Allow me to share a joy with you. Like the woman who found her missing coin, so we have discovered a treasure of our own: the Garden at Ritterfeld, now this second week of June, in the year of our Lord 2023:
I’ll not lie: this is a lovely time of year in the garden. The beds are bursting with blooms – many familiar faces from summers past, some newcomers settling in for their first season. And still more are yet to come – the Sunflowers of various varieties have just begun to built their soft, velveteen crowns behind green fingers, and the cornflowers bide their days drawing energies into leafy verdure til the days grow wispy with humid heat.
Having learned that our best growing season for the foods we eat is Late-Summer/Fall, the Wife and I elected to dedicate most of the beds to certain mixed-flower seeds, for our visual joy and the neighboring wildlife’s sustenance. We anticipate once again watching goldfinches and song sparrows, light as a touch, stand upon the drooping aged heads of great sunflowers and picking out their supper-seeds for themselves. Already the fat bees are bumbling their way among the flowers, stumbling into blossoms and crawling about through fine yellow gumdrops with abandon. Our first hummingbird of the year appeared last week.
It’s lovely, and naturally, I take no credit for its loveliness. The same well-ordered space was empty and bare a few short months ago; we cast some seed and water there, and somehow, in nothing short of Chestertonian magic, it is replaced with a thousand thousand colors smiling at the sky. We hardly knew what all the flowers in the Botanical Interests packets would look like, let alone their names, but now we have the pleasure of their acquaintance. They daily insist, “Come in! and know me better, man!” And we enter. And we learn.
thegreatknock 