Cultivating a passion for plants    Yesterday's hunt was just the kind I like--out in the wilds, hunting down a hard-to-find plant variety to bring home to my yard, searching over acres of leaves and blooms so varied and beautiful that deciding which to bag and which had to be left behind was a real workout. I knew what I wanted to find.  Tilly's foster mother's front yard planter stopped me dead in my tracks the last time I went to pick my niece up.  What was that plant?  I'd never seen anything like it before.  FosterMom wasn't home but Tilly made good on her promise to find out the information and email it to me.  I did a little research on the web and was thrilled to see that my favorite plant place in all of the world--or at least the small world I know about--has the plant, or so the online catalogue promised.  It's a bit of a drive out there, but the price of gasoline be damned!  I counted the drive as a week's vacation, but spent in one long afternoon and concluded that it was an inexpensive thrill if I thought about it in those terms. I'd forgotten how mesmerizing the farm was.  I'd forgotten the scents and the old shed, the gift shop that is easily overlooked by eyes dazzled by plant treasure as far as one can walk, pulling a wagon that first seems like a silly indulgence, but which quickly becomes filled and then over-filled with plants. The first thing that fills your eyes is green in varied shades, then the flowers draw your eyes, and if you take the time to look in the treasures in the furthest corners, you will find things that up until now only existed in your garden dreams. Here are some of the sights at the farm.  Alas!  I couldn't get the plant I went there to get, but did get it's smaller and less spectacular brother.  The plant lady and I commiserated about how hard it is to hunt down certain game in the fields.  I don't feel too bad about the failure, though.  It just gives me a reason to go back out there and hunt some more. Sol here shows you the hard-to-find entrance. This is a part of the day lily collection.  The day lily collection is a small part of the farm's offerings.  I never actually did get to the edges of the place. I want to live in this sweet little house when I grow up.     This is the smaller variety of sea holly I found.  I continue to look for Big Brother Sea Holly.      Where does the chlorophyll hide in these beautiful leaves?      If you are a very good hunter and take hours looking around, you'll find this sweet spot.  I hope the owners don't come up here for a good long time--I don't want to have to leave this.

15.7.08 06:53 Permalink / 4 Comments / comment

Pictures of recent life. The latest sketchcrawl was a week ago, but it’s been a busy week, so I’m just getting around to posting it tonight.   Showers had come and gone all day.  It was hot and sticky out and the thing I really wanted to draw was a cool refuge.  This sweet spot was on the street side of a big old oddly rural looking building in the town next to mine.  The lucky folks who own it and obviously cherish it with care live across the street from a parkway surrounding a river that snakes through green neighborhoods.   Wouldn’t you like to enjoy a quiet hour or two here?     An afternoon at the animal shelter with my niece provided a much less peaceful opportunity to draw.  Kittens don’t sit still for long and Cookie Dough the bunny paused just long enough to identify the next impossible-to-reach place he was going to hide in.

30.6.08 01:44 Permalink / 3 Comments / comment

Pictures of recent life.

30.6.08 01:37 Permalink / comment

I look funny, but please do not laugh.   For all kinds of reasons  I didn't take care of that tooth problem.  Some reasons were absolutely valid -- (Really!  I swear they were!) -- and some so thoroughly weak that even I knew I was just plain chicken --(Buckbuckbuckbuckbu-u-uck!) but the result is the same. Who knew you could get instantaneous service at the big dental place?  All it took was a call there and answering the young receptionist's question with the information that my cheek and undereye get in the way of my seeing other things and BOOM!   The choice was either get into the office pronto or get myself directly to the emergency room where the dental office would probably send me anyway.  I chose the dental office, but prepared for the emergency room and the possibility that I'd end up staying there for a while.  I've been fooled by that emergency room trick before.  They say "ER", but they mean you'll be eating bad hospital food for days and you'll probably leave with less of you than you went in with. Thanks to having to go in to the dentist on an "emergency" basis, I didn't get to see my regular dentist, Dr. Ladykiller.  He did zip in and frown into my mouth at the request of Dr. Young-Yikes!, but Dr. Young-Yikes! is clearly in charge.  She's the one who warned me to take ALL of the antibiotics ON TIME and to go to the hospital if that doesn't work.  She's the one who told me that she didn't want to scare me, but my eye is at some risk and if the infection gets into that, the next desination for the infection is my brain.  She succeeded in impressing me with the seriousness of my situation, a task which intense pain hadn't been able to do.  She failed in her quest not to scare me, though.  I'm pretty fond of my eye and I'm so fond of my brain that my eye is jealous of it.  The potential that it will be invaded did the trick.  Yes, she scared me. Monday morning Dr. Dr. Young-Yikes!-Husband and I are meeting at 9:30 and Dr. Dr. Y-Y!-H will inflict untold pain upon me.  I intend to be in Madison in my art class at 9 AM on Tuesday morning, but Young-Yikes! was skeptical that I'll make it there. All of this hasn't changed my weekend plans beyond adding a baker's dozen of yucky capsules large enough to choke a horse into my menu.  I have a Tuesday class to prepare for.  I have vanishing points to identify, value studies to do, and sketch journal pages to fill. Oh, yeah.  And some high octane pain pills to make it all possible.  Oh yeahhhhhh...

27.6.08 20:01 Permalink / 2 Comments / comment

Did I forget to mention? My daughter Jean made the Dean's List.  I think Mr. Langenscheidt will pay her a congratulatory visit.

26.6.08 06:04 Permalink / 2 Comments / comment

My lesson not yet learned I cannot quite believe how I have spent the entire afternoon. It reminds me of the dreams one has with high school or college as the setting. You know, the ones. You're in school and in a panic. You're totally unprepared for a big test that you've just remembered is being given today. Maybe you're unprepared because you didn't study or you haven't shown up for a single class all semester or maybe you're in a panic because you just realized that you forgot to get dressed between showering at home and going to class and your memory lapse is now out there for all to see. Well, okay. This afternoon hasn't been quite that traumatizing, but it still seems strange that I have had an afternoon of desperately doing homework that I've neglected until the last minute. Homework? I couldn't believe it when the instructor assigned it. Homework? That's okay when your parents force you to go to school and do nothing themselves all day except go to work and have nothing to do in the evening but sit around and do things that parents like to do--things like make dinner and schlepp you to the mall or to your friend's house. But homework for adults who are paying to have a good time one day a week? I was much more gracious than it sounds like I was when MA gave the first assignment. And the second assignment didn't sound like it would be much of a problem. I mean I'm not getting graded on this, right? I could do the whole thing in like ten minutes, easy. It wouldn't be the best picture ever drawn, but hey (and here I shrugged in my mind), I'm not trying to be teacher's pet. Ten minutes and I'm outta there. The third and fourth assignments were assigned in the afternoon class. I was sensible enough to start feeling panic by that time and that's probably why I kept putting off starting the assignments the day after I got them. Yesterday as I started getting ready to go to Nephew's birthday party I remembered what I should have been doing all week, but I couldn't not show up for the party. I was driving the guest of honor and quite a lot of food to the bash and after the bash I felt like I'd been to a bash. So that's why I've been hard at it all afternoon. I figure that I'll finish that last irritatingly impossible piece in time to leave tomorrow if I don't sleep more than four hours tonight. I make no promises about being awake enough to remember to get dressed before I leave the house though.

24.6.08 02:36 Permalink / comment

I am the Warrior Gardener--well, to a point anyway Gardeners in the upper Midwest have to be slow to start, but also quick on their feet. We wait out April (and May) frosts and soil-soaking downpours, hearing and reading accounts of how great gardens in other parts of the world look while the garden outside our windows just look beaten-down and as discouraged as we are. We're just about to give up all hope when SPRING shines forth and we find that we are already behind schedule. At least that's how the gardening year starts for me and this year my being felled by some virus or other gave the weeds an even bigger jump on things than usual. I'd gotten my garden gear together just before I'd retreated to shiver and sleep for four days and I had just one more personal challenge to overcome before getting out into the sunshine today. The last remaining hurdle was a sensible (to me) apprehension of being out there with the new neighbors. Now, I wasn't too worried about the blended family group of five or six that's been wandering through the backyards, nervously looking around lest they be discovered by hostile residents:   But the new fellow in the 'hood is lean and mean and I surely didn't want to let him creep up behind me while I worked. I'd seen him cruising past my window every day for a week, looking very determined. You just wouldn't want to mess with such a well-designed killing machine at the top of his game:   As I saw it, I had two choices. Leave nature to the critters or get out there and grab a corner of it for my own. As soon as I figured that any passersby had passed by, I got to work, only to discover that this guy and his gang had moved into abandoned chipmunk holes next to the herb bed:       The ground bees zizzed between the end of my nose and my soil-working hands, but I didn't lose my nerve. The bees certainly didn't like my being where I was and I certainly didn't like them trying to bully me away from clearing out the runaway mint and oregano, but we could co-exist--at least until I figure out a way to get rid of them, anyway. After finishing up with the little herb bed,  I headed for another session yanking garlic mustard from underneath the trees and shrubs. The stuff wages a never-ending attack, but the agencies that want homeowners to continue the monotony and futility of clearing it use tempting lies as propaganda. “If you keep clearing it, there will be less each year that needs to be cleared,” they lie and what kind of citizen would refuse to at least try to stamp out the Green Menace? Though low branches pull my hair and bent twigs spring back to scratch my face when I do my GM duty, do it I do. Stalwart and brave, stopped by neither large mammal herd nor small wolf on the hunt, I worked until a scuttering demon ducked under a leaf almost out of my sight, but enough within my sight to send me shrieking, running back behind closed doors for protection against this beastie:         We gardeners of the upper Midwest are brave and stalwart, but still . . . we do have our limits. (Thanks to the talented people in the world whose photographs I filched to illustrate this post.  The photographed critters are quite identical to the ones in my yard--except the coyote here is much leaner, looks much hungrier, and is therefore much scarier.)

21.5.08 04:15 Permalink / 2 Comments / comment

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