Gardens and time

Always the same. Never the same.

Spring lasted about two weeks this year, but it was a glorious two weeks. I’ve never seen the trees bloom like that. Seemingly on the same day, every apple and crabapple tree, every plum and cherry, every pear tree, and the banks and banks of lilacs that often serve as borders between our city lots here in town — they all burst into the heaviest bloom any of us have seen in decades. The lilacs lasted almost two weeks. I’ve never seen anything like it. The white lilacs Himself and his ex planted back in the late 80s when they moved here, they were magnificent.

And now we’ve settled into the Ordinary Time of early summer. I’ve been pulling spring greens for a couple of weeks now. One day I pulled all the spinach, the next, the broccoli rabe.Yesterday I pulled everything that still seemed edible, the bolting spinach tops, the mustards that hadn’t gotten woody. I’ve been blanching and draining and freezing and vaccuum sealing them so I can eat my own greens for breakfast over the winter. Then today I pulled up all the remainders, the ones that had gone woody, the ones that had only just sprouted but were thin and weedy, I pulled them all up and threw them into the chicken coop/compost heap.

A layer of new compost to top up the beds, and in went the tomatoes and the peppers, tucked down deep and covered with hoops, and a light layer of fleece to keep them from burning up on a hot afternoon, keep them safe from the inevitable hailstorms of June.

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours. Lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.

Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, 1994, p.30.

The thing about the garden, the thing about the garden that I love, that I have come to rely on, is that it doesn’t change much. Some things change. Details change. For instance, I finally figured out that the strawberries were not thriving as ground cover for the berry bushes, so I cleared out a raised bed that hadn’t been a good home for anything else, topped it up with some new compost, and planted a dozen new strawberry plants there. I ate my first one this morning. Growing your own strawberries will ruin you for store ones. I interplanted borage that self seeded elsewhere, put some nasturtium seeds in, moved some self-seeded calendula in there too. It’ll be a riot of berry plants and flowers before long. The details change but the process, planting things, watering them, watching them grow, harvesting; none of that changes. It’s the same cycle every year. Twenty years I’ve been doing this in this yard.

For a long time, I thought gardening was something I was going to get “right.” I thought I’d find the ultimate combination of plants and hardscaping, the perfect configuration of raised beds, the One True combination of perennials in my flower bed.

This was nonsense of course.

What I love about the garden is that, like art, it’s always different and always the same. Every time you sit down to write it’s exactly the same. A blank notebook, a blinking cursor, a yellow pad, or all of the above when you can’t get started. And then it happens, you start following the thread of your thought, you print it out, read it over, circle around, weed out the bad bits, throw them to the chickens. You start again. During the fallow period, during those winters between projects, you read and plan. You mark passages in other books the way you dog ear the seed catalogs in February. You pin index cards and postcards and photographs to a board. You walk around in circles.

And if you can find the space, if you can find the time away from the lunch breaks and the emails and the last bus home, eventually you can tease another paragraph, another essay, another short story out of the fallow ground of your own self.

And when you can’t? There’s the long beds outside, where bindweed needs pulling, and the glut of summer savory that self-seeded last year needs thinning, and that perennial bed, it’s missing something in that blank place in the middle.

Whole days go by. Whole weekends. And there you are, with dirt under your nails, and a paragraph that’s come alive in your head, clutching a handful of walking onions. The Amen beyond prayer.