War is Hell...

... and the fact that the skirmishes take place in the back yard over sugar water make it no less a pitched battle.

Some 14' from my kitchen window stands an Asian pergola. From the end of the cross frame closest to the window is suspended a hummingbird feeder. Beneath the feeder is a row of mature azaleas taller than my head; above it, suspended from the pergola, is a thick covering of Japanese wisteria. Still higher up is an oak tree, the tippy-branches of which serve as lookout posts, offering 360-degree vantage points for hyper-vigilant Ruby-throated hummingbirds who defend the red plastic feeder with tireless vengeance.

The airborne skirmishes over the endless and ever-fresh supply of nectar are fierce; the fussing, threatening chirps, and dive-bombing constant. If I happen to have the audacity to sit in the chairs in the vicinity of the feeder, I, too, am cursed vehemently. While reading the other afternoon, a bossy little flying ace whizzed past my head, fussing as she flew, and dropped a tiny bomb directly on my book! If Baron von Richthofen had been half as determined, WWI might have had a whole different outcome!

This afternoon, standing at the kitchen window, I watched a battle won not with brawn, but brains. One of the smaller females was being bullied away from the feeder, chased relentlessly by a larger one. They circled each other mid-air, lunging and chirping, until the littler girl darted into the azaleas for cover and respite. Her pursuer hovered just outside the foliage, head cocking side-to-side, searching for her target. Unable to spot her prey, she flew upward to the oak branches to keep angry watch over the approaches to the feeder.

Moments passed and then, from the far end of the row of azaleas where the branches are thickest, emerged the little girl. Stealthily, cautiously, she skirted up the edge of the shrubs to the feeder, keeping under the cover of the wisteria as she flew. As Frau Dominatrix glared confidently about the yard, Little Girl sipped lunch peacefully undetected directly beneath her tormentor.

War is hell, but the victory does not always go to the most swift and strong. Sometimes you gotta run away so you can return to fight another day. And being sneaky doesn't hurt, either!

From the outset I think it's important to be forthright. If you've come here looking for sage and learned gardening advice, you've probably come to the wrong place.

Now, I'm not saying I haven't learned a thing or two from trial and error along the way. And, though what I know won't take long to pass along, I'm happy to share it with you. But I'm no garden guru. The joke about keeping the marigolds alive is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

What I am, though, is a lover of the outdoors, of growing things; and a great experimenter. I'm also somewhat easily distracted by enticing rabbit trails and just as apt to change paths with my gardening plan as I am to stick to it, a fact which has made my local home improvement giant more money than I ever intended to give them.

In fact, just this morning, while looking around the yard and cursing the weeds, snails, and moles which seem to have proliferated with the last several weeks' rain, I realized how like my life-plan is my gardening plan. I kinda-sorta know what I want to do with the space and time allotted, but not exactly. In both cases nothing turns out like I planned and I never have enough cash-flow to live up to the grandeur of my schemes and dreams; but they're as like as not to morph into something entirely unexpected, so I never let that bother me. The dreaming of a thing is half the fun anyway.

My garden plan at the moment is loosely Asian in theme, which is a bit difficult to pull off given my threadbare budget, allotted space, and climate. I'm in zone 8b here, which means that it's humid and hotter than H-E-double-hockeysticks in the summer, and slightly sub-freezing for short stretches in the winter. Not hot enough year-round to be tropical like Miami, but not cold enough to really kill off the bugs. Add to the mix that I have a strange penchant for flowers ranging from coral to orange and blue to purple-black, and the plan becomes even more dodgy. (Purple and orange Asian flowers in zone 8b? Yeah, I'll get back to you on that.)

But I have plans. Big ones. I can see it all now.

I bought this place by accident. Seriously. I didn't plan to buy a house, but somehow it worked out that way. Without waxing maudlin, a little over a year ago life as I knew it imploded around me and I relocated on impulse and instinct. ("Must...get...out...of here...!") My quickly constructed, loosely drafted, and possibly somewhat ill-conceived plan was to find a place to rent, get the lay of the land for a year or so, get my real estate business off the ground again (ha!), and then maybe buy. I scouted the city, quickly finding the neighborhood I wanted (more on that later) and spent the next week looking for rentals.

It didn't take a week to figure out I couldn't afford to rent in this neighborhood. But on my fourth day of hunting I spotted a brand new For Sale sign. Long story short, I fell in love with a funky little 1957 2/1 house with terrazzo floors, open-beam ceiling in the dining room (read: no insulation) and original cabinetry and ghastly blue bath fixtures. Ten days later the bank and I owned the place. I moved in the day the seller moved out.

I'm pretty sure the previous owner, a sweet Irishman named Maurice, didn't have a gardening plan, either. Unless maybe the plan was to do as little yard work as possible. The postage stamp of grass loosely defined as the back yard was 18'x24' and surrounded by a thick periphery of shrubs and ferns which thought they owned the place. I hauled 15 lawn bags of leaves off that little 432 square foot patch of grass the first week, and Lord-knows how many since then.

But the cool thing about the yard was this: During the aforementioned life-implosion, I'd been thinking that if I could build any house I wanted it would be one with an Oriental spirit to it. I could see it all in my mind: rice paper partitions, sleek lines, open and airy spaces, bamboo cabinetry, sandalwood...beauty and calm in simplicity.

Now, this "historically contributing" little concrete block house with its blue bathtub didn't quite fit that bill, but Maurice had planted patches of bamboo in several places about the yard; built a an Oriental-looking trellis for Japanese wisteria in the patio area; and had placed a little ornamental pagoda in its own rock garden in the back corner. Lovely, old azaleas line three sections of the yard, and you have to walk under a bamboo archway to get to the front door.


The beginnings for my imaginings were already in place. I couldn't afford to build my dream house, but I could rebuild my dreams with the blessings at hand.