Mulberry Jam

I had a fabulous weekend. Well, half fabulous. Sunday I worked an eight hour day, but Saturday! Saturday I got out into the garden for the first time. The photo beside this post is me, out raking leaves off the bulbs. My tulips and daffodils were starting to smother under their winter blanket, and I have definitely been smothering after a cooped up winter. I spent a happy day cleaning things up and finding out how my plants have come through the winter. Mostly it seems they’ve done very well, after a mild winter.

My spring nesting impulses come out in gardening. Other creatures are also feeling the bug. I had been out working for about an hour and had left my garden shed open as I went in and out to get various tools. At one point I stepped into the shed and was startled by something flying around my head. I backed out quickly and then peered into the gloom of the small shed. Two pairs of black beady eyes peered back at me– a pair of Carolina wrens. They were perched on the edge of a basket hanging from a nail on the eaves. I think they had just discovered the nesting spot of their dreams in that basket. Can’t you imagine? “Look honey! It’s high and dry, out of the weather and up away from cats. Let’s move in right away!” I felt terrible to dash their hopes but I had to shoo them out, poor dears. They didn’t shoo easily. They thought they’d hit the jackpot.

My mother thinks if I really loved the birds I’d hang the basket outside for them, but I use that basket myself so they’ll just have to make do with one of the shrubs this year. Sorry.

Every place has its spring rituals. A few days ago I read about the spring ice lottery in Nenana, Alaska. Since 1917, each year this town has held a lottery to bet on exactly when the Tanana River will “go out”, or melt. In early March, townspeople erect a tall tripod of painted spruce logs, attached with a guywire to the shore. When the ice melts enough to topple the tripod and snap the wire, that’s the official time. I read about it in connection with a study of climate warming, since this precise timing of the ice melt has given climatologists an almost 100-year record of conditions at this far northern town. When I went to the town’s official site, I was charmed by all the photos documenting the event. Putting up the tripod is a big festival in Nenana, marked with snowmachine and dogsled races, dances and big parties. Last year the winning time was 3:47PM on April 27, and 22 winners split $303,273. Big money is this small town I’m sure. I love that they’ve developed their own holiday tradition here. Maybe the world isn’t yet completely uniform and predictable, with a single global culture created by Madison Avenue. I hope not.

Here in Washington, this week has been full of signs of spring. This daffodil was the first to bloom in my garden. I thought for a moment about leaving it, but decided I’d enjoy it so much more if I brought it inside. The weather has been alternating between days warm enough for a top-down convertible and days so cold and raw all I want to do is stay inside under a blanket and a cat. The birds are beginning to sing more each day, and as I stepped out several mornings this week I saw large flocks of geese heading north. I wondered what it must look like to them, flying over a metropolis like Washington.

Our February weather roller coaster continues. Monday it reached 70 degrees, today it is snowing lightly. No doubt about it, today feels like winter. But the signs of spring are out there. My snowdrops are blooming, and tulip and daffodil foliage is starting to peek up. Robin flocks have already been passing through, though I don’t believe they’re the most reliable harbinger, since some of them overwinter here. More exciting is the fact that yesterday I heard a cardinal singing, a sure sign he’s beginning to think about staking out nesting territory.

The photo is a closeup of one clump of snowdrops that I naturalized years ago among the roots of the mulberry tree. Now they come up faithfully every spring, usually in early to mid-February, and I don’t have to do anything. Bulbs are so great for the lazy gardener!

My beloved mulberry tree had another gift for me this week.

This blog, of course, owes its name to the mulberry in front of my house. (See “Why Mulberry Jam?”) The masthead on this page is a photo of the tree in autumn. This fall my mulberry faithfully turned its usual spectacular shade of gold. You would laugh if you saw my photo library because it has WAY too many pictures of this tree. Every year I can’t resist taking another series of shots trying to capture the evanescent beauty of the turning leaves.

As it happens, this year we’ve had a very warm fall, with only a few light frosts all the way up through mid-November. As a result, the leaves have hung on much later than normal. Up until Saturday the mulberry held all its leaves, hovering protectively over the house and lighting up the whole street with the brilliance of their yellow color.

Finally on Sunday morning we woke up to a heavy frost with temperatures well below freezing. A light coating of silver lay over everything. From my kitchen window I looked out and saw the morning sun beginning to strike the tree. And then it started. As the sun warmed the leaves that were made heavy by their coating of frost, they began to fall. At first just a few here and there, but in a few minutes, the tree was creating a rain of golden heart-shaped leaves. There was no breeze, so the leaves fell straight down to the ground, fluttering gently and turning over in the sunlight on their way.

I ran out in my bathrobe and stood beneath the tree. The sound was incredible on a quiet Sunday morning. Without the usual sounds of traffic I could clearly hear the leathery rustle of the leaves as they fell past their fellows and landed gently on the ground. I was surrounded by bright fluttering coins that brushed my head and shoulders as they fell. I ran back in for my camera and attempted to capture the image.

There is no word in English to describe that feeling of mingled joy and sadness at the beauty of fleeting experience. The Japanese have the concept of “mono no aware,” or the sadness of things. It’s very much connected to a Buddhist sense of the brevity of life and the transience of beauty, summed up in the old Japanese phrase “swirling petals, falling leaves.” It’s partly that spirit that encourages the entire nation to turn out for cherry blossom viewing or hanami, during the brief days when the sakura are in flower.

On Sunday morning, the rain of leaves continued, until within an hour the tree was almost completely bare. By afternoon on the same day the formerly brilliant leaves had faded to a dull brown that thickly carpeted our front walk and yard. Now the tree stands with naked branches, waiting for spring.

We’re now coming into the toughest part of the summer here in Washington. Days are a monotonous stretch of the triple H – “hazy, hot and humid”. August makes you understand why British embassy staff got hardship pay for being stationed here all the way up to the mid seventies. Longtime residents dread this month and do all they can to avoid it by fleeing to vacations at beaches and northern lakes. It’s the only time of the year that beltway traffic is bearable, because so many people are gone.

My garden is showing the stress. We’ve had a very dry summer, and after a certain point even faithful work with the sprinkler just doesn’t cut it anymore. I think I heard we’re down about 8 inches this year compared to average rainfall so far. My tomatoes have suffered from blossom-end rot, which is no surprise. Blossom-end rot is a very unsightly softening of the fruit that makes the tomatoes inedible. It comes from calcium deficiency brought on by uneven or inadequate water. Leaf feeding helps, and eggshells dug in near the plant roots help, but it’s tough to avoid with no rain at all. Even worse, the spider mites lo-o-ove this hot dry weather. They’ve managed to just about kill my beans and tomatoes, and even the zucchini are showing the telltale bronzing on the leaves that means mite trouble. Weekly sprays with insecticidal soap have failed to stave off disaster. I won’t show you photos because it just makes me ashamed. I’m a bad gardener to have tomato plants so sickly.

But we’re still getting enough tomatoes to keep us in insalata caprese, so I guess I can’t complain too much. Thank goodness for the cast iron plants at this time of year. My coneflowers and black-eyed susans still look surprisingly good, considering the conditions. And this morning I walked out to a lovely surprise. My Resurrection Lily popped up and bloomed, seemingly overnight. Two days ago there was no sign of it, or at least none that I noticed. Today, there it stands in all its glory.

Lycoris squamigera in catalogs nowadays is usually called Surprise Lily, but I prefer the old-fashioned name, Resurrection Lily. That’s what my grandmother called them, and mine came from her garden. It’s a good name for a plant with this kind of life cycle. The leaves that appear in spring die back and completely disappear by mid summer, so when the lily blooms in late summer it seems to rise up out of nowhere, coming back from the dead. I planted these early last summer, which is not a good time. Lycoris don’t like being disturbed at any time, but usually it’s best to transplant in the fall. Last summer the broad strap-like leaves seemed to take the move fairly well, but later when the plants should have bloomed, no dice. Nothing came up. I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. To be honest, by now I’d forgotten all about them. Still no sign of the other five, but I consider it a hopeful sign that this one seems to have taken to its new spot.

Mark and I maintain a small but intensively planted yard of about 1/3 of an acre with lots of flower beds and a 10×20 foot vegetable garden. Every year in early spring we have a five-minute moment of thinking, should we do something about our lawn this year? Should we put down some turfbuilder, or some weed-n-feed? But then we wake up. Nah. We’ve gone thirteen years doing nothing to the grass, why start now?

Besides, it looks great right now. Mind you, it isn’t exactly ready for the Scotts commercial. It has a lot of clover, and okay, we have a few dandelions. Maybe more than a few. But really, dandelions get an undeserved bad rap—it’s all in how you spin it. Are they menaces to the well-kept suburban lawn, or bright harbingers of spring that bring color to the garden? The clover isn’t technically a grass, but it’s green and soft underfoot and the honeybees love it. Same with all the buttercups that grow at the bottom of the yard. Are they broadleaf weeds that should be eradicated? Or naturalized flowers that add interest to the lawn?

And even better, they’re naturally naturalized. I never did a thing to encourage them except ask my lawn care service (i.e., long-suffering Mark) to mow around them. After 13 years in this house I’ve had plenty of time to add lots of things for him to mow around. He is very sweet about this—I know it is a pain in the neck to carefully avoid these random clusters of flowers out in the grass, but he does it without complaint. I love the cheerful look of the bright yellow blossoms. “Why honey,” I tell him ingenuously. “Lots of people pay landscapers plenty of money for this effect!” And I got mine by practicing my favorite gardening method: doing nothing. I like to think of it as the Tao of gardening.

I’ve found over the years that the best way to handle many garden problems is in fact to do absolutely nothing. You could call me lazy, but I prefer to think of myself as practicing Green methods. I mean, look at what happens when an insect pest hatches out in my vegetable garden, like aphids or worms. Sure, you could pull out the heavy duty chemicals, put on the haz-mat suit and go spray. Or you could follow my method and just wait a couple of days; see what happens. Lots of times the infestation gets knocked back just as quickly as it appears by natural predators of the insects. In my garden that would be birds or ladybugs. I have plenty of both because I don’t spray and I keep lots of shrubbery at the edge of the garden for bird habitat. The few pests that can’t be managed by doing nothing I can often avoid by putting floating row covers over young seedlings. No poison necessary and it’s pretty quick work to just lay a lightweight cloth over the ground. I’ve lost a few delicate plants over the years through my laissez-faire methods, but on the whole the system works very well for me.

Isn’t it great when doing the easy thing is actually good for you? Maybe this is a lesson I can apply to other aspects of life besides gardening. After all, doing nothing is absolutely organic and completely chemical free!

My fingers are typing more slowly than usual this morning. I’m feeling the after-effects of spending the entire day in the garden. It was a great day, but I’m afraid I had to spend a lot of my time pulling weeds—our cold wet April has left me very behind on cleaning up the early spring monsters.

Great news, though—the catbird arrived yesterday. I looked up at one point in the midday and there he was lunching on some bugs disturbed by my digging, just as though he had never left. The catbirds are handsome and sleek with dark gray feathers, like something Cary Grant would wear. It’s impossible to forget what they’re called because their call sounds exactly like a cat’s meow. In the evening they hang around in our bushes making strange noises, but they can also sing beautifully. They’re in the mockingbird family and their song sounds very similar, although simpler.

After living here so many years, I know fairly precisely when the migratory birds of summer will be back. The wrens arrived just a bit late because of our cold weather, and have now been here a week. Since their arrival they’ve been busy setting up in the little bird house that hangs from one of my dogwood trees. The hole in the wren house is carefully sized to allow the passage of only the tiniest birds. The wrens fit nicely, as they’re only 4 1/2 inches long. That small entrance hole is a source of immense frustration to the larger, fatter sparrows, who try incessantly to squeeze themselves in. They can get their heads in far enough to see that the house would be perfect! But even though they push and strain, they just can’t get their whole bodies in. They’re so shameless they keep trying to get in even after Mr. Wren and his bride have moved in. This drives the wrens absolutely berserk! They’ll fuss at the top of their voices and even strafe the sparrows’ backsides with flyby passes. The sparrows stolidly ignore them and keep trying to push their stupid selves into a hole they can never fit.

I have a ball watching the wrens at their nest-building. The male wren always arrives first. He sets up his territory with a burst of bubbling song, and keeps it up all day long. In between songs, he starts carrying small twigs into the birdhouse. This takes a lot of dexterity, as he’s maneuvering twigs of four or five inches through a hole the size of a quarter. Several days later the female arrives. She checks the house out thoroughly and takes her time about it. She’s popping in and out, flitting up to the roof, checking out the view and the neighborhood. Meanwhile the male is putting out a continual burble of ingratiating song. “Don’t you love it! I did it all for you sweetheart!” Sometimes I’ve seen wren females reject a house outright. They fly on to another garden and some other wren. But even if she stays, the male’s troubles aren’t over. As often as not, she’ll climb inside the house and start taking sticks out. One by one, each twig he carried in there at great expense of effort will be dismantled, and he’ll have to start the whole thing over. Can’t you just imagine what she’s saying? “What were you thinking?” That bachelor décor has GOT to GO.

Sometimes I think Mr. Wren must be the most henpecked bird on earth. But he may have his revenge. My bird book says that male wrens will keep more than one female going if they can find enough good nesting sites. Can’t entirely blame him for stepping out, if that’s true, but wow! That means he has not one, but two sets of bossy females and children to take care of. The amount of energy that must take—can you imagine?

(Thanks to Carla Finley on Flickr for the great catbird photo.)

March is giving us the cruel jerk-around, as usual. Yesterday’s high was 80 degrees, but by bedtime the temperature had fallen to 40, with a cold rain setting in.  I don’t mind.  It can only be winter’s last gasp at this point, and the rain will help things grow.  The shrubs in our back garden already have tiny green leaves, no bigger than a squirrel’s ear.  From a distance they look like a veil of sheer green tulle wrapping the framework of branches.

While it was still warm yesterday I picked the bouquet of daffodils you see here.  These flowers are always the first to bloom in the very early spring.  The cups are all ruffled and doubled, with petals in every shade of gold and green.  When Mark and I moved in they were the only things blooming in the long-neglected garden, and I think they must be almost as old as our house.  The house was built in 1948, so I imagine these hardy bulbs have bloomed every year for more than fifty years.  I bless whoever it was that left them for me.

At Manassas Battlefield I have seen the ruins of old farmsteads that date from the mid-nineteenth century.  The farmhouses are long gone, but around the crumbling foundations you can see masses of daffodils that still bring their brightness in thick rows thanks to gardeners who are long gone.  Those flowers look exactly like mine, with crazy mismatched petals that lack any distinctive cup.  I wonder if they were they always that way or whether they gradually took on that form over the decades.  Perhaps as the bulbs crowded in upon one another in the untended garden the petals grew wild as a result.

Sometimes I wonder what my own garden will look like in another fifty years.  After I leave it, will anything remain?  Some of my favorite plants are very long lived.  Peonies can live for many decades without much attention, and I have dozens of them.  I’ve planted hardy roses that climb over the arbor above my patio.  How long will they keep climbing?  And I’ve added to the old wild daffodils that were here when I arrived.  Now there are Jack Snipes and Thalias, Tête-à-têtes and King Alfred daffodils all over my garden.  Will some future gardener wonder who planted them and thank me?  I hope so.

We’ve been having a stretch of cold weather here in Washington, like so many other parts of the country. Nothing too horrible here, just a string of nights below 20 degrees and days that haven’t made it up above the freezing mark. Not very impressive if you live in a place like Minneapolis or Montana or upstate New York. My gosh, have you seen the footage on the Weather Channel showing what it looks like north of Syracuse in places like Oswego and Parish, New York? They’ve had more than 100 inches of snow since January, and it keeps on coming, along with high winds whipping off Lake Ontario. My sister went to college at Oswego, and I remember being incredulous when I saw the steel cables they string between buildings to help the students make their way to classes. Connie says they saved her more than once, which makes me glad I’m just coping with your basic mid-Atlantic snow-and-mixed-precipitation stuff.

Still, this is colder weather than we’ve had for a few winters. I’m afraid the rosemary shrub outside in my herb garden is probably done for by now. I keep planting rosemary although it isn’t supposed to grow in this zone. Most years my plants make it through the winter with no trouble, but when we get a stretch of sub-15-degree nights with wind, that’s it—I know I’ll be planting new seedlings next spring. My current shrub was five years old, so it had gotten big enough to bloom and really give a nice Mediterranean touch to the garden. Oh well. I knew I was pushing it.

Of course this current stretch can’t last much longer. Despite the cold, I can tell the days are getting longer and the sun higher now that we’re six weeks past the winter solstice. I’ve been amused to watch the animals in my back garden taking advantage of the stronger rays of the sun. The squirrels like to stretch out on the black asphalt shingles of our garden shed to sunbathe, and the dove family hangs out all in a row each afternoon on my back porch railing.

And inside the house my cat spends her very stressful day moving to follow the sunbeams on the floor. You know, cats are solar powered!

I’m so proud– I’ve finally managed to get an orchid to rebloom after years of trying. In fact, the house is decorated with several of my little projects right now. I have a reblooming amaryllis lighting up the kitchen with four fiery red flowers on one stalk, and another amaryllis in bud that should bloom in another month or so.

Phalaenopsis orchids are so inexpensive these days, I love to have them around in winter when my garden is under ice and snow. (Literally under snow today in fact. We were shoveling three inches of sleet yesterday morning.) Since you can buy a blooming orchid at the grocery store for about twenty dollars you might well decide it’s not worth the bother of keeping a plant around in hopes it will rebloom. But I love a challenge and I decided to give it a try.

I’ve failed at these reblooming projects with orchids in the past. I’ve wound up frustrated with plants that survived my attentions but refused to bloom. Orchids without blooms are pretty boring, I must say. This time the plant I bought last winter in February 2006 benefitted from benign neglect over the summer. I left it outside in filtered sunlight under my rose arbor throughout the warm weather, which seemed to agree with it. I brought it inside when night temps dropped below 40 degrees and fed it once or twice with your basic plant food. By Christmas it was putting up a big, promising-looking spike from the base of the leaves. Sure enough, by January the spike was forming buds, and now look at it! Gawgeous! If these blooms last half as long as the ones it had last winter, I’m in for flowers until April at least.

Amaryllis are even easier and more dependable rebloomers. The red one I have blooming right now I’ve had for four years. Same routine as with the orchid. I stick the boring-looking plant outside all summer and basically forget about it. See my detailed instructions here, from a post last year.

So okay, I’ve saved myself all of twenty dollars, but hey. It was the challenge that was the point of it. So I’m easily excited, what can I say?