A View From My Garden

This morning I awakened to sunshine pouring in all the windows. The dogs and the cat saw it too and began romping and chasing each other, trying their best to get me involved. I thought about it. Maybe it would be a really good idea to set all other responsibilities aside, load the dogs in the pickup and take off for our favorite spot along the river. Then I looked at the thermometer and had a second thought. I was right, I guess, because the clouds have now moved in and it will be another dreary day with the dogs and the cat sleeping and me at the computer in this nice warm office. There has not been enough writing in recent weeks and at least that can be corrected.

There is so much to be done in the garden, and yet the ground has just now thawed and the worms have certainly not yet turned; the robins wait impatiently while they finish the last of the tiny apples on the ornamental crab along with a few bright red currents on the high-bush cranberry.

High-bush cranberry is probably one of the best illustrations of why we really ought to use the botanical names for plants. This is not a cranberry; cranberries grow in bogs in the wild but moderate climates of the coasts of Oregon and New England. High-bush cranberry is one of the large and varied Viburnum family which also contains the currents and hydrangeas, and maybe the chokecherry. I will have to look that up to be sure. A friend gave me a start from a plant he called a cranberry, and I said it looked like a red current to me, but he insisted. So, I thought maybe it was another high-bush cranberry which has done very well in this garden, or maybe another variety of that very nice ornamental. I did not want any more red currents because the ones I have are afflicted with some virus or another which spoils their foliage and I do not grow them for the berries, except that the birds like them. My friends shrubs turned out to be red currents. Close, but no cigar!

The local birds, the ones that over winter here, are plentiful around the feeders these days, along with a flock of pine siskins and an occasional flock of juncos. The siskins are of the finch family so they sit on the feeders and drop a messy pile of black oil sunflower seeds whole, as well as hulled, while the juncos jump and scratch like chickens underneath them, finding the good seeds and gobbling them down. It is a beautiful example of symbiosis. Neither of them knows they are creating it, of course, nor cares.

The flickers, the hairy woodpecker and his diminutive cousin, the downy woodpecker, have all been nibbling steadily at the GORP I put out. It is a mixture of peanut butter, mollasses, corn meal, oat meal and lard, with a few raisins for the occasional early spring blue jay. (No need to worry about these energetic winter denizens having high cholesterol counts!) I spread it into the hollows on their feeder or onto the bark and natural holes in the old gravenstein apple tree outside the livingroom window.

Soon it will be time to put the GORP away, for the starlings love it also, and while I do not subscribe to practicing genocide against these extremely successful immigrants, for they did not make the decision to come here from the Old World but were brought by the colonists. That would give them as much right as I to tear up the countryside. Still, I do not encourage them. I much prefer that the chickadees and the violet-green swallows, and the robins nest here. Starling flocks are a dependable sign of spring and as yet I have not seen any. Perhaps you have, for my real birdwatching days are over now. Still, I like to have the news and I am grateful when someone stops me on the street or in the store to tell me they have robins in their yard, or that the redwings are back, or even that the starlings have arrived. By such signs do I count my days, even now.