Gardening is great exercise
A rose by any other name
… (Shakespeare)
With the hot summer weather we are having, gardening in the
early morning hours has been my respite.
This morning I got up before 6 a.m. to water my new petunias and
pansies. They are red and purple like the red hat society ladies
wear.
Gardening is great exercise
A rose by any other name … (Shakespeare)
With the hot summer weather we are having, gardening in the early morning hours has been my respite.
This morning I got up before 6 a.m. to water my new petunias and pansies. They are red and purple like the red hat society ladies wear.
Gardening is great exercise. Simply pulling the long green hose, which stretches full length from the Mr. Lincoln red roses in the front yard to my purple alyssum in the back, I get a cooling stretch.
Getting down on my hands and knees to plant the new ground cover, purple, red and yellow in the front is great. It is exciting to grab the shovel, push into the wetted dirt, and dig holes for the new low rose bushes.
Like David Mas Masumoto, author of Epitaph for a Peach, I appreciate the shovel’s emotional connections as it belonged to the children’s great grandmother, Oma Anna Wegerbauer.
She was 70-years old and walking up and down a steep hill, pulling weeds, planting cherry tomatoes, and trimming her chives. She was in fabulous shape and would walk all the way from Palo Alto to our home in Sharon Heights for the fun of it.
Oma recycled before ecology was in, putting coffee grounds into the earth around cherry tomato plants.
My grandmother had a mulch pile she covered with freshly dug earth. She was the most in-shape 75-year old I knew, and all by her walking and gardening. While we dug in the dirt, she told me stories about the old country I can someday pass along to my own grandchildren.
Gardening brings delight to the viewer and the passerby. Purple lavender and roses newly grace the front yard. The children’s grandmother, Ellen Derry, had a love of rose bushes. So the new pink and yellow bushes gracing our front yard are in blossoming in her memory.
I remember being pregnant with my eldest daughter, digging around the base of a small peach tree, pulling weeds. The feeling of the rich sandy loam in my fingers brought me such satisfaction. The pleasure of a ripe peach dropping into my cupped hand and rinsing it off with a hose, biting into the hairy flesh is one of life’s delicious satisfactions.
As the full moon shines at 5:45 a.m., there is no better time to get to know your garden again. You may have a gardener to mow blow and go, but the satisfactions of gardening in the earth of life are pleasures for the body and soul.
