————-
When I was a young girl, one of my favorite activities was to hang upside down and watch this other topsy-turvy world. I often, also, tried to catch glimpses of the life Beatrix Potter described down the rabbit hole or follow bird village life in the tallest of the neighborhood trees. I loved to lay on a quiet hillside and listen for the giants walking across the clouds in the sky high above me. I was a true believer in the Luscious Layers of Life.
What happened that caused me to foolishly believe otherwise? I am suddenly reminded of the song, MacArthur Park, and Jimmy Webb’s symbolism of something wonderful and sweet that has been destroyed because of neglect:
MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
I did think my beautiful, bountiful garden had been destroyed because of my own neglect. The late fall gave way to my yearly overly-scheduled event list and holiday rush, and the new year brought on a long anticipated massive home remodeling project. My so-called “winter garden” never stood a chance. By the time early Spring came and went, and late Spring turned into an early Summer, we hurriedly stuck a carload of nursery plants into our raised beds that had been given too little attention (and too little compost) over the winter.
Some of the plants thrived, but our tomato crop suffered through the summer, no plant ever giving us more than a handful of fruit, and there was never enough to make into salsas or sauces to can for winter enjoyment. We had a very small zucchini crop and we ended up tearing the cucumber vines out long before they produced any fruit.
Our hearts ached with guilt that something so beautiful as our garden had been, just one year previously, had been allowed to wither and die — “all the sweet, green icing flowing down”.
————-
While it’s true that we suffered some real disappointments in the garden this year, we did find a few pleasant surprises tucked into the precious layers there. The tomato plant in the photo, above, was not one of the pitiful nursery plants, but a “volunteer” – a “gift” from the neighbor’s chickens, no doubt, who spent many happy hours digging and scratching at this spot in the front yard.
It is never a good idea to expect life in the garden to be the same, year after year. The garden is the heart center of the Luscious Layers of Life, with many magickal worlds both above in the trees and below the sweet, renewing earth. We had a basil plant that had nearly taken over one of the raised planter beds, that had been heaped with flowers, year after year, and full of happy, appreciative bees.
This year was no exception. We didn’t mind the bees, because they didn’t seem to mind us and tolerated us reaching in to gather fresh leaves for dinner. But, one day, my husband noticed rather a large amount of bee activity at one end of our garden gazebo. He noted it, and then realized the number of bees going beyond and under the gazebo floor was rising at an alarming rate! We soon had to give up using the gazebo at all and decided to contact some bee movers before the situation really got out of hand.
The nice man from Guerilla Beekeepers in Santa Ana arrived to remove, rehabilitate and relocate our 30,000 honeybees from their home under the gazebo. He taught us a lot about the bees and explained they live half their lives in the hive before ever coming out into the garden at all. Apparently, these bees had been building this home for quite a while. If we had been able to wait another month, we would have had loads of honey from the, then, estimated 50,000 bees, instead of the small amount we were able to harvest.
He remarked, several times, that these were the gentlest bees he had ever worked with, as not one even attempted to sting him. He was using a small amount of smoke to calm them, as was the usual practice, and a thought occurred to me that I just had to ask: Could they be calm because of their regular exposure to marijuana smoke? The guys behind the fence tucked my bees into bed each night with a little toke, it seems, making for some sweet, peace-loving hippie freak bees! He thinks that could well be the case, as these were definitely some peaceful, easy feelin’ bees. The Guerilla Beekeeper Guy just put them in his car and drove them up the freeway to Santa Ana — he must have been quite a sight with 30,000 bees buzzing around inside his car!
Well, they’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to be so good
They’ll stone you just like they said they would
They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to go home
They’ll stone you when you’re there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
— Bob Dylan
————-
My husband was walking past the pool one quiet afternoon, when he spotted a “hand” reaching up out of the water, to the deck above. He stopped, just in time to notice an iguana climbing up the pool wall! WHAT?!! We called the guys over from next door, asking if it was theirs, and we were able to get these photos. Apparently, the iguana belonged to someone down the street, and had been missing for several months. We all believe this little guy had been living in one of our trees all this time, taking a dip in the pool and sunning itself on the pool deck when no one was around. It had grown a LOT since leaving home.
Our Golden Retriever had NO reaction (he was there in the yard with my husband) to the iguana, which leads me to believe he had seem it many times before. Fionnlagh, why didn’t you tell us there was an iguana in the garden? You never asked me.
————-
I think this is my FAVORITE part about gardening, the little surprises I find here and there. It’s my favorite part of life, too. If life turned out exactly how it was planned, how boring it all would be! I plan on spending a lot more time sitting in my gazebo, watching and listening for all the surprises my garden has to offer.
