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: Weeding 3.0

Abundant rain kept me out of my garden. After the wet spell, I strolled out to take a proud view of my neat rows. I saw a carpet of thick, tall weeds carpeting the ground. “I must have been mistaken,” I thought. “I must have imagined that I weeded and hoed this garden a week ago. It could not have been this garden that I so carefully tended. Maybe I accidentally weeded and hoed someone else’s garden.”

Garden Coming Along on June 21st

I took my trusty hoe and began. The weeds were worse than they were before. Fortunately, the rain had made the ground easy to work. It was no trouble to pull the largest weeds, root and all. There were just so many of them! Also, the hoe cut through the upper surface of the ground just enough to clip the stems from the roots of the weeds too small to pull. The summer solstice had come and gone, and the heat was much higher than it had been even a week earlier. I follow the practice of my father and the old-time farmers: I wear jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat. I prefer not to be sunburned, and the long sleeves keep me less hot than I would be otherwise. Even with my protective clothing, I soon felt perspiration, which soaked through my shirt. Before long, even my jeans were damp!

Garden After Third Massive Weeding

I struck the hoe over and over against tough roots. I bent low over rows to pull huge pigweeds from amid the potatoes. I could not believe that, for the third time this year, I was involved in a monstrous weeding, as if the previous two weedings had been for nothing.

Next year, before I order seeds, I will read my blogs. Maybe I will become a regular customer at the farmer’s market and will skip gardening. What joy is there in repeating exactly the same hard work of a week ago?

The fact that many of my seeds had not sprouted in the first place was haunting me now. Large gaps were not shaded by the leaves of vegetables and had to be hoed smooth. Not far from where I live is a perfect garden of about the same size as mine. It stands so near the road that I am forced to look upon it. The rows are as straight as a ruler, the plants are spaced exactly alike down the rows, the stakes have the same height throughout and do not lean, and the weeds—well, there are none. What gardener has the patience and the good luck to have a garden like that? I would ask the owner if I could take a picture to post online, but I fear that the obsessive compulsive individual might rightly ask to see my garden. So everyone will have to imagine how faultless and immaculate that other garden is.

The First Flowers in My Garden

My garden is what a garden is meant to be: haphazard, uneven, inexact, and overgrown in spots. Of course, the previous sentence is only a literary stunt intended to sound true but a cheap alibi nonetheless. I wish my rows were as satisfactory as those of my neighbor, but, before I covet my neighbor’s cucumber, I will content myself by saying that, after I hoed my last weed, I harvested three fat zucchini that will send me into an ecstatic state of mind at my dinner table. As I carried them to the house, I almost forgot my aching back.

Why I Plant Flower Borders Around My Vegetable Garden

Ever since I moved to the country, I have had a vegetable garden behind the barn. When I was in college, had you asked me if I would want to plant vegetables, I would have said, “No! Never again!” While I was growing up, my mother forced me to plant, weed, and hoe in her massive garden, and I was delighted to go away to college and avoid sweating and swatting flies while working in the dirt of a vegetable patch. Years later, when I knew I would be moving to a renovated farmhouse, I could not wait to plant a garden. I wanted to revive my dormant knowledge of growing vegetables, and I wanted to honor my mother, who had instilled in me the important values of gardening.

As my mother knew, growing beans and carrots is not done just for the exercise; rather, producing food is meditating, appreciating earth, embracing life, loving neighbors, and a host of other qualities so fundamental that other tasks shrink to relative insignificance in comparison.

Zinnia in My Garden Border

My initial forays into the joys of raising vegetables were not entirely successful. Raccoons and deer helped themselves to my first garden without as much as a thank you. The next year found me at the local livestock supply store, where I bought an electric fence. When I tested it, I was standing in a pool of April rainwater, and I received such a jolt that I literally landed on my butt in the mud. The fence kept my garden free of deer and raccoons, but I felt sorry for the awful shocks that I must have been delivering to them. The next year, I dispensed with the electric fence and grew mostly vegetables that are found beneath the surface of the soil or that are not so desirable to wildlife. This meant that I could not grow sweet corn, but I bought plenty of it from the local farmer’s market. What I could grow were beets, potatoes, carrots, onions, and turnips. I found that animals left my squash and Swiss chard alone.

I have a story to share about how remarkable Beananza bush beans are. Unidentified animals repeatedly gnawed the tops off my beans. Each plant had not more than about eight leaves, yet, surprisingly, week after week, the rows produced more beans than I could use!

Grasshopper Posing on a Giant Marigold in My Border

As my central purpose for writing this posting is to share information about flowers, let me turn to them. Two years ago, I thought how pleasant it would be to plant a border of flowers around my vegetable garden. I added two rows of flower seeds around the perimeter of what is practically a square garden area. In the mix were zinnias, giant marigolds, and cosmos. Like snowflakes, no two of which are alike (they say), my zinnias were as varied as varied can be. On many summer mornings, I brought fresh flowers from the garden to my home and filled vases in all the rooms.

Flowers Filling Border in 2013

Last year, I enthusiastically added a border of flowers again. I chose marigolds, zinnias, tithonia (which I had never previously grown), and different kinds of sunflowers. The ground slopes slightly to the west, and, where the rain ran, the fertilizer must have flowed, too. The tithonia along the western border exceeded eight feet in height. I was so stunned by their stature that I dug out the seed packet to read it again, and, yes, it said that the flowers would reach a height of four feet. I wasn’t dreaming, either. Mine rose far above my head!

Flowers Filling Border Again in 2014

My photographs of the flower borders are deceptive. The images fool me, as well, and, having pulled weeds for years, I know how big my vegetable garden is. The photos make my garden look small: really small, perhaps not larger than thirty-six square feet. The area within the border is actually about three hundred square feet! In the pictures, there is nothing to indicate the scale. The flowers have been simply huge!

Tithonia That Grew to Eight Feet in My Garden

 

Marigolds are said to keep rabbits away, but, last year, I was delighted to discover baby rabbits beneath my squash and cucumber leaves. All summer, I watched them grow. Whenever I harvested squash, I would find the growing rabbits discreetly hopping to hide among the zucchini. Unlike Elmer Fudd, I regarded them as my friends.

The sunflowers and other seeds attracted flocks of birds and large contingents of butterflies. They, too, were my constant acquaintances, and their colorful flitting about made my gardening experience all the richer.

The seeds for this spring’s flower border have already arrived!