They are also the friendliest and most enjoyable to have around and are more likely to be in no rush to either come or go. Whenever plumber père comes to the house, I make sure I have a pot of coffee ready. This guarantees me a half hour of captivating tales of plumber grand-père working on my house and the surrounding estate (now, that was an estate) during the Great Depression.
I was not ready to sit down to coffee—which I could easily see escalating to Russian roulette in a Vietnamese gambling den—with Christopher Walken. But the details and the sadness of his life dripped out a little day by day. He was a single father with a teenage son, just trying to get by, to be a good father. He’d had a lot of “bad breaks,” he seemed to want me to know. I wanted to be sympathetic, but there was always an undercurrent of comparing what he saw as my “privileged” life to his, and it made me feel uncomfortable. On some level, maybe his campaign—if that’s what it was—was working, because despite his spookiness, by the end of the week, when he was finished with the clearing jobs, Anne and I, knowing all too well that good gardeners are next to impossible to find, were considering keeping him on for a few more jobs, maybe even permanently.
That is, until I planted the grass on the newly cleared ground. This was to be an easy job. Christopher Walken had done (as he reminded me daily) all the hard work. All I had to do was lightly rake it over, scatter some seed, and throw on some straw. I figured on two hours for the entire job.
I pulled the rake lightly across the soil. It grabbed on a root and wouldn’t budge. Hmm. I tried a different spot. Same result. I bent over and pulled at the root, a long, fibrous rope. It pulled up from the ground like a rip cord but had no end. I cut it off a few inches under the surface and tried another spot, but wherever I looked, there were roots, living roots, in the ground. All kinds of roots: endless, fibrous roots; bunches of deep roots from wild grasses that had to be removed with a pickax; long, lethal poison ivy runners. Christopher Walken had cut the weeds and shrubs off at the surface and left all their roots intact. I couldn’t possibly plant grass in this soil in its present state. I spent the remainder of that day and all of the next yanking and digging at roots and sucking ibuprofen to ease the throbbing in my joints. Afterward, my body, not used to such physical labor, ached for days, and I seethed for weeks. Worst of all, though, was that my dream of having a gardener had rotted on the vine.
Christopher Walken soon faded into memory, but I had not heard the last of the blasted spikes. The following spring, I passed mowing responsibilities on to Zach, instructing him to mow with two wheels of the mower inside the edging. Finally we could cut the grass—all the grass—neatly with the mower, no weed wacking or hand trimming required. I had even bought a new Sears rotary mower to celebrate the occasion and replace the old, hard-to-start one. I unpacked the mower from the crate, gassed it up, and set Zach loose. Three minutes later, from inside the house I heard a horrible, indescribable sound, then silence. I ran outside. Zach was all right, just a little scared. He had hit something, that much was clear, but what? I didn’t see anything on the lawn. I flipped over the mower, and there, in the housing, was a barely recognizable, twisted, mangled spike. I could see we were going to need a new mower blade. What I couldn’t yet see was that the crankshaft had snapped and we were going to need a new mower. We had set a family record for destroying a new tool: three minutes. And my first thought was, Walken! But I walked through the garden and saw that a number of the spikes were protruding above the edging, a result most likely of frost heave. I guess I couldn’t blame him for that. Now I conduct a spring ritual of walking through the garden with a mallet, checking and resetting all the spikes, before the first mowing of the season.
Zach was more or less permanently scarred from the experience. I still cannot get him to drop two wheels inside the edging. I think he would as soon drive the car down the street with two wheels on the curb. As a result, the grass always looks in need of trimming along the beds, defeating half the advantage of the edging.
Still, the edging was overall a good investment, and it was nice—if a bit unnerving at times—having a gardener, if only for a short while. There was something magical about watching the edging progress up the garden while I was away.
I still dream about having a gardener. My fantasy gardener is an English gentleman of a certain age who wears a proper straw hat and knows how to use a stirrup hoe. He doesn’t need to know all the Latin names; he just needs to know the weeds from the plants and a pine tree from a fir. We will call each other “mister.” He will know exactly what I want. And every week we shall have a cup of tea together while we consider the garden. Whenever there is a problem, he will know how to solve it.
And boy, was I about to have a problem. A very big problem.
Cereal Killer
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
—Chiffon margarine commercial, circa 1972
There’s a serial killer in the garden,” I announced one summer day.
“As in c-e-r-e-a-l?” Anne (I think) joked.
“Look out the window,” I instructed grimly. This was no laughing matter.
I meant “serial” literally. Several days earlier, a single stalk of corn, the last plant in the last row, had toppled over during the night. I didn’t think much of it at the time. It had been windy, corn is fragile—hey, stuff happens all the time, and besides, we had lots more. But the following day, when the adjacent stalk in the same row had toppled over, that seemed a bit strange. And the day after that, when the next adjacent stalk was toppled, bringing the total to three in a row, I remembered the words of a long-forgotten high school science teacher: “One event is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, and three a pattern.” I had to admit, reluctantly, that it wasn’t chance or wind at work here. But what was it?
On closer examination, I could see that each stalk had been eaten off neatly where the roots emerge from the stalk. I immediately suspected my old archnemesis, the groundhog. Had Superchuck returned? At this point I was blaming just about every family misfortune on groundhogs or deer. I couldn’t get them out of my head. While snorkeling, I saw deer hoofprints on the ocean bottom. I had even tried to blame a groundhog for destroying our pool over the winter. The insurance adjuster was skeptical.
“Let me get this straight. Your contention is that a groundhog somehow got under the pool cover, ripped the vinyl liner six feet under the waterline, and got out of the pool alive.”
I nodded. He stopped writing in his notepad to look me in the eye.
“You’d have a better case if there was a drowned groundhog in the pool.”
“Can you come back tomorrow?”
My claim was denied. The adjuster left me with some advice: “Next time, spring for ceramic tile.”
Still, the prime suspect in the Case of the Toppling Corn remained a groundhog. The first step was to check the fence. I hurried home from work and went through my all-too-familiar routine of checking all the wires, measuring the voltage, and looking for gaps. Everything seemed shipshape.
The following day, two more stalks—the next two in the row—were lying flat on the ground. This was incredible! Now as Anne and I looked out the window, the entire lower half of the row was toppled, the upper half untouched. What kind of groundhog eats in such a structured manner, plant by plant, up a row? And besides, this seemed to be happening overnight. Groundhogs are not nocturnal. Could it be a raccoon? Perhaps, but there was still the problem of the serial pattern of destruction, stalk by stalk, moving up the row. I wondered what would happen when whatever it was reached the end of the row. Would it turn around and start down the next row? I didn’t want to find out, but I was baffled, utterly baffled. Could it be something in the soil? I dug around one of the fallen stalks but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I put out the Havahartattack for the hell of it. Nothing. I considered staying up all night and trying to catch the intruder in the act. This wasn’t as extreme as it sounds—in my agitation, I was barely sleeping anyway—but
before pulling an allnighter, I hit upon a better idea: hooking the camcorder up for overnight surveillance. I got out the recorder, which had been collecting dust ever since the kids had outgrown their—ahem—cute stage, and looked for a way to connect it to a motion detector so I could catch the offending critter on tape. I was also going to have to rig it to a light, or all the video would show was the darkness. I turned the camcorder around in my hands for a while, read the manual, and examined the recorder some more, thinking of Bridget’s brother, Lars, trying to hook up the disc.
There have been precious few times that my vocation and avocation—director of technology by day, gentleman farmer by night—have crossed, and generally I try to keep it that way, as each role serves to make the other more tolerable. But this seemed like the time for some collaboration between the technician and the farmer. Alas, after a few minutes, I had to admit, the director of technology didn’t have a clue how to rig up this camcorder. After watching a little of Katie’s first-grade skit—I guess it had been a while since we had used it—I put the damn thing back on the shelf.
Meanwhile, the intruder continued to progress through the corn, like the steady march of an invading army. Anne thought it might be deer, but I attributed that opinion more to her growing animosity toward our hoofed neighbors than to scientific analysis. Ever since the deer had gotten into the garden and eaten a hundred dollars’ worth of her newly planted flowers to the ground, her somewhat fatalistic attitude about the deer had changed dramatically. One day she almost lost her exemplary cool at work. Leaving the exam room, a patient had the bad timing to ask Anne how to keep deer out of her garden.
“Shoot ’em,” Anne replied without thinking. (This from the woman who wouldn’t have anything more than a BB gun in the house a few years earlier.)
The patient was quite taken aback by such a harsh answer from this gentle woman of healing.
“But what about fencing? How high does it—”
“Shoot ’em,” the good doctor repeated, her voice rising. “Look, nothing keeps them out, not fences, not electricity, not dogs. You have to KILL THEM!”
The woman quickly fled the office, probably glad she wasn’t asking advice about her elderly mother.
Whatever the culprit, this was maddening. I was sick of problems, having dealt with an unending stream of groundhog intrusions, thieving squirrels, drought, and, most difficult of all, serious lawn infestations for several years running. Of all these problems, the lawn infestations were the most irritating, because the lawn has always taken a backseat to the vegetable and flower gardens on our property. I am not a big lawn guy. As long as it’s not too horribly weedy and brown, I let the landscaper cut it, and I ignore it. But lately, I couldn’t.
When George was building the garden, I asked him to put sod around the swimming pool, which is down on the lower end of the yard. Having tried twice to start a lawn from seed in the horrible dirt and clay, I had decided to splurge and buy an instant lawn. Much to my surprise, however, I learned that sod takes quite a bit of care to get started—even more, in fact, than seed. The day George installed the sod, he took me aside like a football coach talking to his quarterback during a time-out.
“Make sure you give it two inches of water every day,” he instructed me firmly.
Two inches? Isn’t that a lot?
“Don’t skimp,” he warned, pointing at me for emphasis as he drove off. To keep the roots from drying out, sod needs copious amounts of water, much more than seed requires. And when your plot is as irregularly shaped as ours is, consisting of strips bordering a rectangular swimming pool, you either have to move the sprinkler repeatedly or water by hand. To sequentially give each strip two inches—even one inch—of water takes a good deal of time. Thus I found myself immersed in an unanticipated harried routine that went like this: rushing home from work to start the sprinkler on the first strip, climbing the 150 feet up to the house, eating dinner, going back down to position the sprinkler for the next section, coming back up the hill to the house, and going back down a couple of hours later to reposition it again. At a minimum. Usually, at least once an evening, the spike of the impulse sprinkler would work itself loose in the wet soil and start whipping wildly about the lawn like a crazed, spitting serpent, or it would become jammed and, instead of oscillating, remain fixed in one position until the sod threatened to float away. So night after night, I went up and down the hill, up and down, usually returning to the house wet, angry, and, by the end of the night, exhausted.
Even with all of this attention, the sod started to turn brown at the “seams”—the edges where each twenty-four-inch strip of sod meets the next. Apparently I was skimping. Terrified at the specter of seeing my investment turn to dust, I redoubled my efforts, watering, watering, and watering some more, until somehow—after hours and hours of dragging hoses and sprinklers around, un-jamming and replanting sprinkler heads, and patting down the seams, the sod “took” and rewarded us with a beautiful, lush lawn.
For a while.
The following year, strips of it started turning brown, but not only at the seams, which were now pretty much all blended in. After looking in my lawn-disease reference book, which wasn’t much help (every disease makes a lawn brown, but none looks exactly like your kind of brown), I dug up and carried a square foot of sod to my local garden center, where they instructed me to dig a few inches under the roots of the adjacent healthy sod and look for bugs. Their advice was sound: a few inches under the sod were small brown worms we identified as sod web-worms. I had never seen these creatures before and was now seeing them only in the sod—my one-year-old sod. Could they have arrived in the sod like so many tiny Trojan horses? It seemed unlikely, given the chemical nature of sod farms, but the evidence was somewhat damning. They were not in any other part of the lawn, and I had never had them until I imported the sod. It was also possible that they were partial to bluegrass, but I had been using bluegrass in a mixture for years without attracting the nasty critters. No, I figured they had most likely hitchhiked in with the sod. That’s what you get for buying a lawn instead of growing one. I gave the lawn a hefty dose of insecticide (which required yet more heavy watering), and the sod webworms were soon forgotten, but not before having done considerable damage to the new sod.
Having saved the lawn from webworms, I promptly proceeded to destroy it for good by planting four rosebushes.
I was new to rose gardening but instantly fell in love with roses. They are incredibly, almost indescribably, beautiful, a so-beautiful-it-hurts kind of beautiful. Roses seduce multiple senses: sight, smell (oh, the smell!), even touch. Not the roses you receive on Valentine’s Day or see in most garden borders. Those modern hybrids are but a pale imitation of real roses. Most roses today have been bred to produce tight, whorled petals on long stems. Along the way, the rose’s raison d’être, its very claim to our hearts, our literature, our culture—its scent—has been bred out, along with the dense layers of petals of varying blushes and hues. The roses I’m talking about—real roses—are sexy, powerful aphrodisiacs with pink and peach and pale yellow petals that suggest blushing Victorian maidens and sex in the bushes. These true roses can still be purchased today as “heirloom” roses, although I substitute a modern version of the heirloom that blooms a couple of times a season, the so-called English rose developed by David Austin, a British rose breeder.
Surely something this beautiful must come with a catch. I soon found out what that was after I had planted four of them in a border by our swimming pool. Just four of them, not forty or four hundred, yet these few roses would have a severe and permanent impact on my local ecology.
I can’t say that nature didn’t try to warn me. The earth resisted these shrubs mightily, the hard, dry clay finally yielding to repeated swings of a pickax. Each blow to the earth reverberated through my middle-aged body until, by the fourth hole, it felt as if the pick were driving into my spine instead of the earth.
That’s when Zach came trudging by on his
way home from school, bent under the weight of his backpack.
“What’ya doing, Dad?” he called as he approached.
“Just a little gardening, Zach. Planting some roses.” Whap! I swung the pick into a clod of clay.
“That’s not gardening, Dad,” he said without missing a beat as he passed. “That’s mining.”
And so it feels sometimes. It must be wonderful to live on soil where one can actually dig a hole with a shovel. I know people do it, I’ve seen it in books, but it’s a luxury I will probably never experience. Several times I considered quitting and giving the rosebushes away, but I persevered, and the next year we were rewarded with spectacular blooms, bursting with a heady perfume, painted in soft, undulating pastel tones. Oh, they were gorgeous, and classy! Even the names were classy. The Abraham Darby exploded into large blooms with various peach, salmon, and pink tones all appearing in the dozens of petals that made up each dense flower. And the smell! To some it suggests citrus; others detect peach or honey. I just call it heavenly. Graham Thomas offered various shades of soft yellow and a slightly spicy smell. I was so taken by these roses I even considered converting the entire kitchen garden to a rose garden, but my stomach directed otherwise.
As the roses bloomed, Anne displayed a domestic skill neither of us ever suspected she had: flower arranging. She started bringing large bouquets inside, arranging them with the lavender that grew beneath the rosebushes, and displaying them in vases throughout the house. Almost miraculously, the antique-looking roses elevated our old, slightly shabby interior to a respectible antique. Who knew that flowers held such power?
Our euphoria over the roses, however, was short lived. One June day, Katie saw a pretty bug sitting on one of the roses in the garden.
“Dad, is that a ladybug?” she asked. “It’s pretty.”
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