The Tree
and other Stop-Me-In-My-Tracks Goodness
I came out of the front door to admire the tulips, now a massy, bright, informal swathe and saw the tree, suddenly in its soft new leaf. Glory! It’s an absolute wonder.
This tree is borrowed from the street. I’m so lucky to have it at the end of my garden. Yes, I do get very fed up when, a little later in the year, the black sticky stuff from the aphids it feeds goes all over my car, the pots and the hedge…but I would never change it. Though saying that, I have changed it, in that last year I got permission from the council tree man to lift the canopy a little and to remove a branch which hung right over The Smokehouse.
This huge beauty ( it’s a Lime Tree) adds a luminous green upright to Front Garden. It isn’t only the colour, which alone would be enough to make the tree gladdening to behold, but also the soft intermittency of the leaves, at this moment, before bulk and heft kick in to get it through the summer. It’s the ‘greening of the leaves,’ as the outgoing U.S poet laureate, Ada Limon, puts it in her celebration of the persistence of greening:
Instructions on Not Giving Up More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Wonderful poem with a great before and after - the immediate feeling of the almost overwhelming blossom, too much colour and fuss for someone coming out of something hard, and then the serious acknowledgement of pain and then - persistence of the life force! We can come back, despite ‘the hurt, the empty.’ I love the final assertion of liveliness, whatever has happened: this life, I want it, ‘I’ll take it all.’
Thank you, Ada Limon.
Much work to do out there in the garden and I’m behind in all departments this week as I’ve been away visiting family for a few days. Now I return to my groundwork labours in Back Garden and as the heat comes on, much watering.
First, at Allotment, I have planted up the Asparagus Bed. This is a long term project for my old age. In ten years time (God Willing, as my mother in law would say) I may be harvesting little else, but with a bit of luck, I’ll be cutting asparagus.
I planted these floppy deep-sea-looking creatures before I went away. Here they are spread out on their ridges, looking like washed up seaweed. I covered them in my finest allotment compost. The book said, be sure to thoroughly weed any bed you plant them into, and I know that despite my year of preparation, building the bed, filling it, covering it over, letting it the earth and compost and muck stew in the dark under a big sheet of black plastic, there is still Mare’s Tail coming through very happily in there. Well, we’ll battle it out in the years ahead.
Last night I gave the asparagus their first big drink since planting. Fingers crossed for their successful establishment. It’ll be two years before I’ll cut any. Meanwhile my wonderful plot neighbour, Mr Headteacher, said, casually, as if offering winter cabbage, would you like some Asparagus? I’ve got to keep picking it and I’ve got loads in my freezer… So that was a lovely post-watering tea (or supper, if you are a supper-eater). I also picked rhubarb, which became crumble.
More Watering
Over at Calderstones almost all the donated David Austin Roses are planted now - just two of the Ramblers to go in and they are not in yet because it is so hard digging the holes for them. They need to be close to the established evergreen trees they will scramble into and the holes need to be big, because the earth is poor near those trees. Planning to complete that this week when there will be someone on the team who can wield the pickaxe.
And the roses that are in are going to need many cans of water this hot week. We don’t have a hose or even a tap at the front of the building so our Volunteer Gardeners have to fill ten cans and pull them around from the back yard in a trolley. Hard work. Only the establishing roses will be watered. Everything else in that border must fend for itself. You may be able to make out five R. ‘Gabriel Oak’ there in what seems a bare patch.
In Back Garden, Groundworks Man has not been able to come back, as he is on a bigger job for a few weeks, so I’m just slogging away at moving the pots and clearing the paved area that backs onto the house. Here is the old bath, which I’ve used as a planter for many years, and which has reached the end of my tether. It’s going now.
I found it, cast-iron, original to the house, late nineteenth century, when we first moved in and needed to make a lawn for football. It was buried in Back Garden full of gravel, and linked to a very large pond. Pond marginals no doubt lived there. Previous owner had replaced the Cast Iron with a small pink plastic bath which was one of the first things to be removed from the house . I hoped Cast Iron could be restored but the cost was too great, and anyhow, the actual moving of the beast is almost an impossibility. Which is why it’s been a planter for thirty years.
I spent a good part of yesterday digging and pulling that ‘Brown Turkey’ Fig out of the bath and repotting it. I wish you well, dear Fig, and hope you recover.
Stopped In My Tracks
While I was away I drove through the Cambridge village of Maddingly and saw a planting in a front garden that caused me the slow down and metaphorically whistle admiringly. I wanted to slam the brakes on and take a photo but then I also wanted to get where I was going as soon as I could … so I drove on by, but I them unable to stop thinking about it, I made a detour on my way home. The picture doesn’t quite do justice to the vibrancy of the pairing.
Luckily for me, as I parked up, and walked over to take my photo, I realised there were label tabs on both shrubs so I can tell you the Ceanothus is ‘Puget Blue’ and the Crabapple Malus ‘Rudolph’.
Is it a bit chocolate boxy, a bit Victoriana ? Like the somewhat overpowering blossom in Limon’s poem? Perhaps, but it made me gasp with delight at first sight, and so I will be planting both of these, together, at Calderstones.
What’s Good in the Garden?
‘Tulip Ballerina’ is good!
Other things ?
The origami-style purple Aquilegia is a self-sown descendant of one the first things I had success with from seed. More than twenty years I sowed Aquilegia ‘Woodside Blue’, and quite a few them grew to be planted in Front Garden. The flowers are a dark navy violet, the leaves are ferny and splashed with yellow. That yellow splash has gradually disappeared from the foliage ( I think it has, must have a good hunt through the garden and check) and but the intricate folds keep coming, and occasionally this fine, dark colour. In this random pairing, the Golden Hop provides the splash of limey yellow which sets off the purple.
Very Good in the Garden!
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Lime trees are a joy in every season. I have particularly happy memories of the lime trees beneath my windows during my year in France as part of my degree. Windows flung wide open on the warm evenings, and the scent of lime blossoming perfuming my room.
I'm interested in your Cast Iron planter - did you put a big drainage layer in the bottom/drill holes apart from the obvious plug hole? I have a metal wheelbarrow that I want to recycle this way and am pondering drainage.
That hop is gorgeous - where do you have it and is it a thug or well-behaved?
Love the hue of the new lime leaves - my backdrop in the garden is three limes and soon they will be buzzing with bees.