Houseplants

It’s been so hot around here lately... August, had finally forced me to bring my houseplants in again.  August is a fire-spiting monster here in our high desert and although I was hoping for a longer season outside, and a period of strengthening and growth for my plants, one by one they had to be hauled back inside... 

Thus far, they seem to be doing good, and I think they appreciate the cooler temperatures of the inside of the house; particularly the ones which naturally grow on the forest floor or underlying layer of vegetation where is cooler; such as my Maranta, or Prayer Plant, and my beautiful Monstera deliciosa. I can hardly wait for these two “Delicious Monsters” of a plant to grow to their gigantic sizes.

Unfortunately, our living room is the darkest room of our house.  It faces north, and right outside those windows sits our covered porch.  Its roof provide good shade to the area, but it also prevents sunshine from streaming in.  And because the curtains of grapevines covering the front of the porch get fuller and lusher during summer time, the living room gets even less light and it feels dark and cozy like a cave. 

Every time I think of those beautiful days of the south, and the amount of light our small living room at our little white cottage used to get, I then want to move to another house; or open up a hole on the roof, or bring the sun down and sit on it…

Somehow thought, that’s the area where I have relocated most of my largest houseplants to…  and I worry that they may not do good without the needed light.  Did you know that enough sun will also keep the stem of your plants from rotting? 

Light—like a plant, my own soul craves light.  Lots of it!  I always have.    

I’m hoping they’ll adapt where I have placed them, because if they don’t that means I’d have to move them back to that area by the kitchen where they used to be, all strung against the windows where they do get plenty of sunshine… 

I don’t want to do that again; however.  For I like the cleaner, clearer look of the space now with less plants in it, and I love the way my plants are now distributed throughout the house, instead of all being clumped up in one place… so I’ll wait a little longer and see how they adapt.

I have two humidifiers that I am constantly moving around so that all my plants can have the right levels of humidity they need and I also keep a growing light on all day, particularly under my Philodendron Xanadu. 

I love this plant.  It is old and big and I love how it looks sitting here in our living room.  Philodendron Xanadu tolerates low light conditions but the plant will be much less dens with long stems and smaller and sadder leaves. So if you want yours to really dance, place it an area with lots of bright natural light…  

Hopefully, she’ll like it here… but I know this corner is so dark.

I also love, love my Prayer Plant.  When it gets dark in the evening, the leaves of this plant start to move around and raise themselves up. Then they fold themselves shut, just like praying hands. It's nice to take a moment before bedtime then, just to pause and think about what you are grateful for today!

I also brought in one of my angels
And I'm loving how he looks sitting here so much!

My house looks like a little jungle...

and I just love it!

I decided to transplant my huge asparagus fern the other day for an easier handling in winter, and now I have three of them instead of one...

This one is growing up on the wall...

and this one down onto my kitchen plates...

Another fern... this one is growing on a pebble tray for extra humidity...

I love this little candle lamp I found this weekend at one of our local thrift stores...  love the soft light emanating from the little leaf-shape windows and I love how it looks sitting among my plants on this cute mosaic table by one of the window.

Instead of placing a candle inside, I inserted a string of Christmas lights and I love all the little lights now shining through!  It looks so romantic in the evening when the sun comes down and the house stays lighted up only by little fairy lights...

I also decided to add some more white to this area to enhance light.  So I found my old sit covers and this is how my living room is looking like now... I like it!

It’s been said that the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.  Well, I want my home to be that sanctuary where I can fly to the Universe from the very center of it!  So ‘thank you’ dear plants, for always making so happy!

Roses

The garden has been recuperating—slowly, but it has.  New shoots are sprouting from those roses which, back in July, I decided to prune aggressively.  And what a wonderful thing doing that proved to be… for I see rebirth and hope in these bushes, while the others—those I didn’t have the heart to prune so drastically, are still doing so poorly that I have now decided to cut them too… 

 

It is a scary thing to cut, or prune your roses so much, but there are times when one must do that; and this is one of those occasions.  

It is always such satisfaction knowing you made the right decision… the intuitive mind is a sacred gift, I think, and listening to what our heart is telling us, it is usually the right path to follow… 

Of course, we have to remember that sometimes that doesn’t work for everyone.  The Bible teaches us that the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?   And maybe there were occasions when, throwing caution to the wind, you let your emotions take the wheel, and all went well.  But it’s likely there are at least as many times when people’s decision delivered the opposite outcome. 

I believe; however, that if our hearts are attuned with the Divine, and we walk in the right path, then it is safe to listen to your gut instincts and follow what our heart is telling us.  

God speaks to the believer in real, amazing ways, and sometimes what we think is just ‘gut feelings’ it is actually His voice guiding… It is up to us to learn to trust those inner feelings and learn to listen to God’s voice… until those feelings become stronger and clearer… 

So, avoid going against your better judgment or getting talked into things that just don’t feel right—that’s my motto.

Windows

Funny how things work out sometimes… and thus, it happened that we decided to have every window of our two-story house professionally cleaned for the very first time ever.  And what an amazing thing it is to have clean windows, I tell ya—you can actually see everything outside again!  

It was like being outside from inside, or like being out in the garden from your very own kitchen... and it was as if someone had handed you down a new pair of eye glasses and… you could see again! 

 

Everything was so clear and everything outside looked so green and marvelous from inside. Then, it rained the following day. Yeah, it rained! Which means our squeaky-clean windows got rained down and wind blew bringing dust, and wind and rain and dust blurred everything out, and specially on the top floors, windows got pretty murky again. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, life is so unpredictable. Everything can be perfect one day... but for such short time! 

There are mice in the garden. Dead ones I have seen. Tiny, disgusting dead creatures that had been appearing from time to time in the garden. All dead thanks goodness; for I haven’t seen a live one. I don’t know where they dwell or from where they have been coming, but I just don’t like it. Coming across these dead things while working the soil gives me the creeps and I jump and scream and run away… and I just don’t like it. I need a cat, a cat or two like the feral cats roaming the premises at our little white cottage those years ago.

 

The other day, I found a cat roaming the gardens—yellow and white and I’m sure not wild, for although he didn’t come close when I called him, he did seem friendly, or civilized enough, and he strolled the gardens at his leisure smelling the flowers and taking his time to enjoy his life… oh how I loved seeing him here… 

And then... he jumped on the fence and was gone.  I put food for him outside that evening so he could return, but instead came the ants, and what do you think!  Believe it or not, they ate every morsel of food I left out… they were carnivore ants I guess, for I never knew ants could eat meat like that.

 Be good to yourself, enjoy your moments and thank God for everything He gifts you!

The ape...

The super-hot days of our high desert are here—the July and August summer days. 

Summer enters your soul through your skin and it sits there wanting for you to worship it.  

Nothing feels nor looks anything like with on those lovely days of June.  Around here it is just heat and perspiration and a fluttering of the heart.  The sun shines so bright, that it almost dims the light that shines from within you…

Grasses have started to turn yellow everywhere you look and sunshine in the morning doesn’t feel like powdered gold over the grassy side of the garden.  My little sanctuary doesn’t smell of roses either.  The garden hasn’t been graced by an abundant amount of roses after the infestation that took over it, but at least I was able to collect a posy of the loveliest of little roses to bring inside…

These darling roses are from my Boscobel rose bush—a meager of roses I should say, for what this beautiful bush is supposed to give.  Needless to say, I am happy for this… and won’t complain.

Neither of the two David Austin roses I brought home the spring of 2019—the Boscobel and Abraham Darby, have put ‘real’ roses yet… and I say ‘real’ because all I have gotten from them are but small, unhealthy representations of what these roses ought to be.  What disappointment they’ve been thus far. 

I supposed, these roses are still taking their time to adjust to the garden; to adjust to this new place and new soil to them… but whatever reasons there may be for this ‘delay’, they haven’t been given much.  Actually, they haven’t given anything.  And as of today, this is all I’ve been able to bring in from those bushes. 

It’s been said that summertime is a season, and a song.  And I wonder if it also a growl?  Really! A growl!

We were having breakfast outside in the garden this past Sunday when all of a sudden a most disturbing growl was heard above the gentleness of the morning… ending the beauty and quietness surrounding us.    

It wasn’t a dog’s growl, or a bark, or any other sound made by an animal we could identified.  In fact, we had never heard anything like it before.  It was a frightening, diabolical sound that left us glued onto our sits and kept us very quiet for a while. 

The sound had come from the other side of the fence, across from where we were sitting. We listed for some movement, or another sound like it, but nothing.  Everything went back to the previous quietness.  I walked over to the fence and took a peek onto the other side, to see if there was anyone there, but found nothing.  No one was there, no animal no nothing.  All quiet, all ‘normal’.

We figured that if the sound had come from an animal, naturally there should had been more of it; like what happens with bullfrogs at the peak of the breeding season, or when a wolf howls to claim territory.  If it was someone coughing, there should had been more coughing.  But that was not the case.  This had been just a sudden, terrifying sound, emitted only once, and that was it.   

I remember, how I used to spend my mornings working out in the garden on those days before I started my new job, and how, from time to time, I would hear an odd sound coming from that same house; a shrieking or a sound like a wolf howling, but believing that it had to be the owner of that house spying on me and trying to be funny, or trying to scare me, I didn’t pay much attention to it back then. 

Whatever it was this time, however, it was really disturbing, and we still don’t know what it could had been. 

The Fisherman sweetly mentioned that, perhaps, it could had been that same ape I spied on the rooftops of our neighborhood two Christmas ago? 

So I run inside the house as fast as I could and at sunset time, when the sun was setting in the horizon and the sky was turning to a light, dusky purple, and my soul yearned to go out and wait for the tiny silver stars to appear, I tried to go outside… but I couldn’t. 

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I went outside to watch the sun come down, but instead I saw this nuckle-walking think up above the roofs moving very fast... As you can imagine I was agasp with doubts, and shock, and pondered if I was really seeing what I was seeing. King Kong? Then I realized it must have been someone working on their Christmas lights... right? Or not? But look at those disproportionately long arms for one's body... ape arms for sure, and the way he was moving... you tell me! . #apes #monkeyontheroof #monkey #monkeyman #sundown #endofday #mysteries #unknown #kingkong #kingkongmovie #apeontheroof #inexplicable #inexplicablethings #sunlight #puestadelsol #gorila #gorilas #caughtoncamera

A post shared by @ gypsycielo on Dec 4, 2018 at 4:15pm PST

In the heat of summer

I worked in the garden or four hours last Sunday—under the heat of July, a carpet of green grass under my feet majestic, the music of birds soothing and perfect… and it was fire pressed against my skin and sweat on my lips… and I remembered that I hadn't filled the birdfeeders in a long, long time, and I remembered that hummingbirds had been also missing their sugary water and I must hurry and make some soon…

 

 

Because the infestation that had been affecting my roses was so bad, most of them had to be pruned down almost to the ground.  Even if I had sworn to myself not to be annoyed by this and let it be, I couldn’t stand it any longer.  And I closed my eyes and followed my heart, and I cut… and while I was cutting my thoughts floated onto another tomorrow—onto better days and splendid blooms, and I kept cutting and perspiring some more while hoping for the best...

I later watered each rose bush deeply and tried to remove as much of the yellow leaves still left on branches by hose.  What else could one had done?  The Fisherman insisted that spraying the roses with insecticide; which he did (he did), had been more than enough, and he insisted that I acted unwisely and destroyed what took a year to mature and I just closed my eyes and kept working… under the sun, the marvelous sun of July, which I will remember it later, and wish I could be out under its heat when cold days are here, and skies turn bluesish-black and my soul old and cold.

 

I’ve been freezing watermelons.  I use an ice-cream scoop to scoop out the fruit and then I place the watermelon balls in plastic bags and freeze them.  Watermelons are definitely the epiphany of ‘summer’ to me.  Refreshing like no other fruit, enticingly beautiful to the eye and sweet to the taste buds and I am sure I will never get tired of eating frozen watermelon on scorching hot summer days in the garden, when birds are singing and white fluffy clouds above your head swim the open blue sky like fishes in the lake. 

Watermelon, the sound of sprinklers, flipflops, roses and mourning doves songs.  I love summer.  I love summer!  Can you hear emotions in words?

  

July

Can you believe the month is almost over?  Truly, in just a few more days.  

Ah July—you came unexpectedly upon our days and now I see you already getting ready to depart; to never again come back to us.  You will be remembered down in history as another month of uncertainties and despair to many around the world.  You united us and divided us and here we are awaiting another you, another July and another ‘what would be next?’. 

I’m keeping my faith up and my thoughts together.  Hard times are ahead of us all, but our hearts are aglow in the hope we have believed.  We Christians are watching and gathering signs.  We watch, we see, and we wait.

And the garden?  Something pretty awful had happened to my roses; and I can’t tell if the damage was caused by nature itself or perhaps by me.  For upon seeing the mildew infestation on some of the bushes I proceeded to fumigate, and I might had put too much insecticide in the bottle and burned them all…

I tend to do that, thinking that more is better I would usually overact and the usual results are more damage than good.  In my defense, thought, I still have to doubt if I’m really the one to blamed for the damage.  For those yellow leaves on rose bushes don’t seem burned, and it looks more like an infestation of some kind, or some fungus decease than anything.  But who knows! 

I should cut them low—I should cut down every bush, but I don’t have the guts, and what a waste that would be.  Thus, I am leaving them untouched.  That’s what I’m doing.

 

 

I was looking at my self in the mirror this afternoon and for a moment my eyes were mom’s eyes and I was looking at myself and at her and she was looking at me and I was her, until tears filled both of our eyes, blurring the vision on the mirror.

The yarrow had flowered, and the Shasta daisy is taking over.  It is summer after all, and all the little faces in the garden are smiling and pondering if the sun adores them.