Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow: And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some a hundred.
—PARABLE OF THE SOWER, GOSPEL OF MARK 4:3–8
IT IS THE CUSP OF SUMMER, and—congratulations, it’s your lucky day!—suddenly as hot as hell. Special delivery. I will turn fifty-seven at ten till high noon, and I am having a positive swelter of a birthday, not from some hot flash (one symptom of climate change that blessedly skipped me) but something heading more in the general direction of heatstroke if nobody intervenes.
This is no time to stop, though, and besides, there is no air-conditioning or swimming pool, anyway, to stop in. Garden hose over the head, anyone? After an hour or so of chores I am so overheated that I drag myself back inside and up the steep, narrow enclosed staircase into the furnace atmosphere of the low-ceilinged second floor, because I have it in my head—where do such ideas sprout from?—that I may find relief in some very old jeans and a big pair of scissors strong enough to cut through their industrial-strength twill.
Off at the knees go the twenty-year-old pant legs; off come my baggy, well-worn khakis; on go the newborn—or are they reincarnated?—shorts.
In thirty years of gardening, I have never worn shorts. I do not own a pair, a fact that made this latest improvisation necessary. First impressions as I head down the front path: Outdoors feels cooler with half your trousers missing. So far, so good.
“Nice legs, Marge,” says a carpenter friend, Harry, on his way up the walk at the same time to tackle the latest in this old house’s unending life list of repairs. To be clear (and in the name of retaining a modicum of self-respect): There is nothing unshapely about my legs. They are perfectly acceptable legs, a matched set, basically, and in good working order. What Harry is commenting on is that after several decades under wraps, they have adopted a cast that could very well be counted on to glow in the dark; they are the light-deprived white asparagus or Belgian endive of lower limbs. If legs can be said to have a pallor, mine do. I should consider it a compassionate act that he didn’t sing a few bars of “You Light Up My Life”—though I was carrying a shovel, and was perhaps considered armed and dangerous. Should I have self-tanned in preparation? (Do I seem like someone with the patience for that? Do real gardeners self-tan?)
But today I am fifty-seven and I am busy and burning up. Following the ricocheting style of logic I specialize in, it could be predicted that a solitary person such as myself, one who can even lean toward periods of hermitlike behavior, would love the sun. The word “solitary” is positively sun-filled, springing from the root word sol; and “hermit” comes from the Greek word eremia, for “desert.” Are loners really hot stuff? Not in this outfit.
I hate the heat.
Neither the chores nor the temperature promises to relent, so I have deployed my own countermeasures in the face of them: I shall set about gardening in short pants.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear my cast-off denims cut and rolled.
No, actually, I shall not. The experiment lasts a quarter of an hour or perhaps a half. I feel ill-equipped for the work at hand, and positively naked; back up to the furnace for my trusty khakis. It hadn’t taken long for bare knees to bear an intaglio of each leaf of grass—or worse, gravel—that they confronted or for the vivid orange-green juice of members of the Papaveraceae—the celandine poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum), the plume poppy (Macleaya cordata), the ephemeral Hylomecon japonicum and the volunteer Papaver somniferum youngsters, the ones we call breadseed poppies because the vice squad or DEA will come get us otherwise—to all leave their marks. Their abstract paintings are more hideous for the color of the canvas I provide with my tender flesh. Into the psychedelic poppy sap some soil gets ground here and there like another pigment on the palette, forming blotches that look like a bruise that is aging nastily—and is that smear of something viscous and shiny on my right shin perhaps the aftermath of a slug who failed to inch away in time? Ick. I never garden without two entire legs’ worth of my various adopted long pants for good reason, all of which have rallied round to remind me in appropriately short order. I need a shower, and after this ridiculous experiment, the recent swell of heat is the least of the reasons why.
A RUSH OF CHILDHOOD MEMORY—winter sick days spiced with swigs of terpin hydrate and slathers of Vicks VapoRub—overpowers me as I dig out a formidable congestion of mint runners from just-soaked, cooperative ground. I should not be in this position—on my knees, in service again to the genus Mentha—after spending a good deal of my advanced-beginner garden career working to get the last bit out. I should know better; I should have behaved. I had promised, like any sinner does in one of those negotiation-type I’ll never do it again prayers: “No more mint, at least not in the garden proper, if you’ll please, oh please,” I said years ago only a few yards from here, “just let me get the final trace of this stuff out of this bed where other, unsuspecting plants wish to live in peace.”
But here I am, and here the fragrant but devious Gorgon is, all because I got a taste for homemade curries topped with mint-laced raita, and goaded by my hunger away from prudence, I veered yet again, planting a harmless-looking three-point-five-inch nursery pot of Mentha piperita (peppermint) and another one of its richer-tasting cousin M. spicata (spearmint). In just a single season they have infested a square yard each, and neither observed the boundary set by a ten-inch-high, five-quarters-inch-thick board of rough-hewn local locust that encloses a raised vegetable bed alongside the spaces I’d chosen. Horticultural Houdinis; under and in we go. As I pull—not too roughly, eyes closed and feeling, not thinking, in search of the sweet spot and hoping to get the most-intact lengths of white roots with every haul—I review in my head whether technically these are roots at all, really, or rhizomes. Yes, I think that’s it: rhizomes, a kind of special stem that runs horizontally at or just below ground level. I am having it out today with a giant tangle of stem tissue.
Along each unearthed length are so very many growing points—little enthusiastic knobs that are mints in the making, each a tributary to a whole other potential pipeline of mint. Mentha will never be caught short without a backup plan against adversity; it is never unprepared for the need to divide and conquer—ever ready to scramble the op under pressure, bivouac briefly, then march again. How can I outcompete such intensity and intelligent design?
As frustrated as I am for not having paid closer attention before now, at letting things get this far, there is the pure sensuality of the moment, too: the fact of being surrounded by a cloud of volatile oils, as if undergoing a particularly robust form of aromatherapy. If there were only one class of fragrance per customer in the garden, I’d trade in all the sweet ones—all the lilac and Viburnum carlesii and mock orange and daphnes, too, as delicious as they are—for the brisk, aromatic stuff, the underpinnings of men’s colognes, not the cloying style of women’s eau de toilette or parfum.
Bring on the citrus and conifers, and the sharp green notes of the herb garden, of not just mint but sage and artemisia and all the rest, the plants I cannot pass without reaching down to brush a hand against each one, then quickly moving the impregnated palm past my nose. These bracing members of the garden don’t depend on some short moment of flowering for their scent the way a rose or Narcissus poeticus does—they always smell good. It’s all just molecular chains of carbon and hydrogen, organic compounds formed into terpenes and other terpenoids, but it sure smells like something more artistic that that. Oh, dear; I can see where this is going: Maybe I can replant just a little piece of each mint in the ground, to be surrounded by and surrender to like this another day?
EARTH SMELL. Gotta get me some of that. In 2007, chemists at Brown University published a paper in a scientific journal that explained how geosmin (which translates as “earth smell” and is the organic compound giving soil its scent) is made. That geosmin existed had been known for more than a century; where it came from, not. A so-called bifunctional enzyme—a protein with a two-part action—was found to be at work.
I am interested to see that geosmin is, chemically speaking, a terpene—like all those other good smells I like so much. And I’m also happy to now know why beets smell, and taste, so good to me: geosmin’s at work in them, too, as it is in carrots.
I keep reading that microorganisms in the soil—specifically the bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae—can make you feel better emotionally, akin to using antidepressants, by activating serotonin-releasing brain neurons and also immune cells. Those original findings were also published in 2007, by a British neuroscientist, but the media reprises it regularly. Each time SOIL THE NEW PROZAC? headlines come around, I say to myself: You had to do a study to confirm that? I’ve been happily huffing dirt for decades, and have no intention of stopping until I can inhale no more.
WE HAVE NOT SPOKEN OF IT, but each lengthening afternoon as we slipped toward the solstice together along with all other living things, Jack has tested me, and himself. Jack the Mama’s Boy has been reprising his role as Demon Cat, stirred into expanding hours of stalking and slaying by the force that pulls at all things. On this the year’s longest day he showed back up just as crepuscular denizens such as the gray fox are calling it quits and the nocturnals (raccoons, possums, and more) are on deck, readying themselves for the overnight shift. In his mouth hangs a limp chipmunk; he brings it to his ritual space beside the door, his killing fields. According to his usual butcher’s cut—ass end remaining—he dressed it quickly, expertly. Off with its head, a fast, crunchy snack consumed before he agreed to rejoin me safely inside a moment ahead of when real darkness, once his place of power and dominion, takes hold.
The ceremonial spot where Jack left the now-headless chipmunk is a patch of gravel, part of the foot-wide band of peastone circumnavigating the house foundation so that backsplash from the gutterless roof has a friendly place to touch down. Thanks, Jack, I thought, then silently agreeing with myself in the way that those who live alone do that “we” needn’t pick it up just yet; some other creature will probably take it away for “us” by morning, anyhow. Yes, that’s right: Nature wastes nothing. She’s a good eater. No need to use a trowel or the pooper-scooper on this one.
When we next went out, at dawn, the halfmunk had moved a foot from where it had lain twelve hours prior; Jack and I both noticed. Who moved our cheese? By midmorning it was gone—or was it? No, wait; are those two feet and half a tail poking up from the crumbly soil between the heavy paving stones? (Who buried our cheese?) Jack and I both do a double take, and I’m not sure who is more startled. Even he knows something has gone tremendously wrong.
And then the special effects begin. The upended thing moves, and starts to shrink and descend a little more—like the Wicked Witch in Oz, as if it’s melting into the ground. Melting? Spirits of the underworld? Or, it suddenly dawns on me, as if it’s being pulled under, perhaps into a hidden, hungry mouth. But whose? Not the millipede’s that I notice slinking along nearby (that strange-looking arthropod is a herbivore); not the colony of ants I see, kneeling to look closer at where body meets soil surface—the ants are just opportunistically getting in on some bigger action. Maybe it’s carrion beetles? I have to think this through; I can’t just crouch here and watch all day, though it is riveting in some completely horrifying way. It is finally dry enough to mow now, and I must get on with the to-do list. I get my gear and stop briefly to note the progress of the Case of the Disappearing Halfmunk one more time before heading to the barn for the push mower. When I open the door into the chaotic, chockablock space—a tangle of tools and wheelbarrows and carts and mowers—somehow the only thing I can see despite all that visual noise is a big old snake, who thinks he’s made himself invisible in a tip bag I use to collect garden debris—hiding in hopes of snaring an unwitting chipmunk or mouse himself.
Which answers my first question of the day. Of course: Garter snakes and milk snakes like the environment under the patio stones, and also eat carrion. A snake moved our (dead) cheese. Case solved. Now on to the next question: How can I convince the reptile in the barn to please move aside so I can get to the needed machine?
THERE IS NO ESCAPE, but we try to find relief from the year’s relentless wet, and now from its unexpected and exorbitant offering of heat, too. “I see your eyes,” I say to the otherwise-submerged frog in the seasonal trough by the kitchen door, a big glazed oblong vessel more than three feet long and two-thirds as high. She thinks she has made her slick green self invisible in the velvety, verdant surface of floating pondweed, but her amber eyes are a different luster and color from the tiny plants of Azolla and Lemna she bobs among. They glint, those eyes do, and I am there to catch it. She needs to know I see them; nobody’s fooling me. I see you, flocked frog.
We are all festering, even the amphibians. Nobody’s on deck for anything at all; enervated, we are immobilized in the deep end of this summer together.
Sleepaway camp—though I hated it, as I recall—would be good about now. Two weeks in the cool, deep woods. I could write not-so-revealing postcards home, like the ones in the chest in the living room:
Dear Dad,
How are you? I am fine. Camp is fun. I have new friends. I miss you.
Love,
Miss Smudge
NEITHER WHEN DIGGING NOR at the dinner table am I a fork person, far preferring spoon- or shovelfuls of goodness to lofting the intended prey on sets of prongs. I like my sustenance in dollops, and if it were not for a sense of etiquette instilled so early as to be irredeemable—yes, blame my prudish grandmother for this detail, too—I’d ask for a spoon when I go out to supper, the way I reach for one at home.
A tablespoon to be specific; that is my preferred implement, for the generous proportions it delivers. Yes, I like shoveling food into my mouth (and spooning delicious compost into planting holes and onto beds).
When there is cultivating to be done, as there is today, since I am sowing peas for fall harvest, I have to force myself to bring a spading fork—the one with four nearly flat tines and a short T- or D-grip handle, not to be confused with a pitchfork or manure fork, whose working parts are somewhat curved and sharper, and whose handles are longer and also unadorned. From the hooks on the barn wall I want instead to grab my long-handled shovel, which is so much more my style, though admittedly not the right tool for the job, any more than my tablespoon is right for eating baked potatoes once you get down to the delectable skins. (Thankfully, fingers are, and I admit to sometimes digging with my hands when only a seed or small transplant needs a home.) When there is soil to be turned, the shovel makes for heavier work. When there are plants to be lifted, the fork’s the better choice, too, since a spade or shovel will chop needlessly through more roots than a tool with prongs.
Never eat more than you can lift, Miss Piggy admonished—an etiquette that would certainly entitle me to remain spoon-fed, at least. I am right-handed, and though my left shoulder gave out recently, refusing to let me do many of the simplest things, I am plenty adept at feeding myself, with the garden as my helper. No surprise that I prefer a bowl to a plate—a banked course that helps keep the meal’s players within bounds as I chase them around its surface at high speed. Gobble, gobble.
But I should have adapted and applied a sliver of her porcine wisdom to my gardening, that much is clear. The day my favorite shovel—specifically a long-handled, round-point one—snapped mid-handle, things got messy, and have never really righted themselves. The cherished tool was a tag-sale find that gave me a dozen years’ good service, but when it finally broke—because I used it when I should have been using a fork, admittedly, pigheaded person that I am—I didn’t really think through the consequences, and failed to save the parts. It never occurred to me that the combination of its light weight; a well-worn, not-too-thick ash handle; and a just-big-enough head affixed at the ideal angle for smooth tossing of the contents would prove irreplaceable.
In five years of trying, I have amassed what could stock a shovels-only tag sale of my own, each one too-something for my liking and now on the tool wall in the barn, beside the other rejects that have arrived by UPS or in the back of my car. They are mostly far too heavy; their handles are too beefy to grasp, and not at all tapered nicely or smooth to the touch. From twenty-something dollars to more than one hundred apiece, they represent no small total investment, and each time a new one is discovered and ordered I become momentarily elated: This may be the one! Sadly, blind-dating of shovels has gone as well as the other version, the only difference being that the unsuccessful candidates in this case are still all hanging around.
I DON’T KNOW HOW THE female oriole learned to weave the socklike pouch she hung and nested in way up in that big oak, or why some tadpoles metamorphose much faster than others of the same species, or how the lily leaf beetles found my little stand of lacquer-red Lilium martagon ‘Claude Shride’. The reason that my tomato plants lived through to harvest in 2009, the year that late blight (caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans, which led to the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine) ravaged farms and gardens throughout the Northeast, eludes me, too. I know a few things, and will have to remain content with that.
Thankfully, I’m clear on the most important piece: that nothing about gardening is easy, instant, nonstop, or guaranteed—no matter what it says on the label stuck in the plant you’re holding with an eye to purchase, or on the bellybands, boxes, bags, or hangtags touting the merits of nonliving gadgets at the garden center, either. Some brands of pruning shears will make each cut kinder on the hand, yes, so I invested in a good and comfortable one—but there is no device that makes the job of pruning go away.
I can say with a certainty born of summers of frustration that there are few truly “self-cleaning” annuals, at least not any with sizable flowers, no matter what the grotesquely oversized plastic labels of the modern era say about “deadheading not required.” An example: Hybrid verbenas that are between blooms are pitiful creatures; the faded flowerheads don’t get better-looking anytime fast. Some are less messy and faster to rebound than others, thanks to advances in breeding, yes—but they don’t come with their own pair of clippers and the instinct to clean up after themselves. That’s my job.
Petunias have improved substantially in recent years, too—no longer do hanging baskets turn to little more than stringy, flowerless stems by July, the way their predecessors did. But with the double-flowered types, or with any petunia in a wet year, even the best-bred varieties still need human intervention. No matter what the cultivar, a rainy year is no time to grow petunias, and I wish I’d sited the big bowl of them under the sunny-but-safer south-facing porch overhang instead of out in the open, but it’s far too heavy now to move. The delicate, flared fabric of their flowers is stuck together like my sweaty legs and the slip Mommy made me wear even on the hottest summer days. At heaven’s bidding, I find myself the constant caretaker of a very large, low pot of some near-orange ones—a delicious break in the genetics of the color palette for petunias, so how could I resist?—but they’ve simply looked like wet trash all season long, despite my nonstop tidying. That said, perspective reminds me that a year when there is no rain is more painful than any number of collapsed petunias.
Now I start to veer from semi-fact toward mere opinion: I’m adamant, or perhaps rabid, on the fact that contemporary plant names—particularly faux, soundalike genus names invented by a bunch of marketing people sitting in a room with whiteboards and PowerPoint and boxes of doughnuts and too much coffee—should be forbidden. There are no “Potunias” or “Superbenas,” except in a database of registered plant names or the rolls of the patent office. (I suspect the same consultant types of inventing words such as “Gro” and “Lite.”) Why can’t we teach taxonomy to gardeners instead of what sounds like the cast of plant superheroes in a botanical cartoon series? Poor Linnaeus. Poor us; no wonder we suffer as a civilization from Nature Deficit Disorder. I am happy for breeders to have legal rights and profits from their developments, but wish it weren’t all tangled up with imposing these stupid names—and also that the rush to market (read: money) didn’t push so many not-quite-ready things into the garden centers before they were properly worked out and stable: good, garden-worthy subjects and not just things that could be coaxed into looking all cute and colorful and compact in a nursery pot in peak spring for easy sale.
I am likewise sick of plants with varietal names so unattractive that I wouldn’t want them in the garden: a dwarf, fragrant lilac patented as ‘Bloomerang’, for instance, when something slightly more poetic might have better told me its welcome supposed reblooming story. Instead, all it seems to say is that the shrub may sail on by at any moment, and then come back to haunt you. I don’t know what I visualize with the recently patented floribunda rose called ‘Ketchup & Mustard’, but as arresting as the flower whose red petals have a yellow reverse might be, I cannot stomach the conjured combination of condiments in the garden.
Somewhere between rant and reason, my eye tells me that mulch is not something you should need swatches or color chips to select. If it looks otherwordly, as if it has been custom-dyed, excuse yourself from the transaction and carpet your beds in some other material. (What to use as mulch and when and how much to apply begins on here.) I prefer my twine to be neutral tan in color, and the same with bamboo canes for staking. Hold the green dye they both are so often soaked in (which is an ungodly hue that never would occur in nature, anyhow, and rubs off on your hands). I don’t like white plastic anything—pots, trellises, birdbaths, chairs, tchotchke—in the garden, including plant labels, and I hate myself for trying to conceal the occasional one out of laziness in a bed or border when trying to plant everything all at once in the rush of spring. Go get a proper small wooden label, Margaret.
I wish we could all agree that the color blue in horticulture is best reserved for Meconopsis (though I can’t grow the Himalayan poppy), or the so-easy-as-to-be-thuggish forget-me-not (Myosotis), or maybe one of those sky-blue grape hyacinth varieties (Muscari)—but not under any circumstances for fertilizer. Fertilizer—better thought of as food for the soil rather than as “plant food”—is best when brown and smelling like something dead, or perhaps like some herbivore’s composting toilet. The good ones are recycling at its best, whether the casualty was animal (some leftover from another industry, such as blood meal) or vegetable (compost or alfalfa meal, for instance). We could add the all-important mineral to the list, too, in the form of rock dusts, but they are neither brown nor particularly odorous. One more issue I have with fertilizer, while I’m at it: I’m frustrated that modern bedding plants (such as those renamed petunias and verbenas) are bred to perform on life support—blue chemical fertilizer, and lots of it, and also lots of water—or otherwise limp along after we get them home (and off the equivalent of the IV they were on at the greenhouse they were propagated in).
Despite my list of such harsh, old-fashioned prescriptions and intolerances, I’m also absolutely sure that there is always the possibility of getting away with a little bit of fakery: A clean-cut edge and dose of fresh mulch masks a multitude of sins in a bed or border; a couple of brightly painted chairs moved into a place that might be just past peak seems to set it into bloom again.
THE CUTBACKS NEVER STOP, and even as we enter the most intense battering days of summer—and even after all the rounds of reduction that came before—we stoop and crouch once more, moving from one end of each bed to the other with a tip bag sliding along with us, extracting debris. Certainly the garden and its coconspirators never tire of creating more for us to winnow out: a chewed-on leaf gone limp; another that had torn, then browned as a result; a fallen branch or stem that perhaps gave way when some mammalian plunderer or other stomped through under cover of darkness. Left in place, it is an invitation to another edition of trouble, and the weather metes out enough of that.
A friend is working maybe twenty feet away, and I hear her say, not to me exactly but just a proclamation, “I want this,” and put a handful of something into an empty quart yogurt container that she has positioned in her trug to hold such goodies—pass-along plants that are part of what we kiddingly refer to as the excellent “benefits package” for working here part-time all these years. I watch more carefully across the haze of perennials between us, and then I see: She is cutting off the succulent, fuzzy seedpods of the celandine poppy to take home. For more than a dozen years she has been carrying such things away from here, and yet our gardens could not be more different. Our marinaras and pestos and even our egg salads are different, too, come to think of it; same ingredients, perhaps, but a whole different sense of texture, taste, and proportion.
IT IS THE WORST PLAY I have ever seen: Marmota Monax: A Dramedy in Six Acts. The tragedy, which I have seen far too many times, goes something like this:
Act 1: The Peas Are Gone (May)
Act 2: Where’s the Parsley? (early June)
Act 3: Anyone Seen the Green Beans? (late June)
Act 4: Leafless Sweet Potato Vines (July)
Act 5: Seeking Professional Help (July)
Act 6: Seeking More Professional Help (August)
You fat bastard. I see now that I have been kidding myself to think that my powers of persuasion worked on you; that just because I’d invited you to leave (sending Herb to deliver the message personally—remember?) that you had RSVP’d “yes.” If not for an unintended high sign just now from a wild turkey, I might have let you go unnoticed even longer.
I was on the phone, staring out in the blank way I do to provide myself a neutral backdrop to such conversations or if I am simply thinking, when some movement caught my eye. Far uphill, I could see a turkey inside the tall wire fence, where the small field that is essentially the extreme edge of my backyard meets the woodland that is the state forest surrounding me. Binoculars. It was a hen, pacing back and forth with the fence at her shoulder: first left six or eight feet, about-face, then right, about-face, then left, then right, and so on, as if on some drill, preparing perhaps for maneuvers or maybe a full-dress parade. She became more possessed with each fast lap, as if she would not stop till she dropped from exhaustion. Stuck in this perceptual rut (been there, done that—though mine was in the city and my former career) she wouldn’t move far enough from the impediment to get a clear view of the sky; she thought she was trapped, when the route to freedom was right there waiting for her to stop panicking and notice it all along. Oh, Big Bird, I know; I know.
I walked up halfway, staying to one side to try to stay out of sight, then stopped to call out, fearing I’d spook her by coming much closer. My opening line:
You having a bad day?
I’m not sure she got my chick humor, but the approach worked; the distraction caused her to look into the field at me instead of perceiving only the claustrophobic limitations of that fence, and it broke the cycle. With a burst of beating wings, she was gone into the woods beyond, from whence she came. Sayonara. (I don’t talk turkey, so my single word of Japanese will have to do.) Turning to start back downhill, that is when I saw what you have done: more missing plants. You fat bastard.
And then as if on cue, here you dare come right toward me from the patio, probably intending to slip back underground for a nap now that you’re full, continuing in my general direction until you see me—uh-oh, uh-oh, it’s her again, that crazy woman!—and then you make your own about-face and hurry away, low-hanging flesh swaying vigorously side to side worse than Jack’s own ample dust ruffle. I give chase, and as I quicken my steps I start screaming, too, for good measure: You fat bastard. And then it hits me, literally—a hornet or wasp of some kind hits me right in the forehead and violently deposits a stinger, as if to say, Keep it down, won’t you? Some of us are trying to work here.
What things have come to: Fresh from an attempt at conversation with a turkey, while chasing a woodchuck whom I’m shouting at, I run right into an angry insect, who attacks and also scolds me—the utter exclamation point on my complete undoing. This is war; shades of Winston Churchill, who told the soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon that “war is the normal occupation of man,” but then amended that to say, “war—and gardening.” Hard to tell the difference, when one’s backyard is always under siege.
With Herb gone for the summer, I am thinking it’s time to call for alternate backup. Some of these Animal Planet moments culminate in crossroads I cannot navigate alone, I know, from early years spent innocently setting the roots of a tree on fire (when a proper pest-control smoke bomb shoved down a woodchuck hole backfired), or waking up to find live cage traps filled not with frightened rabbits but with very large and aggravated skunks. The peas are long lost, yes, but now the beans—the flat-podded Italian- or Romano-style ones I rate as an essential ingredient of any summer—are heading in the same direction, and so is the row of hefty ‘Gigante’ flat-leaf parsley plants (more on growing and storing a year of it on here, plus why I skip the curly stuff). Likewise, the twenty-foot-long raised bed of sweet potatoes looked better last week, when it still sported some leaves. I’ve read its foliage is edible—tastes like spinach, apparently (no, not chicken, or woodchuck)—but so far only the waddling marmot, who’s definitely behaving as a hostile witness, could offer any firsthand feedback on the succulence of this year’s crop.
“Hello, Mike, it’s Margaret Roach, over by the state park, with the gardens; remember?” My voice sounds sheepish; almost apologetic, I know. I should be able to handle this myself, I am a big girl now, but then the vintage image of the flames shooting from beneath that tree beside the woodchuck burrow—too far for the garden hose to reach, of course—regains its spot in front of mind. Never again; no way.
“Had any rattlesnakes yet this year?” he says in reply, apparently remembering me very clearly. There have been none in the garden proper lately, none of what a blog reader mistyped to me as “rattlesnacks” in her Freudian-style empathic e-mail, as if she meant to help me find the details of gardening in “rattlesnack” country all very happy-go-lucky and comic-strippish. Whee!
It quickly becomes a summer of can-you-top-this episodes, with the licensed nuisance-wildlife control operator as my witness and my 911. On Visit 1, he leaves enough traps behind to qualify the place as Margaret’s House of Havaharts, if I were the type who wanted to name her garden—or perhaps sign a promotional contract with the manufacturer to supplement a sagging income. On Visit 2, when they are filled with an impressive haul of skunks and raccoons, he rebaits patiently (and somehow misses getting sprayed). On Visit 3, when the catch of the day is three raccoons at once: “You’ve got more things going on here than the Catskill Game Farm,” he says—and that’s before Visit 4, when on the way up the path with a new supply of cantaloupe wedges and a jar of trapper’s fruit-paste lure meant to sweeten the ante, the first glimpse of the backyard includes a magnificent red fox making himself right at home in plain daylight. He must be on the scent of the same woodchuck—oh, could I be so lucky that the fox will handle this for me?
“That’s the biggest one I’ve seen in years,” says the man who makes his living noticing such things. “He must be four or five years old.” We stand motionless and silent, reverentially watching the handsome canid as he circles like the family dog in his own safe-feeling living room and curls up for a snooze. These stolen moments and sights are the bonus rounds—prizes awarded even though I lost the earlier stages of the contest, and really never figure to win more than the occasional point. Not just second chances, as in the rower’s repechage, but actual prizes, apparently awarded for what I’m getting very good at: losing complete and utter control of everything.
As frustration increases with the weeks, a lot of time is spent beating the bushes once again for clues, and we find that by now there are three open woodchuck holes, not just the one discovered in late winter. Days pass and it seems as if every chipmunk, squirrel, raccoon, and skunk in the region has sampled the bait in one cage or another and gotten trapped—but not the woodchuck. I study for ad hoc apprenticeship: learning to let out the squirrels and chipmunks (a try at freeing a raccoon was met with demonic cackling and outstretched claws not extended in any friendly greeting; I never tried again). I close the live traps before sundown and reopen them after dawn to focus on our diurnal target, not his crepuscular and nocturnal neighbors, the raccoons and skunks; I look for flies around an open hole (the sign of an occupied burrow, apparently), and check holes and their immediate surroundings at dawn, midday, and again at dusk to try to figure out who’s where when.
Finally: flies! Mike bombs one hole, presumably with the elusive woodchuck in residence (and without any three-alarm backdraft). Three days post-bombing, I am dismayed to see the burrow active again.
“Cover it,” I am instructed on the morning phone call that is becoming pretty regular. “See if anybody opens it.” Dutifully, I do just that, then follow up throughout the day to see if we still have any takers. Post-it notes on the counter remind me: The last thing I must do before bed and the first thing in the morning is to check the hole. At dusk: still closed. At barely dawn: open, but a smaller opening than the previous day. Disappointed again, I call in my latest findings. This is apparently progress, I am told. Progress?
“A fox probably smelled the woodchuck in the hole and dug it up to eat it,” he says. “Then after you recovered it, a chipmunk smelled the fresh soil—and they just love to dig in that.”
I see. Everybody around here smells opportunity of one form or another, everyone except me. We are apparently working our way through some new flowchart of mammalian genera and their relationship in the food chain—some new twist on the connection of man to woodchuck to fox to chipmunk, and who knows who will be next. Rattlesnack?
Knowledge is power, the saying goes, and so for extra credit in my summer animal-control internship I am madly reading up about my opponent and his habits. But the research proves wildly un-empowering; it sounds hopeless, since apparently these bastards do everything but fly. It’s not enough to fence them out with a four-foot-high heavy mesh barrier unless you continue it, buried, a foot underground—and better still, add a strand of electrified wire maybe four inches outside the fence perimeter and the same distance off the ground. Yes, I read about the single strand of rope sprayed with bobcat urine that kept these beasts out of some cabbage patch somewhere—but between the price per quart of bobcat urine (not even considering where it comes from, and what cruelty the animals producing it experience), and the image of myself maintaining said rope barrier, I think not.
Thankfully, I also learn this: I’m not alone in my plight. While I’m in the throes of all of it, letting the presence or absence of flies dictate my mood for each arriving day, I hear that the farmers down the road shoot fifteen woodchucks in one field after massive crop destruction. Then my old friend Herb, back for a mere three days to check on his house, finds his vegetable garden plundered, and traps out five adults in no time. Five of these supposedly solitary creatures in one hole back-to-back: unheard of. We are all fighting the good fight, comrades-in-arms. I don’t have the heart to tell any of them—the farm family, Herb, even Mike, the trapper—the data from a study I read about from Pennsylvania State University, in which 1,040 woodchucks were removed over the course of four years from a six-hundred-acre agricultural site. The impact on the population: nothing significant. Apparently all the intervention did was help prompt increased birth rates, juvenile survival—and invite nearby animals to come on over, dinner’s on, and best of all: the coast is clear of competition (well, at least the four-legged kind, for this is not my summer’s only infestation by any means).
WE HAVE A MOSTLY ANONYMOUS relationship, and for years I liked it that way. Though they are my closest neighbors on every side and we live all but intertwined, I know few of my weeds by name. Confession: I cannot remember the names of some of my human neighbors, but thankfully in either case, I never forget a face, and therefore manage to behave semi-appropriately.
Mowing and many other chores are all but halted now, in these conditions, but ever since it thawed this year, the soil has been consistently conducive to one task—weeding—to coaxing up and out all unwanted rootlings that compete with garden plants and plans. Audacious and brilliant English gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd spoke of the “soothing monotony” that weeding holds for some of us, myself included. In the process of implementing the latest upheavals, I have been studying my outtakes more closely than usual, taking my time to set aside samples of any I cannot identify and look them up so that I can finally address Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard) and all the others with the proper (dis)respect. And there are a lot of “others,” I realize now, having compiled a rough list these last weeks, adding to it after every routing session. Maybe I simply never made a tally because I knew it would make the garden chore that can never be completed—which is how I think of weeding, really—even more formidable, but never mind. Now that I have started to force myself to surrender to this practice of naming the unwanted plants, I will treat it like the excellent meditation tactic it can be.
In various spiritual traditions, practitioners name the stuff that comes up during a meditation session to try to take its sting out, to release the hold that the invasive thoughts that surface from the stillness—my leg is asleep, or shit, I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning—might otherwise have. We silently name the thoughts and hope by doing so that they will just slip by, cloud-like, untroubling. Nonattachment. Let’s hope that naming works on weeds, and proves a powerful mental herbicide.
The list so far is diverse, and the harvest here is therefore always ample: There lives among those I can now identify the likes of bedstraw (which my friend Marco charmingly calls Sticky Willie), bindweed, bittersweet, broadleaf plantain, bur cucumber, Canada thistle, carpetweed, chickweed, common burdock, crabgrass, dandelion, foxtail, Galinsoga, garlic mustard, greater celandine, ground ivy, heal-all (a kind of Prunella), honeysuckle, jewelweed (or touch-me-not), lamb’s quarters, mugwort, oxalis (at least three species), pigweed, prostrate spurge, poison ivy, pokeweed, purslane, ragweed, Rubus of some kind, sheep sorrel, stinging nettle, wild grape, and wild lettuce. I don’t include violet or dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), because I don’t weed them out of most beds, likewise leaving any clovers and hawkweed right in the lawn where they appear. On a given day, I can practically guarantee finding at least one example of any of those in the list, with the presence of many, many multiples the far more likely scenario. A positive stampede, really.
I wish I were blameless on all counts for such variety, but it’s simply not so. Yes, some came with the place: the Oriental bittersweet; the wild grape; a shrubby Asian honeysuckle; thorny, suckering canes of the wild bramble that’s probably some kind of blackberry. I was greeted right from the start of my days here by stiff, sharp Canada thistle and deceptively benign-looking stinging nettle—not exactly the Welcome Wagon, those two prickly personages (though the latter is an important element used in biodynamic farming and gardening). Poison ivy in its most mature stage was in the inherited mix—a woody vine, wrist-thick around, that shall forever climb most every tree along my perimeter and along the roads nearby. At least it’s an important wildlife plant. I had never seen garlic mustard before I came here, but its abundance locally has more than made up for any deficiency earlier in life. And there is one I cannot find in any book or other reference—not showy enough to be a garden escape, but a fleshy, tall, bright-green self-sowing summer annual that seems to reproduce almost nonstop, and grow upward even faster once there is some heat. No wonder that asking someone to help weed is so tricky: The assistance is always needed, but how will they tell—if I can barely keep track myself—what is to stay and what’s to go? A cookie sheet with a sample of each targeted offender should be handed out to overnight guests upon arrival, I figure. Find me twenty of each, and earn your supper.
I remember where some others came from—accidental immigrants from the gardens of friends, appearing here shortly after some horticultural treasure they’d shared with me had made its way into my ground. You have to take the bad with the good, and I am willing, if not happy, to pull up Galinsoga ciliata, with its little yellow flowers, in payment for the unusual and treasured plants I got from one generous person who never intended the unfortunate bonus. Sadly, creeping red wood sorrel, Oxalis corniculata, came with some more mundane nursery annuals, and now loves the cracks and crevices in the stones here, as does spotted spurge, Euphorbia maculata, which in a case of double-trouble reached my doorstep with a garden Campanula I thought I wanted, but that has proven hideously weedy itself and that I’ll never be able to extirpate, either. Both the spurge and the oxalis hug tight in the cracks as if there’s to be no letting go, no matter how moist the soil is, proving a job for the discarded kitchen bread knife or the Japanese tool called a hori-hori.
People write regularly to ask how to get rid of ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea) in the lawn, and my true answer is “I can’t.” That would be where herbicides come in—or biocides, as Rachel Carson more appropriately called all pesticides, since they are indiscriminate killers—and even with them, it’s not a sure thing. Of course Glechoma, the most successful of my many lawn opponents, would prove to be a mint relative—in this case a low-growing perennial species. Mint? This can’t be a good prognosis; my track record with mints sucks.
Weeds are cleverer than I am, that much is clear, with strokes of built-in genius, such as barbs and hooks that grab on to an animal’s coat (or a gardener’s) for the ride to some new plot to plunder, or plumose hairs and other umbrellalike attachments that act as sails, to send them off onto the breeze. Some set so much seed—even a single plain old dandelion plant can produce more than two thousand—that it’s actually quite exhausting to contemplate. And then there are the real evildoers you can never quite get out: the ones that regard my incessant digging at them as a form of propagation, those capable of regenerating from the tiniest bit of underground root left anywhere on earth, and perhaps beyond. When I lecture, I refer to these as the “under-the-bed plants,” as in: They’ll probably even grow under your bed if you toss them there, they’re that insidious.
Weeds generally have all the good qualities I like in people—they’re un-fancy, enthusiastic, adaptable, and display constancy. They can be counted on, when all else fails, which is why Shakespeare said they “make haste” (compared with what he called “sweet flowers,” which are slow). So shall I try to keep my sweet friends close and my hasty enemies closer? Is that the only plan I can offer after all these years—that and layers of newsprint or recycled, unprinted corrugated cardboard topped with mulch, in the worst situations where total erasure by smothering is required? Better yet, keep your weeds at this time of year out of the ground and deposited into a substantial plastic bag set up as an adjunct to the compost heap—a sort of very inhospitable waiting room, where they can cook to death for a while before gaining entry to the main pile. Such pretreatment is essential with anything bearing seeds, as so many are right now, or with rhizomatous roots that can sprout a new plant.
“Cultivate your weeds,” a blog reader told me she had written on a slip of paper and pinned up in plain view, an admonition to smooth some of the gnarly bits that we each face now and again in ourselves. But as for cultivating garden weeds, other than the occasional crop of dandelion greens for the sauté pan, I think not. And so with each handful or forkful these moist mornings in the garden I’ll be saying this instead: Who are you, my familiar strangers, and also: What’s your secret to success?
EXCEPT WITH WEEDS, where I work hard to be as inconsiderate as they are, the strands of good-neighbor DNA are so ingrained in me that things like this happen: I awaken at five thirty, and my first conscious be-up-be-doing thought is that I need to mow, but I put it off (inconveniencing myself, and sometimes facing quick-rising heat) until a “reasonable hour.” A child of the suburbs, I am incapable of making early-morning noise—or actually any unnecessary sounds that anyone else could hear and be irritated by, except for this little detail: Nobody is close enough these days to really be disturbed. My neighborhood is too spread out. Nevertheless, the mower remains quiet until at least nine; ten on a weekend day.
“Neighbor.” The word has been pushing ever upward in consciousness as I’ve settled into being a small-town one since relocating, which by the most literal of definitions completely changes who, if not what, the term conjures. Once used more widely to connote the biblical-style “one in need” or “fellow man” (deriving from Matthew 19:19, love thy neighbor as thyself), it is typically the Anglo-Saxon derivation, the literal translation of “near-dweller,” that most of us hear today when the word is spoken. Oftentimes, “neighbor” seems more a matter of geography than evocative of an outpouring of goodwill—the literal “person next door,” or at least quite close at hand. Close, indeed:
We may need to travel to see our families for the holiday meal, but our neighbors are always right there. (For better or for worse, some would say.) Even if we barely know their names—even if we can’t tell their kids apart—we can describe their routines. Wherever we live at any given time in our lives, we are one, and have at least one. Being a neighbor is one of those things you can’t escape—even by moving. An understudy awaits at the next location, ready to fill the role.
Necessity is the mother of neighborliness, as my nearest near dweller, Robin, and I have come to manifest lately in our particular enactment of the word. “Do you need anything?” one will ask the other if she must go out on a slippery winter day, or her near-dawn e-mail of, “I called the sand truck; they’ll be here soon to do both our driveways.” And then we have this special bond: the daily digital data swap, to record the body count after the latest respective rounds of mouse patrol. “One in the shed, none in the cellar” is trumped by, “Three in the garage.” Women who live in old houses can’t be squeamish.
“I want you to be concerned about your next-door neighbor,” Mother Teresa of Calcutta taught, asking, “Do you know your next-door neighbor?” Well, I know that she and I both need some more serious carpentry repairs or these unwanted, unneighborly invasions will simply never stop. Maybe we can get a twofer on some hours with the neighborhood handyman?
WORDS I LOVE: Oh, to be a geophyte, ready to carry on (albeit in hiding, or at least in a good disguise) even in the worst of times, rather than stand up and face everything inhospitable that comes along—a sudden lack of resources, for instance, or someone gnawing at you. Geophyte: “A plant growing with stem or tuber below ground, usually applied to bulbous or tuberous species from arid lands.” So says Mark Griffiths in the Index of Garden Plants.
Tulip and daffodil bulbs were the first things I planted here, arriving as I had in autumn after the closing on the house I’d found that summer. (My approach to using mostly animal-proof ones is in the sidebar on here.) Even now, with an overstuffed garden, I tell myself there is always room to layer in more bulbs. In my first years of acquiring houseplants I displayed a natural proclivity for geophytes, too, or, more specifically, for caudiciform plants—ones with fat “bottoms,” whose shortened stem tissue lives just under and/or at the soil surface, often dressing up not as stem at all but more like a rock or piece of craggy bark, or in some cases like a bulb but sitting above-ground. Is drought or fire or cold—or maybe even hungry, nibbling animals—headed your way? Drop any vulnerable greenery and go into hiding, the caudiciforms say, living off the water and carbohydrates in the ingenious storage organ your species evolved to meet such adversity. These plants make survivalists with well-stocked bunkers look positively unprepared.
For nearly twenty years my two most prized and carefree roommates have been Bowiea volubilis (it resembles a pot full of big, thin-skinned pale-green onions that sit on the soil and sprout a feathery-looking vine; every bit is poisonous) and Bombax ellipticum (which would be a thirty-foot tree or taller in its native range of southern Mexico to Honduras, but here is more like a large rock with a pair of five-foot branches that leaf out if and when they want to). Neither has been repotted in a decade or longer, nor do they seem to care. They follow their own calendar—and all I have to do is be respectful, meaning even here in the captivity of my little house they seem to have made the perfect life, no?—living as they wish, among those who display tolerance in return.
Another good word: allelopathy. Being allelopathic would take things a big step further than geophytic, not just outsmarting would-be neighbors with now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t hide-and-go-seekery, but outright repelling or killing off those who tried to sidle up to me, or at least making things pretty inhospitable. I suppose that’s going too far, but there have been days—which I suppose is what the big metal gate at the end of the driveway and caller ID are for.
Allelopathy, says the International Allelopathy Society, is “any process involving secondary metabolites produced by plants, algae, bacteria and fungi that influence the development of natural and agricultural systems.” This takes into account that not all such effects are necessarily negative, though the more generic and commonly used definition might be that allelopathic organisms—plant or otherwise, with the black walnut being the most common example among gardeners—inhibit the germination or growth of certain other species by some chemical action. These characters, the negative allelopaths, mark their territory, and most everybody obeys the boundaries. But looking at the fuller range of potential impact on other members of a community—both upside and downside—might even explain why invasive alien species that were not so troublesome in their home environment so forcefully take over a new home. The sometimes-pushy neighbors of their native turf aren’t there to keep them in line—to enforce building codes and other ordinances, so to speak—and so the new guy on the block just has at it, quickly becoming the aggressive developer type whom everybody hates. The neighborhood? Ruined, or at least altered forever.
“I HAVE CREATED A MONSTER,” Page, an enviably talented garden friend, said the other night. It was the latest of many true-confessions phone calls I find myself having these days on whispered matters ranging from slack body parts and surging awareness of mortality, to shrinking bank balances and no retirement possible ever. “Why did I do this?” she continued, and in case there is any confusion: This monster is not some prickly interpersonal relationship gone wrong, but her too-big garden, the one that has been a mainstay and compass of her adult life and identity the way my very own monster has been of mine.
I love my monster but love-spelled-loathe the grip it has on me, and as we talked about what we plan to do—erase this bed, simplify that one, recruit that ever-elusive local teenager who’ll work really cheap—I mentioned a few of the nothing-special-but-very-“can-do” plants around here that suddenly are looking really good to me, the onetime quasi connoisseur.
“Thank God for Geranium macrorrhizum,” she said, reading my mind, and we laughed together, in that instant imagining our two very different places—her beast of many formal and informal “rooms” makes mine look easy to manage—with nothing remaining but the “bones,” the shrubs and trees, and under every grouping of them that most cooperative of herbaceous perennials, the big-root geranium. That’s it: The answer is a monoculture of what is basically just a living mulch—the next phase of our gardening lives will look like that (echoes of the wisdom of Marco, who is always one step ahead). The hell with needy, too-precious-to-be-practical things.
“Remember wanting absolutely everything—growing everything that came along?” she said, and oh, I do, I do, and as we compared best-of lists from fleets of botanical creatures between us who have come and gone, we couldn’t help but notice how relieved we both sounded.
“I think the monster’s trying to tell us something bigger than just about gardening,” I said eventually of our shared predicament. “You know: How you can’t be everywhere at the same time, or everything to everyone; how you just have to let go of some things, or everything suffers—especially ourselves.”
A moment of silence, and then yes, we agreed, there are other aspects of our lives that could use some pruning back, some weeding (or a lowering of the bar?), which then ricocheted to this last thought:
“Do you have mile-a-minute weed yet?” she asked, referring to a 2006 accidental introduction to the United States from Asia, Persicaria perfoliata, a barbed and aggressive annual vine whose acquaintance I have as yet been spared. Mile-a-minute, I thought, which is how fast the days seem to go now, how fast whole new years appear and then—presto!—elapse. Just what we need when our clocks are running faster and our bodies slowing one bad shoulder at a time: a new opponent in the form of something known as “mile-a-minute weed.” Perfect.
WE HAVE BOTH KNOWN SOME SEXY BEASTS, Page and I, the ones you’d never cast out, no matter what. It’s all a matter of taste, of course—or is it some kind of chemistry that explains an indescribable, elusive sense of attraction? I like screaming, outsize foliage; another person might be inclined toward tight little rock-garden miniatures. Maybe that’s all there is to it: to each her own, and no understanding why. Whatever the source of the attraction, a new one always makes good fodder for gossip.
You know the way a best friend wants to hear all the details of your latest intrigue, based on whatever the friend likes most about objects of intrigue herself? (Forgive me, gentlemen; just swap all the personal pronouns in this passage to suit.) “How are his manners?” she’ll ask, and “His sense of humor? His smile?” Or, “How are his hands, his shoes?” if those are her particular fetishes. Do tell.
Here’s what I’d ask if I were your best friend and you had your eye on someone new, especially in the perennial or shrub department at the garden center: How are his leaves? It’s leaves, after all, that dictate a plant’s character, hanging on as they do longer than most any flower can.
When you go plant shopping or seek an introduction to someone special from a knowing garden friend, be sure to ask the all-important question: How are his leaves? A perfect example, even now, after months of aggravated meteorological assault: Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’ (named for a city in the former Yugoslavia, where it was found), that perennial geranium out front with chocolate-purple chevrons on every leaf, is a real dandy. It hasn’t put out a flower since May or earliest June, but it has nothing to worry about in my way of thinking, because really, who cares if such a hottie ever comes across and blooms?
THEY SHAG AND BONK, but no snogging first—the hell with foreplay, huh? Just do it. I live in an amphibian Plato’s Retreat. Love is in the air, baby. Frog love. The backyard is an equal-opportunity brothel these days, not some prim, prom-like get-together in white gloves and dyed-to-match pumps, but a full-on, naked orgy for one and all.
A big female bullfrog, her left eye clouded over and probably blind, her jaw always just slightly ajar and no longer quite plumb in its hinge, had arrived and quickly claimed her stone at poolside early this spring, hopping a ride on a downpour of a night with another bull or two from wherever they’d spent the off-season. She would be well cast in a movie featuring sorcery; she is no beauty. No matter; there is someone here for everyone. Just across the pool on a diagonal, the one who adores her has his own stone, and each day they take their places, motionless and stonelike themselves. Despite the damaged eye, the misaligned jaw, and her sagging, freckled white belly, she is the one for this boy bull. They sit. And wait, and with at least three of their four collective eyes, watch each other while remaining in a state of readiness for the next meal to crawl or fly on in—their version of a dinner date, I guess.
The males of various species make all sorts of impolite sounds all mating season long, but every so often I hear a froggy little gasp I know is a female voice that I imagine is saying, “Here we go again,” or maybe something slightly more romantic like, “Hey, little guy” (no size-joke insult intended; in some species the male is the smaller of the two). I look around, and sure enough: There she is, the latest one to get grabbed into the embrace called amplexus, when the male clasps the often-larger female around the back. There is no intercourse, exactly, but rather she releases eggs and he releases a fluid to fertilize them. This goes on for some time—frogs don’t know from “nooners” or “quickies,” apparently—and they also don’t seem to be one bit shy. The first public display of affection of the season (as always it was a pair of wood frogs) began in April right out at poolside, where fifteen other frogs of various species were sunning themselves, before the happy couple finally retreated into the shrubbery onto a bed of pine needles. A couple of weeks ago, Lady One Eye gave it up for a daring young bull, not her longtime admirer after all, and barely half her size. The latest: two green frogs in the glazed terra-cotta trough by the kitchen door this week. Twenty-six hours after the moment I heard the little lady’s telltale gasp: still there. Not that I’m the kind of pervert who times frogs having sex or anything.
ANOTHER WEIRD COMMON THREAD—or should I say “filament,” since their threadlike cells are connected end-to-end—is running through this soaking summer, as I find myself hosting a positive world’s fair of fungi. Those all-important neither-plants-nor-animals have the power to make the world go round, but also to bring some plants (think Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight); animals (currently bats suffering from white-nose syndrome, for example), and even humans to their knees. Mushrooms and their kin in all forms, sizes, and colors are appearing here as if from nowhere, and as with weeds and certain insects, the first reflex: Get that thing out of here. And then I calm down and try to discern what each one is telling me—to see if I can find the why.
I needed to brush up on my scant grasp of mycology: A mushroom is the sexual fruiting body of a fungus, but not all fungi have sexual states (nor therefore do they all produce mushrooms). Fungi don’t have chlorophyll, so they cannot make their own food (like plants do), nor can they ingest it (like animals), except through absorption from their surrounding environment. Most fungi are saprophytes, meaning they feed on dead or decaying material, such as the leaf litter of the forest floor—or the debris in the compost heap. Their second critical role: Most of the plant kingdom depends on symbiotic fungi called mycorrhizae, which inhabit plants’ roots, to live. Of the 70,000 species of fungus, says Tom Volk, a personal hero of mine who is a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and proprietor of tomvolkfungi.net, 250 are edible, 250 can kill you—and the rest, well, funky business or just plain blecch.
The winner of all so far this summer: a two-foot-wide colony of something so fluorescent orange you could see it across the yard. I’m fairly certain it is Omphalotus olearius, the jack-o-lantern mushroom, but silly me: Though I mowed around the glistening, glowing community carefully for weeks, I forgot to photograph the underside—to see if there were any keys to identification, such as true gills beneath the cap, or how the stem and cap attached to each other—and it disappeared before I realized the oversight. Next summer?
In nonmushroom fungal news: Cedar-apple rust is having a banner year. So what do you do when you live with warring roommates? In the case of the back-and-forth skirmishes between a towering eastern red cedar (Juniperis virginiana) in front of the house and all the apples and other rose-family plants, nothing. Well, I do watch in fascination in spring, especially at the stage when orange, almost gelatinous “telial horns” (tendrils of spores) are developing where the cedar galls were the previous fall and winter. If you didn’t know, you’d think the conifer was flowering (except that such ancient creatures, which evolved before the angiosperms, don’t). I don’t intervene, despite the havoc this fungus causes, particularly foliar damage and defoliation of Rosaceae relatives. It prompts the shadbush, or Amelanchier; the blue-leaved Rosa glauca (the best rose for combining with perennials), and my oldest of apples to lose their leaves so early each year. Its presence is also the reason I don’t even try to grow hawthorns. Quince, crabapple, and pear are among other Rosaceae members similarly affected, host species that can pass some kinds of rust back and forth with the juniper.
Much darker, and far more ghoulish: Bats have been disappearing in terrifying numbers, in a pattern first noted close by in 2006, near Albany, New York; it has since spread through New England and the Northeast, and at this writing has reached as far as Tennessee and Alabama, out into Missouri and up into four Canadian provinces. The losses are probably because of a fungus that is known as white-nose syndrome, previously unknown to science but now named Geomyces destructans. (That second word, or species name, in the Latin binomial—destructans—is another example of a spot-on specific epithet. Destructans indeed.) Without bats, we’d face not just a booming mosquito population (among other pests), but if the syndrome were to continue its spread into warmer zones, farmers would be without one of the pollinators for avocado and plantain, and missing the only creature that pollinates agave.
Selfishly, the last few summers I very much miss the little brown bat who tucked himself into a crack in the beaded spruce roofers that form the ceiling of my unenclosed back porch, right above the door frame. For decades, from the end of one Myotis lucifugus hibernation period to the start of the next, every day at home was a game of chicken between me and the year’s bat-in-residence. Who would flinch first: him (by waking up and either dropping from his holdfast into flight or drawing up farther and literally disappearing into the woodwork), or me (by using another door, rather than risking such an encounter)? It got so that nobody minded the other one—in fact I came to like to stand below his spot and watch him sleep—but despite how hard we worked on our relationship, we meet no more.
WE HAVE IT HERE, too, that light in August that Estelle Faulkner commented on to her husband, William, as they sat on their Mississippi porch, staring out into the cusp month, the one that offers a glimpse forward. August and its uncanny light teases the first taste of fall in a changing angle of the sun and a few cool nights—but then flip-flops us all right back to the here-and-now of high summer: of heat, humidity, harvest, and usually havoc in some form from hurricane season. The Faulkners’ South has no corner on the phenomenon—and it’s not just the humans that take notice. The rodents seem to know first, burying food and exploring potential shelters long before I need to think of taking fall and winter clothes out of their cupboards for more easy-reach spots, or to choose an option (spin the roulette wheel?) for the year’s heating-fuel payment plan.
It is not autumn, technically, not even close yet, but by the more important standards I can see and smell it coming, and hear it in new movements. There is a sudden, measurable shift in animal behavior; spring and summer’s primary mandate, sex—and with it all the battles in defense of the kingdom—has suddenly lost its appeal. There are no hours in the day when the grass is truly dry, even in a drier year than this sorry one; a changing of the guard has begun among the birds, who are molting and disappearing and will soon be replaced by other friends not seen since spring came on.
Last night was the first blanket night since May, and this morning: so much dew. The gauges are practically empty, but water drips steadily from the roof as if it had stormed, and hard at that, and all the paved surfaces are dark and slick. The moon is out in the morning, high in the west. I go out to pick up the ritual wheelbarrows of windfall apples and pears, none of them ready yet, but the doe who has summered in the cornfield across the road will eat them, anyway. Behaving like my trained fish in this one moment of our daily interaction, she lumbers up the field when the first barrow-load drops by the roadside, thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud, so many imperfect, unfinished fruit touching down and rolling over the embankment to congregate again—reunited—in a hollow that serves as her dinner bowl. On the way out to the task, my shoes get soaked through, as they knock off and then absorb the silvery bead of water from the tip of each and every grass blade I disturb. Outward bound, I leave a dark-green trail of beadless blades in the otherwise light-green, glistening lawn. I try to stay within the lines on my retreat so that, once back inside, I can look out to see the strict, defined mark of my latest imprint on this piece of land.
I PULL DOWN THE LATEST ROUND of nearly ripe tomatoes, another daily late-summer routine that tries to keep me just ahead of the pressure from chipmunks and raccoons, and today also of the tropical storm that’s due any time now. As I write this, a wild woman called Irene is hurling herself up the nation as if to have at the many tropical plants I dare to grow in defiance of my zone. Not that I take things personally.
On the way back inside with my semi-red haul (how to ripen a tomato, here), I notice that six frogs are huddling together two feet aloft in the bough of a dwarf white pine, presumably testing their emergency-preparedness plan in case a move to higher ground is called for. The cradle would fall if Jack and I jumped on this bandwagon; better have our own Plan B. I put out extra rain gauges, which can’t hold the forecast of ten inches, anyhow; I’ll have to dump them at least once mid-storm. I drag anything that could be hurled around into a building for safety, and then basically behave petulantly until bedtime, like someone put-upon, when still no rain of any significance has developed to justify the efforts.
And then I toss: from two to three in the morning, thinking not of sump pumps but of shoveling snow—of trying to carve the path to freedom from the kitchen doorway down toward the street with my increasingly bum left shoulder. I am reminded of how bad it has gotten each time I roll over onto that side and hear it scream at me in response. Not sure I can heft shovelfuls one-handed, the way I have been mowing for weeks and weeks already. Feeling defenseless, I daydream into the night about snowblowers. The tropical storm hasn’t even been reckoned with, and I am worrying about the threat of winter. By morning, though, all thoughts are back to rain: We are at seven-point-five inches, six of which are in the cellar, where my impressive collection of mousetraps—mechanisms of death—float like tiny life rafts on the tide, life rafts each stocked with a ration of peanut butter. Anchors aweigh!
Jack is eager to get out, once the rain slows by afternoon, and makes his rounds of the fieldstone surfaces surrounding the house, the landing pad that seems to anchor the building into the landscape, added a piece at a time over the years. Like a bar-bound sailor in a familiar port, he knows each stone intimately, and which holds the best drink. The puddles that form in their distinctive depressions are of a nectar far superior to any I could pour into his red enamel bowl inside the mudroom. There is no finer water, apparently, and he drinks from each of his favorites on this aftermath morning of way-beyond-plenty.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PLANT? Ken the physical therapist asks, pointing to a green plastic nursery pot on the windowsill while I sit swaddled in an ice pack after our twelfth session in little more than a month, and that’s not including all the other kinds of appointments this uncooperative shoulder has cost me so far. I still can’t buckle my seatbelt, get long-sleeved garments on and off without tears, rub-a-dub-dub my back dry with a bath towel, let alone face the fall cleanup that approaches. But objectively he measures a few degrees’ more range than when we started, and so on we go.
All I can think of as I examine the increasingly crispy Spathiphyllum that just doesn’t look like its roots are properly connected to the soil any longer: I hope it doesn’t look this bad inside my joint capsule, but I bet it does. Ouch. I don’t have the heart to tell Ken to toss it (and thankfully he seems to be sticking with me and my sorry wing for the duration, too). Maybe we will both get lucky.
ONLY THIRTEEN DAYS HAVE PASSED and now the rainfall total for that short span is at fifteen-point-five inches. I’ve fallen (more than a little) behind on the mowing, weeding, and deadheading—but I’m way ahead on the watering, I tell myself, cultivating a succession crop of homegrown garden humor, at least, as the other crops suffocate and decline from too-wet-too-long root systems and all the general hammering. If there had been any real flame to this summer, it is certainly extinguished now for good. The sounds of August, enormous swells of tiny insect voices (can you call them voices if they come from legs or wings being rubbed, not out of throats or mouths?), try mightily to compete for attention with the pounding of the nearby brook, now double-wide and extra-violent. There are so many mosquitoes—not a creature I typically see many of here on my hillside—that I need to add to my tool bucket what my niece in childhood referred to as a “fly swapper” and a can of “bug propeller.” The storms have washed away the summer’s fire, and even my burning desire for the garden is seriously dampened, and almost put out.