Last
year, after 14 seasons of gardening and heavy yard projects, I stopped dead and
let it all fall apart.
This
year, I’m coming back at it sideways, returning to a vegetable garden and flower
planters, doing more work outside . . . but still limited, doing only what I
have to. It’s a by-product of age and fatigue, having less time and
inclination.
What’s
come of this is a delightful mix of cultivated and wild. The yard is now a
potpourri of intention and surprise. When mowing, for instance, I’m
concentrating on just the areas of lawn and field we need to use, veering
around clusters of wildflowers attractive to bees—especially clover—and
unexpected clumps of anything blooming, such as daisies, black-eyed Susans,
yarrow, violets, heal-all, dandelions, hawkweed, vervain, wild strawberry, etc.,
etc.
While
this has resulted in areas impassably overgrown with grasses, it has also
allowed a low red grass to form a big patch that’s as lovely as an on-purpose
planting, especially in the morning when covered with dew in slanted light.
I’m
preserving bigger stands of milkweed for the monarch butterflies. And letting
things grow up between each other, like daylilies through the middle of a
hydrangea, ferns through the strawberries; and weeding with less vigor, so that
johnny-jump-ups and cinquefoil and various things I don’t know the name of are flowering
between the vegetables.
I’m
also taking down a large perennial bed that got choked out with pernicious
spreaders—phlox, bee-balm, an unknown sunflower-like thing (coryopsis variant?),
evening primrose—plus grass-grass-grass, some nonflowering rampant weed, and
horseradish. This brought opportunity to work with friends and neighbors, who
came by to augment their own gardens with my cast-offs. While at it, I
transplanted some favorites elsewhere in the yard, making them easier to manage
(or ignore).
The
front steps and terrace, which last year were taken over by daisies and black-eyed
Susans, this year have the daisies again but also campanula (bellflower) and a single
pink columbine right in the middle of the stoop. Not a black-eyed Susan to be
seen. Where did they go?
Oh,
over there. And there. Next year, they’ll be somewhere else, and I’ll have to
mow a different pattern in the lawn.
