Finding gifts for friends can some times be a challenge for me, but I found some good ideas right in my backyard.   Don't be afraid of using color and putting things together you never considered before.  The best garden gifts mix it up and offer a bit of whimsy as well.  Better … [Read more...]

What you forget is that plants themselves want to live as much as you want them to.  More. -   Elizabeth Smart, Elizabeth's Garden, 1989   Several years back, when I lived in San Francisco, I did a course for women by a woman whose sole objective was to teach us to step outside … [Read more...]

My 20 year old niece Alex and I visited the San Diego Botanical Gardens last November. It was great bonding time for me with this smart and beautiful young woman who holds wonderful promise and enjoys adventure like I do. I had wanted to visit the gardens -- once named Quail … [Read more...]

The old saying ...the older I get the less I know.    I go about the day thinking how better put, right?  I have it handled and then I am thrown a curve and realize I don’t have it handled at all.  Take the plumbing.  It works fine and then it doesn’t and one goes through a whole … [Read more...]

Chaos has a place.   In all our travels, did we recognize the possibility that mayhem teaches something?  So I sit in my adirondack chair, contemplating the possibility.  I consider that  I missed something in the reality called my life -- that maybe chaos has a place and for … [Read more...]

Every spring is the only spring - a perpetual astonishment.  ~Ellis Peters   Every year, at this particular time, I fall in love all over again with the garden.   I get giddy like a little kid discovering a whole other world.  Everything looks new, different even, better than … [Read more...]

Death ends a life, not a relationship. - Jack Lemmon I knew Ronald James MacIndoe only a short time.   He was part of the MacIndoe clan in which I married.  Our interaction was brief by yearly and decade standards, but Ron’s presence struck a chord in my heart and he touched … [Read more...]

I never knew Jim’s late wife, Sheila.  Except in memories shared by him.  Many memories actually from almost twenty five years shared as husband and wife.  I entered Jim’s life eight months after colon cancer claimed Sheila’s life.  From her diagnosis to her death, time raced … [Read more...]

I call it the Merlin splat.  Jim lays down quietly on the couch to watch TV and then all of a sudden a 40 pound dog leaps on to his chest – splat – and says love me!  Just like that.  He did that to me once.   I now sit upright.  There is something about Merlin that makes you … [Read more...]

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.  Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.  ~Anaïs Nin   I am no different than the … [Read more...]