Spring!

It’s finally, really, truly Spring! The picture above shows one of my Japanese maples leafing out in the woodland garden, just beside a Japanese temple pine and an old acuba.

Today, on Twitter, @selenafox shared this lovely video:

Hail Flora! Hail Persephone! Hail the Maiden!

Here, in the Magical MidAtlantic, we’ve been acknowledging Spring ever since Eostara, but it’s only this week that it’s felt as if the trees really went green, the pointy things (hostas, jack-in-the-pulpits, lilies, toad lilies, and ferns like flames) began to emerge from underground, and the birds began to join my morning meditation. (In the Winter, I have coffee, silence, and what Dylan Thomas called the “close and holy darkness.” In the Spring, I have coffee, growing light, birdsong — what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “Lo! Morning at the brown brink eastward springs! And [Sophia] over the bent world broods with warm breast and with Ah! bright wings.”)

Here, hat tip to @allisonlily, is another lovely meditation on Spring:

Then I see it, my special spot, the birch trees about to burst open their buds, everything hanging in anticipation. Narcissus flower everywhere underneath the white boles, running down through the patch of woodland that hides the stream from prying eyes. Spots of yellow, like little suns, laugh and smile as they stretch towards our nearest star.

I walk beneath the birch trees, looking at the fox den and rabbit holes. I find my place, a clear space of ground and here I put down my bag. Looking around me, there are branches everywhere as the recent winds of springtime have brought many down. I gather some up, together with pieces of flint and quartz that lie upon the mossy earth. I make my circle of sticks and stones, and smile at the thought.

Lighting the incense, I walk around the circle several times, then place it carefully upon a bare patch of earth. I take my bottle of water and allow a thin stream of water to bless this sacred space. Standing at the four directions I honour them for all that they are. Within the centre I recognise and remind myself of the three worlds: land, sea and sky. I use the ritual gestures that I have created over the years to emphasize my words, to bring them into action. I breathe in the air, filled with the scents of spring, face the stream and call to my goddess.

“Lady of the sacred flame. Lady of the sacred water. Where fire and water meet is the greatest power. I honour you with all that I am, for all that you are. Lady of healing, lady of transformation, lady of poetry, lady of creativity. Show me your mysteries. I open my soul to you, to hear your song.”

A wave of energy comes towards me, nearly knocking me off my feet. I balance, and turn around, knowing that there is incense behind me. I move carefully around the incense, walking as if through treacle or dark, sticky molasses. I need to lie down. The Earth is pulling me down, down into her mysteries. Carefully I lower myself to the ground, a pair of hawks overhead crying as they circle, riding the thermals.

I close my eyes. The earth thrums beneath me, the sky singing above me. I hear it. I hear The Song.

The entire post is worth a read.

Here are a few more pictures from my garden: here in the shadow of Columbia, in the State named for the Maiden, in a spot where I’ve done magic for over a decade, in the place where the great-great-many-times-great granddaughter of the tarragon that I planted is sprouting in the herb bed, where the great grandson of my first cardinal shows up when I’m brewing coffee and demands that I put out seed with which he can court his lady, where, just now, the gentle rain is making the grass so green it would make your heart ache.

May it be so for you.

Bonus Sunday Garden Blogging

Last Winter’s brutal cold killed nearly all of my Spring camellia buds, but it looks as if I’m going to have quite a crop of Autumn camellias.

Late Spring in the Garden

I thought you might like a garden tour today.

Here’s one of my jack-in-the-pulpits:

Shortly after the jacks bloom, the wisteria flowers:

Then, the iris open up:

And, just now, the foxgloves are in their glory:

What’s blooming in your garden? In your life?

Remembering Spring

Photo by the blogger; if you copy, please link back.

Lilies

Growing in the woodland garden.

Photo by the blogger; if you copy, please link back.

In the Garden

My voodoo lily’s in bloom. It’s beautiful but . . . pungent.

Wisteria Wordless Wednesday

Wisteria, SouthEast Garden Shed

What’s growing in your garden?

Photo by the blogger; if you copy please link back.

Saturday in the Garden PotPourri

* This just gives me goosebumps:

As an old woman watching the world change, I just have to say: The Kids Are Alright.

I think the idea of building the greenhouse on the roof of a grocery store is just bloody brilliant. It’s like wheels on suitcases — you just sit there and wonder how no one ever thought of this before. (It’s like my one, overriding idea for any new house: the laundry room should be ON THE SAME FLOOR as the bedroom closets.)

Imagine if every urban apartment/condo building had, due to simple zoning laws, similar greenhouses for community gardens so that the people who live there could grow their own flowers, vegetables, herbs. If we can regulate the required number of parking spaces, I think we can regulate greenhouses on the roofs.

Most of us, we’re urban Witches. We live in cities. We should be doing spells for our cities to create more of these wonderful solutions. Beltane’s coming; that’s a good time to do spells for your landbase, especially if you live in the city.

* Old Moss Woman posted this poem, which is new to me:

Babylon by Robert Graves

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all’s poetry with him.
Rhyme and music flow in plenty
For the lad of one-and-twenty,
But Spring for him is no more now
Than daisies to a munching cow;
Just a cheery pleasant season,
Daisy buds to live at ease on.
He’s forgotten how he smiled
And shrieked at snowdrops when a child,
Or wept one evening secretly
For April’s glorious misery.
Wisdom made him old and wary
Banishing the Lords of Faery.
Wisdom made a breach and battered
Babylon to bits: she scattered
To the hedges and ditches
All our nursery gnomes and witches.
Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves,
Drag their treasures from the shelves.
Jack the Giant-killer’s gone,
Mother Goose and Oberon,
Bluebeard and King Solomon.
Robin, and Red Riding Hood
Take together to the wood,
And Sir Galahad lies hid
In a cave with Captain Kidd.
None of all the magic hosts,
None remain but a few ghosts
Of timorous heart, to linger on
Weeping for lost Babylon.

Maybe one thing that differentiates Pagans is that we don’t get too old for Spring and Fairyland.

One thing that I keep teaching G/Son is that fairies are, as his admin-law Nonna phrases it, “both arbitrary AND capricious.” (It never surprises me when federal agencies behave in this manner; I’ve spent all my life with fairies.) I’m trying to figure out where in my garden I’d put this plaque:

* This has been a cool April, and we’re weeks away from the weather described below, but I love Goodman’s description of gardening in the hot summer sun:

At the end of the morning, when the sun’s force had made it too hot to work anymore, it was time to go. It was hard to leave the garden sometimes — especially later in the summer when things really began to grow. Then sometimes I stayed on foolishly in the heat, working away, once or twice nearly fainting in the furious noon sun. But it was also satisfying to stand back at the edge of the garden and look at the good work [that] I had done, to see how clear the land looked around the plants that had been weeded and how gratifying the freshly turned earth looked around a row of plants. They had been tended.

I would take my pail and shovel and whatever other equipment I had and go back to the car. It was fine, driving back to St. Sebastien after a morning’s work in the garden, my arm muscles throbbing a bit, my face beating from the sun, the window open. I was dirty. I was tired. I was sweaty. I was happy.

~ from French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France by Richard Goodman

* One of the things that I told Landscape Guy when we started working on my garden was that I really wanted to grow arisaema, commonly known as jack-in-the-pulpit. We’ve got a rather nice little colony going in my SouthEast woodland garden, although I think that, in a year or two, I’m going to add a few dozen more. They’re one of my very favorite flowers.

I grow a lot of black flowers and they are notoriously difficult to photograph:

* I garden for many reasons, not the least of which is to feel connected to the vast and mysterious magic going on in my landbase. But, of course, like every gardener, like everyone who’s ever stuck an acorn into a fingerhole or planted a sapling in a suburban yard, I also garden because I believe, mother, Nonna, MiL, teacher, and lawyer that I am, in the future.

As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion — the small, hunched-over figure , her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

~ Onward & Upward in the Garden by E. B. White.

Pictures of jack-in-the-pulpit by the blogger. If you copy, please link back.

Picture found here.

Garden Porn

I am currently possessed by the worst sort of lust.

Picture found here.