When I volunteer at the Botanical Garden however, it's usually all about weeds. And that's what I did yesterday--weeding at the Botanical Garden. Weeding can be a pleasant enough activity. Do you agree? Depending on how you weed, or the nature of the weeds you're pulling, weeding can be very focused, detail-oriented work, or rough, fast and indiscriminate. Yesterday I did mostly the former kind--pulling bits of chickweed out of the Checkerbloom, pinching thin blades of grass out of the Douglas iris, carefully digging out whole crowns of Ehrharta trying not to damage the crown of the plant next to it.
After an hour I was in a very relaxed state, my brain humming with alpha waves. By the time I finished some hours later, I was in so deep it took me a half-hour to "wake up" again. I meandered around the place looking at small things, close up.
Romneya coulteri seed heads.
Currant buds.
Glints of red (Mahonia aquifolium).
In accordance with my mental state, I wasn't thinking about blog photography; I didn't take a lot of pictures. Before I left I did take some pictures of the areas I weeded.
My instructions were to "pick and lay", that is, lay everything I picked back down with the roots up. It's too early for in the season for grass seed, and the volume of weed seeds already banked in the Botanical Garden is far too large to overcome anyway. No need to worry about that. Too tight an area to mulch with chips, so I used the weeds as mulch to keep the soil from running off during the next rains, if there are any "next rains".
Before:
After:
Here are some other, larger things I noticed before I left for the day.
