We had a wonderful, cool misty break from summer heat last week. The plants and the Portlanders seem to be in much better spirits. I know I am.
We’ve naturally been showing off sun worshipping plants the last few months, but I don’t want the woodland plants to feel left out. I have always had a soft spot for shady characters that make me think of a cool, mossy, ferny forest. I’m loving the little log gardens I’ve noticed here and there lately.
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Happy September! This is my absolute favorite month. All the big leaved plants are peaking. Trees and shrubs start pushing new growth. The weather gets more cooperative for digging, moving, planting. And we’re bathed in golden diffused sunlight at the end of each day. What could be better?
I wanted to share another little bit of happy today. There’s a tiny but well done sidewalk garden on Broadway that always makes me smile. The bold, bright wall color is such a cheerful backdrop for a few well selected plants. I love instant gratification in a garden, and this is the type of garden you could pop in to a little sidewalk planter in an afternoon, and have a fab planting, no patience required.
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I’ve been holding out for rain, garden on pause. Avoiding the temptation of nursery visits. Averting my eyes to avoid confronting the sight of plants unquenched from my unreliable hose offerings. The weeds, they’ll have to stay until the soil more willingly releases them.
Could it be, the wait is finally over? Do I fall for the meteorologists’s sweet lies this time? The promise of precipitation? The return of workable soil, hospitable to new nursery spoils? Even though there remains another week of our typically hot, dry August to endure enjoy? Might our hottest, driest summer ever be prepared to yield, even briefly, to warm rains?
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I love finding inspiration from other people’s searches on plant lust. I’ll admit, I’m a little set in my ways in my garden, and sometimes doubt I’m going to be swayed by popular opinion. But I’m always pleasantly surprised at what jumps out at me and right onto my wish list. It shakes me out of my comfort zone and gets me checking out plants I otherwise would have overlooked.
This summer, our most popular search term was big flowers. Normally when I daydream about plants, big leaves come to mind, but I can get behind a big flower craze. Come to think of it, one of the most memorable plants I saw in a friend’s garden this spring was an unnamed peony with a plentiful crop of monstrous of a peach-ish-brownish flowers. Even a foliage lover like me couldn’t help but see the charm.
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Here we are again, the time of year when there’s a bottomless pile of zucchini on the counter. Last year I said there’s no such thing as too much zucchini, and I stand by it, but I’ll admit there are moments where doubt creeps in. You have to keep remembering what a miracle it is, how many ways you can use it.
This week’s biggest hit was the vanilla salted caramel breakfast milkshake. A surplus of zucchini isn’t so scary when you remember how versatile it can be. Its flavor is so neutral, it’s easy to turn it into desert. Healthy desert. No refined sugar, no dairy. Ready to go in 5 minutes.
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I’ve recently been working on a project out at Intel in Hillsboro. This is my first experience with a long daily commute, and I’m spending a lot more time surrounded by concrete than I’m used to. Long drives, big parking lots, big buildings.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Intel does a great job with their cafeterias. Fruits and veggies are easy to come by. There are always multiple options for healthy meals, even for people with special diet requirements. You can find fresh cooked greens and colorful veggies on the menu every day.
There’s space to eat on a big outdoor patio surrounded by plants. The landscaping is sort of what you’d expect at a big company, no inspired botanical gardens or anything like that. However, there is a stretch of raised beds just beyond the patio. I assumed they were supplying some of the cafeteria’s fresh veggies, until I recognized folks from the office pulling weeds and emerging with armloads of garden spoils on their lunch hour. Time for closer inspection.
The best laid plans. After too many months of my rain dances going ignored by the weather gods, the time had come to give my trees a long overdue hose soak before things got too crispy. Which meant creeping through paths I haven’t been down for a while. Which is how I discovered a huge nest of angry yellow jackets. And by discovered, I mean, getting stung on the bum. And then a few more stings on my leg and back for good measure. Jerks.
I dropped the hose on the spot, and scooted right out of there. Thankfully, they didn’t get Pokey Doggie, who thought we were doing a fun new dance, and chased me back inside.
I really hate what I did next.
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I’ve always been fascinated with caterpillars. I spent many hours searching for them when I was a kid, picking them up and watching them march across my hand. I’ve become more squeamish about holding them, but they’re still a beautiful miracle.
Somehow I made it to 40 years old without ever knowing that many chrysalises were bright gold. How miraculous is that?
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It can be challenging as a tourist and get a sense for local life and culture. It’s always a bit awkward when you’re stopping to photograph something that seems novel to you, while the people around you are just in a hurry to get on with their day and some tourist is in the way making a big deal of something that seems mundane and trivial to a local.
Sometimes there’s just no getting around it. You are a tourist. You don’t know where you’re going or how anything works. It certainly gives you an appreciation for the people you see at home struggling with the parking meters, or whatever the tourist tell is in your city.
I’m shy and anxious and don’t like people to see me fumbling with something I don’t know how to do, but I like to see where people buy their food. In some ways it’s a universal experience. You get to see locals working and shopping. You get to see what grows where, and what’s in season. Plus you find alien looking produce that perhaps expands your palette when you get back home.
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The one thing I knew I wanted to see in Zanzibar was a spice plantation. I think of spices as things that come from jars that come from stores. Have you seen the clips of Jamie Oliver showing city kids fresh fruits and vegetables, while they make sadly wrong guesses? They guess that tomatoes are potatoes, an eggplant is a pear, a beet is an onion. You could think, “wow, they have no idea what real food looks like.”
Going on the spice tour though, I got to experience being that kid. Our spice tour guide, David, walked through a lush green forest, plucking this and that, handing it to us to smell and take a guess, and store in the leaf cone they made for us to collect our treasures. Being a gardener, I thought I’d do okay, but I think I flunked the test. I got off to a good start when our first off I got a whiff of lemongrass, which I’ve seen in nurseries. But too many times I had to default to “that smells like Christmas.” Would you recognize these plants?
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