Today I cannot write, I cannot write today breezily about beauty today. Today of all days. More black people killed by the police, a police force undisciplined, a citizenry complicit, a president stirring the volatile pot. Today I cannot write because the world is in turmoil, there are protests and riots all over the country over the death of George Floyd, including in La Mesa, just down the road. This turmoil recalls earlier uprisings, for instance after the Rodney King murder in Los Angeles. So why today? Today, alas, is not special, it is just one day in the life of this country, one day in the ongoing saga of legitimized daily deadly racism. One more day in which I turn to the garden to avoid the larger world.

A friend, younger than I, asks me, Did you know Lesley, have you ever encountered such hatred, such political evil? I have, I grew up in Rhodesia. But I still cannot grasp this or face up to it fully. I ask another friend, older than I: Where have they come from all the Trumpistas? She was a red diaper baby and answers me with a certain air of fatigue: the U.S. has always been two countries, this is nothing new. What is new, I think, is that Trump has lifted the lid and allowed free expression to the racism and violent hatred of that other country. Other, that is, to protected white liberals like me. But nothing new today.

Just one more day in the history of the U.S. of A.

40 million out of work, nearly 100,000 dead from the coronavirus, the economy crashing, police killing black people, cities burning in protest.

Just another day.  

So I pull myself out of the morass of incapacitating despair, the oppressive sense of futility, grab the shears that have long blades, and lay into the Mexican sage. Its bloom is over, just a few stragglers popping purple. It’s energetic and exhausting work, but eventually the huge tuft is lopped low. 

and then, eventually, there will be new flowers. The white agrostemmas will hopefully reseed – they form a slow dancing partnership with the Mexican sage.

So this is why I garden. We live in dystopian times. I do not necessarily think there is hope, that things will get better in this country. But in the garden there is both the possibility of escaping and the simple fact of renewal. And writing? Who knows. To connect … that is an aspiration, and Tershia tells me, when we talk on the phone today, you write in order to find out what you think. But really who knows.

You garden and you cook things grown – knowingly or by chance – in the garden in order to be surprised. And because the seasons change. Sometimes those things, seasonal change and surprise, occur together. Like yesterday. Even though I had been peering at the cucumbers everyday I’d failed to see summer come barreling in – there were two kinds of ripe cucumber, two kinds of zucchinis, an orange tomato, apples, strawberries and shishito peppers (where were they hiding?).

From the garden to the plate, via the grill for some unfortunates.

The cucumber that looks as though it’s a pickling variety is actually the Row7 experimental, and after being grilled lightly was super tasty. The raw cucumber is green fingers, a small Persian variety. To eat super fresh cucumber, to bite into its crispness, well there is nothing like it, but it tasted simply of cucumber without the flavor of the experimental. The tomato is Flamme and the taste is heavenly. The grilled zucchini, cocozelle, loses its stripes when heated. Shishito – oh shishito we have been eating you frozen from last season and had forgotten how exquisite is the taste of fresh charred shishito tossed lightly in olive oil and salt. At the last minute I remembered basil, both sweet Italian and the zesty purple.

Luckily, earlier in the week I had made chocolate financiers (from a recipe given to me by Kristen Gallerneaux) though they are in the shape of small muffins. There was a little cream saved from the top of the bottle of Strauss milk I used to make yoghurt

And what of the apples? you ask.

Who could it be? I put my money on The Squirrel, but it could equally have been The Rat or The Possum or The Skunk. Jeffrey laughs at the way I individualize the enemy, kind of incorporating them into the menagerie, along with The Chickens. I put my money on The Squirrel because it taunts me, enjoys sqaurreling, even poses, as though it were the Arc Angel Gabriel looking down on a world of paltry sinners, to have its picture taken.

I know it’s not a great picture, but it does constitute evidence. And talking of not-great pics there is another one but I’m going to risk posting it, because it made my heart crumble

It is not so easy, though, to capture the crumbling of a heart

Nor to convey the anxiety attending scans, scanxiety we call it. This week I had to go to the hospital for scans for both the CLL (chronic leukemia) and the lung cancer. I more-or-less know what to expect from the CLL scans as blood tests have been a guide to how the disease is progressing. I know that new treatment is on the cards. But what really frightens me is waiting for the results of the lung cancer scans, I’m terrified of it returning like the creature from the black lagoon. And while my other hospital visits have been orderly and pretty stress-free the waiting room in radiology was a nightmare of disorganization. Although there was some tape on the floor it didn’t make any sense; social distancing seemed like a game of chance, many patients oblivious of the rules.

Unlike Jack the Dog in Tucson, who seems oblivious of the rattle snake in his garden, but is actually alert to distancing protocols

So a special mollifying treat was in order after the scans – something both luxurious and comforting. Risotto of course. We had two gifts waiting to be pulled out of the freezer: fish stock made by Heike, and some scallops from William next door, Mrs Tam’s grandson. Add to that a lurking lobster tail (from whence that hails I know not), and some chives from garden

The squirrel is not the only interloper. Every garden is full of things-out-of-place, most obviously weeds and marauding critters. But sometimes you can be taken by surprise. Imagine my astonishment when I went to check on the white foxgloves and saw this

A foxglove this color grew in the bed before it was a white garden and perhaps a few seeds have been lying dormant all these years and with a little cultivation sprang to life. Or perhaps I planted three, not two foxgloves, and by mistake a nursery worker included this beauty though at the time it was just a little green plantlet.

And what about fennel? Fennel totally lack discrimination, cannot be confined to a single bed, will lay down with any other plant – foxgloves or salvia or even tomatoes. One of the things I didn’t mention when I indulged in a fennel rave a few blogs back is that fennel supports the Anise Swallowtail, a large black and yellow butterfly with orange eyespots and blue markings on its hind wings. In the warmer southern parts of its range, such as in Southern California, the adults can be seen year-round if they have suitable plants to feed on. While it is relatively easy to keep the adult, or butterfly, happy with many kinds of suitable flowers, the caterpillar is much more picky. It will make do with carrots and parsley, and sometimes citrus trees if nothing else is on offer, but its absolutely favorite food is fennel.

And then there is the itinerant pumpkin. Or maybe it is a squash. It started growing next to the compost bin in the vegetable garden and draped itself over the bin (so Jeffrey was unable to get at the compost) and started twining its tendrils around the grape arbor. I tenderly repositioned it to get a bit more sun and to have its own path rather than sharing with humans so now it is going along the back of the shishito bed, in front of the apples, and I anticipate it will then go back on the ground and wend its way toward the Greek fig.

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My fervent hope is that it will turn out to be a kabocha which i grew two years ago, but more likely is from some seeds in the compost, perhaps butternut squash which would not be such a bad thing. That’s if it survives at all. When these orphan seeds start growing they do not think about how large they will become and how hard it will be to find the amount of sunlight needed.

All week, as we worked away in the garden, as we went to the hospital, as we muttered in fury and wept in despair about the state of the nation and the planet, we were looking forward to the weekend, to the moment of unwrapping our farm duck. At last that moment came. This time I tried David Tanis’s recipe for roast duck with orange and ginger. Apart from the cooking method and time I followed his instructions and it turned out crispy, succulent, and flavorful. But just as pleasurable as the eating was

Tanis suggested mashed butternut squash to go with the duck and as there was a good half of one in the fridge I complied. I love to mash this squash with walnut oil and smashed up walnuts

The next day I made stock from the bones

Finished up with a light cleansing salad, using the rest of the delicious experimental cucumber, slices of apple and avocado, festooned with borage and canary nasturtium flowers.

The poor climbing canary nasturtium is being crowded out now by the yellow grape tomato, and many of the weedy nasturtiums that grow everywhere are fading. They are almost by definition out-of-place, and yet you might think that every-place is their-place, even the kitchen. You can eat them, leaves and flowers, or just plonk them in a vase and feel, for a moment, happy.

The blog today is dedicated to George Freeman Winfield, who I did not know, but he grew things, and he died.

Eleanor sends me a photo of her first harvested green beans and a tomato, Lucky Tiger, planted at exactly the same time as mine. I bought us each a plant at Tomatomania, and mine hardly has any flowers yet, let alone fruit. Lucky Tiger is beautiful and she assures me he was tasty. This provokes in me a response of unmitigated envy and I can hardly bring myself to congratulate her. But, steeling myself and acknowledging how childish is this response I generously ask her if I may post it. I go searching for the photo and find that it exists nowhere on my computer. Somehow it has managed to erase itself.

Refusing to play tit for tat I don’t tell Eleanor that I have harvested my first zucchini. But let me humbly offer here am image of my tromboncini. Remember

Come in closer and take a look at the fruit

This is the new variety bred by Row7 Seeds for flavor. I have high expectations, but must beware to pick the squash before they

I am always so earnest, anxious, envious or boastful about my garden. I wish I could cultivate sprezzatura; this blog should be a kind of playground for developing that kind of studied nonchalance, but somehow my baser instincts rise, unsummoned, to the surface.

Actually envy can be a great motivator in the garden. Nothing like a bit of nudging from the green eyed monster to move one along, to spur experimentation. Let’s face it, though, malice frequently shadows envy. And if you throw in a bit of money much can be achieved. Consider the case of Louis X1V who was so envious of his finance minister’s grand garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte that he had the minister put in prison and proceeded to appropriate his architects, his gardeners, and over one hundred of his trees. Included in the appropriated  staff was Jean Baptiste de La Quintinie (Quintyne) who so famously developed the vegetable gardens and orchard at Versailles.

One of the vegetables that La Quintinie grew at Versailles was artichokes. This last season I replaced the cardoon on the nature strip with artichokes, but the plants are still small. We were lucky, however, to score an abundant gift of small artichokes that Steve gathered from the garden of a friend of his

the rest were pared down to their hearts and double deep fried (!!!). They are meant to look like roses, their petals opening out. In that respect the dish was a failure, but tasted crunchy and like nothing else imaginable on this earth

Speaking of envy and jealousy in the garden brings Peggy Guggenheim to mind. She made a garden with one of her lovers, the English poet Douglas Garman. In her autobiography, Out of this Century, she unashamedly revealed that when he refused to marry her, “I went out into the garden and tore up his best flower bed. It contained many rare plants and I…hurled them over the fence into the field next door. It happened to be the coldest night of the year.”

She wasn’t really a great garden lover, or perhaps she was indeed the best kind of garden lover – when one of her grandsons asked her what she most liked to do, she replied, “The best thing is to make love in the garden.”

And talking of such things I have been doing a lot of tying up this last week

You wouldn’t really call this espaliering. But you should have seen the mess before i disciplined them. This way we get fewer figs but I can grow three trees against the fence and still have room for other plants. It’s enough. If only they can be protected against the varmin this year.

While working on the figs my eye was caught by the delphinium. So slowly it opened, every day adding some blueness to the world. Now it is beginning to fade, but a new spire on the same plant is shooting up

You can see the borlotti beans at the base of the delphinium. One day they will catch up with Eleanor’s beans ….. and maybe overtake her …

A highlight of the week in the kitchen was our tapas night. We have been hoarding and anticipating this for months now. My dear friends Katie in Austen and Susan in Santa Cruz sent me a mighty gift certificate for my birthday from Zingerman’s. They sent this before my planned party but there was a mix up in the mail and by the time it arrived shelter-in-place was well underway. So as well as some wondrous cheeses I chose a selection of Portuguese canned seafood. When Lyndal was here from Australia for Christmas 2018 I gave Jeffrey a bottle of grey goose vodka which we sipped with blinis and salmon. So in memory of absent friends we kind of reprised that night (not having touched the vodka since), extending it into a tapas affair. I made the blinis but where all recipes say add caviar and creme fresh, we went with a more modest but equally delicious option.

Returning to work on the white garden:

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see how that single white sweet pea is turning pink, and how the hollyhock is slowly lifting its head, thinking about blooming, against the sky and the sheets hung out to dry

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and the two little Mexican lions; one has lost an ear amidst the rough and tumble of the white garden

Meanwhile the strawberries refused to slow down, so I made a quick emergency jarlet of jam, and even though there is nothing like a fresh strawberry the alchemy involved in jam making is always surprising and magical. This is how it goes:

with a few sprigs of rose geranium, and a few drops of rose water, it finally lands up here

In case you think I’ve been neglecting the front garden here are some snatches of spring, the last gasp really.

up close

To extend the spring I got out the extension snippers Steve gave me for my birthday, started dead-heading and also snipping a few beauties out of reach

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The next morning I woke with a very bad back. Moreover it looks like a lot of work for a minute reward. The bad back, however, was no doubt a result of obsession (not pausing to stretch) and an accumulation of many ill- advised gardening malpractices and maneuvers. But the reward was hardly insignificant:

And it lasted.

So I took a day off gardening and made some cheddar and chive scones which we ate with Jeffrey’s cabbage and blue cheese soup (yes, we like cheese)

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Today, as I finish this blog, it’s Monday, Memorial Day. The neighborhood is horribly quiet. Yesterday, across the front of the New York Times was blazoned a headline: U.S. Deaths Near 100,000. The rest of the page is filled with names and brief descriptions, because “They were not simply names on a list. They were us.” Only 1,000 names are recorded here, just 1% of the toll. Jeffrey rings a name for me: “George Freeman Winfield, 72, Shelburne Vt, could make anything grow.”

There are days when I don’t get out of my pajamas, don’t brush my hair, hardly speak a word to any living being. Though I am able to enter into muttering and grunting exchanges with inanimate things like my laptop, the stove, cookery books. Some books are good for reading, other books are best for hurling across a room, aimed either at someone’s head or simply hurled for pleasure, for the gratification to be derived from launching something heavy into the lightness of air, listening to the whoosh, followed by a thump, thump, thump.

It is best, on such days, not to look in the mirror. On such days, when bumping into the mirror, I either go back to bed and pull the blankets over my head, or go out into the garden. There lies salvation, so you might think. Not always. Last week I came up against the dishevelment and chaotic overgrown

of the white garden

“White Garden” is a grand and preposterously inflated term for what is merely a large bed in the middle of the backyard, between our offices and the chicken run. I was originally inspired by the idea of the alluring night scents of such famous gardens as Vita Sackville West’s at Sissinghurst in England. I’ve written about the development of “my” white garden in the book I began many years ago and am just picking up again, Gardening in a Strange Land. Suffice to say now that this “garden” was a misconceived project in many ways, but one that I have never quite been able to relinquish. Like those grand passions that have seized and consumed and derailed one from sensible existence, and that somehow won’t go away, even after years of therapy and self reproachement and rapprochement too, even then they won’t go away.

When the chickens were let loose to roam the the backyard, before their run was built, they laid waste my little oasis of gentility. After they were confined by the stylish run that Matthew built, rather than seizing the opportunity to begin again, differently, I couldn’t resist, I just couldn’t stop myself from buying six packs of tiny white flowering plants and even now and then a four incher foxglove, and I even inveigled Steve to start me some white hollyhock. I began dreaming.

But neglect turned my dreams to dust. So I turned my back on the white garden and gazed upon the mass of Brazilian plume flowers

Jeffrey keeps reminding me (ironically, but i can detect an undertone of alarm) of what his mother would have said – that in these times (behind closed doors, unseen, unsocialized) we must not go to pieces. Or as Alexandra Fuller’s family would have said, in her marvelous Zimbabwe memoir, Let’s Not go to the Dogs Tonight.

So I pull myself together, reach for the beautiful ceremonial green bowls hidden away from quotidian life on a top shelf, and make a dish of marinated egg yolks with sushi rice.

And along with it:

The bowls, combined with the use of chopsticks, seem to introduce a modicum of etiquette into the low-key savagery into which the house- and-garden has descended.

We eat the sushi and eggs while watching Baby Face. Barbara Stanwyck, in this gratifyingly wicked pre-code movie (i.e. before censorship) plays a woman on the make, who manages to rise in the world by seducing and using, with immense joi de vivre, one poor man after another. She tries reading Nietzsche, but tosses him aside in favor of a manual on Etiquette.

Baby Face revives me, and I get to work on the white garden. The bulbs – mainly different kinds of Paperwhites and some ornithogallum – are gorgeous when they bloom. But then the long green leaves loll and languish all over the bed and can’t be cut yet because as long as they are green they are supplying nutrients to the bulbs underground. And then the brugmansia which smells so divine at night drops its flowers and leaves which get tangled in the rose bush which in its turn is growing into the mandarin tree. Craig prunes the mandarin and cuts back the Iceberg rose – a daschund that thinks it’s a great dane.

clean up the Brugmansia debris, pull the far-from-white nasturtiums, and wonder about the maderense geraniums that have migrated from the chicken run, small now but destined to be huge and purply pink blooming.

All kinds of forgotten wonders emerge as I squirrel away:

a closer look reveals phlox, antirrhinums, dianthus and diamond frost euphorbia. The dianthus is so shy that it’s blushing.

and most miraculously

Exhausted by all the renovating work but battling a self-satisfied cheshire cat grin that has settled in to my face I stagger into the kitchen and bake a triumphant

that we eat with strawberry compote and freshly made yoghourt

Jeffrey took me to Thornton hospital the next day and dropped me at the front. I negotiated very easily through several stations, several questionings, until eventually I made it to the Jacobson wing for Outpatient Surgery. The hospital was quiet, none of the usual hustle and bustle, and because the nurses were less harassed (though no doubt stressed by Covid) they were very genial and chatty. The bone marrow biopsy this time was a dream, after feeling pleasantly drowsy I drifted off and then was woken, not having felt at all the drilling through bone.

At home I walked through the arch of scented Sombreuil and onto the porch, where

I stop and breathe, give thanks that we remain safe and alive. On the other side of the porch

almost the sole survivor from when I bought the house, Annie must have planted it.

There are days when I don’t get out of my pajamas, and simply can’t face mixing up the dough for another effing loaf of bread. My friend Patricia Montoya posted a link to an article by Sabrina Orah Mark in The Paris Review (May 7, 2020). I stole her title today by way of homage because it resonated so precisely, the cackling it induced made me feel so much better. When Orah Mark called her her mother to complain that, like most of us, she couldn’t find either flour or yeast, anywhere, her mother retorted: “Fuck the bread. The bread is over.”

Lovely cool day. Woke at 5 and read a little of Hard Times – so dramatic, marvelous oratorical speeches, and magical conversions of villainy. The inventiveness of the language is breathtaking, like discovering a new plant that you could never have imagined

This week have been throwing myself into cooking and heavier garden work. First up fish pie After all that work in the garden needed some comfort food. Heike went to the fish market and got us some fish

An orange-hued fish pie! Because there weren’t enough potatoes I added in some yams (which looked fun but rather overwhelmed the subtlety of my oh-so delicate white sauce and the fish itself). Also, didn’t have enough fresh fish so added in a can each of salmon and tuna. That worked well. Somehow fish pie, like shepherd’s pie, always does the trick; like Dickens it can turn a hard or dull day into a marvel of festivity. It’s partly about texture – the merging of mashed potato with more gooey delights, and the surprise of comforting blandness shot through with unexpected tastes and aromas.

And of course I added in

In the mornings I worked in the front garden before it was sun drenched, where the ongoing project is the pathway where I have been trying to keep the weeds out so that the dymondia

Grass is the worst culprit but there is another alien moving into the territory: dichondra.

and wait to see which survives best, with least pampering. Both of them, however, spread beyond the pathway and I suspect that the dichondra will be harder to keep under control. When did I plant it? I have no memory and suspect it’s wandered in here from some other garden. But I’m constantly amazed when I look back at photos and notes to recall the plants that once grew in this garden which I have entirely forgotten, or they have been edged out by the obsession of the moment.

Every so often I stand and stretch and then am deflected from the chore in hand by the need to pull grass and dandelions growing as high as the flowers. The wretched weed we call hydra is back, I think it’s ruella, it has a pretty purple flower, though I am trying to expunge them before they flower this year. The approach I take is one of attrition – with these plants that have  spreading rhizomatic roots it seems useless to try pulling, they just spread more aggressively. The way we finally conquered the bamboo was to cut cut cut, as soon as the shoots appeared, and eventually the roots were starved and died away. Eventually, however, can be  a long long time and attrition can wear down the perpetrator as well as the victim.

As well as grass and dandelions and other hopeful vagrants I thinned and wrenched from the earth a lot of fennel. The way it seeds and spreads would seem to assign it to the category of weeds. And it’s true that I seem to spend almost all the year thinning and pulling. Yet still I love to have it in my garden, front and back. As gardeners know the distinction between a flower garden and vegetable garden is not clear cut. All vegetables produce flowers. And many flowers can be eaten. One of the reasons for growing flowers in among the vegetables is that they attract pollinators – the butterflies and moths and humming birds. And one of the reasons for letting the fennel grow in the front yard, among the flowers and fruit trees, is that the foliage is fabulous – feathery and flowing, a willowy green. Then, when they bolt, they grow pretty high and bold and the flowers appear – large yellow umbals. 

Posh restaurants charge a lot for dishes mottled with fennel pollen, and here we have a meadow! But this is the real clincher

fennel grow long tap roots so they are great at breaking up and conditioning clay soil.

Then the strawberries started whimpering: After harvesting so many beautiful luscious squishy berries I felt remorseful for the way I have neglected them. I cleaned up the bed, getting rid of the dead leaves, composted, watered (the irrigation doesn’t seem to be working, tho it hardly matters now as they have mostly escaped the bed and put down roots all over) and then a jug of diluted fish oil and seaweed. I haven’t grown strawberries for about thirty years, so am kind of winging it. After this summer I will do some research and divide them properly.

After the renovations I felt better about eating the strawberries, gathered a bowl and on my way in to the kitchen, stopped by the chickens. They love strawberries even more than we do if that’s possible. I throw them the damaged berries, but not in any random fashion, it’s a skill to make sure they each get one, especially Lorelei the most timid. Isadora is the greediest and a bully to boot, and Gigi is the smartest. To begin with you have to know how to hoodwink Izzie, and then it all flows smoothly.

The strawberries we ate with some quickly made scones (or what, in this country are called biscuits) and a drizzle of cream

While weeding and cleaning in the front my frenzied mode would subside every so often, I’d sit sit back on my haunches and look around. And saw some surprising things growing in the garden

Suddenly while my back was turned, hunched over the weeds

and the first pomegranate blooms

Last year was the first fruiting year for this small bush and it yielded precisely ONE pomegranate, that was plucked and made off with by some villainous poacher, before it was even fully ripe. Growing fruit in the front yard I am happy to share, but that is just plain mean. Though of course it could be that the poacher was just seduced by the glorious shiny ruby-slippers quality of the fruit and imagined that, if in possession of the prize, they might be transported to the Land of Oz, or perhaps to somewhere rather more lascivious.

I was happy to hear last week from two gardeners in other parts of the world. My friend Liz Sisco, who has moved to Tucson with her husband Charlie for part of the year, sent me images of her developing garden. When I visited her in the New Year of 2019 (a great road trip with my old friend Lyndal Jones, a performance artist, who was here from Australia and keen to visit Biosphere which also intrigued both Liz and I) there was no garden. Tucson has such a different climate from San Diego. It snowed while we were there and now the temperature is over a 100 degrees. So Liz’s vegetables are growing in pots, very productively, and she has planted trees (fruit and others) and natives of various kinds. I particularly love this photo which shows

from what you have been seeing on my site. And here’s a close up of that elegant Parry’s penstemon, a wildflower native to the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona and northern Mexico.

The other message from afar came in the form of a posting from Judy Annear, who moved last year from Sydney to a town in the country about an hour from Melbourne. She writes, “As someone who never, until 6 months ago, had a garden I am slowly learning the nuanced lives of plants.” Not so slowly, I think, her description of the plant life in her neighborhood is so vivid. I believe that all her years as a photo historian and curator have trained her powers of observation to the nth degree, and close observation is a good part of gardening. I laughed at the way her quite lyrical posting ended thus: “The new romance with plants is somewhat back breaking, and I am deeply annoyed that the possums come in the night and shit in the birdbath.”

You can read her full posting as a comment at the end of ” Turning Something Sweet into Savory Delight,” Friday May 1st.

Here are the chamomile flowers, early in the day

And then, as the sun comes up, they elevate their petals 

Other changes take a little longer. Look at these poppies slowly, over days, lifting their heavy heads. 

But they do. And then they open. They do it every year, and they come up all over the yard, back and front. Although they have changed color over the years, their purple hue grown more dusky. They grow from seeds, blown hither and thither, are not perennials, although they appear so.

Just as predictable as the return of the poppies is the return of my chronic cancer. A telehealth visit today with my CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia) oncologist, Thomas Kipps. It wasn’t a surprise, I knew it already from the way my lab results have been trending, and fatigue creeping into each day. It wasn’t a surprise, but still it was a shock: time to start treatment again. It was a shock in that I was unprepared for how depressed this would make me feel. I think it’s the sense of being confined to the category of “sick person” again, and by this I don’t just mean “being sick” but rather, all the time and management that goes into being a patient: spending hours on the phone, endlessly making appointments, waiting for calls, investigating insurance, making sure that my different specialists confer and that treatments and drugs don’t clash. Scans and labs ahead, but worst of all, as I really dread it, is a bone marrow biopsy.

The Covid nightmare had fairly successfully brushed the phantom of cancer under the carpet. In the context of the pandemic my own little dis-ease is trivial. So many people affected in all sorts of devastating ways. But today they seem compounded, my own miseries and the misery of the planet. 

Analogies between human and plant bodies, or between the human body and a garden can only take you so far. But those analogies can, nevertheless, take you somewhere, somewhere better than a deep dark hole. Particularly when you harness the imagination. I sometimes imagine that my chronic cancer is a bit like a perennial plant. It comes and goes but never really disappears, sometimes it seems to have disappeared because it stays away for longer than usual, but then it pops back stronger than ever. Or, like the annual poppies, it turns up in a different place, slightly mutated. 

To cheer ourselves up we plucked and ate 

for lunch. The insects had wormed into part of it since it grew so low on the ground, but we had more than half and although it wasn’t zinging with full flavor, since the days have not been hot enough, it still tasted of summer.

I planted two seeds of the Row 7 Centercut squash (tromboncini), less than a week ago. 

When they are established I’ll snip one of them at soil level. Pulling could disturb the fragile roots of the one destined to remain. And in any case I usually prefer to cut plants at ground level rather than pull, so that the roots can rot in the ground and add to the fertility.

If a few hours can make a difference, or a few days, so too a few months. Fruit takes time. Here are the fejoa (pineapple guava) flowers

The two trees grow outside the kitchen window, on each side of a short path, watered by grey water from the laundry. If you took the Welcome tour you will have walked between them as you transitioned from the side of the house to the back yard. My idea is that when they grow tall enough they will meet overhead, forming an arch that you walk through into a different mini-world. Actually the idea of the arch came from my friend Tershia who has a great eye. The flowers are gorgeous, the fleshy pink petals edible. And when the flowers fall the bulbous part under the flower, the ovary, grows into fruit. 

I love every part of this tree: look at the bark and the color of the leaves, deep dark olive on one side, soft grayish green on the other other. In the breeze it shimmies and glows.

We ended the day with comfort: a kimchi ramen (that same kimchi whose making was documented in The Duck and I), swimming in Jeffrey’s great stock and padded out with bits of chicken left over from his Sunday night roast

Each morning you rush out to the garden with your cup of coffee and then tiptoe around the beds where you’ve direct seeded, or approach quietly those plants that might be beginning to show signs of fruiting. You tiptoe without reason or rhyme, hold your breath and gently move a leaf here and there, searching for signs of emerging edibles.  You do not want to disturb them, you speak coaxingly in low tones, are inclined to break into a lullaby. 

It’s such an exciting time of the year, as the summer crop starts revving into life. My Doctor, MM, tells me that the quarantine has been so long that her kids have learned to plant a variety of seeds and actually seen them sprout and grow! I remember as a little kid the excitement and fun of watching maize seeds in a jar, captured between glass and blotting paper, sprout. And everyday at this time of year, for a short time each morning, I enter again that childhood zone where curiosity and revelation fuel the everyday, radiating wonder.

Here is the Jetsetter tomato I’ve been watching ripen day-by-day.

Slow planting continues – in the front yard: a cactus dahlia and green sunburst sunflower. Also some spreading vines, a bit of an experiment: an eight ball squash, and a sweet passion melon, one on each side. Also have a delicata squash to go in. Normally it’s not such a great idea to mix these snakelike creatures in with flowers and fruit trees, partly because they take up so much surface room and are likely to displace the more modest and delicate flowering beauties. Plus, they are greedy feeders and their requirements are different from the predominantly floral denizens of the landscape they are now inhabiting. Reading Lab Girl today Jahn reminds me that any plant is as big below ground as above. Moreover, I’ve never succeeded in the past – mixing in the squash and melons in the front. But this year I’ve made sure to situate the plants at water outlets, and will watch and nurture them closely. As the summer progresses the front yard becomes more and more bare as only the most sun loving flowers persist, therefore as the melon and squash expand so will the space around them.

Certainly it’s no option to leave the garden purely to its own devices. There is always a struggle between the stronger and weaker plants. And often those designations of ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ are not intrinsic qualities but have to do with climate, the soil, what kinds of nutrients are available, how strong the sun is, how long or short the days are. Take the African Blue Basil, planted between the fruit trees and the veg at back, mainly because it is a bee magnet, and also because it is beautiful and smells divine.

It is crowding out the little citrus tree it’s meant to be nurturing, and needs to be severely cut back. It’s a reminder to me of how invasives can thrive in certain environments and crowd out other plants, most injuriously, natives. Neither of these plants are native, it’s true; the environment I conjure into being is artificial, but equally we might say that most environments are stochastic and even the most apparently wild, if they have been traversed or occupied by humans and touched by their baggage at some stage, require constant vigilance.

After feeling the bush vibrate with the whirring hum of bees I come inside and read, horror-struck, about the ‘murder hornets’, an Asian insect that has hit US shores and is beginning to decimate bee populations. The report is grueling to read, detailing scenes of savagery and carnage. On top of everything else they have to contend with, namely toxic sprays, the bees now have to face this. And the repercussions for our crops if the pollinators disappear is devastating. The story is all over the media, reported in all major newspapers. I go to my ‘go to’ site for further information – the Facebook group, San Diego Gardener, started by Nan Sterman and John Clements. This is an amazing resource, composed of experienced gardeners and professionals as well as absolute beginners. People post fascinating photos and snippets of info and links to useful sites, and people ask questions and get helpful responses. I don’t even have to start searching for ‘murder hornets’; the topic comes up straightaway. Someone posts a link to an entomologist, Doug Yanega, from UC Riverside, who has worked on the hornet, and states categorically that there are no living murder hornets in the U.S. Suddenly all the panic stories are discredited, the hype dies down, and the fear of invasion is put on hold. Though the paranoia simmers away. While it certainly behoves us to be alert to the invasive patterns of particular flora and fauna, the irruption of the hornets panic suggests a displaced form of the xenophobia that exists not far below the surface of this country’s hospitable ethos.

To recover from the shock of the murder hornets I turned to the balm of baking. Gathered chard and oregano and eggs from the garden and using the goats cheese that came our way via Heike I made an easy tart. Deborah Madsen has a  recipe for a yeasty rustic dough which I often use – you simply press it into the quiche dish and don’t have to prebake. The pine nuts got a little burnt but still tasted delish.

But not all my baking works. A loaf of bread emerged from the oven

Jeffrey’s suggestion is that we use it to hurl at the squirrel – cackling and purloining with shameless impunity – that torments us.

However, I can’t resist posting a better looking bread. Even though I know that by so doing I enter, cravenly, into covid-one-up-manship, the puerile posting of feeble achievements in domestic adaptation and ingenuity.

In the morning  Steve brought around a tray of plantlets and a bag of lemons for me to preserve as we are almost at the end of the current jar. Here is an image of his potting shed. I’m lucky that he brings plants to me, but this photo does beckon me into the space, it’s so seductive, a gardener’s delight—so many unusual plants, so carefully tended.

And what about those beautiful old fashioned watering cans, so elegantly designed and gloriously preplastic.

Before Covid and after he retired Steve used to come around early on Thursday mornings and weed for an hour. What a friend!

By this gesture – turning something sweet into a savory delight–J managed to turn the tables on a malevolent ghost that has haunted our relationship. When we first met J tried to seduce me by an offering of matza brei, which needless to say he did not know that I hated. Really hated, to the extent of feeling queezy when faced by its stickily sweet lumpishness. Needless to say the seduction did not work, and we’ve muddled along, but this barely suppressed failure (on my part, to overcome sticky earlier marital associations; and on his part to misjudge my taste and person, imagining me to be a much sweeter person than I am) has existed as a sort of ghost at the table, a bit like Elijah, never there but still taking up space, and always threatening to materialize. So, when J was inspired yesterday to turn matza brei into the most delicious savory concoction, he banished the ghost, and I guess it means we will stagger on together into the twilight.

There is a covid ritual to these exchanges: We all wear masks, Steve deposits his gifts on the stoop and steps back at least six feet. I bring in the bag of lemons, wearing gloves, and then put out his wrapped slice of matza brei and step back again, and we exchange the day’s news.

In the vegetable garden I planted out another green fingers pickling cucumber to make up the trio at the base of the tepee, a pepper from Craig, and three marigolds, and tied up the tomatoes, reusing the twine that was holding the favas upright.

Lesley Ruda, my oldest friend in the world—we grew up together in Zimbabwe, and she now lives in San Francisco—sent me, even before she saw my last post about delphinium color, a pic she had taken walking in the Golden Gate Park

And speaking of color, look at the foliage on the Persimmon; it seems that it was only a few weeks ago that it was a bare scraggy twig sticking up out of the ground

Secret is in full bloom again, the most lovely and most highly scented of the roses that still grow in the front yard 

You can also see, also in full bloom, and dwarfing our house, Mme Alfred Carrière, an antique climber, released in France in 1879, considered to be a Noisette though its blooms are more Bourbon-like. It has nearly thornless canes, is a repeat bloomer, and seems to suffer no diseases here. There is a fun story of how I came by this rose, but that must wait for another time. The salvia is Indigo Spires that has been growing in this garden since its inception, though it meanders around, always returning, however, to roost with Secret—an harmonious pair.

In the evening I cut the fat fennel from the cucumber bed, chopped it into tiny pieces and used it, with onions, as a base for my version of Sicilian pasta. Fennel and sardines, pine nuts and raisins, tomato paste and saffron. When I lived in Sydney I would use fresh sardines, but they are hard to come by here. We were lucky, however, to have a can of large succulent aromatic sardines from Portugal – part of a package of rare cheeses, luxury canned fish and ham that arrived as a gift from Katie and Susan for my birthday. I only wish we could have shared the bounty with them. But we will do some sharing when we are released.

We ate the pasta with a bright green salad from the garden, one of the last of the season.

Last night, looking through old photos, I came upon one that was unlabeled, devoid of color, ugly and obscure.

Then suddenly I realized: it was my amateurish documentation of digging a hole for a tomato. Why bother to document such a widely, ordinary and much-repeated garden chore? Then I remembered: it included the vital ingredient of calcium in the form of ground-up egg shells! In that same moment a realization of disaster hit me between the eyes. In my panic about getting the tomatoes into the ground before the party guests started arriving (and to whom I would need to turn my attention) in mid-March I clean forgot this vital ingredient.  Why is it vital? Because tomato plants are prone to blossom end rot (where the end of the tomato rots), and planting with calcium prevents this (gypsum works just well, we use egg shells because the chickens give us these in return for regular feedings of cherry tomatoes with which they play soccer before devouring). How could I forget, after so many years, such an habitual routine? And the story only gets worse. When it came to planting the later tomatoes – the yellow grape and Dad’s Sunset my body remembered not the years of accumulated wisdom, but the month or so of cretinous mistakes.

It is a weird thing this question of body memory and gardening. I do believe the body remembers, better often than the conscious mind, but sometimes, it seems a whole lot worse. And yet, maybe I needed this shock to shake me out of routine unthinking behavior. Some of the practices I try and maintain regularly, but mostly fail, stress the breaking of habit, the retraining of body memory – Tai Chi and Xi Gong and Feldenkrais and Meditation. And so with gardening too it is possible to slip into repetition and maintenance of the status quo rather than exploring new processes and plants and combinations. So now I must explore what to do to when you haven’t included calcium in the planting. I remember Brijette telling me about an organic spray which you need to apply to the flowers, before the fruit suits. What is it? How does it work? It is also of course possible that there is enough calcium in the compost since Jeffrey includes ground -up eggshells.

Spent some time in the morning preparing the potting medium to welcome for the first time Astia, a French zucchini developed particularly for container growing and small gardens, and a Patio tomato, always very productive for me in a pot, and surprisingly tasty. They are now sitting in the driveway.

Surprise in the front yard: sunflowers

and poppies galore, including scarlet Delos poppies grown (by Steve) from seeds collected by a friend of a friend on the Greek island of Delos. The foliage is gorgeous, but the flowers a real knock out. They are growing on the Tam side, by our driveway (used for pots, not cars) so you can see them if you are out for a walk in the neighborhood and heading north.

At the front everyone walking by can see what we call Milane’s red poppy, as it grew in her garden when she was alive and Steve saved the seeds, along with a few Heirloom carnation poppies called, in a name that matches their show-offy exuberance, French Flounce (from Renee’s Seeds). 

In among the Delos are a couple of very flouncy in their own way, but much more ostentatiously modest, frilly Shirleys

I have had more conversations with neighbors in this time of lockdown than ever before, and all the conversations are about the garden. People do venture out from their homes to walk, generally being vigilant about keeping a safe distance. Because the nature strip is developed with plants and bushes people have the sensation of actually walking through the garden, of being enveloped by a variety of sensations, especially at the moment, because of the sweet peas and roses. One elderly couple paused to look around and the man grudgingly asked, How do you ever find anything in here? But the woman told me how much she loved passing through. The colors! she said, Oh and the smells, and she squished up her nose, sniffing, reminding me of my dear departed cat, Elvis

Another woman told me, yours is my favorite garden in the neighborhood. Then she added, No, in the world! The world, for everyone, has really shrunken in this time of sheltering in place. So for us, the neighborhood IS our world. For those who can venture out that is. For others it is much more restricted, frightening, and without the pleasure of distracting sensations. My hope is that this blog might reach not just my gardening friends but gardeners I don’t know and even more, people who do not have access to gardens or space. So if those of you who read this blog could forward the link to one other person I’d be most appreciative

Last night Jeffrey put together the remainder of my (predominantly) veg and bean stew with the left-over mashed potato from my gnocchi dish to make a sort of shepherd’s pie, which he served up with an orange salad (oranges from Eleanor) with daikon, cabbage, and cucumber. 

I neglect God and his angels for the noise of a fly … a memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of tomorrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.

I came across this quote from John Donne in a racy article by Katherine Rundell called “Night Climbing.” It seems so contemporary in its detailing of the quotidian distractions that deflect one from concentration. Although I do not grieve for neglecting God the experience resonates, is something I experience everyday when meditating. And many people, during this ghastly pandemic, are experiencing difficulty in concentrating – on anything at all. 

Surprising things are blooming, like this delphinium, just beginning to unfurl

Some delphiniums are a much deeper blue. When I was writing The Smoking Book, back in Harare at the time, I was struggling with the description of a certain character, and suddenly it came to me – from out of nowhere – that his eyes were “delphinium blue.” It was a fabulous moment, everything clicked into place, the story began to write itself, to unfurl. I can still recall that moment of elation and surprise. Where did the delphinium come from? Was it an angel who sent it from a secret land where magical words grow, like fruit, on trees and can be plucked merely by the force of desire or frustration? Or perhaps it just slithered out of the chains that tethered it to all redundant sentences in the great big Writer’s Block in the sky. Or perhaps it came—travelling as straight and as fast as an arrow—from the past, from the garden of colors I knew as a child.

So while it’s not really the best flower to grow in among the veg I can’t resist it, I love watching and waiting for it to bloom, watching the blooms creep up the stem, anticipating the joy of experiencing again that ineffable CLICK.

Many apologies for those who might have already tried to sign up using the form that was on the right. It seems it doesn’t work. Am new to this blogging/webbing business. But here is a way that DOES WORK. Click the comments button at the end of any blog, and you can enter your email to get alerts every time a new blog is posted (you do have to enter a comment I’m afraid, though you can just enter your name; however, you’ll make my day if you do say something).

Two tepees built today for the cucumbers. Used as stakes what was around – bamboo poles from the days when we had a forest of bamboo, a piece of 2×2 left over from some building project, and rebars.

at the base of one I planted green fingers (shown), a pickling cucumber, and at the base of the other two experimental cucumbers from Row 7 seed company.

I use rebars a lot, they can be moved around and reused, as time passes they rust and merge into the landscape. Sometimes my garden hovers, suspended in time, like a Baja building project, between hope and resigned failure, between past and future. When you drive into Mexico and down the coast you pass endless building projects where flat roofs have rebars sticking up, reaching into the sky. Sometimes this is just a brief pause and soon another story will be added to the building; other times the rebars remain for months or years, waving rustily against the blue of the ocean, like scarlet blooming ocotillo in the desert, against the blue of the sky.

My neighbor the dear late Mrs Tam would build amazing structures every summer and have vines growing vertically and horizontally all over the front yard. How I miss her. Now there is a bare lawn. On the other side: neighbors who hose down the driveway and clip my plants if they grow a few inches on to their property. The horticultural penumbra that separated Mrs Tam and I was porous,

so that paradoxically we—despite my ignorance of her Chinese and her scant English—like our gardens, were intertwined rather than separated.  

partly just run their course, but helped along by some greedy critter.  At first it just started nibbling at the eastern end, as partial to the young shoots and flowers as to the beans themselves. But more recently the critter must either have grown, and its appetite too, or it brought in its extended kin, because the fava plantings began to look like a scene of decimation.

I figured maybe a mouse. It’s still cool enough for Roxy to enjoy snuggling up on our bed at night so she isn’t out there intercepting the marauders. Once I disturbed a beautiful tiny lizard, its coloring rhyming with the rebar, but I doubt it was the culprit.

Some kind of caterpillar perhaps, but I could never find any trace. I had a while ago suspected grasshoppers, but could never see any. Then I saw one! But failed to catch it.

I figured the favas had been bountiful (we ate and ate and ate and still managed to freeze a lot) and so didn’t mind sharing the tail end of the crop. But am not so sure about sharing with grasshoppers, especially since I can rarely see them, I suspect they come out at night. When I was a kid on the farm in Zimbabwe we once had to look after and rear a baby nagapie (the Afrikaans name, meaning small night ape) or Bushbaby. Somehow it got separated from its mother and crawled into my mum’s felt hat. So that became its nesting pouch and we upended an old cot and placed branches in it. Every dusk we had to go out into the vlei and collect grasshoppers for the baby. As we walked though the long grass, almost as tall as we were, grasshoppers would fly up and we would catch them, and when our bags were full we would return to the house and feed the baby who would venture out of its pouch at night, all cuddly looking, fluffy fur and huge huge eyes. Its teeth, however, were vicious and it once bit Mum so hard …she screamed. We had never heard our mother scream. It was a scream to freeze the blood of a small child. Still, we loved that little Night Ape, and were sad when the time came to release her into the wild. 

What I need in the garden, now, is a Bushbaby.

For dinner I made potato gnocchi and cut sage leaves and chives and a few chive flowers to go in the burnt butter sauce.

Welcome to my garden and my musings.

My name is Lesley Stern, I’m a writer and have been gardening most of my life, for the last twenty years in San Diego where we are lucky enough to garden all year. I share the garden with Jeffrey and Roxy the cat and three chickens, as well as numerous butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, lizards and pests galore. 

I am starting this diary during a global pandemic and a climate crisis such as never before experienced. If gardening is addictive and frequently bucolic it is also sometimes a battleground. I feel immensely lucky to have my garden, but miss talking with other gardeners, and also visiting other gardens and nurseries. I do, however, talk with passersby (wearing our masks and at a suitable distance), and it gives me great pleasure in this time to give pleasure to many who do not have a garden of their own. Especially the little boy who calls it the Butterfly Jungle. I would like to welcome to this blog new gardeners, old gardeners, and those who simply enjoy the sensations, and the ideas, that gardens make possible. 

At last we reach the vegetable garden

Sometimes the posts to this blog will occur daily, sometimes they will be spaced out over weeks. Sometimes the writing and images will stay close to home, other times they will digress and meander. I’m interested in hearing from other gardeners particularly from other parts of this country and from other parts of the world, and in including your images.

If you would like to receive an alert when a new blog is posted just click on the comments button at the end of this post, or any other, and you can fill in your email. You do have to leave something in the comment box I’m afraid (though you can just enter one word, your name say; I’d love it, however, if you would say something).