Late yesterday evening a very active thunderstorm passed through this part of the valley, moving northwest from the Cascades, bringing with it a spectacular display of lightning and enough thunder to wake the dead. And yet somehow, I fell asleep before it was over — but not before I heard the music of heavy rain landing on the roof and on the plants outside. That, and being generally exhausted from […]
Today I started removing our last big swath of ivy, which looked something like a green glacier flowing down from the wide, mounded base of the fir tree in the southeast corner of the backyard — the leafy “ice” being about two and a half feet deep and matted with summer spider webs, twigs, needles, and cones, twenty feet long, and six feet wide. When I’m done, there will be […]
Cedar, juniper, green maple, red maple, pine. Arborvitae, crape myrtle, rhododendron, barberry, apricot. Blueberry, grape, fig, birch, fir. Grasses. Such, in varying numbers, constitute the perennials on this relatively average-sized suburban lot. Hosta, fern, moss. Lilac. Ivy. Rose. To arrive at a complete list, one would need to comb the area with notebook in hand, to look carefully, see calmly, patiently, making it the work of a lifetime, his own […]
William Michaelian 