The Hummingbird Chronicles with Novelist Amy Wilentz - Gardenista
I don’t do my own gardening, usually. I tend to stay inside even in Southern California, reading books and surfing the Internet and watching television shows of dubious quality. Sensing my ineptitude, Paul came by a few days later and installed the new feeder in a nice spot in my garden, visible from the patio where my husband and I spend most of our limited outdoors time. A set of four Modern Cylindrical Glass Hummingbird Feeders is $98 from Nova68. They fought over territorial rights to the feeder. Then one day I decided to get some landscaping done. There was this hideous old fig that gave bad fruit and was mixed in with stray pear branches and junky vines growing over some household equipment near the wall of the house. I decided to get those cut back and at the same time, I asked the gardener to “open up” the big Chinese elm in the yard so we could get more light. A Glass and Rope Bird Feeder is $88 from Terrain. I went away for two days on a business trip and took down the feeder so it and the birds wouldn’t get hit by falling branches and leaves. I awoke my husband to announce that I had become a person I despised. A bronze Birdhouse by Stan Bitters is $268 from Totokaelo. But then I realized he wouldn’t know how to open the glass canister, or even how to take the feeder off its hook.) I was going to plant red salvia, a surefire hummingbird attractor, and pray that the next generation of ruby-throats to pass over my neighborhood would have forgotten the tragedy I’d inflicted on their forbears, my destruction of their habitat. A Roost Utopia Bird Feeder is $75 from Aha Modern Living. And yesterday as I sat reading the Times at a table in the middle of the garden, I heard that special buzz that sounds as if a huge bumblebee were descending.