Ready, set...stop

My first Tai Chi class. I'm hooked. Doing something yet relaxing. A workout. Forgetting daily cares yet remembering something forgotten.

Normally each day I do what I've planned, or make plans. I try to sit and relax and enjoy the flowers. Eventually I think of something I wanted to do and go do that.

I overheard the instructor say something like this to one person in the class: "It's not about doing it right--however you do is right."

But this Tai Chi engages me yet I can let go. I'm practicing with the DVD and look forward to next week's class.

Everyone is different, everyone has a different path from our own path. We're immersed in competition from a young age. At schools we compete with each other for a high grade, we compete in sports to win or be at least better than someone else.

But competition can go too far. We can lose sight of the truth that "it's not about doing it right--however you do it is right." So when someone else is slower than yourself, or not as sophisticated, or just beginning when you are an expert, or hasn't had your experience or luck or practice--encourage them. Don't judge people by comparing them to your track record. You will always learn something from them, if you set yourself aside, and say "ready, set...stop."

Recipe: Last days of summer Chocolate Pie-pan Cake

Fall is coming; I've seen the ads for school supplies, the news stories about flu shots, the previews of fall TV shows. Then there is something in the landscape--the leaves of wild ash trees along country roads are heavily riddled with dry scaly brown; wild blackberries are in full harvest mode; U-pick blueberries have just a few more weeks left.

And something else: a sense that time has stopped for a moment, that the long warm days are have been around forever, that nature is on hold--for a bit. You know it won't last. So a quiet sense of urgency begins to build. You want to get every last bit of summer enjoyment out of each hazy sunny hour, each calm warm evening with crickets mildly chirping.

I still must take a road trip to a certain lake in the mountains to the south, spend a day or two in a small coastal town, spend hours reading in the lawn chair--feeling the breeze that carries the scent of honeysuckle.

Meanwhile I'm freezing blueberries and sliced peaches like mad.

That muskrat house along the community path--by the winter-flooding creek--wasn't it awfully big this year? Doesn't that foretell a colder than usual winter?

I realize I haven't eaten an apple for months, while I've enjoyed melons, berries, peaches, corn, cucumbers and fresh tomatoes instead.

I haven't used the oven much the past months--don't want to heat up the house--but now and then I have to bake a chocolate cake to eat with vanilla ice cream. I made up the recipe from several others. I'd rather bake something myself and know it has healthy ingredients and not too much sugar, than buy a cake mix or cake at a store that has unknown preservatives or (gulp) maybe even hydrogenated shortening.

Then I buy fat-free vanilla ice cream to eat with it (I just don't read the ingredients on it, I know they aren't all "natural;" the fat-free is what I want--too much dairy fat isn't good for you, I have to save my arteries for Christmas cookies made out of butter):

Chocolate Pie-pan Cake (to eat with ice vanilla cream and cherry brandy)

1/3 cup unsweetened powdered cocoa
(the blend of natural and dutched 100% cocoa)
3/4 cup white unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 large eggs (cage-free, vegetarian fed)
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil, or light olive oil
Vanilla ice cream
Cherry brandy
1/2 cup cherry preserves

Mix the dry ingredients, including the cocoa powder. In separate bowl, beat eggs, one at a time, into the sugars. Beat in the oil. Mix in the dry ingredients.

Grease a glass 9" pie pan with some olive oil. Pour the batter into the pie pan. Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20-25 minutes, or until when you press down on the top lightly, it springs back.

Let cool to where it is still warm. Cut into triangles and put in bowls.

Spoon vanilla ice cream onto cake. Mix the cherry brandy with the cherry preserves. Make a well in the ice cream and put tablespoon of the brandy mix into it.

Draw plans for a new landscape, or plant what you find?

I have three lace-cap hydrangeas, that come up faithfully each year. In March they are a desolate patch of raggedy broomstraws. Buds appear in April, a profusion of green leaves follow, then finally in mid-summer, I'm rewarded with the delicate circle of pale flowers surrounding a center of small buds. One has variagated leaves--light green and white (Hydrangea macrophylla "Mariesii Variegata). Very beautiful.

When I walk in early morning in a quiet beach town neighborhood, the sky misty gray before the sun climbs up and burns off the coulds, intensely dark blue-purple hydrangeas welcome and contrast with the grays of the early morning and the muted paints of the houses.

I admire the deep pink hydrangeas anchoring an old house as I drive past to the grocery store.

A large hydrangea with pure white flowers looks mysterious and bright, yet soft as moonlight, in a friend's garden at night.

I'd like to have a big, beautiful hydrangea with the full, round blossom, not the lace cap type. Shall I dig up a few more yards of lawn and put in another plant in the lawn that's left?

Or should I make a garden design first for the only side left that has any lawn?

When re-did the east side, I first made a garden plan. I looked at lots of books and magazines from the library on landscaping. Over a two-month period, I made about 6 plans, then kept coming back to the simplest one. I finally went with that one.

Chopped down a couple of small trees, killed all the grass, put in a gravel path, a 4' wide planter out of decorated stone (to get 8" of raised soil), made many trips to nurseries.

I pretty much stuck to the plan, but I did add more plants than I originally intended. It would have been better done more simply. But it's so beautiful now, with a year-round skeleton of evergreens (arborvitae, 2 kinds of grasses, a rhododendron).

The rest is mostly perennials that come back each year: a spring flowering blue "mountain" phlox, a mound of pink coreopsis (Coreopsis rosea)--a bed of thyme--a few feet of a flowering wild grass with tiny white flowers in early summer--a big bleeding heart (pink flowers)--a bunch of very pale pinkish lavender (Lavandula angustifolia Jean Davi)--a hardy purple/red blooming fuchia--and some blue star creeper that grows by leaps and bounds instead of creeping. The blue star creeper, the thyme, the blooming wild grass, and the pink coreopsis soften the edge of the gravel path. And one large deciduous variageted weigela with fragrant spring blooms.

So plans are good. But the other side of my yard just grew in bits and pieces--with not as much planning. I still put in evergreens as a border for a year-round "skeleton' to build on--few scattered arborvitae (I like them this way, rather than always in a row), silver king euonymus, evergreen azaleas, nandina, pieris japonica, viburnum.

I also planted perennials and another weigela. For perennials: Moonraker phygelius, with cascades of light yellow trumpet-shaped flowers all summer; Lavatera "Barnsley" (Tree Mallow), one of the fastest-growing plants on earth, with continual pink flowers all summer--must be pruned back each spring, and lasts for years in the Pacific Northwest (it might die off in colder areas), and groundcover Phlox "Scarlet Flame" that puts on a great spring show.

Then I couldn't resist--found a lovely fragrant Clematis armandii "Apple Blossom," an evergreen vine with white 4-petaled flowers in very early spring that have a strong apple blossom scent. I put it in the ground by the patio and it's grown to be 6' tall and has great promise for more growth and blooms next spring. Sometimes I see a plant that I just love and will find a place for it, and this was one of those.

Now I'll go for a walk in a local "wilderness" park, with haphazard, tangled field grasses, woods shrubs, old gnarled oaks, completely unplanned, yet more beautiful than anything I could dream up and design, weeds and all.


Tip: to kill or prevent black spot on roses, mix 1 part milk, 2 parts water, and a drop or two of dish detergent; spray on foliage every week in muggy weather, and every other week in hot, dryer weather, or as needed. Works great!