Weeding's Day

I stand on the mound where the golden cat sleeps in the golden sun. He culls the grassy verge, depopulating the sweet who die young and thus bear much fruit. He stretches, gives me the eye, a once-over from a higher power which has undergone kenosis.

Every morning, he does his weeding. I only do mine as appropriate. And what other day is there, but that which was dedicated to the Lord of Mounds, the Weeder of the Slain, he who hung on a tree for three days to learn the mystery of salvation?

Such an odd echo. But as someone else once put it, only the greatest rock makes the greatest ripples.

Gaia Endrained

i caught this evening weeding's failure
kingdom of greening's greatness
fern-frond flashing furious flora
surging stalks storm-drain seething

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There are some lovely leaves to be seen in that drain. They are deep green, with pink hearts and dappled yellow. There are some tiny fernlets and an accretion of moss. The drain may be discomfited, but Gaia has been poking her elegant nose into the business of men again, and her little beautiful victory is to be respected.

Horticulture

Dorothy Parker once infamously quipped, "You can bring a horticulture but you can't make her think." It's interesting to hear stories from old uncles in the Family.

I've mentioned this before, but here it is again, because I keep hearing it. Apparently some people who didn't actually do an orchid cross got hold of samples of someone else's orchid cross and registered that with the Royal Horticultural Society. The aggrieved person keeps mentioning it, but he's too nice to do anything about it. He said he was a man, he'd just take it on the chin. My brother replied that this was what came of not checking.

Ah, the flagrant dishonesty. I'm sure there's something deeply unethical about a supposed orchid hybridisation programme which doesn't quite produce what it's meant to produce and has to fake the results. This same uncle said, "You know that one which they hastily named after the Wyverns? Well, the bugger won't flower, look I have a whole field of pots of the stuff and I can't get more than a few to bloom. Lousy thing."

Meanwhile, my parents' backyard is full of the stuff, which my brother decided to grow as a challenge. In the meantime, he's been successfully hybridising his own. He's got a few that look a lot more like Wyvern colours, and are a lot more profuse in their flowering. He hopes to produce one with my mother's initials.

A Thousand Flowers

And there they were, all in bloom, a garden full of exotic plants; a thousand plants, a thousand flowers. In these days of financial shenanigans and difficulties, liquidity is king.

If you were to take a walk past the garden of my father's house, you would see what a few hundred denarii could buy in terms of labour and consequent beauty. In that garden, my brother is attempting to make hybrids of a rich dark bluish tinge, balanced by golden hues and a small amount of deep red. He says they will be 'the real thing'.

The other day I walked into the house to find more flasks and sealed bags. There were more flasks in the house than in my old lab. I asked him what was happening. He grinned (white teeth in a sun-darkened face, startling in the gloom) and said, "Crosses."

I had this vision of a huge cemetery. But of course, it was the other way round. Each of those crosses held the magnificent potential of new life; each was a plant that perhaps the world had never seen before.

They only need watering twice a day, and no hothousing.

Three Days

Well, wielding a mighty five-litre watering can or two does wonders for the musculature in theory, but is hell on the aging citizen in practice. Not to mention the hose that I am sure has the resilient obstinacy of a boa constrictor minus the homicidal tendencies, this gardening business gives me an idea why Eden might not have been Paradise (actually, it wasn't anyway).

Last night's convos were alarming and wonderful. It was interesting to see people thinking about truth as an artifact rather than as an axiomatic and undeniable baseline for our existence. It was even more interesting to see the ways in which reality was being manipulated. As I incautiously let out, this group is one of the finest, most interesting and entertaining bunches of young people I have ever had the honour to teach.

I think in all my life, groups of four to five students have been plentiful, and I am grateful for that. But once in a while comes a group that, by some odd quirk of chemistry or biology or history or something, will forever etch themselves into your memory. You know who you are, I will not name names here. *grin*

Anyway, I've done five rounds of watering so far, with one more to come this evening. I hope the dendrobia and vandas and the lone oncidium in the corner and phaelanopses and all the others are happy. If anything, speaking to them (what am I doing, have I gone mad) is doing wonders for my Latin and some of my Greek.