Challishing* in Whipple

I'm sitting at a table alive with daffodils and bicolored tulips in vases. I had to buy those. Two huge appleblossom pink amaryllis tower over them. Those, I grew from babies. Outside, the ground and sky are stubbornly, resolutely white. It was a weekend. Friday afternoon Bill and I hand-carried a ton or so of music equipment up a snowy hill in a blizzard to the van, because we couldn't pull down to the basement door. Loaded that. Bill, the kids and I drove in two cars to Columbus in a three-hour, white-knuckle nightmare of slush and overturned cars so we could play our Swinging Orangutangs gig for the Ohio Ornithological Society. The other Orangs made it, but everyone was hollow-eyed and shell-shocked by the time they staggered in. Something about seeing trucks losing control in front of you takes the shine off winter driving.

The people who were able to get there at all enjoyed it, and so did we. The band busted down the doors and had a great time, ate fire-hot chicken wings and drank bad margaritas at midnight and then flopped in our hotel. That was nice. I drove home with the kids on Saturday afternoon, ran out of gas, coasted down the providential exit ramp, walked to a station, bought a $9 one-gallon gas can, and spent twenty minutes just trying to figure out how to assemble the childproof nozzle and cap so I could put the damn gallon in my dead car. By then it had started snowing again, and I resumed my death grip on the wheel to guide us home. The roads were lousy; our driveway was very nearly impassable. Another foot. Another freakin' foot of snow. What is going on??

Sunday morning I shoveled leaden wet snow for two hours, and practically had to call a Whipple Township trustee meeting to get our driveway plowed out so we could have 19 people over Sunday afternoon for an early birthday celebration for Bill of the Birds, who was still in Columbus volunteering for the OOS event (he's the emcee with the mostest). I had raided my favorite stores in Columbus--Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. I bought the biggest fattest Whole Foods spears of Mexican asparagus that you have ever seen; I was making sweet potato hash, baby Swiss quiche and slow-roasted baby back ribs for 20, and in my book having all that fabulous fresh food and an impassable driveway is an unqualified Domestic Emergency. Luckily the trustees agreed, at least in theory, and a huge tractor with a blade showed up to deliver this resolute foodqueen from disaster in her snowbound castle. The dinner was a smashing success. If I had had my choice, I wouldn't have started a full day of heavy cooking with several hours of shoveling wet snow and finding someone to remove same from a quarter-mile-long driveway. But this winter, at least for me, is all about having no choice. I feel like a feedsack full of boulders today.

Any more, our house feels like McMurdo Station, the outside having changed from my second home to an inhospitable, barely-navigable place that makes me miserable. The snow is a mess to walk through, all crusty and bumpy. The idea of taking a hike in it is about as appealing as pounding my shins with a hammer. Chet and I have grown fat and lazy in our enforced confinement. There was one day--one day--when we saw a few bare patches of grass, but by nightfall it was being covered up again, and within two days we had another foot of it on the ground.

After my shoveling and plowing adventure, I decided that I had one good thing to say about the latest foot of heavy wet snow. You can grab handfuls of it and scrub the starling sh*t off the bird feeders.

There. There's your silver lining.

Hence the vases upon vases of daffodils and tulips, the blooming amaryllis, the orchids. I am challishing**, and these are the decorations in my hospital room.


a detail of a new Guatemalan quilt I just broke out for the occasion.

My neighbor Beth said she saw a woodcock wandering along the side of our road. Poor thing. He should have been singing, displaying and mating for two weeks now. Instead he ekes out a living on almost nothing. I don't even want to think about what happens to woodcocks who arrive on schedule to find more than a foot of snow on their lekking and feeding grounds. I can't imagine what they find to eat. Maybe they go into the woods and poke around in the unfrozen parts of streams.

We're out of sunflower seed. Again. Gotta buy another 150 pounds of seed next trip into town. Gotta make another sextupled batch of Zick Dough. Gotta keep those bluebirds going. Gotta get another 40 lb. of corn for the four whitetail fawns who are losing all fear of me, the Good Corn Fairy. Gotta toss out the old pork roast for the three crows I adore, who will now come up right under the studio window and cock their bright eyes at me. If I look directly at them they turn their backs and wigwag away, arms crossed behind their backs, as if the last thing on their minds was begging, but they're begging, make no mistake. I've got them right where I want them, and they've got me. I love, love, love my crows.

I stick my nose into the daffodils and breathe deeply of their polleny yellow scent. The tulips, fainter but sweetly heady. They keep growing in the vase, their long stems twisting like curious necks. I don't know how they do that, grow with no bulb or roots as fuel, but I'm glad they do. Something has to be growing in this wasteland.


Never have I been so winter-weary, so thoroughly pummeled, pounded and beaten by a winter. I can't remember what it feels like to take the wheel of a car and not worry about the road conditions. I can't remember T-shirts or a warm breeze lifting the downy hairs on my arms. I can't remember going outside without a hat and parka.


So I fill the vases with storebought spring, and wait.


** a lovely Yiddish word meaning, "to die slowly, inch by inch."

Drowning in Flowers

The hawthorn hedge is snowing white petals.

Why is it that, just when everything starts to go nuts outside, my orchids inside do too? Couldn't I get a little flower love in January and February? Nope, it all comes at once. I hardly know what to do.

The last daffodils are fading outside. Only late pink Salome and a few King Alfreds and smaller narcissus are still hanging on. I wanted to share some photos of our daffodils this year, because never has there been a finer year for bulbs in southern Ohio. The flowers are huge and abundant, the leaves tall and long. The growing conditions last year suited them just fine, I suspect.

My mother-in-law Elsa Thompson, Publisher Emeritus of Bird Watcher's Digest, is a great gardener, and a respecter of old things, fine things. She has an extraordinary eye for beauty.
She's also a fabulous cook, and sets a mean Easter table.For years, the big house right across the alley from the Thompsons was owned by two elderly sisters who grew beautiful flowers. When the sisters died, the house was sold, and Elsa was horrified to see the new homeowner ripping out the ladies' daffodils--in full bloom--and throwing them out into the alley.

For some people, nothing, or concrete, suits them better than beauty. I don't pretend to understand them, but they're generally the ones with the overactive weedwhackers, the chemical lawns and the perfectly trimmed ball-shaped shrubs. The ones who consider birds sort of a nuisance, like blooming daffodils. My friend Rob put up a bluebird box in a woman's Connecticut backyard. The bluebirds nested successfully, but when the babies came out and sat on the deck railing, she asked Rob to take the box down so the bluebirds wouldn't nest again. Why? The bluebirds were pooping on her railing, and that made her mad, because she had to go out and hose it off every day. Well, he took the box down, because nobody who can think that way deserves bluebirds on their deck railing. These are the folks who are missing out on all the best things in life. As my father would say in his most pious voice, "They are more to be pitied than censured."

Elsa hurried out and gathered the dying bulbs and put them in shopping bags, and being out of room in her own garden, she gave them to Bill and me for our farm. "I know these don't look like much now, but they're very special daffodils--all fancy kinds. You'll love them." I looked at the withered leaves and wondered if they'd survive the insult, having been dug up in the height of bloom. Bill dug a long trench and we dropped the bulbs in and covered them over and watered them. That was about ten years ago.

They lived.And they are loved.


Liam is not to be pitied; he eats a ripe pear, up to his eyeballs in flowers, and loving it in an offhand, nine-year-old boy way. He's always been surrounded by flowers.


Speaking of flower rescue, I found this exquisite creature at a big box store in February. I had to get it out of there. And I got one for Elsa, too. They're both blooming their heads off for us, even putting out more buds from the tips! Orchids know when they're appreciated.

Psychopsis mendenhall "Hildos" is working on its tenth flower since last June. That's an average of one a month, all year long, all off the same 3' tall stalk. You have to love an orchid like that. And I do, I do.
Party on wit yo bad self, little Kabuki lobster clown dude.

Laeliocattleya Firedance "Patricia" is unequivocal about her color.
As is my elegant huge purple Phalaenopsis, one of the first orchids I ever got, as a tiny baby from Shila.
I love the intricate ones.
Back in the bedroom, everything's going nuts, as usual in April.
While outside, the hot wind is whipping lilac flowers open. This enormous lilac is another heirloom from Bill's family, via Elsa. It's 15 feet tall now, planted right outside my studio windows, and the room is full of the perfume of lilacs. I told you she knows the good stuff.

I'm overloading. If only I could parcel it out from November to March. Just drowning in flowers.

What's Blooming Now

Did everyone turn off their lights from 8:30-9:30 on Saturday? We did. We're pretty good at dealing without electricity, after this winter. If anyone's wondering, that's a vintage Poll Parrot clock on the wall, a second anniversary gift Bill and I gave each other. The mysterious black machine beneath the clock filters our water five times, ozonates, carbon polishes it, and, we hope, fills us with never-ending health and goodness. I couldn't live without Mr. Goodwater.

Turning the lights off made us notice how beautiful daffodils are by candlelight. So are clivias.


The Clivia miniata (Kafir lily) I've nurtured for three years has three huge bursts of orange, fragrant blossoms. This, for having left it bone-dry in a cold basement all winter. That's what it likes.

I love flower time. I really, really love flowers. Outside, there are crocuses and daffodils galore.


When we first moved here, there was a sad little straight line of fancy daffodils that ran right through the middle of the lawn. It had once lined a driveway that was no more, and it no longer made sense in the landscape. So we mowed around them for a few years, then dug them up out of the rock-hard soil and planted them in the soft compost of our new raised flower beds. This is just a fraction of the daffodils we now have.

The big dig was about 14 years ago. They have multiplied to the point that I dig up daffodil bulbs with everything I try to plant in those beds. I can bring them in by the armload and never notice I've cut them, there are so many bobbing and dancing in the cold spring wind. All that from just a few bulbs, transplanted to a place they can thrive and multiply. Plants just give and give and give.

Meanwhile, out in the greenhouse, everyone's going k-k-k-krazy.Look at the little red and yellow bells of Abutilon megapotamicum. All the gerania that were just leaves in my last post are blooming their heads off.

Inside the house, the orchids are winding up. Oh Lord, I love this time of year, when I get up every morning and peek down into their paired leaves to see if I can find a new bloom spike starting. Plants are blooming this spring that haven't bloomed for years. I think it's the massive repotting I did in November, that's what I think. I think it's the Aussie Gold medium I used. It's payback time. The diatomaceous earth in the Aussie Gold medium seems to have licked the mealybugs, and throwing out sick plants helped a lot. Not to mention the thorough washing and spraying they got in November, in that marathon of orchidaceous labor. With orchids, it's all about being willing to wait.

Psychopsis Mendenhall "Hildos" is about to unfurl another dancing flamenco lobster, its eighth since last June. Ahhh.

Here's Laeliocattleya " Firedance Patricia" about to haul off and give me some red flowers.
You can tell it's happy because the new growth off to the left side is so robust and full of buds.


The promise in those fat bronze buds...the anticipation of waiting for them to open...such fun. And then a few days go by and boom, they open.
But for now, the undisputed Queen of the Collection is a Brassaevola cross called "Morning Glory." I....love.....this.....plant.
The flowers are enormous, three inches or more across, and fragrant. OK, you had me at enormous, but fragrant? Almost seems too much to ask for. Now, pull back and look at the entire plant, which is a couple of feet across at this point.


That's what I'm talkin' about. A plant that is self-actualizing, blooming from every new growth point, practically leaping from its pot in exuberance. At last count, sixteen blossoms open at once. Stinkin' up the place.

These are the things that happen when plants are happy, when the lines of caring and communication are open between plant and caretaker. You feel like an orchid samurai, keeper of ancient secrets, axion of ability, but really, it's just this little magical thing that happens when you care enough to figure out how to do the right thing.

On Friday, I made my way back from my speaking engagement in Middletown by way of Columbus. There was to be a huge orchid show and sale, if the American Orchid Society and Central Ohio Orchid Society web sites were to be believed, running from Friday through Sunday at an airport hotel. I drove around in circles looking for the right Mariott, and when I finally found the entrance, I made my way inside the huge atrium where I teamed up with two equally confused women who'd driven down from Detroit, who, when I spotted them, had that look of the orchid fancier about them: smart, sharply dressed, well-tended. (I am a distinct anomaly). We wandered around asking custodians about it until someone told us which conference room might hold the show. Finally we found a room with a few orchids on a folding table, nothing more. It seems the web sites had misled us; setup was Friday, and the show actually opened Saturday morning. The vendors hadn't even arrived yet.

Oh.

The orchid ladies from Detroit, who'd driven three hours expressly to buy some new orchids, were a good deal more perturbed than I. I immediately took it as a cosmic smackdown, and actually felt relieved. Clearly, I don't need any more orchids than the 38 currently cramming my shelves, and the gods agree about that. I climbed back in the Exploder, kissed Chet Baker, and headed home to enjoy what I already have. Which, in truth, is way more than enough. A fact that will make itself clear next November, at the next repotting marathon.

It's not having what you want.
It's wanting what you've got.

Sheryl Crow, "Soak Up the Sun"