Onions in the Stew

by Betty Macdonald

  Mother said, “Stick them in. They will be late but it can’t be helped. Be sure and put some bone meal under each bulb.”

  I also told her about the green spikes and asked her to identify them.

  She said, “Daffodils and narcissus, probably. I’ll come out one of these days and take a look. I love to poke around in an old garden and see what is coming up.”

  So I planted the bulbs in masses and in spite of the fact that every place I dug I ran into other bulbs and morning-glory roots and planted the ranunculuses upside down, they all grew, were almost as big as the pictures and, for the first time in my life, I could pick an armful of blue hyacinths.

  I learned that first spring that gardening is for very small children and adults. The inbetweeners’, especially young females’, only interest in the garden is picking flowers for their hair. From the day of the first camellia, which was some time in January, Anne and Joan left for school looking from the front like natives about to attend a fiesta, from the back, with their dishtowel bandannas, wooden shoes and long boy’s coats, like sad old peasants going out to gather faggots.

  After the hyacinths had finished blooming, Don, who is under the illusion that he knows more about gardening than Burbank but actually doesn’t know a Pachysandra terminalis from an aspirin tablet, strode out one Sunday morning in a spurt of neatness, clipped off all the hyacinth leaves close to the ground and tossed them on the compost heap. The next year where I had had my masses of hyacinths, I had only two or three spindly little stalks with a few scattered blooms like scillas.

  I also learned that first spring how riotously things grow here on Vashon. We cleared land in January and by June it was a jungle again. I sent away for a dwarf white buddleia because it was unconditionally guaranteed not to exceed thirty inches, stuck it in what we considered a very poor spot at the top of the rockery in the white garden and it grew ten feet that first year and bore blossoms eight inches long. Right now it is twenty feet high and I cut it to the ground every time I go past it. There are also millions of little dwarf (hah) white buddleias flourishing around the mother plant for a radius of one hundred feet. The blossoms are a pure white, lilac-shaped and lovely if you can see them without tipping over backwards.

  Then there are the Empress trees I bought that first spring. “Very rare!” the nurseryman told me, pretending in the crafty sure-fire way all nurserymen do that he didn’t really want to sell them, that he was only letting me buy them because his wife was at her sister Cora’s. As he dug me up five he told me that they were so terribly rare, “Sacred tree of the Empress of China,” that there were only two in Seattle. Don and I planted the Empress trees and I hovered over them and stroked them and was awed by their rareness and wondered how they were going to display it.

  They then started to grow. Wow! The one by the kitchen door is over forty feet high and by Empress tree standards is still only a little tiny baby. Empress trees have lovely, sweet-scented, periwinkle-blue blossoms in spikes like foxglove. The buds, formed at the ends of the branches in the fall, stand up against the winter sky like brown velvet buttons unless Don happens along with his pruning saw and decides to “shape the trees” by cutting off a limb four inches in diameter.

  Empress trees have enormous, loosely attached leaves which drop off all summer long and lie around on the patios and flower beds like palm-leaf fans. We have found that the best, well really the only, way to enjoy the Empress tree blossoms is to go out in the rowboat and look in at them against the sky.

  That is really the best way to view all of my gardening. One hundred yards from shore in the rowboat it looks marvelous. Up close there is the embarrassing sight of horsetail, wild morning-glory, dock, wild cucumber, blackberries and nettles, busily choking out the tender planted things.

  I suppose our original mistake was in trying to take in the entire seven acres with only Mother as gardener. I mean true gardener, the kind who goes quietly along day after day, transplanting, spraying, pruning, weeding, picking, a little here, a little there. I rush out seasonally and put in long hours for a short time. Don waits until the wild cucumbers are shamelessly bearing little cucumbers right in front of us on the paths, then takes a sharp scythe and goes out to “clear things up,” which in my language means slashing off azaleas, ripping out blue ball thistles, mowing down heathers and other acts of vandalism.

  Don always prunes things that should never be pruned, digs tiny holes and rams in huge balls of roots, divides by brute force and lifts with a yank. It is very irritating to have the things he plants so mannishly, grow.

  The best vegetable garden we ever had was our first, planted in an old cesspool. An old cesspool that didn’t work exactly right, the Hendersons told us with a chuckle, intimating that the not working was a temporary thing like rheumatism caused by the damp weather but would clear up in the spring.

  When spring came it was not necessary for us to go down to the sea wall to see how the old cesspool was not working. We could tell by just opening any door. Joan said with some pride, “Gosh, you can smell our cesspool clear up at the bus stop.” So one Saturday morning Don and I went purposefully down and began poking around. It took us about five minutes to deduce that for years and years the cesspool had not been emptying into the sump, or whatever was planned, but had been viciously seeping into an area about fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide along the sea wall. Don drilled drainage holes in the sea wall, cleaned out the intake and outgo pipes, remarking bitterly that standing in an old cesspool was not his idea of a day off, dug up the sump when the tide was right and he could get at it, and finally had the whole system working again.

  Though all the seepage had been drained off and that part of the sea wall smelled better, it looked forsaken and untidy. Don suggested buying clover seed and scattering it around, but as this is his stock remedy for anything not curable by whisky in hot milk, I decided instead to plant a vegetable garden there. I cleared out all the syringa and horsetail and wild blackberry vines, Don dug up the ground and, as it was pure clay, I drafted the girls into helping us scoop up and dump on about fifty (they still say a thousand) buckets of beach sand. For the next two weeks I raked and smashed clay lumps until my hands were reduced to flapping blisters with fingers but I had a fairly friable soil.

  I made neat, short, north-and-south rows and we all planted radishes, romaine, carrots, ruby Swiss chard, New Zealand spinach, salsify, cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, garlic, onions and tomatoes. I marked all the rows carefully with the seed packages stuck on little sticks, but I needn’t have bothered. Those vegetables shot out of the ground like rockets and grew so enormous that even nearsighted Anne and I could look north from the old dock and tell our salsify from our carrots.

  Because of the fast growth, some of the things were hollow like gourds, but we had enough for the whole Northwest. I was terribly proud and planned on sharing, until the afternoon when Anne and Joan came breathlessly in and told me with relish that the whole beach was talking about my garden and waiting hopefully for us all to get hookworm or Shigella. “Does hookworm start with a sort of pain in your ribs?” Joan asked.

  “No,” I said shortly, “that is the direct result of seven peanut butter sandwiches and three Cokes before lunch and not making your bed.”

  Then I called Mary’s husband who is a doctor and asked him if we were doing a dangerous thing. He said wistfully that he certainly wished he had some of that fine fertilizer for his garden. He had gone in strongly for coffee grounds that year. In fact had commandeered the entire output from the Naval Hospital and was dumping them on their vegetable garden to loosen the clay soil. The results had not been too satisfactory. Really more like a giant percolator than a garden and certainly did not compare to clay loosened with beach sand and cess.

  I planted the tomato plants the Italian way of bending up three or four inches at the top for the plant and burying the rest. I also kept them pruned to one stalk. They grew into small trees and bore bushels of tomatoes. That was
the same year I lined all the sea wall with parsley and for the first time in my life had enough.

  Heady with the success of that first small garden which I cared for, Don read aloud to me an article from the Gardener’s Monthly entitled “Weeding Is a Waste of Time.” The big liar who wrote it (a man) said that he spaded up his very large garden, planted his seeds and that was that until harvesttime. “Nature does not expect us to weed—weeds provide the plants with much needed oxygen”—and so on, and so on. I noticed that there were no pictures of the man’s garden, no record of his crop, nor any comments from his wife.

  The upshot of this was that the next spring Don had a five acre field, on the farm above us, plowed just a little, bought his seeds by the pound and left the rest up to God and old Weeding-is-a-waste-of-time. We raised about six spindly carrots, a few wrinkled peas which the pheasants ate and the biggest crop of quack grass this side of Wyoming.

  Don loves trees—I suspect sometimes that he had a dryad ancestor, because he will never willingly part with any tree and suffers actual physical pain when I chop one down—even the wild cherry that was choking out his favorite weeping pussy-willow. When we began landscaping he rushed feverishly to town and bought out the entire evergreen output of a small nursery. It was fine when they were itty-bitty. Now they have taken hold and though Mother and I secretly slash them back all the time, it doesn’t even show and you should see the Sequoias which were about six inches high when Don brought them home. “Zowie!” they said, after he had turned them out of their tiny pots and tucked them into our black leaf mold. “This is a place we like!” and they began beating their chests and springing toward heaven in dark green leaps and bounds.

  It is satisfactory, though, to plant things and have them thrive. To celebrate our first Valentine’s Day on Vashon, Anne and Joan brought me a pale pink single camellia in a little pink pot. It was a sallow trembly little thing about four inches high with one bloom. I stuck it in the bed with the espaliered apricot tree, even then apparently dedicated to pushing in the south wall of the house. The little camellia grew very well and the next year had four blossoms. After a while we put in a gas furnace. “The exhaust has to come out here” (right by the camellia), the furnaceman said sternly. I was worried. “Shall I move it?” I asked Mother.

  “Move that damn wisteria first,” Mother said. She hates wisteria because it is vigorous and heedless and its little clutching hands had choked the life out of a rare French lilac before it had time to settle its roots or learn the English for “Cut that out!”

  So I moved the wisteria over by the guesthouse where there were no foreigners and where we wanted it to clutch and choke, and forgot about the camellia. I just went out and looked at it to make sure I was not dreaming and the camellia is taller than I am, five feet, six and three-quarters inches in my stocking feet and I have on shoes (just for a lark, of course), it is well branched and loaded with blossoms. Either it likes gas fumes or this is Shangrila.

  One of the plants or rather shrubs we bought for the rockery by the small patio is called Pittosporum tobira, honestly that is the only name it has. It has shiny evergreen leaves, small waxy white blossoms that look like orange blossoms and smell like hyacinths and are supposed to appear only in semi-tropical climates. I bought it because of its delightful fragrance, because it was small and compact and seemed such a little evergreen for the rockery, and also of course because the nurseryman said he didn’t really want to sell it but as long as his wife was at her sister Ethel’s. . . . When I showed it to several of my gardening friends they liked it because it had such a hard name but shook their heads sadly and said, “You won’t have it long. It will never survive our winters.” Well, it is now as big around as our umbrella table, about four feet tall and Mother and I have been pruning it for three years.

  All this vigor has nothing at all to do with me. Mother can take as much credit as she wants but I was really a very unsuccessful gardener until we moved to Vashon. Here we have an unbeatable combination of salt air, the Japanese Current, continual rain, hundreds of years of leaf mold washed down every winter, and cool summers. This is the perfect climate for rhododendrons, camellias and azaleas, not so good for people. My Fabia rhododendrons, which have tubular orange-apricot blossoms and are labeled by the garden book, “rare and delicate,” bloom in May and again in September. Butterfly, a pale yellow hybrid, noted for being both sulky and leggy, has a blossom on every branchlet and has the contours of a teapot. This morning, just for fun, I counted the blossoms on one of our Unknown Warrior rhododendrons—the one the nurseryman said was so spindly we could have it for half price—it has seventy-eight blossoms. The blossoms average seven inches in diameter—the individual flowerets three inches. Mother was worried about these rhododendrons because they began showing color in December and some of the blossoms were frozen.

  I should really stop right here while you have the impression that we are living in the Du Pont conservatories. But honesty demands that I go on and say that it is not to be overlooked that such remarkable climatic and soil conditions affect weeds the way they affect non-weeds. What do you think of horsetail that pushes its head right through asphalt paving? What about seedling alders that invade the rockery en masse and grow four feet a season—wild cucumber that climbs to the top of maples—docks with roots two feet long rammed straight down into the ground like spikes, but spikes cemented in—syringa and elderberry that completely healed the raw wound of a landslide down the beach in one season—wild morning-glory sneaking across the guesthouse porch, in the door and around the leg of the Benjamin Franklin stove during the week we were painting?

  There is also the little matter of things taking hold—ajuga, for instance—I love its true blue blossoms and lovely copper-colored leaves and it is a good groundcover so I put a clump here and there in the rockeries—on banks—along the road. Before I could say “atropurpurea” it was pushing the lithospermum and perennial candytuft out of the rockery and into the kitchen, had completely obliterated the guesthouse path, killed all the rock roses, and was spitting on its hands getting ready to rip the shakes off the roof. Mother and I yanked it out and moved it clear up into the deep woods, about ten acres away. Yesterday Don took me up to show me the exact location of a surveyor’s stake (usual vital last-minute information before leaving on a trip—he had already explained the difference between heavy duty and light duty wiring—how to lower cutting blade on lawn mower) and I was attracted by a brilliant patch of blue at the edge of the wood’s road. It was the ajuga in full brilliant battle dress, standing tall, heads erect, marching toward home. I noticed also that it has made a full recovery in the rockeries and is fighting it out with the coral bells for possession of the azaleas.

  Another slight disadvantage observed by gardeners in this mild damp country is the size and ferocity of the slugs. We have black, red, yellow, olive-green and gray slugs. We have them up to six inches long, impervious to all baits and fond of Frisky dog food. One time I climbed laboriously down the face of a bank to pick some lovely apricot-colored broom. I had gathered a large armload and was almost up to the house with it before I noticed that on all the branches black slugs were hanging like Bing cherries.

  We also have tent caterpillars—worse some years than others. Last summer, a bad year, we had all of our property sprayed but, because of no road, the rest of the beach sprayed only their gardens and didn’t do anything about the hills back of them. In the evening when we ate dinner in the patio we had the cozy accompaniment of millions of caterpillars crunching their way through millions of alder leaves. It was a crisp noise like walking in spilled sugar. Very penetrating.

  We have no aphis, Japanese beetles or ordinary biting mosquitoes, but when the tent caterpillars hatch we have millions of moths that flutter around the porch and patio lights like torn paper. We have tried all kinds of moth-catching devices, all of which always make a worse mess than the moths and get my windows dirty. That first summer Don rigged up a powerful spotlight
focused into a bucket of water with kerosene in it. The moths swarmed around the light, took dips in the kerosene and then insane and dripping, hurled themselves against the living room and kitchen windows, then on to the patios. Moths are heedless fools with fat juicy bodies and I don’t relish them batting around but I was never prepared for the girls’ hysterical outbursts. We would be peacefully eating dinner when suddenly one (or both) of them would leap to her feet, usually knocking over her milk and her chair, and rush from the table shrieking. If they had company, which they usually did, this would be a signal for them all to begin to yelp and shudder and tip over things.

  Even worse than moths are the WooWoos, those mosquito-like creatures with a wing spread of about four inches, a body like a B-29 and inside my nightgown their goal. It has always distressed Don, who is a peaceful man of studied actions, to be suddenly interrupted in his reading of some morbid atomic bit in Time by a bloodcurdling shriek and me diving under the covers down by his feet. Each time, after he has disposed of the attacker and is settling himself, he says, “You know, I hate those hysterical outbursts of yours, Betty. If you would only warn me.”

  And I reply, “But the WooWoo didn’t warn me.”

  “That’s because you insist on having the window open.”

  That goes back to our long-enduring argument about night air. Don has always insisted we get enough air from the fireplace. I like a gale blowing in the window. We have compromised on the windows open, screens down, the draperies drawn, which trick is old stuff to the moths and WooWoos who don’t like night air either and long ago got hold of the plans of the house and took note of every flaw and crack between screen and windowsill. This year I am thinking of one of those huge tropical mosquito nets soaked in DDT and draped from the ceiling like a tent over me.