The View From Outside

What do they see when they look at my garden?  Rich black soil pebbled with iron, light fluffy loam atop the soil, rich and fragrant, a tender blanket of straw to protect against winter frost…  raked over to reveal sturdy green shoots in a blanket of growth…

What does he see when he looks at my garden?  Patches of untended soil, dry and crumbly, powdered in it’s neglect, bordering up to deep black sopping wet soil turned by long worms that consume and fertilize in the same motion, empty landscape of contrasting soils, withering lonely bushes scattered through out.

What do I see?  Weeds.  Mixed in with glorious fragrant peonies.  I see tall yellow dandilions hidden amongst the powerful bright happy sunflowers. I see trailing twining choking vines wrapping round my carefully tended flowering trees… and a scattering of brown dead things left behind by my pruning and plucking and pinching.  I see tall flowering vegetable plants, wildly growing herbs, and basic marigolds amongst the variegated grasses and the lavendar mixed with the Asiatic Lillies mixed with sexy Gladioli.  I see both the tipping top heavy flowers uprooted by those sneaky moles, I see the green buds on the tree limbs above the scattered dirt of a chipmunks rummaging.  I see the lacy beauty in a leaf partially consumed by a caterpillar awaiting his turn to become a cocoon.

What is real?  Which view is truth?  Which view is most practical? Do we have to vote? Why can’t they all be just the same garden?

If you don’t like it… you can leave.  But you cannot change my garden.  Only I can do that.  The thing is, I don’t think, really, that I want to change it. 

I think… really… that I like my garden.  Or at least, I like the way the roots are coming out.  The pulling of them is horrid but the absence of them is mighty… and I don’t want to stop now.  I like this thing I’m creating out of nothing but rot and trash.  I like this thing I’m creating out of your fertilizer, out of your water, out of your sunshine.  See what you started? Now watch me finish it…

Watch my garden grow, and then come in and see the beauty in the mix of things I’ve grown… I’ll prepare a special place just for you to sit.

Who buys this stuff?

I’m not a professional gardener.  I have been playacting at it for so long that I thought I was top notch.  I’d pull a weed and feel satisfied.  I’d plant a new flower, stand in awe of it’s beauty while it bloomed, but forgot about it when it faded.

The one true thing I knew for certain about gardening was that I needed “amend” my soil.  I needed to fill it with nutrients and moistured holding elements.  I knew that I wanted it to be an organic garden, nothing artificial or fake, just pureness and the simplicity of natural growth.

The problem is that I think I got a bad load of fertilizer.  I just used whatever I had on hand to mix into what was already there, and then I threw on a bunch of stuff I’d read about or heard about.  I figured I couldn’t add too much “good” stuff.  But it turned out all wrong.  My garden smells to high heaven and I can’t even hardly bear to get out there into it. 

This is not your everyday smelly fertilizer.  This is not the scent wafting on the wind from the fields that makes you hold your nose and grimace.  This is no simple spreadable manure.  This is bad shit.

Something is rotten and putrified in there.  Something is half alive feeding on itself, eating up my efforts and destroying my will.  Something stomach churning, fume producing, wet, sticky, toxic.

Is this it? Is it just that I handled it so badly and messed it up so hugely that even I don’t want to go step around in it for fear it will suck me down and consume me?  Do I put on my gas mask, my HEPA suit, and go out there with a rake and stir it up until it dries out or do I seal it off and walk away to let it consume itself?

It’s not like I was the only one.  He pulled a weed or two, and even planted many pretties.  And when it came time to unload and fling the fertilizer to all the corners, I didn’t see him hesitate.  We both did it.  And as much as I want to leave it now, he wants to cover it up with something else and pretend it didn’t happen. 

I can’t see that working out very well.

Immersed in Fertilizer

Sometimes there is nothing else to do, except to just accept that fertilizer, stinky and choking and gag-worthy, is the foundation for growth.

I try…

We speak, we falter and then change the subject and underneath we are both thinking about the weeds but ignoring them for the beauty of the flowers.

We share, a connection rebuilt, a bridge shored up, a paddle retrieved from the creek… and even in the tenseness there is comfort.

But I must say… why was I the one to apologize?  Why were YOU the one to nod your head, sigh, and tell me that forgiveness was a process.  Do you not, will you ever, is it possible… that you could see your own forest in spite of the trees?

Why is it that I can point out the storm, coming in from the south, and you can point to the clear sky in the north and say, “Well, if it wern’t clear there, the storm wouldn’t come” or “There is a breeze offshore created by the pull of the moon and the shifting global economy so we should expect a lot of storms and be prepared to meet them”.

Could you never admit that your storm, your fury unleashed, your fragile climate so uncontrolled, is at the root of the damage done?  That possibly my original garden plan was not up to the standards required, but that it was the storm that destroyed the garden, and not the flimsy design?

Anger wells underneath the frail tenuous peace… uncertainty bubbles like a slow simmer of toxic chemicals over a bunsen burner, looking so much like a healing chicken soup but smelling so much like the regurgitated remains of ecoli infested vegetation… deadly.

And you sleep, well satisfied, having decided that your garden is just fine the way it is… while I stomp around my fresh fill dirt, kicking at rocks and cursing at the tunneling rodents and wondering why it is that I have to even bother caring so much.  T’would be so much easier to just let it all go.

 

Low Pressure Front

It’s always hanging on the horizon, the storm and it’s black clouds and it’s undercurrent of pressure.  The sticky uncomfortable way it stills the air and brings the scent of something far away… a low pressure front coming through.

Sometimes we need the rain.  The rain seeps down deep into the soil and makes things grow.  It provides moisture for the burrowing and tunneling creatures.  We need the rain.  I don’t mind the rain – but I don’t like that pressure and fullness before it comes.

Sometimes the anticipation of the storm lasts a long time and we scurry to prepare with extra supplies to prevent too much damage.  The feelings build and build and then a wind comes and pushes the storm off to another direction.  We are left with extra supplies and absolutely nothing else.  No rain, furied wind and the release that comes when the storm breaks.

Sometimes the storm comes so quick and we are so unprepared.  It blows through and detroys everything in it’s path and we are defenseless and crippled in our own helpless humanity.  Surveying the ravaged land we decide: do we wait and see what will grow and what has gone?  Do we move the garden to a new spot?  Do we decide to keep our garden in small portable planters safely on our deck?  Or do we go out with our rakes and shovels, overturning littered soil and adding fresh rich fertilizer, making long even rows and carefully dropping in new seeds, new transplants, and redesigning it.  It may look different, but it’s still a garden.

My storm came… it built up, that low pressure feeling forever, the clouds rolling in the distance, the scent of rain in the air.  I saw that storm and I tried to prepare but as time passed I got used to the low pressure feeling, the image of those rolling clouds out on the horizon became normal.  And when it finally broke, I wasn’t ready at all.

Do I replant? Do I wait and see what grows? Do I redesign?  Do I decide to never grow a garden again?

It’s hard work, this growing and weeding and recovering.  I’m sweaty and tired and bone weary now.   The air cleared briefly, just long enough to truly reveal the damage, but the clouds are back and they cover up the worst of it, softening the way the ugly garden looks… making it all so deceptive.

You see it don’t you?  The ruined plantings, the trash that lies littered all over, piles of dead broken branches tripping you up… or do you just look up, and see the sky and think, “oh look, it’s a clear day above us!”