When you prepare to move from an apartment to a house, you might anticipate the pleasure you’ll take from your new backyard. You’ll have a place for cookouts, instead of the 2×4 grass patch next to the parking lot. You’ll have a beautiful expanse of lawn lined with trees, shrubs and flowers. Tulips in spring. Red maples. Azaleas (azaleas are the rule in the D.C. area). And so on. However, if you are me, you will imagine all of that, but you will not imagine actually doing anything to plant or maintain it. And frankly, I’d be happy with a meadow of wildflowers or a desert of saguaros, as long as I have a place to sit. A great advantage to either a desert or a meadow is that I don’t have to do anything to them. When I lived in an apartment it was all well and good to hear other people talk about their gardens and the work they put in. But apparently, once I moved to a house, I could no longer just listen and nod. I was expected to participate.
There’s an old piece that ran in Harper’s Magazine called, “The General Theory of Not-Gardening” by Leszek Kolakowski. Kolakowski contends that you need not garden, but if you’re not going to, you must have a theory: “The alternative to not-gardening without a theory is to garden. However, it is much easier to have a theory than actually to garden.” He provides examples ranging from Freudian to Marxist to Existentialist theories. I will take any one of these. For today, I will advocate the Structuralist Theory of not-gardening: “People work in houses (factories, offices) and rest in the open (gardens, parks, forests, rivers, etc.). Such distinctions are crucial in maintaining the conceptual framework whereby people structure their lives. To garden is to confuse the distinction between house and field, between leisure and work; it is to blur, indeed to destroy, the oppositional structure that is the basis of thinking. Gardening is a blunder.”
Do not be confused if you have seen me on my knees planting things year after year. This is not the same as actual gardening. Gardening requires an attitude of dedication. For several years, I planted things because I felt compelled to do so. For some reason, when I left the yard alone, it didn’t grow into a meadow. Instead, it grew weeds. It is not okay to have empty dirt patches overgrown with weeds and invasive English ivy all over the yard. This is when I learned that gardening also requires some knowledge. If I planted annuals, they would turn out to be perennials and come back every year. If they were perennials, I would never see them again. If the plants were supposed to be shade-tolerant, they would die from lack of sun. If they were supposedly deer-proof, they would be eaten by rabbits and deer. I considered covering the plants with netting to keep away the animals. Because doesn’t it seem like a great idea to plant things, and then, to keep them looking good, cover them with a hairnet? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.
For several years in a row, we tried to grow grass in the shaded dirt patch where otherwise nothing grew but moss. I don’t know why we did this, unless it was to say we had tried. The result was spindly anemic blades that were too fragile to walk on. What was the point again?
The most fun I had taking care of the garden was when I bought containers of ladybugs and baby praying mantises and let them loose in the yard so that I could watch them. I don’t know if, technically, we needed them for any specific purpose at the time. I only know that watching the praying mantises catch bugs was a lot more fun (and more environmentally sound) than standing and watering the grass, which would die, seemingly before my eyes, the moment I stopped watering. To be clear, I was totally okay with not having grass in that part of the yard. But this is probably where the difference between men and women emerges. Men want lawns. I have no idea why. I don’t know why we didn’t just “plant” a Zen rock garden years ago.
Meanwhile, my son had the right idea for using the other major dirt patch, a spot that was left without grass when we removed the toddler play set that stood there for a couple years. He excavated this section of the yard and started a “city,” complete with plantings (i.e., weeds transplanted from other areas, though this eventually included maple seedlings); dwellings made from twigs; ponds, dams, and miniature trails; and toy soldiers as citizens. The only problem with this city was, like any city, it constantly threatened to expand beyond its borders. If we were not careful, we would have an entire yard of houses for Eeyore.
Clearly, it was time to get professional help. I interviewed a number of people. They all wanted to make maps of our yard and create a “design” for the plantings. This seemed to me a rather overblown approach. We’re not exactly overseeing the gardens of Versailles, here. We’re talking about a few half-dead hemlocks and a city of weeds. Perhaps a topiary?
What really puzzled me was that people who claimed to be landscapers kept showing up dressed in suits. It was hard to believe they spent any time around dirt. Until I met “Clyde.” Clyde didn’t knock on my door, but went directly to the yard, where he paced for several minutes, making gravelly "hmm" and clucking sounds. Then he told me that what I needed were hellebores. (And by "hellebore," I thought he meant a person who stays too long at parties. That wasn’t what he meant.) Put a smoke bush over here, he said, and transplant these bushes to there, and plant nandinas and move the forsythias, and put ornamental grasses here and scylla there, and move that vinca… And then he told me not only what month these plants would bloom, but what week of the month, and not just that the flowers would be blue, but what SHADE of blue. Quite obviously, this man knew his way around plants. Still, this was not what sealed the deal. No, what did that was the beard. A beard twice as large and unkempt as the Christian Bale-at-the-Oscars beard. In his beard, in Clyde’s beard, there was a fly. Now there’s a man who’s one with the earth. Sold!
Now, I know that a hellebore is green, and it has flowers, and it looks pretty nice, even with the popsicle-stick populated dirt city spreading out in the background. And, I know that once you plant the right things, you can mostly leave them alone, which leaves me free to contemplate my next theory of not-gardening.
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