Summer of my (Gardening) Discontent

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York..."

--Richard III, Shakespeare

Drought. Persistent record-breaking heat. High humidity. Mosquitoes--swarms of them. Sclerotium rolfsii. Sharon.

These are the causes of the summer of my gardening discontent.

The drought has claimed several plants, most notably several of the Japanese Painted Ferns.  I pulled a scraggly chrysanthemum from the raised bed around the maple tree that had finally donned the crispness and color of botanical death.

The Japanese Beech  Ferns have lost three-quarters of their mass. Buddha meditates on the impermanence of life (yet I cannot help but think Buddha silently impugns, "impermanence assisted as it were by neglectful people like MSW").

Add to those Gramsci's assistance with watering and fertilizing, well, then, we have a perfect storm. This poor hosta has not had a break; Gramsci prefers to deposit his droppings, and scrape the mulch and soil around it, never caring that each week he breaks another leaf from the crown.

More damningly and disturbingly, he has come to prefer the lavatorial privacy afforded by the Nikko Blue Hydrangea, which, since the gardening contest last month, has been succumbing to the slow creep of death.

One of the Golden Tiara hostas, afflicted last year by Sclerotium rolfsii, has this year been nearly obliterated by it, its flower stalks a tragic testament to resilience.

To add to my woes, or perception of my woes, Sharon asked for lavender yesterday. Her homeopathic therapist suggested she inhale its aromatic oil to help her sleep, which she has not been able to do in any meaningful sense since she returned from hospital four weeks ago. Her body and her psyche exude the failings caused by chronic insomnia. I raced to the garden to face my own denial: the lavender--the massive one that I transplanted earlier this year--was definitely dead. Dessicated. Brittle. Cast in sickly hues.

Gardening has become, like much in life of late, a chore, something to be avoided.

But a walk this morning reminded me of Shakespeare and the power of suggestion and image and perception: "Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York."

Hardly a commentary of Yorkshire weather.

His story demanded an antagonist, a villain. Richard III proved an available figure: an unhappy man in a world which hated him, brooding and melancholic, malevolent even. The portrait continues a few lines down, which is framed as Richard's decidedly non-fraternal feelings towards his brother, King Edward IV:

"I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be."

Yet on many accounts Richard III was loved, enlightened, 'forward-thinking'. He proved a loyal and skilled military commander--well, that is until his defeat (er, death) at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the penultimate duel in the Wars of the Roses.

Some Shakespeare scholars opine that the portrait of the dead king reflected his own views of the state of England during the wars when Englishman butchered Englishman, when the House of Lancaster battled, and eventually prevailed over, the House of York and ended the Plantagenet dynasty, the 15 kings of which ruled England from 1154 to 1485. But their paternal ancestors were French, and we all know about the historical (and not so historical) tensions between the English and the French. To Yorkshire pudding Lancaster said yes. To French-descendent kings, a resounding no.

Shakespeare needed a foil--something, someone, to exemplify the fetid gash that divided England, of the plots and schemes and pettiness that fed a war--to prove the futility of (internecine) conflict. We humans thrive, it seems, on nastiness, and therefore nastiness demands a rejoinder.

And so my irenic reading of Shakespeare found an analogue in my garden this morning, an antidote to the summer of my gardening discontent: in my Rudbeckia I found the sun of York, a blazing presence in a drought- and cancer-scarred landscape.

As I drove home from an exhaustingly invigorating yoga class last evening, I thought that I would not have the strength to battle the aggressive cancer that Sharon, nearly 2 years my senior, faces. I could feel her palpable, quite evident exhaustion and frustration, and would want, if I were in her shoes, to simply curl up and die. But she does not budge; her feet remain planted on terra firma all the while she scans the heavens looking for signs from her maker.

Hope remains even in the face of the most adversarial nastiness and discontent.

That we must remember. 

Groundcover, or Measuring the Courage of Your Convictions

For the small garden gardener, groundcover—for example, creeping phlox, alyssum, creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia), ajuga (Ajuga reptans)—may be categorized as either blessing or curse. In its former guise, groundcover may almost instantly transform small patches and beds into floral carpets or coverlets of richly-textured and colorful foliage; the arresting display is worth the effort, or lack of effort as it were.

But groundcover may also curse the soul of the gardener who planted it. It invades. It conquers. It recognizes no boundaries. I spend considerable time and energy cutting back ajuga each morning as it nightly assaults the ramparts of Golden Tiara Hosta, or ripping out the improperly named Creepy Jenny (a more apt designation would be Leaping Jenny) from the front garden. Now, my stunning lavender phlox may need some trimming as it overtakes a chrysanthemum and threatens a Bird’s Nest Spruce. (Admittedly, I really wanted my Blue Star Lithodora to do what the others are doing, but it could not withstand nearly 4 feet of snow over the winter.) At the time, planting groundcover seemed appropriate, a rescue remedy for the barren earth than is the new garden.

But choices need to be made, aesthetics pleased, tastes acquired, and plans amended. With regards to amending plans, the gardener needs to dispose of remorse and shed sensitivity; the Realist gardener must take hold and show no mercy on errant plants.

I shan’t obliterate my ground cover, but I shall attempt to control it with some concentrated excisions by the trowel or, as with the larger sprawls of ajuga, the shovel. In this respect, I won’t permit those lovely blue spikes to influence my decisions, as compelling as they are. In part, I know ajuga will always grow back. Also, ajuga forms a critical part of my long term strategy in my war against nature with nature. I simply transplant ajuga to those sparsely populated areas of the so-called lawn. Given that I do not own a lann-mower or weed-eater (save for my Gramsci-cat, who can’t keep up with what grass does exist), I don’t care. In fact, I grant it a "marque of reprisal and proliferation" in my war against weeds, lawn, and, after heavy rains, mud holes that Gramsci always seems to locate and, well, enjoy.

In the garden beds, however, I have learned that greater control is needed. The property of 410 is limited; thus I don’t wish to relinquish valuable space to excessive ground covers (and ground covers always end up excessive), or, more importantly, any opportunity for experimentation and the introduction of additional specimens which attract and seduce me. The size of my property, not vanity or snobbery, remains the central source of my selectivity. Hence when I scoff at day lilies or impatiens--which, as I realized last year in my own gardens, are the real flowering work-horses as they continued to produce blooms even after 2 frosts--I reflect my bourgeois distaste for my proletarian limitations.

Groundcover, I conclude, becomes the perfect proxy for measuring the certitude of one’s will. One either succumbs to its beauty (which has the advantage of permitting the gardener—or ought that title be stripped and the person simply referred to as a property owner?—to do other things), or one plants and celebrates it (as I have done), only to attack it with occasional ferocity in an effort to manage it. Only with such experiences, ones that pit us against improbable foes, can one develop the courage of one's convictions.