Come Visit

Monarch Gardens, my new native prairie garden coaching business, will be making some appearances. You've got a couple chances to talk to me in person over the next week--and I promise you good conversation and lots of helpful info, among other goodies. I may even wear cologne.

Lincoln Earth Day
Party at Antelope Park
Sunday 4/22
12-5pm
Our booth is right across from the farmer's market. Can't miss it. 80 vendors will be there!

Spring Affair Plant Sale
Lancaster Event Center
Friday 4/27, 6-9pm (special preview party)
Saturday 4/28, 9-4pm
Our booth is in the front row facing the plants. Biggest plant sale in the Midwest! It gets crazy. Thousands of people.

Here's what you'll find at our booth:

-- Plants for sale, cheap (Earth Day only)
-- Native plant seeds
-- Fine art photograph prints
-- My Nebraska garden memoir: Sleep, Creep, Leap
-- Information on monarch butterflies, including how to raise them
-- Lists of the best native plants for wildlife, and why natives are so important
-- How to grow chemical free and often carefree
-- And maybe, if we get real lucky and the southern winds are strong, monarch eggs. Remember, milkweed is not a weed, which is why I call it wilkmeed.

If you're at Spring Affair you could hire me for a bit to walk around and pick out some good natives. Ahem.

In June I'll be presenting again on native Nebraska wildflowers at Finke Gardens. Hope to see you soon!

Picture Picture

I've been posting some recent macro photos to my personal Facebook page, but I should also post them here--if anything, it's another way to keep track of the seasons. In case you haven't noticed, it's summer. I'd say, like most everyone, here in Nebraska we're 3-4 weeks ahead. Yesterday, there were reports of over 100 tornadoes in the central Plains (the cats and I were in the basement at 11:30 last night due to some supposed funnel clouds), but all we really saw was 4" of rain. That's our precipitation cycle this year: a deluge, then weeks of drought. Kind of like the photos I'm gonna toss up at you right now.

Golden Smokebush

Concord Grape

Pasque Flower

Kiss

Amsonia

Baptisia

Centaurea

Tulip

Tulip Petal

Maple

Lysimachia ciliata

Cloudy Crabapple

The New Veggie Bed

This year, for reasons I still can't quite discern, I'm trying my hand at vegetables. For the first time. Ever.

Folks say, "Oh yeah, veggies are easy." But then I start reading about companion plants, the many pests, vine borers, cabbage beetles, hail, fire and brimstone--and I think to myself, "Geeze, 1,500 feet of prairie plants are WAAAAY easier than this. I don't have to touch them but once a year."

Still, making a new bed got me some exercise. An early tan. Bruises, cuts, gangrene, a nervous tic that makes me point at the ground in order to stretch my dirt-caked and contorted fingers. If this doesn't work out, I have 80 new square feet for either a trial bed or transplant bed for indoor seedlings (which are going tolerably well, about 75% germination).

Way too tiny original bed about 2' deep.

Moved aluminum edging for new 4' bed.

Turned over 80' of wet clay fescue.

Added 1-1.5 yards of city soil.

I was planning on making 5 trips with plastic tubs in my hatchback to the city dump, where there's free compost (this stuff has been magic in my garden). On the first trip I met a guy who flagged me down, offered to help me load my car, then offered to deliver all the compost I'd need for a modest fee. Local landscaping companies would've charged five times as much. I was a happy camper who doesn't like camping.

Since this is my first year flirting with vegetables, I just ordered seeds I could get with a coupon--no heirlooms, nothing too fussy I hope. Broccoli, spinach, eggplant, bush beans, pole beans, summer squash, watermelon, pumpkin. The pumpkin and pole beans I'll sow elsewhere in my main garden once the tulips die back (and since they're blooming 4 weeks early, this should be well before the "normal" last frost date in early May).

UNL Campus Springing Sculptures

While I had two classes doing a creative writing exercise outside, I took advantage of the time and weather to stroll around the Sheldon Art Gallery's sculpture garden. I really wanted a donut, but I refrained. Art and nature, a winning combination without saturated fats.

Crabapple

The previous sculpture from the front.

Pasque flower.

Redbud and dogwood being horizontal.

A moving piece tucked behind a hedge.

Redbud

I like the color and textures.

Front steps.

Even the manhole covers are artistic here.

It's a pretty campus in spring filled with flowering shrubs and trees galore. In the fall and winter the birds have a grand ole time with berries. Now, if only some of the unused lawn spaces could be patches of prairie. I dream of one day teaching a writing class that uses knowledge of plants--names and medicinal properties and folklore. Maybe taking field trips to gardens and reserves, crossing with other departments. That'd be fun.
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A New Essay, & Tulip Bee

For every essay I'm able to publish, roughly 20-30 publications reject my work. More and more often with compliments. But here's a piece that finally found a home after a few close calls, titled Across the Flats--which ends my unpublished memoir Morning Glory. It's about plant shopping with my mom after losing my childhood home, solitude, creativity, depression, and marriage. The essay refers to Ambergate Gardens in Minnesota, link here for pics.

And yesterday I ran across this bee rubbing herself on tulip pollen (3-4 weeks early) like a cat would on catnip.

Healing the Garden & Ourselves

As I ready the landscape for spring, I'm reminded of Linda Hogan's words, which we've just read in my English classes. Her book is Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, and highly recommended. 

"The word rake means to gather or heap up, to smooth the broken ground. That's what this work is, all of it, the smoothing over of broken ground, the healing of the severed trust we humans hold with earth. We gather it back together again with great care, take the broken pieces and fragments and return them to the sky. It is work at the borderland between species, at the boundary between injury and healing."

And as I cut down old sunflower stems beneath migrating snow geese and sand hill cranes half a mile above:

"In this one plant, in one summer season, a drama of need and survival took place. Hungers were filled. Insects coupled. There was escape, exhaustion, and death. Lives touched down a moment and were gone.

I was an outsider. I only watched. I never learned the sunflower's golden language or the tongues of its citizens. I had a small understanding, nothing more than a shallow observation of the flower, insects, and birds. But they knew what to do, how to live. An old voice from somewhere, gene or cell, told the plant how to evade the pull of gravity and find its way upward, how to open. It was instinct, intuition, necessity. A certain knowing directed the seed-bearing birds on paths to ancestral homelands they had never seen. They believed it. They followed."

Talking Plants, Live

As part of Finke Garden's 2012 opening, I'll be giving a talk on some local prairie plants that work for me, and maybe doing a little reading / signing of my garden memoir Sleep, Creep, Leap. There will be art and poetry, too, as well as plants to buy and a NE guide to wildflowers book. For the full list of events, click on the link below.

Our Lives With Nebraska Wildflowers
Finke Gardens
500 N. 66th St. 
Lincoln, NE
Thursday, March 22
5-7pm

And in case you don't stalk me, here's my pictorial spread (ooolala) on Fine Gardening's blog.

Also have a guest post / story up for Timber Press about being on a garden tour last year.

Why I Hate Spring

Not just why I hate this spring, mind you, but every spring. Of course, this year it's just plain worse. Worse I says.

1) There was no winter. There was no break. There was no respite. It was dry and warm. Which means fewer seeds will germinate. It's 80 here. I got mild heat stroke.

2) I'm not rested. There is hardly a blip in my mind and heart from October to March. I swear it was a week ago I was marveling at the bright red of ninebark and the copper of bald cypress. I need my seasons, and....

3) I'm sick sick sick of hearing people on social media praising spring, so excited to garden again, as if the winter was long and boring and the most terrible period of their lives ever. Get real. It was waaaaay too easy. We haven't earned spring. I feel like a massive slacker. I need to go beat my back with a whip. I'm still impure.

4) I'm not anxious for spring one bit. Spring means clean up. And since it's so hot I started nearly a month before last year, and finished on 3/10. The pressure of spring is pissing me off. Get off my back, spring. I'm warning you. Step off, punk.

5) I always boast that my 1,500 feet would require only one mad day of cleanup. Which is true. If you aren't a garden hawk. I see seedlings to move, plants to divide, mulch to place, beds to expand, branches to trim.... It's like having a frenetic disco ball inside my head. And now this year I've started seed inside and plan a veggie bed. What the sandhill crane was I thinking?

6) People leave their barky dogs outside longer, and more often. This means less sleep for me.

7) Basketballs thud well past dark. Leftover fireworks punctuate twilight. The gun range is getting busier.

8) Lawnmowers. This is inevitable, like death or bad bowel movements. Or blog posts like this one with references to bad bowel movements. Usually, the first mowers go off about April 1 even though the lawns aren't even green. Then come leaf blowers and edgers for 6 months. Then comes the cRaZy blogger.

9) Winter is for reading and writing. I did much reading. I did not do much writing. This infuriates me. I'm way off schedule. But I wasn't ready. Now I am. And now it's spring. How can I stay inside when the birds are chirping and butterflies are coming out and there are so many crocus and iris to macro? (yes, it's now a verb) It's hard to get in a groove, especially hard to discipline one's self anyway. Stupid spring.

10) Spring means summer is next. Summer is hot. Summer means many trips. Summer means insects and flowers to photograph and fawn over like Homer Simpson does donuts. Summer means even less time to write. I will never name my kid summer. Autumn would be better. Spring would imply they walk funny. Winter would be weird. Might as well name your kid wintergreen and hang a pine tree around their neck. Which I would do.

* And to add insult to injury, the willows and crabapples are turning green, chokeberry and serviceberry are breaking bud, the elm is blooming, and I think I saw a cicada the size of a football eating a junco (it was far away, so maybe not the case). Fall right on into summer this year. :(

The Sadness of Scissors

Iris reticulata began blooming yesterday, weeks early. The crocus began on 2/2, weeks early. In the garden is a sense that winter never came--the leaves are still fluffy and crisp between stalks of aster and coneflower, and many seeds still adorn stems like ornate finials.

So spring is here early, and I've begun the annual cut down not in keeping with my lazy, late March schedule. If I can let in sunlight to the bare soil now, perhaps more plants will sprout. Today I saw two silver-spotted skipper butterflies--how hungry they must be.

As I grasp the stiff neck of a liatris stem, it's not hard to remember the monarch that touched the fleshy sinews, that tasted with its feet the deep-tongued scent of a bloom. It is almost impossible for me to close the sharp blades of my scissors around the stem and snap them closed. The same can be said for the eupatorium that was a favorite ambush point for a preying mantis over several days. And there, beneath the shadow of a maple, I nursed back to health a transplanted milkweed. Up on the hill, the contorted tube of blue sage is an afterimage of a hummingbird, bent down just so against the wind as it reached for early autumn sun, and frozen in this position like some plastic flamingo's neck.

It's difficult being in the spring garden, wiping away a year so carelessly. I'm a sentimental fool. For over a year I've kept the 12' tall ironweed, laid ceremoniously against the basement foundation, tucked away like a mortar board or birth announcement. Looking at it now, two years later, I just can't break it into pieces for the compost pile. It doesn't deserve that.

On my hands and knees I poke my head into a caryopteris and find the seed head of a last black-eyed susan. Pinching it between my fingers I rub off the seeds and toss them into the breeze, letting them fall wherever spring will have them. When the garden is empty of its autumn, flat and devoid of memory, I hope the promise of new growth will carry me past myself and into the world again--as it has each of the last four years. But I just don't know. The garden is never the same, always the same, again and never again. I put the scissors in my pocket and settle on the nearby bench. I hear red-winged blackbirds. The sun is warm. Tulips are breaking through the stubborn clay soil.

Go Go Gadget Grow Lights

My wife helped me reorganize the closet under the stairs so I could fit in a grow station. It's my first ever. I've two shelves, with one to expand on, two T5 lights at 6400K, heat pads, timer, and fan. Even soil-less potting soil. Hopefully, in a few weeks I'll some native perennial seedlings to hand out at Lincoln's Earth Day, where my garden coaching business will be (coneflowers, aster, goldenrod, liatris, milkweed). Also may start some veg--I'm virginal with that, too.

So, grade me on a scale of 1-10: 1 it's ugly and won't work and I think you stink at gardening (you're mother was a hamster and smelt of elderberries), and 10 it's awesome and makes me want to strip naked howling through the streets in joy for you and all creation glory be amen.

Crocodile Crocus Crosses Circus

I like alliteration. So much so that many nachos were sacrificed for my lunch time crocus sandwich. (eh) The crocus have been blooming since 2/22, a full three weeks earlier than normal. I even trimmed tree branches and began cleaning up in prep for my vegetable experiment (a new bed, and I don't believe you people who say growing veg is easy. Ornamentals are easy.).

I ate some of the flowers, so here are what's left:

 

You're thinking: "Wow, so that's what crocus look like! I had no idea. I haven't seen any others in my garden, or on 50 other blogs this week. Thank you. You have the best gardening / writing blog ever. And you're so attractive. Man. You got the whole package going on. Are you married?" 

 

Certain Uncertainty

Over the last six months I've been feeling an overwhelming pressure on my bones, muscle, and blood. I think I've felt this before--in periods of my life of stagnation and fear. I've let it go too far this time and it's hell getting back. Usually, the way to overcome such invisible weight is to do something, but I feel like I don't know what to do. But I also feel like I do, and that's what scares me the most. The older we get, the higher the stakes it seems, the more we have to risk, the more we have to lose and we forget what it is we can gain by risking everything. And I'm talking in vague abstractions, something I tell my students to never do. This was an introduction to upheaval.

Yesterday my last grandparent, my grandmother, was moved into assisted living. The only idea I have of what this place looks like is the one my other grandmother died in nearly 6 years ago in Oklahoma, a woman who would be 90 tomorrow (2/22/22). The physical distance I've had from both events, both places--nursing homes in Oklahoma and now Minnesota--are reliefs and forms of torture. There is nothing any of us can do about tomorrow, it's true, and I've been a poor example of carpe diem. But to me, in the face of such changes in my family, and at 35 and unsecure in employment or even place, the only real answer to living in the present seems like a giving up and cashing in. That is, thinking seriously about risking everything--home, car, everything we are taught we need to be happy, and that, of course, do bring real joy and necessity. I do like having air conditioning and reliable transportation. I am blessed and fortunate.

See, I'm rambling. I feel like I've been in a coma for a year, maybe years. In that time I've surfaced for gulps of air--write a poem or essay, finish a book, host a garden tour. But these events are like the aftertaste of good chocolate in your mouth, and you want more. I want more. More than whatever this is. Purgatory? No man's land? I need a kick in the butt.

I'm nearing the realization that, at least in this point of my life, I won't be a college teacher. And this is maybe an essential step to my evolution as a person, that might, someday, make me an even better college teacher--or simply lead to something else just as or more rewarding. Maybe I've dumped too much energy into a machine I can't be a part of. See, I don't know. I wish I could do this on television (bad joke at the wrong time?) and make some money off of it, get myself that acreage and prairie. But maybe that's too much. I'm not ready for that kind happiness if I can't find it in my 1,500 foot paradise.

I look at my grandmother who was so happy, seemingly, with so little. A small apartment, but near family. She walked and lived (walks and lives, why the past tense) with rose-colored glasses both to be admired and concerned with. But as Alzheimers slips over her I feel with great urgency, a great restlessness pushing against my skin from somewhere deep inside, the need for a massive change. A change I might not be prepared for. I don't want to forget who I am, and I think over the last year or so I have begun to forget, lost some wonder, lost some carpe diem. I am a mirage to myself.

I don't know what such rambling posts mean to this blog. Both I and the blog seem to be in some pre mid life crisis. I can see it in the sedum and bluestem, too, in the garden. We need dividing.

Today I notice the snow receding from the garden through the window. It is very much like a bed sheet, exposing warmth to cold. The cloud line has moved east, the sun is out, I feel entombed and fenced in by the nearby stand of trees. This is why I could never live anywhere but on the plains--if I lived in the mountains or forest I'd feel breathless and afraid. Hunted. Stalked. Our species' primal memory is of emerging from the jungle into a savanna where we could see danger coming and escape.

There are two incredibly important tasks at hand for me: writing a book on the Plains and Oklahoma and family, and whatever this thing is behind the fog that lays over me. I can sense it. Hear its breath. Feel its eyes centered on me. Is it predator or prey? Strange, but I believe that until I write a memoir I won't know. How can writing a book set you free? Physically free, not just emotionally or spiritually. And how afraid I am of it--this big experiment, this leap of faith which in the end will be only a small step, yet one that will deplete me. The real leap is beyond and unimaginable. We tend to call it faith.

We leave memories. Moments. Feelings in walls some people pick up on and call ghosts. We are echos the moment we speak or move, even before we are physically gone. We trail off in our thinking and passions, our love is a conditional uncertainty that is certain. I love the prairie that is now only an echo in our landscapes. I love my family in the remnants of barns and stories, memories of warm 7up in plastic cups and sweet juniper after a rainfall. I think that if I leave only one thing behind, my marker, my echo, I want it to be a piece of writing. And yet writing is in everything--a garden, a child, a wife. Not just a book. Writing is that red-winged blackbird perched on the fence eying the feeder, the flash of its body, the ricochet sound of its warning call and its wings in the air like a pebble in a pond. Slowly, our rippled presence blends into the world around us if we remain still enough to settle our spirits into one moment that can be forever. I think, right now, it is a prayer.

Nebraska Blooms

Did I miss GBBD? Well, here ya go.

Is that the first hummingbird?

Actually, it's quite lovely outside. Low 40s and sunny. Our 12" of snow is now about 2-4", and will be gone this weekend. I no longer order plants--growing my old, from wild seedlings to cuttings to divisions to closet propagation. Still, shouldn't plant catalogs have seeds embedded in their pages?

What 12" of Snow Looks Like

Biggest snow in 3 years. Heavy and wet, equal to 1.25" of rain. It's absolutely gorgeous outside--warm ski weather.

Have a seat

This is not a weeper--it's an althea in dire straits

Garden entrance

Not much "interest" left, let alone bird cover

Cool elm trunk

Snow took down a feeder

Click and expand

Rotate upside down to see through

Off the rain chain