“If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” ~Vincent Van Gogh

"It is at the edge of a petal that love waits." ~William Carlos Williams

For a hushed moment after sunrise the sun touched the garden and everything was new and perfect. Then the sun rose higher and I saw the Japanese beetles. They love the same plants I do, like roses. Despite  my annual battle with these noxious pests, my garden is a little bit of Eden. I tripled my efforts outdoors this year after my dear father's passing. The Memorial Garden reminds me of a painting as it unfolds. Gardening is a living form of art.

Neglected corners remain in the yard, but gardening is an ongoing journey. I'm eyeing the long border along the road with ideas for improvements I might make late summer or fall. Efforts there must be undertaken with caution because of the road monster. 

(Breadseed Poppy--seed originally from Monticello)

Did any of you see Finding Neverland years ago, starring a young Johnny Depp as Author J. M. Barrie? Excellent film, made before Depp went off the rails. Near the end of the movie, Kate Winslet, who portrays the mother of the boy who inspired Barrie to write Peter Pan, enters  the wondrous Neverland set Barrie has created. (Peter Pan began as a play in 1904.) At times, when I go into the garden, surrounded by magical beauty, it reminds me a bit of that scene.

There's nothing quite like a near perfect day in the garden. I say 'near' because perfection is elusive and my idea of a magical garden excursion may not be yours. But when the cerulean sky reaches to heaven, flowers sparkle like jewels, and leafy green enfolds me, I am uplifted. In that moment, I am happy.

All winter and spring I dreamed of delphinium spires. This is 'Million Dollar Blue,' an improved kind from Wayside Gardens, more heat and cold tolerant.

On blue sky days, the ridges rise clearly beyond the wooded hills. Country noises fill air pungent with farm smells sweetened by herbs and flowers. Meadow larks trill from tall grass, bees hum, and butterflies flit. I chase them with my camera.

When a new birds calls, we must know what kind it is--recently an oriole. Red Winged black birds have a distinct cry. They mostly stay at the pond but sometimes visit our back garden. Goose squawks resound except during afternoon siestas beneath the pear trees. Never mind, I spoke too soon. Our two buddy brother roosters peck around and crow, a lot. A typical country sound.

We still hear cows. Young ones will remain until old enough to go, but we had to sell our dairy herd--sad sigh. We're remaining on the farm, thank the good Lord. Son Cory will raise beef cows while Hubby Dennis runs his farm machinery business. As for me, I will garden, cherish my friends and family, and write again. Not much to report on that front, but I'm beginning to miss writing, an inherent part of who I am. Or was. I know Dad wouldn't want me to give it up. His death, on top of my brother Chad's, threw me more than I can say, but I'm slowly mending, largely with the help of garden therapy. I've come to realize missing them will ever be woven into the fabric of my life.

This country scene may not strike some as idyllic, but it's heaven on earth to me.

Hollyhocks set off our barn in this pic. I used to call it 'the old red barn' until Cory redid it in white. A decorative barn quilt adds color to the front.

(Bathsheba climbing rose from David Austin)

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." ~John Muir

"I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright." ~Henry David Thoreau

(Red Admiral Butterfly on mini buddleia from Jackson and Perkins)

The fuzzy bumble bee (pictured below on larkspur) reminds me of a tiny teddy bear. The heirloom larkspur has been here longer than I have. The flowers come in blue,white, pink, and purple. A hardy annual, it reseeds for the next spring.

All images were taken this month by me.

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life." ~Rachel Carson

"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes." ~ e.e. cummings

Gardening and Country Life in Glorious Color!

I’ve labored away adding lovely images to Shenandoah Watercolors, my nonfiction book about life on our small family farm in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Given my love of gardening, this includes a strong focus on my gardens and love of nature. The book is already out in print with images, but now that kindle and nook E-Readers support colored photographs, I’ve added heaps more. Shenandoah Watercolors in available in  eBook and print format at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  I will also get it up on Kobo soon. If someone is dying for me to have it somewhere else, let me know.

Book description: Author/farm wife Beth Trissel shares the joys and challenges of rural life on her family’s small farm in the scenic Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Journey with her through the seasons on the farm, owned by the family since the 1930′s, and savor the richness of her cherished gardens and beloved valley. This journal, with images of her farm and valley, is a poignant, often humorous, sometimes sad glimpse into country life. Recommended for anyone who loves the country, and even those who don’t. ***Shenandoah Watercolors is a 2012 EPPIC eBOOK FINALIST.

Excerpt:  The heavy rain has given way to a misting drizzle, but streams of water pour down from the hills and make new ponds and creeks. It’s chilly with that raw wet feel. This spring is awash in moisture and amazing after last summer’s searing drought. I’m struck by the intense beauty around me, and I thought I was already seeing it, but it’s so much more somehow. The grass seems to shimmer, yet there’s no sun out today, and the meadow is so richly green it’s like seeing heaven. Our barnyard geese are enraptured, as much as geese can be, with all the grass. If there’s a lovelier place to revel in spring than the Shenandoah Valley and the mountains, I don’t know it. Narnia, maybe.I’ve been thinking about my favorite places.

The pool I like best lies in the woods near a place called Rip Rap Hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A splendid falls cascades up above, but I like the pool far more. We always meant to go back, but never have. The cold water ripped through me like liquid ice and is as clear as melted crystal. I could see the rocks on the bottom, some slick with moss, others brown-gold in the light where the sun broke through the leafy canopy overhead. Trout hid beneath big rounded stones or ones that formed a cleft, but the men tickled them out to flash over the flat rocks strewn across the bottom like a path. Drifts of hay-scented fern rose around the edges of the pool, warming the air with the fragrance of new mown hay, and made the shady places a rich green.Now, that’s a good place to go in my mind when I’m troubled. The problem with cities is that people don’t learn what really matters. Don’t really feel or know the rhythms of the earth. When we are separated from that vital center place, we grow lost. Sadly, most people will never know what they are lost from, or where they can be found.~

***Images of the Shenandoah Valley in early spring and Dark Hollow Falls in the Blue Ridge.

“You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.” ~Author Unknown

“I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border.  I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error.”  ~Sara Stein, My Weeds, 1988

To that quote I add, and Nature generally wins. But it’s April and the world is newborn. I’m in my zealous mode, clearing away the old growth and wintering over weeds from around perennial herbs, flowers, and vegetables, like asparagus and rhubarb, and seeking out the newly emerging seedlings to determine whether they’re friend or foe. Or something in between. If foe, then they must be gotten out before they smother the surrounding plants. But it isn’t that simple. Many of the plants are wanted, within reason.

Take larkspur for example, a beautiful flower, but will take over unless kept at bay and that’s the way with many of my cottage garden favorites. Sunflowers are wonderful, but if not curtailed will overrun the garden. A knowing eye and hand must make order out of would be chaos–an ongoing challenge. One mostly undertaken by me, with some much needed help from daughter Elise. This year I’m also starting many seedlings in the small greenhouse husband Dennis built me years ago. It had fallen apart but he recently restored it; I’m very glad to have the use of this happy space again.  So far the gardens look hopeful and are bursting with promise. I pray the weather will be reasonable this year. And that we dodge the frost tonight.

Despite all the challenges, creating a garden is inestimably worthwhile and blesses everyone it touches.  Go and plant something. And if you must wait until the snow melts, you have my sympathies. Spring is late but has arrived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

“Gardens are a form of autobiography.” ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993

“One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.”  ~W.E. Johns, The Passing Show

“Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there.”  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

“In my garden there is a large place for sentiment.  My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams.  The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.”  ~Abram L. Urban

“I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.”  ~F. Frankfort Moore, A Garden of Peace

*Images of my garden(s) by my mom and daughter Elise

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems." ~Rainer Maria Rilke

*Images of past springs in The Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  

Photographs by my mom, Pat Churchman

"Where man sees but withered leaves,
God sees sweet flowers growing."
~Albert Laighton

"And Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
rose from the dreams of its wintry rest."
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Sensitive Plant"

*Virginia Bluebells in my garden, flowers given to me by my dear grandmother.

"I think that no matter how old or infirm I may become, I will always plant a large garden in the spring.  Who can resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from participating in nature's rebirth?"  ~Edward Giobbi

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day."
~Robert Frost

*Poppies and iris in the garden.

"April hath put a spirit of youth in everything."  ~William Shakespeare

"Yesterday the twig was brown and bare;
To-day the glint of green is there;
Tomorrow will be leaflets spare;
I know no thing so wondrous fair,
No miracle so strangely rare.
I wonder what will next be there!"
~L.H. Bailey

"If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring

 and stay that way later in the fall."  ~Nadine Stair

*Country Lane in the valley.

"Spring in verses,
Verses in spring."
~Violet Gartenlicht

"Now every field is clothed with grass, and every tree with leaves; 

now the woods put forth their blossoms, and the year assumes its gay attire."  ~Virgil

*A country roadside not far from our farm.

"The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring."
~Bern Williams

"Spring is when life's alive in everything."
~Christina Rossetti

"The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven--
All's right with the world!"
~Robert Browning

*My parent's yard.

"A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King."
~Emily Dickinson

"Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil."
~Bishop Reginald Heber

"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils."
~William Wordsworth

*Stone wall with daffodils at my parent's home

A Healer, Nature Lover, and Suspected Witch--Kira, Daughter of the Moon--Beth Trissel

Release Day is here! Now, more about my new historical romance and very unique heroine. 

A beautiful Scots-Irish healer in the rugged Alleghenies finds herself accused of witchcraft. With the terror of the French and Indian War fresh in her mind, can Kira love a white warrior?

1765––The recent Indian wars are over (for now) and an uneasy truce in place. Free-spirited Kira is at odds with the superstitious Scots-Irish in the settlement and rumor spreads that she may be a witch. Her imagination runs to fairy rings, the little people, and haints (something that’s there but ain’t). She's happiest out among the trees where she can hide from her painful past and any warriors who might again appear. A gifted healer with a menagerie of wild creatures, she's in the forest releasing a tame crow when her little beagle sounds the alarm. She peers warily from the leaves at the handsome young stranger. His buckskin breechclout and moccasins are more in keeping with a warrior's than any frontiersmen she knows and there's a stealth in his manner that reminds her of the way Indians pass through the trees. Yet he's not a warrior. Unless, he’s a renegade. This is the set up for the story, but there’s a great deal more behind it, and especially, Kira, the most unique heroine I’ve ever written.

Not only does Kira have a tame crow she’s nursed back to health, but a number of wild animals under her care in what she calls her nursery, a protected nook in the woods close to the homestead where she lives with the Houston family who took her in after her parent’s death (relatives of the hero, Logan McCutcheon). Some of her Kira’s babies ride in pockets she’s sewn inside her cloak for that purpose. Her guardian, particularly his wife, aren’t happy about hosting her creatures and banish the talkative crow, the reason she’s in the woods releasing him when she spots the potential threat.

Besides my love of animals, two books influenced this aspect of Kira’s character, one was a children’s book my youngest daughter brought home from the school library in fifth grade. I wish I could recall the title and maybe a helpful reader will because I’d love to locate a copy. I only remember it’s a true story about a family who took in injured and orphaned animals and I was much impressed by their talking crows. The second book, The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow, The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley, is a remarkable journal first written in crayon by an amazing girl, and later laboriously pierced back together after her sister shredded the pages. Sadly, Opal suffered from schizophrenia in an era when little was known about treatment, but her relationship with nature is the most outstanding I’ve ever come across.

When I first wrote Kira, Daughter of the Moon, I simply entitled the novel Kira, because she’s very much her own person. But she evolves into a much stronger young woman as a result of Logan’s return to her life, and that aspect of Kira is influenced by the Native Americans he counts as friends who give her the name, Daughter of the Moon.

***Kira, Daughter of the Moon is available in print and various ebook formats from The Wild Rose Press, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s Nookbook,All Romance eBooks, and other online booksellers.

In All Things of Nature There Is Something of the Marvelous.~Aristotle

Some lovely thoughts and images on this fine spring day~

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”  ~Henry David Thoreau

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kind.” William Shakespeare

“I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees.  The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.

It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day.  It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.  Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me – I am happy.”  

~Hamlin Garland, McClure’s, February 1899

“You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.”

~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church, I keep it staying at Home -With a bobolink for a Chorister, And an Orchard, for a Dome.” 

~Emily Dickinson

“Joy all creatures drink At nature’s bosoms…”  ~Friedrich von Schiller, “Ode to Joy,” 1785

“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”  ~Jane Austen

“I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.  Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”  ~Wendell Berry

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.”
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.  This is not done by jostling in the street.”  ~William Blake

“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”  ~Helen Keller

“To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, – to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.”
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV

“Fieldes have eies and woods have eares.”  ~John Heywood, 1565

“You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness – perhaps ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things…”  

~Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, “Birds – And a Caution”  (Thanks, Corinne)

“Butterflies are self propelled flowers.”  ~R.H. Heinlein

“If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.”  ~Author Unknown

*Images of the green-gold trees, the baby goose and kitten, the Shenandoah Valley in early spring and the nesting duck are by my mom, Pat Churchman.  The black swallowtail butterfly is by my daughter Elise.  Dark Hollow Falls in the Blue Ridge Mountains is a royalty free pic.

***For gardeners, nature lovers, anyone who thinks fondly of country life, or is just plain human…you might enjoy my nonfiction book out in kindle now, in nookbook by April, and soon out in print with beautiful pics, a 2012 EPIC eBOOK FINALIST, Shenandoah Watercolors.