During these summer days while walking through Prospect Gardens I am mindful of the abundance and beauty that surrounds me. The Gardens now are like a Monet painting awash in pinks and yellows with tinges of reds, purples and blues. Phlox, black-eyed susan, tickseed, early sunflower, coreopsis, Joe Pye Weed, purple cone flower, cardinal plant, lavender hysop, and blue lobelia are in bloom. During my visits, I am likely to see a chipmunk scurry across the rocks, a bunny dive into the undergrowth, butterflies, bees, and a Gold Finch perched on the pod of purple cones looking for some early seeds.
Last week while checking on transplanted plants from a neighbor, Hanns stopped and got off his bike for a friendly chat. Katie, who lives nearby is expanding play space for her three active children which requires removal of several flower beds. I moved lily of the valley, purple cones and ginger to the Gardens.
I so enjoyed the brief visit with Hanns as we talked at an appropriate distance and masked. Hanns has a delightful sense of humor. These brief visits with passersby are even more precious during these days of restricted socializing. Ann and I continue to practice social isolation while missing face-to-face visits with neighbors, friends and relatives. Zoom gatherings, sometimes up to three a week, are an inadequate substitute and yet I value these virtual ties.
Here's a few pictures showing the abundance of Prospect Gardens along with quotations about gardens.
"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. May Sarton (1912-1995): American poet.
"Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower." Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875): Dane famous for fairy tales.
"I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow." President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
"We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?" Wendell Berry: Poet, activist, critic and Kentucky farmer born in 1934.
"Because I am really interested in gardening, I do really interesting plants, not even always flowers. And because I have grown them, I really know them like friends. I paint everything from exotic orchids to rosehips growing wild in a hedge. They just have to speak to me." Emma Tennant (1932-2017): British novelist and editor known for her post-modern style.
"A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust." Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932): British horticulturist .
"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul." Luther Burbank (1949-1926); American botanist.
"I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds."Robert Bridges (1844-1930): British Poet Laureate .
“In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful. ” Abram L. Urban (1899-1963): Prominent African American Economist
"It's August, and the Joe Pye Weed has appeared in all its glory to announce the coming end of summer. This showy giant native plant gained its common name from a Colonial-era Native American by the name of Joe Pye who used the plant medicinally. This wise medicine man reputedly knew many cures made with the herb “Eupatorium purpureum,” curing fevers, urinary obstructions and typhus outbreaks. Along with its beauty and medicinal qualities Joe Pye is a favorite of pollinators. " Rita Jones/For The Logan Daily News, August 20. 2020.
Thank you to Marcia and Jim for donating the small decorative fence now bordering the Peg Arnold memorial garden. It's the perfect touch. Peg was one of the first volunteers along with her husband Steve.
Recently Steve moved to Ashland so he could be near his daughter, her husband and their son. I bet Grandpa Steve is enjoying his Grandson. His daughter's dog loved eating raspberries at Prospect Gardens before Steve and I, during our encounters, would notice.
Another grateful thank you to Marcia and Jim for sharing the abundance of their friend's organic vegetable garden, which is in Appleton. What a generous and tasteful gift. Ann made delicious gazpacho with the heirloom tomatoes, garlic, leeks and cucumbers. The beets, yellow summer squash and the potatoes were just as tasteful. The red cabbage, along with pork chops, made for another delicious dinner. Still another dinner featured homemade tomato soup from several different kinds of tomatoes.
The ground cherries made a unique pie plus added a new taste to a salad of beets and cherry tomatoes. Ground cherries taste like a cherry tomato injected with mango and pineapple juice, and look like an orange pearl encased in a miniature paper lantern.
Ann's friend and a former neighbor of ours on Fox, Peg, also shared tomatoes and herbs from their backyard garden. Thanks, Peg.
The gifts of fresh summer vegetables reminded me of the vegetable gardens and orchards on my family farm. Summer was a time of harvesting. While my brothers and I harvested crops, our Mother canned in the hot kitchen during the entire summer. Windows and the screen door to front porch were wide open in anticipation of a breeze.
She canned several different kinds of apples from the orchards, vegetables from our garden, Georgia or Colorado peaches, and Door County cherries. Empty jars were brought up from the cool basement into the steaming kitchen and washed. The prepared fruits and vegetables, packed into jars, were stacked into the copper boiler for a steamed bath. Ma, with her hair pulled back and her brow covered with sweat, would pull, at the appointed time, the hot jars from the steaming water.
By September, the basement shelves were filled with the results of her hard labor. Stored nearby were potatoes, pumpkins, and squash in bins with a dirt floor, crocks of sauerkraut, and an old butter churn full of pickles next to the sauerkraut. The filled storehouse fed us throughout the winter. The massive woodpile and sometimes a pile of coal stored in the basement kept us warm during the long winter days and nights. Sometime in September, I recall hauling the wood with a tractor and trailer to a basement window and tossing the wood into the basement. One of my brothers would assist.
Prior to getting a gas stove in the late 1940s, Ma, as we referred to her, canned and baked using a wood stove. Somehow she knew how to create and regulate the heat of burning wood. The gas stove stood next to the wood stove. Ma preferred using the wood stove for baking bread because she said wood heat made a better brown crust. I can recall the large tin bread pan full of dough covered with a dish cloth sitting near the hot wood stove rising and eventually bellowing like a cloud. Ma eventually punched the cloud down and divided up the dough into well used darkened tins. If it was early morning Ma would be listening to the "Farm Hour", coming from Green Bay. I can still hear the mellow voice of one of the men as he and his partner chatted about farm topics including the market price of milk, hogs and cattle.
Ma was well known for her pies. She often used Wolf River apples from one of the orchards. These large apples have pale yellow skin with shades of pale dull red and their flesh is tender, white and creamy. Ma made sheet pies rather than the typical round nine inch pies. Remember Ma had fourteen children and during my elementary school years she was feeding eleven counting her.
Ma in the neighborhood was known also for her homemade raised doughnuts. She often made them weekly. The large harvest kitchen table would be covered with cut out doughnuts waiting to be popped into hot lard. We often ate them when they were still warm and without any sugar or powdered sugar.
She often shared her doughnuts with neighbors. My sister Theresa walked the mile dead-end road delivering freshly made doughnuts to Katie and Mary Johnson who lived in a house made of logs. Katie and Mary Johnson were generous, kind, and sweet. Their house was always spotless and had a sweet smell even though the kitchen had a kerosene cook stove. On the kitchen wall was the wooden box-like phone with the crank on the side. Many neighbors, including us, had access to the phone for fetching the doctor or ordering gas. Katie usually did the actual calling.
Here is Ma with me in 1962 when I graduated from high school. The farm was already sold and we were about to move into Pulaski. After the move, Ma still had a garden in the backyard. She made bread well into her eighties as well as apple pie. However, the pies were in nine inch tins and the bread baked in a gas stove. Yet the bread always had a brown crust. She didn't do much canning in town.
When Emily, Ann and I visited, Ma usually offered pie. Sometimes we would have lunch or dinner which included her homemade bread. If we were lucky, polish sausage was on the menu.
We plant zinnias, one of her favorite flowers, every year in her honor. She died in 1998. There is now a large pot of zinnias on the deck of our apartment just outside my office window. I close with a poem by American poet Amy Schmidt followed by another poem of blessing. The pictured zinnias from our deck are a virtual gift to you.
ABUNDANCE in memory of Mary Oliver
when you’re zesting an orange.
Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room
fills with fruit.
Look around: you have
more than enough.
Always have.
You just didn’t notice
until now.
Blessing by Carrie Newcomer
May you wake with a sense of play,
An exultation of the possible.May you rest without guilt,
Satisfied at the end of a day well done.
May all the rough edges be smoothed,
If to smooth is to heal,
And the edges be left rough,
When the unpolished is more true
And infinitely more interesting.
May you wear your years like a well-tailored coat
Or a brave sassy scarf.
May every year yet to come:
Be one more bright button
Sewn on a hat you wear at a tilt.
May the friendships you’ve sown
Grown tall as summer corn.
And the things you’ve left behind,
Rest quietly in the unchangeable past.
May you embrace this day,
Not just as any old day,
But as this day.
Your day.
Held in trust
By you,
In a singular place,
Called now.
