For some reason, I’ve always associated Memorial Day weekend as the “official” spring cleaning weekend. Plants must be in the garden before then, because Memorial day is going to be wet and cold and devoted to all the inside cleaning and organizing tasks that need to be done before the summer heat is upon us. It’s the other side of Labor Day Weekend, where all the things that need to be done to prior to chill really being in the air get accomplished.

more…

I got my pictures of the progress on the garden.

Working in the garden isn’t always fun, but I really enjoy the results. Right now, it’s still not looking like much, but I can picture what things will look like in just a few weeks even. Part of the joy is watching the garden grow and change. To me, that’s also part of the joy of crafting, and in particular knitting and crocheting.

more…

It was another busy weekend with not much time for knitting. The yard is freshly mowed. The apple tree has been pruned. My viburnum came back from the dead, so all the dead growth was pruned from it, too.

The salsa garden is mostly in. The onions are up. The tomatoes and sweet peppers are planted. Given our luck in past years with growing hot peppers, we’re just going to buy our hot peppers from the farmer’s market. I still need to get some cilantro put in, as well as lay down the straw mulch around the plants.

We planted some new flowers in the front beds near the house. There are pansies in the pansy planter. We’ve got snapdragons and marigolds up by the house, and petunias around the mailbox. Everything’s gotten fresh mulch for the season, too.

I was too exhausted to think to snap gardening pictures along the way. I’ll have to take the camera out this evening.

more…

The apple blossoms have fallen from the tree. They’ve fluttered down around the base of the tree in drifts, like the all too recent snow.
more…

In the cherry blossom’s shade
there’s no such thing
as a stranger.

- Kobayashi Issa, 1763 - 1828

In the nearly ten years we’ve lived here, the little flowering cherry at the side of our house has never flowered. Not once. I figured the tree was simply not long for this world, and that I’d be doing stump removal in a year or two at most.

Imagine my surprise when I came home this afternoon and noticed this.

Is that a bit of pink I see among those blood red leaves? No. It can’t be.
These blossoms are barely the size of the nail on my index finger. I almost had to climb up on the little bit of retaining wall at the west side of the house to be certain, but yes, those are blossoms on my half dead flowering cherry.

It is! My scraggly little cherry tree has blossoms!
I ran in to get the camera so I could get pictures to share tonight. Cherry blossoms have a life span of about two minutes. There’s no “I’ll take pictures tomorrow” with them. I saw them at just the right time, so I had to take the pictures right away. That did involve balancing somewhat precariously on the retaining wall. Note to self: the retaining wall on this side needs to be redone by next spring at the latest.

On Mt. Yoshino my path strays from last year’s landmarks:
onward to cherry flowers I’ve yet to see.
- Saigyō Hōshi, 1118 - 1190
I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’m getting both apple and cherry blossoms this year. That’s like getting two springs this year and I got to see them both.

Sometimes I have a hard time when I’m weeding. I’ve heard it said that weeds are just plants that are growing where you don’t want them to grow. I don’t think that way. I hate to pull up beautiful things just because they volunteered to grow in a place where I hadn’t expected them. It’s still beautiful, even if I didn’t plant it or plan for it. I see these unexpected joys as special little gifts from God to me.

The hosta under my floribunda is one such gift. I didn’t plant hostas there and the people who lived in the house before us certainly didn’t. It just turned up a couple years ago and I’ve been content to let it be. After all, it’s a hosta growing in shade. That’s where it’s supposed to be, even if I didn’t plant it there.

I was prepping the tomato bed this weekend and discovered a single miniature pansy growing at the edge of the bed. We planted miniature pansies in a pot near the bed last year and plan to plant them in the same pot again this year, but the last thing I expected to see was one lone pansy smiling at me from the edge of my tomato bed. That, of all places, is not where it’s supposed to be, but I can’t bring myself to pull it or move it. It’s a pansy.

Maman, Aunt Net, and Gran all have flowers to me. The peonies by the side of the garage that I need to move? They’re Aunt Net’s flower and I need to get them moved to a new spot this year. The lilacs that threaten to strangle me each year when they bloom because I’m allergic to them? Those are Maman’s flower (and on the neighbor’s side of the property line, to boot).

“And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.”
- Ophelia in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet at Act IV, Verse v

Pansies were one of the flowers Gran always planted in whatever little garden space she managed to have. It’s her flower. How could I move a pansy when God planted a special little reminder of Gran for me right at the edge of my tomato bed? I’m content to let it grow where it’s planted, even if I didn’t do the planting.

I have a secret to tell you. I plan out my week of blogging on my Sunday walk. I think about what I see and what projects I’m working on. I take a lot of pictures then preparing for the next week of blogging, and supplement with additional pictures taken through the week, as needed.

For example: yesterday’s apple blossom pictures were taken on Sunday with the plan to write about them when I posted them Tuesday and track their bloom progress and take new pictures whenever they opened. The good thing about this kind of planning is that it’s made me open my eyes again and take notice of the world around me because I have to make sure I get the follow up pictures. I’ve felt like I’ve been in something of a fog since well before my endometriosis surgery back in September. It’s nice to feel like I’m starting to reengage in the world around me.

Yesterday when I left the house for work, I saw this.

Flowering apple in full bloom.
Okay, I really saw something very much like that, but with the sunrise coming through it. I don’t carry my camera with me to work, as they’re not allowed in the building. I walk to work, so it’s not as if I can leave the camera in my car.

Under the boughs.

I took these pictures after I came home from work. That was better timing anyway because I could linger under the apple tree as I took my pictures. It made a great excuse to slow down after a long day and just enjoy basking under those fragrant boughs.

From miniature bouquets to blooms by the fistful.
I think it’s sad that we can’t just rest anymore. We have to have an excuse to lay under a tree and do nothing more than look at it. I’m not just laying here. I’m blogging about my apple blossoms. See, I have my camera and everything. This isn’t laziness. It’s work. No wonder we’re all exhausted and no one seems to see anything anymore.

In some ways, I’m a little sad that my flowering apple is in full bloom. Those blooms only last a few days. It seems like it blooms for about the space of a breath before the petals fall and spring has fluttered out of my grasp. At least I got to see it for the moment it was here.

Cherry blossoms may be the symbol of fleeting spring in Japan, but to me spring has always been apple blossoms, from the little sour apple tree in our back yard growing up, to the flowering apple in my front yard now. For the past two years bouts of late frost have taken the blooms from my flowering apple before it could blossom. It’s been very disappointing. Without the apple blossoms, it just doesn’t feel like spring to me.

Thankfully this year it looks like the apple blossoms survived the one late frost we had last week. I’ll get a proper spring this year, assuming the temperatures stay in the mid-forties overnight.

A haven of pinks and greens.

Enrobed in miniature bouquets.
Just a few more days now and spring will finally really be here after a two year absence. I can hardly wait.

It’s looking to be a busy weekend. I’ve still got one color repeat of the fuzz to complete, so hopefully I’ll be able to do that tomorrow morning. Then I can get started on summer mitts for Aunt Net.

The weekend wouldn’t be so busy, but my friend Brian from St. Louis will be in town this weekend, and the old gang from work is getting together because of it. Tonight we’re going to see Iron-man and then tomorrow afternoon, after Brian completes the stuff for his job which brought him up here, we’re all getting together again to play games until we collapse.

It’s always a little bittersweet when Brian from St. Louis comes to visit. Brian is a friend from the days of ex-fiance Number 2. After the break-up, Brian was one of the few friends I got to keep when friends were split in the dividing of all things. Number 2 got the friends we spent the most time with, possibly because he was trying to worm his way into a friend’s wife’s panties. I don’t know and I no longer care. What still stings is that he got nearly all our mutual friends, including some of my high-school acquaintances.

I got to keep Rosie, my best friend and third sister. Apart from her, I got to keep Brian and the gang from work. It was a very lonely time for me, but I remember feeling so hopeful in those days. I believed I would find someone to love and marry. I believed I would have children one day. I believed a lot of things I would still like to believe, even though none of them have turned out to be terribly true.

Still, spring renews all things and for a short time they grow and bloom anew. Even hope. Even stupid hope for things that haven’t turned out to be terribly true.

Warble for Lilac-Time, by Walt Whitman

Warble me now for joy of lilac-time, (returning in reminiscence,)
Sort me O tongue and lips for Nature’s sake, souvenirs of earliest summer,
Gather the welcome signs, (as children with pebbles or stringing shells,)
Put in April and May, the hylas croaking in the ponds, the elastic air,
Bees, butterflies, the sparrow with its simple notes,
Blue-bird and darting swallow, nor forget the high-hole flashing his
golden wings,
The tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor,
Shimmer of waters with fish in them, the cerulean above,
All that is jocund and sparkling, the brooks running,
The maple woods, the crisp February days and the sugar-making,
The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted,
With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset,
Or flitting among the trees of the apple-orchard, building the nest
of his mate,
The melted snow of March, the willow sending forth its yellow-green sprouts,
For spring-time is here! the summer is here! and what is this in it
and from it?
Thou, soul, unloosen’d–the restlessness after I know not what;
Come, let us lag here no longer, let us be up and away!
O if one could but fly like a bird!
O to escape, to sail forth as in a ship!
To glide with thee O soul, o’er all, in all, as a ship o’er the waters;
Gathering these hints, the preludes, the blue sky, the grass, the
morning drops of dew,
The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves,
Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blossoms called innocence,
Samples and sorts not for themselves alone, but for their atmosphere,
To grace the bush I love–to sing with the birds,
A warble for joy of returning in reminiscence.

The flowers have come in on the bush with the thorns that grows under our living room window. It came with the house, so there’s really no way of knowing what kind of plant it is. It seems to be thriving where it’s at, so I’ll put it as one hit out of far too many misses for the previous owners of the house. They planted hostas on a southern exposure and put burning bush on the east side of the house where it’s shaded the silver maple that looms in the back yard.

A sea of blooms.
Neither one of can count ourselves as any kind of gardening expert, but there are some basic things we know. Hostas like shade or they burn in the heat of summer. Burning bush likes full sun or else it doesn’t really fire in the fall. Identifying the random plants that the people who owned the house before us planted is mostly my guesswork.

An abundance of buds.
The flowers look like wild roses and, as the Rosie One has noted, the plant is particularly bloodthirsty when you try to trim it. The leaves aren’t quite right, though. I expect roses, even wild varieties, to have leaves with toothed edges but the edges of these leaves are smooth.

One open bloom hiding by my volunteer hosta.
It does bear a striking resemblance to some floribunda species, in particular Crazy Dottie, and that’s a much stronger possibility to me since the leaves look much more like floribunda leaves than rose leaves. Assuming the low temperatures overnight didn’t get to the flowers, it won’t be long until there’s a veritable explosion of flora right outside my living room window.

This is a good thing, because the Flowering Korean Spice Viburnum I planted last year didn’t make it. It looked like it was doing so well last year, too. I suppose I’ll have to get another one this spring to replace it.

So much packed into such a tiny blossom.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that something not much larger than a quarter has so much detail packed inside, let alone that something in nature could be that vibrant. It makes me want to knit something that color even though I look horrible in that shade of pink. Maybe I can find some pink and green sock yarn and minimize the damage by keeping it as far from my face as possible.