07/13/2025 Sunday 73-87F Mostly Sunny
I got up at 5:40am—to me, getting up early has many benefits, such as fresher air, and the day tended to look longer.
As always, I began my day with boiling some water for drinking. This habit has been with me for many years, since I read somewhere saying that it’s healthy to drink boiled water first thing in the morning. While waiting for the water to boil, I opened all the windows with their screens on; washed my face with last night’s jasmine tea water; braided my hair; and started the washer for doing laundry.
Finally, the water boiled. I poured it into my mug and the rest into a teapot. It’s too hot to drink, but I could use this short period of time to water the vegetables, which needed to be watered every morning on hot summer days—another habit I had developed since I moved into this house about three years ago and became a home gardener.
I call this place where I am living “the country”. In fact, it’s not a country but a city, a small one of course compared to New York city from where I moved after five years’ residence; before that, I had lived in Shanghai for twelve years. So I was used to the crowds, the noises, the concrete forests and being cooped up. Therefore, when I saw this place surrounded by intense trees and all kinds of birds’ chirps, I believed that I was in “the country”.
When watering the vegetables in early morning, I must wear long pants, long sleeve top and socks to avoid mosquitos’ bite. They love damp, tall grassy places; although I was well protected, this morning they still got me—my pants were made with a thin silk fabric, not tough enough for the mosquitos to poke through; and when I raised my arms and the sleeves slid down, they began to strike at my wrists.
Scratching here and there annoyingly, I noticed that some shoots of my loofah were gone—perhaps that’s why my two loofahs had been in flower for a while but I never saw even one baby loofah. Who could eat them since they set high on the branch (five feet above the ground)? Not deer as they would cause more damage than this; not groundhogs since they were too heavy to climb. So it must have been squirrels, who ate all my spider chrysanthemums and loved stealing my bulbs!
“If they want to eat my loofah, there’s nothing I can do about it.” I told myself. No fence, nor netting could stop the thefts from a squirrel—they could dig, climb, tear; and they were like bandits. “I shall watch my loofahs more closely. Hopefully there will be survivors left for me.”
After drinking two mugs of water, I ate a peach, hung the laundry outdoors, then had a cup of black coffee with my homemade shortbread cookies--which usually was my favorite time of a day. I call the combination of the coffee and cookies “my morning treats”; they were each other’s soulmate; they were born for each other😊, though my cookies didn’t look that pretty.
Yesterday I cleaned the north side of the house, where I planted a Zuzu ornamental cherry tree and a calycanthus venus in the spring of 2023, accompanied by an old hydrangea. The ornamental cherry and calycanthus seemed to be very happy in their spots, since in the past two years they had grown a lot in size and their flowers were just wonderful. Especially the calycanthus—starting from early May till now, it kept blooming (though the peak flower season had passed). Their white petaled, burgundy hearted flowers were exquisite, along with a sweet fragrance which smelt like ripe banana.
Since they were bigger girls now and deer no more nibbled on them often, I removed their trellis and cleaned up the weeds near their bases. Some kind of beetle was eating a top leaf of my ornamental cherry, and there were many holes in other leaves. “It needs a spray.” I reminded myself. So today I brought my tobacco spray which I made by myself from cigars and gave the whole shrub a good spray. Hope it would work as a natural pesticide!
After breakfast, I worked on trimming the edges of the lawn along the walkway, the front flower beds, and also weeded and redesigned my lavender corner at the side steps. Finally, everything looked fresh and tidy, while I was soaking wet from sweat.
Actually, I like working in the garden. When I want to empty my mind, putting my hands in the dirt is the best way. Before I thought that having a garden was romantic and poetic, while now, I fully understand how much harder it is to maintain a garden than to build one—it demands constant efforts and care; love perhaps is the only motivation. A garden will never lie to you; it always reflects how much work you have put into it. From this point, it’s certain and fair; while in most part of our lives, hard work may turn fruitless.
This summer my jasmine sambac did very well. Since I moved it from the back yard onto the porch, its leaves turned greener and everyday delivered dozens of fresh flowers to me (considering the plant’s small size). I love its humble fragrant flowers-- they open early in the morning and fall off the branches in the evening—beauty always lasts just a short period of time. I picked up all the fallen flowers, blew ants off them (other than peony, ants love jasmine flowers as well as the nice nectar they produce), then rinsed them under running water. Today I was going to make jasmine lemon honey tea and cook jasmine mung bean soup. There was one old Chinese saying that said "we ought to pick the flowers when they are blooming; otherwise only empty branches will be left for us once they fade". Yes, we should live in the moment, enjoy as much fun as possible since only what we have right now counts.
If I could only plant one plant in the soil in my garden, it would be lavender; if I could keep just one potted plant in the house, it would be jasmine.
I thought of the jasmine song which I had sung last summer:
“What a beautiful jasmine,
What a beautiful jasmine.
Loaded on the branch,
Pure white and lovely!”