more about the blessings of green

Jessica posted comments and questions to that last post that I thought it would be fun to answer.  With lots of nostalgic photos!  She said:

I've never seen a redwood in real life, so these photos are just amazing to me.

I still think your backyard looks like something out of a fairytale. I imagine little Tinkerbells dancing around in there or for other mythical creatures to be hiding behind those massive trees. What a blessing for your children to be able to play in their own little forest :)

What a shame about the wild blackberries :(

Green is my favorite color, so I just love the spring and seeing all the trees start to bloom around here. Your trees look very lush already. I'm not familiar with how it works in your area of California - does everything essentially die throughout the winter there? Do you guys get a lot of snow?


I agree--redwoods are pretty amazing!  We are very proud of our trees, since redwoods once covered much of the earth, waaaay back in the history of creation, but now only exist in this relatively small spot along the northern CA coast, and just over the border into Oregon.  (There are three varieties of redwoods, two of which grow only here: the coast redwood, and the giant redwood, or what we usually just call the sequoia. There is also the dawn redwood, but you can only find forests of it in China now.  We know all this because we did a fun unit on redwoods for homeschool a few years back. : )  If any of you are a homeschool family or just enjoy life-long learning, there is an interesting documentary about redwoods available as an instant download on Netflix called Climbing Redwood Giants. 

Your comment about the trees being something out of a fairytale and little Tinkerbelles dancing around them of course brought back to mind our traditional Fairies in the Forest teaparties we have given each girl when they turn six. : )  And just the other day--when I was looking for that old photo of DH and the two girls up on the redwood stump--I went through old photos posted to facebook, and rediscovered the ones my friend Willow took at Merry's "Fairies" party four years ago, which I've never shared here before.  Here are a few:

Gratuitous cute daughters photos at the end!

Those weren't taken in our backyard, but just down the creek behind our local elementary school. 

I do love our backyard being something a little bit wild--where the kids can be a little bit wild.  I do wish it was bigger, and I do wish we had some good places of sunshine so I could grow some veggies, and I do wish it had a little more useful landscaping--like steps down, and a stone patio, and a way to get down closer to the creek and make the most of our property--but all of that is not as important to me as being able to look out of my windows and see so much green. 

The view from my front windows is not as pretty, but is still full of green:

There is a very nice housing development up the hill over there, and the developer bought this land as a green belt to buffer the residents from I guess all us regular old poor folks.  But we sure do benefit from it, and see nothing but trees beyond the road. 

This is the view of the front from inside, through the big antique windows:

I took this photo standing up, and wish I had sat down instead, so you would see more of the great green expanse higher up and less of our lovely dirt and gravel yard.  Because the image just can't capture how much green fills my view when I am sitting here at the computer, with trees (mostly native oak) filling my view to the left out the front window, and all those redwoods dominating my view when I turn my head to the right and look out the back over the deck.  It helps too that these living room windows are enormous--11 1/2 feet wide and 6 feet high! 

It's my favorite color too, Jessica (well, besides grey), and where we live on Monterey Bay the weather is always so temperate that most trees stay green year round.  (Well, redwoods themselves are evergreens, which helps, but we also have a lot of oaks and other varieties that seem to keep their leaves year round out here.  But we have just enough trees that change color and lose leaves to give me some feeling of Fall, which used to be my favorite season!)  If you look at that last post and the photo of DH and the girls up on the stump--notice the tree behind them, which has lost its leaves.  That is what winter looks like for us.  The coldest it usually gets is down to the lower 40's at night, although it usually gets to the freezing point at least one night every winter.  A very cold winter day out here will be in the low 50's.  But we routinely have pockets of lovely weather at the most unexpected times, and so will often have days of temperatures in the upper 70's in January!  (Such a difference from the Midwest, eh?)

But then, in the summer we have lots of fog, and our trees do an excellent job of keeping us cool in the shade, so while our area often sees temperatures up to the 80's (if the temps stray into the 90's that's unusual), our peak temperature in our yard is the upper 70's.  Usually the temperature of our yard in the summer is in the 70's all summer long--at the warmest parts of the day!   And anywhere here on Monterey Bay or San Francisco Bay just north of us you are just as likely to have cold, foggy days with temperatures in the upper 50's and lower 60's.  As Mark Twain famously said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco." ; )

So, it does not really ever get very hot where we live, nor does it ever get very cold.  We don't get snow, and only get frost a few times a year.  Although, there was that hail storm in March of '06. . . .

So, weather anomalies can happen, but they are rare. : )  I think the hail lasted all of 35 minutes before it melted.  But gardeners all over the area remember that hailstorm, for the damage it did to our Spring flowers. 

Oh, and about those blackberry vines--we still have them aplenty down on the lower slope of our yard before the creek.  But they are hard to get to there, so we don't actually harvest many berries, although the kids love to pick what they can reach.  But when the vines grew up the neighbor's deck supports, we had so many more, and they were so easy to reach!

So convenient for picking to make ink out of, when we had our Colonial America homeschool "camp" with friends, in the summer of '08:

We tried our best to dress like Colonial girls for the event.  You'll recognize these dresses, Mother!

My mismatched blacks and panty lines bug me, but hey I was pregnant with Smiley, and hosting a day of fun educational activities for five eager little girls, so won't apologize for how I looked. ; ) 

 
So, I do miss that lush, easy-to-reach wall of natural goodness there at the side of our yard.  And I have even toyed with the idea of asking the neighbors if we could put up some attractive metal supports to grow more plants there against the side of their deck scaffolding. . . . but we have more necessary projects to work on first.

In the meantime, like everything else in my life, I will just try to ignore the unattractive, less than ideal things about my yard, and try to focus on its beauty and blessing.