That stranger the sun came out briefly today, and hundreds of honeybees from our backyard hive streamed out to greet a world festooned with spring blossoms. They seemed to take as much delight as I do when the clouds break and the temperature rises. Of course for them this weather change is like a factory whistle signaling it’s time to make honey. That’s not to say their pantry is empty. Many pounds of honey await harvesting in our top-bar-style bee box, crafted by Benjamin Alexander Clark, our artist and woodworking friend extraordinaire.
If there’s enough sun and warmth this weekend — good conditions for honey harvesting, we’ll get our first taste of the bees’ labors since they moved in last summer. However, our reason for getting the bee box from Benjamin and wild swarm from bee wrangler Will Dart had more to do with helping to reverse the essential insects’ dwindling numbers around the world. The book A World Without Bees, awaiting me on my nightstand, features on the cover this quote from Albert Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”
Benjamin’s boxes, made from recycled materials, are increasingly in demand in Portland as more people add honeybees to urban backyards. Interested? Contact him at benjaminsbeeboxes@gmail.com. He ships out of state, too.
A sudden medical problem nearly a decade ago made me afraid I was going to die on the spot. Inside a Costco of all places and near a woman cooking meat samples. Croaking at Costco wasn’t my idea of death with dignity, especially with shoppers rushing past to score the woman’s free food. They looked as if a corpse sprawled in the aisle wouldn’t deter them. Luckily the symptoms faded, and I finished my shopping trip.
Today, strolling through a nursery that supplies plants for my small but lush goldfish pond, I thought again of death. If everything ended now, this would be a fine and fitting place. A brief item in the newspaper would read: “Police said nursery workers at Hughes Water Gardens found him in a greenhouse, floating face down among giant tropical lilies. When they turned him over, he was smiling.”
Who wouldn’t prefer a last breath scented with the earthy smell of water alive with greenery rather than that of sizzling fat at Costco? Or see as a last sight the veined symmetry of Victoria lily pads rather than the meat cooker’s inadequate hairnet? Then again, no one gets to choose.
“It’s his time.” A doctor said this twenty-three days ago. He was speaking to my father’s wife and one of my two brothers. Down the hall in the emergency room, Dad was slipping away.
Gazing into still waters aglow with exotic plants and flowers, I wanted to see a reflection of his face, not mine. I wanted to go back fifty years, back to our lake, my brothers and I kids again, taking turns launching from Dad’s slippery shoulders. I wanted to see him looking skyward, squinting into the sun to follow my arc, the rise and fall that he began. But I felt only a memory. It was his skin that I remembered.
For two weeks the broccoli heads stood like princes of the garden, waiting for a kitchen coronation. The wait was too long.
Hordes of aphids stormed the cedar-plank box from which the broccoli grew and blanketed anything green. The heads looked cloaked in a lumpy white soot. Ruined. Read More
I’m afflicted with vegetable garden envy. Sure, we have many things growing and gracing the dinner table. Way too much lettuce in fact. But our urban bounty has come to harvest slowly because no part of the yard has day-long sun. And there’s one raised bed in which everything seems frozen in time despite the adjacent house wall radiating afternoon sun. (The soil testing kit — pH, nitrogen, potassium, and potash levels — arrived late today.) Read More
In February on a rare sunny day, I helped friends dig up and move a Japanese laceleaf maple from their backyard to their front. No chance the tree was going to survive the unavoidable mugging at our hands. Read More
Maybe aches and pains from transplanting a tree explain why I keep thinking about the Japanese maple. But the real reason, I’m afraid, is irrational emotional attachment for something not even in my yard.
The tree belongs to friends in Portland’s Sabin neighborhood. I spent several hours Saturday helping them extricate it from a tight spot between patio and garage, then relocating it to their front yard. Read More
Even with the onslaught of winter, some flowers refuse to yield to nature. They won’t give in despite the overwhelming forces aligned against them.
Yes, I’m granting powers to plants — thinking, free will, emotions — that to our knowledge don’t exist. Read More
A squirrel is mocking me. We had a peace pact for a few years. But the critter has had an attitude ever since I removed its nest from the eaves above the front porch. Or maybe it’s because I inadvertently dig up nuts the squirrel has socked away around the yard. Read More
I have this thing for gardening. Just me and plants and dirt. Creative yet mindless. Mixing and matching. Trial and error. Nobody telling me how to do it.
My three-year-old son draws better than me, but the yard is a canvas on which I can paint something of merit. I say “I” as if it’s me making the art. But in this part of Oregon, any fool can fashion a wonderland of color and texture and symmetry. The climate in Portland, viewed as inhospitable by some, is ideal for growing things. Read More
Every spring I start filling up the front porch with potted plants. The porch extends the width of our 1920s Craftsman house, so there are long wide ledges begging for greenery. The back deck next to the small goldfish pond gets a few plants too.
I gravitate toward the tropical and cold-sensitive, mostly begonias because of their exotic-colored leaves and elephant ear varieties that remind me of a youth spent in Florida lakes and swamps.
If I left them outside much longer, the first freeze would write their obituary. So a sad annual ritual took up an hour this afternoon: the move inside. Read More
An autopsy photo? A closeup of an alien’s skin? Or nature in all its bizarre beauty and symmetry?
Hint: I captured the image today at Hughes Water Garden south of Portland in Tualatin. Going there is my crack cocaine: the sound of running water and plants everywhere. Read More
Big news about the definitive confirmation of water’s presence on Mars dispatches my mind not to the Red Planet but back in time. Back to a dark hole at the edge of a Florida orange grove.
When we were kids growing up in Maitland, my two brothers and I dug down five feet through the sandy soil. It was behind a hedge in back of our house. We put plywood over the hole, left a small opening beneath the hedge as a door, and covered the plywood with dirt. Instant underground fort. Read More
Nothing stops more people along our precious corner of Northeast Portland than these towering July beauties. I sit on the porch, unseen by passersby, and eavesdrop on the oohing and ahhing.
Luckily, the flower thieves haven’t struck; some regal lily blooms were snipped last summer. Read More
