solace in the garden

Even when you're sweating and grubby and stooped over and straining your back, there's solace in the garden. There just is.

You brush against the basil and smell basil. You pick a snow pea and munch it.

Here I seeded some bee-attracting flowers because I thought there was room when the tomato plants were still tiny, but now the flowers are in with the tomatoes--which is okay, but my garden doesn't look as nice and orderly as some of the others.

The beans haven't started blooming yet, but they're wound up the stakes I tied with pink cord to help me see them. I keep stabbing myself on stakes.

Behind the beans are beets. In the foreground is a stray calendula another gardener gave me. Calendula oil has beneficial properties but I'm not going to make oil from a single plant, so it gets to have a carefree, flower-in-the-sun existence.

There's also arugula, some carrots, Scotch bonnets, rhubarb, red lettuce, onions, eggplant, green pepper, purslane, and a corner patch of blue cornflowers. Voilà: mon jardin.