Wild Muse Notes ♣ Aria Nadii’s Weblog

A lovely way to start the first morning of May is with a reminder of Lord Whimsy’s post about David Brenner’s moss garden. I love moss and don’t care much for water hogging cultivated lawns or obsessively hedge trimmed blandscapes. There is a small cottage up the road with a moss path to the door with a big stone at the end in front of the door. It’s like an anti-welcome mat. I love that. We’ve turned up every stone with moss attached and tucked them under shaded places. I dream of a bed of soft green moss like the one I napped on in an old growth forest in Oregon or a mossy stone path.

Lack of mossiness aside, the rest of our garden is thriving and the micro-climate we created has held up well to the elements. We are still working on the dry laid stone wall that will go all the way around the garden and up the hill. Last night we had an unexpected frost. It’s an ironic May Eve gift for gardeners, a sort of literal “May Day” for the seedlings and bulbs just beginning to bloom. I put tomatoes, peppers, and basil in the potting shed and lit all of the votive candles I could find.

After the mad dash to rescue my future pesto and salsa, I finished up my first solo recording experiment just in time to be included on Webbed Hand’s strings compilation. The track is called “Beltaine Frost”. Can you tell I came up with the title at the eleventh hour?. The piece is acoustic and abstract, composed using samples of the same 3 note melody played on an autoharp, ukulele, and my vintage Stella banjolele. I’ve also used my voice to repeat the notes and layered it to create a drone. Nemo sneezed while I was recording. This is how I discovered that cat sneezes sound like maracas when looped. There is also a Djinnestan track called “C plus A”. I’ve had two full weeks of bright sunshine. The brain fog is lifting. Here are more garden pictures because I am obsessed as you may have guessed.

The mossy path and spring tulips in the front garden.











The dry laid wall in progress.





The beginnings of a strawberry patch and phlox with rocks.





Pesto and salsa hiding in the potting shed.

Oh yes. That is a large bare patch of sand in front of the stone wall. We live on sand. The bare space is 24 x 24 feet with nothing planted on it. Purslane grows there every spring and every summer we eat it and then the patch is bare again. My plan is to lay out a spiral path with flagstones that I’ve been collecting and then to see what will grow there other than purslane.