June Update

I’ve been trying to stay off screens when I can… only somewhat successfully. It’s tricky being stuck at home (yay chronic illness) when everything – writing, entertainment, connection with friends, even my weekly meditation class – are restricted to phones and computers. Sigh. It’s a work in progress. At least we have books. Of which there were MANY this month.

From the Bookshelf

In contrast to the usual breezy vibes of the summer reading season, I’ve been up to my neck in ghosts this month. Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo took a journey through the fascinating mythology of Chinese Malaysian afterlives, and The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden played with the temptation of oblivion when the world is filled with horror. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing was intense and brutal, a vivid exploration of the legacy of antiblackness in the US South. I’m also going to group Bad Cree by Jessica Johns in with hauntings, as the protagonist’s dreams are stalked by a creature of greed and hunger.

Concepts of ghosts and spirits are near ubiquitous around the globe, but every culture has their own take on it, and my favourite thing about reading lots of ghost books has been observing where traditions meet and diverge. The final book in this little study will be K. Ankrum’s The Corruption of Hollis Brown, which I’m very excited for – Icarus was one of my favourite reads last year.

From the Garden

Lots of things happening in the garden, but not too many photos of them: a bout of high winds, torrential rain and hail (yes, HAIL. in JUNE.) whipped the flowers off the more delicate plants, as well as the seed heads off the aquilegia I really wanted to harvest. The sweet peas took a battering, but they’ll be right as rain again before long. Enough of them opened a flower or two, letting me I’d botched the planting. I was aiming for my usual arrangement, reds, pinks and whites in one spot, purples and blues in the other. Instead, I’ve just got purples everywhere, with reds and whites in clusters. Whoops.

I did manage to capture some butterfly appreciation the very day before the bad weather swept in. I hadn’t heard of dame’s violets before researching native plants for this patch of garden, but I’ve fallen head over heels in love with them, and the butterflies have too. They’ve gone to seed now, so I’m hoping to propagate them in situ. Check in next year to see I have any success 🙂

Finally, have some pretty grass. I give a lot of attention to flower here, but grass (and trees and shrubs and fallen leaves and piles of sticks and bare dirt) is hugely important to the resilience of a wildlife garden. Now that No Mo May is over we’ve had to cut down some areas of lawn for the dogs, but we’ve left what we can to grow longer, which creates a dense habitat for insects, feeds birds, and protects the whole mini-ecosystem during the inevitable heatwaves. (Seriously, the long grass is most resilient area of my garden during extreme heat. It’s magic. Everything else will shrivel and die, the soil will bake hard, but the long grass just turns golden up top, with green growth below and happy soil. Highly recommend.)

Thanks for reading!