I Tippy, Tippy Toe Thru My Garden

[If you ever saw the great Han Conried on “I Love Lucy”, you’ll get the title.]

We are discussing gardens this week…so much to choose from!

I have vegetable-gardened only a few times. I had moderate success , but my sons are great at it and depending on their work-load and where they are living, they supply me well with fresh veggies. If not, I have garden-crazy next-door neighbors who load me with their abundance all Summer long.

I had incredible success with certain vegetables when I lived in the Denver area. I had a townhouse with a fair-sized yard, but the sunny part was all deck. I learned to do container gardening and had not only several types of tomatoes and peppers, but leaf lettuce, zucchini, squash and eggplant, which grew well for me. I also had many herbs.
The front of the townhouse was also a redwood porch, a several foot strip of land and then a sidewalk. In front of that was our garage, which was attached to our neighbors garages and carports, so I learned to do shady-area gardening, and was quite successful there, too. In fact, I am proud to say that the homeowners’ association monthly letter always pointed my garden out,(along with some others), as an example as to how they’d like to see the neighborhood kept up.

We have an incredible number of stones imbedded with fossils here and I gathered many from a nearby river to outline a few flower beds and my flat-slab patio. (I admit to also hauling a number of quartz rocks with me from Colorado!) Alas, over the last few years, despite my good intentions, my flower gardens have been overrun with weeds, quick-growing trees and vines. I swore I’d take care of them this year and started to, until I got an offer on my house from a commercial enterprise. I don’t know if anything will come of it but I had removed the pathetically worn-out hostas and irises that languished by my side door. I intended to make an herb garden there. I will next year, if the builders don’t come up with enough money to make it worth my while to leave.

For now, I will be content to let the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds sip on my honeysuckle that has run amuck and the trumpet vines that are insidious. The terribly cold, harsh Winter killed my mimosa trees that made a canopy over my driveway with the big maple out front, which is sad.

I have blackberries that mostly feed the birds, but I take a number of them if there is a huge crop. They grow on what is left of the privacy fence in the corner of the side yard and onto the Rose of Sharons there. The big Rose of Sharon out front at the base of the driveway was also taken by the terrible cold we had this year. But my bamboo is flourishing nearby and it will bloom this Fall, there and in the backyard. It is a losing battle to stop the vines of Fall-blooming clematis, but the tiny, white flowers are darling when almost all of the others are gone. The regular clematis is duking it out with those vines and the honeysuckle right now; the huge purple flowers at the corner of the garage-porch are lovely in a natural flow over the fence. My daffodils went crazy this year with blossoms; we have a dogwood that also did its best, along with a crab apple that blooms its little heart out, and a peach tree. I have a number of shrubs and trees, especially in front of the house, where I let them grow pretty much on their own. We have an empty lot now on the busy corner next to us where the state highway runs and a store across the street .They have helped to cut down on noise and to let us have some privacy. Since it is now so shady there, I rely on English ivy to cover the flowerbed in front, (it’s one of the few things I keep clipped).

I was trying to decide if I should enclose a picture and saw that my word count was 666! So with that little push, here is a picture that was published a few years back in one of the online St.Jude Books of Inspiration. These were rescued as left-over from Easters past, white lilies that reverted to their natural yellow in my garden.

Lilies of Hope
from my garden

And I may as well add the poem that it accompanied. Although I know it is very far from my best poetical work, I received a lot of feedback from the message.

Consider the Lilies

Consider the lilies of the field, just as Jesus told,
Though not even Solomon was ever dressed as bold.

Yet even these creations, so beautiful and bright
Gently fold their petals together in the night.
The flowers fade and wither in the coolness of the Fall,
Their leaves and stems alone left vacant standing tall.
And then even these succumb as the days go by.
And anyone might think that it is the end to die.
But in the coming season, more flowers will arrive,
And inspire us to know something in us is alive.
God has His Mansions for us, as we all will see,
If we put our hope in Him, our souls will truly be
To blossom like the lilies, that come back as even more,
In the next Life, in Heaven, we’ll praise love and adore.

I will not be able to answer you right away, as I will be in North Carolina with my sister attending a Joyce family reunion,  visiting cousins with whom we have only recently become acquainted and reacquainted… and our last surviving aunt, who will be 92 in September, (we’re almost sure of it!)