Sunday Dinner: Coincidence

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“I don’t think that anything happens by coincidence…

No one is here by accident…

Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us.

Otherwise they would have taken another path,

or left earlier or later.

The fact that these people are here

means that they are here for some reason”…

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James Redfield

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“I’ve often noticed that when coincidences start happening

they go on happening

in the most extraordinary way.

I dare say it’s some natural law

that we haven’t found out.”

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Agatha Christie

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“I like coincidences.

Seems like when you have a coincidence

it is a clue to how the world all fits together,

even though things

may look to be wide apart.”

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Marilyn Oser

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“I do believe in Providence.

There have been far too many

tiny perfect coincidences in my life.

At some point,

they cease to be coincidences.”

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Caspar Vega

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“We cannot see how our lives will unfold.

What is destiny and What is accident?

And how can one ever be certain?”

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Cathy Ostlere

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“If we stay aware

and acknowledge the great mystery that is this life,

we will see that we have been perfectly placed,

in exactly the right position…

to make all the difference in the world.”

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James Redfield

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019

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“Of course, a story always begins

with such a coincidence.”
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Kōji Suzuki

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Six on Saturday: Flowers from Wood

Dogwood, Cornus florida, as its buds begin opening to mark another spring.

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Flowers are such soft, fragile, ephemeral things.  We wait for them for months and months, enjoy them as they bloom, and then watch them drop their petals all too quickly.

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Star Magnolia, Magnolia stellata

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Flowers that emerge from wood amaze me.  Hard, woody branches magically bud and blossom, opening their bark to allow such soft perfection to manifest.

What a beautiful miracle!

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Camellia japonica

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Thousands of flowers may open all at once, completely covering the bare, woody skeleton of a tree.  Their perfume drifts on the slightest breeze.

What a celebration of life and living to walk under a blooming cherry tree, watching stray petals floating through the air to carpet the path beneath.

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Here in coastal Virginia, we celebrate the dogwoods and Azaleas as they bloom each April.  But we have already enjoyed Magnolias and hybrid pears, and we’re watching the redbuds and all of the fruit trees come into bloom this week, too.  Our roads are lined with budding and flowering trees, welcome signs of spring.

As the years go by, I appreciate woody flowers ever more.  So little effort, so much beauty…

The annual extravaganza of flowering trees is something to anticipate, reliable and always satisfying.

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Dogwood

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I came home this evening to discover buds opening on our dogwood trees.  The warmth these last few days awakened them.  The flowers will stretch and grow, each petal turning pure, glossy white as they reach their fullness.

Flowers bursting into bloom from woody wisteria vines, trees and many shrubs transform the drab winter landscape into a fantasy of flowers.  Everything is new again; soft, bright and buzzing with life.

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Magnolia liliflora

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Woodland Gnome 2019

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“There are only two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
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Albert Einstein

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Many thanks to the wonderful ‘Six on Saturday’ meme sponsored by The Propagator.

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Pieris

WPC: Living Lines

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Much of our garden’s personality can be defined by the lines.  There are the lines we create and the lines we allow.

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Do we cultivate the formality of lines straight and orderly, or do we invite ever changing curves and organic softness?

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Our plants grow in lines.  Our beds are bordered by lines… or not.  We organize our garden spaces within the confines of a line.

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Lines give us structure.  Woody trunks and branches frame and fixate; divide, fill, support and explode with soft flowers and leaves.

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We recognize our garden’s denizens by the outline of their leaf; the pattern of the life giving veins networking through them.

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At times, the lines of vines overtake and blur the others.  They extend of their own accord, to their own rhythm, geometry and design.

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There is a primal intelligence in these living, breathing, ever exuberant lines as they stretch towards the light, defying gravity and the gardener’s imagination.

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As the season progresses, all of the lines evolve and change.  New lines criss-cross the old.  Lines swell into curves, then shrivel into zig-zagged shrunken shells of  themselves before falling away.

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Our gardens’ lines inspire us even as they define us, ever unfolding, ever new.

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2018

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For The Daily Post’s

Weekly Photo Challenge:  Lines

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A Profusion of Flowers: Dogwood

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There is nothing quite like a flowering tree to fill the garden with a profusion of flowers.  Our native dogwood, Corunus florida, which explodes with flowers each April, remains my favorite.

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Chosen by the Virginia Native Plant Society as their Wildflower of the Year for 2018, flowering dogwood is an easy to grow understory tree which adapts to sun or partial shade.

Native across most of the Eastern half of the United States, from Florida to New Hampshire and west to Texas in zones 5-9, dogwood adapts to many soils and climates.  They prefer neutral to slightly acidic, moist soil and afternoon shade.

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Dogwoods are found growing along the edges of deciduous forests, but are also popular trees for parks and neighborhoods.  Their clouds of white or pink flowers, when in bloom, show up through shady woods or down winding neighborhood streets.  They grow to only about 30′, which makes dogwood a good landscape choice close to one’s home.

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Dogwoods are one of our most wildlife friendly native trees.  They offer nectar to pollinators early in the season, and their canopy supports over 100 species of butterfly and moth larvae in summer.  Many other insects find shelter in their branches, which makes them a prime feeding spot for song birds all summer long.  Birds find shelter and nesting spots in their branches, and in autumn  their plump scarlet fruits ripen; a feast for dozens of species of birds and small mammals.

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The beautiful white ‘petals’ which surround a dogwood’s flowers are actually bracts.  The flowers are small, almost unnoticeable and yellow green, in the center of four bracts.  A cluster of drupes emerges by September, rosy red and beautiful against a dogwood’s scarlet autumn leaves.

Birds distribute dogwood seeds over a wide area, and they grow easily from seed in the garden or the wild.  Young trees grow relatively quickly and are seldom grazed by deer.

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I am always happy to notice a dogwood seedling crop up in our garden and astounded at how quickly they develop.  A seedling dogwood will most likely bloom by its fourth or fifth spring.

Dogwood trees may also be started from cuttings, especially if more trees of a particular form or color are needed.  Their seeds may be gathered and planted outside in a prepared bed in autumn.  They need cold stratification to germinate, and so an outdoor seedbed is a reliable method to grow new trees from gathered seeds.

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There are many dogwood cultivars and trees found with white, pink or red bracts.  There are also several other native and Asian species in the Cornus genus, some with beautiful variegated foliage or colorful stems.

All are relatively pest free and graceful plants.  The Anthracnose virus is a problem for dogwood trees in some areas.  Good hygiene, removing and destroying any affected plant tissue, is important in controlling this fungal disease.  Keeping the tree in good health, especially irrigating during drought, helps to prevent disease problems.

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The last time I counted, we had at least 15 native dogwood trees around our garden, filling it, this month, with billowing clouds of flowers.  It nearly takes my breath away when the sun is shining and we see them against a colorful backdrop of budding trees and clear blue sky.

There is such prolific beauty in April, how can one person take it all in?

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Woodland Gnome 2018

For the Daily Post’s

Weekly Photo Challenge:  Prolific

Sunday Dinner: Curious

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“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds,

the first passion and the last.”

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Samuel Johnson

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“Enjoy every step you take.

If you’re curious, there is always something new

to be discovered in the backdrop

of your daily life.”

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Roy T. Bennett

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“I set out to discover the why of it,

and to transform my pleasure

into knowledge.”

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Charles Baudelaire

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“The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Curiosity has its own reason for existence.

One cannot help but be in awe

when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life,

of the marvelous structure of reality.

It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend

a little of this mystery each day.

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Albert Einstein

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“Study hard what interests you the most

in the most undisciplined, irreverent

and original manner possible.”

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Richard Feynman

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“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.

Try to make sense of what you see

and wonder about what makes the universe exist.

Be curious.

And however difficult life may seem,

there is always something you can do and succeed at.

It matters that you don’t just give up.”

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Stephen Hawking

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Woodland Gnome 2018

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“The mind is not a vessel to be filled,

but a fire to be kindled.”

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Plutarch

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WPC: Awakening

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“The world is exploding in emerald, sage,

and lusty chartreuse – neon green with so much yellow in it.

It is an explosive green that,

if one could watch it moment by moment throughout the day,

would grow in every dimension.”

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Amy Seidl

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“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression,

it must come completely undone.

The shell cracks, its insides come out

and everything changes.

To someone who doesn’t understand growth,

it would look like complete destruction.”

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Cynthia Occelli

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Meaning is only found

when you go beyond meaning.

Life only makes sense

when you perceive it as mystery

and it makes no sense

to the conceptualizing mind.”

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Anthony de Mello

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“Waking up from a deep sleep,

I always seem to be discovering life

for the first time.”

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Marty Rubin

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“A single event

can awaken within us

a stranger totally unknown to us.

To live is to be slowly born.”

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Woodland Gnome 2018

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For the Daily Post’s

Weekly Photo Challenge:  Awakening

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“My speaking is meant to shake you awake,

not to tell you how to dream better.”

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Adyashanti

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Sunday Dinner: Complex

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“Abandon the urge to simplify everything,

to look for formulas and easy answers,

and to begin to think multidimensionally,

to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life;

not to be dismayed by the multitude

of causes and consequences

that are inherent in each experience –

– to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”

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M. Scott Peck

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“This is the time for every artist in every genre

to do what he or she does loudly and consistently.

It doesn’t matter to me what your position is.

You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity

and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it,

and the facets of it.

This is about being a complex human being in the world,

not about finding a villain.

This is no time for anything else

than the best that you’ve got.”

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Toni Morrison

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“Today the network of relationships

linking the human race to itself

and to the rest of the biosphere

is so complex that all aspects affect all others

to an extraordinary degree.

Someone should be studying the whole system,

however crudely that has to be done,

because no gluing together of partial studies

of a complex nonlinear system

can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. ”

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Murray Gell-Mann

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“Simplicities are enormously complex.

Consider the sentence “I love you”.”

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Richard O. Moore 

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2018

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“Complexity is the blending of perfect symmetry and pure randomness.

This is where the arrow of time lives.

I think these two extremes are elusive ideals.”

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R.A.Delmonico

Green Thumb Tip #16: Diversify!

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Strange but true:  Gardening can become political, too.

This disturbing notion is reflected in our gardening styles.  Consider the traditional scheme of evergreen shrubs and lawn.  Maybe there is an urn filled with bright annuals, somewhere.

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A ‘monoculture’ garden where the same plant, or small number of plants is repeated over and over, lacks diversity.  Most everything in the garden is green.

Now, where there is a limited palette of plants, there will also be a very limited number of insects, birds and small mammals supported.  What will they eat?  Where will they rest?  Other than a few robins pulling worms from the lawn, there will be a very small number of species observed.

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This common scheme, repeated over and again in neighborhoods across the country, gives us a clue as to why native birds, butterflies, amphibians and other small animals have been in decline for some time.  We have transformed woods and prairie and farms and natural riparian communities into suburbs.  Suburbs of lawn and largely imported shrubs and trees.

Once we introduce a larger palette of plants, providing more ‘niches’ for both plants and animals, the diversity and interest increases exponentially.  And interestingly, our garden comes alive with synergistic abundance.

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For example:  A single oak tree can support over 250 different species of insects.  It serves as a host for many common butterfly larvae, too.  The insects it harbors attract songbirds who will visit to eat, but will also use the tree for cover and nesting.  Every native tree and large shrub will provide food and shelter to wildlife, and will become a hub of life in the garden.

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Native Live Oak in Colonial Williamsburg

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Trees form the backbone of our garden and of our ecosystem.  They offer us shade.  They freshen the air, fix carbon, and may even bloom in the spring.

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Dogwood was chosen as the Virginia Native Plant Society’s Wildflower of the Year for 2018.  Its spring blossoms support pollinators, and fall berries feed birds.  Many sorts of insects, including caterpillars, live in its canopy each summer

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Native trees support more animal species than do exotic imports, but all trees have value.  Willow, Magnolias, poplars, sycamore, black cherry, beech and redbud all enrich the lives of wildlife and of gardeners!

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March 2017, with the flowering Magnolia trees in our garden covered in blossoms.

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Deciduous trees mark the passing months, providing different sorts of beauty in each season.  Evergreen trees anchor the landscape, serve as windbreaks, and give us bright green structure through winter.  Many, like hollies, also produce berries to feed wildlife when little else can be found.

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American Holly

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As we add various layers to the garden with ground covers, ferns, herbaceous perennials, shrubs, vines and trees; the number of wildlife species our garden can support increases exponentially.  But even more importantly, it comes alive as an interesting and intriguing habitat for us humans as well!

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A dynamic cast of horticultural characters come and go with the seasons.  They grow and change, transforming the character of our outdoor space as well.  We bring color, fragrance, texture and maybe even delicious flavor to our garden as we diversify our planting scheme.

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We can begin with what we have, converting turf into habitat a little at a time.  Plant ground covers under existing shrubs to form a living mulch; plant large shrubs to anchor new planting beds, or begin to cultivate wide borders beside walls or fences.  Early spring is the perfect time to plan and establish new plantings.

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Brent and Becky Heath’s Gloucester display garden December 4, 2015

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A tidy benefit of this approach comes with reducing the amount of turf we need to maintain each year.  Consider the savings when there is less grass to water, fertilizer, treat with chemicals and to mow.  Turf is the most expensive landscape plant, per square foot, of any commonly grown plant in North America.  It demands the most effort and gives the least return.

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The Heath’s display gardens in Gloucester, October 2015.

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It is our adventurous spirit which motivates us to try new plants each year.  As our gardens evolve, we evolve with them; building a wealth of experience and appreciation with our ever expanding community of plants and wildlife.  We add beauty to our home and to our neighborhood.

We help preserve species for future generations, sustaining the wildlife that sustain the web of our own existence on planet Earth.

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Woodland Gnome 2018

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Gardening for Wildlife

Butterfly Garden Plants

Bringing Nature Home by Dr. Douglas Tallamy

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Black Swallowtail butterfly and caterpillars on fennel, August 2017

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“Green Thumb” Tips: 

Many visitors to Forest Garden are amazing gardeners with years of experience to share.  Others are just getting started, and are looking for a few ‘tips and tricks’ to help grow the garden of their dreams.

I believe the only difference between a “Green Thumb” and a “Brown Thumb” is a little bit of know-how and a lot of passion for our plants.

If you feel inclined to share a little bit of what YOU KNOW from your years of gardening experience, please create a new post titled: “Green Thumb” Tip: (topic) and include a link back to this page.  I will update this page with a clear link back to your post in a listing by topic, so others can find your post, and will include the link in all future “Green Thumb” Tip posts.

Let’s work together to build an online resource of helpful tips for all of those who are passionate about plants, and who would like to learn more about how to grow them well.

Green Thumb Tip # 13: Breaching Your Zone

Green Thumb Tip # 14: Right Place Right Plant

Green Thumb Tip # 15: Conquer the Weeds!

‘Green Thumb’ Tip:  Release Those Pot-Bound Roots! from Peggy, of Oak Trees Studios

Wednesday Vignette: Dogwood in Bloom

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“You are the beloved child of this universe,

so live as if everything is yours.

Every morning the sun is rising for you.

The rays of light are kissing you,

birds are singing for you,

flowers are dancing for you,

and everything belongs to you.”

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Debasish Mridha

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“I love to see the bud bursting into maturity;

I love to mark the deepening tints

with which the beams of heaven paint

the expanded flower;

nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure,

I love to watch that progress towards decay,

so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship

in man’s transient glory”

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Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

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“I’m on the side of whatever keeps the flowers growing.”

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Marty Rubin

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2017