Garden Journal~May 2013

Last month I did my first Garden Journal post as I thought it would be interesting to document the progress of our gardening efforts and to begin a record of what blooms when. Below is the right side of our garden, one month later. All my bulbs have finished blooming and now the perennials are taking the stage, though many of my seedlings are still too small to provide any visual pleasure. I'm just trying to keep them alive by giving them enough water and protecting them from snails. I've lost a few small plants, but most of them are thriving.

Dear Husband added four teucrium  bushes, drought resistant plants with silver/green foliage and lavender flowers.  They should grow another foot or two, providing a visual wall between the garden and the front concrete wall.












My tomatoes, which were three to six inch seedlings a month ago, have produced their first blossoms this week. Lesson learned: I had a few extra seedlings, which I threw out after I planted the garden. I should have saved them as pests destroyed a few of my seedlings. The basil is doing well, too, and I'm trying to resist picking it too much so that it can really take off. I know that pinching off basil encourages new growth, but I was hardly giving mine a chance to grow!

I planted a few  varieties of tomatoes, and their plant shape/height is quite different.

My healthiest coneflower is slowly blossoming--the flowers are slow to open, but they do last for a long time. I planted a number of coneflower seedlings this spring in two different colors, but I don't know if they'll mature enough to bloom this season.

The Russian sage has bloomed. It was already established before Dear Husband erected the canopy--it's sort of half in/half out, but unless it gets a lot bigger, I don't think we'll have to relocate it.

The left side of the garden has a few mature perennials and lots of seedlings.

The Grosso lavender plant that I stowed away in my carry-on luggage last September has survived and I'm enjoying its first blooms this week. The mature French lavender has finished its first bloom and I've cut it back. The Hidcote, begun by seed a few years ago is blooming, too. I used to be proud that I started these from seeds, but I've since learned that you "shouldn't" start lavender from seed as the plant quality in unreliable. It's better to propagate from an existing plant or buy a plant that has been started that way. 

The Leonotis has just begun blooming, providing a nice contrast to all the purple blooms I seem to favor.

Below is one of of the salvia plants I began from seed. While some garden pest has gnawed away at a few bottom leaves, the plant is otherwise thriving, albeit with a weird half-albino leaf thing going on. I've searched around on the internet to see what the problem could be but haven't yet come up with anything. If anyone knows, please inform me. I have a couple other seedlings grown from the same pack of seeds but none of them are affected. Ironically, this is the biggest and otherwise healthiest seedling of the bunch.

Artist Son's Birth Day

May 16, 1994 was Artist Son's due date, but with no imminent signs of labor, Dear Husband cautiously proceeded with his plans to spend the day in the northern city of Irbid, about one and a half hours from Amman. A neighbor and dear friend was standing by to watch Oldest Daughter (4) and Active Son (2) should I need to go to the hospital. It was lovely May afternoon, the children were playing here and there, in the house, and in the garden, and I was stationed in the kitchen, my in-between house and garden world, as I often was these days. What better time to prepare a large pot of fasulia--green been, beef , garlic, and tomato stew--a favorite family dish which I prepared more often in the spring when the green beans are fresh and tender.

I recall stirring the stew and calling Dear Husband when I felt my first mild I-think-that-might-have-been-a-contraction. Maybe. Given my previous labor experiences, that was enough to bring Dear Husband back to Amman posthaste.

I can't remember if I called my doctor before or after Dear Husband arrived home, but either way we headed to the hospital together to meet him. At this point I still hadn't really had many contractions but the nurses in the labor room confirmed that yes, Artist Son would be arriving soon.

At this point my doctor entered the labor room to inform us that there was no room for us in the inn, and if I stayed at this hospital  I would have to recover and possibly sleep in the labor room, and all this without my baby by my side after his delivery. He had done some checking, and there was a suite available at a neighboring hospital, the new maternity hospital, so we made the easy decision to go there. I was already "dressed" for delivery, so had to redress in my street clothes, after which Dear Husband and I walked the three blocks to the alternate hospital and checked in.

Artist Son was born a couple hours later, troubling me with only a handful of mild contractions before the big ones took over and quickly brought him into the world.

Artist Son in his flannel hospital gown

Upon looking through our photo album, I see that we're improving a bit in documenting our children's arrivals in photographs...

...and we even managed a family photo in which it appears we did our best to look nice. 

Artist Son's nineteenth birthday finds him traveling between his two worlds, from Gordon College in Massachusetts where he has just completed his freshman year, home to us in Jordan. Homecoming preparations are underway and we so look forward to his unique presence among us again. Happy Birthday, Artist Son! We thank God for you and for all the ways in which you are a blessing to each one of us, and to our family. Godspeed! Tayta will have your birthday tiramisu waiting.

Flowering Jordan Calendar~May 2013

Wildflower spotting: along the road between Irbid and Um Qais during a particularly lovely Jordan spring.

What is the Function of Art? ~and a "Music Heals Us" Project Update

This article, The Trueness of Beauty, by George Anderson, has me thinking (again) about beauty, art, and in particular about Lauren and Danny's music project planned for this summer. Anderson asks the question:

"What is the function of art?"

His answer:

"It's to heal. And such also is the function of love."

Anderson acknowledges that form and function can't be separated, however looking at the approach of art, he feels, can help us to identify what has gone wrong when art and love aren't working. 

He also asks:

"So how should we talk to each other?"

Art and love as healing, and healing in relationship with other--that's what I'm thinking about. I look forward to seeing how Lauren and Danny will have a chance to embody these ideas through their music this summer.

Project Update:  John (Active Son) has signed on as the project manager and will be accompanying Lauren and Danny to the West Bank this summer.

John had already made plans to be in Jordan this summer for an internship, and is glad to join with his sister in this project for part of the summer. I'm glad too, and I think his strengths in the areas of  logistics and service will contribute to the goals and vision of the project in a significant way. 

Danny, Lauren, and John have a little over a week to finish raising the necessary funds for their project. Many thanks to those of you who have contributed. If you haven't already, you can read more about their project on their Kickstarter page.

Why I'm Reading Gilead Slowly

I think I'm figuring it out.

This week, as I neared the halfway point of  Gilead, I pondered as to why it was taking me so long to read this book. I have already reckoned with the fact that I need to read fiction more slowly than non-fiction, but still. I was able to zip through, and appreciate Chaim Potok's, The Chosen, in a matter of days. Gilead is taking weeks, okay, months. It's not that I don't like the book; Marilynne Robinson's writing is exquisite; I so admire her intellect and her easy, graceful expression of the human condition. (If you like Marilynne Robinson, do follow these links!)

I sensed Gilead isn't a book I can read well just before bed, when my mind either fades or runs too quickly. I should read this book when my pace of living is relaxed (not so often) and I have time to read and savor. I had such an opportunity the other day, and so decided to spend some time with Reverend Ames and his memiors. I didn't get very far. I read the passage below and then stopped:

"I was speaking of visions. I remember once when I was a young child my father helped to pull down a church that had burned. Lightning struck the steeple, and then the steeple fell into the building. It rained the day we came to pull it down. The pulpit was left intact, standing there in the rain, but the pews were mostly kindling. There was a lot of praising the Lord that it happened at midnight on a Tuesday. It was a warm day, a warm rain, and there was no real shelter, so everybody ignored it, more or less. All kinds of people came to help. It was like a camp meeting and a picnic. They unhitched the horses  and we younger children lay on an old quilt under the wagon out of the way and talked and played marbles, and watched the older boys and the men clamber over the ruins, searching out Bibles and hymnals. They would sing, we would all sing, "Blessed Jesus" and "The Old Rugged Cross," and the wind would blow the rain in gusts and the spray would reach us where we were. It was cooler than the rain was. The rain falling on the wagon bed sounded the way it does in an attic eave. It never rains, but I remember that day. And when they had gathered up all the books that were ruined, they made two graves for them, and put the Bibles in one and the hymnals in the other, and then the minister whose church it was--a Baptist, as I recall--said a prayer over them. I was always amazed watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing.

The women put the pies and cakes they had brought and the books that would still be used into our wagon and then covered the bed with planks and tarps and lap robes. The rood was pretty damp. No one seems to have thought there might be rain. And harvest was coming, so they'd have been too busy to come back again for a good while. They put the pulpit under a tree and covered it with a horse blanket, and they salvaged whatever they could, which amounted mainly to shingles and nails, and then they pulled down everything that was still standing, to make a bonfire when it all dried out. The ashes turned liquid in the rain and the men who were working in the ruins got entirely black and filthy, till you could hardly know one from another. My father brought me some biscuit that had soot on it from his hands. "Never mind," he said  "there's nothing cleaner than ash." But it affected the taste of that biscuit, which I thought might resemble the bread of affliction, which was often mentioned in those days, though it's rather forgotten now.

"Strange are the uses of adversity." That's a fact. When I'm up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it's nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it's as though I'm back in hard times for a minute or two, and there's a sweetness in the experience which I don't understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand  with the old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing, "The Old Rugged Cross" while they saw to things, moving so gently as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father's hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that's what it was."

It didn't seem right to keep reading. This short narrative needed to be savored, pondered. Though prose, it had the feel of a poem to me, and though I had the time, I couldn't make myself read on.

On Sunday night, Dear Husband, Artist Son and I had a brief discussion about abstract art and how to approach it. We are tempted to ask, "What does it mean?" Artist Son, recalling insights gained from poet John Ciardi's book, How Does a Poem Mean?,  proposed we should instead ask, "How does it mean?" Form and content are inextricably bound.

John Ciardi says it well, but then he would because he is a poet, and I think his insight extends beyond poetry to prose, music, and visual art:

"For What Does The Poem Mean? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is: How Does a Poem Mean? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning. As Yeats wrote:

O body swayed to music, o quickening glance,
How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?

What the poem is, is inseparble from its own performance of itself. The dance is in the dancer and the dance is in the dance. Or put in another way: where is the "dance" when no one is dancing it? and what man is a "dancer" except when he is dancing?

Above all else, poetry is a performance...What for example does a dance "mean"? Or what does music "mean"? Or what does a juggler "mean" when we watch him with such admiration of his skill? All of these forms--and poetry with them--have meaning only as they succeed in being good performances."

And what then, makes a good performance? That is a point to be pondered further, but the first idea that comes to mind is a favorite point of mine made by author Dorothy Sayers in her writing on aesthetics:

"A poet is a man who not only suffers the impact of external events but also experiences them (You only experience a thing when you can express it--however haltingly--to your own mind--also Sayers) He puts the experience into words in his own mind, and in so doing recognizes the experience for what it is. To the extent that we can do that, we are all poets. A poet so-called is simply a man like ourselves with an exceptional power of revealing his experience by expressing it (me: not only in words, perhaps, but also in music or visual art) , so that not only he, but we ourselves, recognize that experience as our own."

And to add to my ponderings, as if that were needed, Tatya is working on writing narratives in her composition course this week. We are considering: point of view, purpose, subject, characteristic trait, movement, and order. I've been thinking in particular of the movement of the details in Gilead--slow. And so, I am reading Gilead slowly.

Garden Journal~April 2013

We will enjoy our first summer in Mafraq this year, and so made extra efforts to finish planting our garden. We moved into this house and yard in the fall of 2011, and at that time I planted only the perennials that I brought with me from Amman, so those are the most established. Last spring, I didn't add much of anything as we would be in the States the entire dry, hot summer. The garden went into survival mode, with a friend keeping the bare minimum of moisture on it.

I returned to Jordan last fall, ever optimistic of making my garden bloom, with a dozen seed packets and several live lavender plants. I transplanted the lavender plants in the fall; the Giant Hidcote and the Grosso, below, are faring the best and have lots of new growth on them. Already blooming is the french lavender that I brought up from Amman. I added the small phlomis bush this spring



Dear Husband put up our canopy a few weeks ago. It has been in storage since moving from Amman. I added a few red geraniums for color, and there is a potted mint plant in the back. The Russian sage is half in/half out of the canopy--we'll see how that works. It doesn't seem to mind so far, so I will leave it for now, hoping that it doesn't attract too many bees when it blooms. To its left is a small lantana with bright pink flowers. It is very drought resistant and should do well in its sunny spot.

The ranunculus are on their way out, but the irises are looking great. I still have lots of empty space in my flower beds, but they are fully planted now with the white plastic yogurt containers marking and protecting the seedlings I transplanted on Friday: blue salvia, verbena, coneflowers, and coreopsis.

Dear Husband marked off two herb/tomato beds for me. The soil level is raised just a little, but the main purpose of the wood is to mark off the beds. Right now they hold fifteen basil plants, three beet plants, and about 25 tomato plants. I'm pretty confident about the basil plants, but it is my first attempt at vegetables. I'm pretty sure my soil isn't up to par, even with the compost and peat moss we added. I 'll continue to add compost and coffee grounds. Please feel free to share any tips you have for growing tomatoes!

The pomegranate tree is bursting into bloom

The other flower bed, also a work in process, but anchored by the ever-blooming lavender.

Flowering Jordan Calendar~April 2013

A Milestone Birthday

When I was young, I felt April to be the perfect month for a birthday, and now that I am older I still feel that way. Living in Jordan has reinforced my thankfulness for an April birthday for a couple of reasons: Dear Husband and my children take me on a trip to the countryside to enjoy the soon-to-fade spring beauty one last time, and it is a perfect excuse for some of my dearest friends to get together to see each other after a busy winter and early spring.

I celebrated my 50th(!) birthday last week, and though it is a milestone birthday of sorts, I was able to convince Dear Husband and Tayta that I wanted nothing more than an afternoon trip to the countryside, ending with an early dinner at our favorite Lebanese restaurant in Jerash. My wishes were obliged, enhanced with a few sweet touches by family and friends. I awoke to this banner, which I could see and read even before getting out of bed. (Yes, I have a view into the kitchen from my bed. I think it very cozy.)

Dear Husband went to work for the morning and my friend, Kelly, called to ask if she could stop by. We enjoyed a cup of coffee/tea together and some relaxed conversation. She showered me with some fun gifts--chocolate, of course, and this lovely tea towel which she embroidered. Translation: "shy" = tea. Yis'lam idayki! (God's peace on your hands). What a unexpectedly pleasant beginning to my day!

Dear Husband came home about lunch time.We grabbed our water bottles, sunscreen, and cameras, and we all set off for an afternoon of  wildflower spotting in the countryside. As it is mid-April, the colors of the landscape are fading and muting. The textures are changing too, as wheat and grasses grow long, even as their color fades, and sturdier wildflowers take the stage, replacing those who have finished performing.

It is always a delight to observe some species of wildflower that I've not observed before, and I found a few on my birthday. The first one was easy to find as we could see many bright yellow clumps of flax as we drove the road from Mafraq to Jerash.

Linum mucronatum

Yellow Flax

This doesn't look like much to take a picture of, but this clump of spent irises looked to be black irises and so I took note of their location. I'll try returning a couple weeks earlier next year to observe them. Hat tip to Dear Husband for finding them.

At our next roadside stop, Tatya camped out at one particular clump of Anchusa around which fluttered about a dozen butterflies. She took this beautiful picture:



I found a few interesting flowers just hanging out by the side of the road:

Crupina crupinastrum

Crupina

Something in genus Asteriscus, I think?

Hmm. I can't get better than family Lamiaceae on this one. At least for now.

Ferula

We continued on to Dibeen Nature Reserve. I nurtured a hope of spotting an orchid there, though I thought it was probably too late in the season. The pine forest of Dibeen is one of the few places in Jordan where orchids are found in the wild. Being the beautiful spring day that it was, the forest was full of picnickers.

We found a deserted field just outside of the forested area so we stopped to relax for awhile, and of course, take a look around for wildflowers.

Maybe something in the genus Anthemis?

Cistus creticus

Pink Rock Rose

Something in the mint/sage family of plants~Lamiaceae

Trifolium purpureum

Purple Clover

Dear Husband enjoyed the outdoors in his own particular way.

We had to drive back through the picnickers and pine forest to leave the reserve; there was no color to be found, except the green of the trees and the accumulating trash of the picnickers. And then I spotted this from the car window, growing right next to the road.

"Stop the car! I think I saw an orchid!"

From a distance, it didn't look like much, but as I got a close-up view I was delighted to behold its orchid beauty, orchid beauty of a species I hadn't yet seen before. Such a perfect end to a day of wildflower spotting!

Limodorum abortivum

Violet Limodore

We made our way from Dibeen back to Jerash. The Lebanese House was packed with people, but thankfully we had only to wait about ten minutes for a table. My next wonderful birthday surprise was the arrival of  one of my first friends in Jordan, a kindred spirit who has been as a sister to me. She is in the thick of writing her doctoral dissertation, not to mention teaching and directing a play, and I have not talked with her since Christmas! Just two days ago I shot off a plaintive Facebook message to her: " Any chance that I'll be able to see you soon? I MISS YOU!  Dear husband knew nothing of this message when he arranged the surprise. And its a good thing that her husband came along so that Dear Husband had someone to talk to as my friend and I yakked the almost the entire time. Tatya did a lot of listening through that dinner.

The perfect end to the day was arriving home and enjoying a Skype call with all my children, scattered about four locations, if you count Tayta in Jordan. Tatya thought the one blight on an otherwise perfect birthday was the absence of a birthday cake, but with my Lebanese dinner and Lindt chocolate I didn't miss it at all. She promises me a belated birthday cake. My cup runneth over! Happy Birthday to me! 

Wadi Dana~Rim Hike

After enjoying a leisurely Arab breakfast, put out by the camp organizers, and our now traditional Wadi Dana Palm  Sunday/Easter passion play with singing and prayer, most of us decided to set on on the Dana rim hike. The hike was not a race, but I soon fell to the back of the pack since I stopped so often to look, smell, and take pictures. At least in the beginning I can still see my other hiking friends as we head up to the top of the rim of  Wadi Dana.

I never tire of the views, every view, in this remarkable place. Wadi Dana's beautifully rugged landscape falls along the face of the Great Rift Valley, and it is the only nature reserve in Jordan which includes all four of the bio-geographical zones found in Jordan. That explains the diversity of flora found here.

Located in the valley is the Feynan district, which is rich with copper and is believed to be  the site of King Solomon's famed copper mines. During the time of the Roman empire, Christians were condemned to work in the copper mines under oppressive conditions, which often led to death. 



I discovered something beautiful around every turn in the path. Sometimes a carpet of wildflowers...

 ...and many times, a fragrant thorny broom bush.

 Calycotome

Thorny Broom

 Globurlaria

Helianthemum

Sun Rose

Edit: Tayta scolded me for forgetting to add the family picture. I real had thought to do that but, I forgot. Tatya laments my lack of people pictures. And, I must remember to take the family picture before our last two minutes in the campground, after two full days of hiking and camping!