Living in Season

Wordless Wednesday: Signs of Spring

2012-01-12T01:05:00.001-08:00

Book Review: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

2011-07-08T01:23:00.000-07:00

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

The most soothing book I’ve ever read. It moves at a snail’s pace. Small in size, lyrical in language, precise in observation, delicate in articulation.

The author, Elizabeth Tova Bailey, is bedridden due to a mysterious auto-immune disease. A friend bringers her a flowerpot containing a wild violet from the nearby woods, and along with the plant, a snail. Bailey watches the snail and becomes fascinated by its journeys. Up and down the pot to sip the water that collects in the saucer. She figures out what to feed it (in the most dramatic moments of the book, the snail gluts on cornmeal and almost dies) and eventually moves it to a terrarium (a refurbished aquarium) where it settles in a lays eggs. The snail is mostly silent, although in the night, Bailey sometimes hears the tiny rasping sound of it eating. Bailey begins reading about snails and as she expands her knowledge of her quiet companion, her world begins to expand. By the end of the book she has recovered enough to move home and the snail and all 138 baby snails have been released in the woods from which the snail came.

But the true magic of this book is not that the snail healed the woman or that the woman recovered, but rather that loving attention to the smallest creature can open up a world of marvels. I felt refreshed after reading this book (which I read at an un-snail-like pace straight through in two hours) and also as if life had simultaneously slowed down and expanded.

Favorite Quote:

Inches from my bed and from each other stood the terrarium and a clock. While life in the terrarium flourished, time ticked away its seconds. But the relationship between time and the snail confused me. The snail would make its way through the terrarium while the hand of the clock barely moved—so I often thought the snail traveled faster than time. Then, absorbed in snail watching, I‘d find that time had flown by, unnoticed.

If you would like to hear a wild snail eating, Elizabeth Tova Bailey published a mp3 recording done by Lang Elliott and Marla Coppolino at her web site.

You can also watch a slide slow which includes video of the snail in the terrarium.

I also published this review at Goodreads and on my web site.

My Happiness Project

2011-07-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

I’m in the middle of reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. In fact, I’m in July. I thought the book sounded annoying: too chipper, too cheerful, too prescriptive. And at times, it can be all of those things. But, for the most part, I find it charming, informative, inspiring.

Rubin notice one day that although she was reasonably happy with her life—and her husband, her two young daughters, her work as a writer—she always had a nagging feeling she should be happier. So she created the Happiness Project. She assigned themes to each month (of course, this made me happy, because this is what I did in My Year in Flowers book). Her twelve themes for the year were:

January: Vitality
February: Marriage
March: Work
April: Parenthood
May: Leisure
June: Friendship
July: Money
August: Eternity
September: Books
October: Mindfulness
November: Attitude
December Happiness

She spent each month reading about the topic and applying certain principles she distilled from her reading to her own life, for example, during the month of July (Money) she worked with these concepts: Indulge in a Modest Splurge, Buy Needful Things, Spend Out, and Give Something Up.

Naturally I was enchanted by this idea. I love putting things in boxes (hence my fascination with planners) and, in fact, I was contemplating posting a monthly theme on my web site. So I decided to create my own Happiness Project and these are the themes I chose (carefully chosen to be seasonal, naturally):

January: Serenity
February: Relationship
March: Health
April: Clarity
May: Beauty
June: Play
July: Creativity
August: Spaciousness
September: Mystery
October: Work
November: Legacy
December: Gift-Giving

I’m still tinkering with these. I stole some from Rubin. Others are my theme words for 2011. I’m already sad I missed some (Play!) but they’ll come around again next year (my Happiness Year apparently starts in July).

Right now I’m having a great time figuring out what to do during the month of Creativity. My principles so far are Borrow Creativity (a trip to a museum or attending a concert). Go on an Artist Date (I’m planning a trip to my local art supply store, perhaps a perfume store too!). Try Something New: I’m thinking of trying a different artistic medium each week, but am having a hard time figuring out what besides my two favorites (outside of writing): photography and collage. Attend Art Events: Luckily I am already attending the opening of the Long Shot photo exhibit at Photo Center Northwest on July 23 (I’ll have a photo in the exhibit! As will everyone who participated). http://pcnw.org/ I also found some great events sponsored by the Henry Art Gallery: a workshop on art books (maybe I’ll be inspired to make one) and a talk on the future of book stores by one of the people who is reshaping publishing, Matthew Stadler.

My assignment is already reshaping the way I approach my life. I spent a couple of happy hours this morning looking at various visual artist’s sites and found all sorts of cool projects that parallel my own, like the Long Walk a project by artist Susan Robb and this article on Hamish Fulton who makes art resulting from the experience of individual walks, which also led me to an article on How To Get Lost in a City, by about Amira Hanafi, who produces art from walks she takes. I have no idea what a situationist derive is but I think I should learn. (Actually I just found out by visiting Wikipedia: it's a drifting, unplanned walk taken to absorb the ambiance of the city and go in the direction of what appeals.)

Come to think of it, this will be my fourth art form: a walk. Which is really at the heart of My Year in Flowers book so it all comes around in a neat circle, like the seasons.

All the photos are mine. Took the shadow on the sidewalk during the Long Shot (a 24 hours fund-raising event sponsored by Photo Center Northwest) and I took the night photo one evening coming home on the bus when I was bored because I didn't have a book to read.

Flower Art for Corpus Christi

2011-06-23T00:29:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 23 is Corpus Christi, a Catholic holiday that arrived on the Church calendar fairly late ((the 13th century), a holiday devoted to the veneration of the Blessed Sacrament. It is often celebrated with a procession in which the priest carries the blessed Host (which represents the Body of Christ). I remember it from my Catholic childhood as the most golden of holidays, with the priest wearing gold vestments, and walking under a gilt-fringed canopy, holding aloft the gold vessel containing the host, flanked by altar boys swinging glittering thuribles emitting the smoke of frankincense.

The most amazing celebrations of this holiday have evolved in Spain and Italy where people create carpets of flowers over which the procession can pass. I wrote about this in 2007 in my blog when I discovered some fabulous flower art in my neighborhood.

A few months ago, I happened upon a form of flower art that is even more simple but in some ways more poignant. I was on my way to the University of Washington when I spotted this flower, poised on top of a concrete pole, obviously carefully placed there. I was so surprised and moved, I took a photo. Then a few steps further on, I found another camellia tucked into the corner of a re-paving project.

So I challenge you to create some flower art of your own on Corpus Christi. Find a flower, and arrange it where someone else will find and enjoy it.

Driving Kindness

2011-02-08T00:38:00.000-08:00

Lately I’ve been thinking about driving more kindly. It doesn’t come naturally.

I have a lot of friends who are angry drivers. I hate riding with them. They yell at other drivers as they drive. “What do you think you are doing?” Or make impatient noises indicating their disgust. Or tailgate slow drivers to try to make them uncomfortable. Or complain about how poorly everyone else is driving.

I used to feel a bit superior because I don’t do this. But the other day as I was driving home, I realized how judgmental I am. I may not be yelling or tsking or tail-gating but I’m still thinking those things. “Could you move a littler faster?” “What do you think you’re doing?” “You really think I’m going to let you cut into this lane just because you were too impatient to wait with the rest of us?”

I decided to try driving with loving-kindness. If I drove with loving-kindness, when I’m behind a slow driver, I would simply slow down, keep a respectful distance and think, “Hmm, maybe I need to be reminded to slow down,” or “Maybe they are looking for an address. I hope they find it.” If I drove with loving kindness, when someone tries to sneak into my lane, I’d think, “I bet they didn’t know they had to be in this lane,” and let them in. If I drove with loving-kindness and someone else tail-gated me, I’d say, “Oh, do you want to go by? I’ll move aside.” When I came to an intersection where it was confusing as to who should go first, I would not decide when to go by what is right (“I was here first”) or logic “(Well, he’s waiting for a pedestrian, so I should go.”) No, I would take my turn in the way I assume would make everyone else the happiest.

I have tried to put this into action. I don’t drive that often (maybe once or twice a week) so I haven’t had much practice. I have to tell you it is extremely difficult (at least for me) but it turns driving into a totally different experience.

That cute yellow car is my three year old Ford Focus: Sunny.

The Scent of Spring 2011

2011-01-12T00:24:00.000-08:00

The first day I smelled the scent of spring in 2011 was Monday, January 10.

In the past I've always associated it with an unusually warm and sunny winter day but Monday it was snowing in Seattle: soft, clumpy flakes drifting down from the sky on and off all day long, leaving a frosting of white on the grass and car windows.

Still when I left work in the afternoon, there was that piercing sweet scent that I immediately identified as sweet box (sarcococcus humilis, I believe, though I am a little confused by my sarococcus species).

The scent is hard to describe but almost everyone describes it as piercing. For instance, I found this blog post by Barbara Wilde who gardens in Paris and found it wafting out of Parc Monceau. She describes it as powerful and piercingly sweet.

Another common description, and one I have used in the past, is the sensation of being stopped in your tracks, as described by Sue Taylor in an article at Dave’s Garden. She compares the scent to honey.

This year my first thought was of violets. Mary Robson at Muck About describes the fragrance as vanilla and honey. She brings in branches in November and “forces’ them to bloom indoors.

I have tried this myself as a way to extend this delicious scent but it really loses its charm after a few hours in a warm house and becomes cloying. I prefer that elusive, piercing, evasive scent that surprises me on a winter day with its promise of spring.

Top Ten Books of 2010

2011-01-04T00:12:00.000-08:00

I wanted to list my Top Ten Books of 2010 as I did in 2009 (and I will—see below, if you’re impatient). Then I realized I wanted to write more about each of these books and what they mean to me.

I’m making a commitment to blog more frequently in 2010 and I plan to blog each week about a book I am currently reading. I could post these reviews on Library Thing or Good Reads, the sites my friends are using to keep track of books they’ve read and are reading, and I probably will post there as well.

I read about 104 books last year and I didn’t finish about a third of the books I began this year. I follow famous librarian Nancy Pearl’s rule. She says that up to the age of 50, you should read 50 pages of any book before deciding if it is worthwhile or not. After the age of 50, you can subtract one year for every year you age, so that by the time you are 90 you only have to read 10 pages. Life is too short to waste time reading bad books!

When I made my Top Ten list this year, I noticed that most were non-fiction. Only two novelists made it onto my list. That got me thinking. I realized I go to novels for entertainment and story-telling and these days, I get a lot of those desires satisfied by watching TV. Yes, I am about to come out of the closet about my plebian tastes!

When I want short stories featuring a character with a problem, some conflict and a resolution, I turn to court TV and get two or three of these stories in an hour. If I want to experience a longer journey--about a character on a quest, struggling against obstacles, finding allies and mentors, learning lessons and eventually achieving a goal--I watch reality TV shows, like Survivor or America’s Next Top Model or Top Chef. And finally if I want a really good dramatic show, something with the density of a Dickens novel with complex characters, multiple plot lines and layers of theme, I can watch dramatic series like Mad Men or True Blood or Big Love. So maybe next year I will have to write a top ten list of my favorite TV shows. I didn’t even keep track of them this year.

My reading tastes have shifted in the direction of non-fiction and most of the books on my top ten list are books that changed the way I live or the way I think. I also notice that three out of ten have the word “home” in the title. Not sure about the significance of that but it was a year when I stayed home a lot.

Here’s my list. I’ll do a countdown starting with #10 and working my way up to #1, in the tradition of all Top Ten Lists, over the next ten weeks. By then I should have read enough good books to keep me posting reviews every week all year long.

Fox Woman by Kij Johnson

The Chet and Bernie mysteries by Spencer Quinn: Dog Gone It, Thereby Hangs a Tale and To Catch a Thief

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding and the Art of Making Cheese by Brad Kessler

The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping and Why Clothes Matter by Linda Grant

Reading the Mountains of Home by John Elder

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell

Circumference of Home: One’s Man Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life by Kurt Hoelting

Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl by Stacey O’Brien

Spiders of the Season

2010-10-07T00:56:00.001-07:00

I've seen many spiderwebs in the last few weeks. At first, I thought I was just noticing them more, perhaps because of a trick of the autumn light. But when I went to my garden, there were webs all over my bay tree. One spider had a striped grub all wrapped up in the middle of the web. I tried to trim the tree without disturbing the spider's web but I accidentally tore one of the threads and watched the spider scuttle to safety on the topmost twig of the tree. I think it was an orb weaver: a big, round golden spider. It looked very healthy.

A little bit of web research (none of it definitive) suggests that many spiders only live for a year. The orb weavers I am seeing are probably females who are waiting for males to find them so they can mate and lay eggs. The males will die shortly after mating while the females will survive until the first frost. Other spiders, like hobo spiders, hibernate in the winter. Does anyone know more about the seasonal cycle of spiders?

It took me a while to recognize that I had just posted a message to subscribers to my weekly Calendar Companion suggesting they look for an animal ally. So I wondered if I was noticing the spiders because they had a message for me. In Medicine Cards, Jamie Sams and David Carson say that Spider's message is to create, create, create. That makes sense as I'm currently working on revising a novel, revising one flower essay and creating another one. So I'm definitely in the throes of creative chaos.

Sams and Carson also say the appearance of a spider might remind you to look at what you've caught in your web. That makes sense to me as I just learned I was awarded an Artist Trust grant to write the final essay for my book of essays on flowers.

I got this great photo from Wikipedia. I haven't been able to achieve a good spiderweb photo yet myself.

Personality Type and Time

2010-10-02T00:20:00.000-07:00

I asked the students in my current Slow Time class to take a version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a test which categorizes people based on certain personality traits, because I was curious about how these traits might affect a person’s relationship with time. (As far as I know the MBTI must be administered by someone who is certified in the method; the test I suggested to my students is a free variation which I found at this web site).

I’ve always enjoyed personality tests and have used my understanding of the MBTI for many years, primarily as a way to understand differences between my approach (I’m an INFJ) and that of those around me. Wikipedia has a lengthy article on the MBTI which describes its development and provides charts showing the percentages of types in the general population and the labels associated with the various types.

There are two traits that I’m pretty sure affect tempo, if not approach to time. One is the measure of introversion/extraversion. I’ve been reading a lot about Introverts recently (including Networking for People who Hate Networking by Devora Zack) and the article “Revenge of the Introverts” by Laurie Helgoe in Psychology Today (Sept/Oct 2010)). Introverts need more alone time than extroverts. Zack also encourages introverts to pace themselves, allowing for plenty of quiet time after intensely social activities. (I’ve found that my introversion has increased as I grow older. I used to be able to sustain the extended extroversion of a writers’ conference for a whole weekend. Now I’m a TV-watching-vegetable after one full day.) So introverts would want to plan for solitary time in their schedules.

But those two words—plan and schedule—are problematic for the P’s among us. This is another trait that is expressed in the Myers-Briggs test as P (perceptive) or J (judgmental). The labels are unfortunate as they are often misunderstood. P’s are impulsive and spontaneous, they like things open-ended. I always use the example of cupboard doors. P’s leave them open; J’s close them. J’s love making schedules; they probably love routine as well (I do). But P’s don’t like having things locked down; a full schedule makes them feel hemmed in. They want to be able to choose an activity based on how they feel at the moment.

J’s love calendars and deadlines, schedules and plans. That’s how they get things done. But P’s want to accomplish things as well. I always recommend they use a more intuitive approach to goal-setting, like mind-mapping. You would put the desired goal in the center of a page, then branch out from it, writing in tasks, outcomes and qualities. A P could then feel free (I imagine) to tackle any of the steps in any order.

The other two traits identified in the Myers-Briggs type come from Jung’s four personality types. He believed people had a preference for either Thinking or Feeling (that is acting from logic or acting from the heart) and a preference for either Sensing (practical, hands-on experience) or Intuiting (a more mental, future-oriented approach to the world). I’m not as sure how these traits might affect your relationship with time.

I found one discussion at a website which discusses how the various types deal with time at work. It suggests that Sensing types will be more rigid about sticking to a time schedule. I’m not so sure about that. That assumes that time is actually measurable and quantifiable. I would think a Sensing type would be just as likely to eat when hungry (they would sense that it’s meal time) as to eat when the clock says noon. This web site also believes that Thinking types will plan their day rationally while Feeling types would plan their day according to the personal encounters they want to have. Again, I think that’s probably simplistic. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say a Thinking type might be more motivated to achieve certain outcomes while a Feeling type would be trying to cultivate a certain quality of experience while moving through time.

What do you think? Can you make any correlations between your MBTI type and your relationship to time?

Bon Odori Dances

2010-07-20T02:05:00.000-07:00

For years, my holiday calendar contained a reference to the silent, gliding dances of the Bon Odori perfomed during the O-Bon festival in Japan. The image always seemed marvelous to me, and even more so, when I read this fantastic description of the dances written by Lafcadio Hearn, in 1894:

And at another tap of the drum begins a performance impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal—a dance, an astonishment.

All together glide the right foot forward one pace, without lifting the sandal from the ground, and extend both hands to the right, with a strange, floating motion and a smiling, mysterious obeisance. Then the right foot is drawn back with a repetition of the waving of hands and the mysterious bow. Then all advance the left foot and repeat the previous movements, half-turning to the left. Then all take two gliding paces forward, with a single simultaneous soft clap of the hands, and the first performance is reiterated, alternately to right and left; all the sandaled feet gliding together, all the supple hands waving together, all the pliant bodies bowing and swaying together. And so slowly, weirdly, the processional movement changes into a great round, circling about the moonlit court and around the voiceless crowd of spectators.

The Bon Odori dances are part of the O-Bon festival honoring the dead, who return to visit their families at this time of the year. The festival is celebrated on the 15^th day of the 7^th month in Japan (July 15; although in some parts of Japan it’s celebrated on August 15), but it used to be celebrated on the full moon of the seventh lunation in the Chinese calendar, which would be the full moon of July 25, which is also the Moon of the Hungry Ghosts. Like our Western festival of the dead, Halloween, this holiday mingles several elements: the traditional end of the summer retreat for Buddhist monks, the Full Moon of the Hungry Ghosts, and a midsummer lantern festival. The dances were designed to welcome and honor the spirits of the ancestors; one can see that reverent and otherworldly aspect of the dances in Hearn’s description.

A few years ago, my friend, Susan told me about the O-Bon festival held at the Betusin Buddhist Temple in Seattle. And I finally got a chance to see the dances. My first impression was that they were not particularly gliding. And they are not silent: each is accompanied by recorded music, which is played on a loudspeaker, accompanied by a drummer. The crowd gathers in the street and makes a long shuffling circle around the yagura, a temporary stage set in the middle of the street, from which the dances are announced and where the drum is placed. In Seattle, everyone is invited to participate, even if you don’t know the dances, and so the crowd is diverse, with people dressed in traditional summer kimonos and people in jeans and flipflops, some who perform the dance elegantly, others who look lost and are always off the beat. Some of the dances are quite playful and whimsical. The Wikipedia article on Bon Odori describes some the various dances, some of which are quite old and others which come from popular culture, for instsance, the Pokemon ondo. Another website, which calls the Bon Odori dances, the spiritual dance in the midsummer night, provides descriptions and videos of several types of bon odori dances.

I was a little disappointed that first time, although I enjoyed the friendly crowd, the camaraderie of the dancers, and the generosity of the Buddhist temple which opens its doors to make this festival possible. It has the atmosphere of any small community event, complete with princesses (beautiful young women wearing tiaras and kimonos), food booths, a beer garden, a display of crafts (including ikebana arrangements and bonsai trees), and little kids sitting on the curb to watch the dancers lining the street.

But this year, I attended the festival again with my niece, Shayla, and this time I really did see the gliding dances of my fantasy. Perhaps this was because the temple sponsored practice sessions during the weeks before the event (you can see one in this You Tube video) and more of the dancers knew what they were doing ahead of time. Perhaps it was because of the elegant grace of the dance leaders, women in pink kimonos who walked alongside the dancers, demonstrating the movements. But suddenly, I could see how the gestures were intended to welcome and honor the spirits. I watched the dancers move slowly along the street, in a gliding, undulating line. And I saw all the elements Hearn saw in 1895: the swaying, the supple hands, and most of all, that sense of otherworldliness. No silence, but the beat of the drum and the repetition of the movements that began to have a trance-like, hypnotic effect. I even got up and danced to one song and felt I had truly honored the ancestors.

This video was not taken in Seattle but at the Bon Odori at the Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles. I think it gives you the feel of the dancing. In LA, they were dancing in concentric circles, which creates an interesting effect. Several of the dancers are very elegant and attentive to what they are doing; others have that dazed look of people just trying to keep up. And from time to time, passers by, oblivious to the camera wander by, making you feel like you are there.

Lotus Moon

2010-07-13T00:25:00.000-07:00

Thinking about the fact that this new moon, the sixth new moon of the year in the Chinese calendar, is known as the Lotus Moon.

I took this photo of the water lilies in the wading pool at Volunteer Park after enjoying Fleeting Pleasures, the exhibit of woodblock prints at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. I think the beautiful design aesthetics of those prints influenced the composition.

During the lotus moon, I always spend at least a day on the water in a kayak or rowboat visiting the water lilies that thrive on Lake Washington. For more on water lilies and lotuses, read the article I wrote on the flower of July.

Fourth of July as Midsummer

2010-07-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

I like to think of Fourth of July as a secular version of pagan Midsummer festivals.

Like many historical holidays, Fourth of July seems to have co-opted many of the symbols of the earlier celebrations at this time of year. For centuries at Summer Solstice, people stayed up all night, dancing around bonfires and rolling burning wheels down the hillsides, to honor the sun. On Fourth of July, we set off pinwheels in the street (evoking the circle, the symbol of the sun), wave sparklers around in the darkness (they look like the sparks that fly up from a bonfire) and gaze at fireworks blazing overhead late into the night.

Many families spend the daytime hours on Fourth of July, at parks and lakes, enjoying a picnic lunch and eagerly waiting for the sun to set on the longest day of the year. We worship the sun and may pay for our devotion with sunburns.

Both Midsummer and Fourth of July are associated with heavy drinking. In fact, Fourth of July is one of the deadliest days of the year in America due to alcohol-related traffic accidents. The traditional Fourth of July BBQ combines many of these elements: drinking and fire and spending hours outdoors with friends and family.

Midsummer was always a time of revelry and romance. A Swedish proverb says “Midsummer’s night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking.” The Fourth of July places a little more emphasis on family than on coupling, but there’s no denying the romance involved in lying in your lover’s arms in a grassy park while watching fireworks burst overhead.

Of course, there are many differences between Fourth of July and Midsummer. Midsummer festivals also celebrate flowers and herbs, and often include the element of water (which we do acknowledge here in Seattle by setting our fireworks off over Lake Union). Still, when I’m annoyed by the drunken crowds or frightened by the sound of firecrackers exploding, I remind myself that this is just the traditional way to celebrate the height of Summer and the glory of the Sun.

Summer Sunlight

2010-06-28T23:54:00.000-07:00

In my latest newsletter, I mentioned that I was overwhelmed by the prospect of writing eight or nine articles every month for my Living in Season magazine, and all sorts of readers have stepped forward, offering to share with me their ideas and writing. I am slowly making my way through the responses, and learning so much as I go.

For instance, Debra Redalia sent me a link to her blog, Rooted in Nature, and I loved her last blog entry about a new web site she discovered, Gaisma, (the name is Latvian for "light")which provides stunning graphs showing the amount of sunlight at different times of the year. I've found this information on other web sites but not with such clear visuals.

I played around with several scenarios, including my location (Seattle) and Costa Rica near the equator. In Costa Rica, the difference between the amount of sunlight at Midsummer and Midwinter is 1 minute. In Seattle, it's 7 and 1/2 hours. I like sunshine but I'm not sure I would like living in a place where the amount of light was so even all year around.

Photo of Golden Gate Park taken during my recent trip to San Francisco.

Coast Starlight

2010-06-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

I took the train to San Francisco to take a one-day workshop on distilling essential oils from plants with legendary herbalist, Jeanne Rose. And I chose the train for two reasons: 1) taking the Coast Starlighter is on my list of things I want to do in my lifetime and 2) I hate air travel and I wanted to find an alternative mode of transportation.

Before I left I envisioned the train as a sort of coffee shop where I could sit with my laptop in front of me and read and write, while gazing out the window at stunning scenery. The stunning scenery is there (except for half of the 22 hours it was dark so no scenery whatsoever) but I couldn’t really plug in my laptop and use it at my seat because I had an aisle seat and I didn't want to drape the cord over my seat mate. And there's no wifi on the train.

The people you meet on the train are fascinating. My seatmate was a guy named Ted who’s on his way to meet his wife with whom he’s going to drive a semi trailer full of cooking equipment across country for Amma’s summer tour. We chatted for hours. He was as distracting as the scenery. And over dinner I met a man who was born in the same hospital I was in the same year, and grew up about a mile from where I grew up. He told us all about the five years he lived in the woods with his wife and kids after he got back from Vietnam, building a log cabin by hand, going out every day to forage and hunt for their food.

But I do have several complaints about the train, besides these pleasant distractions and beautiful scenery (waking up at dawn to see the silhouettes of palm trees against the golden sky—enchanting!). There is no privacy—every conversation you have—by cell phone (which is frowned upon) and with your seat mates or table mates, is overheard. It is impossible to sleep in a coach seat (perhaps it is possible in a window seat but I couldn’t get the conductor to assign me one despite the fact there were plenty in my car).Of course, there are sleeping cars but they are very pricey, especially for a single person.

In fact, the train discriminates against single people. If you're a couple, you have seats side by side and can sleep draped over each other. But the conductor sat me next to another single person rather than giving me a window seat because he was "saving" those seats for the couples who might board the train later. Also the tables in the lounge car were reserved for two people, which meant I was scolded for sitting at a table with my laptop. I must admit most people used the lounge car as an opportunity to meet and talk to new people and the most interesting conversations were going on all around me. One woman was practicing her Spanish with a Spanish speaker.

However, I'm one of those introverts who is totally drained by too much socializing. I need my time alone to recharge. So the train is not really ideal for me. Also I am no good without sleep and I've never been able to sleep in cars or on airplanes, so it's possible I could not sleep on a train, even if I had a window seat.

I arrived in Oakland totally fried, way too tired to think. Now it's two days later and I'm sitting in a charming little coffee shop one block from the Haight and three blocks from Golden Gate park and drinking a great latte (all the lattes in San Francisco are served in glass carafes! very European).

Tomorrow night I get back on the train for a 22 hour trip to Seattle. I wonder how that will go. I thought about buying an airplane ticket but I just can't convince myself to get on an airplane. Not since I've seen what it's like to travel along the ground, seeing the landscape through which you're passing, the junkyards and the fields of grass, the glacial rivers and the back yards of little wooden houses, elk in the meadows and deer in the woods.

Red-Winged Blackbirds and Cattails

2010-05-31T17:38:00.000-07:00

On May 14, I attended the Environmental Writing workshop sponsored by the Burke Museum.

I especially enjoyed the workshop taught by Lynda Mapes who writes a column called Natural Wonders for the Seattle Times. She taught us the techniques she uses to prepare for writing these articles, which she calls immersion reporting.

She begins with research, including looking at old maps, current maps and books on the subject. When observing the subject, she suggested: 1) show up and be quiet and be present for at least three minutes 2) take notes and 3) background the subject: look at everything that is happening around it. Then she organizes her notes, outlines her article and walks away from it (usually overnight) before revising for the final publication, which includes fact checking and sentence polishing.

Then she sent us out into reclaimed area south of the Center for Urban Horticulture, which was once a gathering place for local tribes, then a dump for the City of Seattle, and currently a recovering wetlands known as Union Bay.

I was particulary struck by the cattails which lined the ponds and took copious notes about them. The seedheads reminded me of cotton candy, and when I touched them, they felt like spider webs, sticky and capable of being teased apart only with difficulty.

I was also struck by these striking birds with red bars on their wings swooping all over the marshlands. I had only seen a red-winged blackbird once before, in Wisconsin, and had no idea they lived in Seattle. It turns out they love marshland and build their nests, partly with the cotton fluff from the cattails, near the water.

Thanks to Doug Plummer for permission to use his photograph which is one of many beautiful photos featured on his web site in his daily photos.

This Unique Day

2010-05-16T23:21:00.000-07:00

The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are

For the past month I've adopted a new practice of writing down at least one unique moment in every day. I already keep track of my appointments in my calendar, and my accomplishments in my journal. And I record phenological events, year after year, by noting events, like the linden trees that are just beginning to blossom, in a Book of Days.

But I was looking for something different to record in my the weekly planner, Leaves from the Tree of Time, that I created for 2010 and so I decided to start recording unique moments, those moments in each day, never before experienced and not likely to be experienced again.

I'm enjoying the fruits of this practice. It helps me notice what is going on around me in an entirely different way. I know poets who write a haiku every day and photographers who take a photo every day (I love Doug Plummer's daily photos). And I also benefit as a writer from the time spent choosing just the right few words to capture these images as if they were snapshots.

Here are some of my favorites:
April 6: A guy walks into Online Coffee and announces that Jesus blesses all of us
April 7: Pepe (the Chihuahua) licks a cherry blossom fallen in the parkway
May 1: I startle a crow, so close I can feel the wind from his feathers
May 2: A bald guy reading by flashlight behind three umbrellas in the doorway of the shoe shop

My recent trip to the beach was full of unique moments. Here are a few:
May 8: A black swan flies over my car on the Astoria Bridge, going south
May 8: Steam rising from the asphalt, sunshine on rain-soaked pavement, Route 26 between Astoria and Portland
May 8: After the rain shower, a coyote in the bushes shakes water off its fur like a dog, Route 26 between Portland and Astoria
May 8: Crossing the Astoria bridge north, it looks like I am driving into the sky
May 9: Floating on my back in the swimming pool, overhead white clouds float by in a blue sky, four birds fly by, high as the clouds and going the same direction

The photograph is one I took in the pool at the place where I was staying on Long Beach. I have been taking a class on photography called Eyes of the Heart with Christine Valters Paintner of Abbey of the Arts and it is changing the way I see things, a topic for another day.

Listening for Lent

2010-02-23T01:41:00.000-08:00

You know how much I love Lent. I love how it resonates with the energy of spring, with its encouragement to shed bad habits, to make room for new growth, to channel the power of change.

This year I thought I was going to give up TV (which is what I gave up last year, though I returned to it fairly quickly afterwards). But then I signed up for Christine Valters Paintner's Lent class at Abbey of the Arts, and realized that instead of giving something up (as I was schooled to do during my Catholic childhood), I was going to acquire a new habit: a daily spiritual practice.

Christine's class focuses on the Benedictine practice of lectio divina,, that is, reading a sacred text each day and allowing it to resonate within (listening with "the ear of the heart," as Benedict wrote). While reading about this concept in Christine's book, Lectio Divina, I realized how seldom I really listen (which is probably why my experience of listening to the plants was so profound). I'm usually preparing an answer or adrift in a sea of my own thoughts. And I thought about how deeply the people around me, particularly my daughter, want to be heard. She's always talking, but probably because no one's listening. I think she would be shocked, and possibly a little terrified, if she realized I was really listening.

Listening doesn't mean responding, so I have to curb my desire to be useful and to give advice. If my desire is to fully hear, to seek to understand, to allow my heart to be touched, that's enough.

So I'm listening for Lent. What are you doing for Lent?

Pussy Willows for Spring

2010-02-13T18:22:00.001-08:00

It was a goat willow tree that launched My Year in Flower project back in 2008 when it dropped a spent blossom on my head as I walked past with the dog. At first I thought it was a caterpillar and recoiled in disgust. The sidewalk at my feet was littered with hundreds of little squishy yellow items. And when I looked up, I discovered they came from a spindly tree with bare branches growing close to the sidewalk. And on the lower branches of the tree, I recognized the white fuzzy buds of pussy willows.

Pussy willows had always seemed mythical to me. They didn’t grow wild in Southern California. We only saw them when we went to the Farmers Market in downtown Los Angeles which we only did when relatives came to visit. The pussy willow branches came wrapped in plastic. When brought home and put in vases, they remained frozen in their fuzzy bud stage.

But on this tree, I saw all the stages in their development. First, tender milk-white buds. Bristling green catkins came next, which were gradually frosted with yellow pollen before dropping from the tree to litter the sidewalk in soggy clumps like so many used condoms. And, as I thought about it, I realized this tree was in a constant wave of orgasm as each little flower puffed out its pollen and then collapsed, spent.

It amazed me that I had walked past this tree for years (I’ve lived in my neighborhood for 14 years) and never noticed this miraculous transformation. (To give me credit, this whole cycle is over in one month; for the rest of the year, the tree is rather boring:either bare branches or green leaves.)

The goat willow tree surprised me again this year when I realized there is another stage in its development. Before the milky white buds appear, the ones we think of as pussy willows, they have to push through the brown caps that have protected them through the winter. Right now the sidewalk is covered with those light brown husks, like so many tiny insect shells.

It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired. Thoreau.

This entry was also cross-posted at my other blog at Living in Season.

Candlemas Collage

2010-02-09T00:38:00.001-08:00

My New Year's practice is to make a collage that represents the experiences I hope to enjoy in the new year. For the past few years, I've been making Soul Collage (R) cards to embody the themes I've chosen for the year. Here you can see my three themes for 2010 as works in progress: Refreshment, Sustainability and Sovereignity.

On the other side of the table you get an upside-down view of the collage my friend Janis made. We love this ritual which we have been sharing for years. We light candles, make wishes, drink tea, nibble on cookies and play with images.

My cards right now are up on the wall in the entry way of my home where they will remind me every time I enter of my themes for the year.

This post is cross-posted at my new blog at Living in Season.

Good Omens

2010-01-25T00:41:00.001-08:00

At the end of the week, I went away for a three-week mini-retreat which I created and orchestrated so I could have three friends help me figure out what I am doing with my life during this upcoming year. One was Joanna, my web designer, who inspired me to create the School of the Seasons web site, ten years ago. Another was my friend, Noelle, a talented life coach. And the third was Whitney, who specializes in marketing and development for small businesses.

As I walking to my car, I passed two crows eating a dead rat (or mouse?) that was lying in the road. Seattle was experiencing a sunny spell, with balmy breezes and blue skies. But as I headed north to Bellingham where we met, I watched ribbons of rain streaming down from a dark bank of clouds. I wondered about these omens.

Our three days together were fruitful and nourishing. We stayed at the Fairhaven Village Inn, which was a lovely place to stay. My room had a view of Bellingham Bay and the huge Alaska ferry (in dry dock) and the train going by. We met and talked and went out to eat and talked and made maps and went out to eat and ate chocolate and talked and went out for gelato and talked and made lists and talked and came up with a plan for the year that is both refreshing and sustainable (two of my theme words for this year). I’m not ready to reveal the details (because it’s not completely clear yet) but I should be ready by Spring Equinox.

When I left Bellingham, it was raining. I took a wandering course home, along the coast, and through some lovely farmland. Ahead of me the clouds were dark but I could see golden sun streaming out from behind them. And I passed a field full of white swans (they like to over-winter in the Skagit Valley). That seemed like a good omen.

I found this Youtube video of trumpeter swans in the Skagit Valley. It makes it clear why they are called trumpeters.

Shedding for the New Year

2010-01-13T00:58:00.000-08:00

This new year I’ve been feeling really bogged down by all of the clutter in my house. I thought I would get it all cleared out during the week I was off work after Christmas but, of course, that didn’t happen.

I accidentally watched part of an episode of the TV show Hoarders last year. I don’t recommend it for anyone who has any hoarding tendencies--I’ve been horrified ever since at the prospect that I might become one of those old ladies who lives in an apartment with little paths between the stacks of newspapers. But this tendency does run in my family. My Uncle George, who was the family eccentric in my Mom’s family, apparently had an apartment like that (he also had about a quarter of a million dollars in his estate when he died—unfortunately that part of the hoarding gene seems to have passed me by).

It’s hard to launch into the new year when you’re carrying the weight of all that clutter, all those unfinished projects, all those unread magazines, all those unsorted photographs. And I’m noticing this same theme among the participants in my New Year Dreams class.

I’m hoping that this is all due to the backwards influence of Mercury and Mars both being retrograde at the same time. Madeleine Gerwick, the author of the popular Good Timing Guide says not to initiate any new projects until March 20. That might give me enough time to clear and organize my house.

I’m also reading Julie Morganstern’s new book. I’m a big fan of Julie’s work. The four-step system she explains in her Organizing from the Inside Out book has been very helpful to me. The first step is sorting, and the second step is purging. The third step is containing (finding the right space for the stuff) and the fourth step is maintaining the system you’ve developed. You can use this with clothes, with papers, etc. Over the summer, I used it with my books (and actually got rid of some--a first!).

Her new book, Shed Your Stuff, Change Your Life, is more about how to get rid of stuff you’re holding onto, and she extends it from clutter in your house to clutter in your schedule to bad habits in your personal life. Again, she has come up with a simple system and an Acronym to remind you of it in SHED. First you Separate the treasures from the trash in your life, then you Heave the trash. The final two steps are Embrace your Identity and Drive Yourself Forward.

What I especially like is her focus on the end result. What are the values you are trying to manifest in your life? And do the items in your house (or schedule or life) serve your purpose/help you achieve your goals?

Once you identify the arena in which you want to work, you create a list of entry points, for instance, the pile of unread magazines, the box of unsorted photographs or the box full of old Christmas cards. Then you choose the point which will cause you the minimum amount of difficulty and get you the maximum amount of effect. This is about where I am in the book so I don't know yet how it will work out. But I have until March 20 to carry out all the steps.

Do you have a system that works for you?

The Scent of Spring

2010-01-09T16:15:00.001-08:00

The first sign of spring for me is always a delightful flowery fragrance that I call the Scent of Spring.

This year I smelled it for the first time on January 8, just outside the front door of an apartment building in my neighborhood.

The next earliest smelling (can't call it a sighting) was January 18 in 2004, so this is really early.

When I got home that night, I saw that the sweet box (Sarcocca humilis, also known as Christmas box) outside my apartment building was already in bloom. So that might be the Scent of Spring. Although my friend Janis mentioned that she smelled a daphne odora the other day, so it could have been a dahpne rather than sweet box.

Whatever it was, I know spring is coming soon. What is the first sign of spring where you live?

This blog entry was cross-posted at my new blog

Thanksgiving Grinch Ungrinched

2009-12-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

I am not a Christmas Grinch (though it would be easy to be one). Long ago I learned how to deal with the pressures of Yule, which I should write about it another blog entry. But I did not realize how many negative feelings I had about Thanksgiving until this year when it burst out of me in a rant.

I was grateful to learn that others felt the same way, and have developed their own methods of coping. Havi, for instance, replaces the gratitude list with a lentil list of things that don’t stuck, and I was delighted to appear on this year’s list. Other folks, like Cairene, have now adopted this tradition (and I made her list too!).

Several people wrote to tell me how much they do enjoy Thanksgiving, for instance, because it’s the least commercial of all American holidays (so true!) or because they are grateful to be with family and friends. But this only made me feel more Grinchy. Then, this week, I got some insights that helped my Grinchy heart grow several sizes.

It started with a good session with my counselor, in which I clarified my longings around Thanksgiving, and followed up with the serendipitous arrival of a newsletter about NVC (Non-Violent Communication). In the newsletter, Evan Gorsline wrote about his negative reaction to the word “happy.” He experienced it as a judgment, a way that he was expected to feel; it was often used to describe a false optimism that repressed other more complex feelings. What Evan longed for in relationship with others was authenticity and honesty and the felt demand to be “happy” often prevented that. (You should read the whole article here, as I can’t really do it justice in a few sentences.)

What I long for at Thanksgiving (or any dinner party) is meaningful, challenging and playful conversation (something sorely lacking at my family’s Thanksgiving feasts where we were expected to focus on “happy” topics, like being grateful) and delicious food (and I really don’t like turkey). No wonder I had trouble with Thanksgiving.

Having identified what I do want, I can set up about getting it next Thanksgiving. Just like when I took charge of my birthday parties, after years of being disappointed, and they suddenly became fabulous, because, after all, I know what I like. But the good news is that good conversation and good food can be enjoyed all year around.

This post appeared first at my blog at Living in Season.

Healing Waters

2009-10-03T17:09:00.000-07:00

After two weeks of reflection, I don’t think the huge headache I developed after the Herbal Conference at Breitenbush was due solely to caffeine withdrawal (maybe I’m in denial here). It might have been part of a healing process sparked by some of the workshops I attended. I’ve come up with this theory because I started dreaming again, within days of returning from the conference, and I haven’t had a really remarkable dream for years.

These dreams have been both vivid and significant. In one, my father (who died over 25 years ago) was being healed. He was lying on a beach and healer was painting his face with reddish pigment. A huge green wave came and washed over his body as I watched. In another dream, I was with my family and we were trying to escape a tidal wave by jumping into and floating around in the large lake in back of our house. The water was warm and green in color.

Both of these dreams emphasized water. Breitenbush is famous for its healing hot springs. And at the conference, I attended a workshop on Spiritual Bathing led by Rosita Arvigo who was trained by a Mayan shaman in Belize. She spoke about some of the conditions that require healing in that culture, conditions we might consider emotionally based, like fright or envy or grief. Then she created a florecida (a floral water) by placing herbs and flowers in a bowl of water and squeezing them with her fingers, while reciting this prayer she learned from Don Elijio Panti, a Mayan shaman with whom she studied:

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I give thanks to the spirit of this plant and I have faith with all my heart that you will help me to make a healing, purifying bath for [person].

She also called on the Blessed Virgin Mary and Ix Chel, the Mayan goddess of the moon, water and healing, and she told us we could use any deity we wanted, though it was important to recognize the power to heal came through this connection with the divine. We could use any flowers or herbs we liked in creating a bath for ourselves, but we should choose a significant number, for instance, 9 sprigs of each plant, and non-toxic plants or flowers, especially those that evoke certain qualities. She worked the plants with her fingers until they had discharged their qualities into the water—it should be a greenish color, and, since she used some mallow family flowers, it was also slimy.

Normally she would let this sit out in the sun for several hours but since we were doing a one-hour workshop, she walked around the room and asperged us, that is, sprinkled us with this special floral water, using a branch of cedar. I definitely felt the clearing energy of the water as she sprinkled it around my head, and I noticed the atmosphere of the room change as well, as she went around, asperging everyone.

But I don’t think I realized how profoundly this affected me until I began dreaming in the days that followed. After reading through Spiritual Bathing, the book of water rituals compiled by Rosita Arvigo and Nadine Epstein, I noticed that green water was mentioned in descriptions of certain rituals, including the preparation of agua de florida, used in Ayauasca ceremonies. Rosita also mentions the green color of the florecidas prepared by Julia Riveras during a workshop on the Amazon.

If you are looking for an overview of spiritual bathing traditions from all over the world, Spiritual Bathing is a good place to start. The book is beautiful, full of wonderful photographs but the coverage is a bit shallow. We get only the most general discussion, a page or two for each culture from Rome to India, Russia to Turkey, Japan to Peru. And the suggested rituals, though intriguing (I will try several of them), don’t seem traditional but rather adapted for modern American readers. I think this probably the nature of any glossy coffee-table book. One of the aspects of the book I enjoyed most were personal accounts of spiritual bath experiences from the two authors.

But if you want a really engaging, personal account of baths all over the world, I recommend Alexia Brue’s travel memoir: Cathedrals of the Flesh: My Search for the Perfect Bath, which details her trips around the world, searching for the perfect bath. However, she is more interested in the culture of the bath than the spiritual aspects of it.

Herbal Conference at Breitenbush

2009-09-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

These blog posts are now being cross-posted at my new magazine, Living in Season. Check there for more feature articles.

Just got back from attending the Herbal Conference at Breitenbush Hot Springs. I haven't been to Breitenbush for 17 years, yet it felt so familiar that I wondered if I had simply forgotten a previous visit. Five years ago, I would have called this feeling deja vu. Now I simply wonder if I am losing my memory.

Perhaps it felt familiar, because it was so comfortable. I could sit down besides anyone and immediately fall into a meaningful conversation. And I had friends there--my herb teachers, Eaglesong and Sally King--and I met a School of the Seasons reader: Carmen, who won the Sniffathon (I only placed third). (The Sniffathon involved correctly identifying drops of essential oils dripped onto index cards.)

I always have a hard time at group meals, after I've filled up my tray and have to find a place to sit (bad memories from my year at Reed College). But on Friday night, I was lucky enough to sit at a table with two women who became my new Best Friends: Mary Lou and Amber. Amber was a green-haired, tattooed, 21-year-old from Dallas who had driven to the conference on her own and was camping for the first time in her life in a tent borrowed from her grandfather. I loved her energy and excitement and enthusiasm about everything. She also had that great Texas twang and Southern generosity. When I wandered late into my first class, she made sure I got a handout. Mary Lou was closer to my age but like Amber, she was also at a crossroads, since she had just quit her job as a dietitian for a nursing home and was searching for something meaningful to do with her passion for healthy foods and herbs. She was in every class I took and probably ended up taking the one class I missed, after I developed a bad headache.

It was ironic that I left a conference full of healers because I was sick but I'm one of those folks who when sick, wants to crawl off into the bushes, rather than admit I need help. And I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it was probably mostly caused by caffeine withdrawal (no caffeine served at Breitenbush--just vegetarian food and herbal teas). The headache started to ebb after I stopped at the first rest stop with free coffee.

So did I learn anything new about herbs? Not as much as I expected. Mostly I learned about nutritional anthropology and metabolic types and intuitive eating (that's Paul Bergner's term--I loved it--it means asking your body to inform you of what it wants for your highest good). I also learned about stress and susto (as it's called by healers in Belize where Rosita Arvigo lives and works, fright in English) and how the production of adrenaline and subsequent crash (the body's response to trauma) can create imbalances that can later be treated by herbs, vitamins and nutritional supplements (Leslie Korn's methods) and spiritual practices (Rosita taught a great class on spiritual bathing). I also went on a great plant walk with Paul Bergner where he taught us to draw plants by memory. More about this later.

Plant Birthday

2009-09-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

These entries are now being posted both here and at my new web site, Living in Season.

Tell me of what plant birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

For Leopold it’s the cutleaf Silphium, blooming in the corner of an old cemetery. For me, it’s the autumn crocus, blooming on my birthday.

It always catches my by surprise, even though I watch for it as my birthday approaches. I didn’t see a trace of it in its usual habitat but coming home from a BBQ on Sunday night, I spotted the autumn croci (above) springing up from the dirt outside an apartment building.

Then on my way to work today, I found them in the place I’ve grown accustomed to seeing them. With the sunlight shining on them, they truly resembled “the lamps of the ghoul,” the name the Arabs give this plant (according to Wilfrid Blunt) because they are so poisonous. Other common names: naked nannies and bare-bottoms.

So what does that say of me, that this is the plant birthday I notice?

Rose Desserts

2009-08-26T00:25:00.000-07:00

As part of my experiment with edible flowers, I made two desserts out of rose petals this past weekend and to my surprise, both of them produced wonderful results.

Rose Sorbet
I used the delightfully spicy-smelling petals from my favorite vacant lot rose to make a rose sorbet. The recipe I was using called for petals from 16 roses, but I only had four so I cut the recipe by one fourth.

1-1/4 cups castor (superfine) sugar (I used powdered sugar--I think regular sugar would work fine too)
2 cups cold water
4 oz scented unsprayed rose petals (about 16 roses)
6 tbsp rosewater
2 tsp glycerin
juice of 1 lemon [optional]

1) Put the sugar and 1 cup of water in a saucepan and heat until the sugar dissolves. Put the rose petals in the syrup and allow them to wilt, then add the second cup of cold water and the rosewater. Let cool for 20 to 30 minutes. Then add the glycerin (this preserves the wonderful bright color of the roses; without it the sorbet will be muddy looking and not so appetizing).
2) Let this mixture steep for 5 hours or overnight.
3) Add the lemon juice (I didn't) and push the mixture through a sieve, to get all the juice out of the rose petals. Discard them.
4) Churn using an ice cream machine. I don't have one so I made the sorbet using instructions for making ice cream by hand from David Lebovitz, author of The Perfect Scoop.

Basically, you cool the mixture over an ice bath (I didn't do this since it was already cool since I put it in the refrigerator overnight). Then you put it in a plastic dish in the freezer and set a timer for 45 minutes. At 45 minutes you stir it up with a whisk or a spoon, breaking up all the ice crystals that are forming. You set the timer for 30 minutes and do that again. And then another 30 minutes. And then another. And so forth for about two to three hours or until it seems done.

I have to confess I stopped stirring my sorbet after two hours. It stayed rather icy, more like a granita than a sorbet. That wasn't a problem for me as I enjoyed the texture, the flavor and the color. I had much better success with this method of making ice cream when I made the recipe below.

Rose Ice Cream
I was so happy with the sorbet I wanted to make ice cream but I didn't have any fresh rose petals. So I made this recipe, which requires fresh flowers, with the dried flowers from my pink rosa rugosa. They are much sweeter and pinker than the red rose.

1 cup heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
1 cup sugar
5 large egg yolks
1 1/2 cups loosely packed, very fragrant rose petals, washed and spun dry

1) Prepare an ice bath by placing ice cubes in a large flat-bottomed container that will hold the bowl where the ice cream will be chilled
2) Combine the rose petals and sugar in a food processor with the metal blade and make into a paste. (Since I used dried flowers, it was more like rose sugar than paste).
3) Combine the cream, milk and sugar paste in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Bring to a simmer and then take off the heat.
4) Place the egg yolks in a bowl and whisk until light. Then add the hot liquid slowly, whisking until thoroughly mixed. Return to the saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon until it reaches 180 degrees on a candy thermometer or coats the back of the spoon.
5) Strain the mixture into a clean container (I didn't do this since I didn't mind the faint texture of the petals) and place in the ice bath.
Then you would proceed to make ice cream either as above or with your ice cream machine.

This recipe did not call for glycerin, but I think I would add that to the rose and sugar mixture to bring up the color. I added red food color instead and the end result was a muddy pink. It looks a bit like Play Doh and the texture is somewhat chewy as well but the flavor is like nothing I've ever tasted. I dream about it all day long. Luckily I still have some in the freezer.

Let me know if you have any success with these recipes or if you have another recipe you like.

Many Moon Names

2009-08-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

I'm a total fan of Havi Brooks of the Fluent Self, so it was totally amazing to be a featured guest at her Kitchen Table, and now she's mentioned my book on her delightful blog and suggested her readers play with one of the exercises, the one where you get to make up your own names for the moons. I'm reveling in all the creative names people posted as comments. Check it out!

I'm illustrating this blog entry with one of Catherine Kerr's magnificent moon photos. She has been taking these every full moon for years. This one, like the one featured on the Celebrations article at my new online magazine, is the August full moon. Cate always provides a long list of traditional names for each full moon as she did in the blog entry that accompanied the photograph.

Summer Slowly

2009-07-30T00:21:00.001-07:00

I've decided to keep both blogs running, though I will encourage you to sign up at my new blog at my new magazine, Living in Season in case I ever do abandon my beloved Blogger blog.

A long-time School of the Seasons reader and contributor, Taffy Hill, sent me a link to a blog entry by Beth Dargis of My Simpler Life about things that should be savored and done slowly.

I loved Beth’s list and was even more delighted to see the thread was started by my friend and colleague, Christine Valters Paintner, at her blog, Abbey of the Arts.

Let’s expand this idea here. I'd love to entertain your ideas about things that should be done slowly.

My favorite is walking slowly. I find this easiest to do while walking the dog. Right now my walking companion is Pepe, my daughter's Chihuahua. He likes to go slow, especially in the summer. He often plops down on the grass and refuses to move

New Blog

2009-07-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

I've just created a beautiful magazine, and it includes a blog column. So look for new entries there.

Sillage

2009-07-09T00:51:00.001-07:00

I'm finishing up my blogging about trying to capture the scent of flowers, as I prepare for my new adventure: eating flowers. Thought I would do a last blog on sillage. Such an interesting word and one you will add to your vocabulary if you haunt perfume blogs, as I do.

Sillage is used in the perfume world to describe the trail of scent you leave behind when you pass through a room. It is a French word, pronounced see-yazh, for the wake of the ship, from the same root as a word that also means furrow. In that sense it is an impression, but a transient one, one that will dissolve or resolve.

Michelle Krell Kydd at Glass Petal Smoke has a good story about stealing mojo from a man with her sillage. Patty White at Perfume Posse wrote this lovely essay on the sillage of her mother-in-law's life. An interesting concept. At Bois de Jasmin, another one of my favorite perfume blogs, a reader mentions that when people ask her about the scent she's wearing, she worries that she put on too much. She ends with the comment: "sillage is almost illegal in the U.S."

I have been feeling very self-conscious in fragrance-free Seattle about wearing scent. My current favorite is Mimosa Pour Moi by L'Artisan. It is a soft, powdery scent with a honey undertone, and so far no one has noticed my sillage.

The amazing photograph was taken by Rennett Stowe and I found it at Flickr.com

Waverly Time

2009-06-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

In my last newsletter, I wrote about showing up late for a BBQ with the excuse that I was late because I was working in my garden, and later realizing that I was living in "plant time," an entirely different kind of time than clock time.

Well, this weekend, the same friend invited me to yet another BBQ (his apartment building is famous for their long, hospitable BBQs) and this time, when he left the message he said: "It starts at 3 PM people time, not Waverly time." And that got me started thinking about a whole new kind of time: Waverly time.

I didn't make it to the BBQ but that's because I was living in Waverly time. In Waverly time, you are never rushed and you do things when you feel like doing them. That's all I know so far about Waverly time. But I find the whole concept delightful.

Red Valerian: Fragrant or Stinky?

2009-06-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

This plant (centhrantus rubra) blooms all over my neighborhood and I like its common name: Jupiter's Beard. I hoped there was some mythological association between the plant and Jupiter, but after checking extensive Googling and checking my primary source for mythology of plants on the web, Paghat, I couldn't find any. I suspect the name comes from the belief that Jupiter's beard was red.

I haven't paid much attention to it because it doesn't do much, except spring up exuberantly as early as April and continue blooming far into November. The bees love it but it's not edible, medicinal or fragrant.

Or so I thought until last month when I was walking by a large patch in bloom and I smelled a most heavenly odor. Knowing that I sometimes assume flowers don't have fragrance when they do (I was totally shocked by my first fragrant rhododendron), I bent down and inhaled. Quite a nice fragrance--it reminded me a bit of grape jelly.

But on a later walk, when I decided to validate my findings, I couldn't discern any scent at all. I wondered if this was one of those flowers that is fragrant only before it's pollinated and then loses its scent.

And during a quick search of the web today, before posting this entry, I found various descriptions of its smell, all contradictory. There are many entries which claim its fragrant, without describing the fragrance. One post said it smelled like vanilla. Another just said it smelled "divine." That was it for the positive associations.

Plants for the Future has a reference to it as smelling like perspiration. One gardener at Dave's garden complained that the cut flowers smelled like "cat pee." Web sites describing the flowers blooming wild in England said the smell was "doggy," as in "stale dog dung" or "catty."

I know that true valerian (the one that does have herbal properties) has such an unpleasant odor that early herbalists, Discorides and Galen, named it Phu. At least that's what Mrs. Grieves reports in her herbal. And the two valerians are in the same family.

What's going on? What does red valerian really smell like? I'm going out to smell some right now. If you have some in your neighborhood, please check it out and let me know what you think?

The photo came from the Washington State University site.

Flower Child

2009-06-16T01:05:00.000-07:00

When I first decided to tackle the topic of flowers, I actually thought of flowers as a separate species, as in there are trees, plants and flowers.
It took a while before I realized that flowers are simply a stage in the life cycle of every plant, at least, all of the angiosperms. Trees have flowers. Right now in Seattle, the lindens are about to burst into bloom. The horse chestnuts are sporting the delightful red and white blossoms known as candles. And the laburnums have shed their petals, as have the locusts. Grasses also have flowers, although we rarely see them because they’re so small and fine. The fuzzy pussy willow buds that I wrote about in March are flowers, as are the catkins dangling from the birches and the alders.
All flowers exist to flirt, to lure the pollinators that will fertilize the ovules and swell into fruit and disperse the seed. And all flowers are transitory, existing only for a brief interval in the life of the plant. Lucky for me there is a far wider time range for blossoming than I imagined when I started my flower project. Now I know that I can find blossoms year round, like the curving yellow threads of the witch hazel in January.
The photo of a wisteria blossom was taken by my friend Michael McIntosh at Schreiner's Iris Farm in May 2008.

Sunlight Through Green Leaves

2009-06-10T01:49:00.001-07:00

All last week I kept trying to capture on film the effect of sunlight seen through the new green leaves of summer. Then I heard this Basho poem and realized he had captured this perfectly in words:

Speechless before
These budding green spring leaves
In blazing sunlight
Basho, A Voyage to the Interior
Translated by Sam Hamill

Enfleurage

2009-05-31T23:35:00.001-07:00

In my last post, where I featured Octavian’s suggestions for reproducing the smell of wisteria, I forgot to mention that it’s necessary to reproduce the scent of wisteria because it’s one of those flowers whose scent cannot be extracted directly. Many of my favorite fragrant flowers fall in this category: lily of the valley, gardenia, tuberose, jasmine, lilac, iris and wisteria. These fragile flowers crumple when exposed to the heat of the steam which is used to distill scent from other hardier flowers (like lavender and rose).

Of course, this didn’t stop people who wanted to capture the scent of these flowers from developing a method to do so. It’s been around since ancient times and it’s called enfleurage, a name which is actually much prettier than the process.

In its most developed form, as practiced in Grasse, the perfume center of France, during the nineteenth century, fresh flower petals are placed on panes of glass which are smeared with purified fat. The fat absorbs the odors of the flowers, which are replenished when they are spent, until the fat is thoroughly imbued with fragrance. Then the scented fat, which is called a pomade, is washed with alcohol which absorbs the scent. The leftover scented fat was often used to make soap. The scented alcohol is called an absolute. If the alcohol is allowed to evaporate, what is left is an essential oil.

There are more primitive ways of creating the same effect, including simply stirring flowers into hot fat until it absorbs their odors. This cheerful article at Mother Earth News explains how to do enfleurage in your kitchen. I’m not sure I agree that you can use rubbing alcohol; I believe my Natural Perfumery teacher (Jeanne Rose) would shudder at this, because rubbing alcohol has a strong odor of its own which would affect your end result.

The illustration of women handling the chassis used in the enfleurage process comes from Sacred Earth which also explains the process, along with other methods used to extract scent from flowers.

The Scent of Wisteria

2009-05-28T00:45:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a series of essays for the past year about my experiences getting to know the flowers that flourish along the eight blocks I walk between my apartment on the top of Capitol Hill in Seattle and my work at Richard Hugo House, at the corner of Pine and Eleventh. I assigned myself a series of tasks, one per month (I love being a teacher and I love being a student). My task for June is to figure out how to capture the scent of flowers. So I plan to post entries on my experiments and let you know how they are going.

Tonight as I walked home on a sunny summer evening I was noticing the scent of wisteria. To me it has a pleasant, creamy vanilla scent. So I was pleased when I went searching online to see that Octavian, one of my favorite perfume writers (I know him from his comments on Luca Turin's perfume blog) has written an entry at his own blog, 1000 Perfumes, carefully analyzing the scent of wisteria with much more precision than my nose can register.

I hadn't considered the difference color might make in the scent of a wisteria until I read Octavian's entry (though I know from much experimentation that I love the smell of purple irises more than any other color). All of the wisteria on my walk was purple.

A few years ago, when I was learning about wine (in the process of researching a wine mystery novel which never got written), I developed much more discrimination in my ability to identify flavors and scents. As I learn about scents, I am trying to increase my scent vocabulary as well. (Oddly enough many of the scents I encountered today reminded me of banana (and I love the scent of banana, especially artificial banana flavor. I don't know what caused this olfactory delusion.)

What does wisteria smell like to you?

Osoberry

2009-04-04T00:40:00.001-07:00

One of my friends asked me about the plants at Hedgebrook and I had to laugh because I spent a good amount of time in my cottage writing about plants and not so much walking around in the woods and meadow and garden. Finally one sunny afternoon I grabbed my favorite plant identification book, Wild Plants of Seattle by Arthur Lee Jacobson, and went for a walk in the woods.

There are people who walk through a museum reading the captions and then stepping back and looking at the pictures, and people who just look at the pictures and let them soak in. I have to admit I am one of the former. Likewise there are people who walk through the woods, thumbing through the pages of a book trying to identify plants and people who just commune with the plants. Guess which one I am? Actually I had a good excuse. I was working on an essay about identifying plants.

I didn’t get too far into the woods because I was struck when I walked into a nearby clearing by a plant I had never seen before. It seemed to be alight in the dimness of the woods, all the leaves lifting straight up towards the sky like bright-green candles. I was able to identify it because Jacobson captured this quality in his description of the plant: “as the young green leaves awaken, they illuminate the woods with tender fresh greenery.” The photograph taken by Alyss in Portland really captures this quality. The leaves have the delightful smell and flavor of bitter cucumber.

This deciduous shrub is an osoberry, so named because bears (oso is the Spanish word for bear—I know that from going to Camp Osito as a Girl Scout) like the berries. Jacobson also gives alternate names as Indian Plum or Cherry, Squaw Plum , Bird Cherry and Skunk Bush. The scientific name is Oelemeria cerasiformis and it’s a member of the rose family (as are plums and cherries).

The common names refer to the fruit: bluish-black berries which are favorites of the birds. Jacobson says they are “juicy and melon-flavored [but] marred by a bitter tinge and big pits.” The name Skunk Bush (I assume) comes from the stinky flowers. I brought just one spray into my cottage to sketch and quickly regretted it. The flowers are delicate looking, tiny packages of petals held on drooping stems, almost like lilies of the valley, with raggedy edges but they have a terrible smell.

Every time I learn about a new plant, I fall in love with it and osoberry is my new emblem of spring.

Goat Willow Catkins on Whidbey Island

2009-03-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Southern California, we never saw real pussywillows (except as imported curiosities). They were captive items, like peacock feathers or Mexican jumping beans. They stayed frozen in their soft furry grey velvet form forever.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t recognize them at first in my Seattle neighborhood. I had walked around the same block for years without ever seeing them. Then one March, on a walk with the dog, I noticed something plopping down around me. They were spent pussy willow catkins that had thrown off their pollen and were dropping to in an orgy of dissipation.

From then on, I kept my eye on the bush and came to know all its phases. I love it best when the buds are just showing that flash of milk white, before they open. No, I love it best when the stems are studded with those soft, furry grey velvet puffs, like tiny rabbit feet. I have a vase of them sitting in my window in front of me at my writing retreat. They were blown off this tree in the high wind that came up several nights ago and I found them on the side of the road. They don’t seem to be opening despite the warmth of the cottage, which is just fine.

But I do love the next stage. Here they are on the same tree a few days later, popping out, covered with yellow pollen. I will be eager to get back to Seattle and see how the ones in my neighborhood are progressing.. I think because Seattle is warmer they will already be littering the ground.

I’ve been reading Bill Felker’s list of March Zeitgebers from Poor Will’s Almanac. In Yellow Springs, Ohio, he predicts pussy willow catkins will break in the second week and pollen will appear on the catkins in the fourth week.

city dogs and country dogs

2009-03-09T17:02:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about the difference between city dogs and country dogs, when I was walking into town yesterday. My daughter's dog, Pepe, seen above in a nest of down comforter, is definitely a city dog.

Though we both harbor the fantasy of buying land in the country, partly so Pepe could just run outside whenever he wanted to pee, I don't think he would last more than a few days. There was an eagle drifting overhead as I was walking into town and I think Pepe would look like a great snack to an eagle. Ditto to an owl. Last night one of the resident owls at Hedgebrook ate one of the resident bunnies.

It struck me that a dog like a Chihuahua (and probably other toy dogs), are designed to be city dogs. They are status symbols, like long fingernails or white carpets, that say, I don't have a dirty job. They signal class and wealth, which is probably why Paris Hilton flaunts them. (I'm not sure what Mickey Rourke is doing with a Chihuahua, but it is adorable to see that ravaged, rough-looking man cradling the small, big-eyed dog against his chest.)

The country dogs here seem to be working dogs, dogs like collies and shepherds that are bred for herding skills, or guard dogs, like the yappy Chow mix at the farm down the road. On my way back from town, I saw a border collie mix crossing the street in front of me. He just stopped in the middle, his ears cocked in my direction. He stood there for about 45 seconds, then loped up a long drive into the woods. About three minutes later, a car approached from town and turned up that same drive. The dog had apparently recognized the sound from miles away and was heading to his post, to greet the members of his family when they disembarked.

what I'm missing

2009-03-07T23:09:00.000-08:00

A picture of the window seat in my cabin where I sit and look out at the trees (and occasional snow flurries) and read some of the books I've brought: the Culture of Flowers by Jack Goody and Essential Oils and Hydrosols by Jeanne Rose.

Here I am on a two-week writing retreat. I imported all the books I thought I needed (and the ones I didn't bring I ordered at the local library). I brought my new cute laptop and new flash drive and found the recharger for my digital camera so I could take pictures and show them to you. And I brought notebooks galore, warm clothes, some earrings, even. But what am I missing the most?

Post-it notes.

I went into town to try to buy some and I couldn't find any at the store. It seems silly. Even wasteful to use post-it notes when I have scratch paper, but I find I'm very attached to them.

Hedgebrook: The Residency

2009-03-07T00:31:00.000-08:00

I realized that while away on my writer’s retreat I could still post entries to my blog because the Internet is everywhere. Even here in this idyllic retreat for women writers called Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island.

We don’t have internet access in our cottages but we can walk a brief distance through the woods (a spooky walk at night by the feeble light of my eco-friendly flashlight) to a little shed called the Pumphouse which connects us to the outside world via phone and an internet connection. (Cell phones don’t work too well here. At least mine doesn’t.)

We’re encouraged to stay off the grid as much as possible, since we’re here to write. And I have been writing for the past four days. Working on a commissioned piece for an art jewelry journal. Beginning an essay on plant identification. Polishing up one I wrote long ago on the names of plants. Considering new possibilities for my Victorian ghost novel.

It’s an amazing gift for a writer. To have nothing on my schedule but writing. That and sleeping and eating and reading and making tea and keeping a fire burning in the wood stove.

I want to live in this cottage for the rest of my life. Finally, a desk big enough so I can spread out all my projects. A tiny kitchen, perfect for one person. A cozy armchair with a footstool and a lamp. A windowseat that looks out on the woods. A wood stove to stoke; it keeps the kettle hot enough so I can make a cup of tea anytime I want. The bed is up a ladder in the loft. The windows have leaded glass panes so prisms dance around the room when the sun is out.

There are seven writers here at the moment and all of them are fabulously talented, so talented I sometimes wonder what I’m doing here. At night we meet at the farmhouse where we are served a fabulous dinner. We talk about writing over this gorgeous food and that is a luxury too.

When we leave to go back to our cottages, we are carrying our flashlights and our baskets laden with the lunches that were made for us (mac and cheese tomorrow) and the fixings for breakfast (I’ve been grooving on oatmeal).

Tonight I walked up the road under the stars. The first quarter moon was so bright I didn’t need my flashlight. The frogs were chirping in the pond besides my cottage as I crossed over the bridge and saw the welcoming lights of my cottage.

I’m already counting the days until I go home (ten), not because I’m eager to leave but because each one is precious.

out of Time

2009-03-01T20:37:00.000-08:00

You might have noticed that I disappeared for a while there. I've been struggling with a persistent cold ever since the last week in December. It recurred twice, once in January and once at the end of February, knocking me out for a week each time. Meanwhile I got the news on February 4 that my mother was dying.

It was not a surprise. She has been in a long decline starting in 1999 when she had a major heart attack. She was already suffering from short term memory loss and that progressed into Alzheimers. She lived in a succession of nursing homes and rest homes for the past nine years. In the last few months, she slept most of the time, like an old cat.

My daughter, Shaw, and I rushed down to Ventura and were able to be with her in the hospital for two days. We took shifts and I was with her when she died in the early hours of February 6. Although her death was peaceful, being with her was not easy. I wished I had taken more time to think through how to create a sense of sacred space in the hospital room. I should have talked to my friend, death midwife, Nora Cedarwind, who has made it her life's work to bring dignity and beauty into the dying process.

We were blessed with the presence of a priest who came to give my mother the Anointing of the Sick, after my daughter insisted my mother would want this Catholic ritual. And after my mother died, we were comforted by the services provided by the funeral home and the rituals of the Catholic Church. It was clear both were the result of years and centuries of considering what people need when they are experiencing loss and grief.

Perhaps the most surprising moments during this whole process happened at the cemetery. My sister, who is an engineer, wanted to see how they would lower the coffin into the ground. So after the burial service, we stayed to watch as the cemetery workers with shovels and bulldozer lowered the coffin into the vault and the vault into the ground and then shoveled the dirt back over it. (I wish we had stepped forward at this point to shovel dirt ourselves but we weren't invited to do so and so we didn't.) Then they carefully laid back down the strips of sod they had removed and replaced the headstone (which marks my father's resting place) and laid the big bouquet of flowers on the green grass. It was an amazing end to an intense process, to look back, as we walked towards our rental cars, and see the lilies and roses lying on the green grass.

Although it seems my mother's death should be a sad event, it was not entirely sad. It was also beautiful and disturbing, peaceful and exhausting. Here's a picture of my daughter on the beach that captures a certain sense of grace about our trip:

Signs of Spring

2009-01-25T17:54:00.001-08:00

I spend the entire month of January dreaming about what I want to grow in the New Year, and doing a process of sorting those dreams into themes and goals. This year I'm sharing that process with the students in my New Year Dreams class.

I'm still in the thick of it, generating lots of ideas. Launching an online magazine. Writing a historical novel. Writing essays about plants in the city. Promoting my Slow Time book to coaches and writers. Sponsoring week-long Slow Time retreats. Contributing to Wikipedia, Library Thing. Joining Facebook. Teaching a year-long Slow Time class. The new ideas keep springing forth.

I'm at the point in the process where I need to make choices. It's clearly impossible to do everything. But I'm having a harder time choosing this year than in other years. I like to choose a word for the year that distills my intention for the entire year and this year I'm having trouble with that as well. In previous years, I've picked Fun and Frolic. This year it's something more like Connecting but that's too abstract for me.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying all the signs of spring around me. The red twigs on the maples. The green blades of tulips kniving through the dark soil. The single yellow bloom on the forsythia. The fuzzy buds on the goat willow. I saw my first robin three days ago.

Christmas Day

2008-12-26T00:17:00.001-08:00

Christmas Day after the presents were opened. My daughter insisted that one must rip the paper off the packages and throw it over your shoulder, so a new tradition was born. This contrasts with my mother's habit of carefully smoothing out and folding up each piece of paper, as presents were unwrapped. In this photo, Pepe is sleeping in front of my favorite present, a painting of Pepe sleeping that my daughter painted.

We also enjoyed one of our newer holiday traditions going to a movie on Christmas Day. We both wanted to see Bolt, an animated Disney movie about a dog who thinks he's a superhero, mostly because it also stars a hamster in a ball. (We have both had hamsters as pets.) So we went to the 12:50 showing downtown, sloshing through the slush to get there. It was a great Christmas movie, in many ways, sentimental and charming at the same time. But I think it would be upsetting for kids: there were many scary scenes, and I cried through about half of the movie, as did many other people in the theatre judging by the sniffling.

Under the Christmas Tree

2008-12-25T01:25:00.001-08:00

This is what it looks like on Chistmas Eve at my house.
Pepe is snuggled in his little bed (that Shaw made for him) under the tree.

This was a new kind of tree for us, a noble fir, I believe. It's a hard tree to decorate, because it's so bushy. For some reason the red and yellow lights on the Christmas light set didn't work so that set the theme. My daughter Shaw decided to use only blue and silver ornaments.

For years we argued about whether or not to get a real Christmas tree. The artificial trees seem to be returning in popularity, partly because they're so
kitschy, and partly because they don't use up natural resources. I understand the reasons to abstain from getting a real tree but I love the smell. I consider it partial compensation for taking the life of the tree that I buy the tree from a charity and we burn the tree after Christmas.

This was a practice that began when I was a college student. It was great fun to drag the tree out onto the street and light it on fire. (Warning: don't try this at home! Christmas trees are highly flammable.) As I matured, instead of burning the tree in front of the house, I would take it to the beach on Candlemas and burn it. I remember doing this with a boyfriend, Jerry, huddled in the cold wind on a beach in the Pacific Northwest, with our daughters running around waving branches with lit ends, and making patterns in the darkness, like sparklers. For the past ten or fifteen years, I've burned my tree at the Summer Solstice bonfire. That means storing it in the closet. I cut off the branches and store the bare tree trunk, along with garbage bags full of the branches and needles. It makes the closet smell like Christmas for half the year.

Happy celebrations to you.

Snow Art

2008-12-23T00:53:00.000-08:00

One of my readers commented last year when I was posting pumpkin pictures about how pumpkin carving was a true folk art. I recognized that this is an activity in which every person feels they can participate, strives to make a unique design and is proud to display it in public, all unusual in other creative activities. And this year, in the midst of our snow storm, I'm realizing that there's another unique folk art form: snow creatures.

I have to say creatures because some of my favorite snow sculptures depicted animals like this dog and the cat below.

I found them all in Cal Anderson Park. The whole park was dotted with them,
strange white shapes emerging from the snow, quiet presences.

Berry Walk: Yew Berries

2008-11-29T01:03:00.001-08:00

I focus on different plants at different times of the year. Through most of the spring and summer, I'm looking for flowers. Around August, at the time of the Assumption, I begin noticing the grasses which are in flower. And beginning in Lammas, it's the berries. I thought I would feature some of the local berries over the next few days.

Yew berries. They're not actually berries but arils. I first learned about them a few years ago when I noticed a flock of bird twittering in a yew hedge. They stripped the tree within an hour, gorging on the berries.

I just finished taking a class with master teacher Priscilla Long. I was working on an essay on foraging and one of my fellow writers was writing about a patch of dirt in her yard that is next to a yew tree. She mentioned the "poisonous looking" berries on the tree. I told her they were not--I think it's just the fluorescent pink and the gelatinous texture that makes people think they're poisonous.

Then I got a couple of books on edible plants from the library and learned the seeds (there are hard brown seeds inside those bright pink fruits) are quite poisonous. I was so relieved to see Chris in class the next week and hastened to let her know she should not eat the berries. Apparently birds can eat them because they don't digest the seeds but simply poop them out, thus helping the yew to reproduce.

The yew's reputation for toxicity is well-deserved. Both bark and leaves are poisonous.

Pumpkin Art

2008-10-30T23:45:00.001-07:00

This is our Halloween pumpkin for this year, carved by my daughter.

A reader commented last year that pumpkins are truly folk art. People make an effort to acquire a perfect pumpkin and carve into its orange flesh a truly unique expression, one that hasn't been seen before. And then we share our creative projects, proudly, by displaying them on front porches for everyone to see. When else do we feel so unselfconscious about displaying the fruit of our artistic efforts?

Last year I went crazy photographing pumpkins in my Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. It seemed like there were many more than there are this year. This year I have only seen two on my way to work. I wonder if that means anything.

Rose Hydrosol

2008-10-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted anything about making my rose hydrosol because I was disappointed in the end result. I have yet to make anything from roses that actually captures the amazing fragrance they exude.

I’ve been using the petals of an old red rose that grows in the abandoned lot across the street. It’s my secret treasure, since it’s hard to find a rose in my urban neighborhood that I can be sure isn’t sprayed. Since this rose is entirely neglected (except for my feeble attempts at pruning it this year), I know it’s safe to harvest the petals.

They smell absolutely marvelous and look beautiful in the vase when first picked. But they don’t last long—they wither and go limp within a few days, as is true for many older roses. The newer varieties have been bred to last longer in the vase at the cost of the scent. The very chemicals that diffuse fragrance also age the flower.

The rose petals smelled wonderful while cooking in the pan but the rose water I collected had a slightly musty smell. I bottled it and put it in the refrigerator anyway, thinking maybe it would get better. A few days later I added glycerin to the hydrosol to make it last longer but it still smelled unpleasant. I realized I was never going to use it, so I poured it out.

I don’t know the secret of how to capture the fragrance of the rose but maybe I will learn next weekend when I attend Jeanne Rose’s workshop on Natural Perfumery in Los Angeles.

Bay Laurel Hydrosol

2008-09-30T00:49:00.000-07:00

If you read my last newsletter

you know I’m taking a herbal preparations class at my local natural pharmacy, Rainbow Natural Remedies. The class combines all the pleasures of crafting, cooking and working with plants. The fabulous teacher, Crystal Stelzer, makes something every week and shows us how to do it, then gives us the opportunity to taste it, test it and bring samples home. I’ve set myself the task—I love homework—of making each of the things we’ve learned about every week. I’m about two weeks behind, still working on the assignments from Week 2 when we learned to make hydrosols, spritzers and flower essences.

Yesterday I made my first hydrosol. I love that word. It sounds so official. So scientific. Hydrosol is the term for the water that is left over after the distilling process by which essential oils are extracted. Rose water is a hydrosol; so is orange (blossom) water. Those two have always been saved and used for centuries, but most other hydrosols were thrown away after the distillation process. Now people are recognizing that they can be used. For one thing, because they contain only tiny amounts of the essential oils, so they can be taken internally or used in cooking. I’ve used rosewater for years on my Christmas kourabiedes cookies. Hydrosols can also be used as mouthwash (think mint hydrosol), antiseptic sprays (rosemary and thyme hydrosols), air fresheners (for instance, lavender hydrosol).

I wanted to try making a hydrosol from my bay tree. I have a lovely tree, about seven years old, that I’m shaping into a topiary. Because of that I trim it frequently and end up with many more bay leaves than I can use in cooking. So I covered the bottom of a stainless steel saucepan with a one to two inch layer of fresh bay leaves, added water to cover it, and put a stainless steel strainer with no center pole on top. I set a porcelain collection dish in the middle of the strainer, then got the water boiling with a lid on top to help capture the essential oils.

Once the water was boiling, I turned it down to a simmer, turned the lid of the pot upside down, and put a plastic bag full of ice on top of the inverted lid. The steam condensed on the inside of the lid and ran down to the lowest point of the lid from which point it dripped down into the collection dish. The most wonderful aroma filled the house. It was spicy. Shaw, my daughter, thought it smelled like Christmas trees. I thought it smelled like eucalyptus.

After about ten minutes, I turned off the pot and let it cool. After a long time, and working very carefully, since everything was still hot, I removed the bag of ice, the lid and finally the collection dish. I poured the liquid I had collected into a sterilized glass jar which I labeled and placed in the refrigerator.

Then I had to figure out what to do with bay hydrosol. It smelled great. I can imagine it would make a great aftershave. It has that woodsy, spicy scent to it. I wasn’t sure what else it could be used for. The article at Wikipedia

informs me that bay laurel has antioxidant, analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties. It might also be good for rubbing on sore muscles (though then I would probably rather infuse it in an oil) since it has analgesic qualities.

The fragrance come from the essential oils which include 45% eucalyptol (that was what I was smelling) and also eugenol (one of the main ingredients in clove cigarettes, an old vice of mine), pinenes (that's what my daughter was smelling--the scent of pine trees), linalool, geraniol and terpineol.

I wish I could spray some your way. It’s a marvelous scent. Next I’m going to try to make rose hydrosol from the roses in the abandoned lot across the street. They’re almost gone for the year so I have to make this in the next few days. I'll let you know how it works in my next post.

Birthday Flowers

2008-09-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

I've written before in my newsletter and my blog about the concept of Birthday Flowers, that is a flower that blooms on your birthday. My mother associated the Amaryllis Belladonna with my birthday because it blooms in Southern California where I was born on September 4, my birthday. It's also called Naked Lady and there's another flower called Naked Lady, the autumn crocus, which blooms in Seattle, where I live now, on my birthday.

This year I was worried as my birthday approached because I didn't see any sign of my birthday flowers where they usually bloom, in the parkway of a residential street near my work. Then on the day before my birthday, my daughter invited me to go on a long ramble with her through the nearby park. On our way home we spotted some of my birthday flowers emerging from a patch of dirt outside a brick apartment building only a block from our house. It's not a block I usually travel, either when walking the dog or on my way to work or the store or the library. In fact, I'm only on that block when the lindens are in bloom. So it was a nice find. It's one of the great things about being a naturalist in the city, that you can discover something brand new right around the corner.

On the day after my birthday I was on my way to work, traveling along my usual path, and there were my birthday flowers in their usual spot. I don't know how I missed them on my previous trips. I'm not sure how I feel about having the autumn crocus as my birthday flower. It's highly poisonous but also poignant, appearing in the midst of a blighted landscape as a pale apparition of vulnerable beauty.

Do you have a birthday flower?

Later Lammas

2008-08-03T23:51:00.001-07:00

It's amazing how fast something becomes a holiday tradition., i.e., the Lammas Festival. I attended last year and returned this year, eager to experience some of the magical moments from last year, like swimming in the river, and singing the song "They Shall Remain" in the closing circle, and breakfast at the Acme Cafe on the way home.

But the beauty of repeating an experience is that it isn't quite the same the second time. And although all of those things happened again, I left with a whole new set of magical memories. Like singing around the campfire and sleeping in my car and waking up every few hours to see the shifting tableaux of the campground, like a series of camera frames.

When I first curled up in my front seat, I could look out my window and see the picture above, of the bonfire and sparks dancing upward into the night sky, like fiery snakes, and the people were only rosy glows moving in and out of the light. A few hours later when I awoke, I saw only a blazing fire throwing off great sparks; all the rest was dark though I know there was a fire tender keeping watch. The next time I woke up, fog had settled in the valley, and the fire was just a dull orange glow although the ascending sparks occasionally lit the mist above the fire with bursts of pale peach-colored light. I woke again a few hours later after daybreak and saw a circle of empty camp chairs around the fire pit. It was all so close, almost within a hand's reach, it seemed, though the bonfire had seemed so far away from my car when I retired. I closed my eyes again and when I next woke up, the chairs were populated. People were drinking coffee and talking. I rolled down my window and let their words drift in, along with the smell of dried grass (I love the smell of dried grass.)

Probably the best memory, though, was my recognition that I had become part of a tribe. Even though I hadn't seen most of these people since last year, I felt so comfortable, so accepted, so welcomed, it was easy to be myself (a shy person and a cranky camper). I have a feeling this gathering, in its own small way, recaptures the way people felt when gathering for the Teltown Fair back in the eleventh century.

A chance to reconnect with old friends, to hear the stories of what's happened in their lives, to sit back and watch the new babies being passed around the circle, to see how the kids have grown, to admire the talents each person brings to the group (clothing, song, art work, learning, embroidery, food art, ritual, etc.), to feast and sing and dance. I'm already looking forward to returning next year, knowing the magical memories will be completely different.

Early Lammas

2008-08-02T00:40:00.001-07:00

When you're a holiday maven, it's hard to keep up with all the holiday traditions you develop. this year I missed my usual July/Lotus Moon water lily paddle on Lake Washington, but I didn't miss my Lammas blackberry picking, a tradition I developed to simulate in Seattle the Irish custom of climbing high mountains on the Sunday before Lughnasad to pick bilberries.

Usually I go blackberry picking on the Sunday before Lammas with my friend Michael after our usual Sunday breakfast. We go to the blackberry bushes that grow along the Burke Gilman trail, right below the University of Washington and the I-5 bridge. But we didn't go on the Sunday before Lammas because we were both in a hurry to go someplace else and we didn't think the berries would be ripe (it's been overcast in Seattle in recent weeks).

Luckily I got another chance to go berry picking on Friday, August 1st, because my car got a flat tire and I was delayed in heading out of town to a Lammas festival. So I made a solitary pilgrimage to the berry bushes. As you can see from the photo, there were a few ripe ones on these bushes, but I couldn't reach them. But all I had to do was cross the street. On the other side of 40th, I found plenty of warm, sweet, ripe blackberries. I brought home a basket full to share with my daughter.

Flowers to Seeds

2008-07-14T00:04:00.001-07:00

I mentioned in my newsletter that I was really noticing the transition from flower to seed at this time of the year and here are a few pictorial examples.

I love the way the seed pod is so visible inside the ruffled petals of the poppy. This photograph was taken almost two weeks ago and most of the petals have dropped by now.

This second photo is of the rhododendrons going to seed. I apologize for the poor quality of the photo. I dropped my digital camera (a Canon) six weeks ago (which is why you've heard nothing from me) and borrowed a friend's camera to take these.But I'm not yet very comfortable with the new camera (a Fuji). I do like how you can see the withered petals of the flowers along with the swelling at the base of the ovaries and the long remaining pistil(?)

And finally the Coreopsis, one of whose common names is Tickweed because the black seeds look like ticks. This photo was taken a little too late at night, though I like the way the background suggests a black velvet painting. You can see the intermediate stage between the orange flower and the tick seeds in the pale green flower head that's closest to the camera. Behind it you see one that is farther along and turning brown. The curved sections are clutching the humped black seeds. I'll try to take a better picture of this and post it later.

Iris Farm

2008-06-14T01:15:00.000-07:00

These beautiful photographs were taken by my friend, Michael, who accompanied me on both my first and my most recent visits to Schreiner's Gardens just outside of Salem, Oregon.
We went on Mother's Day weekend this year and because it's been so cloudy and cool, most of the bearded irises were not yet in bloom. So most of the display iris in this area, were the dwarf irises, which I had never seen before. I wandered up and down the aisles smelling irises and found many new favorite fragrances.
There's also an area where you can buy plants. This photo shows me in the background in my "cat hat" (my daughter makes them) and a beautiful columbine in the foreground. I bought one like this for my garden.
Schreiners also has a beautiful iris garden where samples of every kind of iris are planted in rows and clearly labeled, so you can see how they grow. There's also a section (as shown in this photo) which was full of lilacs and rhododenrons in bloom. The last picture shows me in front of a magnificent yellow rhododendron.

The Pink Rain

2008-05-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite times of the year. I call it the season of the Pink Rain, when the cherry petals drop and carpet the sidewalks.

The picture on the left was taken on April 28, when the sidewalks were peppered with petals like confetti.

The next two photos were taken on May 7 when the dusting of petals had become a carpet, filling the gutters with pink rain.

These last two photos were taken on May 14 and May 16 and show the heaps of petals covering parked cars and covering the surface of a decorative pool in front of an apartment building. The pink rain is almost over, alas!

A Trip to the Iris Farm in my New Car

2008-05-13T22:59:00.001-07:00

On Mother's Day, I made a quick trip down to Schreiners Iris Farm just outside of Salem, Oregon. It's a pilgrimage I plan every year but seldom execute. This year the leisurely trip I planned ended up crunched into one grueling day of driving. But it was all so much more pleasant because I was driving my new car, which I bought last Mother's Day. That's a whole story in itself. I just thought I would celebrate the ease it has brought me. It's a 2007 Ford Focus and it really looks good parked next to my neighbor's tulips. I'll post more about the iris farm trip in a few days.

Fragrant Rhododendrons

2008-05-07T00:18:00.001-07:00

Ever since I read the book Tales of the Rose Tree by Jane Brown and learned that the earliest rhododendrons, brought to England from Nepal and China by plant explorers, were fragrant, I’ve been searching for a fragrant rhododendron. Seattle is rhododendron city; there’s a rhodie on every block, practically every yard. It’s our state flower after all. But, despite sniffing every rhodendron I passed, I couldn’t find one with any scent. That’s partly because, as with other highly hybridized flowers, the scent has been bred out of them in favor of big blossoms and vivid colors.

Then on May 1, when I was leaving the Museum of History and Industry after a great reunion of Nearby History participants, I smelled the most intoxicating fragrance. I looked around and the only blossoms in sight were on a huge rhododendron with large white flowers. So I thought I would try sniffing the blossoms. Ah! A heavenly aroma. A truly fragrant rhododendron.

A few days later, I was celebrating an impromptu May ceremony with some friends, tossing wreaths into the lagoons at the end of the Arboretum, when I saw another white rhododendron, right next to the gatehouse that leads into Broadmoor. I pointed it out and we went over to smell it. Again, that intoxicating fragrance, a lot like honeysuckle. We stuck our noses deep into the blossoms to inhale the scent and when we raised our heads, there were smudges of pollen on our noses and sticky pistils. The flower had lured us, hapless pollinators, to spread its seed around. A perfect ending for May Day.

The photograph above is not either of the bushes described but it may be the same cultivar. This is Polar Bear and it’s a fragrant rhododendron offered for sale by Banwy Valley Nursery in the UK.

The Berkeley Horticultural Nursery has a wonderful list of fragrant rhododendron cultivars.

I was especially fascinated by the distinctions made in describing their scents. Bill Massey is very fragrant with cinnamon/chocolate overtones. Fragrantissimum smells of honeysuckle and nutmeg. And Fragrantissimum Improved has “an almost tropical fragrance with nuances of jasmine and cloves.” McNabbi smells like nutmeg and Mi Amor has hints of musk and tarragon. Paul Molinari has the scent of wild honeysuckle (I have a feeling this is the cultivar I enjoyed) while Scott’s Valentine smells like jasmine. It’s enough to make me run out and buy some rhododendrons for my garden.

One thing this flower project is doing for me is making me fall in love with flowers I always disdained (like the bergenia and the big showy, scentless rhodies).

May Flowers

2008-05-02T00:12:00.000-07:00

As we do every May Eve, my daughter and I went out last night at midnight and wandered around our neighborhood in the dark, armed with bags and clippers, looking for fragrant flowers in the parkways and the alleyways (where we consider them fair game). This year, to our astonishment, there were no lilacs in bloom (except at the very top of the bushes where we couldn't reach them). We brought home a few buds hoping to force them in the warmth of our house but with no success. This tells me that spring is truly late this year (I've been refusing to believe it, since other flowers, like the daffodils, bloomed on time.) The only May flower which is blooming on time is the sweet woodruff, the plant traditionally used to flavor May wine.

The picture of the little basket is from last year when we had a better haul, and shows one of the offerings we left on all the doorknobs in our apartment building. This year we simply filled all the vases in our apartment.

Are your May Day flowers blooming on time or are they late, like ours?

The Mystery Plant

2008-04-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

At the start of March, I embarked on a new topic in my year-long quest to learn about flowers. I began to focus on plant identification. I read Botany in a Day by Thomas J Elpel, a wonderful book that teaches you to identify plants by learning about plant families, then went out walking, eager to apply my newfound knowledge.

Unfortunately, I ran into a snag right away. I decided to identify the plant on the left. I call it the snail plant because snails love to eat the leaves and it usually looks pretty ratty by this time of year (the one on the left is looking pretty good). I used the process of keying out described by Elpel and quickly established that this was a Pyrola or wintergreen. I was thrilled! I had identified my first plant. Wanting to confirm my conclusion, I Googled Pyrola only to find out: this is not a Pyrola.

I was relating this story over lunch to some friends and one of them after hearing my description (round leaves with scalloped edges, pink flowers on red stalks) suggested my mystery plant was bear's britches. Again more excitement.

I rushed home and Googled Bear's Britches, the common name for acanthus mollis, the ancient plant whose leaves often decorate the capitals of Roman columns. Unfortunately, my plant is not Acanthus mollis (although I did have the good fortune, now that I know about it, to find an Acanthus on my walk to work this morning)

So I was sulking and feeling like I couldn't post anything because I was such a failure as an amateur botanist. Then I realized, this is what the Internet is for. One of you will surely recognize this plant. Can you tell me what it is? I look forward to your wisdom.

One thing that has happened as a result of my quest is that I now love this plant that I used to hate. I'm much more intimate with it now, having pried apart the five pink petals to count the ten tiny white stamens. I admire the combination of colors the bloom displays as it fades: the vivid magenta of the petals, the greenish-purple sepals and the deep maroon of the stem.

Spring Equinox in the City: An Iris Blooms!

2008-03-20T19:01:00.001-07:00

It's not a glamorous photo but it records a sighting that made my heart leap with joy! The first iris bud of the year. Spotted at the corner of Broadway and John in Seattle on the first day of spring.

When I went to write this into my phenological journal, I noted that the first iris bud appeared in the front yard of the apartment building across the street a week earlier (Mar 13) in 2005. I wonder if there is one over there right now? I will have to go check.

Besotted by Violets

2008-03-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

I spent the last week in a happy haze of violets.

It all began when I bought a chunk of violet-scented soap from Lush, my favorite source for hand-made soap and bath bombs.

It was named Gratuitous Violet in an internal rhyme that made me smile. Immediately, it became my favorite soap, a pleasure to slide over my skin, the sumptuous scent lingering on my skin in a shimmer of fragrance for hours. It reminded me of the scent of irises (and I have since learned they share a common chemical compound: ionone) which I love. It is floral without being pretty, sweet without being saccharine, with a hint of dark spiciness. It did not seem familiar to me, and this is probably good, since many people seem to associate the scent with old ladies doused with violets and powder.

The soap soon became an addiction. Alas, on my last trip to Lush on Winter Solstice, I discovered they were discontinuing this soap. I bought the largest piece I could afford and am still doling it out, one little slippery shard at a time, but meanwhile it was time to look for a new supply of violet scent.

I’ve been haunting perfume review sites for some months, eavesdropping on the fabulous discussions of perfumes far too expensive for me to dream of buying a bottle, where I learned about the Perfumed Court, a small company run by three women perfume addicts who got the bright idea of selling samples of decanted perfumes from those big expensive bottles so people like me could try these extravagant pleasures for a minimal price. I searched for “violets” on their web site and found that they offered a violet sampler which I immediately ordered.

While I was waiting for my violet sampler to arrive, I received an email from a Living in Season reader who had read my wistful comment that I had never smelled a real violet as I didn’t believe they grew in Seattle. Not so! She replied. Martha had violets growing in her yard and she volunteered to give me some for my garden. So last Sunday I drove to Martha’s house and we got on our hands and knees and pried them out from among the day lily bulbs.

Martha had several varieties: parma violets with their almost psychedelic red-violet color, and delicate pale apricot colored violets, but the real prize for me were the sweet violets (viola odorata). The tiniest of the lot, you couldn’t smell them unless you got down on your hands and knees and stuck your nose inches from the soil. No wonder violets are so often associated with humility (in the language of the flowers) as they bring us so low to appreciate their fragrance. But the scent! It was intoxicating! Martha told me she picks a few stems and floats them in water. The scent, she said, is so strong it imbues the water with fragrance.

I rushed my transplants home and planted them in my plot in the community garden. The apricot-colored violets have been the happiest with the transfer, but the others are surviving, though they still look a bit crushed. I did pluck three stems of the sweet violets and placed them in a glass of water on my desk where I could periodically reach out and bring it to my nose. The scent is heavenly.

And then my perfume sampler arrived. Thus began a week of prying open tiny glass bottles, one at a time (remembering one of my prized possessions as an adolescent, a box of perfume samples packing in skinny glass ampules, as thin as toothpicks, which you snapped open to release the few drops of liquid inside). Every night I daubed my wrists with violet-themed perfumes, then spent a happy hour trolling the Internet reading perfume reviews.

The jargon amazed and baffled me. Reviewers raved about silage and top notes, threw around terms like dry-off and dark base. It was like being at a wine tasting with a bunch of snobby connoisseurs. One reviewer found notes of blond hay, tobacco, mint, aniseed and violet in a perfume where I smelled merely intense, obnoxious sweetness. To my delight, the perfumes I liked the most were the simplest and the most true to the violet scent: Violetta di Bosco and Violettes de Toulouse, named after the French city which celebrates the violet with a festival every year. I think I will have to visit next year.

Song of the Plants

2008-03-12T00:46:00.001-07:00

This is a picture of the first quince blossom I saw this year, taken February 25. But I didn't choose this picture to illustrate that important phenological event but simply because it's the best photograph I've taken to illustrate the rather mysterious topic of this blog.

When I first launched my project of getting to know the plants in my urban neighborhood, it wasn't really because I wanted to learn their Latin names or know what date they bloomed in a particular year but because I wanted a deeper connection with the natural world.

All through February I've been tracking and annotating the buds and blossoms, the proliferating of twigs on branches and the reddish haze at the top of the linden trees, even the elusive scents that are drifting through the spring air. But my phenological observations while helping me engage more with the natural world, still keep me at a distance. The plants are the objects of my scrutiny but they are still objects, data pinned in the pages of my notebook.

Then about a week ago I was walking home from work in the dark. And I became aware that my mind was churning over my list of to-dos, as it used to do during my walks before I became distracted by the plants. One of the lovely things about walking as a phenologist is that I'm freed from this sort of incessant mind chatter. But in the dark, it seemed I had no plants to observe.

My friend Janis had just remarked on how much she was enjoying reading one of Stephen Buhner's books about plants. He writes about how native healers in different cultures learn about the herbs they use medicinally. They say the plants speak to them, some say the plants even have specific songs that tell something about their character.

I wondered if I could tune in to the plants in the dark, so I walked a little more slowly, with curiosity, my head tilted a bit to see what I could hear. I was blown away by what I experienced. Every plant I passed was singing its own song. Mind you, I heard no distinct words, no instructions for their uses. But their personalities were distinct. Some were lively, some greedy, some dispirited (that was the English ivy).

I've felt the energy of trees before (I wrote an essay for my newsletter on tree hugging) but
this was more like walking through halos of energy, or clouds of lyrics sung in a foreign language. Walking in the dark past the plants and being aware of their presence was a miracle. I think maybe life is really like this all the time but we don't notice it.

Daffodils for St David

2008-03-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

Last year I wrote a long post all about daffodils on this day. This year I thought I'd share photographs I took of the daffodils blooming in my neighborhood.

The daffodils on the left are growing in the garden of a nearby apartment building. The daffodils below, usually the earliest to bloom in our neighborhood, are in front of Horizon, the used bookstore on 15th.

I also went in and bought some cool gardening books during their 50% off sale. I got a copy of a hardcover book called called A Paradise out of a Common Field: The Pleasures and Plenty of the Victorian Garden by Joan Morgan and Allison Richards. Looks like it will be good for my Victorian historical novels as well as my garden research. Also a book with beautiful flower arrangements called Country Flower Style by Jane Newdick. Jane recommends displaying daffodils in bunches or with twigs. She says that they cause other flowers to die more quickly (I wonder why?).

I also got an amazing book called Lilies of the Hearth: The Historical Relationship Between Women and Plants by Jennifer Bennet. It covers, among other things, the way medieval women used plants in their stillrooms, plants and convents, the way botany became a pleasing area of study for 19th century women, and ends with biographies of some my plant heroines like Maud Grieve and Rachel Carson.

My rule about buying new books is that I have to take some off the shelf and give them away when I put more on. But I can't resist buying more books about plants and I'm not willing to give up any of my old ones.

The Red of Spring

2008-02-29T22:42:00.000-08:00

Red has always been the color of spring to me, particularly March.

In Bulgaria, on March 1st, people tie red and white tassels called Martenitzas around the wrists of loved ones, also cars, house doors, trees, and young animals. These tassels are protection amulets that are worn until the first stork returns, signaling the beginning of spring.

In Eastern European countries, scarlet eggs were symbols of resurrection and were placed on or buried in the graves of the family dead. A Romanian tale says that eggs are dyed red to represent the blood of Christ. But the Chinese used to exchange scarlet eggs at their Spring Festival in 900 BCE, so it is more likely the red color is the symbol of life.

The month of March is named after the Roman god, Mars, also the name of the Red Planet. Before he was the god of war, Mars was the god of fertility and vegetation. And the new growth of spring is often red.

In the days when I drove up to Clear Lake once a week to visit my mentor and friend, Helen Faris, I always loved that time during the year when the woods on either side of the highway took on a rosy flush, an almost imperceptible halo of color, slowly replaced in the weeks that followed with green.

In my neighborhood the change is a little less obvious since the trees aren't assembled en masse. I often stop to gawk at individual trees and shrubs on my walk to work, convinced they've changed but unable to say exactly how. The first inklings of spring are invisible yet apparent.

As spring rolls on and the leaves unfurl, the shift to spring becomes visible. The twigs of trees flush red at the tips. Right now, the leaves unfurling on the rose bushes are as red as the roses will be later. The new leaves of the hebe (to the left) are dark red, almost violet.

And, of course, who can miss the magic of the ubiquitous photinia, a popular shrub all over Seattle because of this--it's one trick--the bright red of the new leaves which slowly deepen to a darker, rubbery green.

Thanks to a letter posted at my favorite phenology site, Journey North, I now understand why. Anthocyanins. Those pigments that are so good for you, which are found in the skins of grapes and blueberries, are present in the cells of plants, creating the red color which acts as a sort of sunscreen protecting the plant from too much sunlight. As the plant develops, it is able to absorb the sunlight and convert it to chlorophyll, the green pigment, which overshadows the red., which won't be seen again until fall when the leaves of trees die and stop producing chlorophyll and the anthocyanins flame out in their fall colors.

The Journey North web site suggested an experiment which I carried out. I poured some purple grape juice into three cups, filled with bleach, water and white vinegar respectively. The purple color of the grape juice completely disappeared in the bleach, while it intensified in color in the vinegar and became diluted in the water. Don't know what that's supposed to prove but it was fun.

How to Identify a Black Locust Tree in Winter

2008-02-23T21:26:00.000-08:00

I spent the day getting signed up with the Budburst Project. I'm going to be reporting on nine plants that grow on my block. My instructions are to report the following markers: budburst (also known as first leaf, when at least three leaf buds have unfolded), full leaf (95% of leaf buds are unfolded), first flower (when you can see the stamens of the flower), full flower (when at least 50% of the flowers are open), end flower (when at least 95% of the flowers have dried up) and seed or fruit dispersal (when seeds or fruits start dropping naturally).

I chose the following plants from a long of possibilities.
American linden, common dandelion, common yarrow, forsythia, lilac, California poppy, purple passion flower, field mustard and white clover.
All can be found on my block except for the linden which is kitty corner from the northwest corner of my block.

I wanted to add a black locust tree to my list, since black locusts have always been magical trees for me. My mascot tree on the UW campus, the one I always hug (furtively) before and after my classes, is a black locust. But I wasn't sure if the locust tree on my block was a honey locust or a black locust.

Luckily I have Jacobson's Trees of Seattle, a wonderful reference guide which not only describes each tree but also provides addresses and directions so one can find specimens of each tree in residential neighborhoods and parks. (If your town doesn't have such a reference guide, you should create one. It's marvelous.)

Jacobson gives a nice breakdown of the differences between the two trees. Black locusts are likely to be older, grow wild and have extensive root suckers, while honey locusts have usually been planted, are younger and don't put forth suckers. You can see in this photograph of mine, how prolifically black locusts put forth suckers. This was was one of two trees in my neighborhood that were cut down to put up some condominiums. The two trees were damaged in a fierce windstorm and all the branches removed from the top of this one. In the few months it had vigorously re-asserted itself. Unfortunately, both trees are gone now so I couldn't compare them to the tree on my block

According to Jacobson, a black locust has showy white flowers while a honey locust has small greenish flowers; a black locust has 8 to 14 inch leaves with 9-25 leaflets while a honey locust has smaller leaves and up to 36 leaflets. Since there are neither flowers or leaves right now, I wouldn't be able to use these indicators until spring. Right now the tree is covered with lot of golden, bean-like seed pods. In a honey locust these should be 20" long and scarce, in a black locust, 2 to 5 ' long and abundant. My tree has abundant seed pods which made me think it's a black locust.

Then I found the lovely photograph above on Flickr and looked at the photograph of a honey locust on Wikipedia (did I say how much I love the Internet?). Now I'm sure my tree is a black locust. So I'm going to go add it to my observation list.

I also learned from Wikipedia (this time the article on black locusts) that the black locust is a major honey plant (bees love the fragrant flowers), it produces a wonderful hard wood used for fencing, railroad ties and firewood), it helps fix nitrogen in the soil (it's a member of the bean family and the seed pods do resemble bean pods) and it was named after the tree that supposedly fed St. John the Baptist in the desert, though, being native to America, it was not that tree. Jacobson says that black locusts have a beneficial influence on plants around them (unlike Black Walnuts which have a baneful influence). He writes: "Grass under locust trees is remarkably dark, green and lush." No wonder hugging my mascot tree has always inspired feelings of good will in me.

Reference:
Jacobson, Arthur Lee, Trees of Seattle, Sasquatch 1989

first Robin of the season

2008-02-23T00:11:00.000-08:00

On Monday, February 18, when I was heading to the flower store to order some flowers for my Mom's birthday (which is February 19--Happy Birthday, Mom!), I noticed a bird sitting on a telephone wire above the street in front of my apartment building. He (sex uncertain?) was making a lot of noise--I'm not sure I could call all of it singing, though most of it was quite lyrical. I went running back into the apartment and asked my daughter to come out and look at the bird since she's the one with some birding experience but neither of us could tell for sure what it was. I was hoping it was a robin (I've been looking for one for weeks) but when I listened to the robin calls posted at Journey North, one of my favorite phenology sites, they didn't match.

On Friday, February 22, when I dropped off my (way overdue) books at the library, I noticed big bird with a rather fluffy orange-red chest in a tree alongside the library. I prowled around the tree for quite a while, looking up, trying to decide if it was a robin. It looked a bit odd, as if it's orange-red breast was split in two and I always think of robins as having smooth red breasts. But, thanks to Journey North's video, I realized I was seeing a robin preening. He must have felt quite safe up there in that tree as this is not an activity a robin would engage in if he (again I'm not sure of gender but apparently male robins show up first) was feeling unsafe.

I went to Journey North to see if I could figure out if my robin was a male or a female. Probably a male, as the males arrive first. They listed the following markers for Robin phenology: first male seen, first wave (a group of robins seen together), first earthworms, first robin singing (male robins mark their territory with song), first female (they come later after the male has established his turf), first male battle, nest building, incubation of eggs, young hatch, young fledge, young take wing, new nest (or next batch).

I doubt that my singer on the telephone wire was a robin since no one else in my area has reported hearing any robins sing. But it was great to look at the robin map and see the first two robin sightings in Seattle were reported by Beth, who's a School of the Seasons subscriber.

I also found a great article on the etymology of the scientific name for the American robin: Turdus migratorius. No it's not what you think. Turdus is Latin for thrush and the author explains its relationship to the word Sturdy, which originally meant "trashed" or "hammered" because of the way thrushes act after they feast on fermented berries in fall. The French have an expression which means "drunk as a thrush."

Chickadees for Valentines

2008-02-15T01:01:00.001-08:00

Ted Andrews in his book on animals writes about a folk belief that the first bird you see on Valentine's Day will predict who you will marry. If you see a blackbird, you'll marry a minister; a dove, a good-hearted man; a goldfinch, a rich man; a sparrow, a happy man; a crossbill, an arugmentative man; a robin, a sailor; a bluebird, a happy man; a hawk, a soldier; an owl, a man who will die soon. If you see a woodpecker, you will never marry. This sounds like 19th century British folklore to me, though he doesn't give the source.

The first birds I saw this Valentine's day were chickadees, a whole flock of them in the holly bush outside my apartment building. I'm not sure what it means. Perhaps it means that I will find my flock, the group where I feel like I belong. That would be wonderful since I usually feel like an outsider around groups.

While searching on the Internet for some possible folkloric meaning of chickadees, I found this wonderful site which features a chickadee dictionary. (It also features Signs of Spring: tulips are up all over the country and the first robin has been sighted in many places. I haven't seen one yet here in Seattle, although I saw the first robin on February 9 in 2005.) I like knowing that chickadees have a call they use when they're separated from their flock which means "I'm here! I'm here! I'm here!"

Bird Chirping

2008-02-12T00:50:00.000-08:00

I woke up two days ago to a strange sound. At first, I thought it was just the radiator, which usually makes fizzing and hissing and cranking and burbling noises. (I do note the first coming on of the radiator in my old (1905) apartment building. Apparently it is not turned on by a human hand but related to some complicated measuring of temperature, which makes it a true phenological sign. It first came on September 19 last year; it would be harder to measure when it goes off, since one is never quite certain, until some time has passed what was the last day it was on.)

But no, this sound was not the radiator. It took me a while before I recognized it: a bird chirping. Sweet and low, quiet but cheerful. Have no idea what kind of bird it was but I realized that I haven't heard that sound for quite a while. Spring is here!

Snowdrops for Spring

2008-02-07T00:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture I took last spring on February 4 of snowdrops growing just down the block from my apartment building on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

This Sunday, February 3rd, when I was walking back from the library with my new books, I passed the same clump of snowdrops and they looked just like this.

I notice that at the phenological website for the UK, no one has yet reported any snowdrops in bloom. I suspect that's because the technical definition of "in bloom" is that one can see the stamens of the flowers, and these are still tightly closed. I like them almost better like this. They look like little white lanterns.

Signs of Spring in Seattle

2008-01-13T02:06:00.001-08:00

I found this cherry tree blooming in my Capitol Hill neighborhood on December 9th. There are certain cherry trees which always bloom around this time of year in Seattle. I'm not sure why.

On December 20, the day before Winter Solstice, I found this forsythia in bloom. It was on the east side of a brick building. These plants that are right next to buildings which radiate the heat of the sun often bloom before anything else. Still it was surprising to see this sunny promise of spring so early in the year.

My Favorite Books Read in 2007

2008-01-13T01:36:00.000-08:00

I'm in the middle of the review process I go through every year, closing the door on the old year and dreaming of what I want in the new year. As part of this process, I go through my journals for the past year and make notes of important ideas, accomplishments, interactions, insights, dreams and the books I read. Since I read about 2 books a week, the latter is quite a list In fact, last year I read 142 books according to my list (I know there are some I didn't write down).

Unfortunately there were as many books last year that I stopped reading as that I finished. My list is peppered with comments like Ugh! and Ew! I don't know if this comes with increasing age (and thus increasing discrimination--I don't want to waste my time) or if the quality of published books has really declined. I suspect both are true. Everyone in my writing group had similar complaints about the difficult of finding good books to read last year.

Nancy Pearl, our famous Seattle librarian who wrote the book, Book Lust, has an age-related rule for how many pages one should read before deciding whether to finish the book: Take the number 100 and subtract your age. That's how many pages you must read before making your decision. Thus if you are 99, you only have to read 1 page. If 50, 50 pages. If 20, 80 pages. I like this rule. There are just far too many good books to read and not enough time to read them all.

Speaking of good books, here is my list for 2007:

Novels

Dark Angels, by Karleen Koen, an old-fashioned and complicated historical novel that really plunges you into the world of restoration England under Charles II. As L. P. Hartley wrote: “the Past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”And it is. In this novel, people don't just dress in costume, they act from a completely different set of beliefs and operate in a different context than we do. The characters are fascinating, especially the feisty, scheming heroine; the details are rich, sensual and historically accurate. I read Koen's Through a Glass Darkly many years ago and loved it, so I went back and reread that as well as her second book. I think this is the best of the three.

Ruby in her Navel by Barry Unsworth is a marvelous historical novel about Sicily in the twelfth century. It interested me because one of my favorite historical novels of all time, Great Maria by Cecilia Holland, also takes place at this time period and focuses on the Normans in Italy. Whereas Holland's novel focuses on the brigand-like life of the Norman barons in the mountains, this novel is set in the sophisticated and cosmopolitan city of Palermo where the Norman King Roger, rules over a kingdom of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Latins and Greeks. The narrator is a bureaucrat. Despite the fact that he's in charge of providing entertainment for the King, he thinks like a bureaucrat, very observant of details and costs and office politics (some reviewers at Amazon thought he was boring). In the end the office politics bring him down, betrayal comes from unexpected places and he has to free himself from his own prejudices to survive.

Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley is equally complicated. Think of what Dickens would have written if he had tackled the world of horse-racing. The writing is superb. Finely crafted yet translucent. We're introduced to a panoramic cast of characters and the action ranges across the United States. The point of view shifts marvelously, we even enjoy learning how horses think about life. I have to admit I found it hard to keep everyone straight and yet I thoroughly loved this book. I’m told it’s like Moo which I have not yet read.

Song of the Crow by Layne Maheu

[this review comes from my August newsletter at School of the Seasons]

Layne was one of the students in my blogging class. His publishers wanted him to start a blog to promote this book which features a crow’s eye view of the Flood. Even though I’m a huge fan of crows, it sounded like a weird premise, that is, until I started reading it. What a delightful and magical book. I’m hooked on the plot, savoring the delicious language (crows have a very earthy appreciation for life) and thoroughly enjoying the experience of life as a crow. It’s one of those books which I’m forcing myself to read slowly because I don’t want it to end. Those of you who are also crow fans will appreciate the bibliography at the back and the crow epigraphs at the start of each chapter.

Non-Fiction

Wild by Jay Griffiths

[this review comes from my Sept newsletter at School of the Seasons

I met Jay Griffiths at the first Take Back Your Time Day Conference in Chicago in 2005. She was an incantatory presence, reading from her book A Sideways Look at Time. Like a bard of old, she wove a spell of magic and enchantment with her words, exhorting us to open up to the juicy possibilities of time.

Last year she released her new book, Wild: An Elemental Journey, one she’s been working on for seven years and she’s packed in seven years of insights and adventures, research and reflections. Jay knows the magic of words. She knows their raw meanings and loves to play around with them. She uses them to dazzle and delight. She follows them down serpentine paths that lead to surprising places. Though she is always pondering meaning, her work is never dry; she is always grounded in the sensuous and the sensual, even the bawdy and the erotic.

I’ve been reading this book slowly ever since I bought a copy when Jay was here in Seattle in February to read at Elliott Bay Books. It’s the kind of book, you can savor, dip into here and there, use as an oracle. The structure is based on five elements: earth, ice, water, fire and air, and corresponding landscapes Jay visited: the jungles of the Amazon, the Arctic, the South Seas, the outback of Australia, and the mountains of Papua New Guinea. In each place, she connects with the indigenous people, the plants, the animals, setting aside Western assumptions and exploring what it is like to live in these wild places. You can read it as a poem. You can read it as philosophy. You can read it as a grand action/adventure story. I don’t think you can read it without being challenged and changed.

Jay was just given an award by Orion magazine for best book of 2007. For an excerpt from Wild go to the Orion site.

Flower Confidential By Amy Stewart

Stewart writes in a much more journalistic style. Her language is clear and her story is compelling. I couldn’t put it down even though all I was doing was following Stewart on her world-wide tour, exploring the flower business, from the greenhouses where roses are grown in Ecuador, to the giant flower market in Amsterdam, and many place in between. Along the way she interviews growers, workers, florists, horticulturalists and explains some new trends in flowers, including the push towards more organic flowers. One thing you learn is that the flower growing business (for the most part) treats flowers like products: they are altered for maximum size and long life, dipped in fungicide, dyed different colors. Stewart also shares some startling statistics: Americans buy most of their flowers in grocery stores. We also spend significantly less per year on flowers than Europeans: about $25.90 average a year compared to $70 in Norway and $100 in Switzerland. If you’re depressed after reading this book, you might want to read Heirloom Flowers by Tovah Martin which talks about the efforts of gardeners and nursery owners to preserve the incredible variety of local and old flowers.

Memoir

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

I’m not alone in loving this book. It tops many best-selling lists. I especially appreciate the casual, conversational tone of the narrator and the way she infuses spirituality into her life.

A Strong West Wind by Gail Campbell

Gail Campbell grew up in Texas in the Fifties and became estranged from her parents, especially her authoritarian and conservative father, during the tumultuous decades of the Sixties. In sophisticated and supple language, with an instinct for honesty and directness, Gail Campbell writes an extraordinary memoir about this alienation and how she was able to reconcile with both the severe landscape of her childhood and her father. I was amazed that someone who had previously written only book reviews could produce a first book so beautifully crafted. It reads like it was written by a poet.

East Wind Melts Ice by Liza Dalby

[this review comes from my July newsletter at School of the Seasons]

I originally got this book from the library because it sounded like the author was trying to achieve much the same thing I was trying to do in my blog. I totally fell in love with it and have now ordered a copy of my own. This is not only a well written book but a well published book. It feels good to hold and it’s beautiful to look at.

Taking the Chinese almanac with its division of the year into 72 five-day segments, each with a poetic title, like East Wind Melts Ice or Rice Ripens, as her structure, Liza Dalby writes lovely poetic essays on the changes the seasons bring in Japan, China and her garden in Berkeley, California. An anthropologist by training, Dalby has a deep knowledge of Japanese culture as a result of studying in Japan for years (she has also written about kimonos and her training as a geisha as well as a novel based n the life of Lady Murasaki). Her essays are rich with haikus, folklore, etymological snippets, small personal disclosures, plant recommendations, even recipes. Where else would you learn about the colors of the robes worn by noble women of the eleventh century (Pink Maples wore a top kimono of bright pink, over robes of gold, pale yellow, aquamarine, rose and pale pink). Or that the original Japanese word for the color orange: daidai-iro (daidai color), comes from a citrus fruit like a Seville orange (now the English loanword orenji is more common).

Dog Years by Mark Doty

I read this during the Midwinter holidays and it was magical read. The language is gorgeous as might be expected from Mark Doty, a marvelous poet. He writes intelligently, even philosophically about a sentimental subject—the love of dogs—and yet never slides into sentiment or cliché. I didn’t cry while reading about the deaths of his two dogs (though they died in ways surprisingly similar to my dog Chester) but I feel like crying now every time I see the dogs (Mark’s dogs) on the cover of the book, because I have come to love them as well and know what their loss means. Yet overall this is not a sad book, but an uplifting one.

What I noticed after compiling this list is that it seems 2007 was the year of books about animals. Dog Years. Crow Stories. Horse Heaven. I also read a wonderful YA novel called Strays by Ron Koertge about a young boy in foster care who spends most of his time talking to animals and The Tao of Equus by Linda Kohanov, an amazing book about new ways of working with horses, including using them to assist in the therapy and healing of traumatized kids and abused women. Kohanov manages to weave all of this together with dreamwork and shamanism and feminist history.

I have another whole list of books I read and loved this year about plants. If I find the time in the next few days, I might post that.

Stones and a Spa for Winter

2007-12-29T00:43:00.000-08:00

I've just come back from looking at the proofs of my French Republican calendar (you can order it from me at my website store ) and I'm thrilled by its beauty. I had a lot of fun creating the calendar grids and embellishing them with colors and fonts. Plus the photographs taken by my friend, Christine Valters Paintner, are incredible.

One of the things I love about the calendar are the seasonal items associated with each day of the year. Usually these are plants, trees, vegetables and fruits, but in Nivose (the month which covers December/January) the items are mostly all minerals, and I was wondering how I was going to honor these items. Then my friend, Elizabeth, suggested a trip to the Korean spa in Lynnwood for the day after Christmas and lo and behold, they have various mineral rooms as part of their offerings.

Hanging out in hot water is one of my very favorite things, and doing that in a luxurious atmosphere, where I could dip in and out of various bubbling pools, and alternate that with visits to a steam room and a sauna was a perfect indulgence for the day after Christmas. The Korean spa also has a cafe, a lounge, body scrubs, massages, pedicures and manicures and other delights I didn't sample.

But we did try the various rooms: a sand room, a charcoal room and a meditation room lined with elvan stone (which is apparently harvested from the bottom of the ocean surrounding Korea). Each of these minerals is supposed to have a different effect on the body and it was interesting to compare the results. I loved the sand room; it reminded me of happy afternoons spent on Southern California beaches and it made me feel sparkly and alive. Neither of us liked the charcoal room much; it felt rather dull and lifeless to me. Elizabeth loved the meditation room and so did the other women who were in it (they had all fallen asleep as far as I could tell). It amplified my (dehydration?) headache and actually gave me a backache which persisted for a day afterwards. I wonder if it magnifies physical symptoms that are already present.

I like knowing that I can go back to the spa when I want to experience certain minerals that will show up in the December calendar. We went on the day associated with lava. I think a hot tub and a stone room are as close as I will get to lava on December 26.

Christmas this year was the day of the dog, and I finished reading Mark Doty's beautiful and brilliant memoir about his life with dogs, Dog Years, on that day. It's exquisite. Sad, profound, uplifting. It will without doubt make my top ten list for the year. It might even be the best book I've read all year.

The photograph above was taken by Mylene Bressan and can be found at
http://18229.openphoto.net

Shopping and Solstice

2007-12-22T21:52:00.000-08:00

For years I've been rather critical of the emphasis on shopping at this time of the year. This disdain serves me well as I hate shopping. I put it on a par with going to the dentist, something one must do but let's get it over with as quickly as possible. Armed with a list of what I want, choosing a time when the store is least crowded, I'll dart in, grab what I want, pay for it and leave. (I used to feel guilty because I felt I had deprived my daughter of the pleasure of happy mother-daughter shopping expeditions, browsing lazily through choices, wandering the mall, but it turns out she hates shopping as much as I do. It's her boyfriend who's the leisurely shopper.)

So it came as a total surprise on the Winter Solstice when I usually observe a day of quiet and rest that I longed to go shopping. I must admit this wasn't a desire to go shopping in general: I wanted to go to Lush. Now if you know Lush, you'll understand (especially if I add that I had just run out of their violet scented soap) and if you don't know Lush, you should check out their website and you'll understand. Still it didn't seem like a good idea to go downtown to the mall and the Lush store three shopping days before Christmas. Especially when I was committed to spending a quiet day with no electricity, no telephone, nothing but silence and candlelight.

But in the quiet of my apartment, with the rain pattering on the windows, just me and the dog who was sleeping, I started thinking maybe shopping at this time of year is a natural activity not an artificial one. Our natural response to darkness is to light lights, whether they're candles on the Advent wreath or the bright lights of the nearest store. And our natural response to loneliness is to gather with others, whether that's at a feast on Christmas eve or in a shopping mall. It also occurred to me that bright lights and parties are a great way to push away the thoughts of death and feelings of loneliness that imbue the season.

So what did I do?I went to Lush. And it was sweet. I had an eggnog latte while waiting for the bus. When we got downtown we passed a group of young black men singing doowop songs a cappella outside one of the big department stores. One of them stopped to help an old lady into her cab. People were holding open the doors to the mall so shoppers laden with bags could pass through. There was a carousel and and a long line of kids bundled in jackets waiting to ride on it. There was another long line at the hot dog stand and inside the Sees candy store. Lush was crowded but no lines. I got the last bit of violet soap (and a few other presents) and jumped back on the bus.

When I got home I went on my solitary, quiet walk through the wintery woods and stood for a long time in the holly grove. And that was just as wonderful.

Slow Cookie Epiphany

2007-12-18T21:09:00.000-08:00

Every year I have the intention of making 13 different types of cookies for my solstice party, a tradition adapted from the Southern European custom of serving 13 desserts on Christmas Eve. I've never made it to 13; my highest number is 7.

This year, since my goal for my Solstice party was to be as relaxed as possible, I decided to make just my favorite cookies, one batch a night during the week leading up to the party. I also halved the cookie recipes which helped enormously--no more juggling multiple baking trays and drying racks.

But by Wednesday night, I was cranky. I had to throw away two batches of cookies, one because the sour cream had gone bad, the other because I accidently put in too much baking soda. I started to get a little panicked about getting all the cookeis done. I was in a hurry and impatient. The dough kept sticking to the rolling pin. The cookies fell apart when pried from the cookie cutters or else they stuck to the bread board. The kitchen was hot. It was late. I wanted to go to bed.

That's when I had my cookie epiphany. I realized that when you're just checking off items on your to-do list, even if they're things as fundamentally satisfying as making cookies or writing a novel, they become chores.

I decided to slow down and enjoy the process. Who cares if I didn't make a lot of cookies? I could always buy cookies at the store. And as soon as I slowed down, that magical thing happens which always happens in slow time. Time just flew by while I was savoring the silky feel of the flour, the pliancy of the dough, the scent of the spices. The cookies started behaving, rolling out perfectly on the board, filling the baking sheets, emerging from the oven golden and fragrant.

Over the next few nights, I revelled in the cookie-making process. I was alone and sometimes wondered if it would be more fun if I were sharing the experience, but I also liked the silence which allowed me give the process my full attention. Cookie making became a meditation.

In the end, I only made three of my favorite cookies (Kourabiedes, Advent pretzels and Zimsterne). Since I never got around to making my signature lavender shortbread cookies, I did buy some excellent ginger shortbread cookies at the store, but you know what? No one at the party ate any of the store-bought cookies. Apparently they prefer slow time cookies.

Advent Wreath made by an urban forager

2007-12-13T00:57:00.000-08:00

Here's my Advent wreath for this year. I made it using a new technique. For years I've been gathering materials for my wreath during walks around my neighborhood, but, I must confess that I often carried a scissors with me, to help me harvest the evergreen boughs I craved.

For the past two years, I've used a new method which I call urban foraging. I go to the nearby 100-year-old park and look for downed branches under the trees. Often a big December windstorm helps me out by shaking branches loose from the trees. But this year the weather had been fairly calm before my excursion. I still found more than enough material to make my wreath. I found yew branches (with a few berries still on them) and other branches with tiny pine cones. I got offerings from Sequoias, cedars, pines and cypresses (but no holly--holly branches just don't break off like other evergreens).

One problem with this method is that the materials are pretty dry and the Advent wreath doesn't last as long as it would if I harvested living plant materials. But it's worth it for the lack of guilt, both in raiding the park (illegal) and cutting branches off plants (I always ask for permission, and usually bring a gift, but am never really convinced that they say yes).

I use the colors of the four directions for my candles: yellow for east, red for south, blue for west, and green for north, and put the greens I associate with each direction close to those candles. So I loved the blue-tinged evergreens I found to go around my blue candle and the yew branches went by the north candle (yew is often planted on the north side of churches because of its association with death and rebirth) and the cypress branches which had new yellow buds on the tips went near the eastern candle.

You can still see the white of the foam base showing through in places so I still need to pick up a few more branches. I look forward to seeing what evergreens appear along my path.

Colors of Christmas (or should I say Yule?)

2007-12-12T00:59:00.000-08:00

I walked to the park on Sunday to gather my greens for my Advent wreath (yes, I know I'm several weeks behind) and I was stopped in my tracks several times by the brilliant combination of red and green. No wonder these are the colors of the season.

It got me started thinking about how certain color combinations signify certain holidays. You can't really wear red and green without evoking Christmas. The same with orange and black which always screams Halloween.

Feverfew Cures Migraines

2007-12-04T00:59:00.001-08:00

In the depths of grey November, there are still a few flowers blooming on my block and one of them is the cheerful, omnipresent feverfew. I don't know why I haven't written about it before since it's one of the most important plants in my life: it cured me of my migraines.

Ever since I was 8 years old (when my mother took me to the doctor to see if I needed glasses because of my bad headaches--I did need glasses but that wasn't what was causing my headaches), I've suffered from migraines. I've never been as completely incapacitated like some of my friends. I've never ended up in the emergency room with a migraine. I rarely threw up. But I did during the worst migraine I ever had. It came on during a European trip with my aunt, right after a rather rocky crossing of the English Channel on a ferry. (My worst migraines almost all happened while I was traveling.) I spent the next 24 hours in a hotel room off the main square in Bruges. Every time the bells in the clock tower across the square rang the hour, I woke up, threw up and crawled back into bed.

At that point I had tried everything for my migraines. Prescription medication didn't work. Dried feverfew capsules didn't work. Sometimes two aspirins taken right at the first sign of a headache was enough to ward it off. Often it wasn't. I don't remember who first told me about feverfew, but it worked the first time. I've been using it for years and I've had very few migraines and those have been mild. I think part of the reason it works is that I now know relief is available. And I want to let everyone who suffers from migraines know that too.

It's so simple. It grows everywhere (in the Northwest, anyway). It's free. And it absolutely works. I pick three leaves (medium sized leaves, usually tender new leaves) off the nearest plant I can find whenever I get that suspicious feeling that maybe the headache I've feeling is actually a migraine. You want a plant that hasn't been sprayed so I do choose my plant carefully. I eat one leaf and it usually tastes bitter. I wait about five minutes and eat another. And after another five minutes the third. By that time, the leaf actually tastes more sweet than bitter, which indicates to me that it's working.

The biggest difficulty I have is convincing anyone to try it. The longer you've suffered from the agony of migraines, the more things you've tried (unsuccessfully), and the less likely you are to believe relief is possible. And I admit that belief is part of the magic for me. I believe it works and so it does. (Although I must say it has also helped many friends who I've convinced to try it). Yet when I tell people about it, I can see that look in their eyes that says "It may have cured your migraines but it will never cure mine").

If you suffer from migraines, I urge you to give it a try. Here's what you do. Find a plant. They grow wild in the Northwest. I always have one growing in my garden. I keep my eye on the plants in my neighborhood. The plant in the top photo shows the cheerful white daisy-like flowers, besides a feverfew that has no flowers but the characteristic leafy foliage. It smells rather tangy. It tastes bitter. This photograph shows another feverfew growing in the parkway. They can grow to about three feet tall.

November Gold

2007-11-13T00:48:00.000-08:00

We had a big windstorm today and these leaves ended up in the corner of the rectangular formal pond in the park across from where I work. They reminded me of these lines from a poem called "Autumn" by Sara Teasdale:

The leaves fall patiently
Nothing remembers or grieves
The river takes to the sea
The yellow drift of leaves.

Pumpkin Art

2007-11-07T23:50:00.000-08:00

I've spent years studying and writing about holidays and I thought I knew a lot about the reasons people celebrate: to experience the timelessness of ritual, the warmth of community and the magic of aligning with the natural world . But as I walked around my neighborhood, the day after Halloween, I recognized a new and important ingredient: the opportunity to practice creativity.
Almost every porch had a pumpkin and every pumpkin was unique. The artists had obviously put a great deal of thought into their pumpkins and no one was afraid to display their artwork.

When I was young, my siblings and I had a contest every Halloween to see who could draw the best pumpkin face. Because we wanted to conserve the actual pumpkins, we drew our designs on little cut out paper pumpkins, then colored them in with crayons to consider the effect. The design which was most popular was then carved into the actual pumpkin (no doubt by my father wielding one of the kitchen knives). The paper pumpkins were taped to the wall above my brother's bed where they stayed for at least a month; every year the old pumpkins came out like Christmas ornaments and new ones were added. It was one of those peculiar family traditions which evolved out of a few factors (the eternal competition between me and my sister, my brother's birthday a few days before Halloween, and the orange paint on his bedroom wall).

Here are a few of my favorite pumpkins from my neighborhood. I like the simplicity of this presentation, the white pumpkins and they way their shape is echoed by the croquet balls.

Another unique approach or what to do with a big, lumpy, flattish pumpkin.

These pumpkins win my prize for most unique use of materials. Note the one where the face is carved in the top of the pumpkin using the stem for a nose.

This display highlights the importance of having your own pumpkin. Here's a triplex with three doors to three units and each person apparently carved their own pumpkin.

A Leaf With All the Colors of Autumn In It

2007-10-10T23:38:00.001-07:00

Found on the street and scanned on my scanner.

Well, maybe it needs a bit more of brown.

I like the decay and the brokenness.

Our State Grass: Bluebunch Wheatgrass

2007-10-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

You can pretty much bet that when I say I’m done with a subject (as I said in my last post that I was done with the topic of wild grasses), I will immediately find something fascinating to say about that topic.

Yesterday my daughter was reading a copy of the State of Washington Voter’s Pamphlet which has all the Washington symbols (bird, song, gem, boat, etc.) printed on the cover and I learned that we have a state grass: bluebunch wheatgrass.

Curious to know more about it, I went looking and found a website that features a good description and a photograph of bluebunch wheatgrass. The website features activities relating to bluebunch wheatgrass, including growing it in your garden. I realized that I’ve seen a lot of bluebunch wheatgrass while driving around eastern Washington.

Many years ago I wrote a story for my daughter called “Chester Chases Swallows in the Sagebrush,” about the time we let our dog out of the car on a deserted part of I-90 (the highway between Spokane and Seattle) and he took off running. I think the correct title for the story should probably be “Chester Chases Swallows in the Bluebunch Wheatgrass.”

Speaking of state anythings, did you realize that many states have state dances? Most of them that have a state dance, list “square dance” as their dance. Washington does. Boring. Some are obvious. Hawaii has the Hula. Louisiana the Second Line. Virginia has the Virginia Reel. Both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania list the Polka. Some are not. Ohio and the Charleston? And some are interesting. New York has Lindy Hop. California has West Coast Swing. The Carolinas claim the Shag. And Texas claims the Texas Two-Step (although I might also nominate the Texas Push). The most amazing thing is that I know most of these dances (except the Hula).
I found all of these on Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_dances
which also has a list of the state grasses, in case you want to find the grass for your state:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_grasses

Photograph: Loren St. John @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

Last Word in Grass

2007-10-06T23:01:00.001-07:00

The other day I was browsing a website I love for its vintage patterns, and I found a photograph of a dress made out of grass. The designer is Robin Barcus, an artist who is currently doing a project which involves creating a dress for each of the fifties states.
This very beautiful grass dress is called Willow Creek Dress in Wyoming, 2006
It perfectly combines two topics I have been exploring in the last month: wild grasses and flower art.

Meanwhile, I found another blogger, the pseudonymously named Henry Thoreau, who has committed himself to a year-long project of identifying wild grasses in his hometown, San Francisco. He is doing exactly what I hoped to be doing and with much more skill and success. We share similar appreciations for the way wild grass prevails in the city landscape and our annoyance at the way modern landscapers plant ornamental grasses in straight rows of clumps.

Henry Thoreau also mentions another blog on wild grasses which is not quite as personal as his writing, but it does provide some awesome photographs and information about wild grasses.

Here are some books that Henry recommended for identifying wild grasses:
Lauren Brown's Grasses (best for the East Coast)
Manual of Grasses for North America, Utah State University Press
In Full View: Three Ways of Seeing California Plants by Glenn Keator and Linda Yamane, with illustrations by Ann Lewis

Because Henry is doing such a good job of finding, identifying and writing about wild grasses, I’ve decided to end my grass identification project (at least for this year, and with the option to take it up again if inspired by Henry’s posts) and focus on other topics. If you are fascinated by wild grasses, I suggest subscribing to Henry’s blog (I will be!).
http://thoreaugrass.blogspot.com/

Crabgrass in my Garden

2007-09-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

I love volunteers in the garden, those mystery plants that sprig up and only gradually reveal their character. I’ve got a magnificent mullein that was a volunteer—it always makes visitors gasp—and it’s now the matriarch of a thriving colony of mulleins, most of which I will root out (mainly because they take up so much room).

The woman who gardened in my plot before me planted a plant with red-trumpet-like flowers to attract humming birds. It is more invasive than mint or bamboo. It can't be killed, it sneaks around barriers of metal, and no matter how many times I ruthlessly rip it out, I never win the battle. We are in a struggle.

The newest volunteer in my garden is also in this unwelcome category. In the spring, I noticed a grass that was poking through the branches of my big lavender plant. It gradually spread through my garden in waves, slyly insinuating itself all through the herb and iris bed, then creeping around the back and entering the bed with the dog roses, strawberries, arugula and basil (it hasn’t reached the back bed yet whichis where I am doing battle with the red trumpet flower plant). This plant spreads underground, the white roots creeping through the earth before poking up green shoots in some new location. When I try to rip it up, I sometimes yank out the root, back to its last outpost, but I never seem to be able to track it back to its source. Trying to disentangle it from my small lavender bush, I had to dig up the plant, so inexorably were their roots entwined, and, as a result, the lavender died.

The mystery volunteer is a grass so I finally decided to make it the latest subject in my grass identification project. I plucked a fine mature specimen: tall stem, gay green ribbons of leaves and a seedhead with four horizontal grainy blades like a little heliocopter. Can you guess what it was?

Yes, crabgrass. Unremarkable, insidious, unloved, unquenchable crabgrass. When I googled crabgrass to learn about its name, the suggested combinations were “crabgrass control,” “crabgrass removal,” “crabgrass prevention,” “crabgrass herbicide,” “crabgrass treatment,” “crabgrass prevention,” and “crabgrass kill.” It seems no one wants it around.

My new favorite Northwest plant identification guide (known affectionately as Pojar’s) says that it is digitaria sanguinalis (an interesting name suggesting it has something to do with fingers and blood but I haven’t found an explanation for this name). The explanation for its common name, crabgrass, is that it creeps sideways like a crab, or the nodes look like crabs. The little whirligig at the top of the plant is the inflorescence—it flowers from August to September in our area.

The Plants for the Future website says that the seeds can be ground up into flour and the leaves used to make paper. So nice to know there is a positive use for this plant. I was curious to know how to make paper from grass so I did a little snooping around the internet. Apparently it can be quite a difficult process, involving caustic chemicals. The instructions from Akua at the Art Farm, seemed the simplest.

Resources:
Pojar, Jim and Andy MacKinnon, Revised Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, B C Ministry of Fores and Lone Pine Publishing, 2004

Scanned Flower Art?

2007-09-10T22:15:00.000-07:00

I thought I was done with the topic of flower art--see below for posts on flower dogs and flower carpets—when I found an article at Human Flower Project about scanning flowers.

Truly amazing pieces of work, although skeptics ask: Is it Art? Is flower arranging art? Are photographs of flowers art? What about X-ray photographs of art?

Several years ago I saw an amazing show of x-ray photographs of flowers at a local jewelry store. Truly art. Unfortunately I can't prove it because I can't find the artist. Whiel searching for her, I did find x-ray photographs of flowers from Hong Pham, Judith McMillan, and Steven N Meyers.
Some of these I think qualify as art--there is artistry involved in the design. Others strike me as simply unique and intimate ways of looking at flowers more closely.

Birthday Flowers

2007-09-06T23:45:00.000-07:00

I've been championing the idea of a birthday flower, that is a flower that blossoms on your birthday. And here's the most recent picture of mine: the naked lady or autumn crocus.

These grow in the parkway a few blocks from my house. I love how they mysteriously appear and just as mysteriously disappear. I wanted to pick one but I know they are poisonous so I didn't (although I think maybe only the bulb is poisonous).

Linnaeus named the autumn crocus, colchicum, after Colchis, the island on which the poisoner and sorceress Medea lived. It has even more wonderful common names. I know it as a naked lady. It's a naked maiden in Germany (because it has no leaves, just a bare flower stalk). In France, they are called dog-killers and bare-bottoms. In England, Wilfrid Blunt (who gives this delightful list) mentions the names: upstarts, daggers, kite’s legs, naked boys and naked nannies. While the Arabs call them, he says, the lamps of the ghoul. That's my favorite. Do they look like the lamps of the ghoul? Maybe a little.

Foxtail Barley

2007-09-03T23:18:00.000-07:00

I’m making progress on my grass identification project now that I’ve got a copy of Pojar’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. For instance, this grass that grows in the parkways all over my neighborhood. I think of it as foxtail. And according to Pojar’s, it’s common name is foxtail barley. The Latin name is hordeum jubatum.

Pojar's says it grows along roadsides which explains why I find it in the parkway. Once I brought my specimen inside, the little spikelets starting breaking off. They look like little satellites with their long tails (those are called awns) and their sharp points. Each bristle has barbs that point backwards and these can become lodged and work their way into the nose, mouth, ears, eyes or even intestines of animals that eat them. So right now I’m going to scoop them all up and throw them in the trash, before Pepe, the Chihuahua, finds them.

According to Plants for a Future, it is possible to make flour out of them by grinding up the seeds. The roasted seeds can also be used to make a substitute for coffee. But it’s hardly worth the effort.

On the other hand, when I went looking for references on the Internet to foxtail barley, I found a related plant in the University of Washington herbarium: hordeum pusillum. Now I’m not really sure what I found. Since they are related, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Wikipedia’s article on barley mentions that barley was a staple cereal in ancient Egypt where it was used to make both bread and beer. The English word beer comes from barley. It is appropriate that I am featuring it in the month of September, for the initiates at the Eleusinian Mysteries, held in honor of Demeter (known as Barley-mother) during the full moon of September, drank a ritual drink (kykeon) made of barley and herbs.

Barley-water (made by steeping pearl barley in hot water) is a popular drink in England where it is often the first food offered to babies. The Victorian Martha Stewart, Mrs. Beeton, includes a recipe for her barley-water in her section on cooking for invalids. Pearl barley is washed in cold water, then boiled in 2 quarts of boiling water. Once the liquid is reduced to half, the barley is strained out. It can be flavored with lemon peel, either afterwards or while boiling.

References:

Beeton, Isabella, Beeton's Book of Household Management, first published London 1861, facsimile Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1977

Poajr, Jim & Andy MacKinnon, Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Lone Pine Publishing 1994

A Hairy Bentgrass?

2007-09-01T23:39:00.001-07:00

I wrote in my newsletter about how I wanted to learn to identify grasses--I always like to collect a bouquet of all the wild grasses growing on my block on Assumption (August 15) in honor of Our Lady of the Grain. I went out and found a magnificent speciment in the vacant lot across the street--almost three feet high with some fine seed heads at the top--but then couldn't identify it.

The websites I found through a Google search were not helpful. They wanted details I couldn't provide. To my surprise (and dismay), we don't seem to have a single ruler in the house that measures centimeters. Also I can't see the fine detail of the grass--I don't have a hands len--though I am using the magnifying glass that came with my Oxford English Dicitonary.

Luckily one of my readers recommended Pojar's Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. It's amazing. The grass section begins with picture keys which break down the Grass family (Poaeceae) into Tribes: the Barley Tribe, the Millet tribe, etc. To distinguish between the 200 varieties of grasses that grow in my region, it helps to learn technical terms like panicle and glume and lemma. Grasses have their own vocabulary, quite distinct from flowers.

At first I thought my wild grass was a fescue but now I'm leaning towards Bentgrass, possibly Hair Bentgrass (Agrostis scabra). According to Pojar's, the name scabra means rough or scrufy, and refers to the way the grass feels. That's my main clue. When you run your fingertips along the stem and even the panicle branches of my specimen, it feels like sandpaper. I feel no certainty about this identification so if you have a better idea let me know.

Pojar, Jim and Andy MacKinnon, Revised Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Lone Pine Publishing 2004

Autumn Crocus Revisited

2007-09-01T22:34:00.001-07:00

Here they are two days later.

I'll check again on my birthday.

In Time for my Birthday

2007-08-29T23:58:00.000-07:00

Last year, I wrote about how the amaryllis belladoonna is the flower my mother associates with my upcoming birthday (September 4) because it blooms around that date in Southern California where I was born (Burbank, to be exact). And about how the autumn crocus blooms on my birthday here in Seattle.

And here it is, a week before my birthday. I love how ghostly the flowers look as they emerge from the ground, almost more like mushrooms than flowers in their fleshiness which is probably why they are also known as naked ladies, just like the amaryllis belladonna.

Stone Roses in Bloom

2007-08-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I was walking down Twelfth Street past the thrift store operated by an AIDs charity and noticed that the stone roses clustered on the rock wall were sprouting long, phallic protuberances. They seemed odd, emerging so emphatically from the center of those rose-like petals and even more strange when a few days later the top of the fleshy stalk burst forth in red flowers. It gave me a whole new perspective on male orgasm.

But of course, all flowers are in the business of procreation. Just this week, the plants on my balcony went through this same stirring process. I inherited these plants from a gardener at my p-patch who kept them in a stone vase. Very appropriate for their taste (they like to grow on stone) and texture.

The actual botanical name of the plant is sempervivum tectorum. I call them stone roses. Most people call them hens and chicks, a name which baffles me for they don’t at all resemble hens and chicks. Paghat, my authority on many gardening questions, says it is because the central rosette is surrounded by many small rosettes like a hen and her checks (another common name is Cat and Kittens). Other names for these plants include houseleek (they were grown on (slate?) roofs), Thor’s Eye and Jove’s Beard (especially when they are in their phallic mode). According to Paghat, they were called “Welcome Husband” in Dorset where they were grown near the front door so they would be the first thing the husband saw upon coming home from the fields, thus rejuvenating his own member with their exuberant uplift.
http://www.paghat.com/sempervivumalpha.html mpervivumalpha.html

They are also said to provide protection from lightning when planted on the roof. That might be because they are under the patronage of the lightning and thunder God, because their leaves (like those of most succulents contain a lot of water, thus preventing a fire) or because the lightning would surely strike the upraised stalk rather than the roof itself.

I went back to snap a few pictures of the plants on Twelfth Street and found the store had closed and the houseleeks had moved on to a new phase: the stalks and flowers had dried, after an enthusiastic proliferation. Apparently, after the bloom, the central rosette is often exhausted and dies back, but if it has produced many chicks, they will live on.

Dogs Made out of Flowers

2007-08-17T16:28:00.001-07:00

If you type “flower art” into a search engine, these are the pictures you get (if you don’t count pictures and cards made with dried flowers pasted on paper, which I don’t).

I think they’re pretty cute (the white ones bear a certain resemblance to my daughter's chihuahua) but I haven’t been able to find out where these came from or how to create them (are those pompom mums or dahlias?). Somehow I suspect they’re from Japan. If you have a clue, let me know.

Flower Art

2007-08-14T23:35:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I spotted the most amazing work of art on my way to my local coffee shop. Someone had created elaborate designs with flowers on the sidewalk outside Horizon Books, the used bookstore in my neighborhood. There were several central medallions, joined by a trail of petals, and a garland on the sidewalk around the bicycle rack.

I was curious about the purpose of the art. A friend suggested it might have something to do with the rumored closure of the bookstore (and if so could flowers ward off such a fate?) but the bookstore isn't closing. A woman apparently thought it was a memorial to the store's cat and rushed inside, only to discover the cat is very much alive. I asked Nick, who works at the bookstore, and he says it was a performance art project. Which reminded me of a homework assignment I once gave the students in an Artists Way class I was teaching.

Inspired by the art of Andy Goldsworthy, I asked the students to create a transitory work of art in nature. For all of us, it opened up new ways of thinking about art: as mystery (what is it? What does it mean?), as temporary (How long will it last?), as collaborative (created with free materials, provided by the earth). It was also for many of the students, the first time they had ever displayed their work to an unknown audience. One woman who constructed a sculpture of tree branches in a public park had an audience as she worked. Others imagined people coming upon their work and wondering about it.

I loved the piece I created. I used a piece of chalk to outline the shadow cast by a young tree on the sidewalk. As the sun shifted overhead, the shadow changed and I enjoyed watching the way the actual shadow overlaid the chalk traces of the former shadow. I also eagerly waited for the next day to see if the shadow would fill in the same chalk outlines, which lasted a surprisingly long time (several days) before they disappeared.

The flower art outside the bookstore also evoked the fa bulous flower carpets created as part of Corpus Christi processions, primarily in Italy and Spain. An incredible amount of effort, design and labor goes into creating these gorgeous carpets, which are then walked upon by the procession carrying the sacred Host (the Body of Christ), so that all that is left behind is a blurry vision of what once was. And yet I find this design as beautiful as the original, and perhaps more evocative of the nature of flowers, processions and life.

Eight Random Things

2007-08-09T15:50:00.000-07:00

I was tagged by Lunaea and asked to share eight random things about me. Here they are.

1. My ancestress was a Welsh princess (or rather she was the daughter of the last king of South Wales, Rhys ap Tudor, but princess sounds so much better). Her name was Nesta and she married Gerald, a baron who was in charge of the castle the Normans had planted on her ancestral estate, Pembroke Their children were called the Fitzgeralds and later invaded Ireland but that’s another story. Nesta was sometimes called the "Helen of Wales." She was kidnapped by her cousin who was in love with her; she was also the mistress of Henry I who fought to get her back. I spent over 10 years researching Welsh history and made three trips to Wales because I wanted to write a historical novel based on her life and then found out someone else had already done so. The picture on the left represents my rather romantic picture of her and was created when I was participating in the Ancestor Deck.

2. The summer after I graduated from high school was the first summer the Hollywood Bowl hired female ushers. My sister and I were among the handful of girls working with about one hundred guys. Summer nights. Under the stars. Classical music playing. And lots of cute boys. It was a heavenly job, although I never enjoyed classical music (and still don't). My favorite concert featured the Jackson Five in 1970. Our supervisors were worried about crowd control and hired extra security but it was the best behaved audiencecrowd we ever had at the Bowl that summer and the show was fantastic. Michael was 12.

3. My most famous college professor was Angela Davis. I signed up for her class in Existentialism at UCLA during spring quarter 1970. The student strike began after the second class and so we never saw her again (we didn’t go to class and neither did she). I got an A in that class.

4. The worst grades I ever got in my life: a C in Handwriting in third grade. And a C in Balkan Dance at UCLA. I'm still miffed about both of them. Although the C in Handwriting was well deserved. I can't read my own writing.

5. I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen. It featured my best friend, my cousin, and me as orphans who escaped from a cruel orphanage. My second novel written the following year was called Pioneer Polly: it was a historical novel which focused on the life of a young girl with her parents and siblings in a mining town in the Sierra Nevada at the turn of the century. I sold my third novel, a Victorian historical romance called St. John’s Wood, as part of a three-book contract to Doubleday when I was 25. It was followed by Mayfair, Chelsea and Grover Square (published by Jove) under the name Nancy Fitzgerald. I now write female PI novels (three so far) but none have been published.

6. I’ve worked for two museums. I was a Membership Clerk for the Los Angeles County Art Museum and. And an Accounts Payable clerk for the Seattle Art Museum. Neither one of the jobs was very exciting (although my co-workers were great) but I loved wandering through the galleries when the museum was closed.

7. I’ve been a member of two collectives: The Brideswell Collective publishing the women’s spirituality The Beltane Papers in the early 1990s and the Red and Black Collective, running a feminist bookstore, Red & Black Books in Seattle, in the late 1990s. I've also lived in a collective house. Between 1985 and 1987, I lived at Prag House, along with 11 adults and five kids. Prag House just celebrated its 35th anniversary.

8. My not-so-secret ambitions include: taking a perfume class, writing a book about the origins of early Italian martyrs, living in a cottage in Wales, and creating collages that use pictures from travel magazines and brochuresto create new imaginary landscapes.

And now I tag Cate.

Coffee Shop Sketches

2007-08-01T23:34:00.000-07:00

Because I'm most likely to be sitting with a pen in my hand in front of a blank page while at a coffee shop, my notebook is full of sketches that evoke my favorite coffee shops.

The sketch at the left, while not accurate (the table and chair are painfully out of proportion to the clock) still captures a bit of the European flavor of Pettirosso, which makes the world's best veggie BLT sandwiches.

Here's a cup of coffee and a lamp from Victrola, my home away from home:

And finally a bouquet of fading flowers at Cafe Argento, just around the corner from where I work.

This one started out as a spirit drawing but I looked at my page as I was sketching the stems in the vase. My pen gave out at the top of the floral arrangement but I thought that simply amplified the theme of fading so I didn't retrace the lines.

I like having these little reminders of my days tucked inside the pages of my notebook.

I Like Notebooks with Blank Pages

2007-07-31T23:58:00.000-07:00

This year, because I wanted to practice drawing, I bought notebooks with blank pages, which has changed the way I write.

All of my pages, even those with no pictures on them, have more of a design quality. I'm much more likely to put things in columns, use white space, outline and embellish.

For instance, here's a scan of the notes I took in my last blog class:

Spirit Drawing

2007-07-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

Draw bamboos for ten years,
Become a bamboo,
Then forget all about bamboos when you are drawing
Susuki

I first learned about contour drawing in my high school art class. Betty Edwards also describes it in her seminal book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. In blind contour drawing, you put your pen on the page but keep your eyes on the object you are drawing while you trace around its outlines without looking down at the page. It produces mysteriously satisfying results. I used it throughout high school and college classes to capture the likenesses of my teachers, other students in my classes, my shoes and my own hand drawing. Sometimes you get a undecipherable tangle of squiggles. But other times you end up with a lovely sketch that really captures the essence of the person.

Spirit drawing simply takes contour drawing to another level. Jude Siegel in A Pacific Northwest Nature Sketchbook says it's as if “what the eyes sees then travels through the heart (the emotional heart, which can recognize the spirit or essence of an object—something the mind cannot do), then continues down the arm and fingers, and finally through the pen or other tool and is then recorded onto the paper.”

Before beginning to draw, spend time simply taking in the subject as much as possible. Then take your pen (Siegel recommends a pen as it will force you to commit), choose a spot on the subject, and focus your eyes and attention there. Begin drawing, traveling along the lines of the object. If you are drawing a flower, Siegel suggests pretending you are a tiny bug traversing the edges of a petal. Or you can imagine tracing the edges of the object with your fingertip. After tracing the outline, you can being to trace some of the interior edges.

Siegel uses spirit drawing as a warm-up before a more studied attempt and I’ve used it this way. I have to admit that the first sketches are often more lively than the sketches I labor over. As the name implies, they capture more of the spirit of the plant.

For instance, here’s an attempt to analyze the way a plantain plant looks as it bursts into blossom.

And here is a spirit drawing I did of the same plant as it withered and shrunk. I think it has more life (though it’s clearly ebbing away).

Another example of a spirit drawing, this time of a peony, followed by a sketch of the same flower in which I actually looked at what I was doing. Both are appealing and certainly the second one is technically more accurate but there’s a certain peoniness about the spirit drawing.

Although I’ve been practicing spirit drawing on flowers, I’ve also started using it to capture glimpses of my everyday life. I have to admit these are my favorites. For instance, this picture of a dog I saw at Pettirosso one afternoon. It might be hard for you to tell what this is supposed to represent, but for me it vividly recalls that moment when the dog woke up to look at a customer.

If you've never tried contour drawing, try it and let me know what you think.

Can I Draw?

2007-07-24T23:06:00.000-07:00

The answer to the question is: I wish.

During my high school years, while hanging out with the other nerdy girls (although we wouldn't have called ourselves that), I secretly longed to be one of the Artists. Those were the cool girls: they were beautiful and talented and oh so sophisticated.

Although I did make friends with a few of the arty girls, and even hung out with them for a few school lunches, I couldn’t fool our art teacher, Miss Gabrielle. I loved all the projects I did for her: a papier mache dog, a mosaic (of a peasant cottage), a tapestry (of a Spanish city). But she knew I wasn’t an artist. She acknowledged my art work with a nod of her head, while heaping praise upon her pets. And, I think she must have had a good aesthetic sense, because all of her favorite students, have gone on to become working artists. And that is amazing, considering how many people make a living as artists. Lisa Leone is an art director. Mary Heebner is a fine artist (also the subject of an entry in Wikipedia. I think this is my new goal!). Jane Bauman teaches art.

Despite Miss Gabrielle’s discouragement, I’ve always dreamed in design. It used to be that when I closed my eyes I would see designs for fabrics, for china, for wrapping paper, flashing behind my eyelids. These went away as I got older. Where did they go? Perhaps they atrophied out of misuse. But even now when I look at the plates from old herbals, the ones I like the most are the ones in which plants are “reduced to decoration” or “stylized beyond recognition” in the words of Wilfrid Blunt in his book The Illustrated Herbal.

William Morris is one of my heroes and my current wall calendar features his amazing floral patterns. Perhaps I was his wife, Janey Morris, in a former life and my visions of designs were simply etched into my brain because of all those hours spent embroidering them into curtains.

It’s with excitement and a great deal of trepidation that I began drawing again, using the simple technique of contour drawing I first learned from Miss Gabrielle to try to capture the flowers I’m studying. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. And even share a few drawings. If I get my courage up.

Fashions in Landscaping

2007-07-18T01:06:00.000-07:00

At the start of the year, our landlord decided to redo the landscaping of our apartment building. In January, he instructed his henchman (that would be the handy man) to cut down the beautiful cherry tree that grew beside the front porch. I tried to rally my neighbors to save it but I was too late. A few months later, all the other plants followed: the tulips and daffodils my upstairs neighbors had planted and the woodruff and iris I planted in the beds next to the building, a strip of useless grass (useless because no one could ever get to it because of the juniper border) and finally the prickly, hideous junipers that lined the sidewalk. I have to say we were all happy to see them go.

But I am not happy with the new landscaping. There are two Italian cypresses, each planted about halfway between the front door and the ends of the building. There are also two Japanese maples close to the porch, one on each side. And then a scattering of rhododendrons, hebes, sweet box and mountain laurel, all drowning in a sea of brown mulch. It’s the kind of soulless landscaping you could find on any block in Seattle.

Just as flowers and architectural styles go in and out of fashion, so does landscaping. In my neighborhood—which has a mix of housing including brick apartment buildings from the turn of the century, apartments from the Fifties and Sixties that look more like motels, a few houses and some brand-new condos—the landscaping is equally diverse. Yet you can always tell which properties are rentals and thus which yards are maintained by gardening services. They tend to have a generic feel.

The popularity of junipers I suspect dates from the Fifties and Sixties, at least that’s when my dad planted them all around our house in Southern California. I believe the mountain laurels. viburnums and rhododendrons were the choice of the Seventies in Seattle. This is probably the same era responsible for the ornamental St. John’s Wort which shows up everywhere as a ground cover. Then there’s the more modern landscaping that uses drought-tolerant, indigenous plants like salal, covering the area with low ground covers. It’s easy to maintain and environmentally sound but not particularly interesting.

I prefer the yards on my block where I can see an individual aesthetic at play. I still call one house the rose lady’s house, though she sold it years ago. Her front yard was completely covered with rose bushes and she kept it free of other plants, except for a few stray violas. The current owner has kept most of the roses but let some other flowers spring up and it looks a bit softer. There’s an apartment building around the corner where someone went crazy with herbs and I can find rue and wormwood, plus the more usual rosemary and lavender. Another householder really loves the little ground-covers. He has all the sedums plus some sea thrift and other tiny plants surrounded by neat white gravel and stepping stones of concrete blocks. I suspect the inside of his house would display the same tendency towards fussy order and clean lines.

A few months ago I visited my brother in Ventura. He lives in a house built in the Fifties, probably around the same time as our childhood home (it has a similar look and feel). The landscaping seems to date from that era as well: the front lawn, the bottlebrush in the front yard, the bougainvillea spilling over the back fence, the citrus tree with its fragrant flowers. It was great to be back in the landscape of my childhood.