Bomb Day at the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville

Procession from Bok Kai Temple

The Bok Kai Temple in Marysville is one of a handful of still existing temples built in the 19th century in California by the large Chinese immigrant population.  It may be the only temple still regularly used as a place of worship.

This 1880's structure replaced earlier ones a little upstream on the north bank of the Yuba River.  A levee has since been built right smack in front of the front entrance so it's difficult to get a photograph that captures the whole look of the place. 

Here as in most Taoist temples, many gods are honored.  Bok Kai, deity of the north and of water is feted during the 2nd lunar month with parades, food offerings, feasts, prayers and on the sunday, the bomb ceremony.   Towards the end of the afternoon, a representation of the god is carried out of the temple accompanied by incense, a continuously beating gong and firecrackers.  Bok Kai is walked up B Street to a roped off area.  Within are the participants; younger members of the Hop Sing and Sahm Fow community organizations, the man who lights the bombs and assistants.  Without are the rest of us, including a firetruck, the local fire deptment and some police.  The bombs are lit from an ancient wooden stump.  As they explode, lucky rings, maybe 6 inches in diameter are launched in the air.  The young guys compete for the rings.  It's a little like watching rugby through dense smoke while being deafened by non-stop firecrackers and of course the beating gong.

Entrance to Bok Kai Temple

This is the year of the water snake and this last Sunday the 17th of March saw the 133rd celebration of Bok Kai and Bomb Day.

Onward and Upwards

Reading a recent Garden Rant post about the 'White Flower Farm' catalog took me right back to the 1980's when I first had the opportunity to make a garden OF MY OWN!  I collected catalogs, probably under the influence of Katharine S. White's, Onward and Upward in the Garden, which I'd discovered about this time.  My 1979 paperback edition is falling apart & stained from reading in the bath, in the garden & while consuming various foods & beverages on & off for the last few decades.  (Meaning of course, that I've read the book on & off over the years.  Luckily I've been pretty constant with the food & drink).  I've been paging through Onward and Upward the past couple of snowy days.  I still just love it.  Mrs. White writes so solidly, yet with elegance.  She's opinionated (I like that in people), without lecturing.  She's fiercely joyous about gardening & good prose.  I'm using the present tense about her though the book was published after her death in 1977.  She's one of those whom I know only through their writing & feel softly regretful about that.

It may be that I first heard of Roses of Yesterday and Today from Onward and Upward in the Garden'.  I do remember that I got a little nutty about old roses around then & that I bought my first bare roots, mail order from them.  It was agony to choose, but I settled on a Moss Rose, 'Salet' & 'Paul Neyron', a Hybrid Perpetual.  I just looked the nursery up on  the web & they're still around, still family owned, still in Corralitos, CA, south of San  Francisco.   They are still growing both 'Salet' & 'Paul Neyron'. In fact I swear the descriptions in the catalog are the same as now.  Which explains the 'Paul Neyron'.  The catalog is very seductive, while in fact, for me at least, he was something of a disappointment.  'Salet', on the other hand was a wonder.  I think I went overboard on the mushroom compost when I double dug & amended the bed.  'Salet' grew to be 5'X5' (true story), the first year.  She would bloom almost all season & though could look a little tatty because the old blossoms wouldn't drop, worth it.  The fragrance would drift round the corner & up the steps into the house & the resinous scent of the calyx stuck to my fingers when I picked bouquets.

We've been renting the house out for the last 4 years & the garden has suffered.  I haven't had the time, energy or money to keep it up & with one exception, the tenants have not been gardeners.  I've felt so sad & guilty about it that for the most part I've tried not to even look at it.  2 years ago the boyfriend of the, then, occupant took a chainsaw to the 'Salet' & cut it to the ground.  He must have been on drugs.  I wept.   She skipped town.

However, we're moving back in!  M & I have had enough of snowy winters, the long drive into town, the inconvenience of it all & will be moving down the hill, back into town sometime this summer.  I'm thrilled!  M & I are enjoying planning changes inside the house, but he doesn't give a hoot about the garden.  Mine all mine!

Easter

  When I was little Easter holidays were spent at my Grandmother and my Great Aunt Gerda's house in the San Joaquin Valley.  My great grandparents settled there in the mid-19th century.  My great grandmother  unreservedly loved for her sweet temperament & 'Old Dad'... well, I never heard a nice thing said about him.    My Aunt Gerda was one of three girls in a family of nine.  She never married, but stayed with her parents to care for them as they aged and with her brother Peter built a florists shop on the north- east corner of the property that the old farm house was built on (now part of the county hospital parking lot).  When my grandfather died, my grandmother came back to live with her sister and keep house for her.
  The house and garden were magical.  The front of the house almost completely hidden from the street by vines and hedges, also had a proper rose garden.  There were violets & tulips in the spring, not quite secret garden rooms, a loquot tree and a seemingly huge back yard full of  fascinating little sleeping houses and temporarily unused props of the florist trade. Strangely the scent of (now illegal in California), Malathion is strongly reminiscent of that lovely place. 
  The house was almost equally enchanting to children.  It had been built bit by bit and there were strange rooms and unused porches.  I adored that ivy had poked its way through the lathe and plaster and wallpaper and was creeping along the kitchen walls.  The sunlight that made it's way through the vines & sheer drapes carried a softness and grace that existed only inside that house.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Aunt Gerda & my mother in Porterville

Easter - you can tell by the eggs on top of the television.  Uncle David looks like he might be auditioning for Marley's ghost in 'The Christmas Carol.

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Nelumbo nucifera in a pot

Three years ago in China I fell in love with the lotus.   I was familiar with images of lotus in art; the symbolism is rich & well known.  What amazes me... I could live for 5 decades & never have seen them growing & flowering.

This is the year I'm going to grow them - in pots of course & I've been reading up on care & cultivation.

Well...they're amazing.  Lotus tubers planted in a pond can run from 20 to 60 feet in a year, crowding out any other water plants.  The chambered tubers pump oxygen  into their roots & foliage.  The 'bare root' tubers if left floating send out retractor roots that pull the tuber down into it's proper depth in soil.  The leaves rise above the water & the flowers are carried on long stems above these.  The flowers last only 4 days opening early, early in the morning.  The petals drop, the seed head matures & then gently tilts so that the seeds fall into the water.  Apparently lotus are exceptionally sensitive to high water pH and high calcium content.  I need to test our well water but I suspect I'll be packing in either town or distilled water.  They also seem to prefer gently rounded containers - no straight sides or right angles.  For some reason I find this charming.

The Chinese & Japanese have been breeding lotus for centuries & there are a number of cultivars suitable for container growing.  Now I just need to find my tubers & wait for it to stop snowing!

Yesterday I was thinking about touring the gardens in Suzhou & wondering why I didn't ask more questions.  I had a great guide & if he didn't know, he could have found someone who did.  I spent only 2 days there, towards the end of my trip and I reckon I was full up with images and information.  My eyes hurt from trying to keep them as wide open as possible & I was quite literally dizzy from exhaustion. I loved it.

Water

It seems frivolous to think about anything but Japan.   The horror, the sadness, the helplessness .....the courage, the bravery, the compassion. 

Storm warning

The big news here is last week(end)s storm & the damage it hath wrought.

It started Thursday mid-day & was pretty well over by Saturday afternoon, but the amount of snow we had & resulting power outages has us still digging out & cleaning up.  The electricity vanished Thursday night.  We have a  gas powered generator which keeps the well pump going, the telly etc. Then we found the 250 gal. propane tank that we depend on for the cooker, the heater & water heater was almost empty.     We lost telephone service Friday.  The generator packed in later that day, so the electric heater we'd been depending on the keep the deep chill off the house was gone.  HOWEVER-Saturday was brilliantly sunny which cheered me up immensely (though Michael remained  grumpy),  & kept me sweating as I shoveled small mountains of snow.  Saturday also brought a friend of Michaels' who fixed the generator.  Yesterday was blindingly sunny as well & I kept shoveling.  I enjoyed it.  It felt good after days of cooped- upness & satisfying to uncover the vehicles & push back the walls of snow.  I'd forgotten how claustrophobic snow can be. Last evening just at dusk the propane truck appeared & filled the tank. Oh, the sheer luxury, the complete relaxation of heat!  When the electric came on later in the night it was somewhat anti-climactic.  The telephone started to ring as well.  I'd never missed it.

My great grandmothers got out of bed every morning to make fires in cook -stoves, draw water, heat that water to make meals for large families and work hard to maintain a modicum of cleanliness.  They worried about what unseasonable weather would do to crops and how to keep livestock alive.  They wasted nothing; not water, not food, neither scraps of fabric nor bits of money.  Makes me feel both privileged & foolish to feel so inconvenienced.

About the photos:  They're both taken on our deck at the front of the house: one taken yesterday, shows the corridor we made to get from the front door around to the side of the house (Scoshi is about 2 ft high at the shoulder, or do dogs have whithers (?) in which case he'd be about 2 hands high); the other photo is the same scene take in late August/September.  How I long for spring!

Bareroot

I love bare root season  It's January, the slowest time of the year at the garden center.   It's cold & gray, but now in the back beds of the nursery are hundreds of young, bare fruit trees heeled in, in tidy, alphabetical lines with all the promise & romance of orchards of flower in the spring, & harvests of fruit in the summer.  There is something encouraging  & optimistic about all this...& a sense of the miraculous.  Just now, it seems almost impossible that in a few months time there will be a luxury of colour.
 Living on the edges of the remains of a hydraulic mine, there really is NO soil.  The house & yard sit on remains of ancient, exposed river bed. I have pots on the deck, pots in the yard, raised beds in the back for vegetables & a couple of mounds with a couple of small trees.  We have one peach already. I reckon it's a Fey Elberta.  We get a good crop maybe every other year.  It all depends of the weather.  Last spring was cold & stormy, yet we had just enough sun for the peach to flower extravagantly & time enough for pollination.  Then just as the fruit was beginning to form a series of hail storms in late May & early June knocked the crop down.  This year I'm putting a miniature peach in a pot, reasoning that if & when hail, freezing rain, or sudden downpours of small fish occur I can dash out & cover it.  Assuming I'm not at work.  Anyway I'm planting my little peach in a huge, bright orange glazed pot which when it flowers will be instant fiesta!