Floral Foraging

 The wisteria is in bloom here on our Connecticut roadsides. I cannot resist foraging when I run into a cache and abundant wild flowers are no exception. In many parts of the country wisteria is considered invasive so there's no big concern about picking an armful of blossoms as the muscular vines can bulge and flex and pull over a house if they wish. Even if it a dizzy hellion of a vine, it is breathtaking.

 One of my very favorite flowers. I can't really resist it. I tried to pretend that I wasn't going to plant one here but then I got over it when I pulled over to the side of the highway, in the mighty shade of a massive wisteria, laden with soft ropes of blossom dripping all over the entire backside of a some nameless big box store. That single vine where I stopped to fill my arms must have been 30 feet or more across and about 20 feet high....thick with sweet, pendulous clusters.

 There's a potted wisteria sitting in our driveway now, waiting for just the right spot. I am waffling about where exactly I will plant it, my third wisteria at a dwelling of ours. I planted a wisteria vine at our first house, we bought a house with a lush wisteria pergola and then sold it after just one season of ripe blooms and now, here we are again. New beginnings.

 Wisteria is a good flower for us. It will help encourage us to make sure to build that imaginary pergola over the imaginary stone patio in our back yard, a little bit an anchor tying us to plans we dreamed up. It also makes me think of our wedding in my great-grandparents vineyard all draped with gold and purple and is a good tie between our mutual interest in The East and our origin in The West. A flower held in great traditional esteem in China and Japan and then "discovered", named and affectionately adopted in England. Just about exactly right.

And you have to admit. Even if you're not a "flower person" that it is spectacular. Right? Tell I'm right.

Books and Birds and Buds

There is a pair of hawks swooping around our block lately. They shriek together while they soar high over the convent next door and in the morning I often watch them preening in the tops of the very tall maples across the street. I stand in tadasana and then swan dive down towards my yoga mat while they shift and ruffle feathers and the wind silently blows their tails in chill flutters. I hope they will decide to nest nearby. I'd love to see a nesting pair of hawks raise their young. I've never seen birds so big so familiarly. And maybe the local feral rabbit count will go down too which could be good for my vegetable garden, eh?

I am slowly getting bits and bobs of the house together. Today I moved some of the rugs and art work around and yesterday I figured out how to hang a mask I wanted to display. It's all stop and go and a painfully slow process but I feel like at least the motion is forward. And I know that soon...I'll be all outdoors minded and it will be all that I can do just to make myself wash the dishes, hang the rest of the house.

View into the sunroom/studio

Ru and I are reading aloud the rest of The Little House books again...we have worked our way through the first two and are beginning the third and A is reading Farmer Boy at night. I am not sure why I use the phrase "work through" the right label is "burned through" or "tore explosively through" or some other wildly manic phraseology. It is all I can do to keep the reading sessions down to an hour at a time. He's so thrilled to listen that he will beg and beg for it continue no matter where I leave off. If only I didn't want to sit there reading all day long myself. Heh. I don't know where he gets it.

The last of our snow, in that little sloping pile behind Dee.

The latest garden plan at the moment is a standard, tree-form wisteria. I was ready to give up the wisteria dream. All garden types say it is absurdly invasive and no matter the heartbreaking beauty of the plant it is evil and it will send four million runners all over your lawn and worm a thousand robust fingers up your gutters and then beginning to tear lustily at your siding.

Promising looking buds on our forsythia!

Yes, but I do love it and I have dreamed of having wisteria for years and years and A says I shouldn't live so safely. Claim a dream. I'm thinking that the grafted tree form varieties I've read about seem safer...less prone to runners and wildly unkempt habits than their vining relatives. How does this one look? The next question is: "Do I have to keep it in a planter in order to survive co-habitation with said plant? I wouldn't put mint in the ground to save my life...am I insane to consider plunking a wisteria down?

Related articles

• 13 Reasons to Grow a Vegetable Garden. (frugalupstate.com)
• Hawk's Nest (wvcabins.wordpress.com)
• My Hawk Friend (40dreams.wordpress.com)
• How is a hawk's nest different than a blue jays (wiki.answers.com)
• Yep, the FDNY rescues hawks, too (nydailynews.com)
• Proud to Read Aloud (thereaderonline.co.uk)