Our garden is looking particularly wild and beautiful right now.

It’s that time of the year when there is ample rain and the desiccating heat of summer is lurking still far enough over the horizon to pleasantly warm us in its penumbra.

Although I appreciate our garden, I am embarrassed to admit that apart from the required mowing and clipping and watering stuff as directed, I can take zero credit for the current floral display.

Kelly has the green thumbs. I am all fingers. I don’t even know the names of most of the flowers. Thats a red one, and that’s a yellow poppyish one (narrator: they were tulips). I hang my head.

I love the idea of growing our own vegetables and composting and educating a wild botanical surrounds that welcomes bugs and birds and all sundry of critters. I love the idea, but I am oddly resistant to inheriting the technical wherewithal (code for lazy at a DNA level) to actually get much done.

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To whit, I think in a past life I was ugly-wealthy and owned a sprawling summer rural estate. I had gardeners, and I would waltz around my manicured gardens wearing unbuttoned white cotton shirts with lacy sleeves, pausing to perhaps sit beside one of the many resplendent water features…. reading poetry, planning complex hedge mazes and contemplating duels.

Lucky for me, in this life, I have Kelly to attend to such matters.
You should see her with pistols at dawn.

Anyways, I snapped these pics just before mowing the lawn. It is a big lawn, and we have an old clunky mower….so I should get at least some bonus points for my efforts no?

For the record: I was wearing an old t-shirt. No lace.

“The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity.
The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things.
The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe.
It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food.
It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses.
It’s about winning; about providing society with superior things; and about proving that you have taste, and good values, and you work hard.
And what a wonderful relief, every so often, to know who the enemy is.
Because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time.
And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth, and growth, and beauty, and danger, and triumph.
And then everything dies anyway, right?
But you just keep doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life