In which the variety and loveliness of the common clover flower is revealed

In this morning's Washington Post, someone asked the garden columnist, Joel M. Lerner, the following question:

Can I have an environmentally safe lawn that looks good without using products that will harm the Chesapeake Bay? The clover was nice a couple of months ago but is now sprouting white tops, which attract bees.

The answer given was, essentially, clover looks nice and bees are good.

So, later in the afternoon, I took the camera out into the backyard and got down on my belly in the grass to check it out for myself.

In which I start again, with lower expectations and a different take on personal privacy and the World Wide Web

When the mind wanders away in meditation-- as it does, again and again-- you just start over, again and again.

In that spirit, I'm starting again here.

Building nests in the wrong places

Every spring, some bird builds a nest in the holly bush next to our front door. Sometimes more than one bird will do this. These nests are well-snuggled into the bush but very close to where we walk in and out, and to the place where we keep the hose and the rake. No baby birds have ever hatched and fledged within this bush. Indeed, so far as we can tell, no eggs have ever been laid in one of these nests. The birds complete the nests and then abandon them. One such nest was built and abandoned last weekend:

It has always seemed to me that the birds who build these nests might be be same ones who eat the holly berries later in the year. My theory has been that the bush looks ideal, full and quiet, in the pre-dawn hour of the day on which their instincts tell them to make a nest, so they do it. It is only when they finish constructing and sit down in it to rest that they realize how unprotected it is, how much we will disturb it even if we try not to do so. Then, I imagine, they quickly leave their mistake behind and find a new place.

My husband has a slightly different theory of what is going on with these birds. He says that the male bird builds it and then shows it to the female, who rejects it.

Shortly after the appearance of this year's empty nest in the front yard, we started to hear loud scrambling sounds and much tweeting and chirping in the roof of the back porch. I watched for awhile and learned that a bird was bringing twigs, grass, and polyethylene strings to a small open space between the porch roof and the house. It's the small, dark triangle near the center of this picture:

We first noticed this last Saturday morning. Thinking of the birds that regularly are not able to live in the bush because of our presence, we thought for a few hours that we might let them stay there and raise a bird family. We held that thought long enough for them to actually complete a nest, which (I hope) is dimly visible in this somewhat exposure-adjusted picture:
Then we watched as the male bird paused on top of the hot tub with another load of twigs in his beak. This is what he (predictably) did:
I had forgotten that, where there are birds, there is bird poop. And a closer look showed that, in just one morning of nest-building, a lot of guano had been deposited. So we (predictably) decided that the birds really couldn't stay there. We removed the nest and blocked the space with some asphalt tile. It was quite a nice little space for a small creature, and I am surprised that nothing has tried to live there before. Then we scrubbed away the droppings. The bird came back a few times over the next two days. The last time we saw it, it was salvaging the materials that we had dropped on the ground when we destroyed the first nest, carrying them away to some new, I hope safer, place.

I

Perspective

Last week I looked out my window at work and saw a small army of gardeners arriving in the plaza below.

They unloaded about a hundred flats of pansies, yellow ones and purple ones. Over the course of two days they installed these flowers in the planting beds, spaced very precisely so that the beds will look like solid purple or yellow shapes when the plants reach their fullness, about a month from now. Then, as happened last year, the pansies will be ripped out before they become straggly and go to seed. They will be replaced by summer flowers, also in solid color blocks, probably petunias.

My mindstream was a flood of negative judgments about this "instant garden," about the chemicals that were probably used at the nursery to create these highly uniform plants, about how the workers were probably not paid very well, about how the flowers themselves were somehow being exploited by being used in this way. Of course, to go with all this aversion there was also this: how nice might it be to have this skilled, industrious landscaper platoon visit my wild and weedy yard with their nursery flats and their mulch?

One day at lunch time I went down for a look. One of the gardeners smiled when I went to take a close-up picture. His words stopped me right there and made me take a deep, full breath: "Very beautiful flowers."

Inaugural Post, In Which a Butternut Squash Becomes a Metaphor for Spiritual Life

It was an ordinary organic local butternut squash, very similar to this one.

I did not know it was going to become a metaphor, so I did not take its picture while it was still whole. I bought it on a rainy cold day when, by grace of a morning dentist appointment, I had the morning off from work and thus the opportunity to go into the organic grocery store on a weekday morning when the shelves and bins were full and the checkout lines were short. I bought a lot of good stuff, including the squash.

Butternut squashes, in my experience, are hard to penetrate. The last one I wanted to cook refused my efforts with one knife and bent another one; I had to ask my more muscular husband to hack it up for me. So this time I consulted all of the cookbooks on my shelf before approaching the vegetable. The consensus was: prepare the squash by peeling away the hard outside part first, then cut. This approach worked and I created from it a pile of hard, brilliant orange cubes.


Now my squash was accessible, but still not eatable. I was deeply drawn to a Molly Katzen recipe for roast squash, but it called for roasted walnut oil and pomegranate seeds, exotic ingredients not usually found in my house. I put the squash cubes away in the refrigerator.

After a week in which I went to three stores, failed to find any kind of walnut oil, and came to realize that I did not know how to choose a ripe pomegranate, I just threw some of the squash cubes into a pot of channa dal on the stove. I imagined that they would look good in the finished dish.

When the dinner had cooked long enough I lifted the lid of the pot and saw-- no pieces of squash at all. But their sweetness was throughout the meal.