Jaci Dawn

Easter weekend. Resurrection Day. Churchless, but not faithless. No rain, warm(er) temperatures. The garden beckons.

Not the garden in which He sweat blood as He tried to convince Himself He could walk the Via Dolorosa for people He didn’t even know – for people who would, in the next 48 hours, spit on him, deny him, and even hammer nails into his hands and feet.

My garden is a much more pleasant place. It is a place of hard labor, aching back, bruises, and puncture wounds brought on by the Hawthorne or the black-cap raspberries, but still a pleasant place. A place of contemplation, of worship, of prayer.

A place to spend a pleasant Easter weekend on my knees. It is a place of death, resurrection, and change. A place to cull the unwanted plants (not always weeds, but sometimes, something I thought I’d like and, later, rued). A place of destruction in the winter, and beauty in the growing season.

There’s something immensely satisfying when I get both rain barrels set up, and the floor beneath the rhododendrons cleared of old leaves, the ferns trimmed back, and I can see the hostas and lilies poking their brave green stalks heaven-ward.

I removed the privacy screen when the crazy renters moved out. The new renter has small children, but I love to listen to children boss each other around. It’s a far cry from listening to the former renters swear and fight and talk baby-talk to the pet tortoise. (Photo on the left is from last summer, before new neighbor and plastic backyard toys. I also took down that trellis. The honeysuckle refuses to grow over the trellis, and insists on growing over the shed.

I will let Nature prevail, and the honeysuckle can grow the way it wants to. The mason bees (their home is hidden by the honeysuckle) buzzed me as I worked. My amaryllis are ready to bloom – I put a fence up to keep them from big dogs. Anywhere there is a fence, it is to protect my plants from the dogs.

Ferns got trimmed or dug up (yes, I kill sword ferns), weeds pulled, new support provided for the Comfrey in the corner (which will top 5′ tall by mid-summer), new support for the lady fern (which grows to be majestic in the summer, but fades completely in the winter, unlike the sword fern). Daphne the goose shows a lot of wear, but she’s ready to protect the lady fern from the dogs.

The Lenten roses are nearly done. The big sword fern under the mountain maple and the wild yew has been trimmed back. I cleaned the fountain rocks, although I have yet to put in the fountain and ponds (see the forms behind Daphne), and i hacked at the English ivy behind the shed (who thought introducing English ivy would be such a great idea? Haul him to the guillotine! Off with his head! Oh, he’s already long since passed. We just deal with his idiocy. I should try to move some of that ivy into the house as a houseplant…)

Yes, that is a Stegosaurus on the fountain rock. I like to think of it as The Shy Stegosaurus, a Scholastic book I still own.

My back ached, my leg muscles burned, my hands begged to be set free from the labor. My heart cried out to the God I worship. Let me spend a little more time with You!

I moved my broken bench (it’s only wrought iron!) and put the scary kids on the lattice work of it. I like the scary kids (they’ve certainly faded a lot!) – a pause here to say that I believe the God I worship has a wonderful sense of humor, and He probably likes the scary kids as much as I do. Certainly, He directed my steps when I found them for sale at the local thrift store and I rescued them.

I planted all the plants I purchased at Gardenpalooza*, taking care to place them where they would have enough room to grow and blossom. The trellis went over my grape vine, which is only beginning to show signs of renewed life, but which will soon be out-running me efforts to contain the vines to the trellis. I can’t wait.

*violet Lochroma – planted in a container. Sweet laura – Peruvian lily – planted to the very left in this photo: grows 30″ tall and spreads 20″. Abutilon red tiger – planted out front with a mental note that it is not hardy below 35 degrees, and will need to be heavily mulched in the winter, but it grows 4-6′. And the checkered lily (already faded) in amongst my purple tulips.

By this time, I was covered in silt from head to tow. My fingernails were stained black from the holes in my gardening gloves. Prayers had been rolled out and sung in soft mutterings as some plants met their deaths and other plants were trimmed. My garden, which is more of an exercise in what works and what doesn’t, an exercise in mistakes and corrections, of error and forgiveness, of contemplation and peace – my garden began to take shape for the upcoming summer.

As sort ogf a ;ast thing. I used all of my shepherd’s hooks to stabilize my wild black-cap raspberry bush. The green that is growing to the left is the part of the wild vine that I will cull this summer. The new shoots will be trained to the right. I fell in love with black caps when we moved to Ely, and there was a wild bush that grew on the north side of our house. One weekend, when my parents were away and I was house-sitting, our kind neighbor came and cut the black cap back. I freaked out on my mom, who went to the neighbors to explain that the vine was for me. I loved the raspberries.

They have more thorns than a Himalayan blackberry, another uninvited introduction and the bane of many a Pacific Northwest gardener, but the wild black-cap raspberry is a native plant. And so yummy.