Homecoming

My eagerness in going away on vacation is book-ended by feelings of concern and frenzied days of putting house and garden to order. Before the great escape, I’m busy making sure the house is clean and tidy, refrigerator cleaned out, beds stripped and made anew, laundry done, folded and put away nicely, mail put on hold, bills/subscriptions dealt with etc., The list is long.

In the garden I harvest, weed, feed, trim, primp, prop up as well sternly lecture the plants on behaving properly in my absence. What? You don’t talk to your plants? Why ever not? They’re a captive audience!

Now, I do all these things because I really like returning to a home that is clean and welcoming and, a garden that hasn’t mutinied whilst their captain was on leave. I invariably return with some trepidation as I know the weeds will take the opportunity to multiply and spread with abandon. They sense when I’m going away and gleefully plot their proliferation. Nasty thugs.

Well, this time I worked extra hard ahead of my trip. I diligently weeded every day for the 2 weeks leading up, cut back the summer blooming plants by 1/3 their height, deadheaded meticulously, staked anything that could flop or keel over, set up a watering system with a moisture sensor so it wouldn’t turn on if it had rained and generally got the garden in as good a shape as I possibly could.

All that hard work definitely paid off. The plants all look good and healthy. There’s a riot of hot summer colors – red, orange and pink. And while the weeds did make merry, they did not overtake the garden by any measure. I returned this past Saturday and I’ve already got half the garden weeded, neatened up some plants with a few snips of the secateurs, re-positioned the pots I’d moved together so they could be watered by the single system and given said pots a healthy helping of compost. Things are looking fine even if I say so myself.

It’s gratifying to watch the hummingbirds descend upon the feeders in the early hours of the day. There have been many rabbit sightings as well – cute they may be but I’m staying vigilant on the diminutive marauders. Keeping track of the flight paths traced by the insect life as they go from one type of flower to another is fascinating – they hover and linger, visit practically every flower on one plant, move on to a different plant, then retrace their way back and eventually take off to see what’s doing elsewhere in the neighborhood. One swallowtail butterfly spent almost an hour on a particular stand of Echinacea and completely ignored the one just 2 feet away.

It’s impossible to be bored in nature.

It was a lovely vacation. And it’s been an equally lovely homecoming.