105: Touch Grass

I was going to spend this newsletter yelling about how mad I am about the Gollum movie that was announced this past week, and then realized that I've already spent a good hour or two of my one wild and precious life getting worked up over a movie that's only just been greenlit. It was time to touch grass, so this weekend I did.

I spent most of Saturday clearing out a new garden bed for some shade-tolerant native plants in our side yard. They're small now, only six to eight inches tall at the highest, but the hope is that they'll grow big enough to hide some of the ugly conduit and PVC pipe that winds its way along the outside of that side of the house. Most of the plants are a soft tender green, but if they take, they'll grow tall and dark, with woody stems and oblong leaves and tiny composite flowers in white and purple. They've all got ordinary-sounding common names like "downy arrowwood" and "sweet Joe Pye weed," and they all look unassuming, the kinds of plants that sort of fade into the background if you're hiking through a local forest preserve.

The beauty of these plants is that they're native to the area, and therefore more attractive to local wildlife like birds and butterflies; they also require significantly less watering and babying than other popular garden plants. The ones I planted prefer shade and can tolerate clay soil. The dirt in our yard is true clay just a few inches below the surface, sticky and heavy and a real bear to dig up; I don't know much about ceramics but our soil looks like the lump of clay a potter would slap onto a wheel. I raised a couple of blisters cutting out sod, then raised a few more digging holes for the plants I wanted to put in, but the work is done. I won't be planting anything else in the ground until fall, when it's time to put in tulips and snowdrops.

What I wrote about:

For the Seeing & Believing newsletter, I covered Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Really glad I caught up with the three most recent movies in the series beforehand, even though that meant this most recent entry felt like a bit of a letdown. Structurally it feels a little old-fashioned, but I still enjoyed it.

What I talked about:

I also joined the Think Christian podcast to talk about X-Men '97. The show's good! I'm looking forward to this week's finale!