What is there to say about poppies that they do not say for themselves... there, at the back of the garden, their sable-centered flames? Still, I cannot stop watching them. They will be gone soon enough. It is hard not to see some variety of illusively multi-gendered sex in those big blooms... a creature come to seduce us from another world. Invasion of the vision snatchers. How do we wait this long? Every year? Just to witness their quick fire flare and go? I let the seed pods dry and bring them in for the winter. Pod people. Silent there in the vase with the Chinese lanterns. Reminders of what has been. Remembering, every Spring, as they open, I am sure I can hear them sing. *** Gardens hold us in thrall to their inherent mysteries. Not the rigidly formal. Not the too strictly rowed and weeded... those industrial habits of obsessive regularity with their measured rows of annuals and almost mathematically placed perennials... borders and sidewalk edging. None of that. Industrial colorized strips along concrete and asphalt... wilting in the sun. Placed without regard for their own ability, necessity, to spread and overlap, swell and fall and rise. The mystery of gardens, real gardens, is that they, each one, enfold us in their inimitable singularity. Sometimes it can be too powerful for those who demand a kind of Newtonian order in paths and sightlines. They are unable to unleash the instinctual feel of the natural order of a creatively envisioned and realized garden. Real gardens, the only ones worth their effort, in a kind of ideal blossoming that evolves in the mind of the gardener months before the start of the real work, begin to take shape over the years that they build themselves. Authentic gardens are allowed to teach us their own language as they learn it and show it to us. We are encouraged to pay attention to an emerging and seductive, even beautiful, wildness, a mix of the endemic with the rare and elusive. We are a part of how it invites us in. Sometimes it is hard to sit in such a place. We are pushed to wander. Sometimes it becomes a place where dream overlaps with day-to-day humdrum. No. Not escape. Integration. Even in the smallest spaces. Like Earth itself, a garden of wildness, at its best, can guide us into a kind mystery. Gardens are the ability of the gardener and those enveloped by that gardening to create a smaller version of that miracle. There are no rules, only visions. *** I found my first garden toad very early this year, before I had even turned the dirt when the only things growing in the vegetable garden were the spring onions that I planted in the fall. I have Egyptian Walking Onions that produce scads of topset bulblets that I harvest and plant in the Fall so that I will have lots of green onions come the middle of May. The toad was quiet. In my garden it has many hiding places. I think that is a good luck omen in the garden. ***
*** The Night Garden The night garden steams and prickles before any eye can hold what little light spies the nature of its growing stars grow too and move toward dawn, beans and beets break through the dirt and spread some kind of freedom wide. Sleepless in the dim light I believe I can hear the earthworm and the slug, a silent nightjar staring a few fields over, the watchful fox along the river, the other night lives so quicksilver in the moon. Listen! New blooms unfurl, peony, O heady perfume, hardy geranium, dream us all in our beds; even I, my weary restlessness, attends... attends *** I am not sure, as I get older, if the work to prepare my numerous gardens is getting harder or if I am just less tolerant of the discomfort of the aches and pains the work comes with. It doesn’t seem to me to be any more painful, and I like the level of fitness it helps me maintain. But perhaps I am more fatigued. Perhaps. And getting up and down from the ground is a nearly comical undertaking. I do like gardening from the ground though. The dirt feels good. Kneeling and leaning on one hand while I scrape through the dirt to clean seedbeds has always wreaked havoc with my neck and spine. I have had a positional headache for days. Swimming loosens me up, but I am always forced to go to a chiropractor after planting season. It’s worth it. I get to the point that I can wander and be aimless, carrying a trowel. Hoisting a hose. ***
*** We have no control. We have lost what little control we were able to fight and die for. Our garden. The garden of our world. This incredible global swell of seasons, solstice and equinox, waters, food, evolutionary partners. It has been stolen from us. Nothing we will do will give it back to us. Not now. It is demonstrating our impotence by disregarding us as it attempts to reset, recalibrate, and return to equilibrium. In the end we are, in fact, ultimately unnecessary to this effort. We, some of us, may have even become the primary viral impediment. Those others of us who have inherited and worked to sustain our connection to the divine fruitfulness of our home, the rightful if vulnerable stewardship of its fecund eternity, have been discounted and pushed aside. We feel that loss deeply and constantly under our range of hearing. It is not grief. It is not that easy. We drink poisons and ingest plastics that circulate through our brains. We are given instruments of our own destruction that rob us of the ability to direct ourselves. Our incredible gift, those amazing cerebral pathways that evolved in us that allow us to map direction, place, and our visionary overview of this planetary gem with its many tribes, attained through mere thought in partnership with our feet and hands and our eyes, is rapidly being eroded. No one will know where they are in relationship to all other things unless they are told by the thing that has stolen our “us-ness” from us. Our where-ness and our here-ness. We are allowed no respite from the way the buried black blood of the earth has been employed to destroy us. Nothing is being done by those we have elected to do something. Nothing. They have become the fingers of the beast that is devouring us. It is an interior parasitic beast. A collective toxic shadow. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of how, in spite of the nature of our growth into virtually every corner of the globe and our debriding of every wild space with our machines, we are lost. Lost to ourselves and to each other. The garden has lost its center. Its music of unity and being. Its indescribable melodic interconnectedness. Eden was not a myth of where we came from in the beginning but a dystopic vision of what we have allowed ourselves to be cast out from. *** Allowing wildness in one’s garden is essential. Gardens should have naturally occurring, not altogether planned, entrances and passages. We should be required to touch leaves and tall plumes entering and passing through. Push them aside to open our direction into the next viewpoint, the next hall of foliage and flowers, the towers of runner beans and morning glories. The next wide-open sweetness of meadows of food and birds and toads and moths. The walls of the garden should work toward a kind of visual impenetrability. The interest of climbing things and stalks. Amaranth. Hollyhock. Corn. We should be compelled to look toward the dirt. We should see things we do not recognize and must ask about. Wild seed that comes in with the wind should be encouraged. Milkweed is a reliable perennial. Sweet smelling in flower, host to numerous bees and butterflies. Mullein, with its tall velvet stalk and greyish leaves, the spadix loaded with inconstant little yellow blooms. Dames Rocket, those early volunteer clutches of violet. Forget-me-not through the shady areas and tucked into little spaces, everywhere, a riot of blue pointillism before much else has even identified itself. Primrose. The first violets in the lawn. Sunflowers rising... rising. Mud in the hand, mud on the soles of the feet. ***
*** The mud on my feet will stay, the last plants from the greenhouse wilt a little. I must find them a place. So much remains unanswered: how a season will evolve, what storms or little droughts or winds off the lake might suck the sap from bounding stems and siphon the last rain from the dirt. Or perhaps the heat will be just enough and rains will come at night as needed, the tendrils of gourds and cucumbers will climb, feel up their gates unencumbered. Nothing is sure, but it has been cold until now, a number of seeds rotted in the ground and were replanted. And last year’s flowers and tubers that come of their own accord? We make decisions every day to yank them or let them stay. *** I have bragged about the ease of zinnias. How I was given zinnia seed for my first little plot when I was less than 6 years old and how I have gotten over my prejudice against them, my thinking they are merely childhood flowers. How I grow them every year now. But this year has been a puzzle. I have replanted seed at least three times for my zinnia plot. I see the seedlings rise. And then they are gone. I believe it is an infestation of slugs. Slugs have always been a problem here... but nowhere else in the garden this year have they been so prevalent. My lettuce beds, in the past, were the most harassed... so I have prepared those plots and as long as I get past the seedling stage the slugs do not tend to be as much as a problem. I was used to them wiping out an entire bed of lettuce overnight as soon as the seed leaves, those tiny limey hands, bust up through the dirt. I hope this last zinnia seeding will take. ***
*** There is a billboard along a major highway that comes over the hills into town. It is sponsored by some Catholic organization or another. It says, in black and red letters: “And God Made Them Male and Female” or something to that effect. Highly offensive, in many ways... especially coming from an organization that has never come to terms with its horrific legacy of child abuse. In this area it is especially hard to stomach considering the church’s role in the genocide of Native Americans. There was an “Indian School” in a nearby town, across the bay. The old building was taken down about 15 or 20 years ago. Human remains were reported to have been found during the rerouting of a road around the new complex that was built over the old school. I am certain I do not want to be associated with that particular perspective in any way. Besides, it is simply unscientific. There is no science to its proclamation... which has the ignorant audacity to claim is their god’s proclamation. They claimed that about killing Indians too. That being said, despite my belief that adults are endowed with a whole range of choices in regard to how they wish to express their idea of their gender affiliations or the externalization of how they wish their “self” to be seen by others, I remain unsure, unconvinced, that there is any real scientific basis to the idea that anyone born with one set of definitive biological gender markers can, by their feelings and instinct alone, claim to be “the other”, or an undetermined mix of both, genders. I do believe that the expression of gender is entirely cultural, easily flexible, and adults can choose to express that portion of self in any way they wish, even to the point of chemical and plastic surgery. Why not? If Cher can change her lips to fit what she thinks her lips should really look like, why can’t someone have a set of genitalia fashioned for them and attached if it helps them feel more like themselves and who they are supposed to be? I can’t claim to understand how the nature of self and its wide spectrum of influences and proclivities in all areas of living in the world requires such drastic intervention. But that is just me, and my Self has never been so completely subsumed, dictated, by my genitalia in spite or perhaps because of how I never fit into the cultural expectations of male behavior, likes and dislikes, preferences. I have always had a strong enough ego and determination to go my own way, to see my ‘self’ outside any narrow cultural dictates. None of it seemed to me to have much to do with my penis as the culture insisted it must. I think about this a lot. I think gender display and sex preference were once sets of culturally enforced behaviors vs identities. The development of sex preference and culturally (as opposed to biologically) gendered roles and behavior as identity categorizations came about due to the cruel criminalization of naturally occurring ranges of behavior and preferences in a culture that was more interested in control than self-actualization. It was altogether necessary to formulate a strong opposition to those unrealistic cultural dictates, and the emergence of the identity concept model that was primarily focused on ones’ sexual and gender preferences was a good and even healing way to do it. But there is something lost, too, it seems to me, if the focus of identity becomes so narrow, largely limited to sexual desires and which sets of culturally enforced gender norms are more comfortable. It ultimately leaves out an entire universe of other aspects of who we are and how we are individuated from one another. The puzzle of self is missing key pieces when the only pieces, or the primary pieces, considered to be a part of that ‘self’ are the parts that reflect cultural expressions of gender or sex preferences. What does this have to do with gardening? How do I know. I’m just thinking out loud. *** The robins are quite friendly while I plant. Of course, their real intent is to get at the worms and other bugs my shovel and hoe turn up, but they become quite trusting and hang with me while I am working. Sometimes they shout at me... often they let me know when there is a cat nearby. For a number of years, this year in particular, one couple, perhaps the same couple every year, brings out their fledglings to show me... fat little speckled bellies, clumsy. The adults stay very close. I have had other bird visitors who keep me company while I work in the garden or am simply putzing around enjoying the day and watching things grow. One year a white-crowned sparrow would regularly sit on the fence and sing its delightful trill song to me. The gang of chickadees prefer me in my hammock. They dive and sit very near. I’ve yet to have one light on my finger. They seem very bright, smart even. ***
*** The morning floods the garden with stripes of yellow light. It’s a few days after solstice as I write this and the sun travels high over the garden. We are so close to the 45th parallel, the light breaks open almost directly overhead. Things grow quickly when the heat finally comes. And it takes some time. Our proximity to the Great Lake, Lake Michigan, stretches our first hard frost dates well into October many years, and sometimes November. But by then, in my garden, because tall old cedars and an ancient lilac tree (one that sends its scent over the place before one even notices the flowers blooming) form the south border, the sun has dropped well below the apex of that wall of cedar. The garden loses the sun and barely warms. Spring, on the other hand, always stays colder longer than one hopes for. Planting seeds too early practically guarantees they will sit in the dirt and rot. There is a fight between the heat of summer and the chill of the last vestiges of winter. The jet stream is pushed back and forth over us for months. Ice that covers the bay I live near often lasts into April and the last snow can persist in my yard, especially on the south side where the raspberries stand, well into April too. We have been known to have snow in May. Once, on my birthday, the 15th of May, we had almost a foot of new snow! Something of a freak event, but the cold off the recently ice-free waters and the blasts from the stubbornly wavy jetstream keep us impatient for planting weather, snow or no snow. I aim to have peas and lettuce seed in the ground by my birthday. I am rarely... rarely... able to accomplish that. Seeding comes in a two-week rush and many things must wait until the middle of June for the nights to stay consistently above fifty degrees and the days to dry out and radiate into the dark dirt to urge the seed to sprout instead of staying asleep. The sun, today, this morning, striped the yard. It will be entirely lit by 10 or 11. A cardinal, the resident cardinal, shouts out. My red peonies are opening, splashes in light. *** Yesterday I read about an ancient seed, buried by a squirrel some 35 thousand years ago in the Siberian tundra, brought back to life and grown by scientists. This is thrilling. The plant’s flower is delicate, white; its tendrils and leaves a tangled viny frosty green. As a child my father routinely instructed us in planting last year’s leftover seed. Sometimes the seed was older. His only diversion from the way we normally placed seed in their furrows when planting this old seed was that we were to plant two to three seeds at the designated distance from one another, instead of a single seed. This normally worked well and often we were instructed in how to thin seedlings when more than one in those little groupings came up. It happened often enough. So, I have habitually saved seed left from each year. But something has happened in the past ten years. The old seed, even a year old, rarely germinates. Even older seed from ostensibly authentic organic suppliers rarely sprouts. How disturbing is this? Saving, exchanging, and planting seed, old seed, treasured seed taken on long journeys over oceans, rivers, and lakes. Mountains and deserts. This defines the human “body” and its interdependence with the plants that it lives on. The plants, likewise, have enlisted us to help them diverge and spread and become firmly established across the globe. I am told this phenomenon, this reluctance for old seed to be keepable, usable, sprout able, is a result of genetic engineering conducted and promoted through the reach of a mere handful of viral... fungal... companies who believe it is their right alone to profit from seed. This is terrifying. A toxic fungal disorder. This assumption that those companies and their seed technology would last longer than a 35-million-year-old viable seed. How is it we have grown such repulsively ignorant corporate persons? Why is this not criminal? ***
What a treat to read your prose with poetry woven in. May your gardens be as lush and as beautiful as your writing is (consistently).