Deb's Artful Garden

It's been a great, lush spring in my garden so I decided to share some of it with you.

This is Frog and Goldfish World.  A 3,000 gallon fish pond we built in our backyard.  Currently the population is 50-75 small, medium and large (one-foot and plus) goldfish, plus at least five large bullfrogs and unknown numbers of smaller frogs.

I did not buy the goldfish.  I bought their parents, over ten years ago, at a pet store.  Four little fish.  No one warned them that once placed in the wilds of a large pond, goldfish make lots of babies.  Lots and lots of babies.  Nearly every year, Hank and I drain the pond down to a foot deep, crawl in with nets, and capture 50-100 of the past year's babies.  We put an ad in the local paper and give the babies away.

We don't tell the new owners what to expect...

"Carter" showed up a few years ago, obviously happier to hang out at our house more than at his original home.  Eventually he moved in, and so he's now one of the Smith cat gang.  We neutered him but since we was already full-grown he retains a certain bully attitude and jaws that could crack a rock.  He's been known to bring in dead squirrels, birds, and snakes.  The snakes amuse him, and so he doesn't damage them.  We do search-and-rescue operations to return them to the yard.

Carter's latest captive was a large bullfrog.  Unhurt and mad.  I found the two of them in the dining room.  The frog would hop, and Carter would smack him on the head.  Frog basketball.

I returned Mr. B-Ball to the pond, and he appears none the worse for wear.

Our woods are filled with wild laurel.  It blooms best in patches of full sun.  Last month I caught this close-up of a bloom.  When the petals start falling, the ground beneath the shrubs looks like snowfall.

Hank calls them "rats with hooves."  Our local deer herd numbers 20-30, most of them young does.  We toss out a bag of corn every day and they literally run out of the laurel to eat.  They also creep into the yard to forage at bird feeders, eat the hostas, and occasionally stare in the bathroom window.

Our front pond is tiny compared to the back pond.  Only about 500 gallons.  Filled with water plants.  The goldfish population is regularly reduced by a heron who drops in every couple of months to eat the biggest fish.  Not a bad system, actually.  A family of bullfrogs dominates the local frog community, and can often be found sunning on mossy rocks or, in this case, squatting in a plastic lily pad that used to be a fountain.

When in the mood, the bullfrogs utter a deep, rumbling, grunting croak.  As best we can tell, this is a mating call.  We know this much:  The putter of a small airplane or a distant loud muffler will set the whole crew off.

Several years ago, BelleBooks' partner Gin Ellis died from heart disease. Gin was an award-winning writer in several genres: romances for Harlequin, historical fiction for Ballantine Books, and a vampire series for Del Ray, with co-writer Susan Goggins under the pen name Raven Hart. Gin was also a professional photographer who was one of the first women to work as an official NFL team photographer (for the Atlanta Falcons.) Her creativity included pottery-making, jewelry-making and painting. Her family shared some of her wonderful crafts with us, and I'm happy to have this trio of folk-art snakes. Hank made a frame and mounted the canvases on it. The collection hangs on our covered patio, warming the back yard garden and pond with Gin's spirit.

Our local heron.  We've nicknamed him/her Terry Dacdyl.  This huge bird settles precariously in the top of the pine trees, ogling our fish ponds greedily.  He will even tiptoe across our driveway to the shallow front pond and go wading.

His long, sharp beak is perfect for spearing goldfish.  Honestly, we're glad for the help keeping the fish population down, if only he/she would stick with the babies and leave our full-grown fish alone.  Unfortunately, herons aren't discriminating.  If the fish is too big to swallow, they simply toss it aside, where I find it dried out and dead.

Or, on occasion, dried-out and alive.  Amazingly, some very dead-looking fish have come back to life as soon as I've submerged them in the pond.  They twitch, they gulp...and then they swim away.  So I never toss a "dead" fish until I've tried the ol' pond-bath tactic first.

Bumpus is another of our late-bloomer cat arrivals.  Yet another tomcat who came from parts unknown, liked the new digs here, and settled in.  He had clearly been abused--he was very ill-tempered, nervous, and cringed whenever I tried to pet him on the head.  He was also badly chewed up from numerous fights.  Now he's neutered, gaining weight, and has mellowed out a lot.

But occasionally he confronts a raccoon on the back deck, and they have staring matches.

A side note:  We named Bumpus after the trouble-making dogs in "A Christmas Story."

My paintings are traveling!  Here are "Three Windswept Girls" (my painting) behind "Three Lovely Gals" aka New York teen Fanny Wolfowitz (middle) and her two pals.  Fanny is the granddaughter of my good friend Linda Wolfowitz.  Happy Birthday, Fanny.