My Private Afghanistan

I have a gardening style that I like to refer to as "desultory" because it sounds fancier than "hit or miss." My garden is a fairly good size for the city. None of it is in lawn. "Good for you," people call out. "Those lawns are such a lot of work."

No, they're not. You shave them with a power mower now and then and call it a day. Meanwhile, every patch of my soil has something going on in it and a lot of it is not authorized.

But I lose focus. I'll start out on a likely patch with the best intentions and then haul weeds to the yard debris bin, and on the way back I see another likely patch that maybe I should tackle first, and then I go in for water and walk by a whole 'nother patch that really needs to get under control, and by the end of the day, I've done all this stuff in all these places and nobody can tell.

But this weekend I'm getting a load of compost mulch delivered. They'll dump a big ole pile in the street. So now I'm trying my hardest to get ahead of the game by getting actual significant portions weed-free in anticipation of my big pile. Once the mulch goes on a well-weeded patch, things will settle down for a good while. It's a little method I think of as "clear and hold."

I think this is a technique associated with whatever the hell we've been doing in Afghanistan. A piece of territory gets cleared of Taliban and then a few guys get assigned to Holding It--let's call them military mulch--and then you go clear another bit. It works great, and we know, because we've been doing it for eighteen years.

But I won't get it all cleared, not by a long shot. So the second technique comes into play. This involves muscle memory. My entire body has learned which portions of the yard should not be looked at, and I am quite capable of wandering through it in a haze of admiration that edits out all the bad parts. I don't even notice them until a guest comes and pauses in front of an unruly spot. Oh that. I was getting to that, I lie.

Every weed in my garden is fully aware that there is no Shock And Awe coming. There will be no drone strikes of glyphosate; and at some point in August, all the troops are going to leave and allow everything to run rampant, and the only chemical agent being applied will be gin to the gardener. If there's still a heap of compost at the curb, I'll sculpt it into a Volkswagen Beetle and stick a petunia in it.

I'm not one to trivialize the dreadful conditions pertaining in the world by making false comparisons, and I will not stoop to referring to any of my doughty garden invasives as The Taliban.

I would never say that. But just between you and me, the field bindweed doesn't believe girls should be educated.

Meeting The Neighbors

Hi! Yes, nice to met you, too! Carl, did you say? Oh sorry. Kale! Kale? Kale! And who is this little buttonhead in the stroller? Enid? What a sweet name! Hi, Enid! Hi, Enid! Aww, Enid's shy. Welcome to the neighborhood, Kale and Enid!

Gosh, isn't that typical, I just meet someone for the first time and I look like I've done my hair with a fidget spinner. Sorry! I usually fix it first thing in the morning. I've got that big cowlick on the one side, and the flat spot in the back, and it just takes a little floofing but I must've gotten distracted this morning. Anyhoo!

Yeah, I'm in between haircuts, so it's a little weird. Right, Astrid? You haven't even had a haircut yet, have you, honey? Cute little button. Oh, Enid, right, sorry.

The garden? Thanks! I try. It looks a little funky now because the spring bulbs are all done and it's just a bunch of brown crap, and the fall perennials haven't really come in yet. I'd have had a nice new mulch down by now but I haven't even started weeding. There was all that rain, and then it got so dang hot, and you know. Yeah, last week would've been perfect, but I had a thing. Monday. And I had another thing Tuesday. I had all the things last week, I swear. Anyhoo.

Sheesh, you'd think I could've gotten that little postage stamp of a lawn done by now, right, Chive? Sorry. Kale. Mower's in the shop. Four weeks out. Swear to God, every year. You think you're going to get to it, and then the rains come, and all of a sudden it's up to here, and you haul out the mower and she's-a no work. I called a company and you know they want eighty bucks for that little patch? I don't think so. Kids used to do a whole yard for three bucks when I was coming up. Yeah, that was a long time ago, you're right about that.

Anyway, nice to meet you, Chard--no, I'd better not shake hands, I've been in the chicken shit. Ordinarily you wouldn't see me out in public in an old shirt and torn pants and these clodhoppers, but hey, you caught me just when I was thinking about getting to some of these weeds. No sense being a fashion plate in the garden, right? Be nice to get all this done and shower up and put on a nice outfit and enjoy the place. You all should come back in a few days. Bring your wife too. Pardon me? Gerald? Bring Gerald. We'll sit out back and have a beer. Not for you, Aphid! Ha ha! You're too little!

Enid. Swear to God, I've got a mind like a, like a, you know. You drain your spaghetti in it. Mind like a cauliflower.

Colander! Yeah, that's what I meant. Hey, why don't you and little Edna pop inside for a second, and I'll write your name down so I don't forget it, because otherwise I totally will, and I'll give you my email. Come on in. No, no, no need to take your shoes off, I'm going to have to vacuum soon anyway--obviously!--it's usually a lot more picked up in here, but I had that thing. You want some water or something? Sure. Hang on. Let me just rinse this glass. I've got a note pad around here somewhere. It's under that stack of mail, I think. Don't trip on the laundry basket, I was just getting around to that. Let me shut that door--no one needs to see my sewing room while I'm in the middle of something! I'll just shut this one too.

Help with all this? I never really thought about it. I mean, why pay someone to do something I'm perfectly capable of doing? Huh. Your mom, you say? Oh, your grandma. Well sure. She'd be a lot older than me. She's how old? Oh. Huh. Every other week, huh? Sure. I'll bet it looks real spiffy. You know, if you're into that kind of thing. Sometimes I think people care a little too much about appearances, if you ask me. I mean, no matter how much you clean, it just gets dirty again. We're all going to drop dead soon enough anyway. Bam. Finito. Here's my email. Thanks for dropping by! Careful of that door on your way out. Wind gets ahold of it and it can have a helluva kick to it. Smack you right in the fanny.

Broccoli-Boy.

Naked Gardening Day!

Word on the street was last Saturday was Naked Gardening Day. I didn't miss it so much as I suspected it wouldn't miss me. I don't have a problem with naked. I can get naked at the drop of a hat and a few other things. Whenever I have my Naked In Public dreams, I always feel just fine about it until I get to wherever I'm going and discover that nobody else got the memo. Then it's kind of embarrassing. This is a progressive neighborhood, but I don't know if it could provide the critical mass you need if you're going to feel peachy about naked gardening.

Besides, I don't want to start having to store sunscreen in a tank. And these days, the only place on me that the sun don't shine is the acreage just south of where my tits used to be. I could scan a photo of me being both naked in public and twenty-three, and a lot of you would probably like it just fine, but there'd be hell to pay with my dermatologist.

I saw some of the photographs that are being displayed on the Naked Gardening Day websites. That's a bunch of attractive people right there. They ain't gardening. Clearly there are furrows to be plowed and seed to be sown, but they're just dancing in a circle like new-age fairies, tra-la! None of them has more than one or two things on them that are at all dangly. They don't have to worry about lopping off the bingo wings  or inadvertently pruning a neck wattle.

No, there they are, posing with watering cans in a way that never gets anything watered. Gardening is about a lot more than being young and picturesque with a watering can. There are a lot of positions one might routinely get into that the neighbors might consider too much information. Squatting in the asparagus patch has a certain appeal on a personal level, but nobody wants to watch me pull out an obstreperous rootball naked. I don't even know what's going to happen. I got a hold of a small, unauthorized holly tree the other day that wouldn't let go. I chopped it down to a ten-inch stump so as to get better gription on it, got back on my heels, and yanked as hard as I could. What I thought would happen was the tree would suddenly come loose from the soil and I'd go backwards ass over teakettle. Ha ha! Always a crowd favorite.

What actually happened was the stump snapped off at the roots and I plunged it into my solar plexus with all the conviction of someone committing hara kiri. It's the kind of event that's too embarrassing to bring to the emergency room. I'd rather just bleed out. Throw "naked" in on top of that scene and we have a real situation.

The good news is, the neighbors would probably take up a collection. The bad news is, they'd call it a "hedge fund."

The Forbidden Fruit

We get really good strawberries in Oregon. They might not ship as well as the California ones, but they're not taste-free red pulp around a white cardboard heart, either. Our climate and soil are conducive to growing the very best: the Hoods, the Totems, the Quinaults, the Firecrackers. Everyone grows them. You just drop a few bare-root plants in the ground and yell hi-oh and they gallop across the bed. Take the weed-whacker to the edges a few times a season to keep the luscious goo off your driveway. All of which is good news for Dave, who loudly adores strawberries.

Naturally, I can't grow strawberries. I can't even grow one strawberry.

There's a long bed thumping with raspberries; there are blueberry bushes groaning under the load. And somehow, he thinks, none of these is as delicious as the particular strawberry I cannot grow. I don't even think he cares that much. It's just that he can't have it. Suddenly, a good home-grown strawberry is the most important thing in the world, and completely elusive. It's the Holy Grail. Unicorn DNA. The literary agent who loves your manuscript and wouldn't change a single word.

We hike the streets of Portland, where waves of strawberries crash onto the sidewalks like God's own reproach. Dave pauses for a long look, then turns to me with the eyes of an orphaned basset hound. He needs me to feel bad. He's punching a ticket for a free bout of teasing, later. Something along the lines of "I would think you of all people would be good at making shortcake."

I have tried. I have had strawberry plants in the ground for twenty years. Occasionally a small, hard green fruit emerges and dies of loneliness. And I do know that you're not supposed to plant strawberries anywhere that strawberries have grown for the previous three years. Evidently after three years, they're exhausted. I do not know why. They never do anything.

I have a successful garden, otherwise. People assume I know

what I'm doing, but all I'm doing is pulling out the dead shit. The rest looks great. The strawberry plants don't die. They just sit there like a growing stack of unread New Yorker magazines, projecting guilt. There isn't much to the growing of strawberries, according to the experts. Soil pH is important. You can have all the minerals and nutrients in the world and if the soil pH is wrong, your strawberries won't absorb them. It's like the minerals and nutrients are facts, and the pH is the soil's religion. Get it wrong, and the soil will deflect all reason. My strawberry plants, apparently, are sitting around quietly waiting for the second coming.

I could lime their asses, or I could go to the store and buy a pint of Hoods.

Store's only a few blocks away.

Heading For A Knockout

Dave got me a pickup load of compost and parked it in front of the house and then he left, which is why we're still married. If he'd stayed home, he would have been unable to prevent himself from being helpful.

What I need to do is prepare portions of my garden a square yard at a time, taking into account what needs dividing and what needs transplanting and what is so invasive that it needs to be given to a neighbor at least three doors down, and then I need to shovel compost one wheelbarrow at a time in the same way the troops deal with the Taliban: clear and hold. It's work, but a lot of the time--as seen from the house--I am motionless. I am squinting. How tall does that thing get again? Is this the yellow thing or the blue thing? Should this be getting more sun? What was I going to put in that spot? Wheels are spinning like crazy in my head, but from the house, I look like the poster child for inefficiency. Dave, on the other hand, is as efficient as Holy Hell.

"Hey, tell you what. Why don't I shovel out the compost and we can knock this thing out in no time!" he says. And it's true. The man is not lazy. He could empty that pickup truck and have the street polished shiny in twenty minutes. The wheelbarrow would follow him back to the shed at heel. Tools in the neighbor's shed would straighten themselves up out of pure respect. He's a machine. He dumps the wheelbarrow and picks it up like it's a five-gallon bucket to shake out the last dribs. He's already got the shovel and returns in a minute with equal parts compost and zeal. "Where do you want it?"

I want it right here, in this tiny little patch, with care taken not to cover those itty bitty leaves of the hardy fuchsia coming up. Don't step there. Don't step there! There's a hosta there. There! Right there!

"I don't see anything."

I know you don't see anything. You have to take my word for it. Get your size thirteens out of there.

Dave whips the wheelbarrow around and returns a few seconds later with another load. "Where do you want it?"

Here's the thing. Listen up. I want it right here where I'm pointing, and then I want to think about things

for a while, and then I want to weed this patch and dig up that perennial and divide it, and in another half hour or so, maybe, I'll want another load. And so on. By the end of the day I will have this little section done, and the truck will still be three-quarters full. Just the way I want it. Instead, we are headed toward a state of mutually assured exasperation. I will feel stampeded, and Dave will feel thwarted.

Dave cannot stand it. He looks at the truck. There's a job, and that means it needs knocking out. He knows that truck could be empty in twenty minutes. It doesn't matter; we don't need it for anything. But it could be empty. All clean. All done. Knocked out. He will grow more and more helpful and agitated and at some point will demand, edgily, to be assigned a clear patch he can dump ALL the compost, and then I can just go ahead and fuck around with it till the cows come home if that's what I really need to do. I try it that way but there's even less of a hurry moving compost that's already on the ground somewhere, and the next spring there will still be a hump of dirt there with really enthusiastic weeds sticking out of it.

It's true we're wired differently, but it's also true that we have both spent over thirty years training for different jobs. Dave was a hod carrier, and I was a letter carrier. When he got to work, stuff needed moving. Brick, block, mortar; it started out here and needed to go there. He and his buddies knocked

out a job. They worked hard. The quicker you could do it, the sooner you could go drink beer. I also started every day with things that needed moving. Letters. But I couldn't take ten trays of random letters and load them in my truck and dump them off somewhere. I had to take each letter individually and poke it into a little hole in a sorting case and then pull it all down again and strap it out and walk it all over the neighborhood and try to get the addresses on the letters to match the house numbers. People were persnickety about that. It was fussy. It wasn't something you knocked out.

Plus, hell. We were proud U.S. letter carriers. We didn't have to finish a job to start drinking beer.

Weeds vs. Weed

I'm an avid gardener, but I'm not indulgent. I like to introduce my plants to adversity early on so they learn to cope. This is a tough old world, I tell them. Mommy may not always be here to protect you. Sometimes the rain won't fall, sometimes the sun won't shine, sometimes a fleet of cutworms will hack you off at the ankles. Sometimes, I warn darkly, Mommy will be too busy having a few beers and throwing darts over by the tool shed to tend to your every need.

Still, there are always a few specimens I try to keep an eye on: new citizens without the rootage to withstand drought, potted plants that always whine for water or fertilizer. So when I go away for a few weeks, I try to enlist a little help and I try to keep it simple. Just make sure the flowerboxes get water, I explain. You might want to check on this little guy over here, I point out. He's a recent transplant. But generally I expect to entertain a few losses.

I needn't have fretted. In the two weeks since we'd been gone, the topiary frog looked ready to leap. The corn's ears met the elephant's eye. The cherry tomatoes lit out for the territories, and the heirlooms sent a posse out after them. The strawberries were studying a plat for a new development and negotiating with the diascia for open space. Peppers popped. Zauschneria split up into gangs and roughed up the other ground covers.

The squash, showing deference to the seniority of the tomatoes on the east side, galloped to the west and made for a patch of marigolds. The toad lilies were hoppy. Buzz was building for the Shakespeare Festival on the north side, with the nicotiana and datura duking it out for the part of Oberon, King of the Fairies. The little eyringium, which had knocked the Puck audition out of the park, observed impassively. Encouraged, the new pomegranate got together with a few reticent players in the aster family and set up a chapter of Toastmasters International, gaining confidence with every performance.

The phlox stood up and cheered as the helianthums busted out into a chorus of Didn't It Rain, Oh My Lord, Didn't It Rain. The caryopteris shot up two feet to see what the commotion was. The gloriosa daisy shot up three, to see over the caryopteris. The scrub jays, who had started a book group, were unperturbed. As is the case in most book groups, nothing much got read; they were basically in it for the blueberry nosh.

The hummingbirds did one round each on the fuchsias and then had to go lie down for a while; I don't know where the sofa, barely visible under the blue hosta, came from. The star jasmine not only made it to the bottom rung of the new trellis, but went condo on a nearby rogue asparagus plant. The lemon cucumber exhausted its vertical possibilities and shot out over the zinnias. The hibiscus is treating it as a hostage situation.

The only plant that looks to be a little worse for wear is a handsome but dissolute penstemon, which had always been known to drink too much, given the opportunity, and was found staggering over the ground. It will probably recover, given the chance to dry out, and now that I'm back in charge, that's a chance it's likely to get.

As for the weeds, half appeared to have been dispatched and the rest terrified. A particularly tenacious colony of oxalis between the stepping-stones had been completely rooted out, possibly with a spoon and tweezers, and all the thistle seeds have blown away, bearing tales of a holocaust.

So this is what a garden looks like when it gets every little thing it wants. All it ever needed was to be left for a few weeks in the custody of a nice woman with a lot of time on her hands. And a pretty good stash of pot.

Reality-Boy

Don't ever tell him I said so, but I suspect Dave and I are a good team in the garden. I come up with all these cool ideas for projects, and Dave explains why they can't be done. I'll put my hands on my hips, gaze out into the middle distance and begin, "I was thinking..." and Dave instantly begins to groan. Thinking, we both realize, is not my strongest suit.

I have a spot in the garden that I would like to put a pebble mosaic in, all mortared up and everything, and Dave indicated he was willing to help me out with that. So one day I laboriously dug out all the weeds and leveled out the dirt and proclaimed it ready for the concrete base, and he came home and said it looked fine--just fine!--but I'd need to dig the whole thing down about another half foot for the gravel base. Let's see: that's a twelve-foot diameter circle, times pi, multiplied by six, carry the shovel...hummm. That's one hell of a lot of digging. Thanks a lot, Reality-Boy.

At least he's still on board. Usually the whole idea gets smacked down right off the bat. There's the expense factor, the degree of difficulty, and always, always, those precious laws of physics. As if he never broke a law.

I still recall when a casual thought--that it would be really cool to be able to weed without bending over--led me to a glorious vision of a path dug down so deep into the garden that the ground level ended up being waist high. Can you see it? By the time the idea had grown in me for a day, I was already descending into my own personal Grand Canyon on mules of fancy. Excited, I sketched out the vision to Dave. I got The Look. It's a rigid look with no humor in it, and by the time he begins to reply, he is already exhausted with the effort of keeping his eyes from rolling back into his head. Then he proceeds to load down my mules of fancy with packs o' facts. No place for the water to go. Backhoes. Gravel. Ten feet deep. Drainage tiles. Blah, blah, blah.

By the time he wound down, my little Grand Canyon had eroded away, and also the Canals of Venice that had briefly replaced it.

But he did build us some creditable waist-high masonry vegetable beds, and they look to be here for the ages. One thing about this place: our walls do not tip over, our walkways do not crack and our patio does not buckle. I sometimes think Dave just likes to stomp all over my muse. But he just wants my muse to have a decent tool belt.

The Dead of Winter

Just got back from The Oregon Garden. They've got a number of ways to lure you out there, and the bait this time was a nice quilt show. They also have a genuine Frank Lloyd Wright house on the premises that was preserved and moved at great expense. I have taken the tour of the house, a minimalist box in pink cinderblock which was built during Mr. Wright's Jersey Turnpike Rest Area period. I don't know. I'm all for preservation, but even some Steinways make better kindling than music. There were no waterfalls cascading under the house or anything, but I think there might have been something special about the toilets.

There needs to be some kind of draw, if not outright subterfuge, to get people to come to this garden, because it's really remote. It's right next to Narnia on the map. There's no trouble finding the exit from the freeway, which is clearly marked for The Oregon Garden, but then all hell breaks loose for fifteen miles. There is one turn after another, far beyond one's navigational capability, culminating in ever-more-frequent right-hand turns, until by the time the parking lot comes into view, one has the impression of having been screwed into the landscape. Reinforcing this notion, there is no finding your way back home again when you leave.

Even though I made the trip for the quilts, I did want to see the garden in mid-winter. We've been having more winter than we're known for here and we gardeners are presiding over some major winterkill. I have a personal stash of Agapanthus plants that have grown and multiplied for about four years now, becoming something of a feature in my garden, and in December they turned into clumps of snot. Everyone in town has been installing plants from the next zone over and getting away with it until now. So the only thing that would cheer me up, as I survey my freeze-dried New Zealand flax and my paralyzed Abutilon and the snot clump collection, is to see some horticultural devastation on a massive scale. A real big-league die-off, acres of regret and poor choices. I'd perk right up.

Seems the folks at the Oregon Garden make a point of buying local and showcasing the legitimate wonders of our zone. It looked pretty good out there. It was still winter, but the beds were raked clear of debris, unlike at my house, and the dead perennial foliage was trimmed back, unlike at my house, and the marginally hardy items were lovingly wrapped in burlap and crowned with compost, unlike at my house. This place was desolate, but still tidy. By force of habit, I examined the labels in the soil, so determining that this bunch of nubbly bits would become a helenium, and that stand of sheared sticks aspired to being a threadleaf coreopsis. It's a little like surveying a youth hostel to see the Leaders of Tomorrow: it takes some faith and imagination. Gardeners, of course, have both. I am assured that the beauty of admiring a garden in winter is that you can appreciate its structure. Hell, if that's all I was after, I could have stayed home and admired mine. If it had a structure.

Finally I came upon a nice stand of ruined New Zealand flax, and also a large dead plant with a "for sale" sign on it. Mollified, I was ready to go home. Wherever that was.