Apple trees, boats, and button-up shirts: the Oliviary
Our first spring in the big new garden, and so far it’s everything we dreamed. A robin is nesting right outside one of the windows, careless of our proximity. We’re not weeding except in very specific cases (looking at you, Scotch broom), the rabbits are keeping the dandelions well in check, and the quondam lawn is rewarding our laziness and rewilding itself with clover, buttercups, deadnettle, and several mysterious varieties of tiny flowers in white and pink and blue. They carpet the slopes and frost the greenery beneath the trellises and it feels like pure magic.
The earlier apple varieties have started to bloom (crabapple and Pink Ladies), and I bought one more tree (Granny Smith) to make absolutely sure the later varietals (Ambrosia) have something to cross-pollinate with. Lupines are lurking cabbage-like on the rock steps, waiting for their floral spikes. No idea what’s going on with the roses, but they seem healthy so far. Soon the nasturtiums will be climbing as the temperatures rise, and I can start twining them around the trellises — I showed Mr. Waite The Secret Garden (the 1993 film) just so he’d understand what I meant when I talked about going “the full Mary Lennox.”
And then on the sly he made me a walled secret garden in our co-op Stardew Valley game, because he’s a romantic like that. So I took him for a picnic in the local conservatory. You can imagine the two of us in white linen, with champagne in hand, lounging beneath the foliage and quoting Brideshead. I’ve always loved gardens — there’s a reason I put so many kinds of them in Waspish Widows — but this is more gardening than I’ve ever done before. Partly it’s because we finally have space to put a chair in the garden for reading in, and it turns out that’s all I need to encourage me.
Linkery
“Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever”: Gary Shteyngart never fails to amaze, and this piece hits surprisingly hard on a lot of levels (and yes, the famous DFW cruise essay gets mentioned)
Can’t believe I’m just learning about this: The Takahashi family grappled with life in the internment camps by carving incredible wooden birds for three and a half years, and continued as a business when they were finally unimprisoned.
Crafty
I finally made a button-up shirt that I can wear! Just like a real shirt! There’ll be no living with me now. And yes, those are tiny embroidered skulls.
Reading recs
Aside from romances for the column, I’ve been binging the entire four-book Hillary Tamar mystery series by Sarah Caudwell — British mysteries about a scholar’s former students, now all London barristers, solving mysteries between extravagant meals and being very wry and horny and honestly much gayer than you’d expect for the 1980s.
Until next time, in increasingly warmer weather!
Olivia