Talking Points

Outside chasing the rabbit

There's a certain quality to sunlight late on a near-autumn afternoon. It's like the light is being packed in a suitcase and taken away for a long time.

Using my "laser" scope with the bright red bead, I put a sharp lead pellet into his/her buttocks to hurry him/her along. He/she looked offended but quickly took "my point." I could shout after in French, "I eat your push-up sticks for dinner with a nice sauce!"

My garden has a Middle East peace plan

In the front bed, next to the walk ...

... where acid-loving plants and alkali-loving plants thrive in each others' arms. Here, beds of evergreen pachysandra intermarry with Mediterranean thyme.

Lesson learned? Conditions don't have to be perfect for a tough plant to succeed. Maybe that's all tough means: thriving in less-than-perfect.

So my garden proclaims to the world and all its spy-in-the-sky satellite surveillance: There's hope for Israelis and Palestinians yet.

Boots

Birch is the coconut palm of northern climes

Looks best when the trunk is bare.

I am not trying to hold on to life. End games. Don't care to leave anyone a widow. Yet. Lawn ornaments and hidden meanings. Ready to play bad chess with less-than-masters. Cuban Air market soars, driving down the price of fur and that scientifically-certified cold-weather remedy named a PINT of Guinness.

Hillary v. Bambi

I will explain.

I see a mocking smile face in the fawn dots. Ti'wch I reply: "...uck yew, Bambi!" You've heard of rotten eggs. But for the life of me have you SMELLED them? They are a key component in something called "Deer fence," an obnoxiously odorous spray. Applying it made me puke. Guaranteed to work.

Bucket of Blood

Some movie. Only I have the real thing on my front stoop. A deer repellent (so it's billed). The base is dried blood. Mix it with warm water in a pail. Makes a brown-red slurry. Whisk it until you get the lumps out. Spray.

It smells. Like the packaging a steak comes in. Deer, being veggie (theory goes), turn their rapacious mouths away in disgust. [Expletive imagined], I hope so. A doe and her two bambi's roam our property. They invade the perennial beds each night now.

The flowers are just starting their display. The leaves are tender. Buds bursting. The deer rip through this bounty like paper shredders. And the things they didn't eat last year, like sedum? This year they are. With salt and a little dressing.

And so I spray blood. The beds have a month to recover before the party.

Gardening in the rain

I think gardening in an unsteady rain might be my favorite kind of gardening. It's about all we have to choose from lately, anyway.

Today's rain started so light you could count the navy blue drops on my slate blue shirt for a long while, as I made the rounds, tending to one small remembered task after another. Trimming hair. Pulling the willing weeds.

The good weeds are the ones that give up the struggle without intrigue. They come out willingly, root, runner and all. Quitters actually win in this game. As long as I can easily prevent weeds from taking over, I'll leave some, the interesting ones, in the perennial beds.

Tough-rooted weeds, though, must be BANISHED from the garden UTTERLY and with NO chance of redemption. Same as the old British policy for crushing Scotland's rebels: Eradicate them, root and stock.

Light rain to steady rain, fine. It's the perfect time for a second feeding, too; to boost flower displays. I fling fertilizer granules from tall rocks I moved into position, that give me a downward angle into the foliage. Te rain will help wash the food in. I don't feel like sweating under rain gear, even though I've got a chest cold that feels like I have a vegetable brush where my lungs meet. I'll shift to dry clothes when I come in.

I am the destroyer of duckweed

I don't know if it's really called that. And I don't care enough to even look the correct name up. Classifying weeds by morphology: no interest. Understanding their rootage: vindictive interest.

Besides, every time I think "duckweed" I think "duck face," the poor woman denied at the altar in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Every weed has a weakness, I'm pretty sure. Duckweed's is this: it spreads by sending out hair-thin, wire-brown runners; easy to break. But if you're careful, you can move from one weed-head to the next by following the runners just as you'd follow a cord. Today's record was a runner one yard long, with a half dozen leafy extrusions budding along it.

If duckweed has an intelligence and a way of sharing information, I am the Destroyer. I know duckweed's secret. I have the tools and methods to exploit that secret and control (you can never eliminate) duckweed's party-crashing.

Duckweed is ugly, in a garden of pretty. It chokes bare ground that frames good, noble, intriguing, ensorcelling plants; with its polyester green, limp leaves. I'm tempted to try it in a salad, to see. It's the guest you despise and wish would leave cloning himself (never a her) a hundred times and dominating; a familiar sit-com script for the garden.

Every spring, same thing

I shoot tons lots what's a good word obsessive amounts of photos but they're digital so no gain no cost of our daffodils blooming. Almost all of those photos? What's the Canadian word? They pretty much "suck." Are tossed in the first cut. And even so, I CANNOT throw away my entire since 2007 bloated library of predictable, repetitive shots.

That yellow is a very interesting drug. Spinning gold from straw. Addictive. Addiction has a bad name; there are mild addictions too: daffodils.

Where there are mammals there are ticks

Full disclosure: I am a mammal. To ward off Lyme disease and its shocking neurological transgressions, you must guise your mammalian nature so ticks disdain you. Wear rubber boots. Wear long sleeves. Sweat like a woodland spring.