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.

Climbing Yosemite

It started with the taxes, of course, as most of my annual bouts of aggravation do, although in this case I didn't even get to the Doing Taxes part. What I did was load the tax software into the computer until the little icon popped up and when I went to drag the little icon to the Applications folder on my dock, I noticed I no longer had an Applications folder, and it didn't come when it was called, either. So I started poking around until I found something called Applications and tried to coax it onto the dock, but it flat refused to go. And then I managed to drag the tax software into the folder anyway, and clicked on it, and now it says it won't even start until I upgrade my antique operating system. So what with one thing and another I decide to install the newest version of my operating system, "Yosemite," and the machine starts chugging away with all the vigor of someone pulling up a 5,000-pound halibut from the seafloor with a nylon cord; meanwhile a progress bar suggested (at first) that I would have to wait nine hours for it to download. And then suggested I check back next Tuesday. And finally shrugged digitally and declined to advise.

I walked away.

Even nine hours was plenty of time to talk with my neighbor and learn that the operating system I was pulling up from the seafloor was likely to blow up all my data by the time I got it in the boat, and even if my data are stored on the cloud (which is something, in theory, I've been paying for), it doesn't mean I will ever get any of it off the cloud, although in her case it all turned out to be her phone's fault; and by this time I was so confused I decided it would only be prudent to call up the folks at the Mac store and have a chat.

But when I realized that I had, once again, held my cell phone up to my ear for a good minute waiting for the dial tone, I lost all confidence I would understand whatever they'd have to say. So I walked even farther away. And commenced pulling weeds. Weeds I understand.

And then the day got worse.

Dave got out the power washer to clean the patio and walkways. At least that's how it always starts. Dave loves, loves, loves his power washer. I bought it for him one Christmas because I knew he would love, love, love it. It speaks to all his most extreme neatness tendencies and juices them with turbo power. He loves it way, way, way too much. There's nothing he can't destroy with it, one neat, satisfying layer at a time. He could peel the wrinkles off a rhino. He could strip the Holy from the Pope until you couldn't tell him from any other guy in a dress.

Now, to recap, I had a computer slurping up the seeds of its own destruction; it might never come back; and I had a hundred decibels of assurance that our garden and house might soon be thinned to vapor. I walked even farther away. I started pulling weeds at the house next door. Weeds I understand.

You can spend nine hours pulling weeds, and they'll always come back.

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.