Flourishing

In these topsy-turvey times, what a pleasure to see something gather strength, poke up its head, and take off! That seems to be what's happening in our garden these days as it begins paying us back for two months of isolation-induced digging, weeding, wheelbarrowing and planting. We're beginning to eat home-grown greenery from the seedlings I bought in March, and the strawberries are vigorously producing flowers and buds. Sadly, I must nip them off the first year to encourage root growth, but they're certainly trying! The tomato plants still look iffy and the basil is recalcitrant in our current cool temperatures, but there's a long growing season ahead, so I have hopes. Our venture into horticulture may prove to be one of the bright spots of a so-far crazy year.

The little vegetable garden John and I created out of our old compost patch has turned into a mecca of deep-green, ridiculously healthy-looking edibles. If we chow down on this for the rest of the pandemic, we may end up with Popeye physiques. Here I'm collecting our first feed of home-grown lettuce, kale, chard and rocket. Photo by John Denniston.

I've planted a mix of vegetables and flowers in a section of  this garden bed that used to be taken up by a forest of Solomon's seal, which was impressive but inedible. So far, the new arrivals appear to be flourishing. 

 A closer look at that bed, with its tangle of rocket, parsley, kale, daisies and lavender.

The three new lavender plants are all producing buds. In the right foreground, one is already showing off its bee-friendly blooms.

These irises aren't edible or new, but I include them because I'm amazed they're blooming after I tore them all out to clean up their bed in March, then stuck them shallowly back in the soil. These guys are tough!

The new strawberry plants, all bowing toward the sun. Every day I tear off the blooms that would otherwise turn into delicious fruit for this summer. Gardening involves a lot of delayed gratification.

Talk about flourishing: this is mint, confined to a pot without good soil, but looking as if it's in a luxury spa. Mint is famously dangerous to put in the ground because it spreads like a weed, so experienced gardeners only grow it in pots. I look forward to being able to use all the mint I want this summer without paying $2.49 a bunch for it. 

Pickier but still resilient, these cosmos sulked when I planted them in deep shade, but started blooming when I put them in a sunnier spot.

This is the start of what will be a magnificent tower of sweet peas in a couple of months. They're at the base of an obelisk that will vanish under their vines.

And here's the start of the perennial delphiniums that will soon be towering over the sweet peas. I've already begun staking them.

The peonies seem happier this year after I cleaned up their bed and staked them early. They have lots of buds and more room to show them off.

These snap peas, grown from seed, are in the same bed as the peonies and a row of  daisies. I don't know if they'll survive in a shady spot, but this year is all about experimentation.

These little sprinklings of green are from wildflower and other flower seeds that a friend passed along. I scattered them in a front-garden bed left vacant when an azalea died. 

Weeds flourish too when you add compost to your flower beds. This one was about two feet high when I caught it hiding among the hollyhocks.

Here's something that's not flourishing: the lower leaves of some front-garden hollyhocks turn yellow, then brown, then fall off. It's a rust that hits them every year, but the plants keep growing and producing flowers anyway. 

And outside our new backyard veggie garden is a type of weed so tough it grows through asphalt. It's already poking up among the veggie plants, and I will be battling it all summer. Of all plants, weeds are the best at flourishing.

Reviving mom's buns

Here I am, trying to channel my mother after I found her old recipe for hot-cross buns. I'm showing John how she used to squeeze the dough through her thumb and forefinger to create a perfect sphere. Photo by John Denniston. 

Mom wrote out her favourite recipes by hand in an old blue ledger. As you can see from the well-spotted page, this recipe must have been used often. For our family, hot-cross buns were a year-round phenomenon, not reserved for Easter.  Photo by John Denniston.

John’s recent venture into Covid bread-making got me thinking about home-baking and the long-forgotten taste treasures of the past. Oh! the memory of mom’s hot-cross buns, fragrant with cinnamon, browned and puffed, studded with just enough raisins to make each one a treat.

Could they be revived? Six years since she died and at least 10 years since she last made it, could mom’s best bun recipe live again?  Diving into the drawer where I keep such mementoes, I found the hard-cover blue ledger where she wrote her best recipes in a fine and ladylike script unknown to the block-letters-and-computer-keyboard children of today. Five pages in, at the top of a reassuringly well-spotted page, is “Hot-cross buns.”

What’s curious about such recipes, from those whose lives have centred on the kitchen, is what they don’t include. A list of ingredients, yes, and amounts to some degree, but “a few cups” of flour? Whole wheat or white or a mixture? I recall these as whole wheat buns, but the recipe gives no clue. No instructions on kneading times or cooking temperatures and should there be a second rise or is one enough? –– the assumption is that the baker will just know. Such recipes are guides for the knowledgeable.

The best part about the results was the smell – the fragrance of baking bread and cinnamon that I remember so well. The actual buns, well, let’s just say they are a start if I want to figure out my own way of making them. They probably needed more kneading, more rising time, and should have been baked closer together. They had a crusty exterior instead of the soft one I remember, and once cooled, settled into a certain solidity. Mom had a term for such results, and I fear she would have called them “toughy-duffies.”

 John, lacking the idyllic memories of the original, thought they were just fine.

Yes! Yeast has returned to store shelves, and here is my stash.

Since I remember mom's hot-cross buns as being made of whole wheat, I waited until whole wheat flour returned to store shelves before I tried her recipe. The only problem is that it was only available in 10-kg bags. That's a lot of baking ahead!

The makings of the recipe: milk, butter and eggs to the left,  foamy yeast in the measuring cup in centre, bowl awaiting the finished dough to the upper right, and flour and raisins on the lower right.

"A few cups of flour" with the liquid ingredients added. Much more flour was needed to turn this into bread dough.

Dough in greased bowl, ready to rise.

Risen dough: is it double the original as instructed?

This old work-horse of a baking pan is what mom used to bake her buns on. Since I inherited it, I've used it for almost everything, especially baking salmon. It's showing its age, but I hope it lasts me out.

Cutting up the risen dough to make into buns. Photo by John Denniston.

Shaping the buns. Photo by John Denniston.

 I wish mom had been around to give me spacing instructions. Photo by John Denniston.

Ready for the oven.

All cooked. Hmm. They don't look like mom's evenly-sized, closely packed buns that covered the entire pan. I guess this is how you learn!

Close-up of mom's recipe in case anyone else wants to take a shot at it!

Mom's blue ledger with her favourite recipes hand-written inside.

Spring resurgence

John and I have been really good about staying in our neighbourhood during the pandemic, but every once in awhile, we just have to break out. On Wednesday, a month and a half after our last such visit, we returned to Richmond's Iona Beach regional park for another walk on the north arm jetty. Lots has changed; spring has transformed the landscape, and the easing of pandemic restrictions has brought some life back to the adjacent river and the airport. All photos by John Denniston.

The trees have leafed out and the yellow broom has turned some formerly bare  areas into idyllic pathways.

Getting into the sparser, sandy area, I was surprised to sniff the scent of wild roses and see a patch of pink. I don't know what kind of roses these are or why they would have appeared here, but they look like low-growing, large-flowered variations of the Alberta wild roses I grew up with. 

Nearby, poking up amid the sand grasses, are these blue and purple flowers. A Google search shows they are either wild sweet peas or vetches. 

Here's a bank of these same flowers, with the Fraser River and a log boom in the background.

These are probably the rankest weeds, but they were red and looked pretty against this log. Let's call them spring flowers.

Iona Beach was a silent and stripped-down place when John and I walked its north arm jetty at the end of March. All was Covid-era quiet – no action on the river on the one side or at the airport on the other. The scenery was beautiful, but the beauty was in its austerity – in the blue-grey horizontal lines of ocean, sky, sand and water, relieved by the vertical pops of skeletal trees and log-boom pilings poking out of the sand.

A month and a half later, it’s all coming back to life. When we walked there Wednesday, planes rumbled to and from the airport, and on the river, tugboats nudged the log-booms, with pole-wielding crewmen doing their dangerous dances on the logs. On the jetty itself, spring had exploded. Broom turned the river banks electric yellow and leafed-out trees transformed once-bare paths into idyllic byways. On the bleak sand wastes, the usual coarse grasses were interrupted by sudden surprises –a patch of pink that turned out to be heavily scented wild roses, and a bank of blue-purple flowers  foregrounding the river scenery.

It’s a coincidence that the shutdowns of economic and social life due to the coronavirus are lifting just as spring resurrects the natural world. But appropriate, somehow. Even broom, wild roses and wild sweet peas can only stay dormant for so long.

The north arm of the Fraser River, virtually deserted during our last visit to the park, is showing signs of life again. Tugboats were busy moving log-booms around.  

Spring is greening up the rough grasses growing among the rocks of the ocean shoreline.

But even spring weather doesn't make the sand grasses luxuriant. That's why a patch of roses in the midst of  such terrain was a big surprise.

This log photo could have been taken in March, but I include it here because it shows the unchanging beauty of the area. 

And this one shows the grasses, sand and broom that made this visit so different.

As we left, the skies were darkening;  the broom's yellow blossoms shone as bright as electric lights against the gloom.

Layers of different kinds of plants under those impressive skies reminded me of a painting by Kathy Robertson, a beloved Saltspring neighbour who unfortunately is no longer with us. I think she would have enjoyed painting this scene.

Sharing the wealth

Lilacs, apple blossoms, that big old red azalea out front, and the gold of the golden chain tree – right now is the best time in my garden, and recent sunshine has made it positively idyllic. Since distancing rules make it hard to share the pleasure with friends, here are some glimpses of what I’d like everyone to be enjoying along with me:

What an early-morning view! Out of the bedroom window, our neighbour's apple tree is in full bloom to the left, while our lilacs form a counterpoint to the right. 

Down the back steps, you're surrounded by colour. The summer snowflake is the white bush to the left, the pink wiegelia is to the right, and in the middle, the golden chain tree (laburnum) provides a vertical contrast. 

The lilac tree to the right was missing from the previous photo, but it's hard to get it all in!

Another view of the neighbour's apple blossoms, which are unusually prolific this year.

It was an accident, but the tree peony I bought a few years ago is exactly the same shade of pinky-red as the long-established big azalea out front. Luckily, they both are blooming at the same time. 

The snowball tree by the side of the house is just coming out into bloom, adding to the feeling of luxuriant plenty.

This garden bed mixes veggies and flowers; there will be lavender blooming here soon.

The lily-of-the-valley, which has taken over the space under a hedge by the side of the house, scents the yard in the evenings.

A close-up of the bleeding hearts; you can see the little white hearts bleeding away.

All the  plants I put into this new strawberry bed a couple of weeks ago seem to have taken hold, and look like they're flourishing.

No blooms yet, but these sweet peas planted from seed appear to be well on their way. Lots of tying-up to be done soon!

The beginnings of summer feasts of snow-peas, I hope. 

And here is the veggie garden by the back fence that I've written about before. John seems to have stopped the feasting critters by surrounding the plants with boards. I hope it keeps working. Photo by John Denniston.

This is what the back garden looks like now, with tomato plants up against the screen and rows of peas taking the place of the plants eaten by critters earlier. Photo by John Denniston.

And what you'd see at the front sidewalk if you were visiting today. The red azalea dominates, but the volunteer poppies provide a little spark of extra colour.