The Lazy Blogger's Garden Tour, Part 2

This will be the herb edition, starting with lots of mint. Semper Mentha! As I mentioned in Part 1, my primary philosophy of gardening is to plant nice weeds and step back. I plan to have a more well-rounded herb garden eventually, but for starting out it's always a plus if the herb has an invasive growth habit.

From earlier this month, l-r: Apple Mint, Spearmint, Chocolate Mint(?), Lemon Balm. I researched the mints and their larger family, lamiaceae, lest you think I'm making this up about invasive growth habits. The Force is strong with this family; almost all of our longest-established herbs are part of it, including the long row of mints up against the back fence. Over the years, they have grown together and I'm not sure if there's any Peppermint left. So we're attempting to weed them back to a modest and more clearly defined patch for each variety.

Chocolate Mint seems to be easily overwhelmed by the other mint cousins. I found this patch and pulled out all the Apple Mint around it. Chocolate Mint is a hybrid of Peppermint (mentha piperita).

Here's the long view of the fence, starting just after the Chocolate Mint; it's mostly spearmint (mentha spicata) in the immediate foreground; that's the legendary plum tree in the background.

Orange Mint... we had some years ago planted in a different spot but it died out, proving that mint doesn't always invade. This was bought this spring, and we planted it where we had cleared out some Apple Mint.  Orange Mint is also a variety of Peppermint. I am not at all sure that we have any true Peppermint left in the mint bed, and so we may need to buy some of that too.

By far the dominant mint, with the most invasive growth habit, is Apple Mint (mentha suaveolens). It's fuzzy, and not quite as strong-smelling as the other varieties. It's nice enough, but it's the variety we've been weeding out the most lately. We've been making plenty of mint tea.

Moving on to the L-shaped brick raised bed, which I have been thinking of as an herb garden for many years; this is the year I'm really trying! I planted a packet of Cumin seed here; I've never tried growing this herb before. It's a member of the Apiaceae family, which also includes carrots, parsley, celery, lovage, dill, fennel, cilantro and caraway. I am letting the broad-leafed plant grow because I think it might be Borage, reseeded from a previous year. The hydra-headed bindweed is a real problem in this bed, but I am going after it regularly and it's less discouraging than in the past.

Oregano, another member of the mint family, is naturalized throughout our yard. This may be close to where we originally planted it, but it is quite literally all over. It's at least a good-flavored variety.

I planted two Cilantro plants and sowed two beds of seed around them; so far so good.

 Here's a gift from the VP's garden last year; Feverfew. I had no idea it would get so tall. It's already overshadowing the Lemon Thyme I planted this year.

Two well-established Rosemary bushes; my long-term plan is to thin out virtually everything else around them and put in some more herbs, but the wild phlox and daisies and other unidentified plants need to be pulled out.

When I planted this sage 17 years ago, I did not know there was a peony almost right under it because it was late in the season. There might be two inches separating them. I want to grow more sage and thyme if I can. I didn't get a picture of the parsley, basil, marjoram, chives, dill, pineapple sage, lemon verbena or fennel. I'd like to relocate my lovage from its current location by the back door. I'd also sometime like to try savory and caraway.

Closing with a picture of lavender because it's so pretty, and one of my favorites. I toy with the idea of getting a still to distill my own essential oils; it probably would not be cost-effective though. But with multiple lavender, rosemary, mint varieties and lemon balm, it might be fun to try.

The Lazy Blogger's Garden Tour, Part 1

The trouble with being a lazy blogger, or even just giving yourself a much-needed break, is that life keeps barrelling ahead. Thinking about blogging doesn't count, but sometimes you take a bunch of pictures while thinking about blogging. And then two weeks pass, and you take another bunch of pictures while thinking about blogging, and then you have a multi-part series and a quick photo-dump on Facebook just won't do. So let's just go into this with the pics from 2 weeks ago and see how far I get.

The Foxgloves were really pretty this year. They re-seed themselves and do well in our soil. Steve and I believe the secret to gardening success is to live in a favorable climate where even the weeds are nice to have around. Most of our flowers require no effort on our part.

The only real challenge with foxgloves is that they're so tall, they'll need to be taken out after blooming so they don't block the sun from the tomatoes behind them.

Forget-me-nots also are weeds in our garden, and I took this picture on the tail end of the brief time they look nice.

California poppies, also comfortably naturalized, along with lemon balm.

More foxglove, hanging out by the grapevines.

See, this is the trouble; we could be better vegetable gardeners if we weeded up the things that just settle in, like these columbines...but they're too pretty!

And of course, with our 100+ year-old house and a flowerbed made from the foundation of an old barn, plants just settle in.

Here's my sage in blossom. I have a master plan for the L-shaped raised bed with the brick border, made from the old foundation. I've had it for seventeen years, and by gum, this is the year I turn that bed into an herb garden. The sage has been there since we moved in, but it has to fight with some wild phlox and daisies and peonies

Every year I like to have a hanging basket and see how long I can keep it alive. I favor lobelias because they are such a pretty blue and peonies because they usually do well in hanging baskets.

 The rhododendron bushes are probably at least 75 years old.

We pruned this red one back pretty severely last year and it did pretty well.

Some of the peonies. That narrow strip by the driveway is tricky, but they are content.

So is this shrub, whatever it is. Now that Tertia is almost 17 I suppose we need to remove the gate we used to keep her off the street when she was a toddler.

 I love living in a climate where you can grow lavender so easily.

All these pictures were taken when Steve and Daniel were on their road-trip back from graduation, about two weeks ago. Parts 2 and possibly 3 coming up soon.

Time, Like an Ever-rolling Stream

We were at Grove City College last weekend for Daniel's graduation. Graduations are happy events, even when they have to be held inside because of the rain, with limited seating in the gym and overflow in the IM room.  The Baccalaureate on Friday night at least was on the quad, facing into a beautiful sunset:

Michael Horton spoke at Baccalaureate; and in a last-minute change from William Bennett, who was sick, the gentle doctor Ben Carson spoke at Graduation. It was mercifully free of political speechmaking, and full of the joy of life and finding one's purpose in life, with grace and humor. Afterwards, students and families crowded in spots all over campus, processing the momentous life change, connecting with old friends briefly before parting once again, packing up dorm rooms and reminiscing about old days.

I've written before of the disorientation of returning to my own Alma Mater as the parent of a current student. I see the archetypal faces of generations of students, of earlier versions of my own friends, almost rushing past me, superimposed on the fresh young faces of the current crop of graduates who are living only in this present moment. I see the places where old, diamond-leaded windows have been replaced with newer versions, or where 1930's bathroom tiles coexist with automatic soap dispensers, and I concede that the newer ways of managing things are probably better even as I am nostalgic for my particular group of archetypal friends and patterns of life from the old days, which can never come again. I remember the day of my own graduation, and how anticlimactic it was to pile into the family van and drive away, never again to experience the same heady mix of personalities and intellectual stimulation that made life intensely real and personal and engaging for four years. It was a loss, but also a beginning, and I wish for all graduates that they may be able to make a good beginning and keep the best of the good things they are of necessity leaving behind.

I am so grateful for the good friendships Daniel has made; the kind hospitality given to us by the McClelland family after packing up the dorm room and saying many good-byes, easing the transition to the future with good food and baby kittens. I'm glad Daniel and Steve get to travel back overland, taking one more version of the great father-son road-trip. So far they have seen Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, Lincoln's birthplace and boyhood home, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, MS, Hot Springs National Park, Fort Smith...

The rest of the family flew out and back, and we are mostly but not completely recovered from that red-eye. Here at home, another school year is hurtling to its close and there are many details to manage and coordinate. I feel the ever-rolling stream of Time as it bears its sons away. It is good to hang on to the constancy of the Creator in the midst of it all.

Utinam

Last year the Republican Party was in great shape. We had a crowded field of candidates, many of them highly qualified. I was looking forward to a stimulating primary season, and the cream rising to the top. That didn't happen. I kept meaning to write a blog post about my favorites, but you'll have to make do with this. I took this article and arranged all the Republican candidates in my approximate, descending order of popularity. It isn't the exact order in which they dropped out of the race. However, it's close enough that I find it depressing. (I'm leaving out Gilmore and Pataki because I'm not sure exactly who they are and I wouldn't likely have voted for them even if I did).

Jeb Bush: what can I say, I've been a Bush loyalist since 1988. Executive experience and class.
Scott Walker: executive experience, nice Midwest buzz
Marco Rubio: solid, energetic, a Hispanic who speaks passionately about values I share.
Rick Perry: executive experience and, you know, Texas
Bobby Jindal: executive experience, articulate and principled
Carly Fiorina: passionate and articulate, better than anyone else on the pro-life issue.
Lindsay Graham: really solid on national defense and foreign policy
Ben Carson: gentle and appealing to our better natures, at least until he endorsed Trump.
John Kasich: executive experience; quirky but hey, he's from Ohio. I'm a little embarrassed I didn't know more about him.
Huckabee and Santorum: I like them both but they had their chances in previous cycles.
Chris Christie: big guy, big heart, fun to listen to until he endorsed Trump
Ted Cruz: Too Tea Party, too prone to fakey stunts like the government shutdown. At least he was good on the pro-life issue, but there were so many better candidates. I only started liking him when he was the only alternative to Trump.
Rand Paul: it's an academic issue whether I could have voted for him.
Donald Trump: He's toxic. I can't vote for him. He doesn't pass the decency test. He belittles, sneers, mocks military heroes and handicapped people, and lies. He's misogynistic, racist, narcissistic, and has no coherent plan for leadership. He would alienate our closest allies and ramp up an atmosphere encouraging constant violence, just to serve his own huuge ego.

Congratulations to Hillary, your spoiler did good work for you. I assume you'll manage to keep indictment at bay for the duration of your White House stay. Maybe you'll be able to pay Trump back some of his expenses with your $300,000 average speaking honoraria. You can take comfort in knowing you are preferable to Ebola. I can't vote for you either, but the country survived the first Clinton presidency and I suppose you're marginally more ethical than Bill.

I've identified as a Republican since 1976, before I was old enough to vote in anything but the 4th grade mock election. I look at those top 7 names on my list and think there are still some decent people left. But there may not be enough decent people left in the country to deserve decent leadership. I'll be interested to watch the Convention. I would expect the principled, decent people to make a significant gesture as they cut ties with the party of Lincoln.

*Utinam is the Latin word indicating a wish; translate it "would that" or "if only" and you can probably guess at the conclusion.

Throwback Thursday

Twenty-six years ago today, a lot of people ... the number was hotly and endlessly contested ... gathered on the Mall in Washington D.C. to "be counted" for life. I was there at the Rally for Life 1990. Here's the C-SPAN archived footage, in which I strongly doubt that I appear. I was backstage, wearing an apron, a red STAFF t-shirt, a walkie-talkie and as close to 80's hair as I ever got. I was on the team that planned it. Tent rentals, mugs, pins, bumper stickers, meetings with Secret Service, Park Police, FBI background checks, arrangements for VIP pickup and transport, hotel accommodations, 1st aid stations, portapotties, the press pen, audio hook-ups, table rentals. Jacki, bless her dear Arkansas heart, and her massive Rally notebook. No sleep in more than 24 hours. "Water. Water. Water. Water." "Tell the truth! Tell the truth!" and a stonewalling press corps. All of this, before the internet, and before readily available bottled water. It boggles the mind.

It remains a hugely formative event in my life. Here are my two most iconic memories from that frenzied time: I got to drive around the grounds of the Washington Monument, from station to station, in a golf cart, after dark. I cannot express how cool this was.

And I was frisked by Dan Quayle's Secret Service agents. See, I discovered that you don't want to be running anywhere close to a Secret Service agent and their protectee (who was onstage talking at the time, I think), even when you were told to escort the audio guy to the press enclosure fast because he needed to set up the link-up to the White House for President George H. W. Bush's address to the crowd, which was scheduled just as soon as Dan Quayle finished his speech. You don't want to be running, or even walking fast and looking nervous about getting your guy to his place on time, because if you are, the big guys with shades and earpieces will be all around you and even in your pockets before you know what is happening. Actually, it wasn't bad; I was just startled and they must have decided I was 115 pounds of not-threatening pretty fast. And the audio guy, whoever he was, got through too.

It was being part of such a complex, massive event as this that taught me not to be afraid of big, complex challenges, and that if you are patient and organized enough they aren't quite so daunting. But no one is rushing to plan another Rally.

Randomday

Life marches on, Randomdays come and go, and the blog has been neglected. This picture was taken on Palm Sunday, during the 12-hour window where both boys were home on Spring Break and we made it to church and Teresa kindly took our picture for the bulletin board before Peter had to head back.

These days, I find myself caught in a half-world between empty-nester and mother of teenage girls. I miss the boys terribly, but the teenagers at home remind me it's not such a great thing for kids to be in the nest all the time, and it's a good thing for them to grow up, and I hope they will. Daniel is barrelling full speed ahead toward college graduation; Peter is balancing college with plans for his military training, involving things like jumping out of helicopters. Tertia is in 10th grade in the local public high school special ed class, and Quarta is in 8th grade at Cedar Tree.

Added to this is the bizarre sensation of being a dinosaur, about to retire from teaching after 16 years. Other people ask what I will do. Because I'm not really old enough to retire, and apparently I don't look it either, so I guess I'll take that as a compliment. You have to remember I only got into teaching... kind of accidentally. Yes, that's it, the Accidental Classicist. Here's the short version: Y2K. I was homeschooling Daniel for kindergarten, Peter was making a monthly trip to the ER (that's another whole blog post), Tertia was an infant who required weekly therapy and a lot of specialist medical appointments, and we were new in town with no close friends. I burned out on homeschooling after only 6 months of that, and I knew Daniel was going to be the easy one of the three. And Cedar Tree was meeting as a homeschool co-op just down the street; in fact, we bought our house from the outgoing pastor of that church and one of the founding leaders of the school. So when we enrolled Daniel in the school, I knew I would have to work a few hours a week to qualify as part of the co-op. I listed my literature, writing, and French backgrounds, music, and the fact that I had studied Latin myself in high school. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. That was the only skill they were interested in at all. And here I am sixteen years later, well and truly typecast.

It's not such a bad thing. I love Latin. I genuinely like all the kids I teach, unfiltered as they are. Even the ones who write satiric tone-poems about how much they hate Latin and find me insufferably boring. But every time I start getting melancholy about leaving, something happens, vide supra, to affirm that I've stayed more than long enough. I wish there was a way to get graduate level credit for all the work I've done over these years. But I'm no longer an early-thirties mom with young kids to get through school. Life moves on. I'm hoping it's not too late to be a stay-at-home mom for a few more years.

Random things since my last blogging: we watched The Martian, The Peanuts Movie, Zootopia, Laura, and The Intern. I've joined Goodreads and am trying to figure out how not to have it flood my inbox with updates. I've been working on re-imagining the L-shaped brick garden bed, left over from the foundation of the old barn, as an herb garden. Some of the fennel, dill, and caraway seeds from my spice cabinet are sprouting. Cilantro and cumin too. I keep working on pulling up bindweed... it's like the Hydra. I've been trying to sort out the 4-5 kinds of mint in the mint bed and get them growing separate from each other. Apple mint is the one that grows the most vigorously and, of course, I like it the least. It's spider season inside; I keep the vacuum handy in the living room with the attachments to suck the spiders off the ceiling. It averages 4 a day. It's allergy season outside; April is the cruelest month. We had beautiful weather for several days, then the last few we've had heavy rains. Smudge didn't even show for his morning food yesterday; he was probably in one of his hiding spots. He was back last night and this morning, though. No sewing and very little knitting has been done. I have been spending a great deal of time worrying about the disintegration of American culture and the downfall of Western Civilization, and trying to find signs of hope in the current political situation. 

Yesterday I found this lovely quote on Tatoeba: 

Books are ships which pass through the vast sea of time. - Sir Francis Bacon

I traced it to what I think is its source, although it is a fragment of the whole sentence: 
Literae celebrari debent, quae, tanquam naves sulcantes oceanum temporis.

Little Blue Flowers

They are called Veronica.  This time of year they come out and look remarkably pretty by the front fence.  It is a ground cover that we bought years back, and has spread nicely each year, and when I find myself sitting at my computer worrying about the state of politics or 7th grade, or the latest nastiness on the internet, I can go outside and kneel down and take a picture of them and it somehow gets a little better.

I kind of wish they would last all summer long, but they don't.  I will have to find other little blue flowers to meet that basic human need in July.  But maybe by July we will have figured out how to fix the smashed-in parts of the fence.

Peter was home for his spring break 2 weeks ago, then Daniel was home last week, and they are both back at school now.  Quarta is off in Olympia at the Teen Pact legislative camp with her 8th grade class; it is just Tertia and Steve and I at home this week.  I already gave the 3rd quarter final exam to Quarta's class, and have only 7th grade to worry about this week. Then spring break begins for us, but we are not planning a road trip anywhere.  I hope to be caught up on my grading pretty soon.

I haven't been knitting or sewing much, but I'm filling my time with language study and curriculum writing.  It's a little more enjoyable and addictive when you are your own boss, learning what you want when you want, and interacting with people who aren't forced to be in your class and resentful of it. Besides Duolingo, where I have become a regular but unofficial advocate of Latin, there is Memrise, where there are now two courses based on my Latin for Duolingo course.  And recently I discovered Tatoeba.org, a fascinating database of sentences in many languages.  And based on some of those sentences, Clozemaster.com, another site dedicated to "gamifying" language learning.  It feels a little sad to be looking at my final quarter of school teaching, and I'm sure it will be hard to let it go. But so many opportunities exist online, and I have been in the middle-school track for longer than any of my students have been alive... and it's time to move on.

Vinca, Violets, Rosemary, Forget-me-nots, Lithodora, Lobelia, Hydrangea, Lavender, Jonny-Jump-ups... and maybe more that I haven't discovered yet.