I've been traveling for over a month. My life green and wet and all above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Tropical rainforests, montane rainforests, Chenier forests, bayous and beaches. I returned home to a garden wrapped in clutch of winter, being pulled away from fall. Only the garden's pines and Hinokis, cedar and bamboo are leafed. The maples have all laid their blankets and fallen to rest.

Autumn Songs of Success

In the few days I have between Gulf trips the most perfect fall weather has blessed the garden. As I posted, new plantings and scaping have been in the works, but equally as joyful has been the attraction of visitors - avians - some just passing through, others have become as permanently passionate about the garden as I.

My office window faces the sunrise, overlooking the back garden and a scattering of bird feeders hanging like pendants off the porch and maples. Every dawn the garden is alive with song and chittering, and wings flashing in the first flickers of sunlight through the bamboo. Little lives reminding me I share this space and with each new maple and moss I introduced.

For those who follow this blog with mixed passions - love for birds and bushes - here is a list of garden visitors this past week, plus one mystery warbler and a flycatcher that eluded me in hide-n-seek:

• Black-headed Grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus)
• Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)
• Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus)
• House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) - pictured
• Lesser Goldfinch (Carduelis psaltria) - pictured
• American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis)
• Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis)
• Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia)
• Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)
• Golden-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia atricapilla)
• Rufous-Sided Towhee. (Pipilo erythrophthalmus)
• Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus)
• Western Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma californica)
• Western Tanager, (Piranga ludoviciana)
• Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Regulus calendula)

Perfect Planting Season

Changes in the garden are often more obvious to those not witnessing daily ebbs and flows of growth - my being way has helped me see the progress the past couple of years has made. The above photo (looking north down the dry creek bed towards the eventual pond) almost suggest something of a real Japanese sasso garden might be on its way.

Since I'm only home in the garden for a couple weeks before heading back to the Gulf I am trying to get as much fall planting done as possible. This weekend off to Garden World - ya I know, silly name - but they have an excellent collection of native conifers and near wholesale prices. The perimeter of the garden is missing a couple key shade producers. My goal is to add two Incense Cedars (Calocedrus decurrens) in the far right corner behind the single Hinoki cyprus there now. The trio should visually balance the grove of five Hinokis on the far left corner that were planted two years ago as the initial anchors. (Which after the initial first year heat wave have established themselves and are adding wonderful vertical growth. The soil around them was augmented this past spring with a large crumbling western red cedar log I hauled out of the local forest. That log brought with it all manner of micro-flora and fauna which has helped seed the garden and made life pretty exciting for the increasing number of native birds that use the garden - up to 23 species last count!)

This past week five starter plants of the Pachysandra terminalis (sometimes called Japanese spurge - not my favorite name) were planted in and around the rock work bordering the pebble path (photo above - what it looks like established in the Portland Japanese Garden - and below - my humble beginnings). A few more medium sized stones are yet to be places in this area, but already it "feels" right.

One of the happiest successes has been the way the Equisetum (native horsetail) has adopted to its new setting (photo below). My friend and expert gardener/plant guru cautioned me on transplanting Equisetum. So with great caution I did - prepping the subsurface with weed mat and perforated plastic, and course sand mixed into the poor dirt to enable a moderate degree of standing wetness to simulate a tanic wetland. The future for this area is to take the spill over water from the pond and what water floods down the dry creek bed during rainy spring and fall weather. BTW - this is the native Equisetum that does not invade the world.

One last look (below) at the pebble path and the initial plantings along its edge - still much work to do here, but also want to let the "weediness" take its rightful place naturally.

Weedy Wonder in My Absence

I have always had a passion for ferns, and mosses, and that odd collection of plant-like green things that live in the in between world, things like liverwort, clubmosses, and horsetail. My loving fondness for them is a childhood thing. They were woodland friends, the bed where I would lay, away from the "other" world, and stare into the treetops, the woodland world a living omnimax of life.

The appeal was in their evergreen-ness. Regardless the season they always remind me life was there. Some ferns would fade, impress there fine shape on beds of Polytrichum, but the whole house was moist, the scent of rich humus, fertile.

When I learned their names they were even more enchanting. Rarely such things as stodgy Douglas-this, or obvious color name like white or red something. All the contrary. They were imaginary things - ferns of Deer or Maidenhair, Lace, Lady and Licorice; mosses of Rope and Beak and Broom. So when it came to My garden, this world of green on loan to me for my few years, I knew I needed shade, and wet, and and the scent of decay. There could be no other than a sasso, "weed garden", as Motomi Oguchi calls it, and within it a yarimizu, a small pond and side wetland.

The garden has been happily evolving in its weedy wonder in my absence; these many weeks away on the Gulf Coast. Ferns and mosses and horsetails have erupted. While I have been tracking oil on beaches the sasso has been washed in gentle rain, and mild days, the greens have taken over under an umbrella of cumulus. In every seam and surface a bright flush of fern and mat of moss has begun. Without a a single spade being turned, the garden has begun gifting.

Thank you Jenn for watching over it with great kindness.

Last Light in the Japanese Garden

Last Light,

Fading through black pine,

Falls on bamboo.

Back home in Portland and the Fall has drifted over the Northwest while I was away - the colors have not shifted, but the season has. Light is low, and warm, and gentle. There is no rush to it's traverse.

"Perfection is the measure of Heaven and the wish to be perfect is the measure of man."
- unknown

As much as I have "wished" my garden to be perfect in some fanciful place reserved in my mind, I am constantly aware that that garden is not what I am creating and that garden is not what I want. In its later years my garden will be its own garden, "zasso", sprouting, intertwining, layering, reaching skyward on its own. So it's Heaven, that gentle persuasion of wind and rain, pruning by sun and cold, the invisible force of other leafy-kinds by shade and gesture, and the nurture of nutrient tides beyond my sight, that will exact some measure of perfection within this plot I now call home.

When ever my vision drifts too far I return to my smallest gardens
- bonsais -
to remind me of the grand scale and my vision there.

photo: Acer japonicum 'Aconitifolium' - Fullmoon Maple

Japanese Gardening with the Pros

Hi All - not much news here lately - promise to change that, there are changes in my garden.

In the meantime, for those of you in the Portland area - or looking for an excuse to visit - there are a wonderful offering of Japanese gardening workshops this next few months.

Back to this blog soon - I promise Candi.