Lifescapes

more on crossvine

Ah, that lovely crossvine (photo below). Who would have guessed that something so beautiful was once thought to be useful? Native American Ethnobotany (compiled by Daniel Moerman) tells us that the Cherokee used a leaf tea as a blood purifier, the Choctaw as a kidney treatment, and the Koasati to treat rheumatism. Bark tea was used in a steam bath for dropsy (what we now call congestive heart failure), as a gargle to treat diptheria, and as a headache medicine. Consider all these ways of encountering this plant, of taking it into your awareness, into your body and spirit, the next time you see it blooming against a wall. And be grateful.

Reading Note, from Mary Oliver, "Poem: By the Wild-Haired Corn," from Long Life:

This much I know,
when I see the bright
stars of their faces,
when I'm strolling nearby,

I grow soft in my speech,
and soft in my thoughts,
and I remember how everything will be everything else,
by and by.

in bloom this week: crossvine

I'm told that the common name of this beautiful crossvine (aka Bignonia capreolata, Dragon Lady) refers to the dark cross you can see when you slice the stem. I haven't tried slicing stems. I'm too busy admiring the blossoms. The hummingbirds adore it, too. I watched a pair of ruby-throats dipping into one orange-gold blossom after another. Obviously a popular tourist attraction.

I've been catching up on neglected housework, laundry, and last-minute tour details before making my get-away on Saturday. Two local events that day, then a drive to Houston (Murder by the Book) and back on Sunday, and a bookstore signing (Barnes & Noble) in Austin on Monday. On Tuesday I catch a plane to Chicago, pick up a rental car there, and drive to Carmel, IN, for a visit to one of my favorite bookstores, Jim Huang's Mystery Book Company. When we scheduled the flight, Julie (my intrepid publicist) and I forgot that Chicago is on Central time and Indiana is on Eastern time. Dang. I'll have to drive like the wind to make it in time. Cross your fingers.

My one regret about the HEARTS tour: the crossvine will be finished blooming by the time I come home. But not to despair: the madonna lilies will just be opening, creamy white, with a fragrance that breaks the heart. So I have something to look forward to, something to imagine, while I'm driving talking talking driving. Crossvine blossoms and madonna lilies: the thought is enough to keep me going until I'm home again. And I'll see sights along the way: redbuds in Indiana, dogwood in North Carolina, hawks in trees, deer in wild fields. It'll all be like home.

Reading note, from Writing From the Center, by Scott Russell Sanders: "Every thread you discover in the local web of life leads beyond your place to life somewhere else.

copy-edited!

I know, I know. It looks like just another stack of papers on a desk. Nothing at all remarkable about it. But I'll have you know that this is a copy-edited manuscript, 484 pages of it, 148,596 words of it, and that I have completely finished reading every word, and correcting quite a few.

Which doesn't mean that I haven't missed some. Of course I have, and so has the copy editor. But we didn't actually miss them, you see. We've left them on the page, intentionally, carefully scattered here and there, for you to find. And we've been especially careful to leave errors in the Latin, just so you can have the fun of discovering them and pointing them out to your friends. (No, of course you wouldn't do that, would you? I didn't think so.)

Anyway, it's done, and my hat's off to the copy editor, Pamela Barricklow, who did a truly heroic job on this book. I hope she got paid by the hour or by the pound, and not by the job. This one was a doozy. The book was actually pretty clean, but she still had to check all that Latin and those weird plant spellings and the quantities in the recipes and all the things that drive copy editors over the brink of an early grave. Thank you, Pam. You have earned a friend for life. And you, gentle reader, when you pick up this book and notice one or two of the deliberate errors that Pam and I have left on these pages, you may smile and nod and read on, knowing that we did it just for you.

Pretty feet. The feet are Peggy's, who (can you believe this?) has never before owned a pair of handknitted socks! The wool (merino) is KnitPick's SockGarden, Geranium, on #1 needles. These were my first slip-stitch heels, and I have fallen in love with them and intend to knit no other heels for the rest of my natural life.

And now, if you will excuse me, I am going to go and read the chapter on socks in Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's new book, Knitting Rules, which arrived today, full of wise, insightful observations. This one, for instance: Skeins of sock yarn are small enough that many hundreds may be squirreled away in your home without revealing the true scope of your addiction. Look for discreet, infrequently visited locations. . . . the pockets of luggage, tucked inside a gravy boat, behind books on bookshelves, or in the extra space in the corners of the guest-room pillowcases.

What I want to know, Stephie, is how you managed to look in my gravy boat, especially since I hid the thing on the very top shelf of the dish cupboard, where it is covered with a wooly blanket of dust.

Reading Note. Again, from Stephanie:

The great irony about knitting books is that the more you buy, the closer you come to the day when you've learned so much that you will no longer need them. (Not a chance, Stephie! At least, not your knitting books.)

books!

My author's copies of the new China Bayles hardcover, Bleeding Hearts, and the paperback edition of Dead Man's Bones arrived today. Pardon me while I sit on the floor and cradle them in my arms, crooning to them like babies. Birthing a book always feels like a long, drawn-out process, especially since I've already conceived and delivered Spanish Dagger, the next book in the series. But even though I've been living with the ideas and the e-files and the printed manuscript of Hearts for nearly two years (I finished it in December of 2004, delivered it in March 2005, and have seen it again in various stages of production) a book never seems real to me until I'm actually holding it in my hands. So, welcome to the wide, wild world, Hearts. May you be read and enjoyed by many--and get a ton of good reviews.

And there's another bit of good news. We've just agreed to the contract for the next two China Bayles mysteries! #16 (April 2008) will be titled Nightshade, #17 (April, 2009) will be called Wormwood. I don't know about you, but the longevity of this series astonishes and delights me. For a writer, there's no greater privilege than to be able to look ahead to good work, contracted and on the calendar.

In the same delivery that brought Hearts and Bones (what would we do out here in the country without UPS and FedEx?), came the copy-edited manuscript of The Book of Days. It is surprisingly clean--that is, not as full of errors as I feared!--and I'm hoping to get through it by Monday. Fun to read. Did I really write/compile all this great herbal stuff? I guess I did, because it's all right here on the pages, in front of me. The book is due to be published in early October, which means I'll be reading the galley pages sometime in July.

In the meantime, we're enjoying some beautiful spring weather. I pruned the roses around Valentine's Day, and now, as a floral reward, comes the first bloom: a lovely ivory-white blossom on the Ducher rose, which originated in China and was brought to the West about 1870.

Reading Note, from Mary Oliver, "Sand Dabs, Seven", in Long Life:

The sun has a working schedule, and the snow, and the birds, and every green leaf. Perhaps you should have one too?

lady banks

Lady Banks is one of my favorite roses--an old rose, introduced into the trade in 1824, according to some sources. To call her a "vigorous grower" is to vastly understate her capabilities. She grows very large--very, very large. Last year, she ate the trellis on which she was supported and had to be cut severely back and re-trellised, with a much sturdier construction. This year, m'lady is not quite herself, but still beautiful. Next year, I'm sure she'll be fully recovered and ready to eat this trellis. But her trailing bloom sprays are gorgeous, especially after a rain. See for yourself.

I finished the galleys of Cuckoo Brow and shipped the marked-up pages (there weren't many) back to New York. I've been waiting impatiently for the copy-edited manuscript of the Book of Days, which was due to me last week. I'm told it will finally get here tomorrow. I'm a little afraid to see it. It's a largish book with a lot of Latin plant names, quotations in odd dialects of 17th-and 18th-century English, recipes, crafts--too many places for letters and numbers to go wrong, in spite of the author's best intentions. I'm hoping it's clean, but I'm not optimistic.

Other than that, I'm thinking thoughts of the tour, doing some email and phone interviews with media in many of the tour cities, and hearing that the events with pre-registration are filling up. That gladdens my heart, believe me. There's nothing more daunting than four rows of empty seats, with a few loyal souls scattered in the back of the room. We shall hope for the best.

Reading Note, from Abby Frucht (quoted in Bonni Goldberg's Room to Write): 

Think of all the other writers out there in the world, taking the same detour from word processor to coffeepot, thesaurus in hand, hopes in tow. We're all in it together, crossing over and over the elusive bridge between words and literature.

rain!

Just when I thought it was never going to rain again, we're having a rainy weekend. Our weather radio woke us up at 2 a.m. to tell us that we might also be visited by a tornado, but when I got up and looked at the online radar, it didn't look all that bad, so I stopped worrying and went back to sleep. Looks like there are more storms on the way, though. Lady (who is terrified by thunder) will have to take a thunder pill and go to her closet.

The photo: Bill's "Guild" iris, which he dug up nearly 30 years ago from the Co-op Guild House in Austin, where he lived while he was going to U.T. The Guild House is long gone, but the iris have thrived. They're the first iris to bloom in our garden, and there's nothing so lovely as their rain-wet purity. Behind them, a Jerusalem sage, soon to bloom. The garden is obviously loving the rain.

I'm reading Cuckoo Brow galleys this morning. I just wrote an Amazon blog post about galleys (what they are, their place in the process of book production). One thing I might add to that: the copy editor for the Cottage Tales series is really good: careful, thoughtful, not meddlesome. Not all copy editors are equally talented, and there's nothing worse than one who is learning the trade on your manuscript. (We've had our share of those.) So I'm happily looking forward to a full day of reading.

Reading Note, from Henry Beston's wonderful book, The Outermost House: A day of rain, another bright week, and all earth will be filled with the tremor and the thrust of the year's new energies.

unriddled

Breaking news. The mystery plant has been identified as a myrtle spurge (aka donkey tail spurge): Euphorbia myrsinites. Thanks, Gin! This particular spurge, in this particular spot, doesn't seem at all invasive, but if you read Gin's comment on the post below, you'll see that you might want to exercise a little caution when you introduce it to your garden. I'm dealing here at Meadow Knoll with a couple of plant thugs (as my friend Kathleen calls them) that I unthinkingly introduced. I am humbled embarrassed chagrined completely and totally mortified every time I look at them.

mystery plant and two socks

This green beauty has a name, but I just can't remember it. I've always kept pretty good track of my garden plants, mostly because I'm curious and like to read about them--and you can't read about a plant you can't name. I saw it at Beth Chatto's gravel garden in Colchester, UK, about 10 years ago, and liked it so much I made a special effort to find it in a US catalog. (You see, I did know its name, once.)

Name or no name, it's been growing happily ever since, in the gravel garden beside the drive, along with yucca, prickly pear, lantana, and pampas grass. You can see something of the plant's succulent structure in the photo: thick, trailing stems (about 18" long) with stiff, alternate, pointed, gray-green leaves, and these bract-like green flowers growing at the ends of the stems. Easy care, and beautiful. All these details are usually noted down in my garden notebook. But for some reason, I left this plant out, and now I haven't a clue. If you recognize it, write and tell me.

I've set the writing aside this week to get ready for the book tour. I made a couple of changes yesterday--Bill and I reluctantly decided not to go to Malice Domestic, which happens to fall in the middle of the tour and presented several planning challenges. So Malice is out, which means that I have a couple of empty slots in the tour schedule. I've been filling them, doing telephone and email interviews, and finishing up the last of my maps. I'm expecting the copy-edit of Book of Days on Friday, and the page proofs for Cuckoo Brow on Monday. And if I run out of desk-work, there's the garden, and the laundry. Oh, and socks.

Yes, of course. Socks. These are KnitPicks Sock Garden geranium, a merino that is a joy to knit. The cuff pattern is a four-stitch baby cable rib, from Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks, and the heel is knitted with a slip stitch. You can probably see in the photo that the rib twists just enough to require blocking. Do please notice, though, that I have actually finished the gusset of the second sock (to clarify: that is Sock Number Two), and am on my way to the second toe. Two socks. A pair. A knitting miracle.

Reading Note, from At Knit's End, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (our very own Yarn Harlot):

I know knitters who feel guilty for sitting and knitting when they should be "working." What, I ask you, about knitting does not qualify as work? It is productive, it is thrifty, it is creating useful items for fellow humans, and it is a thoughtful and enlightening use of the intellect. True, it's not as exciting as doing the laundry, but really, what is?

first bluebonnet

The first bluebonnet bloom is always cause for celebration here. Because of this year's drought, there won't be many more. This little guy is growing in Lazarus' Meadow, named in honor of a mesquite tree that stubbornly refused to die, even when it was badly burned during a grass fire.

Bluebonnet seeds are very hard (picture tan-colored, flattened peppercorns) and require both abrasion and moisture to crack the seed coat. In the fields, it may take 3-4 years for the seed coat to get to the point where moisture can penetrate it. In a bluebonnet stand, seeds may accumulate for several dry years, then--when there's a wet, warm October--they sprout, forming a substantial root mass in the cool, damp December soil. The tiny seedling grows into a pretty, silvery-green rosette the size of a dinner plate, which puts up bloom stalks in March and April.

We needed October/November rains to help the seeds germinate, but it was unmercifully dry. Only a few lucky ones managed to sprout, among them, this brave soul. The rest are lying dormant, waiting for another season of autumn rain. They're patient. They know it will come.

Reading Note, from Writing From the Center, by Scott Russell Sanders: For each home ground we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.

in bloom this week: agarita

We have only one agarita--Mahonia trifoliolata, "trifolata" for reasons you can clearly see in the photograph. Yes, I know, they do look like holly leaves, don't they? And the plant produces a small, scarlet berry that looks like a holly berry, as well, except that it ripens in the summer. The berries are tart-sweet and delicious in jelly, or so I'm told. Our single 4' x 4' shrub has never produced enough to make jelly with, so I leave them for the birds and the coons, who clean them out as soon as they're ripe.

In one or two of the China novels, I've described the way the berries are gathered: by spreading a cloth on the ground under the bush and giving the branches a sound thwacking. The reason for what might strike you as severe maltreatment is obvious, too, if you will take another close look at the leaves. The points on this little guys are stiff and needle-sharp, and a close encounter is painful. Which makes the agarita a good barrier shrub, in case you want to keep your neighbor's rug rats out of your yard. It's native to Central Texas, west to Arizona and south to Northern Mexico.

As a gardener, I am glad for plants like the agarita, who know their place and thrive in it without any special care from me. The birds planted this shrub beside the drive, and all I've ever done is trim away a few dead branches, admire the tiny yellow flowers, and appreciate its contribution to the health and well-being of our population of birds and small mammals. In fact, over the years, I've abandoned the exotic primadonna plants that sulk if they're neglected for more than a day or two. My garden is full of natives like the agarita, suited to the tough life, up to the daily challenge of making a living on this small patch of hot, dry, limestone soil they call home.

Reading Note, from Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder:

Whether we are leaving it or coming into it, it's here that matters, it is place. Whether we understand where we are or don't, that is the story: To be here or not to be.... Among the greatest of all gifts is to know our place.