Timber

We slept on it for a number of months. A maple that seemed to have grown up by accident was casting a dense shade on the front yard garden, stunting our new raspberry patch, and threatening to join up with the lindens to create a canopy of cool darkness where we want to have light. Was it okay to cut down a tree? We had a good goal in mind - a place to grow food - but even cultivation is a human invention, with a long history of habitat destruction (depending on whom you ask). Maybe taking this tree down would be an act of hubris, human folk once again making the outrageous claim that "the buck stops here," whatever, that we are in charge and nature can suck it.
Maybe debating the ethics of cutting down a tree in the suburbs is pointless, since most trees have been placed there by a human. Almost every tree up here is somehow related to a human act or a human omission, excepting a few mighty old maples and cottonwoods that seem to have been in the so-called "Columbia Heights" since creation. We live in an artificial landscape, not even a shadow of its original form, so maybe eliminating a young maple is not much different from a preschooler knocking down a tower of ABC blocks.
In any case, we consulted a priest, a farmer, a poet, and our tender inner conscience, and knocked the tree down.

We replaced it with this little beauty, a true dwarf Liberty apple from RainTree Gardens in Washington. It came bareroot via UPS in a triangular cardboard box, and for the first month after planting looked pretty much like a stick in the ground. Here, finally, we have some tender first leaves.

Glamour Shots

Before I knew anything about gardening - much less ornamental and perennial gardening - a florist I knew arranged flowering forsythia as a table centerpiece at our wedding reception. I couldn't believe I was looking at what was essentially blooming sticks. In those days, my idea of home decor was random groupings of bare sticks throughout the house, so forsythia was an amazement to me. I decided then that I would one day own a home in order to have my very own forsythia planted near the front door.

Well my friends, I've done it. Today I am enjoying a first meager bloom of my wildest dreams.

The Archpriest Jonathan has assured me that the bloom will get better year by year, so I'm resisting the disappointment in this pathetic show.

ARISE O GOD

Tulip

Forsythia

Peony

Day Lily

Garlic

Rhubarb

I Have Two

I don't know if houseplants count as gardening, but these violets are really special. Besides, there's not much else to comment on in the dead of a Minnesota winter. The plant belonged to Grandma R., and I adopted it when Grandpa R died and she moved into her new home. I almost killed it once when I thought it would like to be transplanted, but it pulled through - much to my relief! Here it is now, blooming vibrant against a snowy picture window. Who knew we would get flowers in January?

little gardener, big carrot

Remember and Don't Forget

Remember to garden next year, don't forget that you love it and it's worth the annoyance of getting out your flats and cells in February.

I'm going to shift into winter mode now. Leaves are falling, snow will follow, and I won't have much to say on the garden for a while. I'll be over here, if you want to watch the circus I'm making of my life.

Guest Speaker Today

Back in April, she'd have killed for a tomato. Not the imported store tomatoes that were strip-mined in Texas, but fresh garden tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. That's how my mother felt, too, back then in my youth, so in May she set out thirty or forty tomato plants to satisfy our tomato lust and now, going into August, fresh tomatoes are no more rare or wonderful than rocks, each of us has eaten a bushel of them and there are plenty left where those came from.
One night, she and I snuck over to the Tollefsons' after their lights went out and left a half-bushel of tomatoes on their back step.

Garrison Keillor, from Lake Wobegon Days