GARDEN

My name is Malia which means "Calm and Serene." My name is also the Hawaiian version of Mary.  My middle name is Marie which is the Italian version of Mary.  My mom called me "Mary Mary Quite Contrary" because I've never been calm and serene at all.  My mom also me in the garden. For this reason, I identify with the familiar story line, "Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow?"
 Being a single parent she needed all the help she could get.  I had a really close relationship with my mom growing up, we were best friends.  I was afraid of spiders and allergic to grass, I didn't like dirt or hard work.  I can even remember the outfit I was wearing the first time my mom took me out to help her in the garden.  In response to the spiders, my mom assured me that she got rid of them all before I came out.  Being a young, impressionable girl I believed every word she said.  I still huffed and puffed and pouted about the garden.  I'd do small tasks like watering the orchids or raking the leaves.  I didn't enjoy gardening until I was a teenager.  I wanted to go to fat camp.  My mom said "I got your fat camp!"  And she used the $500 that the camp would've cost and bought 500lbs of river rocks and had them dumped in our driveway.  Every morning she'd wake me up, fresh smoothie in hand (before smoothies were even trendy) and I put on an uncomfortable pair of shorts and a tank top that hid my belly.  My mom had me tilling up soil and tearing out unruly ground cover (which housed those spiders that my mom had convinced me she got rid of.)  Armed with a wheelbarrow I single handedly shoveled and distributed all of that gravel into our garden, and by the end of that summer my uncomfortable short now fell off my hips and my arms were strong, my hair was sun kissed and so was my skin.  I;m forever grateful to my mom for that invaluable life experience.  That summer changed me from a garden worker to a garden lover.  Now, almost twenty years later, you can't pry me out of my garden.  It's my favorite place.  It's enchanted with memories of my mom and how I became the person I am today, strong, only slightly afraid of spiders, knowledgeable about he variety and care of various plants, immune to dust and pollen, a nature lover.  That summer I sat back and looked at the wonder of teamwork and the marvel of our hard work paying off.  I will forever live in my garden ad reminisce about the good old days when my mom and I worked as a team to maintain our tropical rainforest!

With Kitchen Scraps and seeds and pits and lots and lots of love.

My collection of pineapple plants

My well established but slow growing avocado tree

My mini make shift greenhouse from a recycled water bottle

My baby avocado tree

Kitchen scraps to treasures. Lemongrass, celery, green onions, romaine lettuce and ginger

Meet Charlotte

I'm afraid of spiders, but one thing I practice to acclimate myself to them is taking photos and researching them.

One spring day after hours of tending to my roses I peered out my front screen door at my hard work. To my terror, from eight feet away, I saw this bright green hairy spider sitting on a fresh peach rose.

This spider was about 2" long, not including her legs. The abdomin was beautifully decorated and the legs extremely hairy. I was traumatized but intrigued. In the above photo she's devouring a wasp. In the photo below she's devouring another one. It seems with every wasp she ate she grew bigger and bigger!

She stayed on the same flower for days until it wilted and the petals fell off. I looked for her (and found her) everyday in the same location. I was sad when her flower fell off. I missed her. I had shown her off to Mike and to family and friends. I named her Charlotte after my favorite childhood movie. I knew all of the words to "Charlotte's Web" and I even curled up on the back of my couch and acted out the part.  Weird that with my affinity for that movie that I would grow up to be so afraid of spiders. I think it had something to do with the movie "Arachniphobia."

So I watched Charlotte inhabit a few flowers on the same bush and in the same general vicinity. I watched her continue to catch live wasps and enjoy them until they disappeared. The weather got colder as Summer came to an end and she began to slow and become inactive. Then one stormy day I looked out to her perch and found this

I had thought that she'd been replaced by another spider, one that hadn't yet overstuffed her belly with wasps, I couldn't believe that this was my Charlotte. But as I observed for the days ahead I noticed that it wasn't a wilted flower she clung to, it was an eggs ac.  This is when I knew for sure that Charlotte was a mother. I was so excited that my garden would soon be filled with these beautiful green spiders just like her! Especially because I had been stung by a wasp that season and quite enjoyed watching her exterminate them from the garden.

Well Charlotte eventually faded away but I kept tabs on her little ones for some time, until I didn't see them anymore. We had had some hard rains and I worried that all her hard work had gone to waste, but yesterday, a whole year after watching her beautiful life cycle, I found another eggs ac crawling with little Charlottes, on the same rose bush! This filled my heart with glee and my eyes with tears of joy, for even though I hadn't seen this generation devour wasps and inhabit flowers, some of her offspring had survived.

Charlotte is a green lynx spider and although their bite can be painful, they seldom do bite unless threatened. I will look forward to many more generations of this beautiful creature in my garden. Although I will never touch her and will always keep a good distance, this is a spider that I like having around.