No uncertain terms

In botanical babble, this is a panicle: "a compound raceme, a loose, much-branched indeterminate inflorescence with pedicellate flowers (and fruit) attached along the secondary branches."

Right. I call it a flower stalk on our duranta, and this is how it looked in the greenhouse last week. Actually, the whole thing was covered in these blue beauties.

And after the coming-out party, Robert asked me to prune it to a nice standard ball to force thicker growth over its summer residency at the cabana. Now, I thought I knew what he wanted, but I wanted to make sure, so I asked him: "Prune?"

"Yes, prune."

"You want me to whack the hell out of it."

"Yes." So I did. Bye-bye panicles. See you in a few months.

Swallow hard

I'm a bird lover, and if you are, too, you may find this difficult.

Tough.

These sweet little critters, captured by a Czech wildlife photographer, are wonderful in their place, but that place can't be above our veranda. It's great to watch the little swifties doing their aerobatics, less so to watch them dropping guano all over our dinner guests.

In past years, we've built "decorative" corner blockers to stave off nests. No go. Some years we've let things slide until they hatched out a brood, and only then hosed the mud-daubed nests down and pressure-washed the white-spattered flagstone underneath.

This year I'm giving no quarter. I've had it. So far I've brought four nests down from the north side of the veranda ceiling and one from the south side. The swallows are ticked off -- swooping down with their "Alert! Alert" chirp -- but they still won't take the hint.

I'm keeping the hose out.

Now the garnish

With the pots out, it's time to put little plants around the big plants, and into some of the beds.

And it's no little job.

It's also one that keeps on giving: Some of these puppies need daily hand-watering.

Still, I should count my blessings. Given the economy, Robert's cut back, and the annuals number in the dozens, not the hundreds, let alone the thousands.

Group shots

Are hard. I don't know how they herd all those animals into one place for the duration of a photo shoot at, say, summits.

I was lucky to get these four (three, if you think one is a Pushmi-pullyu). The other seven with them weren't as willing to hang around.

Loads of work

That's Ray on the tractor, and just part of the stuff we brought out to put around the place -- pool, summer house, veranda.

Most of the greenhouse was cleaned out by this point -- the "smaller" plants like 6-foot bananas -- in five or six other full flatbeds. This load was mostly from winter storage in the workshop, most notably the rubber tree and the two big plumerias.

We hired two strong guys for a few days' help with the project, but even that didn't keep us from falling asleep exhausted with very sore backs.

Moving right along

I'm glad to see that Key West isn't letting our absence prevent the festivities from continuing.

Right now, it's Conch Republic Days, celebrating the glorious history of our fair island, and the colorful Drag Races on Duval are always part of it.

This is our friend Mitch (of course accessorized with a refreshing beverage), who has run for both king and queen of Fantasy Fest.

To run a turn on Mr. Porter, That's why the laddie is a tramp.

Gilt complex

Robert tells me the horticulturists have now come up with a yellow tulip magnolia.

My only question: Why would they bother?

I guess botanists aren't necessarily Shakespeare scholars -- ''To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . is wasteful and ridiculous."

All abuzz

This little path got nicknamed "Spider Hollow" a few years ago, not affection- ately.

In summer, in the morning, when you go from the courtyard to the poolside of the house, there's a good chance you'll come down with an acute case of St. Vitus' Dance, quick-stepping and batting your hands around your head.

But this time of year, the azaleas say a vigorous hello before the arachnids have had time to spin.

The only thing you're missing in the picture is a hundred bees buzzing in the blooms. Maybe a thousand; it's that loud.

Commonplaces

A few years back -- actually, quite a few, considering memory's power of compres- sion -- we asked the guy working for us, Danny, to clean the bad vines out of some woods and leave the wisteria, which were wonderful. Around here, they can grow like weeds. Down the road, at the Bowater plant, they were a magnificent acre until the company leveled the trees holding them up to stave off pine beetle. So much beauty, gone so soon.

But I digress. Danny was relentless against every damn vine he could find, which of course included those we loved.

Only now are they coming back, draping their purple panicles at the little corner of the woods down near the edge of the lake. Lovely.

So when I was taking the car in for service the other day, on a perfectly ordinary errand, and I saw a specimen that as was so obviously cultivated and nourished and so beautiful, I had to stop, with flashers going, in that perfectly ordinary neighborhood, in front of a perfectly ordinary bungalow, to get out and capture it. There it is, off on the right.

And I've been thinking: Just as some people cultivate beauty as a perfectly ordinary part of a perfectly ordinary part of town, some people have been cultivating torture, as part of a perfectly ordinary armory that our perfectly wonderful country needs.

To some, the extraordinary is so banal. And in such opposite directions. Hannah Arendt, where are you when we need you?

Reading me

I was just getting ready to post this picture of one of the flowering quinces across the lake (I usually call them japonica, though that's not strictly the name), when a note from my dear friend Lou popped into my mailbox.

She's awfully complimentary about my flower pictures and has been thinking about using some of them for collages, which she's quite good at. I'm flattered, but since I know nothing about what she'd need, I invited her to make a list of prints she might want.

I hope she won't mind if I quote the note: "I was up last night til almost 2, fascinated, scrolling through 3½ years of blogs identifying various flora and stopping along the way to check out things I hadn't remembered. . . .

"I've filled 3 or 4 pages of notes, ranging from single to double checks, to stars and "must use," which I will edit down . . . (like which japonica do I want to use and how many different night-blooming cereus do I want?). . . ."

I hadn't posted any japonica, but this one was already blooming in my heart. Which she's always been uncanny in reading.

Words in the woods

Around here the sun sets in an ocean
. . . of trees.

As it went down tonight and I looked at the calendar, I thought of my grandpa, as I do every April 18th.

Well, of course other times, too. But when that stern, old German harnessmaker got mellow of an evening -- with a cigar out in the big tent in the yard, away from grandma, and maybe even with a glass of applejack -- he'd recite Shakespeare, or sometimes "The Village Smithy." Or:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
On the 18th of April in 'Seventy-five --
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year. . . .

I'd fall asleep on my cot out there in the tent, listening as grandpa galloped on.

Coming-out party

I mentioned that our tropicals would be coming out of the greenhouse -- and, in the case of the really big ones, the shop: higher ceiling there. Two of them in the greenhouse are brugmansias, which have thrived overwinter thanks to Brenda's tender mercies.

Lord knows how long the blooms will last in the April chill they'll encounter, but right now, in the glass house, they're pretty breathtaking. They remind me of Belgian nuns' caps, flared at the corners and high at the top.

And fragrant: You can't imagine the sweetness.

Though I've never sniffed a Belgian nun.

Making pretty

I thought I'd show you something besides devastation -- in this case, the torii gate we put up for Amanda and Aon's wedding all those years ago.

They have two girls now -- and I think the coat of red lacquer on the posts is about as worn out as they are, with the new baby and all.

But if you look very closely at the picture, you might see a hose going through the opening in the hedge.

It's connected to the pressure-washer I've been wielding to clean the flagstone at the summer house and pool house to get ready for the Great Greenhouse Clearout, which is set for next week. The stones get remarkably dirty, and it's actually pretty therapeutic to blast away the grime, strip by strip of the washer nozzle. I won't tell you what I fantasize the pressure stream hitting.

The weather has been at least bearable for it, in the 70s maybe, and almost makes up for the blowback of cold water that turns one into a creature from the mud-spattered lagoon. I even took my shirt off, when the sun got high enough. Unfortunately, the job requires lots of squeezing on the washer handle; and though I alternate right to left, after a few hours of it, it feels as if I have claws, not hands. Painkillers help.

Oh, speaking of hands. I'm doing this while Robert is up in Gatlinburg at a bridge tournament. I suspect that besides the bridge-brain workout, his most-challenged muscles are his glutes.

He says we have to come back in April for tax time. In an age of email, fax and FedEx, I know the real reason is bridge.

Obligatory storm damage picture

Hide in plain sight

From my best count, there are 10 others like her on the place, though it's hard to get them to line up for a group shot.

They play hob with fresh leaves and new plantings, and some days my patience grows thin; but I have to admit there are few things more fun than wandering out on a summer morning and being startled by a deer who's just as startled to see you a few yards away.

One neighbor to the east has put up a deer blind -- that's a camouflaged hunting platform, for the uninitiated in Gomerculture -- at the edge of his fence line one narrow pasture away, facing our driveway.

Hope I don't hear slugs whizzing by (it happened all the time at our place in Wisconsin every fall), because it would be awfully sad if the deer blind spontaneously combusted somehow.

I told you it was gray

Springing out

Lord knows there's enough gray around here -- more of that in the next few days -- but at least the orchard is starting to get interesting. The fanciest apple blossoms, for instance, made a pretty ikebana last night when Ben and Ken brought their sweet pup, Toby, out for dinner.

The place would have looked great, except for the tornado that tore through a couple miles north. It trashed two trailers there; here, it took down three trees (one along the main drive), a few dozen big branches and a thousand twigs.

But I think we were all so happy to see each other after so long that nobody really noticed.

Just in time . . .

. . . for the holiday -- not a jellybean, but an egg exactly the size of one, not three-quarters of an inch long, nestling in the moss by the back door.

I don't know if it froze before or after it fell, but freeze it did the other night.

I assume it's early enough in the season for Mama to crank out a replacement. Hope so, anyway.

Comeback kids

The mussaendas at the porch -- the big pink one in front, and the little white one at the side -- kept bringing questions from passers-by in the last few weeks:

Not the "Ohmygod, what's that," of the height of bloom season, but "Is there something wrong with those bushes?"

They dropped all their leaves. And as much as I pointed to the fuzzy knobs along the branches and at their tips, I was as unhappy as the passers-by were distressed.

Until the knobs started doing their thing.

So now they're on autopilot.

Just wait till midsummer.

Local color

I can't get my head fully northward without a few glances back south -- in this case, at the brilliant little fella who spent so many afternoons basking on the now-all-but-naked mussaenda off the porch.

Click on the photo and you'll appreciate the amazing beauty of his tiny eye, far more attractive than mine: I was out preening the oleander when a gust of wind slammed a leaf, point-first, into my left eye.

The white went blood-red. Maybe it's a trick I'll have to do in the fall, when the Fantasy Fest theme is "Villains, Vixens and Vampires."

Endings

"See you tomorow," I whispered to the sun when we were out on the Sebago Marquesas last week. It was putting on its last show of the day, and there were three people on the starboard stern pouring a container of ashes over the rail, embracing and then getting ready to get on with their lives.

We were out with our friend Gene -- with Sassy, the La Te Da bartender we'd seen a few nights before, at the helm of the big catamaran -- and it was the last day of his fantastic visit. (He is one great houseguest.)

And after that, it was button up the house, pack and venture north of Rockland Key for the first time in six months. We visited Malinda and the kids near Orange Lake, finished the 850-mile trek north and got the computer hooked back up.

Uneventful, aside from the dead squirrel in the den.

I send my regrets in retrospect for the last couple of weeks, but for a variety of reasons making the seasonal migration was harder than ever. Consider: As I write this, in the middle of the night, it's in the 70s there and the 30s here.

But hey, the greenhouse looks as tropically good as it ever has, and once again I can think of the ending of one thing as the beginning of something else.