Autumn Joy becomes Winter Joy

I subscribe to the idea of cleaning up the garden in the fall, so i won't have to do it the following the spring.

Oftentimes, though, the body just doesn't keep up with what the mind has planned for it, so when the first snow falls, i notice various tall brown stems sticking out of the snow. "Hmmm," i think. The mind gets busy again, trying to bend the body to its will. "I should go out there in the freezing cold and cut those down."

A few dead plants actually look good in the winter garden. One is a tall grass, variegated green and white in summer, and now tan with a thin layer of snow. The leaves rustle gracefully in the breeze, and the seed plumes wave.

My friend Frances left her Autumn Joy sedum standing on purpose--the flowerheads retaining a bit of the maroon color. Now an inch of snow sits atop each flowerhead, making them look as if they've bloomed again, and bringing Frances winter joy.

The Tire Retaining Wall

When i moved in to my house 31 years ago, i had more energy and time than i had money, so i built a retaining wall out of tires to hold back my east hillside. Tires? Over the years they have been covered by creeping thyme and, more recently, sedum.

Yesterday i started taking the wall of tires apart to make way for some stonework. Change comes hard for the other person in my household. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," he says.

I see the homemade quality of the tires, which look generally good, but sloppy in the detail work. I look ahead to the time when our aging bodies will need to move out of a 3-story house into one level. I do think a stone retaining wall will sell better than a tire wall.

The garden changes from day to day. That east hillside flowerbed is now bare earth, and the retaining wall is in the middle of being deconstructed so that a reconstruction can begin.

Impermanence.

And after wrestling sand-filled tires out of the dirt for a couple of hours, and bouncing the sand out of them, i am tire-d!