I love all the mixing of media, flipping back and forth from analog to digital.  Gotta see what I can do about that in my life.

It’s also amazing and foreign to see what the luxury of a little time and back and forth give you.  Time to think and collaborate.  As I work mostly in TV, this concept is incredibly strange to me!  It shoots tomorrow!  Ok…here we go!

I mean, I know how it happened.  Breastfeeding hormones + getting up nights to feed and soothe meant that I had no brainpower to make it through a book, or even watch a good, new-to-me series when Ronan was napping on my lap peacefully napping in his crib.  No train of thought could get me hooked on “Treme.”  There were no thought trains, really.  And there’s something about watching TV during the day that has always depressed me.  The quality of the light?  The commercials?  It wasn’t much relief to me that I clearly wasn’t going to make a lifestyle out of this.  I was bored.

The Internet is the Devil’s Playground, especially if you’re hormonal.  Figured that one out pretty quickly.  My child has leukemia if his head gets sweaty?  Really?  ”Doctor…!?”

Thank goodness for my neighborhood.  I’d scuff out the door in something one notch above pajamas, and head to the coffee shop, the bakery, the hardware store, the vintage shops.  If I headed in the other direction there was a calming nursery.

One day I stumbled into my local yarn shop, 2 blocks from my front door.  Is it ok for me to peek inside?  No commitment, right?  What is this?  Oooh, pretty things to touch.  Soft.  Pretty colors.  Smells good.  Baby is sleeping.  Mmmmm….

I bought a book.  Oh dear.  And some yarn.  And smooth bamboo needles.  And embarked.

(Truth be told, I had knitted before.  But the only thing I’d finished was a glasses case out of scrap, circa kindergarten.  Whoever taught me mentioned that I needed to loosen up.  Apparently.)

It was fun teaching myself a new skill, just by figuring out the techniques you need to 1.) start and to 2.) continue.  It was exciting.  I was taking a length of yarn and making it into fabric via two sticks.  And one thing lead to another…

The ergonomics of the situation were not ideal, but I cranked out some hats, some leg warmers for my brother’s girlfriend, gauntlets, a cowl, a mystery pattern hat…each necessitating a trip to the store, some conversation with adults with hopes and fears and, most importantly, enthusiasms.  Stuff got more complicated, more puzzle-like.  A lot of handmade gifts were given that year, and I think some of them have even been worn out in public.

I had sneered at Stitch N’ Bitch when it came out.  And knitting bees!!  I laughed at the tables of “knitting mysteries” in Barnes and Noble.  But did I secretly crave a commute somewhere on public transportation just so I could listen to books on tape and knit?  And now, here I am, deep into my third adult human-sized sweater.  And daily planning my future conquests on that superior, so-much-more-than-social networking site for knitters, Ravelry.

Yet I am in denial.  I’m not a knitter, right?  I don’t feel like a knitter.  I’m not that person, one of those knitty ladies.

There is no shame.  It’s meditative.  It’s one of the great homemaking arts.  I’m not embarrassed by my enthusiasm for cooking or even sewing, and what’s different here?  I’m not even terribly concerned that projects for myself are dubbed “selfish knitting” by the (slightly self-hating?) knitting community.  I’m not embarrassed that I just cited the knitting community.

Apparently we don’t always pick our passions obsessions.

Got the wrong thing in focus. Oops.

It’s been on my radar for a long time, so – as is sometimes the case – the actual visit was a little surreal. This is a garden that photographs beautifully and features a lot of plants that are evergreen, so I expected more, well, lushness. But then I kindly reminded myself that I was there to experience, not quash the fun of the place with my prejudices, and also, Ms. Juliane, please remember that arid California is arid California, even when it’s near mildish Santa Barbara.

Finally allowing myself to be drawn into the idiosyncratic beauty of the garden, I listened to the docent unpack the personal history of its creator, Ganna Walska: an opera singer who made elegant transatlantic crossings, collecting husbands and their fortunes.  What else is new?  But what could be more decadent?  Where are today’s oft-married opera singers?

She was an eccentric, hauling slag glass from the Arrowhead factory to line thousands of feet of dirt paths, refusing to sleep in the main house, devoting a room to a favorite cockatiel.  A pool is rimmed with hundreds of abalone shells (gorgeous? tacky?), and one garden is blue, truly.  She peopled her theatre garden with 2-foot high 17th century “grotesques,” statues which weathered World War II underground in their French homeland. Whenever she drove by a home with a particularly attractive specimen (or one she thought would have a happier spot in one of her “mass plantings”), she’d stop and convince the homeowner to let her send her trucks over.

I love hearing about wacky artists, and Lotusland’s tour did not disappoint.  Dame Walska managed to parlay her beauty and fair weather talent into a fantastic place.  Like other great gardens, it’s a place to think and to be.

But the story which touched me most was about the cactus garden, completed well after her death.  She had met a kindred spirit in Merritt Dunlap, who spent 70 years cultivating cacti, 40 percent of them from seed.  They bonded over their garden “hobbies,” and Walska gave Dunlap a great gift.  She offered his cacti a home after his death.  So:

More than 500 plants were transported from Dunlap’s home in Fallbrook, California, nearly 200 miles from Lotusland. Over thirty of the largest specimens had to be dug up with a backhoe, boxed, and had frames installed on individual branches for the trip on flatbed trucks.

according to Lotusland’s site.  I don’t love cacti, but this garden was extraordinary: extraterrestrial and very, very Walska.

It must have given Mr. Dunlap great comfort to know his spiny legacy was in Lotusland’s hand.  He died shortly after the cactus garden opened in 2004.