On the way home from the beach, I stopped by my favorite nursery in Half Moon Bay (who doesn’t have a website to google but I can give you directions, if you are interested) and bought plants. Not just any plants, but anything that could double its duty as both gopher proof and textural. So I chose a leaf in every shape: oval, circular, fusiform, serrated. And I picked up anything chartreuse and violet, wispy and hugging. In essence, I chose plants that not only worked double time but put in extra hours at playing off one another: purple huechera and silver helichyrysum, lenten rose and bronze fennel, waving yarrow and succulent prostrate sedum. They sit in congragation together on cardboard flats atop whiteplastic lawn chairs, in the shade of two towering cypress beside the house, waiting for me to finish digging vitality back into the cold earth.
A family of quail graze the ground beneath them, black and purple plumes gleaming in the afternoon sun, ebony bobbers wiggling like alien antennae atop their noggins. It’s hard not to grin every time they pass. That’s probably one of those beautiful things about Spring here, although for all I know the quail are permanent residents. But the Robin has started chattering at dusk with the scrub jays around the grapefruit tree’s birdbath, the frogs start peeping soon afterwards, and nothing sounds more like an American Spring, to me.
As you start to spend more time outside, maybe gardening, maybe taking a brisk walk, what sounds of Spring are ringing in the air around you?
Interesting shapes and textures, Stephanie. So like you to choose every leaf shape!
Dad picked up a book for John, Ornamental Foilage Plants by Denise Greig. Most of the colors you love. I won’t let go of it just yet, because they have some tropical plants that would look great out back.
There are a lot of succulents in here that would compliment the plants you chose. How about Aeonium haworthii, Aeonium arboreum, or Aeonium canariense… all great rock garden plants.
John will have to pry this book from his mother’s arms! xxx, mom
100% jealous about the quail. 100%. Love those guys.
Here’s a poem from one of Bea’s books called Today at the Bluebird Cafe by Deborah Ruddell.
The Quail
A certain bird
is so refined
so brainy and smart and well-read,
that every time
he thinks a thought,
a comma pops out of his head.