Snow Day

We woke up yesterday morning to a winter wonderland of snow. We finally got our big snowstorm, closing down the schools,  federal government,  libraries, canceling flights. It was an icy snow, and the plows didn't come round our neighborhood until last night. People were outside all day, though, kids playing, people shoveling, using the snowblowers. We decided that dogs have the most fun in the snow--so fun to watch them running free and playing in the snow!  We had a real crowd in late afternoon, when a car got stuck in front of our house, and the whole neighborhood turned up to help. There was another few inches of snow in the evening, and today all is calm.

Shoveling Snow, by Kirsten Dierking

If day after day I was caught inside

this muffle and hush

I would notice how birches

move with a lovely hum of spirit,

how falling snow is a privacy

warm as the space for sleeping,

how radiant snow is a dream

like leaving behind the body

and rising into that luminous place

where sometimes you meet

the people you've lost. How

silver branches scrawl their names

in tangled script against the white.

How the curves and cheekbones

of all my loved ones appear

in the polished marble of drifts.

Think Spring!

 It's so cold here today and surprise, surprise, we may get some more snow tomorrow.  I do wish we'd get one more good snowstorm, with enough snow to really enjoy it. I have been keeping busy inside these days, looking through old garden magazines for new ideas, painting the trim all around my house (a never-ending job), and the biggest job of all, trying to organize my photos-- moving last year's photos to an external hard drive and generally organizing my photographic life. It's not easy! But as I was looking through last year's photos, I was struck by the beauty of this yellow rose. I love that tight center. Love that creamy color.  I know spring will come, but today let's look at some pretty creamy white fleurs. And then tomorrow, we'll think about snow.

Books On My Nightstand

TransAtlantic, by Colum McCann.  A novel about crossings: of the Atlantic, of national borders, and emotional boundaries. Recommended by a friend.

Under the Wide and Starry Sky, by Nancy Horan.  I loved Horan's first book, Loving Frank, about the wife of Frank Lloyd Wright.  Her second book explores the life of Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson. Heard her on NPR and I was hooked.

The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Looking forward to another great novel by Lahiri.

We Are Water, by Wally Lamb. I loved his first two novels back in the day--She's Come Undone, and I Know This Much is True. Am reading this one now.

Still Life, by Louise Penny. The first in the series that introduces Inspector Armand Gamache from Quebec. I have heard good things about this series and I want to read them!

The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. My brother send me this book because he thought I would like it. About flowers? And I haven't read it?

Second Bloom for Amaryllis

So the first bloom of my new amaryllis 'Tres Chic' was pretty great. It bloomed for a few weeks right after Christmas,  and then I cut that stem down. This is a second stem which was just starting to show when I cut the first stem down,  and it is now blooming, with eight flowers! I think there were seven blooms on the first stem, so 15 flowers for one bulb is amazing. All that energy stored up inside one bulb!  This amaryllis is definitely a winner, as it has been pretty spectacular this year.

And this is my old amaryllis,  'Apple Blossom,' which I have had for several years and I have always been able to make it rebloom. So far all I have are leaves this year. We'll see.  It looks healthy, so I'm not giving up.

And over the weekend I planted the last of my paperwhites...they'll be blooming in a week or so. It's so nice to have some cheerful flowers for these wintery days.

Thinking of Peonies

It's hard to believe yesterday was sunny and sixty degrees, because it's cold and rainy and miserable  here this morning, and the weather people are talking about more storms later this week. Such a crazy winter.  But yesterday was feeling like spring, and so I went off to Green Springs Gardens in the afternoon for one of their Winter Lecture Series--this one was about peonies, one of my favorite fleurs.  The speaker was Kathleen Gagan, the owner of Peony's Envy, one of the largest peony farms in the US (located in New Jersey), and which grows over 500 cultivars of peonies.   She was an enthusiastic and engaging speaker and she talked about the four different kinds of peonies--woodland, herbaceous, tree, and intersectional (Itoh hybrids), their care, and cultivation. She made me want to grow more peonies, and especially try the newer intersectional varieties, which are a cross between the herbaceous and tree peonies.  And I never even knew there was a woodland peony. It is smaller, will grow in shade, and spreads like a  ground cover. Who knew?

I thought this was a great illustration that she showed of the four different kinds of peonies, and what to expect in terms of size, shape, etc.

She also talked about the history of peonies,  the colors, the flower shapes,  and how to use peonies in the landscape. I learned a lot, and was happy that I went. After the lecture I walked around the gardens, still wintery, but always something interesting to photograph.

And I really have to get some of this helleborus foetidus,  which were showing some buds and brightening up the gardens.

O Pioneers!

My book group read this Willa Cather book for our discussion last week, and while there were mixed reviews, most of us liked it. We had all really enjoyed reading My Antonia several years ago, and while we probably liked that better, there was much to appreciate in this book, especially Cather's gift for description, the love for the land,  and the strong woman character.  O Pioneers is the story of Swedish immigrants who settled in Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. Alexandra Bergson inherits her family's farm, and she spends her life making a prosperous and successful life on the prairie. I find it refreshing to read a book like this once in awhile...Cather's writing is spare and beautiful, and the story is simple, with a little bit of history, adventure, and romance. There were many passages in the book that I liked, but as a gardener, this one really resonated with me.

"Marie sat sewing or crocheting and tried to take a friendly interest in the game, but she was always thinking about the wide fields outside, where the snow was drifting over the fences; and about the orchards, where the snow was falling and packing, crust over crust. When she went out into the dark kitchen to fix her plants for the night, she used to stand by the window and look out at the white fields or watch the currents of snow whirling over the orchard. She seemed to feel the weight of all the snow that lay down there. The branches had become so hard that they wounded your hand if you but tried to break a twig. And yet, down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one's heart; and the spring would come again! Oh, it would come again!"

Sunday Drive

On Sunday Walt and I took a break from painting our bedroom and took a drive out into the Virginia countryside, stopping for lunch in Purcellville and then just driving around back roads, passing through the towns of Hillsboro, Waterford, Taylorstown, Stumptown, Lucketts. We saw lots of big open land, farms, and several wineries. And we used a map~no GPS~ sometimes I just like looking at a map and seeing where we are instead of listening to that annoying voice telling me where to turn. And what if you don't know where you are going?

I didn't take many photos, but I liked how this first photo turned out. Virginia sure is pretty country, even in the winter.

Winter Fleurs

~ I must have flowers, always, and always ~ Claude Monet

The Garden in Art

One of my favorite things to do in the winter is read garden books. Lately I've been looking through a beautiful book that I brought home from the library, The Garden in Art, by art historian Debra Mancoff. The book looks at artists from ancient Egypt to the present day and how they have depicted the garden throughout history.  There are more than 200 full color photographs of paintings in the book,  some familiar, with chapters on working gardens, public gardens, the garden throughout the seasons, the garden as metaphor, and artists' gardens.  I highly recommend for a cold, snowy afternoon on the sofa.  

Manna

Manna, by Joseph Stroud


Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,
a world becoming white, no more sounds,
no longer possible to find the heart of the day,
the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all
I wanted in life – so be it – whatever it is
that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever
blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am
grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,
palms up, I know it is impossible to hold
for long what we love of the world, but look
at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,
see how the snow drifts down, look how happy
I am.

The Calm Before the Storm

We are waiting for snow to begin, as we are supposed to get a big storm today--up to eight inches of snow. While there isn't a snowflake to be seen yet, the sky is gray and the temps are beginning to fall. All the schools are already closed as well as the federal government. I am supposed to work this afternoon and so far the library is open, but I hope that changes once the snow starts. We sure have had crazy weather this winter--yesterday it was in the 50s. I hadn't been out in the garden for weeks, so over the weekend I walked around and checked things out. Everything looks pretty bleak, with no leaves and not much green, but the hellebores are showing signs of life, teeny buds just starting to peek through the dirt.  Maybe I'll have pictures of a snow-covered garden tomorrow!

**Update** It's starting to snow!

To the New Year

BY W. S. MERWIN

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

The Goldfinch

I don't know where to start with this book.  When I finished it this week, all I could think was--wow. Maybe because there are so many average, so-so books out there that when we read one that is truly fine literature, it literally knocks us off our feet. And that is how I felt about this book. First of all, the language—wow. There were many instances where I went back and reread a paragraph because the words were just so beautiful and perfect—how can someone write like this I wonder? So many issues populate this book--art, beauty, truth, loss, drug culture, antiques and restoration, friendship,  mental illness, coincidence, loyalty, love-- but at its core it is a tale of traumatic loss-- a missing painting and a lost boy.

The painting that goes missing is a real painting, The Goldfinch, by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) and the painting is a major part of the entire story, as the action moves from New York City to Las Vegas, back to New York, and finally to Amsterdam.

"Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? ...You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time - four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone - it'll never strike anybody in the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but - a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you."

What a wonderful way to think about a piece of art, that thread that joins us all who appreciate it, now and forever. Coincidentally, the real Goldfinch is now on display at the Frick Collection in New York City as part of an exhibit of Dutch masterpieces, and the museum has reported record crowds because of this book.

I’m not going to summarize the story, other than to say it is the story of a young boy named Theo, and how one event alters the rest of his life. We meet wonderful and memorable characters–Boris, his Ukrainian/ Russian friend, Hobie, an antique restorer, literate and kind, his schemer/gambler father, and a young girl named Pippa, to whom Theo is forever connected. There is action, suspense, and the sense of place is so well done--you feel like you are walking with Theo through the streets of New York and Amsterdam, and the half-finished housing development in Las Vegas. You feel the comfort and charm of Hobie's dusty antique shop in the West Village.

I think The Goldfinch was probably the best book I read all year.  If I had to give it  any criticism, it is that is a bit too long. At 771 pages it requires a major commitment. But even though there were parts that could have been edited, every time I picked it up I was happy to realize there was still a lot left to read.

And this quote from the end, stays with me for sure.

"That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch."