Category: gardening

The Garden Past and Present

Posted in Art, art and healing, disability, gardeningTagged , , , 11 Comments

Last summer, my elephant ear garden looked like this:

This year, it looks like this:

We had an abnormally cold winter and it killed off many of the bulbs. Elephant Ears make new bulbs every summer, often along the bottom of the old bulbs. I think these are all newly made bulbs that grew from underneath their frozen parents.

I love my elephant ears when they get dramatically big. I like seeing the slender stalks of the first small leaves divide into larger and larger leaves until they are nearly as big as me. I get cocky about them. I see other people’s plants and think, mine are bigger. It’s a bit of delusion that I have anything to do with how big they get. I do my part, of course: making sure they’re watered and have enough room to grow by weeding and tending the ground around them.

Or I used to. Now, I get other people to help me with it. Now that I’m a full time wheelchair user, I can’t get to the weeds, I can’t divide the bulbs, I can’t do all the little fussy things an urban gardener does to get credit for beautiful plants. I appreciate those who’ve helped me weed and keep some order in the small patch by my porch. I’m not totally happy about having to give up the responsibilities I enjoyed, but I’m happy that the garden grows.

I’ve also had struggles cultivating creativity over the past few years. I don’t get as many paintings done. I don’t have the energy to organize shows or to participate in groups. I don’t write as much. I don’t even go to art shows as much – transportation and fatigue issues. Like so many of us, I was changed by the arrival of COVID in our lives. Also the continuing fragmentation of our country and a seeming inability for us to build working bridges to help each other out. In my personal life, I’ve aged enough to have to deal with death more often (also a COVID factor), and my own disability takes its share of my energy. I’ve often felt as if my well was empty and I couldn’t tap into a new source of flow.

But watching these scrappy plants emerge and grow after a hostile winter, has inspired me. Slowly I am writing more, drawing again, painting again. Since I have no deadlines, I can set my own pace. I don’t have to create things at the same rate. And as I look back over all that I’ve done in previous years, I realize that I’m a productive person, even if I never actually create anything tangible ever again.

There is a form of art called “social practice.” It “focuses on engagement through human interaction and social discourse.” If I’m feeling small and insecure, I can always say I do social practice art (though no one will know what I’m talking about). To me, in its simplest form, social practice art is a way of living creatively, sharing ideas with others, contributing to a better, more peaceful and beautiful world. The goal is not necessarily a finished object or project. Living is an art. The creative ways we deal with life’s challenges are an art form.

I may just be trying to give a label to my fallow periods to feel better about them. These periods are a part of the process. Are they an art in themselves? It’s not like I’ve stopped thinking about creativity, or living creatively for even one day while I’ve navigated these past few years. I’ve been helped a lot by others, and had lots of conversations with them about the world at large, and the small world that I occupy.

And now this little garden is growing back. The plants on my porch that I can tend to are thriving. Whenever someone walks by – and looks up from their phone – they see growth and blooms. I don’t actually create it, but I facilitate it.

I once led an art workshop and one of the young participants asked if you could make a good living as an artist. I said it’s difficult. But you can make a good life.

If we survive a brutal winter and grow a little slower afterwards, there’s a lot of beauty in that. Noticing gardens is being creative. Carrying sorrow, but living with delight, that’s a good life.

Joy At the Memphis Brook Museum – living a good life

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Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypalCards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

Stuck

Posted in degenerative disease, disability, gardening3 Comments

I’ve mostly adjusted to life using wheelchairs. I love them — my power chair and manual chair. I can go many places but not everywhere I want to. The power chair can handle a lot of different surfaces, but does best on flat paved ground. Of course, it does well on floors and indoor surfaces.

If it hasn’t rained too much, I can get around on grass, so I can get out and see my garden.

It’s been raining often lately, but it’s still quite warm. I’m seeing mushrooms pop up and they delight me. I want to take photos of them, but often they are in places I can’t get to.

A neighbor’s garden got an extra bit of zen from mushrooms (I was able to get close because this is close to the driveway)

A few days ago, I saw huge yellow fungus that had grown up overnight under the oak trees across the street. The trees are surrounded by an island of mulch. I went to see if I could get close enough to get pictures. There were about six big yellow blobby mushrooms. I tested my wheelchair on the edge of the mulched area, and it seemed to be able to move okay.

I flew across the mulch and got a few photos of two, then turned to get another.

I don’t know what kind of mushroom this is — a brain mushroom?
Here’s a baby one

Then I wanted to go photograph the others and tried to move the chair. And it didn’t move. The wheels dug into the mulch, which was damp from the rains. I tried different speeds and pushed my weight around at different angles, but the wheels just spun.

I was stuck.

I felt like such an idiot. I also felt an acute sadness at not being able to follow my whim and capture pictures of these wonderous bits of nature.

I phoned my son and he was home. (I have a list of helpers I can call and he’s first on the list.) He came in about 10 minutes. It seemed a long time to me because my sense of stupidity and loss seeped into my entire being. I started to cry a little bit.

When my son arrived, he disengaged the motor of the chair, and pushed and pulled it out of the hole I’d dug myself into. He took time to marvel at the mushrooms. A young woman jogged by, but stopped to see if we needed help. She asked if the garden across the street was mine. It is. She’d seen me sitting on the porch.

“I always love walking by it. It makes me happy.”

It makes me happy, too.

Garden sweet garden

My son walked with me across the street and made sure I was safely in the house. He didn’t chastise me for my foolish pursuit of images.

I sat out on my porch for awhile, surrounded by plants I have full access to. I’ve photographed them hundreds of times. Every year I still get a garden. The whole world isn’t accessible to me, but I have a good space.

This is disability pride month. I’ve seen people with disabilities online showing their amazing lives and ways of getting around. I’ve see people with disabilities let nothing get in their way. But I know they struggle, like me, with limits and barriers that no amount of pride or strength will break down. It’s not bad. It just is.

Within my limits, I know I have a lot of riches. I doubt if I were able bodied, I would have developed the eye for detail that made me notice the mushrooms. I couldn’t take the time to nurture my porch garden. The reason I love and respect plants so much is that they are rooted, immobile, but they grow, bloom, fight and flourish from their one small place in the world.

I thought about my list of people who will come help me when I get in trouble, need rides, get stuck. When I feel the limits of my life are unbearable, this circle of friends (I include my kids in the circle) come to put wheels on my troubles and we move forward together.

Friends are the best assistive devices. Friends are accessible. There is always an accessible bridge between our hearts.

I bought this celosia the day after I got stuck — something more to see up close while the mushrooms continue their lives at a distance

~~~

Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at pay pal

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

Moonflower Morning

Posted in gardening, UncategorizedTagged , Leave a comment

Fall fell all at once this week.  One day the high was 90 degrees, the next the high was 64.  I expected a more gradual drop, but I love the cooler weather and the impending turning colors of leaves.  Here, we have a lot of oaks, so the dominant color of fall is this lovely golden light filtered through yellow and brown leaves.

But these last few days have been cloudy and my moonflowers aren’t following their usual bloom schedule.  The first cool cloudy morning, they were open, big as you please.

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This is a bit blurred, but it was a delight to see the moonflower and dahlia blooming at the same time.

In these fall days, leaves are dying back.  Some leaves give you more color for a minute, but some just go from green to brown and you become deeply aware of mortality.  I don’t try to cut back the diminishing leaves too much.  That’s part of the landscape, even of a porch garden.  Plants bloom, give me pleasure, then fade away.

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Moonflower among the fading dahlia leaves

I cut and watched a waning elephant ear leaf fade over a few days.  The yellows and browns seemed so vivid, I enjoyed watching the curling edges brown and the complex swirl of the leaf structure.

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Fall is a welcome relief from the heat of summer.  A beautiful and melancholy season.  I stroll around the neighborhood and see gardens transforming.  People are decorating for Halloween and I see everything from ghoulish bones and monsters to funny pumpkins.

I think of the people I know and love who have died, and I long for another kind of ritual, more like the Day of Dead, celebrating those we have loved and lost and want to keep close through stories, food and visitations to their resting places.  Cleaning a grave, remembering that we are mortal, that we don’t have all the answers, that our lives passing like an undecipherable dream.

I saw a dead robin as I was strolling around and it opened up a stream of grief, I started thinking of lost friends, sad songs, and then actually started crying.  It was so strange.  I wondered if a depression was coming on.  Is the change of light going to be especially hard this year?  I have so enjoyed this sunny summer.  I can’t believe it’s over.  Though many sad and troubling things happen in summer, it seems I reflect more on them in fall.

I wrote a poem about 5 years ago about what leaves tell us about life.

Leaf Story

Under the gray sky

We walk upon a carpet

Of ruby and gold leaves

Enchanted to find

The ground so much

Brighter than the sky

We say this is the time of loss

The leaves blazing a

Last gasp of color

Before they die

Dust to dust

 

But the leaves crackle out

Another side of the story

As they make their yearly journey

Back to simplified elements

Flowing in the winter rains

Back to their roots

Where the tree absorbs them

Where they make their slow way up

To begin life on a limb

Again

And again

 

A friend took me to a local nursery for discount plants — the ones that didn’t get watered and are drooping and browning.  We grabbed up all the ones with live buds and brought them home to give them some TLC.  I should have mums blooming in another week.    Another friend brought me some new plants, new color.

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Ornamental peppers – probably will miss the heat but they hold on to their jewel like colors

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Coleus good for summer and fall

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Angelonia looks like a little orchid — one of the sale plants enjoying the care it’s getting

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Egyptian Star flower and angelonia

I’m learning this year that there are flowers that prefer shorter days and long cool nights.  They are coming to life as others are dying back.  It’s normal to feel the sadness of this old world more keenly as summer ends.

A robin doesn’t worry about its mortality, it flies, it maybe reproduces, it lives, it dies.  As do all things.  Even the oaks, hundreds of years old, who will give me filtered golden light in the coming month.  They will one day fall, making room for some acorn to thrive.

Everything, perhaps, is as it should be.

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Moonflower, watercolor and ink on paper

~~~

Thanks for reading my post.  If you like it, share it.  If you find a typo, please let me know and I’ll send you a thank-you postcard.  

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If you’d like to support my art and writing, please consider becoming a donor on Patreon, a monthly donation platform that helps me pay for internet service, art supplies and living expenses.  A little bit each month goes a long way.  If I get enough supporters, I can make this blog ad-free!  Here’s a link to my Patreon page:

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If you prefer to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal.com  Please email me at joyzmailbox@gmail.com if you’d like details.

Dahlia and Moonflower

Posted in gardening, Photography, UncategorizedTagged , 3 Comments

The days are getting shorter but some flowers like that.  Moonflowers, of course, and dahlias, asters, mums.   Last night a moonflower opened right next to a dahlia bloom and I was able to get a good photograph of it.

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I like that the heart shaped moonflower leaf came out, as well as the dew on the purple dahlia.

I put this print in my Redbubble shop.  It’s available as cards, a canvas bag and a few cases for phones.

Or just to look at and enjoy here.

~~~

Thanks for reading my post.  If you like it share it.  If you find a typo, please let me know and I’ll send you a thank-you postcard.  

You can get prints and cards of some of my work on Redbubble.  They also print my work on lots of other items, including phone skins, tote bags, shirts and journals:

https://www.redbubble.com/people/JoyMurray?asc=u

If you’d like to support my art and writing, please consider becoming a donor on Patreon, a monthly donation platform that helps pay for internet service, art supplies and living expenses.  A little bit each month goes a long way.  If I get enough supporters, I can make this blog ad-free!  Here’s a link to my Patreon page:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=8001665

If you prefer to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal.com  Please email me at joyzmailbox@gmail.com if you’d like details.