Sometimes a garden calls you to create it.

We began planting the garden on the summer solstice in June. Local nurseries and the farmer's market had starts. We continued to build up the beds and left an area in the southeast corner for an orchard area (we later changed our design). I gathered cardboard from the recyclers and laid it down on the paths to keep down weeds.

We special ordered alder bark chips from an island tree service, making sure that there were no cedar chips. (Plants do not grow well in cedar.) Anthony helped shovel the alder on top of the cardboard to create another layer of protection and to make an attractive walking path.

(We discovered later in the year that by doing this we had created a fantastic habitat for pill bugs. They are decomposers and loved the bark and dark places to hide. I was almost devastated to discover that they also love to eat the roots of young plants!)

By the middle of July we had planted about half of the garden. However, we had plans to go to Barcelona, Spain for 2 weeks with our Orcas A Cappella choir for the Europa Cantat XV international choir festival.

My sister came to house-sit with her family and two of my neighbors came to my aid. Not knowing the garden very well, I managed to create a hand watering schedule that seemed to make sense and Anthony designed a map of the garden so they could find the plants on the schedule.

We returned to find the most amazing growth in the plants. In 2 weeks, the young lettuce plants had become huge, monstrous, and stiff. I had never seen lettuce like that. Other plants seemed large and perfectly shaped. I began feeling like I was at the Findhorn garden in Scotland.

One day while standing in the garden admiring it, I realized that we needed to purchase a digital camera. We had not considered it for our trip to Spain, but now it seemed imperative to record what we were experiencing in the garden. We didn't have the money set aside for a camera, but we went ahead, knowing that the garden was asking it of us.

Anthony began his role as the official garden photographer and developed a regular schedule of documenting overviews and individual plants. Later on, he learned how to make panoramas and 3 minute movies.

The history that we have collected has proved to be invaluable in recording the story of this young garden. We started falling in love with all of the plants and found great joy just being in the garden with them.

The purple cabbages won our hearts right away. They had such a strong presence. Their beautifully sculptured leaves captured the dew and sparkled with the first rays of morning sunlight.

I grew cauliflower for the first time. When I harvested the first head, I took it up to the house and put it in the kitchen. It was heavy and alive and felt like a living body, rather than a vegetable. I kept feeling like I was preparing a whole chicken for baking. What an odd sensation!

While it was in the refrigerator, I could still feel it's presence when I was in another room. I could feel it sitting there—glowing. Since I had been a vegetarian for nine years in my past, I was already very sensitive to plant energy. However, I had never felt anything like this before.

I would never have imagined a cauliflower being a teacher for me, but this cauliflower gave me a totally new level of awareness of what vitality and life force truly mean. Eating it was a scared act for me, full of honor and gratitude. This was just the beginning of my initiation into the deeper realms of the Dragonfly Garden.

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