From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

I'm a little annoyed at Blogger, which seems to have changed the header in the template I use -- for a while I ended up with two. I spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to fix it, but it did not turn out as I wanted. And now I'm blogging about it. My blog and I have just reached the heights of self-absorbed absurdity.

Time to move on to more beautiful things, such as our backyard, which shines in the early summer. Lilies-of-the-valley are filling in the cool back end of the garden. I know that many people see them as invasive pests, but they are indigenous here. This picture was taken right before they bloomed. Full of promise.

Every time I look at lilies-of-the-valley, I think of a camper I had when I was a counsellor at West Haven United Church Camp. Service clubs used to send children from Jelly Bean Square to one of the church-run camps every summer. West Haven and Kildevil, the Anglican Camp, were top prizes. The Salvation Army camp, Silver Birches, less so.

My camper, Kim, had been to Silver Birches the year before, where she learned this hymn, which she sang in a raspy voice each morning: He's the Lily of the Valley, he's the bright and Morning Star; he's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul.

Kim was an imaginative child. One morning she ran up from the beach breathlessly telling me that we could not swim or canoe that day because there was a whale in the lake. I told her not to worry, that whales were only found in salt water. She paused for a moment, breathed in, and said "Well then, I guess it's a shark."

Back in the garden, we also have a ton of tiny, buttery daffodils.


We planted many tulips, which were almost all eaten by squirrels. A few survived. This one pops up in the middle of a bunch of globe thistles that will bloom beautifully later in the summer.


The very first area we planted was a rock garden, where creeping phlox makes a soft green and lavender mountain. No danger of mountaintop removal here. Note the mint peeking through. It goes everywhere but we keep it under control by cooking with it. One of the best recipes is grilled eggplant with a salty-minty-garlicky sauce.


These are Labrador violets. (We also have Labrador tea.) The violets are cosied up to a sedum that our friend Susan (aka "Mrs. Friend") gave us a couple of years ago. It is doing amazingly well. We must have dropped a piece in a crack in the paved driveway, where it thrives. There's a message about tenacity in that little plant.


Not-so-plain Spirea. Gold, red, and green all on one little branch.


The lilac is our spring jewel. It had a hard time last year but this spring was overloaded with blooms. They were bent almost to the ground after a heavy rainfall, and I had to gently shake them dry so they wouldn't break.


Its dark purple blossoms perfume the yard, scatter themselves over Teya's and Bodil's stones, and provide cover for the robins as they dip in the birdbath.


There's still an awful lot we have to learn and there are still gaps to fill, plants to move, missteps to correct. Here's to the faithful gardener who keeps it all going.