Summer of '22: A Retrospective

The indispensable garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence pointed out, justifiably, that summer gardening is impossible in the south. I paraphrase, but she essentially averred that spring and fall were the gardening seasons and if a plant could not live past June without being tended, it had best die.

I agree completely, though it’s possible to have a fine high summer garden using plants that only need to be tended in the spring and fall. The big lilies--trumpets, orientals, orienpets, and many species lilies—stand out for carefree summer growing, along with such things as gladiolus, phlox and any number of hybridized field flowers.

A portfolio of lilies.

Of course that doesn’t speak to weeding, especially in a wet summer like this one. Intense thundery heat sends weeds skyrocketing. Dense weed patches spring up in days. Twilight and earliest morning are usually bearable for garden work if the thunder hasn’t set in yet. Other times, it's hard to work in the open.
 
That's why gardeners don’t usually get to see their own gardens. Gardeners tend to see what they are trying to do—imaginary things no one will ever see—or they most easily notice the things they are failing at—rather than what, if anything, they have succeeded at. The garden tools themselves command most of the attention. Otherwise they turn on you. Like our old Holocene monkey-folk ancestors used to say, “When you pick up a tool, you’re shaking hands with danger.”

The cicada—arguably the god of summer.

 We’re being prickled, stung, bit, clawed and prodded anyway, scampered over by innumerable weird insects large and small, smeared with mud and mulch and fungi, protozoans and bacteria, not to mention plant saps and pollen. Imagine it without the tools—impossible. You bleed, and how the other life forms enjoy that! Watering a garden with your sweat is no mere metaphor, but if you want every living thing in the garden to truly exult, try bleeding all over it. Turns out everything loves blood. Even the nectar feeders think it’s pretty funny.

Hover fly on Phlox paniculata—one of the most highly evolved fliers—a nectar-feeder whose flight and appearance mimic the hummingbird and the hornet.

I love lifestyle articles on garden tools. So many of the best tools are Japanese. The gardener needs the braces, however, even more than the tools. Without the braces we cannot use the tools. I refer to the inevitable back brace (I recommend the Mueller), the equally fundamental knee brace, the vitally necessary arm brace, the thumb brace, the garden variety wrist brace, the common Desert Storm army boot (because a thin covering and a little bit of sole will not shield your feet from insult or provide the desperate margin of grip to keep us from plunging onto the spikes below). And the hat, by god. Hat or die. You want the neck flap, the wide brim, the absorbency. The clever straw hat is only for style. The Japanese Infantry or Foreign Legion style adds a lot more wicking surface to help ‘cool’ the back of your neck, if that’s the word we’re looking for.

Meanwhile there’s no telling who or what shares the garden with us. We haven’t got time for that sort of thing.

A tortoise.

Treena, the garden’s owner.

Karen in the garden.

Karen also owns the garden. The vegetable garden is hers, and there is no abandoning the vegetable garden just because it’s 101 F and 99% humidity. These are the plants, some ancient and some more recent, modified by humans to produce food. They live and die in infantile helplessness, some more so than others. Too many diseases. Too many predators. Our big fat invading groundhog, Cyrus the Great. The beetles.

Meet the beetles.

The art of growing vegetables is fundamental to being human. In its infinite calculation and near-impossibility, food gardening is one of the most complex acts the old monkey folk ever took up. We know they did well enough to produce us. At least as well as that. Can we do better? Please try!

Summer changes things. The main wheelbarrow route taken over by a pumpkin vine. The foot of the vegetable garden is to the right.

There’s many valid perils in gardening that deflect our vision away from the stunning displays flower beds afford.  As Thomas Gray said in An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
 
Then summer ends and with fall comes the inevitable next book. As of yesterday, Shad River is freshly available on Amazon Kindle. History—where does it come from? What is history anyway, but the stories of peoples’ lives? People begin as members of families, then as members of communities. Families and communities are the raw sources of history. In Shad River, place is the protagonist. Individuals and families come and go while time melts and reforges a river-crossing community that began before history in the Virginia mountains and has had many faces since. Shad River is a picture of that history’s American moment.

A tiny handful of people around the world have run across Rockfish, my old terribly long experimental historical novel. The Rockfish enterprise entangled itself with decades of my life, which was never my intention, but it made a useful proving ground. Saying goodbye to this OOP oddity required writing Shad River instead. Shad River is retrospective writing--naturally, as a historical novel, but also structurally as a look back on a former book. It will take a couple of weeks to produce a paperback version for those like me who prefer a hard copy, but that is coming soon. Meanwhile Shad River is done, and summer is done, and I can return to my macaques and roses, because fall is when the real garden work gets done.

How to use catnip.

So much work.

Awaiting a tile job... my fall task.

Sometimes you grow an exotic curiosity just for thrills.