Mimi’s Garden 2026
Just some arugula, spinach and kale coming up way at the top so it doesn’t look like a real garden quite yet, but it’s as close to that as it’s been in over a decade. Mimi would be thrilled with all the paths to walk and all the wood to scratch!
Here’s what it looked like in June 2024 when Mimi was coaxing me out there to get her drink from her wheelbarrow water bowl and get me thinking about cleaning up this mess in her garden! Look at that burdock leaf next to her—it’s twice as big as her!
Here’s what it looked like from about 1992 to 2016, in the closest to the same angle I could find. Note little gray Moses napping on the bricks very near the clothes pole.
And finding Mimi in there pretty regularly and actually getting a photo of her just a few days before she came in here, sort of, right in the center, look for ears and the top of her head. She was skeptical of humans when she was outdoors.
And that magic day in 2007 when Mimi visited just after we’d lost Lucy.
The deer first came into our back yard in 2015 when a new development at the top of our hill took the last of their greenspace in this neighborhood. But by 2016 after my wild black cherry tree fell and knocked down all the fences in that corner of the yard where the garden was, they seemed to want to be permanent residents. I spent more time in the next few years trying to keep them from eating my tomato plants and greens than I could keeping things from getting overgrown, and concern over their ticks on me and Mimi and Mewsette kept us constrained to the brick patio a good bit of the time and then we started visiting the front porch. We ended up “10 feet high with jewelweed” in 2017 as the garden and the whole back yard pretty much looked like this.
Cleaned it up in 2018, which Mimi approved of…
But then came my hip replacement in 2019 and I never managed to plant anything more than salad greens once I started frequent summer vendor shows in 2021. Here’s Mimi in 2021 walking through the top area with the picket fence and Mewsette’s garden chair.
2023 got off to a better start and I got the cold frame area and one bed ready at the very top and cleared the rest…
…but then I used that area for my vendor tent to store all the contents of our basement during the construction, and it all got overgrown again.
And in autumn when it was finished Mimi had the boys outside with her as she showed them how to find the brick paths under the overgrowth and push their noses through green leaves, and climb on our old bathroom window.
Then in spring 2024 when it was just Mimi, starting over again in March, rough…
Then my gall bladder surgery followed by Mimi and that wheelbarrow.
Yes, Mimi, I got the idea, standing there watching you drink and missing all your wonderful children and wondering how much longer I had with you, but you knew I was looking around and assessing how I could clean this thing up and get it back to working order.
It was just the top area and not even all three beds but I designed it with Mimi in mind, her little bench and her access to her bird bath water bowl! She enjoyed it for the next two weeks.
2025, getting there…
It’s worth all the work for the memories of Mimi and all the others before her–and after.
It’s always been my refuge, but especially now, healing these losses, and thinking things over for me, my felines, current events…and now and then I play hooky for a few days and just get things done out there. It’s good for me generally, and at my age especially. and then I get to watch all those things grow, and photograph and paint them, and eat them!
Aside from the joy of gardening, I had a heavy bot attack last Friday when all my sites were offline for several hours overnight into morning. I have a Cloudflare account for The Cretive Cat because it’s been under attack by bots practically from the beginning, and I can choose a setting called “under attack” which stops the bots by giving a message checking that you are human and a box to click which bots can’t do. In 20 minutes to a half hour activity is slowed down enough my sites started coming back online. So if you ever come here and see that message from Cloudflare, you’ll know what’s up.
But strangely enough, I decided to edit my post for that day and publish it, but the photos kept disappearing from the post, even when I re-uploaded them. I tried everything to troubleshoot and finally asked my service provider for help, then just let it sit for a while. Things stayed the same for hours. Then I suspected I knew and turned off “under attack mode.” The pictures showed up, all of them, just fine. I put it “under attack mode” again, photos disappeared. Service provider I couldn’t figure out why this was happening, so I let it sit again. The next day they were all there, and may have been earlier too. It’s been fine since then but I’ve also had high traffic meaning more bots so I took some hours to take advantage of Cloudflare’s bot-stopping capabilities. Back out to the garden Saturday, started seeds for this year on Sunday (really late!), did my taxes Monday, checked and filed them Tuesday and ran a bunch of errands I’d been putting off. Today, Wednesday, one more big project cleaning out another overgrown area to get more light in the garden before more rain. This coming weekend I’ll be planting seeds in the garden and we’ll see how things go after that.
And also putting together my new handmade gifts for this year! I can’t wait to share them.
So I’m back to posting again, even though I missed sharing some photos and articles and artwork this week, but I may slip those in somewhere. No doubt this may happen again. Thanks for reading!
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All images and text used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission, although links to your site are more than welcome and are shared. Please ask if you are interested in using and image or story in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of an image or a product including it, check my animal and nature website Portraits of Animals to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.
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I love seeing pictures of cats outside prowling their kingdom. My cats have a catio, but it’s not the same. Still, with coyotes roaming our city streets, it is the best choice I can make for them. Your pictures are lovely.
Thank you! It’s been my joy since I’ve lived here to share that space that I love so much with a garden cat, or two. They are only outdoors with me. They are on leashes if they are active enough to want to roam–this whole neighborhood was Mimi’s territory before she came here so she was like “what’s this leash thing?” But she got used to it. Others obviously felt I needed the supurrvision and stayed with me without a leash or only needed the leash for a year or so, but I never took a chance on letting anyone outside.
Just this spring, after that heavy snow, I found coyote tracks in my back yard, and after it melted I found a piece of coyote scat on the side steps to my front porch, in a way that was marking its territory. It raised my hackles for sure, and for now I’m actually glad that Mimi and all the others through the years aren’t here to be endangered by a coyote. I don’t see them in daytime around here but do hear them at night, and other communities are full of them, much more active. Still no community cats seem to have disappeared because of them, thank goodness.