Is the love of opera part of the gardening “lifestyle”?

I don’t know. It’s part of my style though, and, therefore, part of the “TPG Style” we are creating here, and it keeps growing, adding new and exciting layers to the complexity of this community.

Like opera.

Today, I don’t want exactly to talk about opera, but to tell you about a wonderful feature called “Met HD,” through which people all over the world can actually be live at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City and just enjoy the spectacular productions with the most wonderful singers alive, in the best seats... for a mere $25.

I just came back from the live performance of Macbeth, Verdi’s opera based on Shakespeare’s play, which, to my surprise, revealed itself, in addition to the musical beauty, stunning visuals, and carefully stained and soiled clothes for a nation in turmoil, to be the perfect libretto for Halloween: There is blood everywhere in this new Met production directed by Louisa Proske, a young German-American artist I have never heard of. Until today.

You can safely say that, with her immense talent, Proske brought true blood to the stage, and man, it’s a lot of blood! Including the final scene, in which Kelsey sings with his mouth full of blood, dripping blood down to his bloody chest.

In the opening scene we are already thrown into the intriguing mix of beauty and violence only Shakespeare could produce — helped throughout the centuries by a whole list of creators he seems to inspire ad infinitum — when Kelsey’s Macbeth enters the stage with bloody hands, after killing King Duncan, and leaves a bloody mark on Davidsen’s Lady Macbeth’s immaculate white dress upon embracing her.

I came to the theater attracted by Lise Davidsen, a Norwegian, Wagnerian force of nature singing Verdi for the first time, and ended up with a lot of “firsts.” Among them, in addition to Proske, Macbeth himself, that is, Quinn Kelsey, and two opera stars — Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo and Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff — singing in supporting roles for the first time without losing one scintilla of their original brilliance — with just one aria each.

A special mention goes to the choir of witches — not happy with only three, Verdi multiplied them by… I’m not really sure. I guess it depends on the sophistication of the production, which, of course, hits its peak at the Metropolitan Opera, so we fully enjoyed the privilege of watching a whole army of witches with black lipstick creepily scrubbed around their mouths.

It was one of those surprising, unforgettable experiences, without the need of going to the airport, and sitting in good company — opera lovers like me — in comfortable recliners.

This Met HD season includes 10 productions, ending in June 2027 with Wagner’s Parsifal, one of my favorite operas and one of the longest in history, ranging between 4 hours and 45 minutes and about 5 hours and 40 minutes, depending on the version and the conductor.

I’ll start practicing my musical muscles immediately in preparation for that marathon, but for now, my next appointment for sure will be Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Dalila, on December 5, with Quinn Kelsey as Samson and the exotic Aigul Akhmetshina — a Russian mezzo-soprano I’ve been pursuing for a while, but never had the opportunity to see — as Dalila, a leap of faith you will not want to miss.

It’s not like I wasn’t ambitious when I had the idea of starting a gardening Substack. I just didn’t know, at the time, where this was going to take me, or how far.

It would certainly be so much more than a porch and a couple of pots with plants.

I was tortured by the growing influence of AI over my life, and I needed a respite. Meanwhile, my investments in gardening were growing over time. I wanted to find — and share — a life experience that wasn’t so dominated by work, tech, politics… and anger.

I wanted quality time.

I wanted pleasure.

I wanted fulfillment.

So one day I left town for a week, experimented with a rudimentary drip irrigation system on the porch, and the rest is history — or at least the history of this project.

I’m a very industrious person, so I created the design and immediately started to write to fill in the blanks, or better, the holes in the page among different sections, but it wasn’t long before I realized that I would have a problem talking and sharing TPG, because popularity is not one of my strengths. I’m not a “people person” either, leaning in far stronger on the hermit side.

And oh, yes, I still kept that elusive publisher’s side alive, hidden for years as I was making a living just translating, after I moved to the USA 12 years ago today.

I don’t know how it happened, or what changed, but last Tuesday I woke up in the middle of the night and came up with this comprehensive project that would unify writing, sharing, gardening, and publishing, hopefully also finding a way — a not too painful and not too invasive way — to share my passions with people and invite them to participate in it.

The Porch Gardener Press — or TPG Press for insiders — was born that night.

It is still a baby, and the plan is that it will reach maturity around September 2027, but the work already started and we’re open for business. The plan is to publish an inaugural volume with my own essays in time for Christmas, so you can get a better picture of how all of this is going to work.

Meanwhile, I want to invite you to participate right away, as each book we publish in our collection will take a year to come to fruition.

We are already accepting the first proposals for early analysis.

Here are the first ideas:

• This is a literary project with a focus on fulfilling life experiences far away from phones, tech, AI, and politics — a meditative expression supported by a garden, or gardening

• The books are essentially art books, square, short, with 25-60 pages ( around 6,000-15,000 words) — an easy, yet profound read

• Publishing services are paid a reasonable price, but they can be paid slowly over the whole year leading to the publication

• TPG will publish 1 book a month in a total of 12 a year, at least initially, starting in the fall of 2027

• All authors are required to bring in 12 subscribers to TPG, to progressively form a substantial readership for all. Subscribers don’t need to be paid subscribers initially, but eventually TPG will establish a paywall

• Authors will be contributors to TPG and allowed to publish one or more essays according to their inspiration and success with readers, and will also be tasked with reviewing their colleagues when a new title is published

• Authors will retain 100% of their rights as the books will be published on KDP under their own accounts. True to its own no-tech philosophy, the project will only include printed books

A brief note about “bringing 12 subscribers,” and here is where it gets interesting: You can bring friends, relatives, and neighbors who are dear to you, but they will be complete strangers to other authors, truly expanding each other’s potential through the power of sharing.

Yes, this is all still a dream dancing in my head. I hope y’all will help me make it come true very soon.

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If you came here today you might have spotted something different, and it’s not only the background color.

Yes! The name of our Substack has changed!

But not really. The Porch Gardener was designed to be like this since day one, to follow the seasons. However, I’m certainly excited because this is actually our first seasonal change, with many more to come, I hope.

We should be resting, but instead we will be very busy this fall. We have two species of bulbs in the pantry, awaiting October — drumstick allium and ixia, both supposed to flower profusely in the spring — and our order of lavender and sage (seedlings, not seeds) from American Meadows is scheduled to arrive more or less at the same time to “fill in the blanks” — the flower bed blanks, of course.

I am the eternal optimist (regarding the garden, at least), but I’m also open to accepting my failures and move on to new experiments every year, and every season.

Which takes us to a major problem we have in the garden since we moved here.

The garden is huge, and parts of it are quite inaccessible because the hill is too steep. In two particular sections, the hill and the plot above the flower beds in the main section (I know, I still owe y’all a video tour; it will come eventually, as soon as I stop feeling like an idiot with a cell phone around my neck), the weeds come strongly every summer and turn them into a veritable jungle, pretty ugly to watch.

Last fall (2025) was the first time I made the decision to face the challenge and do something about it, so after a quick research online I bought several pounds of clover, asked my “assistant” to till the land and sowed in September.

The promise was ambitious: These seeds would sprout into a green, luxurious carpet that would immediately win the competition, not only against the weeds, but also against the English ivy that, left unchecked, will cover everything in sight forever, since it is very difficult to eradicate, almost impossible. The beautiful clover, sold as a lawn substitute, would bloom the following spring and, being an evergreen perennial, would come back every year religiously.

Chapter one was successful and uplifting: A couple of weeks after sowing, we did have a “luxurious” green carpet at least on the garden section, not so much on the hill. This was before the drip irrigation, so I did my best to water the sections with a hose and keep everything wet, but not soaked, according to instructions, blah blah blah, a constant hassle.

There was never a carpet of flowers. By the end of the spring, the green carpet started to shrink and had pretty much disappeared by May, even before getting overwhelmingly replaced by the growing weeds in July and August.

There was no trace of the clover left. The jungle had come to reclaim its right, and the clover obliged.

I wrote to American Meadows expressing my disappointment. Customer service there is very nice and the woman was sympathetic, but informed me that I had bought the wrong species of clover and this one was not a perennial and would not come back every year. As a “consolation prize,” I got free shipping on my next order.

Yes, my friends, I sold myself cheap, but what else could I do?

By mid August this year, I was back researching, using Gemini when possible and calling it stupid more often than I would like… until I came to these interesting vincas on Home Depot.

I already had my sights on another variety of vincas since the beginning of summer, but gave up when Gemini told me they were not winter hardy in South Carolina, and as you know I only do non-hardy species very rarely, like in the case of the kalanchoes on our porch, which are brought inside every year for the winter months. These vincas minor, however, appeared to check all the boxes. Except for the fact that they were very expensive, $5.89 per plant at Home Depot.

Do you have the slightest idea of how many plants I would need to make that work?

Exactly. I would probably need a second mortgage to afford that! (Just kidding.)

Well, to make a long story short, and this one is already too long, I have no idea how I ended up on the website of a groundcover provider from Shrub Oak, New York (is this city name for real?), just luck, I guess, but the fact is that the vincas were available there in lots of 100 for $0.60 each!

The rest (will be) history. I bought the plants, and they are scheduled to arrive on week #40, that is, the first week of October.

Lo and behold, today I pulled out all the weeds one by one, buried the drip irrigation hose on that section (which I was already scheduled to do in the fall) and I’m ready to go! On a last note, while pulling the weeds I discovered that the clover is not gone at all… there are hundreds of tiny green leaves sprouting everywhere, so this TPG family will have to figure out a way to live together in harmony. May the best ones win.

Gemini guarantees that planting the vincas in October is the “gold standard,” so help me God!

Vinca minor, Peekskill Nurseries

“Plant 6 to 8 inches apart. Grows 4 to 6 inches off the ground at maturity. Vinca minor likes fairly good soil.” (Peekskill)

$0.60 per plant, in bundles of 50.

“I hadn’t quite realized what a hermit I am by nature — the days go by and I have no desire to move from my house and garden.”

Nancy Mitford, Versailles, May 1968

I heard about Nancy Mitford for the first time on BritBox’s wonderful series “Outrageous,” about six sisters from an aristocratic British family during World War II.

Mitford moved to Paris after the war, where she lived on 7, Rue Monsieur (usually mentioned by her as “Mr. Street”) — a “flat with a garden” where she felt like “a totally different person, as if I had come out of a coal mine into daylight.” But it was in her house in Versailles, to which she moved in January 1967, that gardening became one of her chief delights.

I have no idea why writers and gardens are often associated. Maybe it's because you can move elements around freely until you achieve a harmonious whole, much like words in a page.

As for me, lately I started to envision my work in the garden more like that of a “mentor” than a designer: I move plants around, experiment with possibilities, but my real goal, toward which I started to work actively in 2026, is to create a living mix of native vegetation, spot interference and touches of color that hopefully will, in the future, grow profusely together and feed each other.

Part of this “style” of gardening is a constant observation, in order to detect what plants can move from ground to pot or vice-versa, which should be dug out and planted in a more favorable spot, and which could be divided and spread.

September is the official dividing and transplant season, so all my senses are alert toward this goal.

I took a daisy that got too big for her pot on the porch and planted her in my flower plot near the street. Sometimes I even take native South Carolina wildflowers that appeared near the house and move them to a place where they can be “elevated.”

Some of these interferences are successful, others are not, but nothing beats the joy of experimenting with nature.

So today, while checking out the flower garden, I noticed that the two daylilies had doubled in size, so I decided to divide them and transform the two into a whole line of daylilies along the driveway.

I should add that “double in size” became the norm in this house after I installed the drip irrigation system. The same happened with a mound of carnations I checked today, whose width has now doubled. I guess my plants were really starving before, even if I watered them regularly with a garden hose!

The “mother daylilies” grew so big that I didn’t even care to take them out of the ground, divide them with a sharp knife, separate the parts, plant them back feet apart, etc., as it’s usually recommended. I simply extracted whole crowns of lilies from the sides and replanted them immediately in a row. If you look at the mother plants, they don’t even seem to have been touched at all.

Shortly after I came inside and proceeded to ask AI if the only seedling that came out practically without roots would survive. AI told me — and I sincerely hope it was not “hallucinating” this time — that it would quickly produce a root, and advised me to just cut the leaves short, to make it easier for the plant to transport water to the top.

So looking clockwise on the image below: extract, move, plant… and cut.

Nancy Mitford’s last years were dominated by illness and pain, although she occasionally still enjoyed working in her garden. We could say that she gardened until she died, something I expect to do myself, except for the illness and pain part, of course, so help me God.

You never know. For now, this routine hard work works for me as a bottomless reservoir of energy. After a few hours gardening, no matter how tired or how miserable I felt when I started, I feel stronger than ever and all my problems seem to disappear.

The effect is later multiplied by the pleasure of moving words around like live plants, here at The Porch Gardener.

Earth

Of course we had to start with our beautiful, exclusive planet, our unique blue sphere with variable patches of white floating in space with its equally unique crowd of inhabitants.

Are we alone in the universe? We don’t know. It seems pretentious to believe so, but so far, there is no competition in sight.

However, our goal here today is not to talk planets, satellites, universes, that kind of stuff, but to describe and exalt life on this planet, particularly, according to a Brazilian saying (referring to Brazil, of course), the South Carolinian land “where if you plant, everything grows.”

In our particular case, a clay soil — that’s the easy part — with a lot of stones, big stones, and I mean, big. Every hole you dig you run the risk of reaching something extremely hard that needs to be forcibly extracted and replaced by some garden soil from the nursery, so you can rightfully and unconditionally say that this is “a place where, if you plant, everything grows.”

Of course we want to grow extraneous bulbs, roses, and one of my not-so-easy favorites, alstroemerias. But the truth is, if you really wanted and worked on it, you could certainly create a garden just by collecting and transplanting the super rich and varied wildflowers of South Carolina, which you can find described in detail in this beautiful book, A Guide to the Wildflowers of South Carolina, which my husband bought as a gift to… our next-door neighbor a few years ago.

Am I jealous? Of course I am!

We do keep a beautiful wildflower meadow on the side of our house, mixing SC and non-SC species and watching them fight for survival to see who finally wins, year after year, after a mystifying spring season filled with the species we brought in. As the season advances, the jungle progressively takes over, until, after mid-August, you can’t even go there.

Our neighbor, the fortunate recipient of that precious book, keeps a wildflower garden in front of his house and, let me tell you, he has some beautiful species there, but the “jungle effect” takes over all the same, and it’s not exactly a pretty picture… for the front of a house.

We still owe our dedicated very few readers — and I hope this will change shortly — a “walk in Noga’s garden” dutifully recorded on video, but this will have to be postponed until next spring.

It’s already too late now. I hope you stick around and our readership grows healthily until then, to join “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” And sisters, of course.

Wind

Ah, the Paris Mountain wind. It sings, you know, and it can get pretty strong, scary, even.

But it’s also the only way to explain why, mysteriously, my non-native wildflower species judiciously acquired from American Meadows ended up in our next-door neighbor’s wildflower garden mentioned earlier and vice-versa. Or, on the other hand, how tens of Black-eyed Susans and Shasta Daisies appeared on my porch garden without being invited — and I mean, planted in pots — even if they didn’t thrive this year in the meadow as expected, given the pounds of seeds I sowed down there.

Yes. You already get the idea. A garden life is as full of surprises as it is full of frustration and improvisation. The good part is that it always manages to survive.

And if you, like me, adopted a gardening lifestyle in search of sanity in a digitally dominated world, all you need to do is envision these facts as “curious” and “enlightening.”

Like my husband likes to say, quoting the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “the only constant is change.” And I’d like to add: Learn and grow from what you observe.

Which brings us to…

Water

Man. Dripping water changed my garden — and my whole life — this year. And I mean, radically.

It all started — once more — with my next-door neighbor, Scott. He was the one who decided to install a drip irrigation system in the first place, and all I did initially was observe.

His garden grew exponentially after that. But as a good Brazilian from Minas Gerais, I tend to be highly suspicious, so when he told me I should go to Home Depot and buy some “sick plants” because their only problem was a lack of water, of course I didn’t believe him.

Buy sick plants? I thought to myself. Gross.

Then came that unforgettable trip to Washington to visit my son, thanks to which I was forced to explore and experiment with drip irrigation to avoid the assassination of my recently created porch garden.

The rest is history, this history I now share here with you.

It started with the porch, but surely and not so slowly it did not end there!

I spent the last few weeks of this super hot summer installing drip irrigation in my whole garden, mind you, which is, generally speaking, around 12,000 square feet.

It might sound modest to you, but it feels huge for my 5-foot-tall old self.

The difference in the garden after less than a month is no less than amazing. My guess is that, even with all my dedication, watering it every day for several months with a garden hose, sometimes twice a day, I was actually keeping my poor plants bone dry, in a cruel, desert-like watering regimen.

At this point, according to my previous experience, we should be preparing to sing the Irish traditional song “Last Rose of Summer.” And yet, everything is blooming down here.

I thought about cutting the drip frequency in half this week, after Labor Day, but everything is so vibrant that I didn’t have the courage to do it yet.

Let’s give the summer exactly another 13 days, as it’s due! Then you can come back here and “see the colors change”!

Note: Be prepared. Your water bill will go up! Mine did, substantially, but the garden obliged!

Our history with The American Black Bear in South Carolina is long and filled with drama.

Long before there was even an idea of a garden, there was already a bear around, inflicting pain on us.

The picture below is from March 2018. Little did we know that, in September 2026, we would still be struggling to find the ideal solution.

And man, how we struggled. At the beginning of this saga, we were completely clueless.

Our first attempt to get any protection was a “heavy duty garbage bin lock” from Amazon, not very heavy duty at all. It took the bear one minute to break it and it would take us three garbage bins and three different sets of straps to get to a better place.

Once we found the second set of straps that did not have any resemblance to the first, we had a season of calm, until the bear, in a bout of rage, simply broke the can lid leaving a huge hole and making it useless.

It was Sunday. The next day was a federal holiday, and, as Tuesday was collection day, the trash can was stuffed to the top with garbage. What should we do?

I went to the Home Depot website and bought a beautiful 64-gallon can for $104; the store delivered it the same day, we reused the same straps and were back in business before it got dark.

I was so proud of myself and my newfound American efficiency!

Two days later, I confidently put the trash can outside for the garbage collector, together with the broken one that belonged to them and needed to be discarded.

Problem solved.

A quiet week passed.

But our happiness was short-lived.

The next Monday night, I put the trash out as usual. On Tuesday morning, when I woke up and went outside to get the can back down the driveway, the beautiful $104 trash can had simply vanished.

I called the garbage company, they said they came as usual and there was no trash can to collect.

What? At this point we could well write a Netflix crime mystery special, “The Disappearance of the Sklars’ Trash Can”!

Later that afternoon our next-door neighbor came and told us he heard a loud noise during the night, like someone or something dragging a very heavy object, and deep down in the middle of the forest he could envision our beautiful, brand-new trash can tipped over. It was later swallowed by the ferocious Atlantic Forest, never to be seen again.

What could we do? I called the garbage company again, told them the whole megillah; and not very willingly they delivered a new trash can. Rewind, replay, we installed the old four straps and, this time, added to the “scheme” three dog tie-out stakes and a dog cable and also passed the cable around the shelf of a metal tool organizer as a fourth anchor point to deter the bear from knocking the can down. We also started to use a dog cable wrapped around the mailbox pole to stop the bear from dragging the can into the forest when it was out for the garbage collector.

A couple of weeks passed and we were filled with hope. Maybe this time we had finally figured out how to keep the bear at bay!

Not so fast. One beautiful day I woke up and the can was tipped over again. The lid was open with the rims broken at the corners, practically making it impossible to keep the can closed.

Mind you that we are now already in the summer of 2026, the scalding hot summer of 2026 (due to El Niño, not that other thing) — three trash cans, three different sets of straps, four anchors and three different lengths of cables later.

Eight entire years have passed in this war against the voracious black bear of South Carolina neighborhoods, but we are not the type of people who would give up, so I bought an extra pair of straps to secure the corners and installed a security camera pointed at the trash can to try and meet our opponent personally (and that’s the video you can watch above).

Now, I don’t know what’s wrong with this security camera that it records me and my husband every time we go outside to toss a bag or when I'm working in the garden, but last night, when Mr. Bear finally came again, nothing was recorded.

It must have been a big one this time, because he managed to unearth two anchors from the ground and left them hanging from the cable’s end like useless bags of dirt. The can was knocked down, but lo and behold, the bear could not open the straps this time and there was no mess to be cleaned.

Sklars 1 – Bear 0!

So today, I ordered a replacement anchor and a longer cable from Amazon so I can wrap it around the can more times. This bear has no idea of who he is dealing with.

Where there’s life, there’s hope. To be continued…

Recommendations

Trash Locker Ultimate Black Bear Trash Can Lock Straps, Certified Bear Proof, Amazon (later we used another set of two)

Eurmax USA Heavy Duty Dog Tie Out Stake, No-Tangle In Ground Anchor Runner for Large Dogs up to 210 Lbs, Amazon.

Aosu Solar Camera Outdoor Wireless for Home Surveillance, Fixed Solar Panel, Amazon

I don’t know what came over me that, after starting The Porch Gardener, I immediately engaged in a flurry of landscape initiatives.

Remember the solar-powered drip irrigation on my porch garden that gave me the idea, after I came back from D.C. and the flowers had doubled their size in just five days?

It’s all gone now. After I completed the whole nine yards irrigation on my main garden (more like the whole 90 yards), I decided to “attack” the porch and replaced that solar-powered irrigation toy with a professional drip irrigation system that included all the plants in the porch without that irritating red bucket that needed to be filled with water every other day.

While this was happening, I decided to build a new concrete-paver pathway to partially replace the long gravel path between the front deck and the garden, with the intention of making it easier for my husband to walk along the flowers and even reach the “observation bench” and enjoy the butterflies having lunch in the wildflower meadow (he hates it when I call it a “meadow”, as it is in fact just a 900 square feet plot).

I’m not going to tell you that both my husband and I are no longer young, but know that I am 5 feet tall, so it seemed quite an impossible task to do it all by myself.

I started it anyway.

I thought it was funny that earlier today, while watching a podcast with Dr. David Sinclair, the tenured professor of genetics at Harvard, I heard Dr. Sinclair explain that his favorite sport is gardening, including carrying heavy plants and bricks around… you get the idea.

I started ordering 11 pavers from Home Depot — their limit for cheap delivery — and rapidly established a method, which is something I usually do: scrape the gravel with my small trowel, level the ground, lay the pavers, fill in the joints with gravel, once or twice a week. As the end approached I got impatient and added an extra session, so I’m finally completing the enterprise this weekend, ahead of schedule. For each batch of eleven delivered on the driveway I had to carry the pavers progressively farther, up to the point that now, on the last week, I will need to walk 100 feet carrying the bricks.

I’m not saying that the pathway will be perfect, but it will be mine — my pledge of love to my husband of 20+ years. And this makes me feel very proud.

I will also confess that, before I started this crazy, ambitious landscaping project, I did dedicate a few minutes looking for DIY videos on YouTube, and was mesmerized by how easy it was to remodel your yard by yourself. The stones were so easy to carry, and shoveling away whatever was there on the ground to prepare the terrain was so fast, everything was so much family fun! Even small children could do it, so why wouldn’t I?

Little did I know that all those beautiful videos are in fact super elaborate productions with professional crews behind the scenes; the “happy family” members were actors and the heavy stones were props, or so my AI assistant told me the other day!

Well, that’s not my thing, my friends, and I hope it’s not yours either. You can rest assured that every picture I publish, every story I tell you here on The Porch Gardener is absolutely written and executed exclusively by me and me alone, with the wide reach of my whole five feet.

Happy gardening!

Part of the fun of living in a forest is not only the flora, but also the fauna. Except, of course, the hungry bears that force us to adopt progressively aggressive measures to prevent them tipping over the trash can.

For instance, we have a “house” groundhog that likes to have lunch in our wildflower meadow in early spring. I don’t care, as we have so much green that one or two groundhogs won’t make a difference. This year, it brought the “missus” along and, in sunny afternoons, both enjoyed a siesta together on top of the retaining wall.

But we also have all kinds of critters that enjoy bulbs, flowers, roots, with varying levels of hunger each year: voles, squirrels, chipmunks. We don’t have rabbits. We have the occasional turtle, and deer are, unfortunately, rare.

Let’s leave the several species of hungry ants for another day.

My first encounter with a predator happened with a beautiful line of sunflowers. I planted the seeds and waited for them to sprout, which they did. Then I waited for them to grow and bloom, which they did. However, one beautiful day, I woke up, looked outside, and all the sunflowers had been eaten! All of them!

My first reaction was to double down on roses — the more thorns, the better. I tried some tulips, but was not very excited because they’re so short-lived. And last September I started to experiment with crocus, daffodils, gladiolus and hyacinths; looking forward to seeing the hyacinths naturalize, as in their first year they were pretty sparse.

So a couple of years ago I decided to experiment with lilies, one of my favorite flowers. I bought a couple of plants — plants, not just bulbs — and put them in the dirt, hoping to see them grow.

And they did. Initially. However, to my surprise, one day I was admiring a flower and noticed that it was going back into the ground.

What? How was that possible? I still tried to save some of the plants by putting them in water to grow roots, but I lacked the necessary patience and persistence for that particular method.

My friends, I tried everything, but the critters were clearly winning. I started with some disgusting, foul-smelling powder from Amazon, supposedly “dry blood” from some other animal. I tried a sonar. I even bought a metal screen from Breck’s, but never used it. Stuff like traps and heavy chemicals could very well attract and eliminate some rodents, but they didn’t attract me.

The last round of this inglorious fight, this time around newly planted mums that were entirely eaten, included a suggestion from AI to use cayenne pepper, with the downside that it had to be applied every three or four days.

It was around that time that I discovered that most rodents don’t appreciate some species of bulbs because they taste bad, and this changed everything. From that moment on, I adopted a completely different philosophy for my garden and didn’t regret it for a minute.

I stopped fighting, and started adapting.

Today, I never hesitate when discarding or changing a species that doesn’t perfectly integrate into my environment. I only choose drought-resistant perennials and bitter bulbs that critters detest.

So far, it’s a winning strategy. And I’m still learning every day.

While scrolling through my Google Photos app looking for 2018, I was mesmerized by the fact that our property/garden was so empty when we moved in, after the house was completed.

It was all just a desolate stretch of land covered in mulch, our builder’s idea of “landscaping”: “Plant a few junipers, cover everything in mulch and that’s it.”

What a limited range of imagination… No wonder this same contractor once told me that my “problem” in life was that I didn’t believe in God, well, cut him some slack, we live in South Carolina, I guess otherwise known as “The Bible Belt.”

In all other aspects he was a good contractor, thanks, John, you were a lifesaver, actually. My husband met him by chance in a copy shop, they started talking, and in the next minute he was our “guy,” mostly due to my husband’s talent for convincing people and “tearing them apart” (only psychologically, of course).

Now back to John and how we met him, is there a God out there or not? Maybe. Sometimes everything works so well, doesn’t it?

The empty mulched land has little resemblance to the overwhelming jungle we have outside right now, which I sometimes struggle to tame.

I like to compare this forest with my “forest of origin,” the Atlantic forest in the midst of which our Brazilian house was built, among monkeys and toucans — a true tropical paradise, if we manage to forget about politics.

So here we are. I was also shocked when I found the top picture above — the thujas in containers part on the right — taken less than 9 years ago, in March 2018. At the time, I thought their nickname “giant thujas” was highly overrated, but I guess not.

Therefore, while daily delighted by the current height and strength of our thujas — the fully grown thujas on the left, in a picture taken today — I was truly shocked when our HOA — never buy property under an HOA — reached out to us demanding that we cut off — yes, you heard me, cut off — our beautiful thujas because they were “advancing on community property.”

The simple, metric truth, was that they were not. I carefully went up there with a tape measure and proved they were not, although of course I could not measure the higher branches completely out of my reach.

But they wouldn’t listen. They wanted the thujas out. Period.

It was like asking me to amputate a limb, a beautiful, perfectly normal, and functioning limb. Who would ever possibly want that? Who are these people?

We went on to start studying the law, and fortunately the state of South Carolina basically protects nature and beauty. There were very strict limits to what an HOA could demand regarding our mature thujas, especially considering that they have been there for 8 years and nobody ever said a word about them.

My husband told me they were “afraid” of the thujas as they drove by them. I found that utterly ridiculous, to be honest with you.

However, I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my days regarded as an enemy by my next-door neighbors — even considering that we are not the most popular or sociable members of the neighborhood. So we agreed to a reasonable cut.

The day our garden “associate” arrived — let me make it very clear that the gardener here is me, hands-on and all — was a day of mourning. He did a good job cutting strictly to the property lines, even regarding the highest branches, and we ended up with these tamed thujas (the picture you’re seeing is a month after their “surgery”), of course with zero guarantee that they will stay that way…

Fortunately for us, on our side of the property, they remain reasonably wild.

Lesson #1: When planting thujas, plan for a lot of space. Even if their size in containers is not very convincing… They. Will. Grow.

Happy gardening!

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!

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!