In Our Garden

Diary Entry from 2005–What an unlikely place for me to be on this day February 10, 2005 – an examining room in the bowels of the Morris Cancer Center at Duke University Hospital. My sister, Kay, and husband, Larry were with me as we waited anxiously to meet Dr. Joe Moore to get a second opinion regarding my Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis and treatment options. The three of us made small talk during the wait and even joked a bit. A gentle knock at the door, and Dr. Moore entered with a warm and engaging smile, plopped down beside me on the examination table and with his arm around me quipped, “So, Lee what are you doing going and getting lymphoma for?” Here he was – one of the foremost researchers and experts on lymphoma in the nation, and it seemed like I was reuniting with a favorite friend. We talked about cancer, gardening, families, and when I told him that I wanted to know everything there was about the disease – he jokingly asked his assistant to order pizza because we were going to be there all night for his tutorial.

So, I didn’t get to learn all there is to know about lymphoma, but I did begin to learn the difference between a practitioner of medicine and a healer. I also learned that even with the help of a top expert, I have a lot of control over my own health and healing. There was a dark hole ahead of me – weeks of chemotherapy with its brutal after-effects, the inevitable depression that comes from feeling so lousy so much of the time, and the complications – in my case life-threatening pneumocystis and a leg blood clot with a week in the hospital for each malady. Family and friends provided an immeasurable amount of support. Friends of friends had included me in their prayer lists. I became closer with several friends who were also battling cancer – a couple of them lost the battle raising the inevitable and unanswerable question – “why am I spared?” I read a lot and found my entire frame of thinking change – about health, about what is important in life, about discovering my call in life – to make the most of whatever time I am given, and to plan for a very long and productive next chapter in my life.

As strength returned Sunday evenings resumed as a time of family celebration – an opportunity for me to try out some newly discovered recipes using fresh, organic ingredients. And once the biweekly chemo treatments were over, I returned to my garden – relishing in the opportunity to experiment with growing leafy vegetables, herbs, and heirloom tomatoes. This connection between gardening and preparing healthy and delicious meals took on a life of its own – part of my healing process, increasingly an integral part of my life’s purpose, and a deep spiritual connection to the fruits of the land and the profound sense of being blessed with this Creation.

It is the dog days of July as I write this, four years later – usually one of the most depressing months of the year. In a couple of weeks I will visit Dr. Moore for a semi-annual exam. You can psyche yourself out about these appointments – will I always be a “cancer patient”, is there a point when I won’t have to worry about the return of the cancer, what effect have CT scans and aggressive chemo treatments had on my body? Once when I brought my daughter, Kathryn, to an exam and treatment along with my sister, Kay, and husband, Larry, the healer, Dr. Moore, entered the room with that broad and gracious smile and asked, “Did you bring the whole family?” I joked with him that the dog was hiding underneath the exam table. “The scan is clear, and your blood work is perfect – I’m very happy – let’s keep moving forward”, the good doctor reported on that occasion. But as relieved as I was about the good scan and blood work, I wanted to know what forward meant. I concluded that forward would depend some on Dr. Moore’s expert care and advice, but ultimately, would mean what changes I could make, what I could learn about cancer prevention, and what I could do to influence the health of my family and friends.

There is the technology side of cancer – the overflowing waiting rooms, radiology, and chemo treatment rooms, and there is the healing side of cancer – the calming and careful diagnosis of a healing physician, the healing touch of a wonderful massage therapist, the mounds of reading on how to prevent cancer, the boundless encouragement of friends and family, and the putting into practice what you have learned.

It was at the lowest point in my cancer treatment that I discovered an amazing book, Dr. Gaynor’s Cancer Prevention Program. I was nearing the end of my chemo treatment when I was hospitalized for a respiratory complication, pneumocystis pneumonia – a common respiratory problem for those with weakened immune systems which can sometimes be fatal. After asking for something to read about cancer prevention the nurse gave me a copy of Dr. Gaynor’s book, and I devoured it and took copious notes. What is amazing is I have always been fascinated with how miraculous our bodies are and by what it takes to thrive. I THOUGHT I was doing things right until I read this wonderful book. What those “right things” were is another story.

Our older daughter, Meredith, gave me another amazing book by Donald Yance, entitled, Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer. His chapter on “Spiritual Focus” is especially enlightening and inspiring. He quotes the great Medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, “If the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice.”

Cancer is by definition radical. Most changes we make in life are incremental and even unconscious with stumbling starts and stops. The focus that cancer brings to the need to change has been life-changing, and in hopes of not sounding trite – a splendid gift.

Here are some specifics we have incorporated into daily living:

• We walk briskly for 40 minutes - 6 days a week. (Saturdays are heavy gardening days for us)
• We measure our waistlines instead of watching the scale.
• I have a very much loved organic herb and veggie garden which I gather from each day, and recently, we have incorporated some berry bushes.
• Our meals revolve around fresh and varied vegetables, fruit and foods that have stellar nutrition.
• We prepare almost all of our meals at home, rarely eat out, and avoid processed foods with empty calories.
• My refrigerator and pantry consist of nutrient dense foods.
• Our friend teases us about our carbon footprint by going faithfully every Saturday morning to the Farmer’s Market and going out of our way to hit other markets when we are traveling. Our menus revolve around what is in season- particularly disease-fighting super foods.
• We avoid white sugar or any kind of artificial sweeteners or white flour products in our food preparation. Trans fat, fructose, or anything harmful to eat is banned from our kitchen. We have come to appreciate that we are all hard-wired to crave sugar, fat and salt, but you can re-wire your brain after a time for these cravings to significantly subside – it’s consistency that is the key.

Living my life with vigor and appreciation for every moment is my daily goal. Our children are wonderful grown adults and enjoy coming over for the “Sunday Night Feast”. My younger daughter and her husband are vegetarians, so, we center the meals on fresh produce. Everyone usually helps, and we always sit down to great fellowship along with great food. I want them to never stop striving for the best health they can have. A frequent topic of dinner conversation is the latest health news or what we are seeing at the farmers market.

As a result of my passion for nutrition and good food, I have started conducting healthy cooking workshops. I do this by demonstrating how to prepare power packed foods (tastings are usually included) from delicious recipes that are full of phytonutrients and other good things. Groups gather at my home, and before we begin the session we tour the kitchen garden so they can SEE some of the produce and herbs they will be eating. There is always lively discussion that follows. The participants go home armed with inspiration and recipes highlighting health giving food as they start or re-energize their own journey. I also offer open workshops on selected Saturday mornings each spring and fall season.

Who knows what caused me to get Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and who knows how I’ve beaten it thus far. There is more to preventing and stopping cancer than a good diet and lifestyle. But these are things that I have control over, and it helps me mentally and spiritually to focus on those matters where I can make a difference. The side benefit is that I feel great and a lot healthier having made these choices. Helping others in their quest for good health has become my way of spreading the light. Sometimes you reflect the light and other times you are the candle-just as long as I “keep moving forward” like Dr. Moore urged me.

The Loss of an Oak

This is a picture that is on our personalized 2009 calendar given to us by our daughter and son-in-law for Christmas. It is a White Oak that was in our front yard and which we’ve babied for a number of years bringing in tree surgeons to dead wood it and to inject deep root feeding. Each August for the last few years the foliage turns from green to grey showing the stress from a lightning strike. We were attracted to this ranch style house almost thirty years ago because of the majestic oaks – Black, Red, Willow, and White – that graced the property. We are also very sentimental about oaks having been married underneath a double oak on the Guilford College campus. Unfortunately, the oak pictured here gave up the ghost this summer and was removed this fall.

This is the not the first time we’ve been confronted about what to do after suffering the loss of oak trees. Around Memorial Day of May, 2000 a micro burst (similar to a tornado) swept through the area and downed several of our oaks – a couple landing on our house causing significant damage. If you visit our house and garden today, you will witness a dramatic transformation from the shady landscape where hostas, azaleas, and hydrangeas thrived to a much sunnier lot where we’ve developed garden rooms and kitchen gardens. Now roses, viburnum, and hollies are the featured ornamental plants in addition to herbs, vegetables, and fruits.

This transformation does not negate the value of oaks in our landscape garden. We still have several providing pockets of shade and defining the character of our lawn and garden. The loss of something that is so significant in a garden as an oak is a metaphor about gardening. Despite all of the work and expense entailed in developing and maintaining a garden that provides unspeakable enjoyment, there is an ephemeral quality about gardening. The gardener must deal with the forces of Mother Nature – sudden cold snaps, hailstorms, micro bursts, drought – but the next gardening adventure awaits. What to replace in the void? How and where to bring back shade. What to transplant from the now sunny location?

The loss of this particular oak was especially challenging. No shade tree or group of shade trees would provide the visual screening that we were seeking. So, privacy versus shade became the greater priority. We wanted plant material that already had a good bit of size as we considered our options As winter approached and the landscape was more exposed, we opted for berry-producing, densely branched holly trees.

These evergreens not only gave us instant privacy but also are adorned with bright red berries for our enjoyment and later as they darken provide a feast for the birds. We have a number of hollies in our garden, but this group added two new varieties for us. “Savannah Holly” are the two taller trees with lighter green foliage. They have an abundance of berries, fast growth habit, and is a tried-and-true American holly that is in many Southern gardens. “Little Red” is one of the new variety of “Red Hollies”. It is dubbed red because the new growth turns an appealing maroon. It is the smallest of the Red Hollies growing to about 10 feet in a dense pyramid. The other holly pictured is “Mary Nell” which is the mother plant for the Red Holly hybrids, and a variety that we have used before with great success. It stays very dense requiring little or no pruning, grows as a 15 foot pyramid with moderate growth habit, and produces bright red berries.

What about shade, you might be asking at this point. Since the “Garden Trauma of 2000”, we’ve generally opted for less shade. The lemonade of this lemon is our kitchen garden, Knockout Roses and climbing roses, and a wide assortment of sun-loving shrubs and perennials. We have planted a number of small-space trees including Chinese Fringe Tree, Stewartia, Styrax, Kousa Dogwood, Paperbark Maple, and Dwarf Crepe Myrtle. So, where every Oak once stood there is now an abundance of plants of some description. On the warmer days of summer, we miss those Oaks that once stood on our property, but in general, we are making new garden memories with new exposures, new garden rooms, and new plant material.

We have been knee deep in compost as we approach the official start of spring. As usual the garden doesn’t pay attention to calendars – we had some wonderful February Saturdays to work in the garden. Spring in the NC Piedmont always arrives in sputters – a beautiful 70 degree day here – a night in the 20’s there. The big news this past week has been a near deluge of rain – twice in one week for the first time in a long time yielding over two inches of desperately needed rainfall for our region, which like much of the Southeast is in exceptional drought. Fortunately, our garden has not been too thirsty even in last summer’s record-breaking heat and drought. The reason is that we have been methodically adding compost to our kitchen gardens and plant beds for a number of years. This has done wonders to improve the soil texture, encourage earthworms and micro biotic activity, and retain moisture.

Discussing compost and humus isn’t as exciting or inspirational as talking about the newest plant or the latest gardening technique, but it is as critical to good gardening as a solid foundation is to a house. You can read a lot of technical minutiae about the in’s and out’s of composting, but we like what an expert from the American Horticultural Society said, “Folks, this ain’t rocket science.” With that in mind we don’t follow any rules in tending our three compost bins. Our bins are slightly hidden from view but in close proximity to our shade garden and kitchen garden. If we were in a cooler climate, we would want to have sited them in more sun, but turning the compost is hard work where shade is welcome. This shady area also happens to be the best place to hide the bins in our garden – we moved them from a more prominent open space and are glad we did with no harm to the composting process.

We try to have one bin that is usable at any given time – obviously, there are times of the year that all three bins are still “cooking”, but more often than not we have some compost at our disposal to incorporate with new plantings. We have found as important as what goes into the compost – shredded leaves and twigs, kitchen scraps (not meats), plus grass clippings and green matter for nitrogen – that turning the compost often (once every couple of weeks) helps the decomposition process. We know that the compost pile is cooking by the steam that emanates with the turn of the pitchfork. You can buy compost thermometers to gauge when to turn, but this leans towards the “rocket science” end of the composting spectrum. If we had had more rain these past several months, we would have had compost ready earlier, but we’ve saved our precious well water and recycled inside water for the new fall plantings.

The past few weeks we have been adding compost to our kitchen garden – double digging it in. We aren’t too concerned about changing the pH of the soil because we limed this garden well last fall. We really don’t test pH much, deciding instead to add regular doses of lime to our clay soils. On our “to do” list is to add compost around all of the hydrangeas and perennials. This provides a good bit of nutrients, helps retain moisture as a top mulch, and eventually works its way into the soil providing improved texture and organic matter. Larry fertilized most of the shrubs and trees with Espoma Hollytone yesterday, and the added compost will energize the plants to withstand droughts better and produce bigger and more prolific blooms and berries.

This past week we also ordered an 865 gallon above-ground cistern that is imported from Australia. We selected this rainwater collection device because we’ve tried 65 gallon rain barrels in the past, and a typical thunderstorm will overwhelm them – plus, the storage capacity didn’t get far in helping us keep up with our watering needs (a half acre of gardens). The Aussies have designed above-ground cisterns that come in decorator colors – we chose desert sand to blend into our exterior color, do not allow sunlight to penetrate reducing algae and mildew, and are thick enough to reduce the threat of freezing. We can use a pump if needed, but we are going to try gravity flow first since much of the garden that requires supplemental watering is downhill from where the cistern will be placed. The Raleigh garden center where we purchased it has sold hundreds of rain barrels and cisterns, providing evidence that even in a city with a total outside watering ban avid gardeners will find a way to continue to garden.