Lessons from a Charlie Brown Garden

This is not a Charlie Brown Garden.  This picture is from Annie's hibiscus, surprise lilies (more on those in a moment) and cleome bed.  Lovely isn't it?

This is a Charlie Brown garden.  This discouraging patch of weeds greets me every time I walk outside.  What you see is a failed dream.   A dream of a lovely vegetable garden that might look like Charlie's

lovely, order, neat as a pin, square edges and not a weed in sight. Sigh.

Or like Annie's lovely vegetable garden

packed full of nutritious and beautiful vegetables.  Isn't this curly kale the most lovely shade of green-blue?

Here's what I've been harvesting since I put in these tiny little raised beds--weeds!  Wheelbarrows full of weeds, over and over again--weeds.

Every year at this time I'd tell myself like Charlie Brown "wait until next year".  Winter I'd make new plans and resolutions to become a better person, a more diligent and persistent gardener, the kind of person who can grow beautiful, healthy vegetables for her family in neat tidy gardens.  As the weather warmed each spring, I'd give myself a pep talk.  "This is GOING to be the year!  Yes sir, no worries, I've got my garden all laid out on graph paper and it's going to be a thing of beauty."

Nothing says hope and potential like a formerly weedy bed, cleared of all weeds. And nothing says failure like a defeated gardener facing a weed pile.

I have great excuses for my failures.

There are distractions of all sorts.

Bob with tacos, Prince Charming with beer and Linda

Summer picnics

Music festivals

Sheep herding competitions (bet you didn't see that coming!)

Pool parties

Yes, summer is full of all kinds of distractions which keep me out of the my teeny, tiny, in theory oh-so-managable vegetable garden.

A few weeks ago Linda and Charlie were over for dinner and walk around our gardens.  Charlie, always the diplomat, didn't comment on my weedy vegetable patch, like the true friend he is and with his best southern manners and charming drawl, he said, "Felecia, you are a new American gardner."

I love flowers, drifts and drifts of flowers.  Wild, exultant flowers climbing all over each other. It took me a couple of weeks of savoring Charlie's compliment to acknowledge that while I might be a New American Gardener, I most assuredly wasn't a vegetable kind of gardener. 

Instead of that Charlie Brown garden being a reminder of all my failures, it could become a new blank slate for more flowers.  I've always wanted a cutting garden.  This little spot has all of the right features.  It's just outside the back door, it's small, it's behind other bushes so the public doesn't have to watch the ugly part of the cutting garden when it's getting started or I've harvested everything.

And so I tackled the weeding of this garden with new resolve and energy. 

"To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom"--Socrates

As I began to accept that I'm not a vegetable gardener, other unflattering truths were easier to accept. I'm also not the kind of gardener who can get annuals to sprout from seed.  Never, ever, under any circumstances.  Kind of a bummer because most of the flowers I want to grow  in my new cutting garden are annuals, prolific, all summer bloomers, that one generally only starts from seed.

Why is self knowledge, which seems so easy, so hard?  I wake up morning after morning with myself.  Why am I such a mystery; especially to myself?  Charlie can see what kind of gardner I am, a different kind of gardner than he is.  But still one worthy of respect.

Since I'm so late getting this garden started there were no plants at the garden store.  But they did have this new tape.  See the seeds neatly positioned in the tape? And very clear and explicit instructions on how to plant.

Just lay the tape down, toss a little dirt on it.

Wait seven days and voila!  Zinnia plants. You can't see it, but they have the tiniest little buds.

It's a small start towards redemption.  You can also see that I heavily mulched these new beds and the areas around them.  No reason not to give myself a jump on the weeds.

This is what redemption and grace look like.  

If we don't learn to love ourselves as we are, can we ever learn to love others with all of their quirks and ticks?  Once we acknowledge our own human-ness with all of our frailties and short-comings, can we extend a little grace to ourselves? Can we lay that mulch on good and thick so that we don't have a weed field in our souls 10-minutes after  we finished the last weeding?  Can we offer ourselves some forgiveness?  Can I forgive myself for thinking and trying over several years to be a vegetable kind of gardener?  In that forgiveness, can we find the ability to love who we truly are?

One more word on those surprise lilies, or what Annie calls "naked ladies"

They are called "naked" and "surprise" because there's no foliage at the base of the flower.  The flower stalk comes up naked, or surprises the gardener without a hint that it was there.  Actually there is foliage.  The foliage comes up in early spring dying back as summer progresses. The lilies spring up naked in late summer.

Wishing you love, compassion and peace in the next week Wonder Ones!

Last Forever

This time of year makes me want to cry out like Goethe's Faust, "Verweile doch!" "Last forever" but this is our augenblick, the blink of an eye. Monday evening I heard the locusts sing for the first time this year.  Every year I think I'll know it, the moment when it becomes real summer.

And every summer I'm caught by the surprise of the locusts with their bugle like announcement that it's well and truly summer. Yes the calendar says summer, depending on how you mark it, either on Memorial Day or the summer solstice of June 21; but to my mind those are the salad days of spring.  Summer begins when the locusts say it begins.  This year that was Monday.

I knew spring was slipping away as the roses faded.  I forget every year that nature pauses before showing her summer colors. She breathes in and out in green foliage, all verde. I feel real grief at spring's passing.  It marks another spring spent of my lifetime allotment of springs.  Did I spend it well? I worry.

"Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough," Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  Perhaps that's what I seek, an innocence easily satisfied, content.  Often I find myself panting after perfection, stuck in a loop of wanting to hold this moment just a little longer and squeeze in the next moment too.

But the rain comes and washes it away, the petals of this moment floating in the street gutter. "What I call innocence," Dillard writes, "is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object.  It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration."

Let us go, off to Linda's garden, delightfully weed free, where we can all find a taste of that innocence of spring becoming summer. (We've toured Linda's home several other times you can find those links here and here)

Look at these fuchsia!

These yummy apricot roses are a gift for her daughter.  Linda walked me to the car to make sure I didn't leave with one of these pots!  Even those of us who long for a spiritual perfection sadly are not above pilfering our good friend's roses.

I felt so inspired seeing Linda's beautifully weed-free garden.  Notice how all of her plants have a little breathing space?

Linda's got an eye for detail I admire.  Look at the little iron fence which provides needed support for these phlox.  Linda knows how to combine utility and beauty.

She's a generous friend too. I've got a pot of these hot pink phlox sitting on my patio right this minute, waiting for me to clear a space in one of the gardens for them, a gift from Linda.

Linda is so clever, notice how she mixed fever few in with her annuals to give these window boxes some height.

Here she uses hosta to  fill out a window box. Of course!  Why not use perennials in window boxes?!

Her porch is charming too with it's many colorful pots. I love the little wobbly bench.

I have several wobbly benches of my own.  Prince Charming keeps trying to pitch them out when I'm not looking.  I understand his desire for a well curated and lovely home and garden, something ripped from the pages of a magazine.  But these little wobblies remind me of the flesh and bone, the sinew and wildly open-mouthed wobbly clay vessel I am, always threatening to tip over.

Yesterday morning we had an early morning downpour. Later the sun came out without heating up the morning.  It was a lovely, golden morning for a walk. The leaves of the trees held onto the big fat rain drops unwilling to let go until a gentle breeze nudged the fat water droplets off the edge of the leaves, where the early morning sunlight caught them and lit them so that it looked as though I walked through a gentle and intermittent shower of the softest gold. The moment stretched out, lasting the entire length of the walk. Only reluctantly did I return home.

The trick of living in the moment is to let each come through us and pass.  Like nature we breathe through the moments and then they are gone.  We empty out so we can take the next moment in.  Our attention too short, lasting only 2.3 to 12 seconds research shows, to crowd much in.

Picasso suggested that we give up trying to gain perspective as painters do with trompe-l'oeil and find instead trompe-l'esprit. My good friend, Brenda, expresses trompe-l'espirit by reminding me to live life with fingers wide open instead of grasping after life with closed fists. It's only by opening and letting it pass through our fingers that we capture the moment, a closed fist, closed heart, closed mind, closed eyes capture none of these golden moments raining down on us.

Dillard says, "These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present." Amen.

Happy 4th of July to my sparkling readers!  Let's all go out and live like fireworks, shinning for our brief stunning moment.