The magic garden

That's how my father calls the large garden of our large house in the small city. The third owner of this house (we are the fifth owners) built large flower beds and planted flowering trees and a stunning array of tulips that pop up out of nowhere and dazzle you with their late spring beauty.



It's a garden where the robins and the squirrels and the rabbits and even Lazarus, the opossum, and the Cooper's hawk, and more than 20 species of birds visit regularly. When it's well tended, the garden is a feast for the eyes.

Yesterday, my husband and I got to do our first gardening of the year, especially some direly needed weeding in those same flower beds, which were almost overtaken by weeds.

Since we'll be moving at some point, I decided to plant any new plants in pots so they're mobile. I planted a few flowers that I purchased with my mother-in-law at my favorite nursery in their little town in West Virginia, a nursery that has now grown into a small empire that ships plants even to Puerto Rico!

New to my stock this year are a few showy snapdragons, in deep hues of orange, yellow and pink, which I love because of their flirty petals. They look to me like the unfurling skirts of a Flamenco dancer.

After treating my mother-in-law to some red-petaled begonias as an early Mother's Day present, I also stocked up on some of my very favorites: the Torena Clown Faces, or brujitas, as they call them in Puerto Rico, which always make me smile.


I also got some of my favorite baby pink miramelindas, or impatiens (which I like to call impatient(s), because they're quite fickle and need a lot of care).

But the happiest creature of all yesterday near the garden was Magellan, who only rarely is let out onto the deck to wallow in the sunshine, like the true boricua cat that she is. The expression of utter satisfaction (mixed with her usual bit of defiance) in those Caribbean-blue eyes is unmistakable, I think. That's Magellan for you!

(BTW, if these garden photos are much better than the ones I ordinarily post it's because my husband, who recently purchased a new camera for his freelancing work, did the photographic honors. He's a pro, I'm very much the amateur.)

I felt a little like Magellan yesterday, after doing some gardening. Not only did the garden look much better after we were done, but I felt intimately happy after doing something that had absolutely no relation to school or dissertation work, but which was nature-related and simply to produce aesthetic pleasure.

While we won't keep this magic garden forever, we will definitely have another one, even better than this one, in our next home, whenever that comes and wherever that may be. Magic gardens, after all, must first exist within us, before they can be expressed without.