March is . . .

Daffodils -- or, botanically speaking, the entire genus of narcissus -- are one of the most delightful things about March in England.

All year long, they lurk under the ground . . .
and by mid-March there are clumps of yellow everywhere.

Very cheering, don't you think?

This is not a snow story

Definite signs of life in the February garden:

poppy leaves, dwarf iris, grape hyacinth

witchhazel, viburnum, primrose

azalea buds, tulip shoots, snowdrops
(click on them twice to enlarge)

It's one of those bleakish, windy days despised by people with fine (ie, "difficult") hair.

Wintry and dull, still, but there are definitely signs of burgeoning green life in the garden.  This is the compensation for English winter, with its long string of gray days.  The damp earth, hardly ever frozen, is so fertile -- even in February.

For the past couple of weeks, I feel like I have been making all sorts of preparations for what is to come:

New passports and endless forms have been filled out for my oldest daughter's trip to Africa.

The house is being touched up for its launch on the spring housing market.

My youngest daughter has been prepped, for countless hours, for her scholarship exams this month.

And every day, sending out feelers about new jobs and work studies and a new house.

We're laying the groundwork, but time still has that suspended "waiting" quality to it.

I've been asking advice (from all and sundry) about how to keep the muntjac deer away from my tulips.

Our gardener suggested putting a radio set on a low volume into the beds.

Apparently the deer have keen hearing and shy away from human noise.

Do you think this will work?

(Sigmund is highly doubtful,

but that is his reflexive position on many questions.)

May: hymn of light, colour and leaf

May, in England, is extravagantly beautiful.

The garden is at its most demanding, but also its most rewarding.  A lesson in this?
Weeding, watering, feeding, and tweaking could take up every hour of the day, but on a sunny day those jobs are a pleasure.

May makes a person want to wax lyrical. 
Adam Nicolson, the heir to Sissinghurst -- one of the most famous gardens in the world -- wrote this:

This is a damp, lush country.  The late winters are grey and depressing. The spring is often a disappointment. But then in May, the condition of our life in these islands becomes heavenly.  "When I die," Monty Don wrote in The Ivington Diaries, published last year, "I shall go to May.  It will be green, actually the colour green in all its thousand shining faces.  Every moment will be like the arc of a diver breaking the waters of a green lake, a shifting, growing hymn of light, colour and leaf."

And yes, the world is so green . . . but full of other colours, too.
Lilac, wisteria, peony, allium, bluebell:  these are the May palette.

And horses kiss in a green, green field full of buttercups and white-blossomed May trees.

Luxembourg Gardens

Although I grew up in a smallish town, and now live in the countryside, I like to think of myself as a "city" person -- by inclination, if not location.  Whenever I entertain fantasies of moving to London, my husband and children respond with varying degrees of horror:  House prices! Noise! Filth! Crime! Traffic!

But wouldn't you miss the countryside and your garden, my friends say, with all of the scepticism of country converts.  Well, yes; but mostly no.  This morning, as I weeded and fed my many rose bushes -- a thankless and thorny task -- I thought longingly of Queen Mary's Rose Gardens in Regent's Park.  I was there just a week ago, admiring the vigour and health of hundreds and hundreds of shrub roses.  Unlike my straggling, deer-chewed specimens, these bushes are beautiful -- and they aren't even blooming yet. 

Frankly, I don't need ownership of rose bushes to delight in them.  In fact, it may be the other way around. I am content to wander through a public garden and enjoy the fruits of someone else's labour -- not to mention taking in the sights of people out and about.  A park is a great place to be alone, or to walk with friends.   It allows for all of the pleasures of anonymity, and yet there is something companionable about it, too. 

On the first fine day of spring, when the pale city-dwellers throng the park, the feeling of solidarity is almost palpable.   A park exists for no other reason than the human need for leisure -- and the emotional/physical benefits of fresh air.

These boys had flung down their backpacks in order to play football at the gates of Luxembourg Gardens.  I don't know if it was a lunch-time break, or if they were playing hooky just because the sun was shining.  Remember when running and kicking a ball was pure pleasure?

In the wilder, "English garden" section of the park, the older generation take the sun with their daily dose of news.   The bright yellow forsythia was in bloom, and drifts of narcissus were just emerging.

When I was in Paris at the end of March, the forecast was for rain:  one solid string of dark clouds.  Most fortuitously, on the day we planned to visit the Luxembourg Gardens, there was an unexpected break in the gloomy forecast. 

Just out of sight of these three are Jenni and I, sharing a jambon baguette and a quiche lorraine.  Lunch from the boulangerie is a veritable bargain . . . and you can splurge your savings on some ice cream, later.

Do you think these French gentleman rendezvous daily for boules?

It was warmer on that late March day than it is now, in early May.  If you double-click on the picture, you can see a coat-rack -- where some of the men have hung up their jackets.

Although my love for city parks is genuine, I will confess that I wanted to visit Luxembourg Gardens because of a book.  Several years ago, I read Adam Gopnik's brilliant tribute to Parisian expat life:  Paris to the Moon.

Gopnik writes this: There are two kinds of travelers.  There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and see it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.

I'm both kinds of traveler, but I went to the Luxembourg Gardens in a sort of emotional homage to Adam Gopnik and his young son . . . who spent many hours riding the carousel in the park.  Adam and Luke Auden's visits to the Luxembourg Gardens become the emotional timeline of this wide-ranging book -- which covers philosophy, history, politics, family and cultural differences.  When the Gopnik family first arrives in Paris, Luke Auden is just a toddler -- only fit to ride in one of the "safe" inner chariots, with his father as protector.  By the time they leave Paris, five years later, he is a confident boy -- reaching out for brass rings.

Unlike many things in life, the carousel in Luxembourg Gardens was just as Gopnik described it.  I could almost see the cautious baby face of Luke Auden in this young girl.  Unsure about the experience, she kept looking for her mother.  Meanwhile, on a horse nearby, an older girl crowed with satisfaction each time she managed to pick off a brass ring with her little stick.  Childhood pleasures and progress are so welcomely predictable.

Gopnik describes the children's playground as a "designated bacchanal,"  and I thought of that rather fanciful description again when I saw statues of Pan and Baudelaire amongst various queens of France and Marie de Medicis.  A park is an outlet for controlled chaos.

''There, there is only order and beauty,

Luxury, quietness, and pleasure.''

(Charles Baudelaire)

Cultivating patience

miraculous green shoots

I was an impatient child.

I can remember waiting at the train station with my grandfather – waiting because we had come too early, way too early. (My grandfather was not a man to cut it fine, to race the clock, to risk being late.) I remember wanting to cry, such was my frustration, and then actually crying . . . for no other reason than that I could not stand the limbo of waiting.

I suppose that motherhood helps cultivate the quality of patience. All of that waiting, all of that forced stillness -- as you let a child learn to dress herself, or sound out the letters of a word, or eat a meal with a clumsy knife and fork and a dreamy disinterest in the plate’s contents. And that’s not to mention piano scales, or ballet practice, or all those many hours waiting in a car for someone else to finish. But still, I am childishly impatient – and I have learned to always carry a book, so that I can be entertained – so that I can escape.

I once bought a card that featured a cantankerous elderly woman. She said, “Lord, give me patience. And can you hurry it up.”

My favourite exercise has always been walking – but always outside; never on a treadmill. I want to breathe the fresh air, and observe the landscape as it changes, but most of all I want the sensation of movement. I want to feel that I am going somewhere.

This winter, for the first time since we have lived in England, there have been long stretches (weeks, months) where the weather has been too bad to go outside. Unable to walk, I’ve had to look for some other form of mental/physical exercise; and I’ve discovered an unexpected affinity for yoga – that practice associated with stillness, and concentration, and patience.

Necessary parenthetical caveat: (But having said that, I started with yoga on the Wii – which encourages the rather un-yoga-like competitive aspect. Although the various beeps are helpful for correcting one’s form, and getting a score for each pose is wonderfully motivating, I don’t think the desire to beat your teenaged daughter’s scores are wholly within the yogic spirit.)

Last Friday, for the first time, I graduated (transcended?) to a real yoga class. For 90 minutes, we breathed, we stretched, and we held our poses in silence. I had a more or less empty mind for once, hearing only the crackling of the wood-burning stove and the howling of the wind outside. The time passed quickly . . . or maybe not quickly, but it passed without my being conscious of counting it, or minding it, or ticking it away. I don’t remember thinking, not even once, that I wanted it to end so that I could move on to something else.

Yesterday I was reading a novel in which a woman, who lives in Chicago, is offered a dream house in California. All winter, I have dreamed of living in California. I’ve longed for blue skies, with an angry, deeply impatient sort of longing. Take the house, I say to the fictional character! Are you crazy? But the woman thinks this: “she probably really does need the seasons, their lessons of birth and rebirth, the rich variety they offer, even when the offering is a freezing day full of howling winds and driving snow.”

Hmmm.

Yesterday, we had that blue sky that I’ve been yearning for. We also had a sun hot enough to encourage me to put on my gardening gloves and dig my spade into the cold, damp earth. I turned over the soil – “airing it,” even as I aired out my own winter-weary body. I felt this deep sense of – well, exultation, really. I just felt so joyful, so grateful, for this most optimistic of all seasons.

And even though I can’t wait to see everything come into full and glorious bloom, I actually felt content to appreciate and admire these first few signs of spring.

miniature iris

enjoy their brief moment,

because they are a favorite snack

 of the muntjac deer who often visit

Snowdrops

It seems that nearly everyone in the Northern Hemisphere

has had too much snow this winter

(except, perhaps, Vancouver).

In England,

February is a tug-of-war

between winter and spring.

All week long, we've had shafts of sunlight

playing peek-a-boo

with volleys of hail,

and flurries of snow,

and sheets of sleet.

Never mind the frigid temperatures,

spring will eventually get the upper hand.

Snow-like they may be,

but these galanthus

are the first bulbs out of the starting gate.

Autumn leaves,

it's your turn to sink into the earth.

So soon now, the gray of winter

will be replaced by spring green.

February is a pointillist painter,

adding a swathe of yellow aconites

to winter's monochrome palette.

Not the showiest flower,

it's true,

but so refreshing.

Haiku Festival

Each year the fresh shock

a tight bud unfurls, reveals

hot pink peony

Please visit Elizabeth, at About New York

for a full list of Haiku Festival participants

Stopping for a moment

at Wisley

Yesterday, Sigmund and I sat by this pond for all of twenty minutes, maybe. Who knows, because neither of us thought to consult a watch. We talked, in a fairly loose way, about vague plans for the future. Moving to Oxford or London. Retiring to somewhere warm -- Madeira, perhaps.

Mostly, we just watched the ducks. What a mind-lulling thing it is to sit on a bench and gaze out on the water and admire the glint of sun on the silky emerald-jet of a duck's sleek head.

Today, we sifted through papers and pensions and met with a financial counselor. Tomorrow, we will work through our wills. Both projects have been on the long-term TO DO list for ages now, years even.

Perhaps we can make time for the future because our life is relatively stable -- for once. Although I shouldn't tempt fate by suggesting such a thing!

Sorry, Canadians . . . but we've got green shoots here

They are green, and they are in my garden!

It has been a gloriously sunny day – “false” spring only, perhaps – but I will take it. I meant to take a short walk to the corner store, but I got waylaid by the beauty of the day and wandered into the forest to look for snowdrops. Everywhere I looked there were people doing the same . . . I even saw two men, shirtless, out jogging! (It wasn’t really that warm, but the urge to bare one’s skin to the sun can be strong.)

One of the things that I love about Texas winter is that you only have to endure cold weather for short periods of time. That is best, I think; otherwise, winter’s harsh and antisocial qualities start to grind a person down.

I would agree that every season has its beauties, but for me, spring is incomparable. One of the things that I like best about England is that the signs of spring appear so early. Snowdrops are first, but the daffodils and narcissus will appear soon after. Then, the other bulbs: tulips and iris and fritillary. We’ve planted hundreds of bulbs this year . . . and I can’t even remember what or where now that the garden is all bare branched and knobby.

When I look out my bathroom window, I can see these green shoots. I will be plotting their progress . . .