Category Archives: writing

What it looks like now

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a longish view

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from the right

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new columbine blooms, and one fern taking root.

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after cutting down the iris, it began to sprout again.

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hidden basket

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more of the same

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Hidden miniature rose and pansies, salvia, & bee balm.

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From the right

So, here is what the Secret Hanging Gardens look like now.  To lemon balm*, iris, pansies, rose geranium, columbine, anemone,solomon’s seal, bee balm, wild violets, alyssum, million bells,  I’ve added a coleus, two types of Salvia, a bit of fern and sweet woodruff.  A protecting Crow Godess* watches. It is a garden of singles, of onesies, when wisdom says plant three of each, or five.  I hope in time, the violets and columbine will spread, as will the solomon’s seal.  I want to scatter some bulbs in the fall.

Does it represent my novel’s current state? My novel looks at a tragedy, which is couched in other events of a scattered extended family, during 1991-92.  That is, it is an assemblage of various plants (characters) in relationship to each other, but does it  an overarching harmonic scheme

Is it at all political?  Does it say anything?  This slender novel, I mean, garden,  beats back the wilderness with a view to free some trees.  Creating a garden; creating a novel?

What does it need, friends?

 

 

 

 

*Lemon balm from my friend, Alla; and a Crow Goddess medallion purchased from Sarah’s etsy shop.

Clearing Land

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What it sort of looked like

What it sort of looked like, though it isn’t mine.

Clearing in progress

Still in progress

My summer project, aka Avoiding the Revision, is clearing some brush out back.  Full of creepers, vines, and Poison ivy, I have been donning long sleeves and gloves, and applying a newly acquired set of lopers to the woods.  I now understand how the pioneers must have felt felling trees to create homesteads.  The sound of the lopers cutting through branches and roots is chillingly satisfying.  I barely made a dent, despite filling a garbage bin half-dozen times to lug to the compost pile.  Still, when I raked a narrow edge in the woods to reveal leaf mold and dirt, I was thrilled.  There is  now a small, liberated wild honeysuckle tree.  The thorny vines that were not roses that were never to be roses, are cut and release their grasp on the flowering trees.

I envision native plants: trilliums, mallow, maybe woodland bulbs.  What I’d like  to is create a small oasis for the eyes, hang trailing flowers from the dead tree limbs, scatter bluebells and lily of the valley at ground level.  A hammock and a book could be very nice. Why, one could even revise there.