by Donna
I've been spending the afternoon of Earth Day in an environmentally responsible way, appreciating nature and planting things.
I started by planting some Impatiens. Normally, I don't bother much with annuals—give me a perennial, where you get years of payoff for the effort of planting them. But a few days ago my sister-in-law found a really good sale at Home Depot, and I happened to be there when she suddenly did the math and realized how much excavation would be needed to deal with her purchases.
"Here," she said, thrusting the tray of Impatiens in my direction. 'Wouldn't you like some?"
They'll look lovely beside my front walk, assuming the deer don't eat them all.
I did some weed control the old-fashioned, organic way—pulling the damned things up by the roots. It's kind of restful, sitting on the ground easing tufts of wild strawberry vine out of the earth or lifting up a spadeful of dirt that contains a dandelion plant, gently teasing the earth away from the tap root, and filling the hole back in. The sort of zen manual labor that can be so useful to do when you have something to think about, like, say, unraveling a plot problem for your book. How fortunate for me that my yard provides so much opportunity for zen weeding. I'll probably need that later this spring when I'm in draft mode.
Though I also sowed some grass seed. I'm not big on having a huge expanse of grass, but there are only so many options for over the septic tank. I'm not going to soak the whole yard with chemicals to produce an improbable green surface resembling Astroturf—I'm just working on upping the percentage of actual grass in the lawn to something closer to, say, fifty percent. And a day or two ago, I planted several new kinds of low groundcover around the edges of the grass area—if any of them thrive—well, the grass had better shape up, or it, too, can be replaced.
Then I appreciated the cuttings I'm trying to root. Appreciating them was about all I could do for them. They didn't need watering, since I left them out in yesterday's heavy rain, and I couldn't exactly see anything else they needed. The camellia cuttings are looking seedy, but the boxwood twigs seem lively. Which is good, because the boxwood cuttings have suddenly become important. I've tried—and failed—to root the camellias before, but I never bothered with cuttings from the two twenty-foot boxwoods at the two corners of the house I grew up in until, during our last visit down there, Mom pointed out the boxwoods and told us that they were grown from cuttings of the huge boxwoods that were in front of her grandfather's house. In the 1930s, when the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation was trying to restore some of the historical gardens, representatives came by several times and offered my great-grandfather fabulous sums, at least by Depression standards, for the boxwoods, but he never sold—he liked sitting on his porch in their shade. And every time someone in the family moved into a new house, some of the family who were good at propagating plants from cuttings would present the new householders with a pair of miniature boxwoods, taken from my great-grandfather's plants.
I looked at the boxwoods. I looked at my sister-in-law. I could tell we were thinking the same thing. This was family history!
So now I have eight tiny boxwood twigs in little peat pots in my cutting collection. If these don't work, I'll try again the next time I go down. I'm motivated, now that there's a story attached to them.
I also appreciated my saucer magnolia tree. It has a history, too—shorter than the family boxwoods and more personal to me. I was in a plant store the first spring I lived in my house, and I saw a very nice saucer magnolia. A fairly little one, only five or six feet tall. I immediately realized exactly where I could plant it, and was pondering.
"Can I help you?" A store employee appeared at my elbow, and when I said I was thinking of getting the shrub, he not only answered my questions, he whisked it onto a low cart and helped me wheel it to the checkout. Maybe if I'd tried to lift it onto the cart myself I'd have been alerted to the problem I was creating for myself. As it was, I didn't get a clue until I wheeled the cart to my car and couldn't lift the magnolia. I had to go back to the store to get help. Maybe a wiser person would have simply returned the magnolia then and there.
But it was such a nice magnolia. The two men helped me get it into the back seat, and all the way home, I kept looking in the rear view window and appreciating its graceful white and pink blooms.
When I got to my house, I pondered for a while, then I brought a tarp and set it on the ground beside the back door of my car. I got into the back seat on the other side, braced my back against the magnolia and my feet against the frame of the car and pushed until the plant slowly slid off the seat and plopped onto the tarp.
For the next several hours, I alternated between digging shovelfuls of dirt out of the hole where I wanted to plant the magnolia—I have clay soil, so digging goes very slowly indeed—and pulling the tarp a few feet at a time toward the hole. When I finally had the tree perched on the rim of the hole, I got a ruler and measured. Still several inches to go before the hole was deep enough for the magnolia, and as for making the hole two or three times the size of the root ball, the way the gardening books always advise—well, that clearly wasn't in the cards for this poor plant. When the hole was large enough, I braced my back against it and my feet against the ground and again shoved until it tipped over the side and into the hole.
I filled in the dirt, watered the tree in, and collapsed onto the chaise longue on my deck to pant and swill a quart of lemonade.
The following spring, not one bloom appeared on the tree. I was, to say the least, peeved. But I figured the tree had had a difficult adjustment, so I cut it some slack. Not once, in the tree's hearing, did I remind it of all the work it gave me, or mutter about how easily it could be dug up and replaced. As gardeners do, I sighed, and said, "Okay, wait till next year."
And next year, it was magical. In fact, every year since then it has grown taller and wider, and every spring it has more blossoms. Well over a hundred this year; graceful, elegant blooms that look like some kind of exotic tropical bird, and since the blossoms emerge on slender twigs before the leaves come out, they look as if they are floating on thin air.
Not for the first time, I found myself thinking how similar writing and gardening can be. You can read all the advice books in the world, you can while away your down time—the winter, for gardeners, and the spaces between books, for writers—with elaborate and unrealistic plans of what you will do when you're finally able to make a start--and then you sit down at your computer or pick up your shovel and all those castles in the air shatter as you actually start to work.
Here's hoping that my fellow Femmes Fatales and I all have the kind of year where the books and plants turn out pretty close to what we see in our imaginations!
