In the garden: Le Tour des Plants

Although I wouldn't have picked the name myself, I have to admit it makes me grin just looking at it: Le Tour des Plants. Start your hybrid and bicycle engines running, my gardening friends, because more than 35 locations throughout Oregon and southern Washington are going to be hosting "plantastic events" beginning on September 13th and lasting through the following weekend. We're talking gardening tours, scavenger hunts, accessible experts, workshops, rare plant findings, and, why not? Bluegrass music.

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No longer in the garden: pesky starlings

The lessons of one mistake can be endless. When I try to walk through a public park just about anywhere in the Northwest, I wonder about that Englishman who thought importing starlings to the United States would give us a more Shakespearian atmosphere.

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A tribute to eccentrics

Our garden writer shares why those who refuse to follow the herd can best teach us.

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In the bamboo garden

Without mentioning any names — not that you'd know her anyway — I know someone who helped her partner plant bamboo all over his new yard just before she left him. It is an old, tired story. He was having a secret affair, except she knew and couldn't cope with it anymore. What probably looked like small, lovely bands of green topped with soft shivering leaves is probably upending his driveway and back porch right about now. My heart breaks for both of them. Oh, that karma.

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(Not) in the garden: bees

When I was growing up, a summer wasn't a summer until my first bee sting. Honeybees, in particular, were everywhere. During picnics we would often have to move from place to place until we found a shady bee-free zone at the local park. Playing kick-the-can in the afternoons, racing through the neighborhood yards was its own Olympics:

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In the garden: your pain about Spain cured on the main

Let's just say you are sitting at one of the Starbucks still standing, staring into a cup of stunningly delicious coffee, wishing you were headed somewhere like southern Spain to take a class on, okay, anything. Medicinal herbs is your top choice, but even miniature golf-putting techniques fits the fantasy. Those huge cerulean blue skies. Those plateaus. Those high deserts. Those plants. And let's just say that there isn't a snowball's chance in the Sahara that you are going to Spain, maybe ever. A VISA bill that grows all by itself, combined with ever-growing travel costs, are the marks of a trip that will not happen.

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In the garden: U-pick blueberries

The book Plenty is about a young Vancouver couple, Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon. The two decide to live on locally grown foods for a year. I've just read to the section on blueberries where they find a patch of beautiful, fat juicy ones only to discover that they are being grown for a local Buddhist temple and are not for sale. I don't know, yet, if they talk their way into a sale. Given how personable the couple is, my guess is probably. Putting the book down to attend to chores, I've realized that Smith and Mackinnon have convinced me to seriously consider following their eat-local example. This is the stat that caught me:

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In the garden: mean girls

I happen to be one of those Buddhists who believes in rebirth. I might be the only Buddhist, however, who believes that mean girls are reborn as aphids and continue to prey on the young, the beautiful, and the innocent. In my case this means that aphids almost destroyed my kale.

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In the garden: Random joy

When I first stumbled into this Buddhist path I now call home, my greatest surprise was an instruction to "live in joy." I already knew about the Buddhist teaching that life is difficult. (Perhaps you've noticed.) But joy? Someone had to be kidding. I was too busy.

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In the garden: triage

You have a yard. You're having a party. Your yard looks like shit. The party is tonight. What to do? The answer, my friend, is triage.

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In the garden: beer wars

As a card-carrying Buddhist, I take the precept "do no harm" very seriously. Over the years this has meant a willingness to share my home with all sorts of insects and lowlifes, only removing ones who get too greedy for space. Even then, I help them get to their new homes with as much compassion as I can muster. Toward that end, for example, I once spent an entire pilgrimage perfecting the technique of catching flies in one hand so I could grab them and carry them out of meditation halls and bedrooms and bathrooms.

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Saying 'yes' to a day with Ciscoe Morris

A management consultant-turned Zen teacher plays sidekick to Seattle's inveterate plant-promoter and finds inspiration in a Venus flytrap.

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