The Inspiration of a Guiding Star: Jardim da Estrela

 

My mind was made up 43 years ago after a week filled with cheap vino tinto, emotional Fado music and lots of walking up and down steep hills in Lisbon. In a park, off the busy, beaten path, I found an inspiration for a horticultural career. The Jardim da Estrela was my guiding star. I professed solemn vows in 1976: I would love parks and gardens forever.

Before I arrived in Portugal I had traveled on the cheap across the United Kingdom, Holland, France and Spain. Dog-eared pages of Arthur Frommer’s travel guide led me to abundant parks and gardens.

On my visit to Portugal, as a 24-year-old, I was unsure what would happen after I plowed through my travel budget. I was a college graduate with a sociology degree and no certain career path. I had spent happy months beforehand, working the end of a spade at the great Hillenmeyer Nurseries in Lexington, Kentucky. Digging soil paid a little and was more satisfying than trying to make sense of Émile Durkeim.

A round trip plane ticket and a Eurail Pass would be the best investments of my life.

Lisbon’s Jardim da Estrela (Star Garden) was not mentioned in Frommer’s.

Fifteen years ago, I gave my travel journal from that year, with no redactions, to my traveler-daughter.

I borrowed the journal back last month and enjoyed rereading my account. During three months of traveling in the late fall of 1975 and winter of 1976, mostly by myself, there were moments of joy, wasted nights and confessional passages of lonely days, but nothing that required absolution.

Kapok blooms

1976 was a crucial period in Portugal. The 1974 Carnation Revolution marked the beginning of a messy political and economic transition from a dictatorship to a Democracy. During this time, Angolans were granted independence, and an estimated 250,000 Portuguese fled Angola and returned home.

The chaos in Portugal scared off tourists, but it didn’t scare me. I was naive and lucky. The Portuguese were gracious to this skinny, bearded wanderer.

I arrived in Lisbon in February 1976. I left the train station and started climbing up the hill. My backpack felt like I was dragging a tractor tire. A street merchant took pity. He put me on a bus to a boarding house in the Estrela neighborhood. It was bedbug-free, comfortable and cheap. The rooms slept four or five. My roommates were neither grifters nor adrift. They were searchers for something exciting that wasn’t yet clear. So was I.

Pokeberry-like fruit of bela sombra, Phytolacca dioica

Creepy, crawly roots of bela sombra

The Basilica da Estrela was the centerpiece of the neighborhood. The Jardim da Estrela, the size of a city block, was the neutral ground. Everyone was welcome. The park was humble, nowhere close to London’s Hyde Park or Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, but bold enough to call itself a garden. I found a comfortable home away from home in Lisbon. People-watching was an interest of mine.  I spent hours here each day for four or five days.

It had been the dead of winter on my first visit, and I had barely begun scratching the surface of plants and gardens.

I had a different vantage on my second visit. My career as a nurseryman and seedsman was in the rearview mirror now.

I returned to the Jardim da Estrela late last month. I had a lovely reunion, though my three hours there seemed a little surreal.

It was early autumn.

I had 43 years of catching up to do in only a few hours.

A teenager with green-dyed hair walked purposefully through the park, while old men and women, who came by their gray hair naturally, poked along leaning on canes, past a table of men shuffling dominoes at the outdoor cafe.

Picnickers and sunbathers staked out the grass.

Bodybuilders pumped it up.

Halfway across the park, children watched a puppet show while two kids, in a play area nearby, learned how to walk on stilts. A few paces away was an open-air, free public library.

A scout group of girls and boys with backpacks and whittled walking sticks marched through the park in loose formation, past the statue of a gardener, wielding a hoe that looked heavy enough to chop sugar cane.

The sculpted gardener’s real-life successors knew how to take care of the Jardim da Estrela. The plantings were neatly tended. There was little trash, and the only vandals were easy to identify. They’d carved their names on thick curved, spiny leaves of giant agaves. Mona and Stefi were here. So were Jenean, Stella, Vesma, Andre, Amark, Leo and Silvia.

The thorny kapok tree, of rainforests, was in bloom. (Frost is rare in Lisbon.) I caught a distinct whiff of marijuana but couldn’t detect the malodorous smell of the pink blooms of Ceiba peltandra. They were too high in the tree for me to reach. The fallen blooms had no scent.

Ginkgoes, palms, philodendrons and southern magnolias mingled with one another. A bird perched high in a 100’ tall Norfolk Island pine looked down on a crooked cylindrical cactus and pockets of blue plumbago and the South African lion’s ear, Leonotis leonurus.

African lion’s ear, Leonotis leonurus

I was happy to see a ground cover of evergreen rhodeas. I grow the sacred lily in the shade of a saucer magnolia at home in Salvisa. I wish some clever breeder would come up with a cultivar that has a fruit stalk with bright red mature berries growing above the foliage, instead of the winterberries staying hidden in the thicket of dark green, strap-shaped leaves. Wouldn’t a yellow-berried form of Rhodea japonica be nice?

I could not identify a fascinating, shade tree with a trunk that looked like it had suffered a melt down. I was told it was bela sombra (nice shadow). The hanging clusters of green berries, high in the tree, looked familiar, but I would never have guessed Phytolacca dioica, a woody South American relative of our native pokeberry. I posted a photo of the immature berries, to try to stump the chumps on the Facebook page Plant Idents. It took 15 minutes before someone got it right.

A newly married couple crossed the street from the Basilica de Estrela to have their wedding photos taken in the park. Their hopes and dreams were consummated for the family album under the big banyan tree.

Organizers for the Partido Inciciativa Liberal were busy, 50 feet away, setting up a rally for Portuguese parliamentary election. Cold beer was waiting in coolers for thirsty, prospective voters. “Cool Operator” played on a loudspeaker in the background.

An earnest, young woman stopped by to invite me to a guided mediation group. She said it might improve my body, heart and soul.

I was tempted by the suggestion but needed at the moment to tend to my sweet tooth.

Chocolate gelato worked wonders.

So did the Jardim da Estrela.

I smiled and thanked the nice woman for the gelato.

“Obrigardo!”

She smiled back and said, “Thank you for coming to the park today.”

The Inspiration of a Guiding Star: Jardim da Estrela originally appeared on GardenRant on October 9, 2019.

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Gardening in the Utah Desert and the Push for “Localscapes”

Temple Gardens, Salt Lake City

As soon as I arrived in Salt Lake City for the national conference of garden communicators last month I heard from multiple sources that the Mormon Temple Gardens were shockingly bad! So I left the busy cocktail reception and set off on a mission to behold the horticultural abomination that had been described to me.

What I found were 35 whole acres of turfgrass and annuals in beds surrounding the Temple, there in the desert! Utah is the second driest state in the country, ya know. Wiki writes:

The gardens at Temple Square include 250 flower beds, over 165,000 bedding plants, and over 700 varieties of plants from all over the world. The gardens are redesigned every six months and replanted mostly by volunteers and seven full-time supervising gardeners.

And it gets worse. The LSD Church is far from alone there in Utah in landscaping like it’s Connecticut. Turfgrass and and other thirsty plants are actually the NORM there – still – and that’s thanks to their water supply being so close and so cheap.

It’s so bad, “some 70 percent of the water in Utah’s cities is used primarily to irrigate grass.” (Source.)

But I’m happy to report that sane water-use messages are beginning to be heard there; a local organizer told me that even the Temple Gardens are slated to be updated.

The primary organization charged with turning the public around about thirsty Eastern landscapes is the local water authority, whose conservation efforts focus on teaching people to use “localscapes,” an educational effort led by “outreach coordinator” Cynthia Bee, whose talk for garden writers I attended.

How NOT to Change Residential Landscapes
Having studied the poor results of water authorities and others pushing for conservation, Cynthia learned that people are turned off by the term xeriscape, which is commonly interpreted as requiring lawns to be replaced with rocks and cactus. Information about conservation is often seen as inaccessible and intimidating. People don’t relate to the term “gardener,” so Cynthia decided to teach “landscaping for homeowners,” not gardening for gardeners.

And a “light bulb moment” for her was finding that people “equate conservation with sacrifice,” giving up something of value for the good of other people.

Localscaping 
In Cynthia’s talks and the courses she teaches, lawn is referred to as a recreation center, not a default ground cover. So if people that if they need some lawn, okay, but if not, she shows them gorgeous xeriscapes that their neighbors might just want to copy.

Here are Cynthia’s “Rules of Lawn:”

• It should be a planned element, not the default.
• Lawns should be unobstructed for easier mowing and irrigation (place trees, etc. outside the lawn)
• Lawns must be at least 8′ wide, to eliminate awkward areas that are hard to water, mow and trim.
• Use hardscaping for paths, not lawn.
• No lawn on slopes.

(To Easteners like me, teaching people to design lawns that are easier to irrigate may sound like a dubious conservation message. Water shouldn’t be wasted irrigating lawns, right? But without irrigation there ARE no lawns in Utah.)

One successful message to homeowners is to “Flip the Strip” by replacing lawn in “hell strips” with localscapes. These small spots are easier to tackle and can be “gateway drugs” for larger changes.

“Save Your Saturday” is another promotional theme that’s working. It shows how much time is saved in mowing and trimming lawns that are designed for efficiency.

In new developments, localscaping was initially offered as an “upgrade,” with larger patios and less lawn, but it was so popular, it’s now it’s standard. It’s driving demand! Contractors get cash back if they localscape. Cynthia provides them with marketing tools touting the beauty and virtues of these landscapes.

People who’ve created “localscapes” share them on social media, to the Localscapes Facebook group and elsewhere. Instead of posting signs proclaiming their yards to be “localscapes,” they post signs at the start of installation, when neighbors are most interested in what’s going on, stating “This yard’s being Localized.” It’s “Pardon our dust” with a message.

How Writers can Help
From Cynthia’s talk to garden writers:

• Translate academic language. “Fancytown words” are less effective.
• Depoliticize this. Don’t offend people. Your goal should be getting the most people to move to the next step.
• Ferret out the real roadblocks and get rid of them.
• Focusing on natives v. nonnatives has much less effect than improving irrigation practices, at least in dry regions.
• If you’re writing for a national audience, remember that dry regions are different! E.g., it makes no sense to recommend rain barrels where there’s almost no rain.

At the Water Authority’s Conservation Garden Park near Salt Lake City.

Gardening in the Utah Desert and the Push for “Localscapes” originally appeared on GardenRant on October 4, 2019.

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Silent

Chickadee photo by Jay Burney

Maybe I’m the only one who saw the recent articles and posts detailing a shocking loss in the North American bird population. Somehow, I don’t think so. I think you all saw it. However, to reiterate: we’ve lost 1 in 4 birds since 1970, almost 3 billion. What the hell?

These are not rare birds and it’s not about extinction. The figures—compiled by a number of long-running sources and surveys and published first in Science journal (see link above)—document an across-the-board loss in our “common” backyard birds, including blackbirds, finches, robins, and sparrows. The figures demonstrate a loss of habitat that is little less than complete ecological disruption.

Where efforts have been made to save birds like the American eagle and many waterbirds, those particular species thrive.  In the meantime, we’ve lost track of the birds we ignore at the feeders, as we hope that their cooler brethren will soon arrive.

Unintentional poem. The point is that this trend clearly points to a future with zero birds. Forty-nine years isn’t much time. If that many birds can be lost within less than fifty years, it won’t take long to disappear the rest. I say disappear because the treatment of wildlife by humans isn’t far removed from those who ran the gulags and the killing fields. Not in terms of horror, of course, but definitely in terms of efficiency. Our obsession with agricultural production, unimpeded development, and spotless lawns has led to a cold and thoughtless destruction of nature that may very well lead to the obliteration of the planet.

In the end, the birds will be collateral damage.

Is there hope? Well … first, let’s elect a government that cares whether or not our grandchildren have a planet to live on.

For the short term: there are the seven directives Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology recommends that most ordinary citizens/homeowners can take. Take a look at them. The main ones I take to heart include marking big windows so birds can see them, reducing plastics, and, mainly, when it comes to gardeners, maintaining and creating habitat. I am not so sure this habitat has to be exclusively native. I have shrubs and trees of all kinds and birds love them. (A ton of chickadees hang out in my Boston ivy.) And the cats. Keep them inside or in their catio. That’s all I got and, honestly, I don’t have high hopes.

Silent originally appeared on GardenRant on October 1, 2019.

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Swamp leaks its secrets during drought

Spider can climb trees too, but the swamp rabbits could outclimb her.

It was called Island Road, a puzzle since there was no lake or river. The island turned out to be a large agricultural field that lay behind the house, hidden by woodland. The only way to it without wading through swamp was a raised field road built by a farmer to access this big chunk of fertile alluvial soil. The cropland lay just a few feet higher than the surrounding wetlands. One side was bordered by a wide straightened stream the locals called the channel. The field road to “the island” was gated and the farmer held a key and he handed one to me. It was like having my own wildlife preserve.

The shack can be seen in the distance. The swamp lay behind it.

 

I lived just in front of that gate in a shabby, uninsulated tenant shack, but those eight years were some of the richest of my life. Permission to explore the 1600 acres that surrounded the shack was the gift of a lifetime. Through every season, almost every day (unless there was a driving rain) we headed out for a ramble. The swamps lay behind me and the higher land across the road. Eventually we came to know all the nooks, crests and paths. It was our pleasure and privilege to watch the seasons change in the many plant and animal communities we came to know intimately.

Tadpole inexplicably found pokeweed berries and rolled in them. Pearl is amused.

We, I should explain, are the pack, composed of one human and a troop of dogs. Dogs are the best company for meandering rambles. They live in the moment and bring no angst with them from the world of bills and clocks. Our communication was mostly wordless. I could turn them with a whistle and wave of my arm. They would make me aware of other creatures, sometimes by body English and other times by the art of barking.
The troop size varied by how many dogs had been thrown out at the local bridge, where unscrupulous sorts also threw out garbage, dead appliances and even dead livestock. I picked up the dogs, doctored them , neutered them, and fattened them up. If they blossomed into adoptable dogs, I worked with local rescues to assure these blue collar dogs would end up in white-collar homes. If they stayed too fearful of strangers, or had persistent health issues, they could stay with me. A few dogs declared right away that they wanted only me as their person, and I agreed it was so.
I’d never lived adjacent to a swamp, never thought I’d want to, but if you ever doubted water was life, this was proof. What is the best adjective for that habitat? Teeming. Abundant. Rife. Fecund…
…until that fall. The current fall drought we are experiencing reminded me of this similar one – that fall when I still lived in the Luray bottoms. That fall it grew so dry that we were able to walk areas of the swamp that were usually hip deep in black water, areas I had only been able to navigate before by picking my way along incredibly long and meandering beaver dams.
Some places were deceptive – still a little spongy, and if I didn’t keep moving, I’d begin to sink. Other times what looked solid was just a thin crust that my booth punched right through and I’d find myself up to the knee in muck. My farmer friend Van David Harris had warned me many times about parts of the swamp where you could “git marred up to yer straddle”.
Seeing the swamp stripped of its watery cover was enlightening. Some of the sedges I thought were growing in the water were actually perched atop barely covered stumps. Now they look like wild hairdos atop columns of bark.
There are no common bald cypress trees in this swamp. The larger trees that stood in the water were tupelo gum (Nyssa aquatica). The shape and color of the trunks changed just at submersion level, where they became quite tubby. Many, even most, were hollow, I suspect from being gnawed by beaver at some point. The opening to the hollow was usually half in and half out of the water, forming a dark cave when the swamp was full. Now we could walk right up to peer in, and speculate what other creatures had taken refuge there besides swamp rabbits. On many occasions we had witnessed swamp rabbits (Sylvilagus aquaticus) swim into them and climb up high inside the hollow trees, causing much doggy consternation.

Swamp rabbits always live near water and use it as a means to escape.

The dry swamp revealed a network of narrow ditches just a few inches deep. They ran through the bottoms of the pools, completely invisible when the pools were full of water. The randomness of their directions were in sharp contrast to their puzzling uniformity in width and depth. I followed them, now full of crispy leaves underfoot, and found they often led to beaver lodges, now high and dry. The beavers must have made them, but there was no evidence of digging.

Beaver create wetlands which supports a wide array of wildlife…and they are damn cute.

I made a call to Dr. Allan Houston, wildlife biologist at the Ames Plantation research center in Hardeman County. He explained that the uniform ditches were created by constant use and are called beaver runs. Just as you may find animal paths of uniform width through the fields, these are beaver paths underwater, and the width is just the width of their bodies.
The lodges were impressive – made of mud and sticks, with two holes for entry and exit, both below the usual water level. I was tempted to make a peephole and peer inside, but felt it was rude to tear up someone’s home while they were gone. I hoped they’d be back when the water returned.
Besides, maybe it was time to let some of the secrets remain so. The drought had taken its toll on the swamp and its residents, but it had rewarded me with its revelations. On my way back to the house on the dusty field road, I did my best rain dance. The dogs were tired and thirsty and did not notice.

Carlos sniffs Clover’s butt while Jethro takes a good roll on some deer scat.

Swamp leaks its secrets during drought originally appeared on GardenRant on September 28, 2019.

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It’s Not Just Your Gardening Skills That Will Let Your Garden Flourish

The post It’s Not Just Your Gardening Skills That Will Let Your Garden Flourish appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.

Gardening is one of the most relaxing things in the world. It’s a chance to get out in the open, without it having to involve any real physical exercise at all. Plus, a really nice looking garden is so underestimated, and we really do think that people should be putting more effort into the way it looks. That doesn’t mean that you have to be out there all hours of the day, tending to it in ways that only a YouTube tutorial will show you how.

And that doesn’t mean that you have to spend time adding in fancy garden ornaments, and clogging up your garden. It simply means that you have to have an eye for the way it looks, and take pride in that. Only simple work is needed in a garden to make it truly wonderful, but it’s not always the work you’re doing directly to the garden that’s going to help.

To properly manage and maintain your garden, there are a few other tools that you should consider. We’re going to suggest some of them to you today, and show you how we think they can help with the management! 

A Bit Of Technology

You might be wondering how technology is going to help you here, but it really can. The first way it can help you is by inspiring you in terms of design. There are so many garden design ideas on Pinterest that you could use to inspire you. The other way it can help you is through some of the apps that you might be able to use. There have been some created that will show you the cycle of maintenance that you should be following to achieve the best garden possible.

But because this idea is not as advanced as it could be, a lot of the apps are filled with spam and could harm your computer. If you follow this link https://setapp.com/how-to/how-to-uninstall-apps-on-macos, it will show you how to remove any apps that you think are going to harm the computer, but there will be ones that do the job perfectly, so make sure you’re having a look to see which one suits your gardening needs! 

Creative Design 

Creative design is so important for some of you, and to get that creative flare, you might benefit from bringing in a professional gardener. They can advise you what colours would work well where, how to position plants and trees for optimum growth and just generally how to get that perfect look. Although you might have been doing all of your gardening up until now, having that different view to show you new things is always going to be valuable. 

A Helping Hand

Another form of a helping hand here, but if you feel like your garden is just too much to manage on your own, then why not get some helping hands in the form of grandchildren, or nieces and nephews? Gardening is so much fun for kids to do, and getting them involved and showing them how to manage a garden and take care of things can be a valuable life lesson. 

The post It’s Not Just Your Gardening Skills That Will Let Your Garden Flourish appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.

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There is No Planet B

Louisville Climate Strike

There were student-led Global Climate Strikes all over the world last Friday, inspired by the lovable 16-year old Greta Thunberg. An estimated two hundred people rallied in Louisville. The Louisville kids were lovable, too. I felt unqualified to be among young people so passionate and unjaded.

Is it time to follow their lead or do we roll our eyes and remind them they have so much more they need to learn?

The kids delivered moving speeches, imploring the powerful to take action. “There is no Planet B,” one sign read. I was deeply moved and thanked many of the kids.

The most memorable remark, however, came from an old man, passing by, who saw my sign, “Mr. Mayor…How hot do you like it? More Trees!”

He asked me, “Why bother with trees?” I pointed out how much cooler it was in the shade of the park tree we were standing under. “Air conditioning is a whole lot better,” he said.

I don’t think he knew what he’d stumbled into, earlier, when he walked into Jefferson Square Park across the street from the mayor’s office. The old man, around my age, had no idea how profound his words were. His simple statement was the head-scratching difference between reality and vision. There are a lot more people comfortable with air conditioning than planting more trees.

Oh, to be young again, courageous and undeceiving.

There is No Planet B originally appeared on GardenRant on September 26, 2019.

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Gardening When You Really Don’t Wanna

The most dreaded thing I’ve ever had to face was to be dragged along while my mom took my sisters shopping. Any time this happened, it was beyond awful. A purgatory of boredom and sadness, it could last anywhere from endless to eternal.

Picture it this way: I’m an otherwise happy, well-adjusted 6-8 year old boy, but I’m being held hostage in a cavern of clothes racks at some store for the 6th or 7th hour and my arm is being held straight up above my head. All the blood it ever contained has drained from it hours ago, my wrist is gripped white-knuckled tight by an unbelievably strong, terrifyingly frustrated, and appallingly unsympathetic mother, and she is yanking my arm right and left to emphasize each and every syllable–my whole body violently following each yank–as she repeats some variation of a sentence that starts with “Mister, you had…” and ends with …”something to cry about.”

Any expedition to go buy clothes was like this. Totally unendurable. But the worst of the worst death marches were treks for Easter outfits and shoes. Easter outfits? I want to cry right now just thinking about it. What absolute zero is to physics about describes the absolute misery caused by Easter shopping. But shopping for shoes was even worse.

There is no telling the amount of pain that went into making this photograph possible.

If I remember right, the main issue with shoes was that one of my sisters had skinny little feet and, for her, there were always several choices of adorably cute shoes. Amazing how much time could leave the universe deciding which pair. Ridiculous. But so much worse was this. My other sister had wide feet and needed “corrective” shoes. This was the double whammy that consigned me to dangle from one arm in store after store after store as my mother led us all–wild in sorrow–in an ever widening migration of despair, shoe store to shoe store in what we all knew was a vain pursuit of a cute pair of wide “corrective” shoes.

The sound of this misery–moaning, whining, complaining, crying, and my mother’s hissing, cursing attempts to make it stop–steadily built to a crescendo of unhappiness that NASA should have recorded and then perpetually beamed into space so as to deter hostile aliens from ever having any interest in our planet.

Anyway, this is how I spent somewhere around a quarter of my childhood.

And this same level of misery about describes a quarter of my gardening chores. That’s right. Gardening ain’t all wine and roses. You see, I’m not in it for the motions. I don’t garden because I like to push a mower around the yard in a certain pattern. I never have a hankering to go turn a compost heap, or haul brush to the woods, or spread 15-20 yards of mulch. I don’t like trying to figure out why my well-pump isn’t working, and it’s been a very long time since I found something compelling about digging a hole.

Those activities are merely a means to an end, and the end is a beautiful garden with all the benefits therein: a backyard oasis, a refuge for wildlife, and a safe place to enjoy the sweetest kind of peace on Earth. Bonus credits for a contented wife, adulation from strangers during garden tours, and for a green vegetative kind of privacy that allows open, carefree peeing in the middle of the backyard at any time on any given day during the growing season.

Yes. All this, not pulling weeds, is why I garden.

And yet even as we speak I have sacks and sacks of bulbs to plant before the ground freezes. And it’s football season. It’s been a hard year, I’m kind of gardened out, and no matter how much I try to focus any ESP powers I’ve got, those bulbs just are not going to plant themselves. This, all because I heard Brent Heath speak back in May, got all excited, and placed a big order.

So I will do what I’ve always done: make excuses, put the task off, and try not to think about it too much. And I will do these things for week after week. In certain times when I’m feeling the urgency more greatly, I’ll quietly wish for an injury or a breakdown that will serve as an adequate excuse for failing to get them planted. Eventually however, the day will inevitably come when there’s no room for even one more second of procrastination.

And there I’ll be, on my knees, cold, slimy soil chilling me to my bones, a bitter wind rasping at my face, trying not to smell the dog crap that got on my jeans because it was camouflaged in the leaves, and suffering strange, phantom jerking motions in my right arm. Inside, on TV, The Ohio State Buckeyes are defeating Michigan again. There’s guacamole on the counter. Beer in the fridge. But I’m outside, cursing that smooth talking Brent Heath.

Another time it’ll be summer. 100 degrees out. And I’ll be cutting down a skanky old crabapple and every single twisty, pokey, gnarly, and ugly branch will have made up its mind to fight me every step of the way. Whatever I want, they’ll want the opposite. They’ll gouge at my eyes. They’ll gash my skin. Nasty, itchy stuff will fall down the back of my shirt. I’ll be sweating, bleeding, and pissed off. There will be no easy angle to position for any single cut. Brush will tangle underfoot. Each of a hundred logs will not stack without a brute force battle of wills, and not one piece of brush will go into the truck and stay there until I’ve discovered–by endless repetition only–the mystical combination of cuss words that will unlock the kingdom. And it’ll suck.

A crabapple displaying full on winter interest in the middle of summer.

Or, it’s mid spring in Ohio and like a complete freakin’ idiot I again jumped the gun and planted out a bunch of tender stuff. I get home from work after dark, it’s 35F and raining, and they’re calling for a hard frost. And, like a damned soul in a Renaissance painting, I’ll inconsolably drag myself outside, and for the next fours hours I will–in fits and starts–construct the world’s twelfth largest shanty town in the backyard from whatever little bits of scrap wood, chunks of rock and rubble, some string, tape, old sheets, blankets, and filthy leftover plastic sheeting I can find in a panicked effort to save a bunch of annuals, tropicals, vegetables, and some expensive fern that Tony Avent said was hardy to Zone 7b, (at least) from a cold, lonely, continental, Z6a, untimely death.

Fun times.

Here’s what follows that: You drag yourself back inside, take a forever long hot shower, down a few shots, and, sitting there as surly as sin, you think really dark and dirty thoughts. Other people aren’t doing this shit. Other people live in condos. They have their thermostats set at “Giant-Ass Carbon Footprint.” So warm they’ve been forced to strip down to teddies and speedos. They’ve over-eaten a fabulous dinner and drank a bottle of wine they don’t even know enough to appreciate. Yep, you were having a cold, wet piece of plastic that smelled mind-blowingly bad whipping back and forth across your face as you, both hands engaged, tried to tack it down over a row of tomato plants, and those condo people were doing that. And you loathe them.

And, yet, you garden on.

Honestly, I’m mystified. Where does the fortitude come from that gets gardeners outside to suffer through odious tasks under miserable circumstances simply because they need to be done? I don’t know. Really don’t. But I’ve done it. Over and over and over again. And my gardening friends have all done it too. I don’t know, reminds me of something that parents used to toss off at you with a smirk: “Hey, it builds character.” Maybe gardeners have that.

But, I will say this. Winter is long and it dies hard. It rears its ugly head again and again before it’s finally defeated, and there ain’t no better tonic for that than the almost tearful joy a garden full of blooming bulbs brings. They fill the heart, God bless them, combating cold and gray with color and fragrance.

And then comes summer. Hot and humid. Sometimes you just want to run from the house to the car, from the car to the office, and then back again. A/C to A/C. An inside, artificial existence devoid of anything that stokes our human nature. But under a shade tree you’ve tended for years, you can enjoy a tall drink and the hordes of butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds that come to visit that Lantana you saved. And then can pick some of your own tomatoes right from the vine and bring them in for the BLTs you’ll have for supper.

Some other time you’ll find yourself looking at the empty space where a scabby, rusty crabapple once lived, and you will take huge and vicious satisfaction in knowing that it was living its hideous existence and then you sawed it down. It was ugly and now it’s not. It’s gone. And you’re totally responsible. And, yet, you live as a free man. You feel no guilt. Nope. You feel joy. It poked your eyes. It raked your skin. It hurt your back. But all that’s over now. You’ve got a drink, and you’re smiling almost fiendishly as you enjoy the lovely aromas of ribs smoking in the crab’s smoldering wood.

You just try not to think too much about the stump you chose not to grub out. Nor that day sometime in the future when you’ll roll in a 400-pound, balled and burlaped, plant du jour that some speaker at some conference got you all excited about. Yeah. Sure enough. That day will come, and it will be woeful. But that’s just how it is. That’s how it’s meant to be. To have this, you gotta do that. And you’d have it no other way.

Gardening When You Really Don’t Wanna originally appeared on GardenRant on September 25, 2019.

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