Last Tangle in Paradise

The side garden is one of my favorite places on our property. It’s a tangled, overgrown confusion of intertwining blanches, shaggy foliage and viny things, all growing helter-skelter into a sort of singular impenetrable botanical mass. It could use some management from the property owner, for sure. Studious pruning, for example, would be extremely beneficial for both plant health and aesthetics.

However…

The side garden has my hideaway spot. It’s a little dome-shaped nook mantled over with a matrix of twigs and leaves. I discovered it one day when searching for a lost pair of pruning shears (talk about ironic). Crawling on my hands and knees through the brush like a purposeful opossum, hoping that I might be spared another trip to Ace Hardware to buy yet another pair of pruning shears that I know are Out Here Somewhere—a pair that I wielded a year ago with excellent intentions before my resolve was interrupted by a phone call and then a box of honey grahams and then a nap.

I was shunted this way and that by the caprices of the underbrush until I came upon a small hollow place within the snarl of growing things. It was big enough that I could get into a sitting position, so I gave it a try. Everything was painted with soft filigreed light, and the air was ripe with the smell of dirt and lilac and mint and gently rotting humus. There was a pleasant hush to the spot, as if the hustle of everyday had moved far away. Best of all, I was completely hidden from view. A little thrill worked its way up my innards, as if I was a six-year-old who’d come upon the perfect hide-and-seek concealment.

Since that day I have visited the nook every now and then. It’s a bit of a hassle for a grown man to wriggle through scratchy undergrowth to get there, but once inside the friendly confines you’re pretty much guaranteed a peaceful respite from responsibility. As a bonus, I’ve done some of my most introspective thinking in the hideaway (true, there’s not much else to do in there). Accordingly, I have over time developed a core set of Existential Questions To Ponder:

1) Why am I sitting in the side garden?

This is an excellent question and I’m glad it comes up with regularity. Obviously, being in nature is good for the soul, and I feel very relaxed and at peace in my impromptu monastery. It certainly beats sitting in traffic, or a corporate meeting. If Deb calls for me to haul the trash bins out to the street I can successfully pretend I don’t exist. I do give serious consideration to the fact that, due to the nature (get it?) of my surroundings, a tick might crawl undetected up my pants leg and deliver a crippling dose of Lyme’s disease. That would pretty much put a damper on everything.

2) Why are ticks so disturbing?

That’s definitely one of Earth’s mysteries. Spiders, ants, beetles, and birds feed on ticks, so ticks have certain food-chain obligations. But lets be frank—Ixodes are bloodsucking parasites, and there’s something especially creepy about bloodsucking parasites, especially little bitty tiny ones you can hardly see who are capable of really fucking you up.

3) Am I hiding from something?

Wow, the big questions just keep popping up. It’s true that occasionally I don't want anybody to see me. I’m not sure why. I know that at night deer have snuggled down in this very spot—perhaps there’s some biochemically induced sense of security to be had when tucked away inside walls of leafy greenery. Although now that I think about it, the presence of deer exponentially increases the chances that ticks are close at hand.

4) What should I do when I’m done hiding away and pondering?

Tough one. Maybe go make a peanut butter-and-jam sandwich using graham crackers instead of bread. Then slather myself with insect repellent, tuck my pants legs inside my socks, and go back out to the side garden with that brand new pair of pruning shears and get to work. This isn’t a deer sanctuary, it’s a landscape ripe with potential! And I’m going to get after it. I think.

Welcome to the Anti-Nut House

It’s 105 degrees outside, inflation is bonkers, wildfires are roaming the countryside, and most folks find themselves on the Going Nutty Scale slotted somewhere between Quite Nutty and Extremely Nutty. With that in mind I have decided in this blog not to engage in slandering my garden spaces (which oh so deserve a good slandering) as I typically do, but to focus on some of our horticultural bright spots (as rare as they might be) that I have found to be soul-soothing and—hopefully—harbingers of less-nutty tomorrows.

We actually have many healthy columbine plants. I know, it's hard for me to believe, too.

Seeing a ladybug definitely puts the day in the plus column. Did you know ladybugs can live up to 3 years? Sure you did.

A little photo fun here. I was going to look up what these delicate little flowers are before I published this blog, but I forgot. I think they're Platycodon grandiflorus. One of those surprise offerings from our yard that we didn't plant and that just appeared one season and decided to stay.

Bees are all over the alliums. Are they making onion-flavored honey? That doesn't sound marketable.

Camellias. 'Nuff said.

If I was a wee katydid, I'd hang out inside a lily blossom, too.

Sunny Side Up

Getting immersed in the immediate.

I’m not much of a world traveler. I can count the number of foreign countries I’ve been to on one hand, and that includes Canada, which is cheating. We could add Las Vegas to the mix—that’s pretty foreign—as fate would have it I’ve been there more than I care to recall.

But I have stood in the column of sunlight that falls from the open roof of the Pantheon, and I’ve jumped naked into the Baltic Sea in the middle of January. I’ve watched 14-foot manta rays sashay through the waters of the Bahia de Banderas and seen the northern lights pirouette in the night skies of Manitoba.

I’ve done a bit more traveling within the continental U.S., although in an official capacity that often had me bound to airplane terminals and hotels. Nevertheless, those trips also brought me to the open plains of Nebraska to see one of the last original sod homes melting back into the earth, and to the backwoods of Arkansas where migrating tarantulas created a moving carpet on the forest floor. I’ve been on the shores of a Wisconsin lake in April to hear the ice crack with a whistling rumble—shooting from one end of the lake to the other—as if God was hurling a giant bowling ball across the floor of heaven.

These kinds of moments invite us to partake of an Earth that’s wondrous and complex and magical. They can enable our empathy and retrieve our humanity. Hopefully, they remind us to be humble.

But it’s not necessarily grandeur that has the power to blow our minds (although a sprawling vista can definitely be sublime) Nor is it necessarily the vividness of an experience (although the shocking cold blackness of the Baltic Sea is forever seared in my memory). In fact, a transportive, meaningful connection to the natural world is more likely to occur amidst the ordinary and the everyday. It happens when we engage with the immediate, letting the natural world find its way into our fluttery souls no matter where we might be.

In our own gardens, for example.

Ours is a modest property, merely an eighth of an acre—about half the size of a typical suburban lot. Yet these foreshortened boundaries offer no fewer examples of the intimacies between geology and biology, of the teeming complex interplay of soil and plant and animals, than any far horizon or depth of ocean or vastness of sky.

Here our spinach does battle with an invasion of leaf miners, a venerable climbing rose seeks the upper reaches of a 40-foot-high crepe myrtle, a group of heretofore placid daisies suddenly erupts into a towering island of nodding color. Well-planted dahlias refuse to emerge while unwanted weeds and invasives flourish in every concrete crack and patch of malignant dirt available.

Daddy long-legs hang fibrous webs in the eaves, tiny garden spiders fashion diaphanous doilies in the lilies, an occasional black widow pokes her bulbous body out to inspect the world of light before scurrying back into her preferred darkness. Trumpeting scrub jays trumpet do battle with marauding ravens as each seeks eminence over our modest patch of yard, unconcerned robins troll the grass for the trove of fat grubs that live in our lawn, ash sawflies are devouring the lower leaves of the Raywood ash.

So I sit in an old lawn chair, close my eyes, and turn my face to the warming sun. The heat feels good, like it’s sinking into my brain. I hear the enchanting melody of a black-billed grosbeak. I think: A few cut daises would look nice in a vase.