I had to remind myself the other day that blogging about gardening and blogging about my life as a gardener, but also my life outside of the garden, is what this space is about.  Why then did I choose to call myself a hermit?

Recently I told a friend in a rather maudlin text message the hardest part about being alone isn’t the pain of loneliness.  No, rather the pain come from surfacing for air, leaving the solitude, and risking contact with people outside of one’s solitude.

Don’t get me wrong!  I’m going to tell every person I come in contact with that has some genuine spark of normal that human beings are dangerous animals that should be avoided at all costs.  I need to be social, but there’s a line to draw between being social and allowing someone into your space.  I wrote about that in my journal about the importance of the gate in a garden, the importance of how the gate functions not only to define the space, but defines who can and can’t enter the space beyond.  It’s control in a way, but it’s also part of creating the safe space, the sacred space, that is the garden.  Or, if you follow the metaphor, the sacred within.

What I’m learning more and more each day is that peace is something not earned, not sought after and found; peace is what exists.  The choice we have as gardeners, as human beings, is how we choose to adapt to that peace.  The last two weeks I’ve found myself trying to create what I thought was what I wanted, but instead it pulled me further from the peace that already existed in my life.  A human being, a man, suffering because of the choices he’s made in his life and perhaps because of the choices that were made around him, has no choice but to return the the agonies of his life.  Do I want to live like that?  Do I want my life to be a reflection of those choices, those distractions, those weeds?

Being a hermit isn’t about being alone.  It’s about making choices, active choices, about the people we want to interact with, how we want to interact with them, and how we choose to spend our solitude:  do I as a hermit want to wallow in being alone, a loneliness that I choose for myself?  Or do I want to instead love the peace that surrounds me in my solitude, choose to admit those into my garden, my peace, who will help the garden to grow?

Every day we are bombarded with choices, from the moment we wake up until the moment we go into our beds at night.  Some of us are meant to be stationary, to live stationary lives, meant to live within the hermitage.  Others of us, like my friend Russel, are meant to go out into the world like a Franciscan and take the message to others, to serve others, to live in the world.  For Russel, living in solitude is against his heart.  He’s spoken recently about moving back to Toronto and I realized after telling him (rather presumptuously I might add) to not act rashly that unless he’s moving, unless he’s settling for short periods in different places, he can’t thrive.  For him, his garden moves with him.  This is the way he tends his garden.  The choice is ours every day to thrive, to flourish, and to choose if we will do this with weeds, with grasses, or with grains.

For my part, my seedlings are an inch tall in some of the peat pods.  Soon I’m going to have to transplant them into other containers, and start seeding my sweet peas.  The melt has begun.  The itch to turn soil has begun.  The square beds are so visible to me now, the pond, the borders of lilies and poppies and the talls; the closer it comes to spring, spring in Saskatchewan, the greater the call to enter the garden.

On my desk, in a tray covered with a clear plastic top, are 72 small peat pellets that have become, in effect, my garden.  Scabiosa, Salvia, Echinops, and Hesperis are all either laying just bellow the surface or on the surface.  The smell is enchanting, deep and rich.

St. Thomas Aquinas, at the end of “Prayer Before Study” writes:

Ingressum instruas, progressum dirigas, egressum compleas.  Tu, qui es verus Deus et homo, qui vivis et regnas in saecula saeculorum.  Amen.

-or-

Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the achievement of my work.  You who are true God and true man, and who lives and reigns forever and ever.  Amen.

I’m trying to memorize the latin, trying to pray the prayer when I rise in the morning, and before I begin anything significant.  So before I planted the seeds, I prayed the prayer.

Not everything that we do is blessed, or appears to be blessed, by the hand of God.  Sometimes we are too far from the actual goal to see the transition between events.  I did not think starting work at the job I am at almost 16 years ago that it would eventually lead me to this place, a place where very shortly the snow will melt and my garden will increase in size.  And yet, the little things like planting the seeds will eventually produce one of two results:  a seedling will appear, or it will not.  A plant will grow and thrive, or it will not.  We are given the opportunity to use all the skills and talents we have acquired to try and make this an easier transition for the potential in the seed.  But sometimes, the soil is too wet or too dry, the seed is buried when it must lay on the top of the soil, a seed is not frozen by winter when the cold is needed to urge the growing.

Every garden is potential; even in that potential there is the possibility of failure, or success. Every year is another effort towards knowing, gaining knowledge, becoming and growing alongside the seedlings.  Plants become old friends.  I have a ficus I purchased when I first moved into the place I’m in now.  This tree has been through everything with me, and other ficus that have grown along side it have died, withered, not nearly become as strong a tree as this one.  The ones that have died are added to my in-head file of “what not to do” or “what is difficult to grow” or “how not to water” or “how to water and feed”.

People are like gardens.  Often we are thrown, or we throw ourselves, into relationships with people and like the seedlings, they either grow and flourish, or they wither.  In some ways, we are only responsible for the actions of our own hands, our own hearts.  We can only turn so much soil, compost, water, prune, and then we are at the mercy of nature.  Nature is the ultimate gardener, and although we do enjoy a hand in participating, she is the ultimate pruner, weeder, harvester, and planter.

So a flower bloomed in my life recently.  It faded very quickly, the petals fell to the ground, and I was left confused, sad, but gladdened as well that I had the opportunity to experience the blossoming.  I know very little about how to be in a relationship.  I can only hope, and pray, that I know far more about growing plants, turning soil, and mowing grass.

In as much as I can, all I have is the ability to choose the seed, plant the seed, do the best to nurture rather than suffocate the seedlings, pot them on, and once mature find a place of rest for the plant.  The snow cannot disappear soon enough.

A garden is only as good as the gardener’s self awareness.  If a gardener cannot intimately know himself, then he cannot enter the garden complete and free, able to see the needs of his plants, the proper portions and placements of things.  Of course, a gardener and a garden have a special relationship that is different from one who enters a garden simply to experience it. In this way, the garden becomes the means by which a gardener know himself.  So in the planning of my own garden I find myself able to buy seed, sketch plans, but not able to fully see what it is that is garden, which has been the expression of a one hundred year old woman from the past forty years, will be.  This was her space before it was mine. I suspect in many ways she must know herself better than I know myself!  So the garden must be an honouring of her, but also an honouring of me.

Because I’m feeling a little alone these days, thought I’d share this poem/video link I found online.

HOW TO BE ALONE by Tanya Davis

If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There’s also the gym. If you’re shy you could hang out with yourself in mirrors, you could put headphones in (guitar stroke).

And there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and meditation. No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously (electric guitar plucking) based on your avoid being alone principals.

The lunch counter. Where you will be surrounded by chow-downers. Employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they — like you — will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

When you are comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner. A restaurant with linen and silverware. You’re no less intriguing a person when you’re eating solo dessert to cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

Go to the movies. Where it is dark and soothing. Alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.
And then, take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you. Stand on the outside of the floor till the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching…because, they’re probably not. And, if they are, assume it is with best of human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating, and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things, down your back like a brook of blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you.
Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there’re always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches might’ve never happened had you not been there by yourself

Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.

You could stand, swathed by groups and mobs or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther for the endless quest for company. But no one’s in your head and by the time you translate your thoughts, some essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept.

Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from preschool over to high school’s groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay. Cuz if you’re happy in your head than solitude is blessed and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you. All experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be releived, keeps things interesting lifes magic things in reach.

And it doesn’t mean you’re not connected, that communitie’s not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. take silence and respect it. if you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it. if your family doesn’t get you, or religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

you could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it
If your heart is bleeding make the best of it
There is heat in freezing, be a testament.

My first year as a member of the horticulture society, I jumped into a minivan filled with middle aged women and we went on a garden tour of three gardens/growers near where I live.  One garden I will never forget:  it belonged to two really sweet guys who were very much into botany.  There were three distinct rooms in that garden that we were shown, a herbaceous garden with lawn that opened into a massive squared vegetable and herb garden straight out of England, followed by a reproduction of an art deco garden they saw while traveling Europe that included a long oval pond made out of red brick, surrounded by peonies (the sword dancer will probably make the next plants I love section), day lilies, perennials, and a chicken coupe at the end of the lane that looked like a little swiss cottage. Those two may not have realized it but the gardens on that farm outside Earl Gray, Saskatchewan, not only inspired me beyond words but have left a lasting impression on me.

One plant in particular that I snatched up the first time I found it at the garden centre is this one, Dictamnus Albus (the gas plant, not to be confused as google does with actual gas producing plants, or gas using electrical power plants, or certain members of my immediate and extended family).  It took four years to bloom, and there were a few times I didn’t think it would get any bigger than a small clump I could hold in the palm of my hand.  This past year for some reason, the plant took off and bushed out, and up, and threw some beautiful blueberry sundae and cream coloured flowers.

This plant has an interesting history.  Apparently in the summer, I was told, it produces a rather pungent and volatile gas around its foliage and flowers.  The word is that this particular plant produces enough of this gas that if one puts an open flame close enough to the leaves, the gas will burn off all over the plant giving the appearance of a burning bush.

Heaven forbid.

I haven’t tried igniting the plant as of yet, I was too overcome with joy to see it bloom.  I did however bend down on both knees and stick my hooter into the blossoms to see how they smelled.

Awful.

It’s become one of the treasures in my perennial garden and I’m a little nervous about having to dig it up and move it over to the new garden because it’s supposed to be “sensitive about it’s roots being disturbed”…meaning there’s a good chance that if and when I do decide to dig it up, I’m probably going to have to give it a good distance around the base of the plant to try and take up as much soil as possible without disturbing the roots.  God forbid I do.  I thought about collecting seed from the pods and went out a few weeks before Christmas only to realize any seeds that might have been in the pods are long gone.

Mental note:  collect seeds sooner.  I’m such a rookie.

If it doesn’t make it, I’ll have to try and dig another one up somewhere in the garden centres around here, cross my fingers, and hope that it will thrive.  The other thing I’ll do is check out the seed houses and see if anyone has anything.  I haven’t seen anything so far so if you, reading this, happen to know where I can either purchase plants or seeds, drop me a line.  I’d love to hear from you!

Maybe it’s cliche, I don’t know.  They are beautiful flowers after all, not only stunning as an oriental lily, but that scent…that heavenly scent.

This lily was first introduced to me by a long ago friend named Belinda up in Saskatoon, her absolute favourite.  A bouquet of these in a room fills it with heavenly scent.  So when I planted one in my lily garden to remind me of the times I spent in Saskatoon, it seemed strange that after a few years it began to grow more stunted until last year, all it did was throw up a spike of leaves without any blooms to speak of.  This particular bulb I suspect is not doing well in the kind of soil I have it in, and it may do better once it’s moved over into the new garden.

Back in my 20’s I spent a lot of time running away from myself, as probably many of you have or know someone who did.  To me, it was easier to run away to Saskatoon on the week-ends, take time out to spend on the soft silky beach at Cranberry Flats, eat fattening and delicious meals, smoke way too many cigarettes and other substances, and dance my ass off in Divas, the local gay bar up there.  It was safe because my relationship with my friend Belinda made it safe.  The only down side was that as I grew, our relationship and our friendship grew apart until now, most of the relationships with the people I did know there in Saskatoon are just memories.  I had a lot of fun in Saskatoon, but I made a lot of mistakes and eventually had to come back, settle down, and rediscover who I was here in my own home.

I love how the day lilies compliment orientals by pushing punches of single spiked colours through the foliage of the day lilies that seem grounded, almost herbaciously hedge-like.  I’ve got a few orientals in my side garden that will have to be potted up come spring, but the star gazer, if I can get it to stay alive, and thrive again, will be a good reminder for me of my times past.

Right now we’ve had a bit of a reprieve from the freezing cold temperatures that I’m told were actually at times colder than the surface of Mars.  I’m thinking about potting up the lilies, the friends that I’ve made out in that west flower bed that I need to take with me; not so much hoarding, more like book marking the time that I spent here.  In a way, they’re the memories I can choose to take with me and hopefully hold onto and use to help me grow a new space.

Baby’s Breath has sentimental meaning for me; a favourite aunt of mine had baby’s breath growing in the flower bed under her kitchen window and it was always the first sight that I saw when we got to Brandon from Regina.  The summers that I spent there were magic.  My aunt was loving, strict, and had my best interests at heart.  My uncle was just…fun.  Even as I write this I can still hear him singing “Clang clang clang went the trolly”.

Gypsophila is a great plant to attract bees and other pollinators, developing into an almost shrub-like mound of tiny white flowers that have a sweet, sometimes sickly scent.  The first time I planted it was in the northern most end of my west flower bed, and a daylily that went in beside it would thrust up a blossom spike through the white creating a great contrast of pale white and rusty red flowers.  I’ve left them to cut back until spring because two springs ago when I started weeding I accidentally pulled up the shoots of the new plant that was put in the following year on the south side of the bed.  My bad.

The plant is seen in a lot of ditches around the province now and has the reputation of being somewhat of a weed.  The story my grandmother told me was that in the 20’s and 30’s, people would include gypsophila in floral arrangements that they left on graves during funerals.  Some of these bunches had seed pods, and the rest is history.  Now random bunches of baby’s breath can be seen in ditches all over the province.

So the next time you see wild flowers in a ditch, and think they’re beautiful, just remember:  they could be there because of dead people.

Now I know many of you won’t know what sun dogs are.  This is a picture I snagged that shows what looks like some kind of distortion created and caused by the camera lens.

It is not.

This is what it looks like in the sky.

This is a visible sign in the sky that means if you go outside unprotected your private parts will turn black and fall off.

It is also a sign that it is not a good idea to plant anything outside.

This is why house plants are important when you live in the prairies.  Something someone told me a few years back that I’ve taken really seriously (especially the last couple of years) is that winter is hard on us.  No kidding when we live in a place that the wind can make your face hurt.  The point is creating a space where you will have things around you that draw you back into summer.  Best thing I ever did for myself was move my work space from the basement where I got no sunlight into my room where I get sunlight flooding me in the early morning, warming me up, but also letting me grow geraniums, amaryllis, a bougainvillia, an olive, figs, spider plants, and an aquarium that loves sunlight and gives me great plant grown as a dividend.  Take a little of the green with you like an ark to keep you going.

Ok course rye helps as well.

Right now, currently in Regina, the temperature is about minus 30.  With the wind chill…well, here’s what Environment Canada has to say about the weather right now:

10:30 PM CST Sunday 04 January 2015
Extreme Cold Warning in effect for:

• City of Regina

A prolonged period of very cold wind chills continues.

A frigid Arctic airmass has settled over the Prairies. Very cold temperatures combined with brisk west winds are giving extreme wind chill values of minus 40 to minus 45 throughout much of southern Saskatchewan tonight into early Monday. Extreme wind chill values are expected to ease Monday morning as temperatures moderate somewhat.

Coincidentally, when I was looking at gardening web pages today I saw that the city of London, England is expecting a high of plus 10C.

To put it into perspective, the only thing that grows at minus 40C is hope.  For those of you who’ve never experienced cold this chilling, picture driving down a road, hitting a pot hole too hard, and your wind shield spider webbing from a small chip you didn’t see in the summer.  Picture throwing a cup of boiling water into the cold air and watching it fall to the ground as powder.  Powder.  My dog can walk for about a block before I have to pick her up and warm her feet. Along the streets today people were boosting each other and tow trucks were as numerous as the cars parked along the side streets.  If you can’t plug your block heater in right now, you’re screwed unless you’ve got a good battery and prayer.

I remember hearing my social studies teacher talking about taking the high school basket ball team down to southern California for a tournament, and the people there wondering why his car had an electrical plug hanging out from the hood.  He told them up north in Canada, we plug into parking meters and at the end of the month, the city just collects it out of the bank.

I think about hearing stories about people at the time of my grandparents who homesteaded out here in Saskatchewan and would have to spend cold days like this in bed because it was literally too cold to get out of bed.  Things have changed.  Sitting here at my desk looking out into the cold night, I can feel the heat kick in and make my feet all toasty.

Around February, I notice a change in people’s attitudes.  Not necessarily for the better, but for the worse.  There’s a lack of patience, a kind of edginess that just travels around the population like a virus.  We’re all on edge; the snow is lingering, we’re getting tired of the white.  Some people can afford to travel to a sunny beach further south for a week or two to break the winter blah’s.  I don’t have the luxury.  But I do have something that gives me hope and keeps my spirits up.  The gardener’s spirit.

The gardener’s spirit is like those trees out in the park that I can hear cracking from extreme cold:  the winter can crack you, but it doesn’t break you if you hold onto hope.

Today I trimmed down my amaryllis and took a deeper look into the pot.  Surprise of surprises, the one bulb has now got two baby bulbs sprouting out of the side that I’ll be soon trimming off and repotting.  The bulb from last year hasn’t bloomed yet but I am keeping my fingers crossed.

We have to catch out moments of spring in ways like this, and keep hope.  I think about people in London gardening year round and yeah….I’m a little jealous.  But the cold weather provides us opportunities and conditions, unique challenges of patience and frustration that aren’t the same in warmer climates.

Oh who am I kidding.  Any good looking single guys in the UK want to pay my air fair over?  I’d make a great house husband/gardening fool!