Wordless Wednesday: Green Peeks from Sicily, Italy (Sicilia, Italia)

Tassel Hyacinth aka Muscari comosa or Leopoldia comosa. (Photo taken at Villa Romana del Casale.) 

Possibly date palm—let me know if you can identify it. (Photo taken at Villa Romana del Casale.)

One of many Cercis siliquastrum seen blooming in Sicily in April. (Photo taken in the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento at the garden wall of Alexander Hardcastle's home.) 

Lovely Bougainvillea.  (Photo taken in the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento at Alexander Hardcastle's home.) 

Please don't prune your Asparagus to look like this. (Photo taken in the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento at Alexander Hardcastle's home.) 

Unknown tree. (Photo taken at the cimitero in Termini Imerese.)

More palm trees and lovely handmade pebble paving from the streets of Termini Imerese. (This was the home of my great-grandparents.)

Trees in the city park in Termini Imerese. 

Lovely large Lantana along the street in Termini Imerese.

Caster bean (Ricinus communis) plants grow wild along the roads in Sicily. 

Artichokes (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus) growing along the road.) 

Borage (Borago officinalis) growing wild along the side of the road in Sicily. 

Wild Sedum growing along the roadside near Termini Imerese. 

Wild snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus) growing in its native environs. My husband told me that in Italian they're called  "mouth of the lion". He played a lot with these flowers as a boy.  

Not exactly sure of the plant, but I do recognize Sicilian ingenuity. If Dad gardened, this is how he'd stake his plants.

Convolvulus tricolor growing wild in Sicily. 

Anticipating Springtime

Galanthus elwesii.

This past weekend I worked outside for a few hours. There is much debris yet to pick up before the daffodils fully emerge from the ground and I've more pruning to do.

The temperatures were chilly, but it was sunny, and the back garden looks a bit better now thanks to the effort.

Container ships waiting near the mouth of the Columbia River to be driven over the Columbia Bar by one of the bar pilots. It's dangerous work and from this restaurant window we can watch as the pilots are escorted out to the vessels. 

The weekend before that we were able to escape for an extended mini-vacation—but I had to take my work along with me. 

I worked a lot, but we somehow found the time to visit my maternal grandmother in Aberdeen (WA) one day, and we went to Astoria (OR) the day beforehand. 

It's rarely this clear and sunny during January so I took John up to the Astoria Column. (It is quite a landmark and I was surprised when he told me he'd never been there.) The views were breathtaking that day.

Looking southward (sort of) you see Youngs Bay. This is one of my all-time favorite views. Somehow, it always appears to me to look a bit like a painting.

Anticipating springtime. 

Back at the house in Portland, life continues to change and we're all adapting to the new vitality being breathed into our home. John is a lot of fun and has his own ways about him. He's a special man to have moved into a place that is so mine, but we're working to make it his too.

The most interesting adaptation we're currently going through is that the youngest cat (the partially feral one) is moving in upstairs. As she has aged, she has changed. It has been interesting to observe her as she's gone through a lot these past few years. Often, I find her hiding in plants like this just staring at me as I work. I stare back at her and she looks away. I suppose she is working too. I don't really know for certain. She observes the garden for hours on end.

There have been some major territorial adjustments but the two female cats are respecting one another for the first time. (Maurice goes wherever he wants. It's best that way—but nowadays he limps and doesn't move around nearly as much.)

Mona tends to sit on furniture more and more and the ground less. 

Indoors, Mona likes to be around the plants because she is used to living under them during the outdoor half of her year. She seeks them out in her daily routine.

She's anticipating spring and follows me outdoors to spend time with me as I work. I never dreamed she'd shadow me so much. She is very much a loner cat but she's changing. I'm honored but it's more about her than me.

John is getting to know her more as well. He rarely saw her before but now they see one another everyday and he's able to spend time petting her.

When I work indoors—writing and cooking as a ghostblogger for a food blog—she sits near my feet.

This is a big change for me. The other two cats are too old now to remain so alert to my movements all day. Maurice used to always be by my side, but now it's Mona. This is a change. 

Sedum spathulifolium.

Life is still a bit uncertain for me professionally as I try to manage working and serious chronic health issues. I miss my time spent at home, but it was very difficult for me to be living without career fulfillment. I grew tired of struggling to get by, and of working so hard to stay afloat, but it has been a humbling experience. I'm grateful.

The garden is seen differently now, but I'm at least seeing it again. The thought of losing it in the divorce made the sight of it excruciatingly painful. I now deeply admire those others who've gone through that kind of dissolution. I'm not ready to move on from here, but my time will come. Until then, I want to see my dreams and plans come to life outside.

I miss my garden though because I work a lot now and in order to be able to work I need to exercise a lot to keep the pain under control. The absolute pleasure and peace gardening gave me is now at odds with the reality of living a real life, but I am learning how to cope. It is an opportunity I never was given. I'm reintegrating gardening and am starting seeds again. I'm determined that this place will be reborn again soon.

Lewisia columbiana ssp. rupicola.

That's why I'm set to rebuild it. I've been pulling the garden alongside me during the journey as I've been rebuilding myself during these past two years. As time has passed, and as I've struggle with its passage, how could I not think of the garden?

Freelance writing work is not easy to find and I was blessed with my current job. It's amazing and I know it's the right thing for me to be doing. Being a part-time caregiver is becoming more difficult though. I'm growing to the point now where I want to be away from illness. I live in both worlds, but I still want to belong to the living for a bit longer. I know exactly what I have to look forward to in the future, but right now, it's my time.

It took the experience of a difficult client telling me repeatedly that I was there to provide her comfort and to take care of her needs. She repeatedly told me I was doing a poor job. Something inside of me rose up and rebelled. I'm in control of my own comfort and needs right now and I'm going to keep making better and more informed decisions so that I will land in a better place soon. I also realized that I was a damned good caregiver. She simply wasn't the right client for me.

I'm growing in ways I wasn't able to grow.

I'm carving out more time to write too. I cannot wait to see what publishing some of my own work will do for me as a person. It's all I ever wanted out of life and it's accomplishable now. Part of me will be at peace soon after settling that score.

Writing more—more than anything else—will heal some large wounds for me.

I've always been a writer at heart who just so happens to garden and love plants.

Lastly, as I go along plotting all these things out, my mind continues to go in and out of the garden and my plans for it—I mean our plans for it.

I'm currently sorting things around the house and am getting rid of old gardening books and other pieces of junk and this vintage window box combination really struck me the other day. I tossed the book but I kept this image from it.

This is the tangled and complicated kind of beauty I admire most. The round and tender leaves of a nasturtium are the last thing I'd imagine paired with a rattail cactus. One plant grows with ease in one season, while the other is an incredibly mature specimen plant—perfect example of the passage of time in the garden.

Spring is coming soon and I guess I'm not the gardening fraud I feel like I've become due to these past two years or so of major life changes and transitions. I'm going to Italy and I will be looking at a lot of plants. There hopefully will be a beautiful one-year wedding anniversary celebration to plan. There are more plans for the future than I can mention. I'm not necessarily the specimen plant I wanted to become. I've accepted that maybe sometimes I'm going to be the annual plant with great growth and vigor put on during one season. Or, it's baroque and complicated and like everyone else I'm everything at once and far less interesting or important than I imagine myself to be and then I just don't matter and I drift back with my eyelids shut to a sunny day in the summertime where all I can hear is the noise from the city streets, or waves from the Pacific Ocean, and I remember the sound of my grandma's trowel in the dirt beside me as I doze off in the lounge chair.

Yes, I'm anticipating springtime too and the calm nothingness brought on by spontaneous moments of profundity caught in nature and in the garden. Maybe that's what the feral cat is anticipating too.  

Going on Now: Labor Day Sale at Cistus Nursery

Gorgeous Hedychium met us in the parking lot.

This summer has been lean and mean for me financially. So when Cistus Nursery posted that they were having a 30% off Labor Day Sale I knew I was in luck. What a great opportunity for me to save some pennies and head on out to Sauvie Island with my friend Billye.

Admittedly, I hadn't been to Cistus since June so that made this visit a bit more special to me. It looked lovely as usual and I was so happy to be back. 

While walking around with all the prickly things I thought about my friend Loree over at Danger Garden. I can still hear myself thinking, "Wow, there's no reason why I shouldn't take a picture of one of these things for my blog. I can talk about these things." Then, just as I leaned in with my camera to get a closer look at the gorgeous Agave americana 'Yellow Ribbons' on the top shelf, the Agave aff. macroculmis T73-99 just beneath it on the bench poked me in the leg. Oops! When will I ever learn? (Both are great plants. Don't let me give any of these plants a bad name.)

I admire those of you out there who can live with these plants and not hurt yourselves. Maybe I would do better with the Nolina macrocarpa sitting beside 'Yellow Ribbons'? Hmmm, I think not. No. Let's be positive. Maybe now is just not my time. 

It really was a beautiful day and I loved looking up above the nursery to see all of the textures from the plantings. I'm so in love with green texture these days.

I was a little bit disappointed that Sean Hogan (the nursery's owner) wasn't around that day, but I hope to catch up with him this winter. He is a good plant friend and very much understands and encourages my seed habit. I like talking to him a lot about seed collecting adventures.

Canary Islands Juniper, Juniperus cedrus.

During this visit I looked at things differently. Sure, I don't have room for this tree, but I liked it so I took a picture. I'm branching out a bit again, learning a few new things, paying attention.

My friend Billye with her new Italian greyhound Tango. 

When you visit Cistus Nursery it's often quite relaxing. This is the kind of retail environment you like to sit around in while you enjoy the sights.

Than again, if you're like me, you can park people in the shade while you shop. Billye went for the plants but we all know that we're not always so lucky and sometimes we end up dragging people with us to nurseries. Cistus is friendly for those folks.

While we were there, birds swirled overhead.

Chilean lantern tree, Crinodendron hookerianum. 

As we walked back to pay for our plants I saw this Chilean lantern tree blooming. Mine is still happily growing along but it's not blooming right now. I think I might have pruned it when it didn't want to be pruned. I can wait.

Ashe magnolia, Magnolia macrophylla ssp. ashei. 

My friend and I ventured back into the corner we'd missed. It was fun seeing a big leaf magnolia. These trees really make me smile with their big huge leaves.

Giant Cape Restio, Rhodocoma capensis. 

There were other treats.

Lysionotus pauciflorus.

Up at the register I found temptation after temptation.

Lysionotus pauciflorus.

This one was really difficult to say "No" to but I did. Maybe next time...

Salvia buchananii 'Velvet Slipper'.

I liked this one too.

Looking around it felt great to be back. I wish I could have purchased more but planting all of these plants takes time. I don't have a lot of extra time nowadays. It's good though because I'm staying busy with my garden coaching client. 

Sometime soon I'll be back. I highly recommend you go too if you can do so before now and Monday. The sale was really quite a treat. It's worth the trip. 

In the end I walked away with a few things I'd lost in the garden: Sedum divergens, a pine-scented rosemary, and a Melicytus crassifolius. I also added a few new friends: Carex testacea 'Prairie Fire', Mahonia gracilipes, and my first Dahlia. (It's a Dahlia 'Fascination' and I'm so excited to finally have one.)

Who knows what I'll end up doing this weekend, oh wait, I know: Annual Dahlia Festival. Maybe I'll see you there!

My Garden (An Exercise in Garden Writing)

Back of the house as seen from the back corner of my garden. The willow arbor is floating there to the left. 

After having seen many residential gardens over the last few years I think it's safe to say that mine is rather small, a regular city lot, with areas more or less here and there in strips along the north, south, and west sides of the home. The backyard is probably more of what would be traditionally called a garden, but even it is quite small when compared to larger gardens seen in this city. It is square, roughly 30' x 30', and in its heart is my 10' x 10' living willow arbor. For me, this is the shaggy, ragged and often messy heart of my garden. It's my outdoor living room. It's cozy and a bit wild—probably a bit like me.

This area looks sort of finished but if I'd pulled the camera out a bit the illusion of order would disappear. (That's Cryptomeria japonica 'Spiraliter Falcata' there on the right and an Impatiens tinctoria on the far left. Still cannot find the tag for the really hardy evergreen fern there but I'm working on it. The grassy bunch is a lovely Carex.) 

Then there is the rest. The bits and pieces. I see swipes and swatches as I wander around watering in the heat. I see finished areas followed by piles of trash that I've not yet picked up from old ideas for projects. There are the overgrown run-on sentences of the garden—mostly vines. My garden is one that's a work-in-progress, it's an artist's studio. This place really is my mad plant scientist's laboratory. 

Antirrhinum majus 'Oriental Lanterns (TM)' grown from seed I bought from Park Seed. The color is amazing and the plant is a great plant.

My house faces west. The front yard is not really coherent. There is the tiny hell strip, cut up into three uneven pieces. There is a central area, with a privacy planting, meant to keep the eyes of those on the sidewalk away from my large front window. The parking area is there too but it's currently filled with racks and pots and is more of a staging area this summer. An edible garden once ran along the southern side of the house. It is overgrown now and a mass of tangled plants. It was created initially to be the domain of my ex, but I've not yet fully reclaimed it. I hope to soon. 

Life in the hammock on a summer evening as I dream of better times ahead.

I see the memories of each and every plant and space. I see the ghosts of plants who've come before and which are gone now. I want to garden to build a future now more than to remember the past. This will be challenging for me, but I want to do so. So much about gardening requires time and patience. I've finally learned too that gardening can be exhilarating when you rip everything out and begin again. Just like a diseased plant, it's best to rip it out. Some plants struggle in the wrong conditions, I have been one of those plants. 

The real garden here at home. The back boundary has been an eyesore for years. Here is Mona the Cat watching the apartment dwellers. Someday soon I'l have the fence I've been hoping for and planning for years.

The front garden runs along the fence and turns along with the walking path into what is my north garden. It is the access walkway and no one ever wants to go that way even when I encourage them to do so. Someday I'll actually consult someone about how to make that entryway more enticing, but for now, I'll just continue to gently encourage folks verbally. 

My engagement bike along the North Side of the house. (Yes, I'm engaged to be married.) The bike "La Dama" is now my mobile seed-collecting unit. I can bike to homes nearby and collect seeds from gardens locally to be sold in my online store. So far, the whole process has worked wonders for my health. 

I like the small northern strip. I don't like having to look directly at my neighbor's house, but he's a nice man. He just isn't as into privacy as I am. He has landscaped with English laurels (Prunus laurocerasus), Japanese privet (Ligustrum japonicum), and cedar (Cedrus)—all having grown randomly on his property from seeds dropped by birds or else they were blown in on the wind. He then plucked them and rearranged them into rows. Amazing in its own way I suppose as a lesson in patience and he has loads of that virtue. He's a great neighbor and I like to harvest from his ever-growing army of Western Sword ferns (Polystichum munitum). (My first client has also been grateful for this too.) 

Sedum morganianum in my office. I'm taking care of my indoor babies before it gets too dark and cold outside to do so in the fall. I hate transplanting houseplants when the days get shorter. It's best to care for them now. Their roots will appreciate it and they'll be far less likely to fall prey to pests and disease.

Forgive me for not writing about my plants though. Major life transitions recently have made that painful. I'm healing. I've learned a lot. So many memories were tied up in every corner of green in my space. During the past few years I've really come to understand how unusual I am in that sense. My plantings have held such sentiments. But I know that I am not the only one. There are those who garden to decorate. Some re-create a time, or a place, or a feeling. Many just want symmetry and low-maintance. Some want that impression—a replication seen in a magazine. I planted to forget. I planted to create another kind of reality. I remember far too much and I've come to realize recently that I've never forgotten nearly as much in my garden as I've remembered. 

The garden of my mother. 

My home is the home of a woman who up until recently didn't really understand she had a moderately serious case of OCD. When I was highly stressed during the past decade—for the first time in my life—the negative effects of this affliction really showed themselves. Now I'm using my "old friend" to help me to organize, clean and make sense of the chaos I'd created during so many years of unhappiness and loneliness. I've taken my life back and I no longer see OCD really at all. I had no idea that such severe and extreme stress could do this to someone. In hindsight, I have been that woman. 

I'm very detail oriented. This can be a wonderful thing—especially for making pastries. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy I have a light form of OCD but I want to use it for good. The kind I have appears to have helped me in the past with my academic achievements. I have an amazing memory and when I want to organize and categorize things, it's like breathing for me and I find it extremely relaxing. It puts me in my happy place. When I'm stressed though, things fall apart. I've lived with a lot of stress for many years now and my garden shows that still. It's the last frontier of my former life but I'm making sense of it now. I'm re-writing my garden as I'm re-writing my life. 

First harvest of the season from the Ficus carica 'Petite Negra'.

For these reasons I do not see what others see. As I walk the circle around my home I see what never was, I hear the echos of arguments, there were the joyous moments after my divorce, conversations with friends and foster kids, and I see myself wandering, wondering what to do with myself. I see myself crying in pain during times of horrible illness and swelling. In my head the refrain, "I need help," repeats over and over. It is far more difficult to ask for help than it is to prune a Japanese maple. When I walk in my garden, I see and feel the pleasure pruning the Japanese maples has given me during the worst of times. When I felt my worst emotionally, I always sought my pruners. 

The front of the house July 2013. 

You'd think that this would make for an organized garden but mine is not. There are yet many unfinished projects. I'm slowly trashing them now and am making room for a new period in my life. I'm keeping the plants that grow well and which bring me happiness. If the memories are too painful, reminding me of when I fell and broke my fingers, or when I fell and hit my head, I'm trying not to let the plants die. Instead, I am either giving things away or moving them. The memories are dying instead and things are no longer falling apart. 

Maurice the Cat in his happy zone.

I should add more pictures but I'm still ashamed to do so. With a party coming up to welcome my fiancé into his new home I'm making strides. These things take time, energy, and money and I don't have a lot of any of these right now.

I'm one of the many chronically ill divorced people who've filed for personal bankruptcy. I'm not a perfectly comfortable member of the middle class and I'm not ashamed to say so. That's what I feel and see when I see my garden but I've been learning to see so much more.  

I feel that I'm lucky and gifted to be here—to be able to continue living here. I'm loved now too—a lot!—and I'm learning to be part of a team. We plan to buy the house and stay here. These things take time, but sometimes things work out for the best. I'm learning that too and being positive makes a huge difference. I adore all of the positive green people in my life and want to thank them from the bottom of my heart. We gardeners are ever the optimists and you've all helped me feel alive during a time when I really needed the lifeline. Thank you.

Gardens are for people and this garden is a big part of me. I really look forward to sharing it more with others in the future—and I guess that means you'll get a bit more of me too.

(The Grow Write Guild is a creative writing club for people who garden. It's a series of bi-weekly writing prompts created by garden author and blogger Gayla Trail. I'm starting out late with the series but hope to catch up soon. It's just what this blogger needed for some summer fun.)