In and Around the Garden
by Robin Coleburn

Guardian on Vacation

My book group just read World without Us by Alan Weisman, a very interesting look at the impact we humans have had on this world, and how the world will realign itself if and when our species ceases to exist. Though I learned quite a lot about the devolvement of plaster, bricks and mortar, and the insidious rusting and rotting of our infrastructure, I did not need to read the book to know how quickly my little garden domain will be wiped from the face of the earth when I am gone.
From experience I know that the condition of my garden depends on the weather, the rainfall, the blights that are either here this year or not, some outright luck, lots of hard work and a constant vigilance. But every year about this time, I suffer from the delusion that the garden is now well in hand and that I can take some time off and get reacquainted with my friends. I fantasize about taking time to go for a hike, lying on the sofa on our porch and taking a nap or reading a book or maybe even going away for a weekend. So in early July, right after I had a big garden event for which the gardens had been groomed to the utmost, I decided to do some of those things on my wish list. There were about four days when I did nothing in the garden except pick some salad greens and take a quick swipe around the lawns with a mower.
On the fifth day of slothful bliss, an inch of rain fell so I was able to take another day for doing whatever I so desired. By the sixth day, my gardens were almost unrecognizable. Where the gardens had had a perfect edge just last week, the grass, chicory, ground ivy and clover had made inroads so that it looked as if the edges had been made with huge pinking shears instead of a straight edged tool. Formerly upright, tall achillia, delphinium and Shasta daisies had become snaky spineless creatures, slumping across their neighbors and moving out of the garden beds. Five-foot-tall horse thistles and asters were revealed behind the now supine perennials. The verbascum had gone to seed, rose blossoms had gone by and turned brown, baby’s breath had swallowed the path in the rock garden and the spinach had bolted. Bending to weed under a conifer, I discovered a large hole, which upon inspection proved to be the second entrance to a woodchuck burrow. This burrow now explained the small area of sinking brick I had been watching develop on the patio and the dead patch of boxwood right in line to the other entrance 40 feet away.
On the insect front, the Japanese beetles had swarmed up out of the ground, slurped up the leaves of the cut leaf buckthorn and made lace of the curly hazelnut shrub and had then climbed to the tops of the asparagus fronds to perform their orgiastic ritual of procreation. Fat waxy scale had attacked the four magnolia trees, and sooty mold had begun to grow on the honeydew that dripped below the infestation. Several 1¼-inch orange and black hornets had moved into one garden and excavated a network of tunnels under a bluestone walkway. Though they were fascinating to watch as they moved the small gravel around like tiny bulldozers, they weren’t friendly and chased other pollinators, the dogs and me away. I envisioned the tunnels undermining the walk, creating a clever trap or garden folly that would drop some unsuspecting garden visitor to his or her grisly death below.
There had been some positive developments, too. Baby birds had now fledged and moved down from their nests to beg food delivery from their overworked parents. One innocent robin baby approached me with hungry eyes as I fiddled with the clogged pump on the fountain in the pond. The daylilies had begun their month-long spectacle, and the annuals had finally had enough warm nights to kick-start their late summer ebullience. The cherry tree was positively laden with ripe, delicious sour cherries, and the sound of the dinner bell hadn’t yet reached the cedar waxwings. The smoke bush was smoking, the phlox showed no signs of powdery mildew, and Asian lily beetles were nowhere to be seen.
Coming back into the garden after an absence is always a shock. But having sat on the porch considering my role in all of this and reading about the ephemeral nature of all of man’s creations, I see that the garden is never in hand, or at least, never in my hand. It is a “temporary work in progress” (“temporary” in that this human creation will exist only as long as the human is here paying attention, and “in progress” in that there was never an enlightened grand design, but rather a yearly reworking of ideas, fraught with wild overgrowth and dismal deaths, that called for a constant change of plans). To make the garden, I have broken up the sod, worked the soil, planted the plants and I nurtured them. But the garden is not an organism with a need to please me. Every living aspect of the garden, from earthworms and microbes to the plants themselves, to the insects and birds that live above them, has its own agenda. It would be serious folly to believe this could ever be kept under control for more than an instant by anyone with feet of clay. I am just the garden steward working here and I occasionally suffer from the delusion that this is mine, all mine.