THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 13, 1996 TAG: 9609130572
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 53 lines
One good thing about owning a dog, or - to put it more squarely - about the dog owning you, is that when the two of you go for a walk you see things in the neighborhood you otherwise might have missed.
Big, important things.
The other morning when Boomer was walking me, we came upon a patch of lovely grayish-pink flowers, each profuse mass as large as a a big man's palm. They bloomed atop foot-high stems.
Some 50 bees were working the blooms. Not the fairly slim, light brown honey bees, but chunky little black bees with a golden thorax midway between head and abdomen, busy, busy teen-agers wearing gold jackets.
You seldom come upon any kind of bee these days, what with all the lethal pesticides dumped on gardens. Those bees made me rejoice.
Enthralled, I picked up a bee to see if it stung as fiercely as of yore. And yelled. Boomer jumped. Believe me, it does.
What fools these mortals be, Boomer thought. He dasn't pick up a bee. Or did only once. As a pup.
I did it for you, dear reader. Do all sorts of fool things to keep you informed. Ye gods, it hurt.
The flowers are at the entrance to what neighbors call the Redfern Garden, a rival in our minds to the Calloway Gardens of Georgia.
Kathleen Redfern, a landscape architect, said that the flower is a sedum spectabile, usually called by its first name.
``You plant it?''
``Oh, no,'' she said. ``It's a perennial. It's been there for years. Grandmother planted them.''
Her grandmother, Bessie, was a beautiful perennial who lived 98 years, perhaps because nearly every day until within two years of her death she was on her knees in the garden.
A tiny figure, she wore a prodigious wide-brimmed straw hat, work clothes and knee-high boots, digging during every kind of weather. And very near the end she could still be found amid the flowers, poking around, touching them.
The sedum and her granddaughter are her legacies. The garden includes, among other things, 40 or so 7-foot-high, rotund, dark-green boxwoods. It makes you feel whole just to look at those fat fellows.
Bessie's daughter Margaret prunes the boxwoods. Kathleen and her mother, Anne, lend a hand in the garden.
I know what you're thinking, that a lout of a fellow should be helping 'em. And I would, except for your sake I have to continue unabated my mission as the Great Appreciator.
As Tom Matthews implied in a nice letter to the editor, I bring you notice of ``life's great trifles,'' seersucker suits, Bergey's ice cream, collards, and politicians and bees that sting like fury. ILLUSTRATION: Color illustration by Janet Shaughnessy by CNB