gardening at dusk. i love it. (i love rem’s “gardening at night” song too, but dusk is honestly a better time because you can see what the hell you are doing.)

let’s see, what have i got growing back there?

the fruit trees are finally putting on some size. i planted most of them about 6 years ago. i haven’t watered them as much as a nursery or an orchard would. but without “vitamin w” things stay fairly dormant; the tree doesn’t overextend if it feels the lack of water. so i’ve started watering a bit more. a bunch of citrus — lemons, limes, a blood orange, naval, valencia, mandarin, a few kumquats. 4 plum trees. i like those dark sweet ones so i planted a bunch. 3 pomegranates. a persimmon. 2 fig trees, one mission and one brown turkey. an apple tree. apples aren’t well-suited to this hot place, but some varieties can sort of cope. the fruit of los angeles apple trees is pretty shabby compared to the ones from the catskills. but it’s probably better than the fruit of orange trees in the catskills. my persian mulberry kicked arse this year. a torrent of huge, 3″ and even 4″ berries. for some reason the parrots and squirrels gave me a break and we humans got to eat the mulberries. i have a blueberry bush, but i may have planted it in too hot a spot, based on the fact that its sibling in the same spot sort of fried and died last year.

one tree i didn’t have to plant is the excellent avocado that was here when we moved in. the drug and alcohol recovery program people that lived here before us had sort of attacked the avocado tree. there were deep saw cuts and hatchet wounds in the trunk. a lacerating chain hung from one of the 3 main branches to hold a heavy boxing bag. it made me angry to see this abuse, but avocados are very resilient. i took that bag down, started watering and fertilizing, and we’ve had as many avocados as we could stand to eat for about 4 months of every year. nobody can really identify the variety of this tree. we’ve studied up, and it appears to be something of an avocado mutt.

this year i’m growing giant pumpkins. you can almost see them growing. the leaves are about 2 feet in diameter, and the vines are stretching out pretty fast. the packet says the fruit may reach several hundred pounds. but that’s only if you make sure each vine only has one pumpkin. i’m thinking of making a big ol’ “pumpkin man” if this all works out.

i’ve got more gardening babble i could share, but let’s see how this first envoy is received before telling you all about my magic compost heap.

oh yeah, we rocked a few shows with the eternal triangle and the evangenitals. it was fun, as those of you who were there know!!

quite a while back, artichoke was asked to play lummis day here in highland park, in the place we live, with many people we know and care about around us. so that’s obviously cool. so i wrote a song about charles lummis, which is the sort of thing i’ve done about scientists on some other records. then artichoke accumulated a bunch of great musicians, starting from a “population bottleneck,” if you will, of just steve and me. pretty rapidly, the band could rock again, with cool melodies, harmonies, lyrical guitar parts, great drums. it was all bee songs, plus “charles lummis.” “woohoo!” i thought.

then a few months ago, while working on recording the bee songs with these musicians, i got motivated to write and record some more songs about highland park to go with old chuck lummis. the idea was to get something presentable on a cd in time for lummis day. so i got to work. i employed a potent combination of coffee, yoga, and scarce employment to get 7 more songs written and recorded. drummer david hurlin is officially an amazing dude. he was creative and focused enough to get drums on 6 of the new songs, and tabla on “highland park,” in a very short time. guitarist daniel leyson contributed wonderful stuff on “highland park” and “trash day,” and voila! we had something in time for lummis day.

and today was the culmination of all that. lummis day! genuine local culcha. it was sunny and hot, but not roasting, a little breeze. the crowds were even bigger than last year. things seemed to be well-organized. there were cute kids with chocolate-sticky mouths. we ran into a lot of artists, musicians, and neighbors of all stripes.

and then we were up. the sound was terrific — thanks, xavier and the other lummis techies! our new bass player wolfe was fully on board with the new material. he had learned it in 3 days! juli and lisa were singing mighty nice. steve’s theremin was the amusing diversion that it always is on artichoke songs. our guitars were solid and well-mixed. dave was somehow amusing and amused while playing his kit. i’m not quite sure how he does all that at once. i could see dave’s family dancing around on the grass, and some of my friends out there in the crowd.

near the end of our set, i broke a string, which i usually do when we play, probably because i’m so manly. then in our last song — “charles lummis”, of course, i broke another, to really prove the point. so i just danced and sang around with everybody and suddenly it was over.

all the other bands were great, including jackson brown of course. if i may summarily pontificate, we live in a good place with good people. we had an ambitious little goal, and today we achieved it. namaste, lummis day.

photographs by art villanueva