Last night I cooked some of the biggest artichokes I've ever seen and I just thought the way this one looked with a few of its petals pulled was almost painterly. Just so perfect in its arrangement of leaves. So I took its picture.
It was every bit as delightful to eat as it was to look at.
Today has been so unusual in that I seem to have gotten a great deal accomplished while feeling rather lazy all day long. Like I just easily drifted from one task to another, put my hand to it, and all fell into place.
I'm not sure I've ever experienced a day like that.
Maybe it was my new magical cargo shorts.
Speaking of magical- look at these beans.
I planted those little beauties last Friday. So five days ago. In that time, they've already busted out of the dirt and formed their first leaves. Once again, rattlesnake beans have proven their immodestly superior germination success and the swiftness with which that occurs. Don't even talk to me about your Kentucky Wonders or Blue Lake varieties.
Get on with your bad self and plant some rattlesnake beans. The bugs don't seem to bother them much, the heat certainly doesn't, and if they were any more prolific you'd need stainless steel trellises to hold their weight and a team of helpers just to pick a darn row of them.
And have I mentioned lately how delicious they are, whether picked young or more mature, pickled or steamed or boiled or canned? They seem to be suitable to every green bean need.
I piddled around in the garden a little this afternoon. I planted a grow-bag with squash seeds and one with cucumber seeds. Glen reminded me that when we tried that last year it seemed that the bugs did not get to the vegetables quite as much as they usually do. So let's try it again. I replanted a few sweet peas to replace the ones that didn't come up at the first planting. Not sure why that happened. It really is too late for them but might as well give it a try. I planted the African basil I bought last week and also some Thai basil seeds. I still very much want to get a Mexican basil. I am seeing quite a few bees this year and I'll do anything I can to encourage that activity. They are already bumbling about the wisteria which is popping into purple with the speed of light. There is a noticeable difference in the number of blooms between morning and afternoon.
I'll get a better picture tomorrow. The sun is lowering and that area of the yard is in shade now. But you can at least get an idea of how quickly those bushy tassels are somehow managing to turn into clusters of flower petals.
More plant magic. Spring is just filled with it.
I watered my new baby azalea and the spirea. Also a few things in the little severely under-tended garden area beside the kitchen door. I have planted some Genovese basil I got from Publix in a bucket I got at the dump in which I'd made some holes in with a nail and a hammer. The funny thing is that there was a volunteer celery plant growing in it which of course I left and it's beautiful!
Now how in the world did that manage to get there? I do not have any idea but it makes me happy to see it coexisting with the basil.
Speaking of volunteers, I have found these sprouting both in the dirt of the garden itself and in some of the grow-bags.
They are squashes of some sort and I'm betting acorn although I surely would love for them to be delicata. But the last squash seeds I threw in the compost were acorn and so that's what they probably are. Whatever they are, I'm going to leave them be and give them a chance to show me exactly who they are and what they can do. I bought some Seminole pumpkin seeds this year and I need and want to get those in the ground. This is an heirloom squash/pumpkin which grows especially well here but has only recently become widely known and their seeds made available. Here's a good article about them.
After I'd gotten everything I felt like doing in the garden done and had turned the sprinklers on, I strolled over to the tung tree to check on its progress. I write about the tung trees every year and every year I love them as passionately as I have in all the years before. They, too, are a sort of magic to me, having been imported to this country from China in the early 1900's for oil production and their flowers are indeed reminiscent of a Chinese watercolor painting of a blossom, their colors almost an indescribable peach/orange/yellow and almost crimson.
But here's what they looked like today.
They will burst out soon and once again, I will swoon.
When I was on my tung tree expedition, I picked spirea, white and purple violets, and oxalis blooms. The camellias are still coming on although it seems almost as if they are trying to get it done, pushing out one flower after another in numbers I don't think I've ever seen although the blooms are smaller and some never really seem to quite mature. But. Many are still so beautiful.
I made a tiny arrangement with the tiny flowers and here that is.
I am not sure there is any place on earth I would rather have been today than outside in my own yard in Lloyd. Everywhere I turn, everywhere I look there is proof beyond doubting that life just wants to live. Joyfully and with grace and grit and grandeur. The sky has been so blue, and there has been a good, stiff breeze all day that has rattled the magnolia leaves and played the wind chimes and brought messages of life from far away places. That same wind is bringing in cooler temperatures and hopefully some rain tomorrow.
But being outside or even just on my back porch has peeled something inside me wide open, revealing some sort of core of me that I can neither describe or really understand. I have been overwhelmed at the power of it all.
I just went out to turn off the garden sprinklers and had to take this picture.
A live oak across the street, wrapped and bathed and awash in the setting sun's gold.
I know there are places all over the world that are as beautiful and more magnificent than this little insignificant place where I live but some days I would not trade it for all those other places in the world.
This has one of those days.
Love...Ms. Moon
Your photography shows your true artist's eye.
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