Garden gone WILD

It’s beginning to look a lot like fall around here. We have been home a month since our Vineyard visit and Granary Gallery show. A great time and very successful show was surrounded by a warm and positive energy which has been riding in my back pocket ever since.

And we needed that to get through some stressful weeks with a string of those unwelcome but generally benign hiccups that lurch your well laid plans into a different gear…or reverse in this case. Extreme heat kept me out of the garden, silly germs kept us all sick and snotty for Zoe’s camp Gran and Mima, the blue screen of death on the studio computer meant a week of tech gurus replacing one motherboard after another, and then there is…( and here I will allude to, but not elaborate on because I have a strict “NO politics in the studio rule”… the mother of all shit storms that is the current state of the nation and the planet )…but worst of all our dear Finn has been plagued with one infection after another.

None of the usual anti-depressants were working.

Putting all the bags of yarn on the daybed to plan out the coming winter of knitting…didn’t help.
Getting out all the spoon carving tools and making pile after pile of shavings on the porch…wasn’t helping.
Planting flats of seedlings for the fall garden and weeding out the old for the new…was hampered by the summer’s sauna.

I just couldn’t shake the blues.

As of today, most of those bumps in the road have been worked out but they wore this artist down and sent some old dragons a’ knocking at the door.

Alas, I caught them on the whisper…
and realized that in spite of all the things I was trying to do to pull myself up and out of that negative space…what I really needed to do was to get myself back to my day job.

The second I sat down at the easel I felt better…lighter…centered and safe.

I have come to understand that this work that I do, the art that I create, the focus that is demanded of the process of bringing a painting to life…it is all of me. It has become what I am not just what I do. And it has an intense and powerful connection to something that is much bigger and vitally more important than Mercury going retrograde and blowing up the schedule.

It is no longer quiet listening, but a fierce reckoning with truth, and finding where it lives at the core of my soul, and then looking hard for where it lives in others. The closest I’ve come to labeling it is that “common ground”. I catch glimpses of it now and then, like a pixie winking from behind a garden shed. And more often when I stand behind someone studying one of my paintings and watch as they step closer. The noise in the gallery shuts off, and they are pulled in to a very private place. Sometimes, when they step back and notice me, they will take me where they went. Sometimes there are no words. But the recognition is there, between us, that there is some common ground.

I can think of it as a portal.
Through which there is a tapestry of threads, more like live wires, and we, the artist and the patron, have found one or two that we recognize as familiar, that are alive in our own paintings as it were, and we come to see that we are not alone.

Well that is starting to get a bit tingly…like I said…the universe..or is it those muses… is shifting things around here in a most unpredictable and frustrating way…which is when I know to step out of the stream and go to a safe place.

OK I’m back now. This started out as a quick peek at the burgeoning fall garden, which is plugging along all on its own tingly threads in spite of the heat and my profound neglect.

And since,  I have already articulated that the best place for me to be right now…with a tiny brush in my hand…and not playing in the dirt…I shall simply throw out these pics of this morning’s garden.

Beginning with a before shot of the Ruth Stout Memorial Arch to compare with the opening photo of today’s vining mess. You will see that the black eyed susan vines are finally thriving but the morning glory (mostly on the right) are insane…with nary a blossom.

Here it is again…before

and after…

In general I am very pleased with the RS bed experiment so far. I will elaborate in future posts but here are some random updates…

WE HAVE A LUFFA !!!

Finally. You can see how showy this vine has become. It has smothered the tunnel and begun to invade the lower forty…

looking back it is on the right

Here it frames the now almost cleared potato run…as it waddles on over to make an annex out of the old pea trellis.

Back at the far end of the bed you get a whole lot of rotting tomatoes and a fair supply of peppers showered by Pat’s zinnias…

A row of bags and boxes are mostly cleared of the failed onions with some lingering leeks…

Walking outside and into the raised bed area it’s the sweet potatoes that have taken the lead…

Three bags full, they hold some promise but it will be a month or more before I peek.
The second planting of cucumbers are fighting off the squash bugs and going strong…

The beans have only now begun to provide enough for a meal for two…

Underneath that tunnel are some newly planted carrots and broccoli …

And the brussel sprouts and parsnips are roaring in the back bed…

On the backside of this very large array is the sad state of the strawberry beds, I am flummoxed at the heavy invasion of grasses and weeds which have taken over every single bed. I’ve weeded this bed intensely 4 times this summer !!! and look at the mess.

Back in civilization…

the new herb beds are doing well…

and the salad bed is once again producing lettuces and spinach…

After taking this pic I pulled a couple of those radishes, and then I yanked them all because I found cabbage worms on each one and a heavy infestation of baby aphids. They all went to the bucket of death. Now Herself can come and pick her lunch in peace.

And that leaves the best part of the garden for last…

Miss Finnegan is starting to feel better. These cooler mornings are just the ticket for a Bernese Mt. Dog. She lays here on the shaded cement and supervises my ramblings while she waits for her buddy to come over and take her for a ride around the neighborhood. Her favorite thing is to turn left out of that gate and jump into the car.

As I write this she and her buddy are getting ready for the tennis finals. Finn lays in front of the TV and as soon as the ball is hit she follows it. She got bored with all those double faults in the match last night but has a special fondness for Nadal, so she’s looking forward to his forehand.

And there we have it.
A winding look into the labyrinth that,
for my sins,
is my world this month.

Now I’m headed to the kitchen for some lunch,
and then up for one more cone at Reeser’s,
and then back to the easel…

ahhhh.

Yours in brilliant blazes of Mexican sunflowers, hovering hummingbirds…
and finally flying brushes,

Heather