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Sitting Around

Winter

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Sitting Around

Sitting around is one of our favorite things to do in the garden. Mom says that's because she's not a real gardener. Real gardeners don't think to put nice places to sit in their gardens because they never sit down - they just work all the time. Mom says she admires the gardeners who work all the time, but she really identifies with gardeners like Mirabel Osler, who wrote a book called "A Gentle Plea for Chaos". We have a lot of chaos around here. Mirabel Osler says if you're allowed to sit in other people's gardens, you should be allowed to sit in your own. I like this idea because I'm never allowed to go to anybody else's garden. I think Mirabel Osler must be a very nice lady.

Murf doesn't hardly ever sit down, except at the piano. Especially since she started getting interested in working in the garden, she just can't seem to sit still for very long. She's always running off to lay a sandstone patio or plant a few dozen shrubs, or dig up 1500 daffodils and move them somewhere else. Makes me tired just watching her. Mom likes it, though. She says she's been digging for years and she's pretty tired; it's kind of nice to hand off the spade to somebody with the energy to move mountains.

The cat, on the other hand, excels at sitting around. Yep, I have to admit she's actually pretty good at it. Of course, she's got an unfair advantage over the rest of us; she can fit in more spaces. You never know where she'll turn up. She can fit behind the crabapple tree, under any rose bush, inside an empty flower pot - she can even get right under mom's favorite bench. On chilly days she sits on top of whichever car was running last. She can even jump right into the window boxes. For some reason, mom doesn't seem to be very impressed with that. I am. I wish I could do that. Don't tell the cat I said that, though.

Mom likes to sit in the twig chairs. I don't really like them because my paws get stuck in them, so I usually put my front paws in mom's lap and leave the rest of them on the ground. Everything all around there is pretty much herbs. Mom calls it her petting garden - she pets me and she pets the herbs. I'm not allowed to eat anything but the mint and lemon balm, but it's pretty nice to sit there where everything smells wonderful and listen to the fountain splashing and the bees buzzing.

The big bench in the back is my favorite place to sit. It's also excellent for jumping over. It used to be bigger. Actually, it used to be one of our front steps. When we got new front steps mom asked the workers to save the slabs of sandstone. They were even nice enough to put them where she wanted them, which was a good thing, because even Murf couldn't have moved a six foot slab of sandstone. As we discovered when mom changed her mind about where she wanted it. Even both of them together couldn't really move it without dropping it once or twice. Now it's only four feet long, and between you and me, I don't think they meant to do that. But they did move it, and nobody yelled at anybody. Of course, I was in the house the whole time.

Sometimes we all hang out here at night. Mom hangs boxes of fire in the trees and all around the pond and we just sit here and listen to the crickets and talk and stuff. No matter how dark it gets we can still see flowers - lots of the roses and lilies are white, and one of the water lilies in the pond is called "Sir Galahad" and it opens up at night. It's very nice. Mom's been reading a really old book called "The Fragrant Garden: a Book about Sweet Scented Flowers and Leaves", by Louise Beebe Wilder. Of course, whenever Mom reads the same book more than once, things start changing around here, and this one is no exception. Now she says that next year she's going to plant more stuff that smells good at night. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, though, because mom and I hardly ever agree on what smells good.

Winter...