made a fine late summer display in the Long Border, the solitary artichoke stood up to be counted, along with the five little 'Liberty' apples and the two (count them, two) 'Desert King' figs, and the tomatoes in the potager looked so fine, ripening on their bamboo structures.  I am pleased that we could wiggle our toes in the cool, green, drought tolerant dwarf fescue that I didn't water all summer.  And my friends went home chattering like magpies about all the progress I've made, as they clutched their "garden note" (a botanical arrangement from garden gleanings), inspired by my workshop.

So I've worked this out on paper...now I'm on my way into mon paradis for the real deal...no stress.

old friends, new insights

my best friends from LA came to visit me last week, and we were all blown away by the experience.  We've known each other for as much as 45 years, but still had stuff to share.  I like to think it is the garden that helped us along to sharing our experiences, thoughts, dreams and even nightmares...

It was the first time for both of them to come to my garden since I moved here.  We knew one another well in urban settings.  One friend has gardened almost as long as I have, the other wouldn't know a daffodil from a lily (that's pretty generous in description, but I love her for lots of other reasons).  I was especially enthralled by the reactions of the non-gardener.  Her closest experience with nature has been on hiking and biking treks, but not to touch, smell and relax in.  Her high energy lifestyle found its match in my hammock in the woodland.  She sighed, and the calm in her was palpable (after she had texted her husband and friends to let them know she had found nirvana).

why I garden

The longer I garden, the more I realize my hands in the dirt have kept me balanced my entire life.  Many of my friends at this point in my life garden also.  They, too, find stability in their lives, no matter how complicated or simple they may be.  I observe the world rushing by now, no longer in the headlong dash to the next station with the masses of humanity.  Planted in a space and time when I can ponder these things...where I've been, where I am, and where I'm likely to go.  This is about the marvelous web of connections to places, people, memories, all the sensations that I experience while out there in mon paradis.  It's about the journey...from one season to the next.