First frog, and a foal for Zenyatta

First frog of the spring

The sun lit the slats in the metal shutters of my bedroom window with the brightness and intensity that announces a beautiful morning, encouragement to get out of bed, in spite of the aches and the pains from yesterday's labors in the garden. It has been 3 years since the last time I pruned the linden trees down to the ham-fisted main branches, and so it was time to do them again, lest the linden trees overtake us and leave us in the dark. I did one in the morning, and the other in the afternoon, going up and down my wooden ladder and wielding a 3-ton 45-inch chainsaw at arm's length.

I now have two very large stacks of 3 to 4 meter long branches of which to dispose, and I need to find someone who can come and feed them into a wood chipper for a modest fee.

Come summer, there will be a whole new crop of wand-like branches growing from the bumps at the end of each solid branch, sending forth a dense canopy of large leaves.

Taking note of my bruised state, little didn't hurt, I rolled gingerly out of bed and made my way, stiffly, to the coffee machine, but the lure of the warm March sunshine was too strong, and I got the fish food instead and headed out to feed the fish and see how nature had been faring since my first exploration and photography session earlier this week, after I had lifted finally the soggy mat of linden leaves off the planting beds, prying them gently from the fresh green spears of the new tulip and hyacinth leaves to expose everything that the warming soil was sending up for another round of the eternal display of nature's simple glory. 

These are the days when you can feel the activity in the soil and the leaves, the energy unfurling progressively more vegetable matter, the chloroform machine working at full tilt, catching the sun's rays and radiating the purest, most joyful green from the effort. I hum right along with the plants and the blades of grass of my garden and all of nature beyond; I began my day brimming with energy and enthusiasm. 

I bent down and called the fish over for breakfast, waiting for the one large female I know is principally responsible for the healthy growth in population since the devastation wreaked by some cracks in the converted fountain's low walls and a sudden, terrible freeze one January, when the water level was too low killed dozens of fish, leaving 4 miraculous survivors. 

She eats first, and she and everyone else know it. She swims right up to my outstretched pinched thumb and forefinger, a koi stick presented to her, and we struggle to get it in her puckering mouth. Some mornings we get it on the first try;  other times, she's either too hungry or too overexcited to get it on anything like the first try, and we nearly give up, but that would be sending a poor message, and so I never admit defeat. She will get it or no one will eat, which is out of the question. 

This morning she was a little late arriving, and my attention drifted off to the others, swimming about in front of me, others heading across from under the old stone sink where they have their hide-away, and which has served as the favorite spot for the frogs, who have come to make the fountain-turned-fish pond their home. She caught me by surprise, suddenly there in front of me when I lowered my gaze again, and ate her koi stick on the third try. I turned the container, sprinkled a generous serving for everyone else, and watched it float out from the center. I love the "fish pond". 

Yesterday, a neighbor's little girls discovered it; I told them there were frogs, too, but they were still asleep, down in the sediment from the decomposed leaves that fall into it and the aquatic plants. They asked when the frogs would wake up, and I said soon. Perhaps in a couple more weeks of this warm early spring sun. They are not like the other neighbor's children, little boys, who run around the fountain and stick their arms in, pulling on the plants. They nodded and returned to watching the fish swim about, and I had a feeling that soon was maybe sooner than I had said; it was the right weather for the frogs to wake up.

Squatting next to the fish breakfast party, I saw movement over near the mossy edge of the stone sink. It didn't move like a fish; the plant leaves disappeared below the water and surfaced again along with the head and large, globular eyes of the first frog of the spring. As if the day did not promise enough wonderful things, with the aubrietta in flower on the tall wall behind the gazebo, the transcandentia sending up its first purple-edge leaf swords, and both the biathlon and the nordic-combined world championships on television, the frogs had woken up.

I said hello, quietly, and asked it please not to move while I went for my camera. They take fright easily, some eventually learning to relax around us, others never failing to dive into the water directly I or anyone passes by them. He, or she, granted my wish, for a moment. In another second, he had ducked back into his watery place to hide, and I went off to see what was sprouting in the garden.

Now, it was time for my coffee and my morning email, Twitter and Facebook correspondence, and to upload my photos and consider a blog post. My old laptop takes its sweet time to boot, time to check the day's events on Eurosport, and when the first Tweets scrolled past, there was news of Zenyatta. She had given birth! A dark-bay colt, the spitting image of his lovely mother. 

As if the day needed another miracle to remind me of how beautiful life is. Sweet, intelligent and wondrously gifted and large-spirited Zenyatta, The Queen, had given birth to her foal with Bernardini, just hours ahead of her due date, under a full Kentucky moon, and her fans were rejoicing a new hope, another racing phenomenon to love and admire and cheer on, born of the intermingling of proud parents' proven genes. 

For now, it was quiet in her box, a mother kissing her long-legged, gangly, adorable newborn child, full of the promise of his family history, everyone who loves and cares for her daily at Lane's End Farm nearby to witness another legend opening its next chapter, and the season of foaling beginning with the greening and unfurling of the grasses.

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http://www.zenyatta.com/diary/diary-post-454

Starting again

A Japanese Maple in bud

It was three weeks ago that I took my camera out into the garden to find spring. It was there. Early, but there it was, in the first leaf shoots of the clematis (which reminds me that I have to go out and cut a bunch of them and the honeysuckle down to 30 cm from the ground or get no flowers again this year), the first buds on the grape vines I still haven't planted after nearly 6 years, on the Hortensia that barely survives summer after summer since I put it in 3 years ago down behind the pool and the maples I stuck in the same planting bed, waiting for inspiration to hit me, and the chives sending new blades up, the Bergenia cordifolias' bubble gum pink flowers opening, and the usual appearance of the first crocus and furls of tulip leaves on their masts.

It has been a clement winter since all the snow and cold of December. People returning from their annual ski weeks were grateful that there was still December snow on which to ski, and I have been longing for it to do its job here, which is to hide the ugliness of the garden out of season. I have had no such luck this year, and to make matters worse, I have had a perfectly well-behaved 6-month-old Labrador Retriever, who is a terror out of doors, racing flat-out around the top terrace and after anything that resembles an empty plastic nursery pot, a bedraggled unplanted clematis, or a stick or bit of wood of any description or origin. The yard is strewn with bits of clematis root, bark, and shredded plastic nursery pots in black, dark green, and terracotta.

Did I mention the piles of pooh?

Add the leaves that fell with the last snow that I never raked, the moss invading the grass, and the generally sodden appearance of everything from the nonstop drizzle, and it's an understatement to say that it looks like hell out there, but, today, the sun came out, and I got my camera again. Where I have crossed the top terrace, heading down to the bottom garden for wood for the wood stove or from the gate to the front door or the front door to the dryer and

fridge in the garage, my eyes averted, I went and looked again. I found things to make my heart soar, and things to make me very sad.

One is the weeping rose I tried to save. It is dead and gone. Rotted from the inside out. I don't know what hit it. For years, it was unstoppable in its pageant of magnificence, even giving us a second burst of bunches of tiny pink roses again in late summer, but last summer, it sent up a virtual bouquet of suckers. I would just like you to know that I have never killed a rose bush. Ever. I have looked and looked, and I haven't found quite what happened to its bark. It has to be a sort of blight, a mildew on the trunk itself. It will be hell to dig it up. The lavender plants at its base will have to come out, and then it will be a major undertaking to dig out its tap root to plant another in its place. I had to do this once years ago, when I first began working in the garden. The twin weeping rose over on the other side of the second terrace had died, and my first birthday gift to my husband was a new one, and all the work that went into renovating the lavender and planting it.

My camera battery died just as I noticed the new leaves uncurling themselves on the peony that lives under the spirea bush I never finished pruning. A little late, now that the leaves are coming out, but I am going to have to do it anyway, whatever the cost to the splendor of the spectacle of minuscule white flowers.

I thought about raking. I thought about pruning. I went inside and got my recently arrived copy of John and Emily Visher's How to Win as a Stepfamily and read to the end.

We have already lost. Time to count the fatalities and see what we can manage in the treaty. We refuse to surrender unconditionally.

And then I went and got the outdoor extension cords, my electric hedge trimmer, the long-handled pruning shears and the ladder and climbed up to make a go of pruning the sentinel yews at the top of the stair down into the garden.

My husband has been complaining about these for, oh, three or four or five years, since the last time I pruned them. They have doubled in height, and branches droop under their own weight. They have become a sorry sight. Fia heard the electric trimmer start up and decided indoors was a safer place as branches started to rain down on the bergenia, crocuses and the single delicate narcissus shoot.

Coward.

The electric trimmer wasn't working very well, though, on the thickened vertical branches. I climbed back down the ladder and got the long-handled pruning shears. It was slow and heard-going, holding them out at shoulder height and closing them hard on 1.5 cm thick branches. I heard her whining at the door to come back out now that all was quiet.

A quarter hour went by, about half of one yew was about a meter shorter, and I was exhausted. What was this? I could do anything in the garden in years past, and here I was, wrecked after 15 minutes, in a cold sweat and feeling nauseous. I battled on. If my garden starts to get to me now, I might as well start looking for an apartment. 15 minutes later, it was nearly dark, and I cut the last upright branch. The whole thing tilted toward me, I could see that without getting down from my ladder. In other words, if you took a large sheet of stiff paper and lay it on the top of the pruned yew, the paper would lie at an angle, tilting toward the fish-pond-in-a-former-fountain. I'll fix that tomorrow, when I shape the shrubs.

I turned and attacked the second yew, just to make myself feel better. Tomorrow when I go back out, I'll have a head start, and when my husband gets home from a night delivering our newest niece, followed by a day and a night on duty and a day of normal work at the hospital, he will see one thing checked off my list of things to do in the garden that stretches to infinity and beyond that I have to fit into a demanding schedule of stepfamily reading, drawings to get the trades and my husband and I going to finish up work on the house (inside and out), and my newest responsibility as the volunteer president of an association that runs a daycare center that provides child care for women in job training programs so they can enter the workforce, provide for their families and enjoy the self-esteem that comes with work outside the home.

Oh? I didn't mention that? How forgetful of me.

One day I will remember how to actually work for money, in addition to greater self-esteem, out of sheer necessity.

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