The Year I Killed My Menorah

Here's my delightfully menorah-like South African Aloe plicatilis; what a pleasure it's been to come home to this plant. Judging by its looks here, I'm guessing it's history; I'm also thinking one of you knows the answer for sure.

Every summer, I scout around for friends with room in their greenhouses to overwinter my Z10 succulents. Every fall, I say, yeah gotta pot those suckers up and get them shelter. And every December, I kill beautiful, innocent and often expensive specimens because I'm disappointingly lazy. (I say disappointingly because I'm gullible enough to think I'll change).

But if I had managed to protect my tender wards, Burl Mostul at Rare Plant Research would be $100 poorer every year and we can't have that.

Hey Kids! Let's Go Botanizing In Turkey!

I'm serious.

I've always wanted to botanize in Turkey and see the world's most popular flora at home in the wild. We're talking tulips, iris, orchids, lilies, crocus; somebody stop me! The thing was, I couldn't get my favorite plant hunter to go with me and I didn't want to go alone.

But thanks to a woman I've only read about but never met, I'm leading a botanical tour to the Aegean in April and I get to invite 17 of you.

Alas, I can't foot your bill since even I'll have to sing for my supper, but I'm told quite the botanical and culinary feast awaits us by a woman with impeccable credentials.

The best news is that I've been relieved of all administrative duty so there's nothing for me to screw up. Instead, I'm leaving it all to an expert who has decades of experience getting plant lovers to Turkey: Holly Chase Middle Eastern Travel.

When A Door Opens, Walk Through

I took one look at this astonishing photograph by a current member of Talking Plants (that's my Flickr group for the horticulturally-inclined) and saw in it all the power and moxie it takes to make that first giant step into the unknown.

And against the tide.

Hopwell Rocks at the Bay of Fundy is in New Brunswick, Canada; this view of Lovers Arch at low tide is from the body of b/w work by photographer Marcus Frank. Thank you Marcus for showing me how to walk the walk and strut through the door.

I'm sorry I can't thank many more of you by name for the overwhelming number of doors you've offered to open for me since I got laid off from NPR. We're talking folks wanting to redesign my website (you'll hear from me)...let me chill out at their homes (a teacher in the Grand Cayman and an old colleague in Oaxaca tie for best location)...take me skydiving in San Francisco (seriously considering it)...and join them in leading a spring botanical tour to Turkey. Here's one of a million reasons why:
And you know what? I'm seriously considering it after seeing some of the wildflower fields shot there by Iranian Flickr member Saital. I wouldn't have the money to take the trip but I could go free if I lead it and clearly I have the time. So I've promised to make a decision TODAY with the understanding that if any of you blog loyalists are jonesing to go botanizing in the wild with me, you get first dibs.

More to follow...

Three Buds And A Buckyball

A rich and poignant Christmas Day is about to end. I spent a lot of time thinking about those of you who've written and what it might be like for me -- for us -- if you return as you said you would. You know, thoughts about the kind of community we might become. And that led me to wondering what you're hoping to find me up to, a question that influenced my entire day as I weighed conversations for their potential blogliness and took pictures with you in mind.

So what's with the frozen buds, right? That's Edgeworthia, on its way to becoming a bloom with the scent of vanilla pudding. More gushing about its optimistic, butter yellow face (yes, here it comes) in my book, Plant This!, a title I will not shamelessly link to a retailer, though you can read my profile of this Z7 shrub from China right here.

Crystallized buds were among the many delights today at my friends' Neil and Norm's snowstruck woodland garden. Much to their relief, the weather had not hurt their species rhododendrons (particularly their beloved R. sinogrande) nor done irreparable damage to their timber bamboo (true, a number of its immense culms snapped under the snow's weight, but there were hundreds more where those came from).

Since I hadn't been to Neil and Norm's in a while, today was the first time I saw their immense Buckyball suspended from several trees. Take a really good look at the scale of the sculpture here, as Neil -- doubling for Vanna White -- elegantly mimics its shape.

Not suprisingly the installation took three days and was supervised by the artist whose name I will happily provide on request (it's too late to call the guys now and ask them).

BEHOLD!

Cary Grant And Viggo Mortensen

Indeed. As Christmas Day dawns and visions of sugar plum fairies dance in sleepy heads, I am thinking how lovely it would be to imagine waking to everything we want without caring whether any of it has come true.

A good high to all And to all a good-night!

A Kind Of Hush And An Incontinent Beagle

(It was not my intention to put Herman's Hermits in your head all day; apologies for title).

Here's the dog whose name should have been Moxie but is instead Zoe Mae. She's my force of nature, my inner intractable rebellious unstoppable and preternaturally (thank you, Anne Rice) focused beast.

Does she want a walk? A treat? Is this the same old fight over giving her the car keys?

But on this very quiet morning, after the blizzard of posts here and e-mails to klevine@npr.org (that address is good for another three weeks), and the blizzard of sorts settling outside, even Zoe Mae is sleeping, as is her snoring beagle sister Starlet. She's the one with the incontinence I mentioned in passing yesterday, that several of you seemed anxious to know about. And I thought my obsessions were unbalanced...

Well, if we are talking dogs then I will say that of late, whenever Starry does her beagle thing and props up pillows and blankets to cover the pea lurking somewhere in her bedding (Princess and the Pea, remember that one?) , she now "releases" everything from drops to tablespoons worth of urine. It's become chronic and really tiresome.

No, no infection. Blood work fine. Food hasn't changed. Certainly somewhat related to the steriod she has to take for her even more tiresome allergies, but she's been on them a while and the incontinence is about a month or so old.

I take excellent care of my animals (read: pre-emptive strike). However, I don't love this little dog as much as I'd hoped to. I got her two years ago, she's probably about 9 yrs old now, and wherever she's been, she was likely always starved and ready to run away. She is sweet and has her endearing qualities, I love sharing the covers with her and have learned to sleep through her snoring, but once she's stirred, I am the first to admit she is a royal pain in the ass.

I don't suppose anyone else has an animal like that, huh.

Can I Get You A Moxie?

Wow, am I relieved to see you. Wasn't sure anyone would find me at my new address (or recognize me from NPR circa 1979). And having come out today as a casuality of the recession and one of the 64 folks laid off from NPR, I frankly wasn't sure how you'd react to my, um, change in status.

Oh yeah, sure, everybody says "You're not what you do!" But people who've been laid off are just a tad less, shall we say, inspiring. A little low on the joie de vivre meter. Not so much fun under the mistletoe. Would you buy self-involved?

But you're here! Thank you, Jesus! Oh wait, maybe I shouldn't sound so grateful. I might seem pitiable. Or God forbid, needy. Never mind that I'm no longer able to sleep (it's true) and am drinking excessive amounts of champagne (actually Oregon Argyle Sparkling Wine). I'm fine, honest.

Stability is overrated, anyway.

All right, bullshit aside, Ketzel Uprooted is my newly created blog, my first step towards reasserting my right to take up space despite having been taken off the air. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not bitter. OK, so maybe I feel a little betrayed. But when the company you love finds itself operating at a 23 million dollar deficit, come on, something's got to give.

But damn it, not my self-esteem.

So, like the folks in my final NPR series, American Moxie, if you're flush with courage or desperate for support in this increasingly hellish time, if you want to swap stories or strategies or just need a shoulder to cry on because your damn dog is losing either her mind or her bladder control(read: my beagle) and your favorite plants will not make it through another day of ice and cold (read: stay tuned for the casualities), I'm open for business, grateful for the company and am ready to entertain.

(Resume available on request.)

To Be A Hinkley Hummer

This just in from the beloved, bewitched and big time bird-besmirched Dan Hinkley who keeps his hummingbird feeder heated for his feathered friends. (Don't miss the bird in the pix, about 9 o'clock).

Of course to make my first mention of Mr. Hinkley about his bulb-warmed feeder is seriously burying the lede. And he'd never stand for it, not when it's about him! So let's back up a few months to when the sun was coaxing riotous bloom out at Windcliff, Dan and Robert Jones's sublime and spoiled-rotten home and garden. The free tour starts here.

Oy, My Aching Acacia

Any worldly horthead will know that Acacia is a relentless species that threatens to inherit the Earth, an invasive plant with low standards that's typically bereft of structural interest.

But then there's Acacia pravissima, one of Portland's great de rigeur plants. Two major reasons for that: #1 is undoubtedly its shovel-shaped phyllodes, "flattened leaf stalks which appear like and serve the same function as leaves." (RHS). Which explains its common name, wedgeleaf wattle; to see its flat little arrowhead non-leaves is to covet them.

Reason #2 is my buddy Sean Hogan of Portland's Cistus Nursery who has made this crowd-pleasing and fast-growing shrub easy to buy.

And, replace. Which is very likely what I'm heading for if the incredible snowstorms of the last few days turn into the final blow of an ice storm that will bring my aching acacia to its knees.

Of course there's also the chance that if the ice doesn't get it, plummeting temperatures will. (So far we're hoving around 20 in my neighborhood). It's happened before; this is, I think, my second or third A. pravissima in 8 years.

Fine, then. Goodbye acacia! Having just come from a winter solstice party, and having meditated on my life, I'm acutely aware that of late I'm a magnet for loss. Not one to overreact, I've decided I am prepared to let go anything I can -- the theory being I'll take more conscious pleasure out of what I have while I have it.

In theory...

And while we're on the subject of letting go, how 'bout a little light reading just as we did at our gathering tonight. Here's an excerpt from the Four Quartets by that perennial Was he/Wasn't he an anti-Semitic poet ("Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."), T.S. Eliot:

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

Please Lord, NOT The Last Studio Mix!

It's a remarkably snowy afternoon here in Stumptown, perfect for a PETA snowball fight or an unconscionably polluting wood fire. (I'd also suggest cuddling, heavy petting, and so very much more but I try not to go there during a dry spell while I've no one to go there with).

But here I am doing what I love the most and do the best: making radio in the kitchen with Dinah, a.k.a. studio engineer Steve Kray, the beating heart of OPB and the rhythm guy for Lockboxx.

We're tracking and mixing #3 and #4 in my American Moxie series for NPR, my last pieces as a senior correspondent. My last pieces ever? EVER? No freaking way, can't be. Maybe the last piece that I'm paid well for, but to think "last piece" is to close a door I am unwilling to even acknowledge.

No door here, just an open-air cabana with views into the jungle...where I hope to be as soon as I can catch a flight. I'm thinking the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica.

Playing Ball With PETA!

It's a heady feeling, being editor-free after so many years at NPR. I get to have all sorts of unseemly interests I couldn't risk airing on-air. So why not start with one of the great hot button organizations of them all, PETA!

Their interactive holiday card is really rather charming. Care to throw a few snowballs at women wearing fur?

I will, however, add a RED word of caution: Should you visit its sight and stray from playing games, the instant you hear "What you're about to see..." is your cue to CLOSE your browser.

Unless, of course, you eat meat without knowing who raised it and wear fur that was taken from a creature who needed it more than you. In which case I gotta figure you're cut from a whole 'nother cloth...

Abusing My Banana

I fully intended to wrap my banana. I'd been learning the same lesson winter after winter, spring after spring. Never again would I allow its majestic leaves to begin a new season rising from a putrid pit of green. No, this was the year my banana would get wrapped and begin life from a standing position, already several feet tall.

Lo and behold, I blew it once again. My hardy banana, the uncomplaining Musa basjoo, is going to have to start from scratch in June. And that's optimistic, since this spring was so cold, I saw nary a leaf until summer. Consequently, my banana barely topped five feet, a sad showing from a creature that could easily top twice that size.

So what have I learned? Despite the beauty and disciplined design of my new courtyard garden, I am the same undisciplined gardener. No wonder I opted for so much hardscape this time 'round. I am not proud.