Notes From a Garden
My garden trowel must be some twenty-five years old or so now. It has traveled with me and dug holes in many different soils. Now it is helping me build my newest garden here in southern Arizona.
It is one of those tools that has proven its worth over the years and still works away as well as ever.
Sonnet to a Garden Trowel
I see you now, my garden trowel old
And dear; your wooden handle and your blade
Steel-black still useful to my hand to hold
And thrust through soil, complete the holes I’ve made
With just your larger cousin, the long spade.
You’ve done your bit in planting many things.
How sturdily you’ve kept on, undismayed
By all the times I’ve bent you. Many springs
You’ve scooped out homes for flowers, herbs. It brings
A sense of certainty to pick you up;
Your handle’s weathered, but your blade still flings
The soil into the newly planted cup
Round lavenders and pinks. We love them still,
We two: our lavender and roses on a hill.
Just before planting a new white and pink dianthus, I watched a deep orange fritillary butterfly enjoying its flowers.
Copper wings over
white-frothed flowers. Go tiptoe,
velvet butterfly.
We have had rain—generally a reason to celebrate in the desert. But the scent of it came well before any rain actually fell on our land. The scent came from bushes in the distance.
The creosote bush, known botanically as Larrea tridentata, is endemic to the western American deserts. It is a large, evergreen shrub with scattered yellow flowers after rain and small white puffballs of seed after the flowers.
The resinous scent of its wet wood is one of the most typical fragrances of the desert. It is pungent and slightly bitter, yet spicy. Some people (presumably those who named it) dislike it; some of us (obviously including myself) love it. Its presence means the desert, and rain. To me, it means freedom and nature’s bounty.
Rain’s fallen somewhere
Upriver. Dark night brings scent
Of wet creosote.
Don’t forget that my book The Hillside Diary and the opportunity to commission a sonnet to ordinary things are available at my Ko-fi site!