My upper body can’t shovel another crumb of dirt. I tried to clean up the rest of the mulch today and my left shoulder pretty much said, No, No more of that. I put the pitchfork and wheelbarrow away.
I’m curious what the gardens look like of people who actually know what they’re doing. There’s a horticulture garden on the Virginia Tech campus, just a couple miles away from our house. I have a Fitbit again, and after four days of it gushing how great I am with all the gardening exercise, I couldn’t stand to have a day without it buzzing to tell me I’ve broken yet another record. So I grabbed my camera and went for a walk.
The cherries and Bradford pears are blooming, so there are soft pink and white petals everywhere. The light was a little flat today and I didn’t get great photos of them along the way to the horticulture garden. But once I arrived, everything I wanted to photograph was close to the ground and didn’t require shooting the sky, and all the flowers are adorable, and I felt like I was in a fairy forest.
Hellebore I think? Also known as Lenten Rose?I don’t know what these purple flowers are, but I love themGrape hyacinthAgain with the purple flowers, I love themI don’t know what these star flowers are either but they’re super cuteSee the robin on the right? Robins are funny. The hop hop hop along.Cherry blossoms (I think? I always think the pink ones are cherries, but I don’t really know anything)These trees with cascades of pink petals are everywhere on campus, and they are gorgeousLittle white violet by the duck pondHellebore budTiny grape hyacinth treesPurple flowers on a leafy floorCherry blossomsForget me nots? Cherry blossoms and Canada geeseCute blue flowers
My coworker Jeremey DuVall wrote recently about adventuring. Specifically, he wrote about taking more microadventures: little adventures taken at little cost, that take you out of your normal routine, and can be done in your own back yard or your own small town.
I took his advice today. For my birthday, my son gave me a book on butterfly gardening with native plants, and now I’ve been bitten hard by the gardening bug. With a naked lawn — a blank slate — I decided I wanted to go find some ideas. So in the early morning, before the tailgaters were out for the big game tomorrow, I packed a water bottle, my real camera, and a Luna bar; slathered on sunscreen and donned a baseball cap; strapped on my day-pack; and I walked across town, across the Virginia Tech campus, to the University’s horticulture garden.
And boy did I find ideas. Now I want a butterfly garden, an herb garden, a woodland garden, a meadow garden, a waterfall, a pond with lily pads, and much, much more.
I would also like to identify the plant in the images below. Its fragrance drew me across the entire garden, and I want one. If you know what this is, please let me know!
When I sit at my tan desk, in our beige room, with dull buff carpet beneath my chair, I often have a hard time coming up with color words. I google “synonyms for green,” rifle through crayon boxes, and scroll through images of paint chips and artists’ color names, but I am not usually inspired by what I find.
Then today, in an effort to wring the last few drops of fun out of summer before the kids go back to school, we rode our bikes over to the Virginia Tech horticulture garden, where they love to play in the sprinklers and find flowers in the colors of the rainbow (“Here’s a red one!”, “I found orange berries!”). I had folded up a blog post draft and stuck it, along with a pen, in my back pocket so that I could work on it in the quiet of the gardens while the kids played, and as I scribbled and edited, walking the mulched paths, filling the page with ink, I saw a pale green hydrangea.
“Hey guys, here’s green,” I said.
“Oh, flowers!” our daughter said when she saw them. “We don’t usually find green flowers, we just use leaves for green.”
I studied the hydrangea petals, trying to determine their color, and thought, celadon. Is that what color celadon is?
Yes.
I looked around and saw banana leaves, fir trees, weeping willows, and thought, these are each a different green – dark and glossy for banana leaves, shadowy blue-green for firs, a soft yellow-green for willow. Each plant species is its own hue. And so I started writing. I’m not usually a write-on-my-hand type of person, but my paper was full, and I needed these words.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“I’m writing down all the greens I see,” and wrote sage. “What greens do y’all see?”
They shrugged, as if that were a dumb question, and then our daughter said, “Shamrock.” Yeah, she’s good.
“Inch worm,” said our son.
They ran off to play in the sprinkler, and I sat and filled my hand. A few minutes later they came back dripping, and our daughter said, “We saw some algae in the pond that looked like troll skin.”
“Troll skin! That’s perfect,” I said, and wrote it down.
“Troll skin isn’t a color,” said our son.
“Sure it is – it’s silvery blue-green and warty.”
“Yeah,” said our daughter, “that’s what color the algae was – it was even bubbly like warts.”
On the bike ride home, the kids shouted out more words – “pea,” “yellow-green,” and “olive” – and when I saw my friend Dee, she asked, “Did you get peridot?” Now, thanks to their assistance, and to inspiration from the gardens, when I am sitting in our neutral living room, trying to conjure color words, I have an entire page in my lexicon dedicated to the color green:
Butterfly Mind 