The knockout rose–gift from my baby–has been blooming like a champion, setting new buds every few days even into December.

And it looks so pretty in the snow.

So do these hips on the Champney’s pink that drapes over the back deck.

And this lovely Bourbon, wearing its coat of fluffy white.

It’ll be warm tomorrow. The snow will be gone.

Wonder how long the roses will last?

In the nearly six months that I’ve been dating “farm boy”–also known as “Marc”–my friends have come to realize that the whole “farm boy” appellation has been, basically, one of my little jokes. (Actually, a tall joke–the boy’s at least six-four.) Marc is, more properly speaking, a horticulturist (I get corrected when I say “horticulturalist.” Apparently that’s what you call it in the  British Isles–in A-MUR-ca, we lose the “al”).

So anyway, baby boy has been running–and repping–large nurseries for the last decade-and-a-half: a commercial nursery with 17 farms in two counties and relationships from central Virginia to the Washington-Baltimore area, then later an educational foundation where he produced 600 varieties of heirloom plants for display and collection purposes and for retail sales. And then there’s that whole garden renovation and design business of his–and the trees and shrubs and perennials he grows on his own land to supply it…

I say all this not to present my beloved’s bona fides–but because, knowing all this, seeing it all in action, with the trucks and the crew and the whole Charlottesville City Market gig–it should come as no surprise to me that my house is turning into … well, an impromptu propagation lab. But it kind of has surprised me … very pleasantly, I might add.

It all started quite innocently enough, back when it was still warm. Marc and I were sipping wine on the deck, talking roses (I just love it when he talks dirty to me). I was moaning about the fact that I’d planted my favorite rose–Rosa chinensis “Mutabilis,” aka “The Confederate Rose”–at my mama’s, where it was blooming prolifically in a riot of blush to deep pink to coral while in mine there were only a bunch of boring Noisettes and Bourbons. (Yes, I was whining, rose lovers–we know Noisettes and Bourbons are not shabby at all). Whereupon, he bounded off the deck and took a whack at one of my hydrangeas to demonstrate how easily we could make rose babies.

Well, not a whack precisely… He started with a simple garden staple.

And then he dug a groove beneath the hydrangea with what happened to be handy–a stray picket from my fence. He selected a branch from the hydrangea, one with a fork …

Stripped off the leaves, scored the stem with his thumb, stapled it in, and covered it with soil…

All to demonstrate how easy it is to make more of your favorite plants. Come spring, I’ll have baby hydrangeas (Hydrangea macrophylla “Endless Summer,” to be precise) that will be ready for potting or planting in my yard. And I’ll save that that 25 smackeroos I’d otherwise spend for each plant at the local garden center. (Hmmm… was that when I knew it was love?)

That was how it started … and I should have known it was just the start. But now that gardening season is nearly done and pruning season is about to begin, little projects are starting to, well, sprout around the house. For instance, I came home from church on Sunday to discover that Marc had cleaned the kitchen (yes, there is a goddess!) and started puttering around with what was handy: a schefflera that had miraculously survived the plant holocaust that was my dissertation and a couple of geraniums–one with a lovely variegated leaf–that were left over from his summer stock.

This is the pretty little thing I found on my counter.

Here’s a nice closeup.

Basically, what he’d done was filled a small clay pot with river pebbles and nested it inside a larger pot filled with a nice potting mix. I don’t know if you can see in the pix, but the soil in the larger pot comes nearly to the lip of the smaller pot. (The stakes are provided by a piece of bamboo cut to roughly 12-inch lengths and spaced around the rim.)

Next, he took sections of the plants–trimmed of their extra branchings with the leaves cut back, too–and inserted them into the soil. This is another method for turning one plant into six, and I’m sure it has a name–probably a Latin one.

The only tools he used were the most basic ones: his trusty pruning shears and a pair of scissors. I’m sure you’ve got those around the house, too.

Next, he labeled the babies and gave them a good misting, followed by a good drenching: pouring lots of water on the pebbles and draining it off, twice.

The last stage of the operation was supplied by my good friends from Southern States. Namely, a plastic bag that had lately held cat food. This is what our kitchen counter “greenhouse” ended up looking like.

This greenhouse doesn’t require much in the way of sun or anything in the way of attention. We’re, in fact, going to forget about it for a while. And when there’s something new to see, I’ll post it in this space.

… I’m beginning to think I’m dating The Green Man.

Hey, as we used to say in the 60s, I can dig it!

This morning, I took a walk along the Rivanna River. It’s the first time I’ve walked the area since the Woolen Mills dam was demolished last August, and the changes seemed quite dramatic.

Now mind you, it’s been some years since I walked the Riverview. Time was — when I lived near the river, in the section of town called the “Woolen Mills,” after the mill founded there in 1841 — I walked that trail every day, winter or summer, whether the weather was dry and fine or ice and snow. My daily companion on those expeditions was Jade, a lab-collie mix with a pure white coat, root beer eyes, a pink mottled nose, and the best disposition of any animal it has ever been my pleasure to share my life with. If an animal can, in fact, be a spirit guide, then she was surely mine … But Jade died in 2002 after a short bitter fight with liver cancer–and I’ve barely set foot on that trail or even in the park that’s the entrance to it since…

But today, I promised a friend who runs a community service agency — QCC, the Quality Community Council — that I would join the ladies taking part in one of her weekly health walks. There were about a dozen of us–some elderly, some disabled, a mother with a toddler, one woman in full walkers’ regalia including an iPod armband. We got a brief pep talk from Susan Pleiss, a volunteer wrangler extraordinaire who does amazing work with parks and gardens and transportation and the poor, and Chris Jensic, the city planner who works with the trails system. Then we all set off in a big crush… but in short order I found myself … all by myself.

I got left behind rather quickly because I had to stop to look at the river. It had been many years since I’d taken a good long look at it, and I noticed the changes wrought by the destruction of the dam immediately. From a deep, sluggish, mossy green snail, the river had turned shallow, wide, clear, quick-moving as a coachwhip snake over rocks that I had never even known were there.

The deep shade cover made the walk blessedly cool, so I walked a bit slower (and, as it happened, a lot farther) than everyone else. I took the time to listen to Susan and Chris bemoaning the colonies of invasive Japanese bindweed that were overtaking the riverbanks (one was literally as tall as a house). I watched bees pollinating chest high stands of milkweed. I stopped to pick mulberries from a tree at the side of the path and exchanged a few laughs with a guy on a mountain bike who stopped and pulled down the branches so I could reach them, then fed handfuls to his daughter.

Cardinals and grackles and catbirds were calling, and there was a memory around every bend. There was where Jade got into a fight with that mean-ass Dalmation. There was where she’d launch herself after sticks until my arm was heavy and aching and her tongue lolled almost to the ground. There was where I scattered her ashes…

But there was much that was new, too. The city has widened and resurfaced the path so that it’s more like a ped-bike superhighway than the little goat track we used to scramble up and over. The deepest, darkest, shadiest portion of the trail–the section where Riverview Cemetery looms 100 feet on a sheer bluff overhead–is now dappled with sunlight because the city permitted a luxury development that decimated the enormous trees that used to block the light. And the trail just keeps going now instead of ending at the city limits.

This requires some explanation: The city and the county actually got together (this may sound strange to folks from other states, but in Virginia, they’re separate and often competing entities) and connected their trails. So now, instead of just ending at U.S. 250, at the city-county line in effect, the trail winds under the Free Bridge, and continues along the river through Darden Towe Park to end in Pen Park, on the far north end of town. … Now I don’t know about you, but to me, the thought of walking through woods in a complete circuit around the east side of town from the southern limit of the city to the northern– that’s cool. I can’t wait to try it.

So I’ll return to Riverview. In addition to the scary, ropy vines of poison ivy — thick as my arm — climbing the sycamores beside the trail, I saw Queen Anne’s Lace and wild yarrow. And the milkweed is just starting to mature. The umbels, though as big as my fist, are just starting to turn a rich coral color. Soon they’ll start attracting monarch butterflies. I want to be there to see that. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get a picture.

(P.S. Apologies for not posting any pictures with this. I didn’t have my camera today, but I’ll be going back soon!)

For the past few days, I’ve been in Charleston, SC, for the opening of the Spoleto Festival USA. The festival is something I try to make every year, partly because it’s one of the premiere performing arts festivals in the country and it’s held in my hometown. But I also work at the festival–more precisely I do projects for my friend and mentor Mary Jane Jacob.

Mary Jane is an “independent curator,” which may sound a bit odd. But what it means is that her whole career since the late ’80s has been based on a critique of museums–their limitations as spaces where the public can encounter art. Shifting her workplace to the street, MJ has done a series of of provocative community-based art installations, starting in 1991 at Spoleto with “Places with a Past”–which engaged directly, provocatively with Charleston history of slavery and segregation–and continuing through “Culture in Action,” “Conversations at the Castle,” “Evoking History,” and “Places With a Future.”

The teams are interdisciplinary and collaborative–we engage deeply with communities that are disenfranchised, forgotten. The one I joined in 2004 included the disciplines of visual and conceptual art, landscape architecture/design, and poetry. You can see images of the project we produced, “Water/Table” on my website, and Thursday night saw the grand opening of one of the sweetest fruits of that collaboration, “Alicia’s Garden,” a memorial garden dedicated to the memory of Countess Alicia Spaulding-Paolozzi, designed by the Places With a Future Collaborative: Mary Jane, Walter Hood, Ernesto Pujol, and little old me.

Seems like something that was worth a party.

But actually, the party was for the reopening of Memminger Auditorium, a 1938 WPA opera house in the middle of the peninsula of Charleston that had fallen on hard times. Upstaged by a glitzier facility in the city in the 1960s, it had been allowed to fall into disrepair–Hurricane Hugo punched holes in the roof in 1989, the building had been officially condemned, it was a home for bats and pigeons basically–until the festival’s director, Nigel Redden, saw it and fell in love with it.

He staged amazing, daring stuff there even when the place was barely habitable. (We won’t talk about those wooden seats, which were a crucifixion even during my 8th grade graduation, 30-odd years ago, not to mention the decades worth of grime and pigeon poop–and please! let us never mention again those the bathrooms…).

But somehow, Nigel made it all cool. Festival fans are still talking about Heiner Goebbels’ post-apocalyptic Surrogate Cities, in 2000. And The Peony Pavilion, an epic-length Chinese opera that turned the building into a fantasy land, all bamboo forests and lotus-filled pools, in 2004. Then there was that sexy Don Giovanni in 2005 that was so popular they had to bring it back for 2006. All the while Nigel was raising money to completely renovate the building…

As we saw Thursday night.

Cool, huh? It changed colors all night… Hmmm, having a full production staff at your disposal … It must be an event planner’s dream…

The interior was no less spectacular…

The production was Amistad–an appropriate choice for the bicentennial of the end of the Atlantic slave trade. But more on Amistad later. Let’s get back to the garden. It turned out to be exactly what we thought it would be… a great place for a party.

The Places With a Future Collaborative could relax and have a glass of champagne. The professionals had taken our vision and made it a reality….

From left, you see Russell “Rusty” Jacob, Ernesto Pujol, Mary Jane Jacob, and Ernesto’s friend and collaborator Valarie Samulski. And last but certainly not least, there’s Walter Hood, with one of his architect buds.

This blog has been idle for many moons and, to my friends and fellow travelers in cyber world, I apologize.

The only excuse I can offer is that I’ve been lost in the universe between my ears–writing the dissertation that was the reason I moved to central Virginia … Lord, going on 15 years ago now. I’m writing the last chapter of the book–and writing the preface to the life I plan to live now that it will no longer be my companion–so I’m reawakening to things that were once important to me that had to be put aside … first so that I could finish my term in politics, and then so that I could finish my book.

I’m reawakening to poetry, to cooking for myself rather than grabbing fast food on the fly, to sorting and filing rather than piling paper on my desk (and the floor around my desk). And most importantly, I’m reawakening to my garden.

There’s been blessed plenteous rain in Virginia after two years of drought. The Sugar Hollow Reservoir is full, at least for the time being, and the roses are spectacular.