Garden

I looked away for a minute and the grass was not just back, it was 18 inches tall. It had surrounded the new plantings and was making a play for some of the old ones. A few places were safe, I’d had the foresight to put another layer of cardboard and mulch around them last fall, but anywhere I hadn’t done that, oh, who knew suburban grass could grow so high.

The weather has been such that we had a lot of rain and then, a week or so of very warm days. The soil holds water now, I don’t have to dig deep to find rich, damp earth, so everything wants to grow. Now. The poppies have returned, and the calendula, and yesterday while trying to free the lillies from the shadow of overgrown fescue I found a tiny blue flower from the wildflower mix I’d scattered in March.

I planted zucchini and pumpkins in the open patches. The zucchini did well last year, they liked being ignored in the hot front yard and I figure pumpkins, being zucchini cousins, will agree. There are three dogwood saplings, full of leaves, and Nootka roses that will get too big way too soon. The currants are established enough now that I have freed them from their bunny-protecting cages, they can now spread and take over that corner of the yard.

Suburban gardening is so competitive, it feels. And it is very focused on the finished product. That’s weird given there are so many uncontrollable variables. The poppies that are now so abundant and give me such pleasure just showed up; I did not plant them. The brutal heat dome temperatures — two or was it three summers ago — burned two of the lavender plants quite badly, but others remain unscathed. Bunnies savaged my first currant planting but I don’t know what took out three of the eight mock orange bushes; they did not make it over the winter. I do not have the vigilance or desire to micromanage something so at the whimsey of everything around it.

I have written before about how I wish I had hired a landscaper when I moved in and I still wonder about that; I would have a well-established suburban yard by now. But I would not have this feeling of seeing myself when I wander this small piece of land that is, after a difficult battle, truly mine. We want change that is efficient and aesthetically pleasing. We would rather not see knee-deep grass and dandelions. I’m sure I have neighbors who judge the disorder out front, but they do not know the story of how my yard got from its manicured 60s lawn and shrubs to the chaotic glorious state it’s in today.

I’m a writer, I like metaphors. As this three or four year reinvention project progresses, I am delighted to find a tiny blue flower making itself known in a place where there were no flowers before. Last year, there were no flowers on the sage. This year, there are.