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Garden memento mori. Probably a gift from the neighbor’s cats.
You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there. Not taken in, unshaken, that’s how you develop the heart. Ardently doing what should be done today, for — who knows? — tomorrow death. There is no bargaining with Mortality & his mighty horde. Whoever lives thus ardently, relentlessly both day & night, has truly had an auspicious day: so says the Peaceful Sage.
— “Bhaddekaratta Sutta: An Auspicious Day” (MN 131), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Edamame (fresh soybeans) and tomatoes. The edamame had been rubbed with kosher salt to remove (somewhat) the fuzz on the outside of the pods.
All my garden plantings have been experimental and freeform. As much as I would like to perspire through my kerchief while squinting knowingly at the sky, all I did in April was search for last frost dates for Zones 6b-7a, then push seeds in the ground and wish them well.
Although my first “crop” of tended-from-seed edamame only half filled a cereal bowl, the soybeans were of course absolutely delicious, buttery and nutty. Frozen edamame taste ok, but these took me back to Japan for the short time it took the two of us to devour them. Upcoming Crop Two will be eaten Japanese style, accompanying a frosty mug of beer.
Corn, perhaps a strange hybrid of “Sugar Pearl” and “Luscious.”
Mama’s trying not to love the tall pretty babies more than the stunted cobs. I planted Sugar Pearl and Luscious sweet corn, but I think the Luscious scrambled up first. Or the ears were a marriage of the two. A friend from the Midwest said I needed to wait a bit longer, but some of the cobs were opening at the silks and I had already lost one or two to bites from squirrels or some other Del Ray mammal (I have now seen an opossum, a rabbit, and a raccoon). The other week a storm had blown over some stalks. I righted them and tied the weak to the strong in a cat’s cradle of twine. All these challenges were making me suspect I had better take the corn that was ready now.
The corn was plump and medium sweet with a clean corn taste, which sounds obvious, but have you eaten picked-within-the-hour corn recently? Even farmers’ market corn seemed flaccid and old compared to this. In all, a “Fuck yeah!” kind of meal. Munching along, I thought about when I planted this corn 85 days ago, how I had watched it grow and watered it, that I had made the corn’s life force part of mine, and I started to feel a bit like a cannibal. Needless to say, I ate on.
The heat here yesterday in Alexandria was intense, you know, for May. After a day of doing chores with no particular urgency, at 10 p.m. I went outside into the warm night air to sit on my front steps and drink a glass of white wine. My street, facing rows of modest one-story homes, was completely quiet. I sat beneath my front porch light and all was still and calm.
Directly in front of me, across the driveway, was the front landscaping of my neighbor’s house, her azaleas, a butterfly bush, some catnip, rocks irregularly marking the edges of the planting bed. Just the other day my neighbor and I had stood in front of those mixed plantings discussing what she had planted herself and the plants that had accumulated over the years as different tenants and family members had passed through the 70-year-old house. She was pointing out the catnip and one of her cats appeared, as if to demonstrate the herb’s efficacy, and rolled erotically in the fresh stems and leaves.
So, last night when I noticed a slight shudder of the azaleas and a cat-sized animal emerged into the light, I assumed it was the fat Abyssinian. Instead, not five feet from me wobbled something large and non-domestic, first a white face with a long snout, then a body covered with grayish-brown fur, and, as it turned to make the rounds of the planting bed, a long, hairless tail. As Sei Shonagon would say, Holy shit!
Sipping wine on my steps, I only expect to encounter the banal semi-wild animals of Del Ray: squirrel and robin, perhaps the occasional toad. But this, no this thing was big and vaguely toothy (come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth), and I start ransacking my dull brain for every Discovery channel show I have ever watched, every biology class I have ever taken. I know what this is! I thought, but I couldn’t remember right away what it was called. No, this was something I had never seen in a zoo or on TV. Why? Because this was a Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana). It’s a cool looking animal to be sure, and it is our own American marsupial, but let’s face it: bottlenose dolphins and mountain gorillas give better documentary footage.
Meanwhile, the opossum slowly circled the outside of the planting bed, paused in front of my neighbor’s steps to investigate something, turned and came out again from behind the azaleas. This time it was lumbering towards me and, I presume, the insects that had congregated under my front porch light. I awkwardly gathered my wine glass and stood up, not really knowing what to do. I was thinking What’s the etiquette for opossum encounters? For a raccoon, I would move. But my movement startled the animal and it ran back under the azaleas. I waited, but Pogo didn’t come back out.
Inside the house I consulted my illustrated Encyclopedia of Mammals (yes, I consulted a book) to confirm the species and filled in the blank slate of my knowledge about opossums:
- The Virginia opossum is one of 63 species of American opossums (including North, Central, and South America). Early American settlers never encountered opossums north of Virginia and Ohio, but now the Virginia opossum’s range is as far north as the Great Lakes.
- Diet: fruit, insects, small vertebrates, carrion, and garbage. Not sure if they like white wine, but I did leave some on the driveway as I ran inside.
- Estimated range: 31 to 96 acres, so our local opossum works perhaps 10 to 20 streets of Del Ray.
- They can nest in a variety of locations, but hollow trees are common. I’m guessing the unfinished crawlspaces beneath our old houses work well too.
- The encyclopedia says, “Despite being hunted for food and pelts, the Virginia opossum thrives both on farms and in towns and even cities.” Well, yeah.
When leave the fig tree putteth out,
When calves and lambs for mothers cry,
When toads begin to hop about,
We know of truth that summer’s nigh.So after Pos (Easter) when hens do cluck,
When gawky goblins peep and feed,
And boys get fewer eggs to suck,
We know that Pinkster comes indeed.
—A Pinkster Ode, pamphlet from 1803, reproduced by the New York Folklore Quarterly, 1952.
Photo: Now just hanging on, my Pinkster (or Pinxster) Bloom azaleas, Rhododendron periclymenoides
The native plants in my garden are just slaying me. The pink pom poms are delightful, but with natives you get a American history lesson: Pinkster/Pinxster has nothing to do with the color pink. Pinkster is a Pentecost festival with Dutch colonial origins, that was celebrated by slaves in the late 18th century, and is continued today by historical societies near the Hudson River Valley. For example, there is a festival in Sleepy Hollow, New York on May 17th and in Milford, Pennsylvania on May 23rd. Apparantly, the flower of choice for the Pinkster celebrations was the this same azalea, but my Pinkster flowers here in Virginia won’t make it until Pentecost.
Photo: Amelanchier x grandiflora ‘Autumn Brilliance’ (Apple Serviceberry)
Warming earth, blue sky, and blossoms, but not those of cherry trees. The white blossoms perfume our garden path and remind us of dusky roses. The University of Florida Environmental Horticulture fact sheet says, “The main ornamental feature is the spectacular white flowers that are larger than those of other amelanchiers. The flowers are borne in early spring and are at first tinged with pink but later fade to white.”
