Pat Bertram's Blog, page 15

A Mangled Ditty

Oh, what a tangled mess we leave when first we practice to believe . . . that we know what we’re doing.

This little mangled ditty came to mind earlier when I looked around my yard and saw the jungle-like garden areas that once were filled with dainty wildflowers. Because of all the moisture this year, gardens that, in the past, have barely managed to survive the summer, have grown into . . . well, into tangled messes. Green messes, for the most part, though a few flowers do manage to bloom.

The grass weeds, like Bermuda grass and foxtail, are growing out of control, choking the plants I want. I didn’t know there were so many types of grass here in this yard because when I came, the “lawn” was a field of broadleaf weeds with some patches of Bermuda grass. If there had been more Bermuda grass and fewer weeds, I would simply have watered the Bermuda grass so that it would spread, but unfortunately, the weeds spread faster than the grass, so I took the easy way out and sodded a large part of the yard.

As it turns out, sodding the yard wasn’t the easy way of solving the weed issue. Now I have a lawn that the Bermuda grass is invading and flowerbeds that the various foxtail grasses — as well as broadleaf weeds, of course — are taking over. I was doing well for a while, keeping on top of the weeds, but with the last couple of rains, there was such an explosion of green (everywhere except the brown swath of my lawn that still remains brown), that I’ve mostly given up. I’d spent the past month or so pulling Bermuda grass out of my lawn, yanking up kochia and ragweed as tall as my knees from the still uncultivated areas, and gathering foxtail seedheads from places in my garden when I couldn’t reach the whole clump of grass, and now my knees are protesting.

With my knees on strike, I’ve been trying to break the habit of pulling up weeds when I see them, but it’s a hard habit to break since the weeds are hard to ignore, and they need to be taken care of before they can do serious damage. Still, the hiss of pain when I stoop helps remind me to take it easy, which is good for my knees, but not so good for the tangled mess I’m left with.

I keep reminding myself that eventually the summer will end and the summer grasses and weeds will die no matter what I do or don’t do now, and then I’ll be able to clear away everything at once (weeds and defunct annuals) to get ready for next spring.

Meantime, that little mangled ditty keeps looping around in my head, taunting me. Last spring, and into the summer, I did begin to believe that I knew what I was doing, but now, not so much.

On a happier note: zinnias! Or rather, one lovely green zinnia.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Love Lies Bleeding

There is an interesting plant in my yard that everyone who sees comments on. I had a couple of those plants last year, too, but I didn’t know if the plants were friends or foes (flowers or weeds, in other words), so when they grew too tall for where they were planted, I pulled them up.

This year, instead of pulling them up, I left them in place for a conversation piece. A couple of times I tried to track down the name of the plant, but apparently, I put in the wrong search terms because I tried again today, and the answer popped right up. The weird looking ropy red flowers are called foxtail amaranth. It’s an annual that seems to have been included in a wildflower seed mix that I threw out there last winter, so unless I buy more seeds, this is the only time I will have the flowers.

Here they are, along the fence behind the zinnias:

And here is a close-up:

The flowers are also called Love Lies Bleeding, a holdover from the Victorian era, when flowers were used to send messages. The message of this flower is hopelessness or hopeless love, which seems a mean thing to want to say to someone in words, let alone in flowers.

I was going to plagiarize another of my posts to fill out this tale of “talking” flowers, but instead, I’ll just direct you to this link if you want to find more “Meanings of Flowers”.

Love Lies Bleeding would be a great title for a book since the phrase could be used to set scenes and develop themes throughout the story: my loved one is lying there bleeding; you broke my heart, and now it lies bleeding; my lover lied and now is bleeding.

Unfortunately, many other authors had the same idea — that Love Lies Bleeding would be a great name for a book — because a quick check on book sites showed a whole library’s worth of books using that title or a variation thereof.

Of course, if I really wanted to use the title, there’s no reason I couldn’t since titles aren’t copyrighted (I could also legally name a book Gone with the Wind if I wanted to, but that would be nothing short of author suicide). I prefer using less trite titles, however, and anyway, there is no book in me at the moment, so a title is the last thing I need.

Not so the plant itself. There are a lot of “last things I need” in my garden — weeds and weedy grasses top that list — but even though the foxtail amaranth isn’t on that list, it doesn’t add much to my yard except as a conversation piece, which, come to think of it, is actually a good thing to have. And now that I know the name of this plant, it not only will serve as a conversation starter, but can become the whole conversation, because truly, Love Lies Bleeding is an evocative name with an interesting history.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

The Good Today

I had a lovely surprise today. I heard a knock on the back door, which was unusual — visitors come straight to the front door rather than meander through my yard to the back. I opened the door, and one of the workers employed by my contractor was standing there with a shovel. “I’ve come to build your raised garden,” he said.

Although the garden has been on their do-to list for a year or two, it hasn’t been a priority. It was more important to me to have these people replace the roof of the house I am looking after for an absent friend. And then today, apparently, my raised garden did become a priority. It’s not really important in the grand scheme of things — the area could just as easily have been a ground-level garden like my other garden spots, but I wanted a different sort of accent in the yard. I have no idea what the finished “box” will look like — my only instructions were to build it 18” high with boards across the ends that I could use as a bench.

The worker was also one who laid my sod, so I cornered him to ask about my brown grass. It did surprise him, the contrast between the bright green healthy area and the dead-looking swath a mere three feet away. He does think, though, that since the sod is well seated and the grass doesn’t yield to being pulled on, the grass is still alive, just dormant. This pleases me in a “grass half full/half empty” sort of way. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.) There is a chance the grass will green up, but meantime, it’s not very pretty.

What I do find pretty are some of the flowers that showed their faces today, especially this petunia. This is one that planted itself and is completely different from the original dark red flower that went to seed.

Speaking of pinks, this one is not only pink but is called a pink, which is another name for dianthus.

And another Heavenly Blue morning glory bloomed. I still don’t know where they came from, but they are welcome all the same.

What aren’t welcome are the mushrooms. We haven’t been getting any more rain, but the humidity is so unusually high that the dew on the ground in the morning is dense, and apparently, such wetness is the perfect environment for mushrooms and toadstools of all kinds. Most pull right up, but a couple were so entrenched I had to dig them out, and a couple even grew in the ornamental rocks around the foundation around the house.

And in the interest of truth — I did spray the herbicide to try to control the Bermuda grass, but nothing happened. Oh, well. As I said once before, it’s about accepting the bad with good, and today, so far, the good has been very good.

One last item: another worker also showed up, and when I opened the garage to show him some boards he could use, this second worker just stopped and stared. It took me a minute to realize he was staring at my car, thoroughly entranced. Gotta love car guys!

So yes, the good today was very good.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

The Cosquer Caves

In a book I’m reading, the prehistoric art in the Cosquer Caves plays a major part, which is fun since I’d never heard of them, though in my defense, my last research into cave paintings preceded the discovery of the caves.

The Cosquer Caves are an underground — and undersea — treasure of cave art. Carbon dating shows two distinct timeframes for the art — around 19,000 BP and 27,000 BP.

[I looked up the definition of BP so you don’t have to. It means “Before the Present,” but since the date of the “present” changes every year, they have chosen the rather arbitrary-seeming date of 1950 to mean the present, which seems silly to me because they exchanged one rather arbitrary date for another. I understand why people don’t like the previous designation of BC because of the mention of Christ, but since he was not born in the year 0, the year itself didn’t mean anything. “They” did try to change the BC to BCE — Before the Common Era — but apparently, 1950 makes better sense to them for a starting date, even though it doesn’t to me.]

The caves weren’t discovered until 1985 when Henri Cosquer, a diver who was exploring the Calanques (a series of cliffs and bays not far from Marseilles), happened to notice a hole in the side of a cliff wall, 36 meters (118 feet) below the surface. And so he discovered the caves, which soon bore his name. Although the caves were made known almost immediately, the first mention of the cave art (all sorts of animals as well as hand tracings) came in 1991 when three divers got lost in the cave and subsequently died.

Before the sea began to rise after the last ice age ended, the Cosquer Caves were located several miles inland. The waters are still rising, slowly submerging the caves, and now the entrance to the caves has been closed off. If you wish to experience the caves, you don’t need to make the dangerous journey under water and through perilous tunnels (even if they were still open) — a replica of the caves has been recreated. Oddly, they have been recreated as they were found — underwater — rather than on land where they originated.

I find this story interesting for several reasons.

One: that such an important discovery wasn’t made public until the three divers died. I’m not exactly sure what that says about us as a species, but it does seem rather true to form.

Two: That the cave paintings came from two such distant eras. Generally, the art found in paleolithic sites seems to be done all in the same era and then is forgotten or just left alone as people move on. It’s been postulated that this was a site visited by nomadic peoples or world travelers, which could be true or just a guess to explain the diversity.

Three: Proof of how climates always change.

There are many terms that really get on my nerves: veggies, 110%, intestinal fortitude, to name a few. But my current most unfavorite is “climate change” because it’s redundant. Climate is change. Climate is always changing. We tend to think we live in a bubble, where what is always was, but this long period of rather temperate weather we’ve been experiencing since the little ice age, is a rather a rarity in the vast history of the earth. (The little ice age was a cold interval from the mid-fourteenth century through the mid nineteenth century. There were even colder intervals of cold between the main interval, the final one from 1840 to 1880.)

Although I am not disagreeing that humans have an effect of the climate, and in a bubble where outside things don’t affect what is in the bubble and where the bubble itself never changes, what we are seeing would definitely be human-caused. But other factors could be at work — sun spots and solar discharges are one hypothesis to account for some of the current climate. Others hypothesize that we are still coming out of the last ice age, and that our activities may or may not be aggravating that warming trend. Or it could be something completely different, perhaps even another planet in our solar system as the Sumerians believed (a belief I made use of in my novel Light Bringer), and the planet’s return from its remote journey into space is playing havoc with our climate.

We tend to think we know all there is to know about the earth and climate and human history, but the rather recent discovery of these caves and the art that was so important to humans back in those far distant days, shows us that we don’t know everything, shows us that we don’t live in a bubble, shows us that there are still surprises.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Lessons From a Garden

A garden is a lot like life. Come to think of it, on a list of silly things to say, that would rank quite high because a garden is life.

Perhaps what I really want to say is that the lessons one learns in a garden are lessons that pertain to the rest of one’s life, too.

Lesson one: You get what you get and what you get is not always what you deserve. You can work hard and do everything right — or as right as you know how to do — and still get the wrong results. I have mentioned that on one side of my path, the grass is bright green and healthy, while on the other side of the path, a mere three feet away, the grass is dead. Both areas of grass were treated exactly the same, and yet the results were completely different.

Lesson two: If you’ve done everything you know how to do, then you have no other recourse except to accept what you have. For now, I have no choice but to accept the dead grass because I can’t do anything about it. Come fall, I can reseed, but until then, I have to accept that, whether I enjoy the looks of the grass or not, it’s what I have. I can be glad, I suppose, that the grass is simply brown and not overrun with weedy grasses like the section of lawn right next to the dead patch.

Lesson three: Take care of that which you can, and if things grow out of your control, do the best you can with that, too. I got rid of some of the sunflowers that planted themselves in my yard because they grew around one of my baby plum trees, but other sunflowers I let go, and now they are too big to deal with. The stalks are as big as my arm and taller than the garage next door. The best thing I can do, I suppose, is wait until fall and hack them off at the base when they die.

Lesson four: Be patient. So many things are growing out of control (my tomato and tomatillo plants are growing so big and so fast they seem to be taking over the garden areas where they were planted) that I feel like ripping them out in preparation for fall clean-up, but we still have a lot of summer left, and despite the relatively cool days we are currently experiencing, I’m sure there is a lot of heat ahead of us. And anyway, there are still blossoms on the tomato plants, so perhaps I will still have a small harvest. On the other hand, some plants grow so slowly they don’t seem worth having, but again, there is still a lot of summer left, so if I am patient, there might still be some color to show for all my care.

Lesson five: Don’t be intimidated. I must admit, plants that seem to be growing hugely due to the rain and the other growth-inducing weather we’ve been having, intimidate me. I’m not sure what I think they can do other than tower over me, but apparently, I’ve read too many plant-based horror stories over the years to be comfortable with looming plants. Still, in the real life of my garden, I tend to think I have the upper hand.

Lesson six: Some things live, and some things die. Eventually, of course everything dies, but no matter how much we might want something to live, its survival is not always in our control. Actually, this is a lesson I learned in life that I am applying to my garden rather than a lesson I learned in my garden that I am applying to my life, but either way, it’s a good thing to remember.

I’m sure there are other lessons, but these are the lessons that seem to concern me most right now. Let’s hope I learn what I need to.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

The Year of Soylent Green

This is the year of Soylent Green, or rather the year that Soylent Green was supposed to portray. The novel upon which the movie was based, Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison, took place in 1999, but the movie makers moved things forward a couple of decades to 2022.

I’ve come across a few articles (one of which was sent to me by a friend) whose authors tried to figure out where the movie got 2022 so wrong, because, of course, we have not devolved to the point where the population is so staggeringly immense, corporate greed so all-consuming, and human life so worthless that the masses are being fed a mystery product called soylent green.

I don’t know why these authors are concerned that the movie got it wrong — after all, most dystopian movies don’t come true. Although some books are burned and banned, the world is awash in books, unlike the society portrayed in Fahrenheit 451. Although Big Sib (have to be politically correct, you know) does seem to be watching us, we have not moved into the extreme totalitarianism of 1984. And although we seem to be living in a society controlled more and more by corporations and technology, we have not yet moved to the robotic social order of Brave New World.

Dystopian literature is about extending what is or what might be into the furthest reaches of imagination. It’s not supposed to predict or preach or even give us a glimpse into a world we are fated to endure. Instead, it’s supposed to expose — perhaps — the truth of humans and what we can or can’t endure, what we can or can’t control, what we can or can’t accept if we wish to retain our humanity. It’s no wonder that in all of these books the authorities, whoever or whatever they might be, show the worst face of us. That lone dissenter, either hero or anti-hero, hopefully shows the best of us. As for the masses — all the rest of us — if the literature tells us anything about ourselves, it’s that we will be corralled somewhere in the middle, just trying to get by.

What so many of the dystopian books and movies of the 1950s through the l970s seemed to be trying to show were possible results of an unchecked birthrate, and no wonder. The population increased 5.5 billion from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 8 billion in 2022. Technology and agricultural advances made it possible to feed all those people or a great percentage, anyway. Despite a supposedly adequate food supply, 9 million people starve to death every year, a totally unacceptable number, and untold other millions deal with malnutrition because so much of the food that is available lacks essential nutrients.

Even though the world did not become as insanely crowded as the dystopian authors seemed to prophesy, our population still increased exponentially, though suddenly, any talk of overpopulation, whether in the dystopian literature, the daily media, or think tanks (formal and informal) has become taboo, making stories like Soylent Green seem even more stridently fanatical. Also, despite periodic whispers of a population cleanse or worldwide genocide, it will never happen. Why? There’s no money in it. Big business makes money with growth. No population growth, no profits. (Is it any wonder that any time the USA birth rate dips the immigration rate rises?)

If instead of disregarding the dystopian stories, if instead of creating more dubious agricultural practices and food products, we had been able to curtail the world’s population back in the nineteen fifties and sixties, we wouldn’t be dealing with a so-called climate crisis now. But then, cynical me says that there are fortunes to be made with selling more and more green vehicles and other green technologies to an ever-greater number of people.

So did the dystopian stories of the early and mid-twentieth century get it wrong? Not really — they got it right for the times. They just weren’t cynical enough, relying more on shock tactics of population bombs than critical thought about what effects a slowly decreasing population would have on the world economy.

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***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Stunning Developments

The weather we have been dealing with this summer — extraordinary heat, occasional wild winds, and periodic rain — seems to be the perfect incubator for weeds of a particularly voracious nature. Every time it rains, whatever weeds I have just pulled grow back and bring along their whole extended families. With as rough a time as I have been having keeping my vegetation under control, it could be worse — I could be dealing with a yard full of waist-high weeds like a couple of people in the neighborhood.

Instead, there have been a few stunning developments besides the unpleasant ones dished out by the ravaging weeds and the tireless sun. This heavenly blue morning glory, for example.

I have no idea where it came from, but oh, it is lovely! Another wonderful development were the orange poppies; like the heavenly blue morning glory, I have no idea where they came from, but they are welcome all the same.

One development of a rather weird nature is this marigold. It was supposed to be a giant marigold; instead, it’s a dwarf. But dramatic for all that.

The petunias, both light

and dark keep chugging along no matter what the weather, bringing cheer to me and my yard.

The final stunning development was (is) this green zinnia. I vaguely remember planting the seeds, but since I don’t really expect anything to come up, I tend not to remember what exactly I planted. That anything decides to grow in this bipolar climate is amazing. Though it’s not exactly bipolar, is it? If this were really a bipolar climate, it would be winter all year round (half Arctic and half Antarctic) instead of very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer.

At least today the weather is rather moderate and will continue to be so for a few more days.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Yard Care

With all the trouble I’ve been having with my lawn, I still don’t regret having the sod laid and all the work I’ve been doing to keep it alive and healthy and weed-free. I’m winning part and losing part, but I’m not sure if there would have been a better choice considering what I started with.

My contractor suggested that I rock the whole weed-infested yard if I didn’t want to have to take care of a lawn, with perhaps a tree in the center of the front yard. I opted out of doing the whole yard, though perhaps half the yard has been covered with rock, such as the ornamental gravel protecting the foundation of my house and garage and filling in the right of way between the sidewalk and the street, as well as all the paths and sidewalks around my property.

The funny thing about gravel is that it isn’t as care-free as one would expect. Since a plastic weed barrier is illegal in parts of Colorado (something to do with interrupting the natural seepage of rain water), what’s left are various grades of a fabric weed barrier. Even with the heaviest option, the Bermuda grass is so aggressive, it pokes right through the fabric. And when it doesn’t poke through, it winds its way from way under the fabric to the outer edges, where — because of that exceptionally long root — it’s impossible to pull or dig out. Then there are the leaves and twigs and other things that fall on the rock. They all have to be blown off, otherwise, they disintegrate and sink down below the rock where they decay, turn acidic, and eventually destroy the fabric. There are lots of other weeds and things that grow in the dirt between the rocks, which they are easy to enough to pull up because of the shallow roots, but when it rains, there could be dozens if not hundreds of those seedlings to gather.

As I mentioned yesterday, I considered turning my yard into a wildflower field — like a mini prairie — but that option brings its own problems, such as weeds and grass that choke out the wildflowers. Eventually you end up with what you started with — Bermuda grass and weeds.

Considering how well Bermuda grass does here, I could have done what a couple of my neighbors do and just water and mow the Bermuda grass. It makes a nice enough lawn for the summer and lies fallow most of the year. Unfortunately, my yard was more weeds than grass, so it would have taken years of hard work to turn the yard into a lawn. Of course, I could have just let it go like one of my neighbors does, and occasionally mow the weeds before they get knee-high, as I did the first years I was here, but even that option isn’t as carefree as it sounds. A good rain, and suddenly, the weeds are shoulder-high, with stalks as thick and tough as saplings.

The only truly care-free yard I ever knew was the place where I’d rented a room before I moved here. The back yard was all concrete, an immense partially covered patio. The front yard was a lush lawn with flowers by the house that the owner never lifted a finger to care for. Perhaps saying it was care-free is a misnomer because, although the owner didn’t do any work, he had an automatic sprinkler system and a hired gardener who came every week and worked for at least a couple of hours, sometimes a lot more.

Come to think of it, I might as well be out there caring for a lawn and my various gardens. It’s as good a way to spend my time as any other.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Feeling Herbicidal

I did something today that I never wanted to do — ordered an herbicide to kill off the Bermuda grass that’s taking over my lawn and choking my new lawn to death. The lawn isn’t really new anymore — it’s ten months old — but in places it’s really regressing, and I want to try to rescue as much as I can.

If I can.

The two biggest areas of grass are doing well, probably because most of the weeds had been dug up beforehand. I’d dug the weeds out of one section, and the people who did some of the rock work around the house dug up the other area almost by accident, but it turned out to be a good thing. The problem arises in those areas where the sod was laid over existing weeds. I remember asking if we should dig up the weeds but was told there was some sort of weed barrier to keep the weedy grasses from working their way to the top of the new sod, but apparently, that wasn’t true.

So, now a large swath of my cold-weather grass has been eaten by the warm-weather Bermuda grass. I’m hoping that the herbicide — which is specifically geared to this very situation — will help. Then I can simply reseed the lawn in those areas. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to dig up the Bermuda grass and then reseed my lawn.

So not my idea of fun!

I could, of course, let nature take its course, but then I will end up how I started — with Bermuda grass and lots of weeds. What will be working in my favor is that the weather will cool down eventually, the Bermuda grass will go dormant, and the cool-season grasses will (with any luck) take hold again.

It’s for this very reason (the complications of having a lawn) that I considered putting in a wildflower field instead of a lawn, but if the area where I did plant wildflowers is anything to go by, that sort of yard is just as problematic. Grass and weeds grow thickly among the wildflowers. I manage to keep the places I can reach looking okay — or at least I did until I all but gave up when the weeds overtook my ability to deal with them — but so much of the wildflower area is beyond arm reach.

It looks as if I will be doing a lot of digging to clear out as many weeds as possible this fall, though as I have learned, they will simply grow back. The weeds, especially the weedy grasses, are just too well-entrenched, which is why, as much as it goes against my nature, I ordered the herbicide.

Just because I ordered the grass killer, though, doesn’t mean I will use it. I guess it depends how herbicidal I feel when I receive it. Today, I wouldn’t have a problem using it. I went outside to get a photo of the brown swath mixed with Bermuda grass across the path from the pretty green area where the lawn is doing well to show what I’m talking about, and I couldn’t take the picture. It just looked too pathetic and made me feel sad and herbicidal. Instead, I’m using a photo of my zinnias to accompany this post and add a bit of cheer.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Moonflower

Last night wasn’t the full moon — that was the previous night, August 11th — but it might as well have been. Not only did the moon look full, it acted full. Or maybe I should say it acted on me as if it were full because I had a rough time falling asleep. (Apparently, I am subject to some sort of full-moon insomnia.) Luckily, this afternoon I had nothing planned except to read, so when I dozed off with a book in my hand, it wasn’t a problem. What was a problem is that when I awoke, I felt disoriented, not knowing day or time or what I was doing.

The disorientation lasted only a moment. By the time I got my eyes pried open and dragged myself away from the uneasiness dreaming always causes me, I was fine.

As for last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I went outside to look at my moonflower in the moonlight. It was too dark to take a decent picture, so I was glad to find the plant still blooming when I got up this morning. It faded quickly in the bright sun, but luckily, I now have a pictorial memory of the flower, though I might not need such a visual memory because it seems as if there are several more buds that will be opening in the coming evenings, so I will have the real thing.

Moonflowers are a perennial subtropical plant. In colder climes, like this one, it’s an annual, but because of its self-seeding nature, it acts as a perennial. The plants grow readily and quickly, and if the flowers aren’t lopped off, the seeds in their prickly casing can be easily harvested to grow more plants. Or to keep the existing plant from taking over since it has a weed-like nature (probably why I can grow it so easily).

Moonflowers are members of the nightshade family and, as you can probably tell by the trumpet-like shape of the flower, are kin to morning glories. “Moonflower” is rather a romantic name, but the plant’s other names are enough to make a person shudder (or, if ingested in great enough quantities, make a person hallucinogenic and maybe even dead): datura, jimsonweed, thornapples, devil’s weed, devil’s trumpets, hell’s bells.

Now that I know all those names, I remember doing this same research when I lived near the desert because datura grew as weed around there. Since this climate is similar to that one, I need to be careful so this plant doesn’t become invasive. Still, it’s a beautiful flower, and as long as I can control it (though my ability to control anything in my yard remains dubious), it makes a pleasing addition to my garden, even when the moon isn’t full.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.