The Water Woes

This is the tale of the Water Woes. The Woes in this case refers to a few plants in our back garden bed. Hellebores, I’m talking about you. You’re woefully narcissistic and demanding and you can never get enough. Water.

I know people who say their hellebores are completely at peace with their surroundings, that generous watering is not required if the hellebores are provided with basic nutritional needs.

Our hellebores are not those kinds of hellebores. If you give them plenty of water, they will look shiny and perky and full of botanical vitality. But should you let them go without water for the briefest amount of time, say in the time it takes to coil up a garden hose, they will collapse like microwaved sticks of butter.

Sure, when it comes to plant flaccidity, you could make the case for homeowner error. Perhaps the soil simply is too dense and full of clay, which most any gardening book will tell is you is bad and worthy of worrying about. Maybe some bonehead continually neglects watering. But hey, try to keep up with every plant’s special requirements and you can drive yourself crazy—and believe me, it’s a short drive. Let’s agree that a garden is never really perfect (except for those folks up the street whose hellebores look absolutely fabulous).

But come on, our hellebores don’t have to be quite so theatrical, collapsing like stabbed and poisoned Montagues and Capulets. Many other plants in our garden do not react this way to a slightly protracted lack of water. Okay, a few of plants might get crispy leaf edges. Boo hoo. For the most part the plants on our property—I’m referring to the ones that are still alive—have survived in the face of poor soil management, erratic watering schedules and a host of other naturally occurring maladies.

One remedy might be better communication. With that in mind, I offer an open letter to our Helleborus:

Dear Woes—

We planted you because your frondy leaves gave the garden a bit of tropical savoir-faire. In retrospect, however, there seems to have been no plausible rationale for such a sultry garden addition other than one too many rum Collins prior to our visit to the greenhouse where we bought you. We’re not fans of exotica per se; our preference is for plants that survive neglect and ignorance. So your unquenchable thirst runs contrary to our base criteria.

But you do have redeeming qualities. You are a bit glamorous and maybe even racy, especially in comparison to your plebeian surroundings. And you do seem bent on survival despite challenging circumstances, and I can personally relate to that. And you have managed, over the past three years, to produce absolutely magnificent blossoms in December and January in a brazen defiance of winter—providing bursts of color amid the humble hues of winter.

So with that in mind, I give this to you, Helleborus, with my hose in hand—the garden hose, to be clear—raining water on your broad leaves as the mulch darkens around you, a poem:

While the wind pulls through the Brewer’s spruce

and the branches ebb and flow,

and finches flit a whole bunch of flits,

I like being in the garden with you.

(it’s better if you say that last “you” like a Brooklyn “yo.” Then it rhymes with “flow.”)

Don't Foodle with Your Doodle

As a wildlife aficionado, I can say with unmitigated pleasure that our outdoor environment is fairly crawling with wildlife. Literally crawling, actually. Sure, there’s the occasional bird or bee. Boring! Who doesn’t have those? I’m talking about the industrious albeit slow-moving Armadillidium vulgare which, despite being not-at-all handsome (note the vulgare genus designation that is scientific nomenclature for yuck!), is owner of some of the cutest nicknames in the animal kingdom, including pill bug, potato bug, roly-poly, and my personal fav, doodle bug.

Doodle bugs feed on dead and decaying matter, which we have in abundance and not necessarily by choice, which is why they find our yard an especially convivial place to party. We find them throughout the warmer months but especially in spring when little half-inch-long doodles emerge from their cozy burrows of dead stuff and start crawling about the smorgasbord of decaying matter that our garden offers. We find them everywhere on the concrete patio, which for creatures in search of organic munchies doesn’t say a lot about their intelligence. Nevertheless they are harmless little buggers.

The really adorable thing about doodle bugs is that when disturbed, they curl themselves up into tight little balls. If you are so inclined to certain types of low-grade entertainment, you can flick these little balls all over your concrete patio. Being almost perfectly spherical, they’ll roll for impressive distances, you have it on my personal authority.

Thanks to their tough, multi-segmented exoskeletons, you can’t harm doodle bugs while doing these important biological experiments in rollability. Their shells—which are made up of rows of crystallized calcite and an endocuticle of amphorous calcium carbonate (like you didn’t know that)—allow them to ball up inside tough, flexible armored sheaths. Ping! And away they go!

Unfortunately, their instinct for self-preservation is also a source of distress. When a balled up Armadillidium decides the coast is clear (it’s not, heh heh), it unfolds itself, invariably onto its back. In this position, it’s difficult for it to right itself. What ensues is much rocking back and forth and waving of its seven pairs of tiny pereopods (legs—again, you probably knew that one). Should an earnest bio-experimenter have a twinge of guilt and attempt to help the little critter turn itself right-side up, it will immediately curl back into its defensive ball. Under these seemingly no-win circumstances, it’s a wonder that doodle bugs have survived for epochs relatively unchanged.

Should an upside-down doodle happen to you, you have two choices: Either leave it alone until it rights itself and returns to its prime directive of eating dead stuff (the preferred choice), or you can imagine it's the 18th at Pebble Beach and you need to putt this one 12 feet into an oak leaf to win the championship and etch your name in history. It depends on your tolerance for low-grade entertainment.

The Case of the Missing Lilies

See that brown patch? That blotch of bare earth and unrequited mulch? That’s the lily garden.

Except…

I don’t see many lilies. In fact, I only see two lilies, nice-looking yellowish varieties, possibly ‘Lonely Lily,’ scientific name Lilium wherethefuckaretheotherliliatum. It’s a rare species.

So I went and planted all these lily bulbs that look like aardvark droppings with the foolish expectation that they will grow and fill aforementioned brown patch with glorious color. The result is this: two lonely sentinels and a morose opening in my hopes. Somewhere in that naked place, buried the recommended 8 to 10 inches beneath a layer of organic mulch, is so much potential, so much unrealized joy, and not a few dollars’ worth of bulbs. What happened to those many bulbs, I have no idea. One might suspect some kind of user error. There’s a slight chance I didn’t plant them pointy end up, like they say to do, but pointy end down. But really, with a hunk of protoplasm that resembles aardvark poo, proper pointiness is a matter of conjecture.

Tell me these don't look like aardvark turds. [gardenofeaden]

Personally, I’m convinced the bulbs were defective. Or, like entitled offspring who believe they’re due significant benefits, these bulbs foolishly expected proper soil pH and the right combination of nutrients and perhaps water. When none of the above was adequately appropriated, they petulantly decided to die. The good news here is that my fundamental philosophy of plant propagation and garden design is intact: Ho hum and may the strong survive.

Meanwhile, I’ll replant. I swear I’ll adjust soil pH this time. I’ll measure that planting depth with a transit. I’ll poll the neighbors about which bulb end is the pointy end. I’ll give the little lily turdettes the high-potassium diet they crave. I’ll even water, I swear.

Gauntlets—do you plant them pointy end up, or down?

Or I could plant something else altogether. Dandelions and vetch have demonstrated a clear willingness to grow anywhere in our yard, and I don’t have to lift a finger to have them propagate. But no, it’s going to be lilies. That open brown patch is a challenge, and I will respond. Meanwhile, I have some lovely river rocks that will look just dandy in that opening, and I can plant those with complete disregard for their pointy ends.