This Winter 2024 Garden Kalendar is composed of edited excerpts from my daily, hand-written garden journal entries from January 2 to March 31, 2023. These passages are accompanied by occasional parenthetical commentaries in italics. The journal records my work in four gardens:
• The Alumni House Garden at Coe;
• A half-acre vegetable garden on a small farm adjacent to the Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center near Toddville (a garden typically identified as the Wickiup garden);
• The gardens and landscape at Buffalo United Methodist Church, a small church not far from Mount Mercy College;
• The gardens at my home on Elmhurst Drive in Cedar Rapids.
This Kalendar constitutes about 50% of my journal entries in the first quarter of 2023. A map of the Alumni House Garden map is posted on the website’s “map” page. The italicized quotations occasionally inserted between journal entries are passages from poems I found in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them, edited by Tess Taylor–a book I was reading while preparing this Garden Shed blogpost. Because of the length of this document, the complete Winter 2024 Kalendar is posted as a pdf. ~Bob
It should surprise no one that, as a poet, I’ve been tickled for years to learn that the word
anthology means a “gathering of flowers.” Even if your garden grows vegetables or fruit,
flowers need to bloom to make the harvest possible.
~Aimee Nezhukumatahil (from her foreword to the anthology Leaning toward Light)
2 January 2023. First journal entry of the new year, but not much gardening news to report. Although it was a day when I could have done some outdoor gardening, I spent most of my time indoors organizing the mailing and distribution of the garden calendars and fall issues of The Garden Quarto. My goal is to mail most of them tomorrow afternoon, but the label printing, packaging, etc never goes as fast as desired. I need to print more GQ copies since I left my last copies in the Alum House. I also drafted the year’s first Monday Morning Garden Report and hope to have it posted by Wednesday. Today’s MMGR focused on observations when walking into the winter garden and how the surrounding urban buildings and sounds felt like a oppressive, alien environment. No leaves on the trees to block the view, and the garden is so monochromatic—minimal attachments to hold the eyes from straying beyond the walls. Alas, the advantage of Holehird Gardens in Cumbria, surrounded by the Langdales as a backdrop for a garden outside Windermere. The Coe garden is intended as an island unto itself, separate from the city. A tough challenge for the garden in the middle of the winter.
Yesterday I led the service at Buffalo and had composed a few notes in preparation for reflections on the second chapter of Matthew and the importance of Joseph in the gospel’s story of Jesus’ birth. But as I began speaking, I saw the creche in front of the piano and started discussing how Matthew’s nativity narrative doesn’t match with what we see in the creche. For example, in Matthew’s gospel Joseph and Mary live in Bethlehem—and thus no need for this business about being born in a stable. Once I was focused on the creche, I followed a path of unplanned topics, though I finally got to Matthew’s Magi, symbolizing how the message of Jesus was intended for all people, including gentiles. Although I never touched on several points I intended to discuss, that’s okay: no one will ever know what was missing, and the focus on the creche as a handy visual prop was probably better than my original plan. My tendency to jump to unintended diversions resembles the way I garden, frequently doing stuff I had not planned ahead of time.
On PBS tonight I watched a program on an American couple doing a four-day hiking trip of about 50 miles, following the Herriot Way in Yorkshire. So many points about their walking experience matched with what MVM and I did with the May-Term classes and our walks in the Cotswalds, Hadrian’s Wall, and Scotland. I’ll never have the strength or courage of heart to engage again in that kind of long-distance hiking, but I’m so blessed that we did what we did. Great memories.
4 January. Today’s meeting with Lisa, Coe’s instructional technologist, was quite productive. She showed me how to use a Google image search for identifying flowers in photos. I had tried using a Bing program earlier this morning that had worked well last spring in identifying photos of Holy Land flowers, but it was not working for me this morning. Back home, using my own computer, I did several Google image searches and immediately identified flowers we saw at Mal Maison in November. In two instances the flowers were varieties of statice—a flower I started from seed 6-7 years ago without much success. In the next few days I’ll work through the French photos and see if I can attach names to more flower faces.
This afternoon, after working on the Winter blog posting, I read two more chapters in Artists Gardens by Bill Laws. While it’s not a particularly insightful or well-written book, it has impressive photos of the chosen gardens and he provides info on several artists for whom I knew nothing about their involvement with gardens (e.g., Henry Moore, Peter Paul Rubens). I have not yet discovered any explanation for the order of the chapters—certainly not chronological—or for how the chapters, each on a different artist, are thematically connected.
Winter 2024 Garden Kalendar PDF