Yesterday afternoon, while watching a tide of tree limbs, flying gravel, dry leaves and a chair blow across our yard in a sudden gale, I realized that all this airborne debris included our blue heron wind spinner lawn ornament, the pride of the front yard. So I put on my shoes and went out into the blast and retrieved it. To the west a wall of cold blue cloud was bearing down on us at tornado-suggestive speed and the temperature, after a handful of extremely spring-like days, was once again falling faster than the House of Hapsburg and Bitcoins. This morning I discovered that the blue glass gazing globe in one of our front beds was a casualty of the wind.
Despite our exciting garden plans for 6 or 8 weeks from now, our whole area looks like the Slough of Despond, or anyway a slough. The ground has been thawed and refrozen repeatedly in cycles of temperatures dropping as low as zero. Some shrubs that should now be showing off their late winter or very early spring finery are ice-burned and pathetic, including some new hellebores that ought to have been able to take it but instead look scalded. We will just have to see what lived and what died in this year’s remarkable winter.
Normally we have our first daffodil between mid January and mid February. Today, March 13, the first daffodils, thin and spindly, appeared in the round frontmost bed in our yard.
This week some early crocuses have also risked taking the air.
I fear this may mean that spring, when it comes, will last about three days, and everything will bloom simultaneously and then fry immediately in 85 degree heat. The long cool incubation that best suits spring flowers may not be with us this year. But that remains to be seen.
I fear this may mean that spring, when it comes, will last about three days, and everything will bloom simultaneously and then fry immediately in 85 degree heat. The long cool incubation that best suits spring flowers may not be with us this year. But that remains to be seen.
I have not been gardening that long. Our first garden year was 1988, the second spring after we bought our first house, a mid-sixties ranch house on Cottonwood Road in town. The first know instance of gardening was at Tell Abu Hureyra in what is now northern Syria around 11,514 years ago. I am trying to avoid the customary round numbers here. The crop was rye. By comparison with that, I have hardly been gardening at all.
I don’t count my entire childhood history of relentless cultivation in this calculation, because we were forced to do it. My father liked vegetables, so at very early ages my brother and I were herded into the yard with hoes and rakes and put to work chopping, weeding, thinning and aerating things. We also served as pest control. We could collect the insect pests in a jar and use them for bug fights or we could mash them between two pieces of wood, whichever amused us the most. Such intensive hand-cranked cultivation results in excellent produce. In fact it is the only way to get any results at all. Domesticated plants react to neglect by dropping dead on the spot. Also, there is no known agricultural poison as discriminating as a kid with a good working notion of “good bug versus bad bug.” One of the things we learned is that bad bugs are not bad in the Calvinist sense. They are just the wrong bug in the wrong place, the same way a weed can be defined as a flower that nobody wants. I would call our childhood activity gardening now, but at the time we regarded it as a punishment and spent our gardening time asking what we had done wrong and why this was a fair sentence for doing it. Obviously we had not yet heard of Original Sin or read Genesis or anything like that and would have been incredulous if we had.
So, our first garden year was 1988 and was caused by a random plant catalog, the famous Dutch Gardens catalog, which at the time was better printed (and more interesting) than most best-sellers. As an aside, the Dutch Gardens catalog of 2014 still has most of the same old plants in it, showing the hidden evolutionary conservatism of gardens. All garden catalogs seem to boast new and stunning plants to be amazed by, and then sell mainly the same old ones. But I digress.
What I am trying to say is that after Karen and I debated the propriety of trying some of these novel plant wonders, we ordered about $60 worth of assorted roots, bulbs and tubers. When they arrived, I bought a shiny
new shovel from the hardware store and guiltily slunk around the corner of the house, lest anyone spot me performing a manual act, and excavated the angle between the chimney and the front yard. It was a fluke, a Neolithic-class happenstance, that this was a south-facing spot against a brick wall. All gardeners will now say, “Ah, yes…”
The type of flower bed I dug is the sort traditionally called a Dog’s Grave. I threw the dirt from it down the hill, stacked the peculiar objects that had come in the mail more or less right-side-up at the bottom of the bed, and then filled it back up by pouring a large bag of potting soil over it. I never expected any of it to come up. That probably helps explain why I crammed enough plants to fill a 20-foot border into a 3 x 5 hole. I assumed at the time that they were doomed anyway.
In an amazingly short time everything came up, and since our city neighborhood had no deer, all of it survived to bloom. The little bed was too full to have weeds. It was a floral jungle so thick that nothing could have been staked up had it needed to be. It was a solid green plug of plant matter, a vegetal eruption. In a true stroke of luck, we’d somehow ordered both short and tall plants, with some very large plants that climbed up and got out of the way of the shorter ones.
I don’t count my entire childhood history of relentless cultivation in this calculation, because we were forced to do it. My father liked vegetables, so at very early ages my brother and I were herded into the yard with hoes and rakes and put to work chopping, weeding, thinning and aerating things. We also served as pest control. We could collect the insect pests in a jar and use them for bug fights or we could mash them between two pieces of wood, whichever amused us the most. Such intensive hand-cranked cultivation results in excellent produce. In fact it is the only way to get any results at all. Domesticated plants react to neglect by dropping dead on the spot. Also, there is no known agricultural poison as discriminating as a kid with a good working notion of “good bug versus bad bug.” One of the things we learned is that bad bugs are not bad in the Calvinist sense. They are just the wrong bug in the wrong place, the same way a weed can be defined as a flower that nobody wants. I would call our childhood activity gardening now, but at the time we regarded it as a punishment and spent our gardening time asking what we had done wrong and why this was a fair sentence for doing it. Obviously we had not yet heard of Original Sin or read Genesis or anything like that and would have been incredulous if we had.
So, our first garden year was 1988 and was caused by a random plant catalog, the famous Dutch Gardens catalog, which at the time was better printed (and more interesting) than most best-sellers. As an aside, the Dutch Gardens catalog of 2014 still has most of the same old plants in it, showing the hidden evolutionary conservatism of gardens. All garden catalogs seem to boast new and stunning plants to be amazed by, and then sell mainly the same old ones. But I digress.
What I am trying to say is that after Karen and I debated the propriety of trying some of these novel plant wonders, we ordered about $60 worth of assorted roots, bulbs and tubers. When they arrived, I bought a shiny
new shovel from the hardware store and guiltily slunk around the corner of the house, lest anyone spot me performing a manual act, and excavated the angle between the chimney and the front yard. It was a fluke, a Neolithic-class happenstance, that this was a south-facing spot against a brick wall. All gardeners will now say, “Ah, yes…”
The type of flower bed I dug is the sort traditionally called a Dog’s Grave. I threw the dirt from it down the hill, stacked the peculiar objects that had come in the mail more or less right-side-up at the bottom of the bed, and then filled it back up by pouring a large bag of potting soil over it. I never expected any of it to come up. That probably helps explain why I crammed enough plants to fill a 20-foot border into a 3 x 5 hole. I assumed at the time that they were doomed anyway.
In an amazingly short time everything came up, and since our city neighborhood had no deer, all of it survived to bloom. The little bed was too full to have weeds. It was a floral jungle so thick that nothing could have been staked up had it needed to be. It was a solid green plug of plant matter, a vegetal eruption. In a true stroke of luck, we’d somehow ordered both short and tall plants, with some very large plants that climbed up and got out of the way of the shorter ones.
I don’t remember everything that was in that bed but it included Casablanca, the giant white oriental lily that smells like the well-known Evyan perfume White Shoulders, and one of the most monstrous of all dahlias, the Kelvin Floodlight. When the bright yellow blooms of the Kelvin Floodlight reached their full 12-in diameter I was utterly hooked. My diffidence of April was gone forever. For the last twenty-five years and counting, ten of them at Cottonwood and the rest at our home in the country, I’ve happily wallowed in mud and dirt just on the off chance of flowers.
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