Gardening

Attack of the Aphids

July 11, 2009

For two weeks the broccoli heads stood like princes of the garden, waiting for a kitchen coronation. The wait was too long.

Hordes of aphids stormed the cedar-plank box from which the broccoli grew and blanketed anything green. The heads looked cloaked in a lumpy white soot. Ruined. Read More

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Dueling Gardens

June 9, 2009

I’m afflicted with vegetable garden envy. Sure, we have many things growing and gracing the dinner table. Way too much lettuce in fact. But our urban bounty has come to harvest slowly because no part of the yard has day-long sun. And there’s one raised bed in which everything seems frozen in time despite the [...]

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Moved and Alive

April 17, 2009

In February on a rare sunny day, I helped friends dig up and move a Japanese laceleaf maple from their backyard to their front. No chance the tree was going to survive the unavoidable mugging at our hands.

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Tree Project Karma

February 9, 2009

Maybe aches and pains from transplanting a tree explain why I keep thinking about the Japanese maple. But the real reason, I’m afraid, is irrational emotional attachment for something not even in my yard.
The tree belongs to friends in Portland’s Sabin neighborhood. I spent several hours Saturday helping them extricate it from a tight spot [...]

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Indomitable Will of Plants

December 14, 2008

Even with the onslaught of winter, some flowers refuse to yield to nature. They won’t give in despite the overwhelming forces aligned against them.
Yes, I’m granting powers to plants — thinking, free will, emotions — that to our knowledge don’t exist.

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Man vs. Squirrel

December 2, 2008

A squirrel is mocking me. We had a peace pact for a few years. But the critter has had an attitude ever since I removed its nest from the eaves above the front porch. Or maybe it’s because I inadvertently dig up nuts the squirrel has socked away around the yard.

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Gardening Van Gogh

November 27, 2008

I have this thing for gardening. Just me and plants and dirt. Creative yet mindless. Mixing and matching. Trial and error. Nobody telling me how to do it.
My three-year-old son draws better than me, but the yard is a canvas on which I can paint something of merit. I say “I” as if it’s me [...]

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Pot Room Confinement

November 9, 2008

Every spring I start filling up the front porch with potted plants. The porch extends the width of our 1920s Craftsman house, so there are long wide ledges begging for greenery. The back deck next to the small goldfish pond gets a few plants too.
I gravitate toward the tropical and cold-sensitive, mostly begonias because of [...]

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Obsessive close encounters

August 11, 2008

An autopsy photo? A closeup of an alien’s skin? Or nature in all its bizarre beauty and symmetry?
Hint: I captured the image today at Hughes Water Garden south of Portland in Tualatin. Going there is my crack cocaine: the sound of running water and plants everywhere.

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Holed up in memory

August 2, 2008

Big news about the definitive confirmation of water’s presence on Mars dispatches my mind not to the Red Planet but back in time. Back to a dark hole at the edge of a Florida orange grove.
When we were kids growing up in Maitland, my two brothers and I dug down five feet through the sandy [...]

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Lilies reign over duded-up garden

July 28, 2008

Nothing stops more people along our precious corner of Northeast Portland than these towering July beauties. I sit on the porch, unseen by passersby, and eavesdrop on the oohing and ahhing.
Luckily, the flower thieves haven’t struck; some regal lily blooms were snipped last summer.

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Boy and the bug

July 9, 2008

This morning at breakfast, my little boy Atticus freaked out when a big fly buzzed on a window near him. It seemed like an overreaction for someone who dug worms and fed them to the goldfish in our little pond before he could walk. (Easy for me to judge.) Maybe this stunning photo will make [...]

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Shimmering portal to distant past

June 29, 2008

Summer stars greet the sun today — freshly opened blossoms in my Portland teardrop pond. I’ll wade in and reward my babies with fertilizer pellets. But I’ll be tempted to disappear beneath the lily pads into my past.

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