Blessings abound

Cleaning windows inspires an ode to nature's bounty. The tree outside our bedroom window, a red maple, blazes like fire and casts its color into the bedroom when the sheer curtains are pulled aside. I was feeling out of sorts about having to clean the windows to install the storm windows today before it freezes next week.

Our house has many windows--lots of light pouring in at all seasons. But, there's the window cleaning. After enjoying the red maple, I made more discoveries looking out the remaining windows as I cleaned them. The squirrels are running full tilt, carrying acorns from the oak tree in front to their stashes in the quarter-acre woods. The chipmunk seems to have found a new domicile in the woods. Soon I'll put the feeders up, and the cardinals, titmice, chickadees and finches will be here in a flash. I'll enjoy them more, looking through clean windows.

Baby-sitting twice a week has subsided to one evening for a few hours. Granddaddy and I are getting pretty good at the routine. I feed Daniel when we get there and let him play awhile until it's his bedtime. He's 14 months old now, toddles everywhere, but never without a truck or a book in hand. I caught him at a serious moment--usually he sparkles with smiles and belly laughs. Lucky me, he loves to go to bed and curls up with Green Dog and goes right to sleep.

Jenna decided last week to build a playground with her big Lego blocks. Her construction included all kinds of play equipment and people to use them. The final touch was a green tree with daisies on one side and a red rose bush on the other. Imagine seeing all that in those rigid rectangular blocks. She delights in reading stories to us from her beginning readers. It's an awesome thing to see a child beginning to read, when you realize the lifetime of pleasure books can bring. We're a family of "bookaholics," it seems.

Ohio spiderwort

When we first moved to this house thirty-eight years ago, my little quarter-acre woods was carpeted with Ohio spiderwort. As the honeysuckle and garlic-mustard spread, the spiderwort disappeared. I removed most of those pests in 2002 and to my delight, one lone spiderwort bloomed that year. I almost missed it because it was at the base of a tree and I couldn't see it from the house. A couple of years later another popped up, also hidden from casual view. Imagine my delight as I sat on the patio this afternoon, looking out over the woods, and saw two bright spots of purple. I walked down the path and found two new volunteer spiderwort plants. So cool!

Web site updates

Back in 1998 when I first posted my web site I had great plans for keeping it up-to-date. Unfortunately, my webmaster had a full-time job and not much time to do the updates. So I learned some rudimentary HTML and started updating the site myself. She helped me redesign the site, because my knowledge of codes is limited to cut-and-paste. I make new pages using old ones for templates. Af first I updated the site every month, adding new articles and projects and all new links and information on the main page. Then the time between updates stretched to every two months, three months.... I felt pretty guilty, but it was sooo time consuming.

Blogging has changed all that. It's easy to post a blog and add a line of html for a link or image. I can go online and post information in a jiffy. I love it.

The difference was obvious yesterday when I set up my Woodland Restoration 2006 page on the web site. Even though I used a template, it took a large part of the afternoon to resize the photos, rewrite the text and upload them to the server.

I also moved my book reviews from the web site main page to my Mini Book Reviews pages. Instead of posting them all at once on the web, I'm going to post them to my blog as I read them and copy the reviews to the mini-review pages. Much easier. I still need to update the art gallery pages on my web site, but that will take time I don't have right now. It's a beautiful day and I'm going to work outside in the gardens.

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Joyce requested this photo. Here's Jack. He grew a couple of inches since yesterday, so I guess he isn't a baby anymore. I noticed flowers on one of the young buckeye trees this morning. The parent tree next door was cut down a couple of years ago, but there are quite a few young trees and seedlings in the woods that are thriving without the honeysuckle overgrowth.

Boston, Wicked and the woods

I've been out of town since last Wednesday, visiting my son in Boston. What a great town! We saw a David Hockney portraits exhibit at the Museum of Fine Art and visited my favorite Arthur Dove paintings while we were there. Then we went to the Fogg Museum at Harvard to see the American Watercolors exhibition, which was fantastic. Not a big show, but really good examples of the work of American artists from the 19th century to 1950. Whistler was my favorite, but I loved the Homers, Sargents and Hoppers, too. We went to see "Wicked," the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. It was great fun. I didn't expect it to be slapstick, but it was, in places. On Friday we hiked through the Garden in the Woods and enjoyed the early wildflowers, which weren't as far out as mine are, but there are many more than I have in my little woods. Nevertheless, I was glad to walk through my little woods when I got home and see even more wildflowers blooming and some new ones popping out. I discovered a couple of colonies of garlic mustard under the big fir trees before I left, so I pulled it all out this afternoon. I keep saying I've seen the end of it, but I suppose I never will. Still, in the woods I find only one or two each time I walk through, so I've made huge progress. In a few days, when I'm caught up on everything else, I'll update my woodlands pages on my web site. I have several paintings to get ready for juried shows. They all seem to come at once in the spring and the fall. I haven't entered shows for years but since I had a few pieces I did for the new book, I thought I might as well put them out there. Framing is so expensive I may not make a habit of it!

What's new in the woodland restoration

Here and there in the woods I'm finding bloodroot blooming where I haven't seen it for years. I know I planted a few, but I'm pretty sure some of it has been dormant for a long time. I think I mentioned the first flowers came in March--a couple of snowdrops, followed by winter aconite. Then suddenly last week some pink Grecian windflowers I planted were blooming next to a little spring beauty I brought from my daughter's woods. Yesterday some grape hyacinths popped out in the same area. Elsewhere there are white striped violets, vinca minor, Siberian squill, celandine poppy, sharp-lobed hepatica, a few toothwort and false rue anemone (isopyrum). The Virginia bluebells will bloom soon. They've scattered here and there throughout the woods and in time will be a beautiful display, I think. I've posted a year of wildflowers in my woods on my web site. Most of them are blooming a little later this year.

It's so nice to be able to walk through the woods without getting snagged by broken honeysuckle invasives everywhere. I've only found one seedling so far this spring. The garlic mustard is widely scattered, so not much work has to be done to clear it except in the back corner, where I wore out last fall and let it go. Even that isn't too bad. Overall, my woodland restoration has been a success, especially since I decided last year not to make this a woodland garden, but to keep it natural. Instead of mulch, the path is covered with fallen leaves and roughly outlined with dead branches. I like to walk on the path so I don't endanger any delicate plants.

Spring has sprung in the quarter-acre woods

It was sunny and cold today, but the wind wasn't blowing, so I took a walk through my woods. I found two brave little snowdrops blooming, the first flowers of the season. They're the same ones that bloomed last year, only a bit later. If you haven't been to my web site, you wouldn't know hard I've worked to restore my little quarter-acre woods, reclaiming it from the grasp of invasive honeysuckle and garlic mustard. Every little flower is like a magic blossom to me, after years of no wildflowers in the woods. Check out the pages on my woodland restoration.