Spring Beauty

Just thought I'd pop in briefly to share a couple of photos I took in the garden today of some spring bulbs (tulips and fresias). It's so heartening to see these beauties popping up out of the ground as soon as the coldest part of the year is past. Spring seems to be the season of hope, does it not?

Fancy Becoming a Professional Hermit?

I'm reading a delightful book at the moment, "In the Garden with Jane Austen" by Kim Wilson. Not only is it beautiful and fascinating in its own right, the book is giving me little tidbits I can use in my writing.

I came across something today which I had to share. In a chapter about mansions and manor house gardens, there is a section entitled "Temples, Gothic Seats, Grottoes and Hermitages". The author discusses how certain garden features were supposed to conjure particular emotions according to the romantic tendencies of the eighteenth century.

Hermitages are discussed last, and I have to admit I have never heard of this as a garden feature before. To quote from the book:

The Bennets in Pride and Prejudice have a hermitage in their wilderness walk. Mrs Bennet wants to show if off to the visit Lady Catherine de Bourgh: 'Go, my dear', she cries, 'and show her ladyship about the different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage.' A hermitage, meant to resemble the hut of a religious recluse and to inspire melancholy associations, ought properly to be located in a secluded wooded area, so the Bennets hermitage is sited correctly, though perhaps too close to the house for the best taste.

Estate owners occasionally advertised for hermits to fill their hermitages. Employers asked such men to let their hair and fingernails grow, wear simple clothing, live in the hermitage and interact with any passing visitors in the character of the religious ascetic. Some contracts promised large payments at the end of specified terms, because it was so hard to keep a good hermit. Eventually, the notion of hiring a hermit was considered so ridiculous that a play called The London Hermit lampooned it, and indeed it's hard to imagine even Mrs Bennet going so far. 

That's right everyone, it's hard to keep a good hermit. Can you believe that was actually a profession? You could pretend to be like a monk, living a solitary religious life in the garden - but you were just faking it! I'm trying to imagine what kind of performance a hermit would give for the privileged few strolling in these gardens. Perhaps this novel might shed some light.

A Time to Grow

It's spring here in New Zealand. Well, on some days it feels like it might be. All of our spring bulbs are awash with colour, and as the winter rains have started to drain from the ground we've begun to actively garden again. Weeds have popped up, some plants need to be moved, and a general treatment of fertiliser is required to give all of our plants a head-start.

One section of our vege patch is already sequestered by strawberry plants - the babies of last year's crop. They've been tentatively producing flowers and rather deformed strawberries for a couple of months now. I was watching a gardening show the other day and was a little surprised by their advice: take off all of the flowers in the early season. This will allow the plant to grow bigger and produce bigger, better fruit.

I took myself out to the patch today, and got busy with weeding. I looked at the lovely white strawberry flowers, and all the developing fruit, and ignored them for a while. Then when I looked closer, I noticed that many of the strawberries were in a sorry state. Some were quite flat, while others had lots of little knobs of them - a bit like a rooster's comb! I realised these are not going to be good strawberries for eating anyway. So, rational thought overtaking my nurturing instincts, I plucked the flowers and fruits from the plants with increasing courage. There was probably a hundred or more. I do hope this act of sacrilege does indeed result in healthier plants (not deceased ones).

A strawberry flower (right) and a baby strawberry (left). Both had to go!

As I stripped the plants, it got me thinking about where I am with my writing at the moment. I have queried a number of agents with my current MS, and while I've had some interest there's been no offers. I have a few more agents to query, including some "dream" agents, and while the rejection (or lack of response) will sting, I'm more ready for it now than I was a few months ago. I have all but accepted that this is not the MS that will launch me into publication orbit. And on one hand it feels like Groundhog Day, but on the other I know I've learned so much this time. I feel much better equipped to start with a new idea, more confident that I have the tools I need (or at least more than I had before) to execute it well.

Like the strawberries, I am in a growing phase. I could try to put work out there, but it won't be as good as the work I'll produce in the future. I know that even if I do get published eventually, I'll continue to improve with each successive novel. It's all about timing (and luck, of course). I need to accept that right now, I'm supposed to be growing. Later when I bear fruit again, I believe it'll be that much better for it.

I'm sure everyone's seen this video, but it helps me every time I hear this advice.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Seeing Beyond Satisfaction

It’s time to prune the roses again. Some of them have indeed lost all of their leaves, with no sign of new buds. A few plants, however, continue to defy the season. One in particular, a yellow rose named Serendipity, keeps reaching skyward with glossy leaves, big buds and bright blooms. It was the same last year: I felt guilty cutting the stems right back when it was still proudly putting on a show. It’s tempting to leave it alone; see how high it’ll grow. But I know that if I don’t trim it, I’m denying it the chance to grow vigorously next year. Left alone until the next season, the old wood’s growth would slow and become spindly, with perhaps half as many flowers. I’d get to keep this year’s shape, but lose the potential vibrancy of unknown beauty.

Here’s where the metaphor kicks in. Sometimes we keep living the same life because it looks pretty good on the outside. But maybe on the inside we’re turning into old wood. We get a bit too comfortable... we move past satisfied. Perhaps we once had a dream that was long since stifled. If we don’t stop to think about it, we assume everything’s okay. But maybe we’re not living up to our full potential. If we don’t step outside the box, we might never know who we’re truly meant to become.

It’s like they say: if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. It takes courage to chop off the dead wood and start again. If something new is nagging at you, don’t ignore it for fear of destroying a satisfactory pattern. Get out those pruning shears, then fertilise your ideas. It might take a while, but the chances are that they’ll bloom into something beautiful.

The Pleasure and Pain of a Life Well Lived

Today we dug compost through the vege patch (and by "we", I mean my husband), then we transplanted some baby strawberry plants and sowed our winter veges (both of us). Fingers crossed everything grows! Once that was done I went around dead-heading the roses, some of which are still going great guns even though we're officially well into autumn.

There's one particular rose that is a lot of work, because it's always covered in hundreds of blossoms. It's an old-fashioned "coral" rose, dark pink with only five petals on each flower. The profusion of blooms is lovely, but it means I have to spend a lot more time snipping off all the dead heads. And I need to do this to make more flowers come.

My brain drifted into thinking about how this is like life. If you'll indulge me...

The first way is that sometimes we need to cut things out of our lives before we can move forward. Perhaps we need to literally clear clutter out of our homes before we can take up a new hobby, make room for a child or downsize to a smaller house. Clearing physical space can also lift weight from our spirits, making it easier to move through life. Other times, we may need to prune bad influences from our lives, whether that is negative people, poor media choices or clinging to old habits... anything else which stops us from moving forward.

The second thing that occurred to me is that with much beauty comes much work, with much risk comes greater reward, and sometimes with much pleasure comes much pain. The bigger lives we lead, the more potential there is for hard times. If we choose to love, we may be hurt. Putting ourselves out there artistically comes with the inevitable stab of rejection. In order to be successful in business, you have to put in the hard yards. Some people live smaller lives, doing just enough to survive with what they're given. But I hope I have the courage to live larger, to work hard and love fully in the hope of a richer existence.

Just in time for Valentine's Day

Strawberry heart

This is a strawberry from our garden. It looks like a heart, don't you think? Sometimes the misshapen things in nature are the best.

This is the other side, and its buddies:

This is the second year we've had a vege patch, and we've been bringing in some great hauls...


Veges from our garden

 I was particularly proud of these carrots, after last year's attempts were mostly stubby and eaten by bugs:

We're really seeing the 'fruits' of our labour... tee hee.