willful gardening

It is weeding season. Yes, it is time to pull the little devils out, sprout the sunflowers and let the longer light of day do its magic. Our mantra is don’t break the irrigation. Much of our quarreling is to do with our integrating our intuition not of what we see now but what we will see in the weeks ahead. 

Not that my wife and I know a thing other than if we have a plant in the ground and give it water the sunlight will often do the rest. Not always do things break our way. We do suffer failure. On our watch when a plant dies there is dirge that aches, sorrow is the soil where we plant our hopes for a luckier day. 

Sprouting a cork oak tree eggcorn three years ago has resulted in a new tree measuring a mighty two-feet-six-inches tall. I have set a small stake in the ground and surrounded the little one with a shroud of boxed wire. The sprouted tree is set in the center of our front yard. A few decades from now we imagine the tree will grow up to be a stunning landmark on our block. Eggcorns allow for gardeners to drive lasting durable events far off into a future we will not be here for. We lend tomorrow a hand up. I appreciate our ancestors I’ve never known for their generosity and forward imagining this better world.

The grapevines are awake, the table grape vines are exploring the arbor we built. During the summer the vine’s leaves will shade the southern side of our backyard studio. Just in front is the patch of blueberry bushes. In conversation with a master gardener, I was urged to give each blueberry bush enough space that they would not feel the stress of their blueberry neighbors. This seems to hold true. I suspect my neighbors and the fences we keep help do the same. 

None of this is anything I should know the first thing about. I was busy as all of us are in our lives with other more urgent things, matters like pursuing a career, keeping the bare cupboards at bay, traveling near and far to implore clients to buy my wares, and perhaps it is only me but dedicating time to crawling between pubs in San Francisco to discuss as little as possible with people I might know and have never met before. Some days you work, other days you garden and depending upon the degree of sloth and toper one suffers on those days you work from one place to another for a favorite revivifying day of unbridled self-indulgence.

I have a game camera in the yard. The camera has caught racoon, possum, fox, and squirrels scampering about to do their wild hunting and gathering business. I’ve a decent list of birds that I’ve spot while laboring in the yard. Regrettably the neighborhood cats’ prey on our birds. I talk with my neighbors but talk of how the domestic house cat has murder in their heart falls on closed minds. Cats are the unvarnished good residents, and the birds are the unfortunate carnage.

Lizards do pretty good. I keep a reptile’s paradise of habitat for these friends to escape into. The Anna’s are fleet and fast hummingbirds and thrive here. Hummers love our Chinese lantern plants and we spend idle moments between dawn and dusk pondering the mechanics of their flight. As DaVinci like as we may appear there is a recognition here in the yard that our gifts compared to the famous Italian are modest.

All we do here with our soil in our yard isn’t a lost cause. Life does go on, but there is a pecking order. Not to put too sharp a point on the matter even my most inner omnipotent self is held to account by the primordial forces found in a yard. My life as retrospect is punctuated as I am sure most lives are by the diary of stupid things. I keep the list hidden away. Sure, I confess in my weak moments or sometimes it is a ploy to throw off those that are onto my shortcomings as a kind of sop and sendoff to the abiding weakness we all hold deep inside for doing things not well thought through. Thinking things through is a worldwide weakness. 

Neighbors report coyote here, bobcat and the occasional mountain lion. A few parts of our yard seem to be ideal habitat for black widow spiders. To keep them down I hose off the decks after washing them with castile soap. This seems to keep the undesirables from thinking they might make a living in my neighborhood.

Logan berries are thriving, our Mandevilles after several failed attempts at cultivating have found a good corner of our yard to thrive. Our four bougainvillea have by trial and error  found a place to call their own. 

There are raised beds for vegetables, the raised beds please us, each day we count on these fortressed garden grounds to thwart the cruel gophers. A few years back I lost a fig tree to this pesky rodent. Voles think here is paradise. You should understand that there is a lot of sudden subterranean life ending trapping going on.  I can report that I regret none of it.

We use mechanical traps, natural repellents and never chemical remedies. Well, in one instance in the front yard bark beetles had last year attacked one of our six larger cork oaks. We called an arborist and after his diagnosis called in a vendor to put a stop to that destructive pest. That has turned out to be the best $300 we’ve ever spent on a tree. The cost of the remedy had the feel of a veterinarian’s office visit.

There was a yellowjacket nest to cope with. For several nights I poured five gallons of water mixed with castile soap over the top of their nest. It took a few days, but they are gone now. I am savaged with guilt, a guilt that I confess doesn’t sting.

There are gutters to keep clear, pathways to sweep and sweep again. We seem to be stuck arranging chairs and then rearranging the chairs again and after another few days yet again. We don’t know why we are so sure we need to keep trying to find an arrangement of chairs that brings us the most serenity within ourselves but for reasons beyond any words we are certain the gods want us to keep trying to bring some illusive symmetry to the arrangement of chairs.

This is how life passes while we are left to our own devices in our yard. Goodness does come from these hours that we use to tinker and toil. Some days it is our front yard other days it is the backyard, the worst are when it is both. We have a fine side yard to the west while we continue working to bring about something better on our east flank. On and on it goes, at least for my wife and me. I can tell some of our neighbors like their yards too, but a yard does take time, and not all of us have as much to spare or waste. I’d likely have a yard in need of more help had I not curbed my inclination to crawl from brew pub to ale house, from cocktail lounge to dive bar. 

That’s really the most urgent aspect of a life well lived, in my opinion, is to get down on all fours and think of pulling weeds as a kind of way of clearing out of a seedy bar the troublemakers and no accounts cause. I owe a lot to weeds. I didn’t know I had run up such a debt, but here it is, and they’ve been around as long as I’ve been alive. Weeds are here to prod, to teach— paradise I’m convinced have the best weeds whereas my backyard is where the worst of them have come to meet their certain fate.