Garden Musings: On Changes

Garden Musings: On Changes

Perennials I planted ‘round the bower
Have sprung up, green, and hasten on to flower,
While bulbs I placed in careful clumps last fall
Now bloom where squirrels rearranged them all!

March: On the Cusp!

Snowmobile and ski trails on Lake Kashagawigamog, all quiet in the early light. Photo © Hildegard Lindschinger

The first week of March – white and cold! We were staying in a second-floor condo in Ontario’s Haliburton Highlands.  Lake Kashagawigamog and the white mounds of rolling hills undulating along the opposite shore stretched right across the width of our large picture window and beyond. Kashagawigamog– I love the sound of this aboriginal Anishinaabe name– aptly means “lake of long and winding waters.”

First Snowfall

It was inevitable, but of course we were surprised (or just in plain ordinary Canadian denial, having procrastinated in getting snow tires) when we got our first real snowfall during the night of Nov. 21.

Huge snowflakes, floating gently, silently from the dark sky and glistening in the soft glow of street lights, piled in soft mounds on branches and covered the ground. Slick driving conditions notwithstanding, you had to be in awe!  

Que sera? – One Last Winter Dream

Saturday Night, March 28 in southern Ontario: the day’s sunny high temperature of -3C was plunging back down to a nightly low of -10C (again/still…)

As I was waltzing dizzily across the dance floor in my hubby’s arms, new lyrics to the familiar Doris Day ditty started spinning in my mind:

When it was cold at minus 10,
I asked the forecaster, “What will it be?
Will it stay winter? Will there be spring?”
Here’s what (s)he said to me:
Que sera, sera! Whatever will be, will be!
The weather’s not ours to see. – Que sera, sera.”

Well, March went out bleating like a lamb after all, and April 1st brought

Is it Still Summer?

A little watercolour sketch of my irises back in June

What a summer! While some Ontarians (those deprived of perfect holiday weather) were complaining about how “not summery” it felt this year– so much rain, our lakes too cold for swimming, etc.– of course I listened sympathetically!

But then a few gardening friends and I gloated privately to one another

About (Not) Writing – Blame the Month of May!

(Chaucer did, so why not I?)

Distractions! One of my favourite down-to-earth poets, Geoffrey Chaucer, put it most eloquently in the prologue to his book The Legend of Good Women:  after declaring his fervent devotion to reading books, from which nothing could waylay him, he confessed in lines 34-39 [non-rhyming modernization]:

“…except, certainly, when the month of May
Has come, and I hear the birds sing,
And the flowers begin to bloom–
Farewell, my book, and my studiousness!”

Well, like many humans, I do enjoy writing, “except, certainly, when” I also succumb to Chaucer’s distractions.  But it’s not just the birds and flowers. It’s living life! Here in a nutshell, in chronological sequence, are our two main wonderful distractions of May 2014: