Tag Archives: gardening

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My Little Family In The Dirt

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Already I have stopped by a couple of nurseries and picked up some babies, herbs mostly, but a Shasta daisy or two, hibiscus, a geranium, old-fashioned perennials I’m not too sure about.  But then, how can we ever know, I mean really, what the little ones will grow into?Will they take to the ways in which we have trained them, nurtured them?  Or will they go their own way, headstrong and difficult, exasperating us, bullying their more delicate siblings, hogging all the light? 

My happiest time in spring is seeing all my young plants, flowers and herbs together, bunched up on the porch in a puppy pile of color and texture.  They sit in the shallow cardboard boxes I bring them home in, and I thrill at the riotous abundance of it.

The day will come when I separate them, take them out of the playpen and put them in their own beds, and it will be sad for all of us.  They will thrive, eventually, more than they ever could on the porch, crowded and craning their slender necks so they might face the sun.  But for the first few nights they will look small and a bit lost in all that space I’ve given them to grow.  

Soon they will settle in, they will nestle sweetly under a brown blanket of new soil and mulch, but there will be a difficult night or two. They may get cold and need extra cover, and I will oblige, placing tea towels and pillowcases just so.  Some nights they are thirsty.  Other nights will arrive with too much wind, until the time they come to rely on it, the sound of it drifting them off to sleep, their roots growing sturdier with each gust and whisper.

I have taken to calling them girls. I greet them in the morning, compliment them, even when they don’t deserve it, just to encourage them along. But sometimes the compliments are genuine, heartfelt, especially in the early days and all that color and green and hopefulness take me by surprise when I open the door in the morning or return from an errand and see their happy brilliance as I pull into the drive. 

But I am a casual parent, too.  By summer’s end they will have had it, will have grown old and tired, or turned their faces to the wall, fading as slowly as their blooms. I give them what they need, food and drink, and I help them tidy up their rooms on occasion.  Sometimes a little treat to refresh their blossoms, or support for their giant and heavy heads. But I let them be themselves. It is the only way.  For I know, I always know, these girls will leave me.

A couple of grandpas and grandmas live around my house. I am not quite so casual with them.  I scratch on their branches, looking for that bit of green that says they have survived one more winter.  I watch for signs of new leaf or budding with a mixture of dread and hope and anticipatory grief. 

I talk to them, too, but in a different timbre, and we commiserate where as the young flowers and I dream. There isn’t much to do for them, really, but sit with them in the sun, enjoy the deepening shadows as they play across their faces. There are no heroic measures to be taken in my yard.  I tried that once, long ago, and hastened the death of a perfectly good, but aged shrub.  One that had a bit more to teach me. A bit more to give. I thought I knew more than I did, and overdid the cure, a cure for which there was no disease but simple, noble old age. 

My little family will grow over the next few weeks, more plants carried home in boxes and containers and little paper packets to be opened and emptied upon prepared patches of ground. I learn each season which plants are apt to be happiest here, which ones will need more light than I can provide.  I will stock the shelves with nourishing food and special treats, but not too many.  Maybe a little something to brighten their blooms like party dresses.  Maybe something to keep the bugs off.  After that, they, like all of us, are on their own.  

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HINTS AND HOPES OF SPRING

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Already there is something stirring, call it spring, call it the vaccine, call it about time.

The weather looks to be better, some nights around freezing, maybe, but daytime temps are creeping up into the fifties, the sixties by the weekend.


It seems the same for friends whose weather I keep up with. I have taken you to my heart, truly and forever, if your city pops up on my phone’s weather app. I keep up with the weather in a couple of places I love like people, too. And almost all of us can count on temperatures at least in the 50s by the middle of the month.


Even if it is snowing where you are now.
Even if you are freezing right this minute.
Even if it won’t last.


Already I am eyeing that spot along the fence that separates my drive from my neighbor’s yard. He has been eyeing it for months now, too. In the fall I offloaded bags of manure and compost with the intention of filling in the low places and preparing a flowerbed for spring. I didn’t have quite enough dirt so I left it all sitting there until I could do the job properly, and there it has sat since.


He has offered to spread the contents of the bags for me, but no, I am happy to do that myself. I want to do it, think I can call it exercise, and so it would be. But first I need more dirt. He is a patient fellow, but he will be glad when I get after it. Soon, John, soon.

This week might just be the week, in fact, because seed and flower catalogs are jamming my mailbox and nothing inspires me quite so much. They are stacking bags of mulch at Kroger and I am giddy about it. I know they are, because my cousin posted a photo of those big bags last week, when she was giddy first.


I have tried watching the British gardening shows, Monty Don being one of my favorites. But if I am honest, he exhausts me. He moves slowly and calmly, digging, uprooting, rerooting, I will give you that. But I think of all the behind the scenes efforts — just getting those nice bins filled up with that custom peatless potting soil, I mean, how long does that take? How does he drag all the ingredients into his well-appointed potting shed? And those wonderful giant terra cotta pots he has all over the place. How much do they weigh? Empty? Loaded?

No, I have already decided, from the comfort of my couch, to pare down my gardening this year, sticking with those things that provide real bang for the buck. I have managed to keep two rosemary bushes alive all winter, and I am trying to overwinter some big geraniums in the basement. My fence row garden plot may serve as an AirBnB for zinnias until fall, when I may plant iris.


But, even so, there will still be plenty of trips to the nurseries, the garden centers and those places that fetch bags of mulch for you and dump them like a body in your trunk. I will be glad to have gardening back, to have it back as the joyful, playful activity it is. Digging in the dirt, water play, all my favorite childhood past times. But now no one yells out the back door to bring those serving spoons back in the house this minute.

I have had tools. I have a wheelbarrow.


So, celebrate with me. It’s almost spring, the vaccine is here and it is more than time.

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Fall Garden

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He is very proud of his hands, my young colleague, who stops by my office on a regular basis. He comes at my calling when I am stuck, as I am so often, when I attempt to navigate the platform upon which we teach on-line classes.

Jason is one of the experts, and he doesn’t so much tell me what I’ve done wrong as he commandeers my office chair and, like Merlin with silent incantations and divinations, fixes my mess while I play around on the iPhone.

Last week he was proud of his hands. They were calloused. He presented them to me, palms up, when I asked how things were going, what he’d been up to. “This is what I have been doing”, he said, as if a quick glance at his hands was all the information I needed. He has been preparing his yard for winter, reseeding, aerating the ground, digging and raking and I am not sure what all. His calloused and blistered palms mark him as more than one of the men of the great indoors, and that is how he likes it.

photo of lantanaMy own yard could use some tidying up before fall sets in, but I neglect it with purpose, and I don’t know why. The flowers in my little English border are cranky and overly physical, the bully Lantana overwhelming her delicate neighbors. The garden phlox is spent, but hangs on like a beaten but determined boxer, all heart, with their battered heads drooping onto their chests.

The chickweed and spurge have so completely integrated with my annuals that I quit pulling them out and treat them like filler, the baby’s breath in a bouquet. Broadleaf plantain climbs my capitata yews and I wince and work to convince myself that, really, it might be considered an ornamental. The impatiens are leggy, the gerbers dead on their feet, and my geraniums, which I have hopes of overwintering, have gone on a hunger strike or some such nonsense, and look quite dreadful.moon vine flower

Blooming comes late to my yard. The tomatoes show up later than my friends’ tomatoes, regardless of how early I plant them. My pal, Alice, had pulled up her moon vine before mine deigned to join us topside to put on a show. I use this excuse to be in no hurry to clean up my garden, but really, I think it is sloth.

Then, too, there is also something about pulling up living things, even though they have lost their vigor, will no longer produce. If a plant isn’t brown and rattly, I just can’t get rid of it. Even when I am sick of looking at it. I always think, just one more weekend and I will make ten gallons of pesto before I yank the basil. Just half an hour tomorrow and I will harvest the parsley, freeze it for winter, so as to astonish my guests with the freshness of my lasagne deep in winter.

But those days come and go with no action and my yard looks like it needs a visit from the city. Or maybe it is the finality of the thing that gets me. Once I clean up my garden I won’t smell dirt again for seven months. I will miss that.

Then, too, the best part of porch life is all the green, in every direction, shot through with red, and pink, purple and yellow. An autumn porch is nice, but brittle in its way.

There are times I wish I were a poet, because I admire them beyond all reason. Just as I sat down to think about this, a poem came across my desk that I wish I had the talent to write. In her poem, “Lines Written In the Days of Growing Darkness,” Mary Oliver has said with such economy and grace that with which I fumble. She gives us this these bookends, with such loveliness in between.

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descendsdried leaf sepia

into a rich mash, in order that it may resume…

…So let us go on

through the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

We need our poets most in autumn, I think, to see us through the winter.

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Mr. Davis Has Elephant Ears

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With spring comes a freshness, a green that won’t appear again until this time next year.  It arrives on the edge of thunder and hail, and even as you are righting all the lawn chairs, flipping the lids back onto the toters, there is that certain whiff in the air.  It is the scent of renewal, hope, forgiveness, even.  It is the scent of spring.

And it smells like mulch. Image

Mulch is the Epcot Center of gardening.  You know what I mean.  At Epcot you can visit the Moroccan and China Pavilions and believe you have traveled to those exotic places. But it’s better.  Everything is just so clean.  And neat. And effortless.

And the best part, you won’t be plagued with those pesky intestinal bugs that the poor slobs who actually go to China and Morocco find so inconvenient and vulgar.

Mulch is like that.  It is nothing more than yard waste, shredded trees and twigs, some dirt and some composted something.  But bag it and stack it on pallets, or store it loose in a giant bin like prized free-range dirt, and it becomes something more than itself, something bigger, something better and we dream of it.  Covet it.  Think we deserve it, because look how hard we have worked, or think about how hard we would work, if only we had some lovely mulch to inspire us.

As strange as this weather has been, you would think we would be bracing for natural disaster, or organizing our bug-out bags, or getting our affairs in order.  But no.

We are not doing any of these things.

We are mowing our yards.Twice a week.

We are out buying plants. Mulch.

We are showing up at work on Monday with sunburned faces and arms, already, here, in mid-March.

Me, I’m buying elephant ears.

Mr. Davis lived next door to my grandmother for as long as Il could remember.  He had a lush green lawn when no one had a lush green lawn.  At a time when yards were mostly clover and Bermuda grass, his was dark and tall and looked like it could hide Easter eggs right past Halloween.

Across the front of his house was a herd of elephant ears.  Gigantic elephant ears.  Ears that he had been nurturing and tending for years.

They are a tropical plant, which  make sense when you think about where elephants live.  The bulbs won’t survive our winters, so every fall Mr. Davis chopped off the foliage and dug up the bulbs.  They must have been immense because the holes they left were impressive.  He dried them, stored them in his basement and in the spring he planted them anew.

What fascinated and sort of disturbed me was the fact that he would plant them, dig them up, plant them, dig them up, year after year.  I had no reference for this kind of care and attention to gardening.   Landscaping at my house consisted of mowing the grass right up to the house, half-heartedly trimming around the sidewalks, and scattering grass seed a few times a year over the spots we rubbed bare with our bicycles and baseball games.

I had gone out to get zinnia seeds because anyone can grow them.   But right there, by my feet in a cardboard bin, were mesh bags of elephant ears.

I must tell you, I have never seen such a thing these. They were easily the size of cantaloupes and I simply had to have them.

I could see the cool dark corner of my yard where I would plant them, could see the small children dressed in  organza playing amongst them as they trip around my garden sanctuary on a dragonfly afternoon.  Could almost hear the crack of the croquet ball, the clinking of ice in the lemonade pitcher, could see the sloping lawn of my estate in the sun gently sets.

All this from a pack of zinnias and three oddly shaped cantaloupes.  That’s right, and so what? I have smelled the mulch.