(Howell Creek Radio Address for May 12, 2012 -- ) Roots and Genesis ================= The forecast called for rain today, but the clouds cut us a deal, for they were in a hurry. They gave us until seven o'clock to get our act together, gathered themselves up in clumps and took off in a kind of tribal lope, to run some unavoidable errand. This kind of borrowed time is always a good omen. Yesterday, I buckled down and bought a lawn mower. You may remember a couple of weeks ago I read a Robert Frost poem[^1] which contained the following couplet: > That made me hear the wakening birds around > And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground. It was probably that bit of old verse that decided me in favour of a push reel mower, the old kind with the cylindrical blades and no engine. I don't care two cents about burning fossil fuels to mow our little lawn -- except perhaps as regards the cost of the stuff -- but on principle, the more of our life we can model after old poetry, the more we surround ourselves with the old quiet, the old nature, and the old peace. I was eager to try out the elegant little machine, not least because I'd allowed the grass to grow to a prodigious length. But first, Trixie and I had an errand to run. There is a medieval superstition that stolen plants grow best, so Trixie and I are trying both the purchased and the stolen kinds. Last Monday, Petrol gave us a tip that there were good violets and moss to be had from the woods at Basset Creek, so we we took a cardboard box and a trowel, and traipsed into the forest to steal some. Trixie bought some glass vases like large wine glasses without stems, and put the moss and the violets in them with some little painted mushrooms, and now nearly every room in the house has its own miniature garden in glass. * * * Maureen and Bridget Boland write[^2], > If a garden always expresses in some way the mind and spirit of the gardener, is it too fanciful to believe that something of the peace we find in old gardens comes from the steps that its makers took to ensure it? The "old garden" they are talking about it one of our great goals: not just two-dimensional islands of flowers in a lake of mown grass, but a whole garden, a three-dimensional arboretum of quiet canopied by trees and hedged with weather-worn ledgestone walls. The only problem is that these things take many seasons and years to cultivate, and we're starting very small, we're starting from near-absolute _scratch_. Anxious to make a good start on the labour of many seasons, we drove off to the state fairgrounds for a special sale, and spent exactly one hundred dollars on seedlings: blue poppies, Impatiens, Jacob's Ladder, Astilbe, and some begonias. Our reverence for medieval plant-lore notwithstanding, it's planting time _now_, and we wouldn't have a garden at all this year if we waited to find and thieve a planting of every flower on our list. My sister Elsa did let us root around the side of her house for some ferns as well. We raked wet leaves and sticks out from amongst the line of bushes on the north side of Swaledale House to create little pockets of cultivated space, and we put all the ferns and all the flowers in and watered them. And truth be told, after all that work it didn't look much different than it had before we started. But it will soon. They say the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, and that the second-best time is now. It turns out you have to go for second-best before you can have the first choice. So that's what we're doing. * * * Synopsis ---------- Radio address for May 12, 2012, about our Original Garden, which doesn't look like very much compared to the way we imagined it. Tie-ins to Mother's Day are subtle, if even at all extant. Music cues are _Over the Hills and Far Away_ from [_Chirping of the Nightingale_][1] and [_Upward Over the Mountain_][2] by Iron and Wine. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004XZUGOS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004XZUGOS "(affiliate link)" [2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000YMY0E6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000YMY0E6 "(affiliate link)" [^1] _A Tuft of Flowers_, read in the [radio address for April 7, 2012](http://jdueck.net/article/365/bees-in-the-air) [^2] [_Gardeners' Lore: Plantings, Potions, and Practical Wisdom_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0880015705/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0880015705) by Maureen and Bridget Boland