garden

Daily, since my return from Vermont, I spend several hours in the early morning and evening trying to revive, restore, reclaim the garden patches and containers in my yard. Once so carefully groomed and lush, now dry and beaten by the drought and sun. I water sparingly to try to keep a bit of bloom going. Along the North side of the garage, a lovely patch of Heavenly blue Morning Glories have popped up. Volunteers from another year, I guess, for, I did not plant them. I built something for them to climb and with any luck, they should bloom well into October.

I can not be in the sun working for more than one hour without becoming dizzy again. The heat is still intolerable. I hope that this will pass in time. It is 90 degrees by 10 am. Today there is a breeze and I mowed the lawns.

Last night I had a happy surprise in a bloom from Katja's cactus. Katja is my dearest friend and we have cemented our friendship in the exchange of plants for nearly twenty years. She is a master artist and print maker and I had the honor of living next door to her and her sculptor husband Mark when I first moved to Maryland. Her friendship in art, food, gardening and family have sustained me.

One Sunday, we were roaming around the Takoma Park market when we saw this gorgeous cactus. It was similar to a night-blooming variety that we had both wrangled with over the years, an ungainly, heavy, ugly plant that overgrows to the point of exasperation before sending out arrays of large, heavily perfumed blooms.

We obtained a cutting of this new cactus. Purloined. A bad habit passed on by some rogue genetic gardener lineage... The shared heritage of generations of grandmothers who pick off a leaf here and there, proliferating African violets, colleus...etc. I could not visit and admire a plant in a neighbor's yard without being encumbered with cuttings, plants and advice on how and where to plant... the community of shared gardening is a great source of pleasure. Buying a plant for myself does not resonate nearly so much as one given by a friend or neaghbour.

After four years, we have several large plants. It has the same bad habits as its cousin plant, but that is ok. It redeems itself with the offer of peasant blooms.

It embodies something of the nature of friendship, sometimes at the brink of drying up, suddenly invasive and needy, remote, fallow, and then suddenly offering up a most delightful treat. The first set of blooms, ten in all, I missed completely. I had seen the beginning of the blooms but became preoccupied with some other matter. One morning when I went in to water, I saw the spent blooms hanging there, drying. In a moment of carelessness, a friendship can also be lost in this way.