Passalong plant. Decades ago, Bill's friend Jimmy Craig rescued a spadeful of these early white iris from the Campus Guild on Whitis, in Austin, where Bill and Jimmy lived while they were undergrads. The iris made three moves with Jimmy, and two moves with us. They've survived the drought without extra water and with very little care, which makes them a winner in my book--that, and their pristine purity, the whitest of white irises.And the earliest. Their blooms are always a welcome promise of spring.
Garden report. This spring's garden is shaping up to be the best in a long while, largely the luck of the weather. The potatoes (Yukon Gold, Reddale) look lovely, the peas are up, the Kentucky Wonder beans are up and their trellis is waiting, and we're eating fresh spinach and kale. The tomatoes have come out from under the lights and will be going into the ground soon. I need to get the eggplants started, and it will soon be time to plant okra. Oh, and the sweet potato starts are flourishing on the kitchen window sill, for planting in mid-May. Busy season!
Book report. I'm just finishing the last chapter of Blood Orange, China's 2016 mystery. By the time I finish a book, I'm never sure whether I like it or not. The problem: the book is never quite as good (in my view) as the idea I had when I started it. Maybe that's just because I've spent three months on the project and am eager to get on to something else, a natural feeling of anticlimax. That feeling always fades, though, and by the time the copyedit arrives on my desk, I'm liking it again.
The "something else" I need to start work on is the copyedited text of The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'clock Lady. This will be my last Dahlias for a while--I'm taking a sabbatical from the series, to do some different kinds of writing. Stay tuned for more later on that.
Also: I'll be giving away copies of the audio edition of A Wilder Rose, starting next Monday. I'll post a link here to that. You might also want to follow my blog at Goodreads, where I'm posting some thoughts about reading and writing.
But most of all, right now, right here, I'm simply enjoying the renewal of another spring in the Texas Hill Country, and loving my place, my own home ground.
Reading Note, 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.--Scott Russell Sanders