Garden dog

Fia's sticks

Fia gardens, too. There's nothing I do that Fia can't do, too. Almost nothing; she doesn't drive, for example, and she waits patiently for me to feed her, rather than tearing into the very accessible pet food bags.

Good dog, Fia. Good dog.

She watches me for long stretches of time, stretched out in the shade of whatever tree, shrub or structure is available -- a recent discovery is the unwanted and unfortunate hollow under the big rhododendron I planted a few years back; at least is has a use, even if it represents a failure to plan for settling correctly --, and she learns what gardening involves and decides what parts of it are appropriate for her. It will not be surprising to anyone who knows and loves Labrador Retrievers that with all the pruning I have been doing this month, she had found her use: stick retrieval.

There were piles and piles of sticks that she watched me carry laboriously down to the burning pile, and she considered this. Sticks. Carrying. Sticks... carrying...

"I can do that!"

She didn't say it. I heard her think it.

And then I saw the consequence of her realization: sticks everywhere. Garden Dog was picking up the sticks out of my piles as a dog can, in her mouth, and carrying them up to the top terrace lawn, while I went on with my Edward Scissorhands imitation, cutting, cutting, cutting and making ever bigger piles of sticks that Fia busily diminished according to her abilities.

Naturally, given what one Labrador Retriever can carry in her mouth, I didn't notice until I staggered up the stairs to get a glass of water and found sticks littering the lawn, all the way from the stop of the stairs, along by the fish-pond-in-the-old-fountain, on to the steps to the French door and then strewn around the terracotta tile floor. Some were shredded, like McDonald's lettuce, only with more fiber.

Rapide's bed is full of shredded sticks at all times. Like having potato chip crumbs in your bed.

Thanks for the hand, Fia.

....

Taking a rain day, or March Misery

The Wood Pigeons in their Tulip Tree

After a long and difficult day on the couch, writing, organizing photos in my laptop, and preparing for Couch by Couch West (enjoy Neko Case and Liza Case), I decided it was time to go out and take relief in the garden, maybe sawing out the rest of the overgrown ivy climbing the garden wall up into the neighbors' neglected fig tree, or maybe raking the bottom garden lawn and burning some more stuff before the rain begin, for it will begin. I have learned in 9 springs in my garden that March is the dry month, making it the perfect month to do the garden clean-up and pruning and burn the cuttings.

Of course, if we are allowed to burn stuff in our gardens, it is because it is generally assumed that this is still the wet time at the end of the winter, so it is generally safe to burn stuff until May, when it begins to rain, and it gets dangerous, but it is supposed to be dry and warm by then, so --

Never mind.

The month -- and I am making an allowance for February 28 by counting it in the month of March for literary purposes -- began with a severe pruning of the two yews, my "sentinel" yews, at the top of the stairs down into the garden. Start, I figured, with what you see every time you leave the house, and that of what your husband complains most.

Ah. Peace and quiet, and thanks. Gratitude is lovely.

The next day, March came in like a lion's maw in my garden, and it's not over yet. No wind, but a whirlwind of pruning and burning. Almost every day, the burning pile reformed and then disappeared in a conflagration, smoke, flames, ashes and sparks jumping into the air. I have ruined one fleece top I have worn for skiing and everything else for 13 years, and one of my husband's favorite organic cotton, long-sleeved shirts I was wearing underneath. They have identical perfectly round holes in exactly the same place on the right upper arm. Now I know why it's important to make clothing anti-inflammable.

I attacked the whatever that tree is down by the gazebo. The one that looked like a Blow-pop pruned, the head of which was leaning over the Rose of Sharon along the bottom garden wall after the weight of snow it carried in December.

I was not sad to see it go.

That was followed in the same afternoon by the gigantic yew just below that had also been damaged by the heavy snow of December. Heavy for Moosesucks.

We were especially not sad to see it begin to disappear.

Aching and feeling my carpal tunnel making its return, hands sound asleep long after I awoke in the mornings, I went after the second terrace plants and shrubs -- the Vanhoutten Spirea that looked like Animal, the Fuchsia magellanica, lavender and the lush and abundant moss in the sparse grass. Slender branches. Easy prey.

There won't be many -- or even any -- sprays of tiny white flowers on the spirea, but that's the way it goes. I'll prune it in November this year.

Then what? Oh, in between the Vanhoutten Spirea and the last of the lavender and fuchsia, I cut down the several meter high trunks of what was supposed to be a Snowball Viburnum bush. Bushes are not several meters high in my book. I call those "trees". This one had lost it years ago, and all that grows now are suckers and these trunks.

This was the first step in destroying its stump and getting rid of it altogether as part of the clearing of the bank and these plants, as well as the hedge across from it, to make place for some sort of shelter for the motorcycles, the old wood boat behind the low cinder block walls, and garden shed. Dream on. I can't even seem to manage to finish the inside of the house.

I am hearing about that from my husband. Trust me. It isn't as easy as pruning down the sentinel yews.

Partially recovered, anyway, I attacked the next big horrible project -- clearing out the top of the high wall behind the barbecue on the gazebo terrace. The last time I did this was 2005. It was, if that is possible, worse then. But back then, it probably hadn't been done since the barbecue was built in 1991. This took two days, March 10 and March 16.

I am still recovering from the bug bites (fleas, I think) and the thorn pricks from the Firethorn shrubs, with their poisonous (for me) several centimeter long thorns on each and every unyielding branch. If Hell has hedges, they are certainly made of Firethorn shrubs.

Between the two skirmishes of the Battle of the Top of The Wall on the 10th and the 16th, I did something. I know I did. Let's see -- yes, I took a little vacation and hand pruned the Saint John's Wort down to the ground.

So, where did I start this? Yes, I got up off the couch to go out and continue, and what did I see, other than the pair of Wood Pigeons in their Tulip Tree? Rain. Rain falling in the fish-pond-in-the-old-fountain. Rain falling into the shocking pink and deep blue hyacinths.

Rain.

I felt relief.

I have pruning elbow from all of this. I think I'll watch the quarter-finals at Indian Wells.

....

Luck o' the Irish in France: An accidental St. Patrick's Day

Fia meets Flaque

Or the 1/8th Irish, to be exact.

Garden Dog and I took a break from the garden yesterday to go pay a visit to Garden Dog's little cousin, Flaque, in Viroflay. I knew it was Saint Patrick's Day, but it had slipped my mind until we passed the hospital on the way to the highway, and I mentally reviewed my outfit. Blue and gray and brown. Not a trace of green anywhere.

It's no big deal, said myself. Look around. No one's wearing green. It's not even that nice a color to wear, and it doesn't suit you. Besides, no one here even realizes it's the traditional day to put green food coloring in your beer and drink until you throw-up all over Fifth Avenue.

It was a consoling thought. Never mind that Mayor Bloomberg got in trouble for having a similar one. Nonetheless, I have only seen more very drunk people -- well, nowhere. Not even at a Fiji house party, where most of the beer was soaking into the floor and gluing us in place. I shudder, and it was a long time ago.

"But, what about the bretons? Do you think they are feeling any particular kinship toward Saint Patrick and the Irish in the Finistère?"

Myself was a little puzzled. We thought about it all the way to the highway, and then we forgot all about it following a very low truck. We had already left late and would never make it home at a

reasonable time to prepare dinner. I fretted and considered doing a U-turn, but I hate wasting a quarter of an hour, driving to the highway, only to turn back home. Besides, Flaque had been in Viroflay for 2 1/2 months, and Fia still hadn't met her cousine germaine.

That's "first cousin" in French.

Half an hour later, we pulled up in front of the gate and pushed it open. Fia knew where she was, but -- there was something new. She looked at me, and yanked me after her on the other end of her leash over the railroad ties and practically headfirst into the bushes. She sniffed. She raised her head and looked around, and then plunged her snout back into the dirt. Spinning around toward me, she got tangled in her leash and flashed me a look of incomprehension, C'est quoi ça que je sens? Mais! C'est quoi alors?

Oh, Fia. I knew, but how to tell her. It was why, in part, we had come.

"Tu vas voir, ma good dog, tu vas voir. Allez, viens."

It was a long trip to the back of the house, with Fia stopping to press her snout to the ground and tremble every few centimeters, but we made it. Marguerite and her friend were having goûter, and she flew to her feet when she saw Fia. I slid the glass door open and followed Fia into the kitchen, where she ran smaque into Flaque and ran straight for cover at Clémence's knees.

Mais quel courage! A 7 1/2-month-old, 24 kg Black Labrador cowering at the knees of a teenage girl, seeking protection from a 4 1/2-month-old Black Labrador about half her side. Now you know what Rapide suffers.

Daily.

We pushed them out the door and into the rear garden, Marguerite, Clémence, my belle-soeur and I right on their tails, where Fia would have all the room she needed -- to run and hide under a bush.

Mais QUEL courage.

It took a few minutes for Fia to recover from her shock and discover the joys of a little cousin, who will soon be a grown-up Lab just like she will be in a few months, and when 3 months will mean nothing, and they will be the very best of first cousins and friends.

But, it wasn't only to make the introduction of Flaque to Fia that we had come to Viroflay. The belle-soeurs had important belle-soeur things to discuss.

"Thé ou un jus de fruit?" she asked. "Pour toi, c'est un thé, non?"

"Oui, plutôt un thé," I said.

"Un peu du gâteau?" she offered. "C'est un gâteau de l'amitié, fait avec de la vrai levure."

"Tu sais, je mange pas vraiment cela," I reminded her, wondering why I had gone and done that. It smelled like heaven. Like beer and fruit and nuts. I nibbled a corner of the piece she had set on the counter for me and reached for the mug she had pulled down from the cabinet.

"Regards ce que j'ai pour toi," she said, handing it to me. I had seen it before. It was covered with brightly colored sheep and words. She held it so the word "crazy" faced me. I laughed. If belle-soeur conversations had titles, that would have been a good one for the sujet du jour.

I poured tea into the mug and looked more closely at the sheep on the inside of the mug. The green was not just green; it was shamrocks, and it said "Ireland" next to it. I could scarcely believe it.

"Mais! Tu sais ce que c'est aujourd'hui? I asked, certain she didn't.

"Non."

"C'est le Saint Patrick!"

"Non!" I scrutinized her. She seemed genuinely surprised, but she is a master of dry humor. I could be wrong. I preferred to think she did not know.

"Oui."

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, after all, and Erin go Bragh!

....

If a photo is a thousand words, a better photo is 12 megawords

Fia, in her glory

Not all things that are stunningly beautiful and wonderful in the garden are flowers and leaves opening, or plants surviving my poor care. There is my dog, and there is my Nikon D300 and Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens with which to shoot all things great and small for posterity.

I prefer shooting with a camera. There's no blood.

This particular shot was a huge stroke of luck, outside of Fia simply being lovely. I was failing trying to get the light exposure right on Shadow, who was being unusually cooperative, but usually vocal, when I heard a noise, turned to look and focused as fast as my right hand would let me and still get the photograph. I was shooting with this old, but superb, Nikon lens, which is another of the manifold reasons to use Nikon equipment. This lens dates from the early 1980's, and because no one, according to Ken Rockwell, shoots with 50mm lenses anymore, I got it pretty cheap, and I can use it on my D300 is from 2007, where it behaves more like a 75mm lens on this APS-C DSLR camera.

This is where my eyes start to glaze over. I got that information from Photozone's review/lab test report of the lens. Ken Rockwell reviews the AI version, but only the E-Series for the Ai-S.

Reading Ken Rockwell has me shopping eBay for lenses again. Please do not tell my husband. He thinks one lens is enough, like the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 VR lens that came with the D300 he gave me for Christmas. It is absolutely marvelous. I absolutely do love it. It is absolutely enormously convenient, but here is what Ken Rockwell has to say about it.

I feel foolish. My husband is right. It looks like I only need one lens now (until I can afford a 12-24 f/4 AF-S DX, or the more recent 10-24mm). And to learn to use my D300 fully.

I'm still not selling my other lenses.

Every day, I go out into the garden with my camera and look for what is new. A bud that might have bloomed, a plant that is still not dead, and I take photos of it all. I can do it forever, and I practically do. I am going to wear my camera out. I must say that I do wonder what exactly the point is. What good do these photographs do? What use will I make of them? What use will anyone make of them? I love them for the fact that they can be.

My husband asked the other night at dinner if we had sold the other camera yet. It was going to be a delicate subject. There was the D300 I had bought for myself, and there was the one he gave me for Christmas, and there is the Canon EOS Rebel XTi I had bought used and given Sam for his birthday a couple of years ago. That was the camera to sell. We had talked about it before, but my husband's memory is as bad for most things as mine is for others. Notably, anything having to do with money, but I refuse to appear to be unkind or ungrateful. It's my son who is the photographer in the making, not I, and yet it is I who have the better camera. It's all a question of timing.

When we gave him his camera, he was hoping to become a photographer in the making, and I was still using the Fuji FinePix 3800 my mother had given me to take better pictures than I was sending digitally, taken with an Aiptek 8 years ago. Those images understandably frustrated everyone. On screen, they looked like film photos taken in 1926. He had done a lot of research and found this camera, used, in Versailles, at a great price in the price range we could swallow. All was good.

Then, I saw what he could do with his camera in the garden, and I started to feel restless. Last fall, I began to research cameras. I'd get a Nikon, that much I knew, since I had a FE and 3 great Nikkor lenses. There was the D90, and then there was the D300. I could get the camera body alone for about the D90 with a lens, and I would have a lot more camera for the money. I could use my old lenses until I felt I had paid enough dues to get a great lens for it. I would also have a camera considered professional, meaning that it is the lowest priced camera to qualify under the Getty rules for publishing.

Not that this really meant anything for me. This does not count as publishing.

That was when my husband started to think about the same thing for me. For years, anytime we went anywhere, he walked ahead, while I dragged along, taking photographs of everything, from door hinges to domes. One weekend, I managed 500 or 600 photos in Prague. From his point of view, we had hit a new low in quality couple time. The next trip, I left the camera home, and he didn't even notice. I had to point it out to him. To be fair, it is only what he expects when he makes the effort to go someplace with his wife: her company, and not the company of her camera as an unwelcome third. When he got me my D300, it appeared that it seemed normal to him that Sam had one, as he thought he did, not realizing that that D300 was mine, since he didn't know Sam had finally taken his Canon to Paris.

This was when we should have realized he was basically giving up on the law.

It did not now appear so normal, it seemed, but these are the heated discussions in which parents find themselves engaged with the passion with which they also (one hopes) love.

"Il n'a pas besoin d'un appareil de photo professionnel," said he, predictably, and feeling pretty sure he'd won. What argument could I give to justify a first year university student in a program of legal studies needing a professional quality camera?

"Mais," -- this is always a good way to start a rebuttal -- "il y a des photos qu'on ne peut même pas prendre avec un appareil moins bien," I countered.

Not that this was necessarily true from a Canon EOS Rebel XTi to a Nikon D300. What was true is that you can see the difference in the quality of the photographs they take, and if you care a lot about that, then it makes a really big difference. Once you can get an image of that quality, it's awfully hard to accept less. In fact, you want more still, even for your not yet professional photographer son, but as much as I wanted to win this, I also wanted my husband to think sweetly of me. I would have to put my foot down and whine convincingly, making the same argument over and over until he essentially gave up, also preferring to think sweet thoughts of his wife. I think this has something to do with his daughter.

I have been especially sweet of late.

"Ben, d'accord," he relented, "mais je pense qu'il devrait au moins nous donner ce qu'il reçoit pour le Canon."

This was actually pretty fair, but I wanted him to be able to get a lens, and he had done some research and found one that would make him happy for his uses that was only about 130 euros.

"Oui, la différence entre le prix de l'appareil de photo et l'objectif qu'il veut pour le D300. Il n'est pas très cher."

He gave up. This is what Sam and I do, and what we share, other than skiing and loving our dogs. We take photographs. We even do it together. And we show one another our photographs. It's a sort of language to talk about the way we see the world and what we notice. A way to know one another that a life without cameras would not allow us, unless we drew, or painted, or talked endlessly. Seeing what makes him take a photograph tells me what moves him, from a blue Birkin bag perfectly matched with dress and shoes to rapture on a cupid's stone face, and the better the equipment, the finer the result, the more powerful is our speech.

It's like suddenly having full possession of a language, with its full vocabulary and grammar.

It's like playing or listening to a fine violin after a scratchy elementary school beginner instrument. There is no going back when you can hear the difference, but I can understand the question of means.

For me, it's a little more monotonous, ranging from my dogs a million times to my flowers a billion times. Each year.

....