Today, for the first time in 2022, I sat on my “observation bench” in the wildflower garden.

A wildflower garden works like this:

• Buy the seeds, and keep them in the refrigerator if it’s too early

• Clear the land

• Till the soil

• And, finally, sow your seeds in February

Then in May, in the spring, voilà! The plants begin to sprout.

My garden, which I like to call a “meadow” — my husband Alan doesn’t like it, he says it’s pretentious — is quite large for a home garden. It must be around 900 square feet.

Over the years (2022 is my second) the plants pile up — the returning ones (perennials) combined with the new ones (annuals) — in a spectacle of nature as exciting as it is unexpected.

At the point we are at now, you can no longer interfere. We can only resign ourselves to the result, relax and enjoy, take notes, and learn a few more tips for the upcoming year!

Throughout the season (spring, summer, and autumn) new plants are born and the colors change.

It was so pretty today that I felt like sharing it with you.

The video is amateurish, of course. It’s a bit cloudy today, and the sun came out somehow at the end of the footage.

Pay attention to the birds singing!

A quick update: My affirmation that “you can no longer interfere” was absolutely false. We are now on the 6th year and still struggling, sowing, updating, trying to control unwanted guests and uncontrolled growth left and right. It is in fact a noble, exciting and endless journey into the mysteries of nature!

The video is also old, not part of my recently created “breed” of The Porch Gardener’s videos (despite the logo that was added much later), therefore a raw, unsophisticated footage.

Enjoy!

Born at the turn of the 20th century, my grandmother was a young woman living in Tiberias, Israel — which is also my hometown — when someone decided she should immigrate to Brazil and marry her cousin.

We don’t know if bride and groom already knew each other, but rumor has it that, from his porch, my grandfather could say hello to my grandmother down the hill, in her Tiberias garden.

My grandfather lived in Tzfat, the “City of Sages,” but it was my grandmother who allegedly had a distant relative among the wisemen of Israel — a Rambam of sorts — the kind of family ties I would be very much proud of if they were true.

My grandmother was not very popular in the family. She notoriously didn’t like Othello, our black German Shepherd. Check. Neither did I. Othello was huge, and I was terribly afraid of him my whole childhood; maybe that’s why I can’t consider myself a “pet person” even today.

We lived together in the beautifully designed house my grandfather built in Belo Horizonte: my parents, my brother and I occupying most of the first floor and my grandparents the rest of it and the whole second floor, with a courtyard separating the two living areas.

With limited options in a country she could never consider her own, my grandmother decided to dedicate herself to the house. My grandfather was well-off, so we had maids and helpers as is customary in Brazil, but my grandmother was known for her “obsession with cleaning,” a personality trait I also developed later in life, after I turned into an immigrant myself, a few years after meeting my American husband — who was not my cousin, but a complete stranger I met on the internet — at the beginning of the 21st century. Check.

Our house garden was also the “Architectural Digest” kind, beautifully planned with rare tropical flowers and frequently visited by lovers of beauty. As a result, my grandmother didn’t have a lot of gardening opportunities. The garden was too intimidating and my grandfather wouldn’t let her anyway, but it is fair to say that there was a lot more to her than a bad temper and a Yiddish accent. Years later, when my grandfather passed away and she moved to an apartment, she used to cultivate roses on her balcony. Check.

So earlier this morning I was meditating on my wildflower garden when, out of the blue, the memory of my grandmother came to me and I realized we were on the eve of Lag Baomer, the Jewish holiday my grandmother’s birthday was associated with.

Lag Baomer is a happy day. Besides marking the anniversary of the passing of the great sage and mystic Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, author of the Zohar, it interrupts the sequence of 49 days between Pessach and Shavuot, a period of spiritual transformation and partial mourning (I’m not exactly sure why). The 33rd day of the sequence — Lamed Guimel, Lag — is the only one during this period in which you can celebrate, have weddings and such.

I couldn’t tell why, all of a sudden, I remembered my grandmother after so many years, but I could quickly realize that, as I age, I’m being transformed into a kind of evolved version of her, for which I’m honored.

My grandma Sarah would be 126 years old today, an age she could never reach, but she did very well for herself, dying peacefully in her sleep on her 90th birthday. I hope I’ll check that box too!

One thing my grandmother could not have was the chutzpah to call herself a writer. Not check. She was actually illiterate, and for her whole life wasn’t capable of even reading the newspaper — not in Hebrew, not in Yiddish, not in Portuguese, which probably made her always feel like an outsider. Check that last part.

Nevertheless, she was a woman of fiber and strongly opinionated. Check!

Happy birthday, grandma!

It all started with a field of poppies that never came to be.

It was February 2020, during the dreadful “15-day” COVID lockdown. I had no work. I had no hope.

I also had an empty 30’ x 30’ area on the side of my house. The land was bare, as it hadn’t yet recovered from construction, so I decided to create a “field of poppies.”

My experience with gardening was limited. As an architect, I more or less knew how to plan and organize the space, but I knew nothing about plant species or how to prepare the soil, so I went to work.

I started by “tiling” the soil l — quotations marks here because I didn’t have any proper tools and used a shovel instead, but I had a lot of determination, so the crazy endeavor took me around two days.

Then I sowed the seeds I had bought online on American Meadows, frankly the only thing that is left from those early days.

The result was a total bust.

Did California poppies do well in South Carolina, zone 8?

I had no idea.

I have to confess I didn’t know a thing about plant hardiness zones back then, more on that later.

Were poppies perennials or annuals?

I had no idea.

Being from Brazil, the land of eternal springtime, I knew nothing about evergreen vs. deciduous plants, absolutely nothing.

Fast-forward six years and I have a beautiful wildflower meadow that warms my heart throughout the season, and I will talk extensively about that in the coming months and, I hope, years.

The porch garden is a whole other story. I only started it a few months ago, but it really took off a mere two weeks ago when I installed an autonomous drip irrigation system before going out of town for a five-day vacation. When I came back, expecting to see all the flowers fading, I was surprised by the growth and vibrance I encountered, the bees, the butterflies and even hummingbirds. I had hit the jackpot!

The rest is history. A week later, The Porch Gardener was born and here we are.

If I could do it, so can you.

Hi there, welcome to my humble abode!

A classic ikebana with 1 carnation, 1 twig, 2 pieces of bamboo.

This was the first year in which my wildflowers meadow exhibited maturity. The image above is form early spring.

There is no real springtime in Brazil, where I grew up.

I mean, nature is wonderful down there, with green foliage and flowers blooming all year round, plus the monkeys, toucans, hummingbirds, and whatnot we had the joy to live with during our seven years in our glass house in the woods.

But, like in human life, the perspective of life and death adds to nature an extra layer of delight.

When I arrived here, I used to love the orange fall leaves everywhere. It was my favorite season. But after I embarked on the indescribable adventure of being an amateur gardener, it all changed radically.

I’m a springtime “gal” now, and will never change back.

It was inevitable that at some point, after I started The Middle Way, I would feel compelled to reveal my gardener persona, maybe to prove that I’m not all evil.

When I designed, and Alan and I subsequently built our house in the woods of South Carolina, we paid extensive attention to all details, from the toilet paper holder to the side window in our bedroom always facing sunrise, moonrise for part of the year, and Venus a little more rarely (Venus morning rising is approaching this March).

However, just this morning I realized that I paid zero attention to the extensive pieces of land around the house, namely in the front and on the left side, where I now keep a wildflower “meadow.”

Let’s start with the meadow, notwithstanding that I planted practically every gigantic tree now standing in the front with my bare hands.

It was the February of Covid, yeah, you’re right, unbelievable five years ago. Like any other American, I was going about my business making a fair amount of money when the plague hit. Everything was suddenly just gone… And I saw myself penniless and with a lot of time on my hands, so I decided to do something about it, and I mean… gardening, like millions of my fellow Americans — something that was very clear if you visited websites and went to nurseries wearing the inevitable, annoying mask.

Everybody seemed to be gardening all of a sudden, and I was no exception.

My first “brilliant idea” was to plant poppies, so I started by tilling the land without the appropriate tools. Two years and a lot of blisters and bouts of frustration later, I understood my garden was not up for poppies.

Yes, a garden has a will of its own, and you disrespect it at your own peril. A lesson learned is a lesson earned, so I had the next brilliant idea of buying seeds and starting a wildflower adventure, which was — is, finally — a success. It gets better every year.

So, if you are yearning to get some useful tips here, I suggest you go with American Meadows. I’ve been buying seeds from them for years now and the result is pretty good, although, of course, they don’t promise anything, and neither do I.

The story of my garden is a long and emotional one, but today I will focus on the most recent discoveries, like the wonderful daffodil bulbs I planted last fall for the first time. They are blooming! The first flowers of the season!

Also, this year I went pretty radical with pruning my roses, and I confess I was worried about it. But hot weather came along et voilà, one by one they started sprouting. I can brag a 100% success rate by now.

And speaking of roses — I didn’t promise you a rose garden, but there you have it — I have a peculiar story to tell.

Last year I planted several rose bushes bought from Lowe’s at the right time, and they all grew and bloomed beautifully. However, one of them developed very long, thin stems and demanded several bamboo sticks to go on growing. I was struggling with it, not really understanding what was going on.

That’s when I read an essay by Kat Rosenfield — no pun intended — in which she mentioned a climbing rose she had brought from her mother’s house and was now blooming in her own garden. I wrote a comment saying that I had a rosebush I suspected was a climbing species, and I didn’t know what to do with it. She answered my comment with some advice, and I followed it.

The rest is history. I pruned the rosebush, bought a trellis on Amazon, tied the branches accordingly, and winter came in.

So starting this week, I’m immensely enjoying the fact that my diagnosis was right, and Kat’s advice was sound: The climbing rose is thriving, so thank you very much, Kat.

Now on with my own advice to you: Don’t go with too many rules and internet mandates. Just observe, care, pay attention, and you will go far.

Happy gardening!