How Gardening Is Not Writing

Monarda bradburiana

You know how it is in June, if you have a couple of days off work. You look out the window during breakfast and the sun is shining and you can't help yourself, you take your coffee and walk out of doors into the garden and you watch the birds and notice that the peonies will definitely open this day; you don't intend to do much, just a brief look about before heading in to write. After all, somewhere W. H. Auden mentions a walk around the garden before setting to work--and then you notice some weeds that need pulling, so you do that, and might be on the way indoors when you realize the tomatoes you'd started but hadn't planted out because of all the rain are still sitting in their cellpacks, so you put them in, and along the way you see that the bumblebees prefer the Monarda bradburiana, while the honeybees are busy at the nepeta--but the carpenter bees seem to like everything, and meanwhile, you put in the columbine and prairie dropseed starts and pull up some coreopsis that's crowding the Monarda, and then you look across the yard, past where the bees are working the clover, and decide you may as well start setting the bricks where you're making an edge for the newly-wider flowerbed around the viburnum. Several hours go by, with stops for water, and suddenly it's time to make supper. But then later that evening you can't stay inside, so you trim the yews, and that night fall in bed exhausted.

 Spring Azure (Celastrina argiolus)

And next day, the same thing happens, except this time the hummingbird shows up, a female, which means there's a nest somewhere nearby and you've achieved your goal of attracting breeding as well as migrating hummers. You remember that Auden wasn't the gardener in the house, and while thinking this you somehow end up by the compost heap, which needs turning, so you get the fork and your favorite short-handled shovel and start in, it's practically a bog at the bottom there's been so much rain, but look, there's some good compost, so you get the sifter and the wheelbarrow and set to work and pretty soon there's a barrow full of clean compost, no bindweed roots at all, so what to do? Plant the two baby oaks with a good helping of compost and dig some in where the old Norway maple had depleted the soil, and plant the little spicebushes--and a spring azure flashes by, right down the line, past the willow amsonia, the columbines and over the now-blooming peonies; then you transplant the parsley, plant the cilantro seeds, lightly cultivate around the chard and the leeks need thinning, so you do that and go put the thinnings in the bag you keep in the freezer for stock-making vegetables, and head right back out, you've succumbed, and by this time you aren't even thinking in words, just colors, shapes, relationships and movements…

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A Question of Trees
Hummingbird Sightings
Compost By Any Other Name
I've Been Away
The Ugly Garden Kerfluffle