Gardening 5

“It was the most wonderful garden in all the world because the flowers did exactly what they pleased. They seeded down and came up and seeded down again and ran into each other’s arms and on past and scattered everywhere, and all the vines ran sprawling over the ground or climbed trees or ran on top of the fence; and all the bulbs spread and grew in clusters, and everything was wild and free.”

—The Magic Garden by Gene Stratton–Porter

A year ago, a bird planted a morning glory seed in the corner of my vegetable garden. I did not recognize the plant as either a vegetable or a weed, and I let it grow. That summer, dark blue blossoms of prodigious size decorated vines that truly “ran sprawling over the ground … wild and free.” This summer, dozens of morning glory seedlings have sprouted in that same corner. I have transplanted several around the lampposts by the street, and I have permitted many more to grow among my vegetables and to do “exactly what they pleased.” Others I have had to plow out, so as to have some semblance of order.

Garden After Rain on the 5th of June

“Oh! Blessed rage for order, Pale Ramon,” I remember studying in college for the first time. How often since those serene days as an undergraduate at Indiana University have I returned to Wallace Stevens’ poem entitled “The Idea of Order at Key West,” teasing out meaning after meaning! Now that I have retired after a long career teaching early American literature at Northern Kentucky University, I am prepared to leave Wallace’s meanings alone. In the same way that Wallace’s order roars in and drifts out like waves on a beach, order in my garden is only one of two opposite manifestations of something larger. By continuous cultivating, I impose order in the form of rows, but, by running “into each other’s arms” and beyond, the flowers bring disorder. Now, what is the name for the synthesis of order and disorder? Call it Beauty, for that is its effect! Or call it Glory, to honor the flower! Or call it nothing at all and relish the feeling that order and disorder are finally the same in a summertime garden.

Another View After the June 5th Rain

The squash seeds that I planted at neat intervals have become jungle plants recognizing no boundaries. The beans have crisscrossed their branches until I am unable to find all the slender pods concealed in rich profusion among the leaves. The heavy heads of the sunflowers droop and bob on springy stalks in and out of the floral border. Throughout the sunlit hours, birds and butterflies flit among the sunflowers, tithonia, and cosmos in kaleidoscopic color.

Sunflower Bobbing in the Border of My Garden on June 29th

At Pontiac, Illinois, many years ago, a deep orange sunset made silhouettes at the Central States Threshermen’s Reunion. Brothers Jim and John Haley had been helping me show my farm steam engine and were teaching me how to shut down the machine for the evening. Jim said, “We’ve had about as much fun as we can stand for one day.” His expression is well suited to gardening, too. Every summer, the garden that I call mine gives me more happiness than I can contain.   

Gardening 2

“The influence of her taste was seen also in the family garden, where the ornamental began to mingle with the useful; whole rows of fiery marigolds and splendid hollyhocks bordered the cabbage beds, and gigantic sunflowers lolled their broad, jolly faces over the fences, seeming to ogle most affectionately the passers-by.”

     —“Wolfert Webber, Or Golden Dreams,” in Tales of a Traveler by Washington Irving

A few years ago, I had the happy inspiration to surround my vegetable garden with a floral border mixing “fiery marigolds” and “gigantic sunflowers.” My thought was to cut as many bouquets as I might like, and I have gathered armloads of blossoms from the prolific display of flowers surrounding my beans and squash. Even so, I have experienced an irrational reluctance to turn to my borders for blooms. The profusion of petals is so spectacular en masse and such an invitation to butterflies and birds that I am hesitant to claim any zinnias or cosmos for my kitchen or living room. To demur is silly. After all, at the end of the season, the flowers will have gone to seed and, in the spring, their stalks will be plowed under. I might as well remain true to my vision and cut flowers at will.

My Garden on May 12, 2016

Unlike the character in Irving’s tale, I have no cabbages for my flowers to accompany. While I like cooked cabbage—especially on St. Patrick’s Day—I seldom have enough use for cabbage to justify growing any in my garden. When I was growing up, my mother planted rows of cabbages. For exhibits at the annual 4-H fair, we walked up and down in search of the largest cabbage, a heavy one with great waxy leaves spread so wide that it was all I could do to hold it in front of me and to lug it back to the house. In retrospect, I wonder what my mother did with all that cabbage. When I was very young, she made sauerkraut in ancient crocks that huddled in the darkness of a cellar beneath our smokehouse, but, by the time I participated in the gardening projects at the county fair, she no longer made kraut. Our family ate plenty of cooked cabbage, but we could not possibly have consumed as much as my mother grew. A cabbage conundrum!

Sunflowers I have in abundance! Small and large, yellow and red, my sunflowers may not “ogle most affectionately the passers-by,” but they serve as banquets for birds and squirrels. At precisely the moment when their diamond-pattern seed cushions become ready for shelling, the birds come to help themselves to the bounty. In only a day or two, the seeds are pecked loose. The birds are not tidy. They drop many seeds on the ground. The squirrels do not pause to thank their feathered compatriots; rather, they busily comb the ground to scavenge every seed abandoned by the birds.

Alas! I have no hollyhocks. I admire them in the distant yards of neighbors, but I grow none of my own. Up close, they are so dry, dusty, insect-ridden, and full of spiders that I am loath to plant any.

My borders feature the delicately arching cosmos, the frankly sturdy marigold, the utterly dependable zinnia, and the wonderfully robust tithonia in rainbows of hue and tint. Going to the garden to fetch a batch of beans is a treat for the eyes!       

My Summer in a Garden: The Chaos of Weeds and the Price of Order

I went away for a week. The weeds in the garden sensed that I was gone, and they went crazy. When I returned, I found a sea of thriving weeds where my garden had been. I had hoed them before I left. Where did they all come from in only a week? How did they get to be so tall in only eight days?

I have known many who would have given up—who would have said, “I can’t tackle a problem this big”—who would have let the weeds take the garden and who would have hoped to find a cucumber or a carrot hidden among the weeds later. Not I. With hope springing eternal, I got my hoe and began at one corner of the garden.

It was about 6:00 a.m. My plan was to finish the weeding before the deer flies were awake. Few insects in my area can make a human life a misery any more aggressively and ruthlessly than a deer fly. At about 9:00, I was still hard at work, and the first deer fly found me. It bit my neck. Then it bit the small of my back, where my shirt was clinging to the perspiration. For the next three hours, it alternated between biting my neck and biting my back. Several times, my instinct to eliminate my fierce adversary overcame my wish to protect nature, and I swatted at the fly. It was always too quick, flying off just as I swatted myself with the palm of my hand.

Painting of a Summer Farm, My Flea Market "Find"

 

The weeding went ever so slowly. When I reached the beets, I had to hunker down to pull by hand the weeds from the rows. I uprooted at least two beets, and I dutifully replanted them, mounding the dirt around them. In my experience, such replanting never works. Usually, the plant perishes. When it lives, it remains small and relatively unproductive. Why do I bother to replant the uprooted vegetables? Because I feel so guilty for having clumsily removed a growing plant that had sprung from an expensive seed.

When I came to the carrots, I was ready to cry out in anguish. Locating the stems of the weeds was practically impossible. Each time that I thought I had a weed stem firmly grasped between my thumb and fingers, I would softly pull back the foliage with my free hand to see if I had a weed or a carrot, and, with an astonishing frequency, I had a carrot in my grasp. The work proceeded with agonizing slowness. Even as careful as I was, I managed to tear several carrots out of the earth where they had been happily growing.

After several hours, my mind became my enemy. I kept thinking, “Surely, this is not a wise investment. The seeds, potatoes, and onions cost too much money and not enough of them grew. Here you are, losing hours that could be spent on more important tasks, and you could just as easily buy fresh vegetables at the farmers’ market. Why should you provide yourself as an entrée for a deer fly?”

By the time that I was ready to agree that I was a fool, I had reached the squash and cucumbers and was beginning to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The sun was beating down, and the perspiration was flowing freely. My shirt clung to me, and the band of my broad-brimmed straw hat was clammy. Even so, I was not going to give up now.

With a fury formed from the desire for victory, I slashed at the weeds. I did so in brief spurts of energy. My muscles were so tired that I could not sustain a long attack. In between bouts, I stood supported by my hoe for several seconds while summoning enough energy to flail at the bindweed, lamb’s quarter, and redroot pigweed. With a final effort, not Herculean but quite puny in fact, I scraped the last weed away.

I wish I could say I felt sorry for the carnage; after all, weeds are simply plants I consider to be in the wrong place. They were strewn about the garden, their wilting leaves half buried under dirt, half trampled by my feet. At the time, I was hardly contrite. I looked across a garden with well-defined rows of lettuce, onions, beans, and even flowers! Such lovely order had arisen from chaos!

Suddenly, I heard my first wren. I should say, “For the first time, I paid attention to the song of the wren.” Undoubtedly, the wren had been singing all along. I had been too focused on weeding to notice. As the bird warbled its notes, I relaxed and realized, “This is why I have a garden. It is my song expressed in vegetables that I can serve for lunch and dinner—vegetables with no herbicides, insecticides, or other ‘cides’ to make me ill—vegetables utterly organic and radically flavorful.” I could not put a price tag on something so pleasant. Smiling, I nodded that the garden was worth the work.   

My Summer in a Garden: Wonder and Reality

I am astonished that I am weeding and watering my garden. From the time I was little until the time I went away to college, my mother insisted that I work in the garden, and I did not look forward to the tedious labor: especially the task of pulling tiny weeds from rows of tiny carrots! Only in my adulthood—after many years of university education and university teaching—have I returned to growing vegetables, and I can hardly get enough of the good feeling that working in the earth invokes for me.

On May 24th, Plants Defining Rows in My Garden

So I stride forth of an early morning, hoe in hand, sprinkling buckets nearby, and survey the dominion of beets and squash. I will become them; they, me. After all, we are what we eat. When I look closely at the beans forming like slow-motion balloons, I am seeing the future cells of my body. Oh, and did I mention I use no insecticide, herbicide, or fungicide on my vegetables? I am afraid that they must face life without such protections. When their matter mixes with mine and becomes me after lunch or dinner, they bring with them no harmful chemicals to inflict illness or disease on me.

On June 5th, Weeds Overtaking My Garden

In “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” Walt Whitman wrote that “the substantial words are in the ground and sea, / They are in the air, they are in you.” He suggested that the words I am using now are feeble and pale in comparison to the strong and vibrant “words” on which they are modeled. Whitman continued, “Human bodies are words,” more substantial than the words I am forming here. Whitman said, “Air, soil, water, fire—those are words, / I myself am a word with them—my qualities interpenetrate with theirs” even as I was just saying about becoming what I have for dinner. Leave it to Whitman to use the metaphor of words, themselves metaphors, to signify the most profound meanings and the most fundamental communication!

On June 5th, My Garden After Meticulous Hoeing

For gardening is meaningful communication with the earth. Each glistening pebble I find in the rows attests to vast geological processes that have brought us together in this instant. Every dancing butterfly I glimpse above the flowers speaks about miraculous biological changes that have transformed caterpillars into fluttering splashes of vivid color. All the stems and leaves around me give voice to rock, water, sun, and wind.

And the baby rabbit I discover watching me is a triumph of living art! My artistic ability is not equal to the challenge of making a twitching rabbit. Yet the universe knows how to create such intricate lives!

When I walk into my garden each day, I am prepared for amazement. Wonders surround me, and I stand sampling the fresh air in their midst. Even as I reflect on the spiritual tonic that gardening has become for me, I must confront realities. My cucumbers are not doing well. They appear to be wilting, even with abundant rainfall. As I have seen no cucumber beetles, I am unable to diagnose the cause of the problem. Animals continue to sample the plants, even eating the tops off one or two sunflowers; the critters have been most devastating to the beans, it seems.

Garden After Rain on June 12: A Few Wonderful Plants

Even though I have gardened for enough years to recognize that all my gardens are similar, I also acknowledge that different years bring different gardens. This year, I will focus my appreciation on a few plants and not spread my gratitude over multitudes crowded into sprawling rows. Why not? Because many seeds did not sprout. Gaps are everywhere and probably will not fill in even when the plants are mature.

Despite my poor yields, I have already been enjoying mustard greens in fresh salads. The mesclun seeds that I planted included five varieties: Beet Bull’s Blood, Spinach Bloomsdale Long Standing, Lettuce Black Seeded Simpson, Lettuce Red Salad Bowl, and Mustard Tendergreen. The mustard predominated, with a few of the green lettuce leaves in between. I find no trace of the beets, the spinach, or the red lettuce. The mustard leaves have what I would describe as a spicy note. Adding the mustard to mixed salad that I have bought at the grocery store has brightened lots of lunches. Recently, I noticed that the mustard leaves are beginning to toughen and become bitter, but I can see that other vegetables will soon be ready to harvest.

So, this year, Whitman might say that my patch of earth is singing simple songs, not grand oratorios as in past summers. I am learning that simplicity can be the proverbial spice of life.