compost bin shadows

The weather’s not very different from last month, but the light has changed. You can tell, even in the face of coronavirus time-fuzz, that summer is sliding gently into fall. The blueberry bushes sit leafy but fruitless inside their net cages. Soon I will take the nets off; there’s nothing left for the birds to loot. Tomatoes are rolling in, and every morning brings an armload of cosmos and zinnias to bundle into the house for bouquets. The flowers mostly grow in their raised beds, but a few volunteers decorate random spots and edges of the garden. Volunteer cosmos: a lovely phrase.

In addition to Charlie, I’ve had a crew of bunnies trimming my lawn. I’m happy to see them eating clover instead of the flowers edging my deck. In early June there were three bunnies; now there’s just one. What has the summer done with them? Are they eating greener clover somewhere else? Bunnies are a prey species, making them a sort of clover for hawk, owl, and eagle. Everyone has to eat.

scented jasmine tobacco

I always thought animals knew what to eat by instinct, but the fawns have changed my mind. They wander through with their mamas and you’d think they would eat what their mamas are eating. Not exactly. I’ve seen them nibble my foxgloves and jasmine tobacco, both of which are poisonous, and neither of which a smart mama deer will touch. But lately they’ve been leaving the foxgloves and tobacco unmolested. This, I suppose, means they’ve learned something in their first summer on earth. Telling the good from the bad is a skill that comes with experience. I hope they didn’t get too sick learning it.

Charlie came with his ride-on mower and cut my lawn yesterday. During the ban on yardwork my laissez-faire lawn got terribly uneven and lumpy looking, but Charlie has now smoothed it back into a semblance of suburban lawn. This is typically a contact-free event anyway – Charlie drives up in his truck, powers the mower across the yard, runs the trimmer, runs the blower, and off he goes. We like to chat if I’m outside, but in the interest of Social Distancing I’ll just wave for now.

Once Charlie’s finished I go back out. I stroll around most of the yard barefoot, but keep a pair of purple crocs by the backdoor for walking in the woods and garden where there’s mulch, too rough for bare feet. Doug has emptied the basement dehumidifier into a bucket and left it for me on the deck. I pour some of it into a watering can for the indoor plants, and distribute the rest to some of the potted deck plants. The begonias have recovered from their infestation and are leafing back out. The morning glories are halfway up their trellis. The weather has cooled, but the supposedly overheated petunia is still producing striped flowers.

I am isolated, insofar as all my concerts, operas, dinners out, bookstore browsing, lunches with friends, and visits with far-flung family are cancelled. But when I walk outside and see the lawn, the flowers, the garden, the trees, the sky, I feel the calm and satisfaction they have always brought me, huge, deep, and familiar, and other considerations fall away. Deep breaths. Yes, the world is still here. What a relief.

And of course I do have Doug for those hugs, lunches, and dinners.

As summer began I realized I wasn’t up for going to the garden store, as I usually do, for annual flowers to fill the pots on the deck. Back in January when I ordered seeds for my tomatoes and tall zinnias and taller cosmos, I had no idea that this would be an issue. Many of the pots had perennials in them – mints for instance. You really want to put mints in a pot. I did have seeds for a variety of basils with leaves ranging from purple to chartreuse; that might work.

But when I finally went out to inspect the flowerpots, I found them sprouting volunteers. Marigolds, yes, those often reseed themselves; what were these other leaves? They looked like petunias. I couldn’t recall having petunias reseed themselves before, but this had been a generous spring for horticulture, if not for human health.

An unexpected plant is so often an unwanted plant. Sometimes it’s competing too ferociously with the deliberate plants; sometimes it’s esthetically displeasing – that is, ugly; sometimes it’s just in the wrong place. So I wasn’t going to count on these things turning out to be petunias when they might be some rank weed, sneaking in under cover of their petunia-like foliage. Time would tell.

And time did. Petunias happened spontaneously among the marigolds, with no input from the gardener. Last year’s petunias were one group of black and one group of very pale yellow. The photos show how they organized themselves for their comeback. According to Burpee, “petunias are sensitive to high temperatures and may change color or produce a stripe when they too warm.” The next surprise will be to see if they change to last year’s colors when the weather cools.

So here’s my reminder to myself: when something unexpected comes up, don’t assume it’s no good and trash it. Inauspicious beginnings do not dictate ruinous ends. Give them time.

It’s so lovely to have a garden to work in when the world gets crazy. With no one but Doug anywhere nearby I can be outside without a mask for hours and hours, making a difference to the plants in my yard if nowhere else. The garden has problems you can solve.

One of the problems was my autumn clematis. It took me years to establish it, trying to keep its roots cool but its head in the sun, which I finally achieved by planting oregano all around its base. The oregano thickened up nicely, spreading into a nice mat without taking over unauthorized territory. The clematis responded with vigor. And more vigor. Until, even though I cut it back in May, it climbed the five feet of its bamboo and cedar stakes with insouciance and by last week was looking for somewhere else to go. It found the innocently growing ferns of the asparagus patch, and swamped them.

This wouldn’t do. Clearly, I needed a taller trellis over the clematis so it would leave the asparagus alone. Doug was consulted, went into his workshop, and came back with an eight-foot tower. I said, won’t we have to wait till I cut it back again? No, he said, this will go on right over the whole thing. And it did.

You can see the fine lines of the once-captive asparagus ferns in front of the clematis.

No telling how long it will take the clematis to reach the top this time, but that is a problem for another day.

I was weeding a flowerbed when the birds in my wild black cherry tree set up a racket of full-throated panic. It sounded like one bird was raiding another bird’s nest. How sad, I thought, and looked up into the tree.

It was very tall but, as wild black cherry trees in Michigan often are, ratty. It had thin spots, jagged edges way up high, rambly bare twigs, but still managed to produce a bumper crop of fruit suitable only for chipmunks, a thin scrim of flesh over a fat seed.

I never suspected that tree to harbor as many birds as now came flying out of it, going in crazy circles, chirping wildly: wren, tufted titmouse, robin, cardinal, finch, jay, and others too obscured by leaf, noise, and movement to identify. Clearly some predator was afoot, or a-wing.

Zerlina, attracted by the hubbub, came to the screen door and I saw her eyes go big and round. What she saw before I did was a very large bird, flying out of the tree with something dangling from its talons, the tail of a something small and four-footed trailing behind it as it crossed my lawn. Not a mouse, Zerlina; a chipmunk.

My, I thought, that bird sure looks like an owl. It sure looks like the Great Horned Owl that spent the early spring hooting at our bedroom window at five a.m. every morning. But it couldn’t be an owl. It was 10:30 in the morning. It must be a hawk.

It flew to the broad, sturdy, horizontal branch of another tree. It was busy now, holding its victim under one foot, beaking at it, sitting up now and then to look one way and then another. While it was occupied I went inside for my binoculars. The sound of the screen door caused the Large Bird to look directly at me as I raised the binoculars. Big round yellow eyes. Ear tufts. All the right markings. It was the Great Horned Owl.

Maybe by owl time this was a midnight snack.

Were all those birds in that tree to start with? I’d never seen such a conglomeration before. Had they joined together to make enough fuss to drive the owl away? A battle plan from a random set of birds seemed like a stretch. Were they like bystanders at a flaming car wreck, drawn to see the disaster for themselves? Being human, all I can think of are human options. What was in the hearts of those birds?

Dark days in the towns and cities, but the light in the skies of Michigan doesn’t go out until after nine at night this time of year. I have brought the seedlings downstairs, the ones I started from seed weeks ago, Black Pearl, Supersteak, Indigo tomatoes. After dinner I go back into the garden and plant them, deep, the way tomatoes like to be planted. Stand them up, lay them down, wherever they meet with earth they root into it, anchor themselves, draw sustenance, grow tall, make flowers, and set fruit.

respite

They are out there now, waving their little green hands in the evening wind, on their way to keeping faith with the promises of the seed companies and the hopes of the gardener.

These are days when I so need the garden. It is good to have a place where faith and promises are kept and hope sustained.

The overnight frost alerts have ended, and real gardening begins. Though I have liberated the emerging ferns and mayapples from the suffocating grip of garlic mustard, filling yard waste bag after bag with it because no one wants garlic mustard in their compost, I am going to have to leave the rest of it to go to dreaded seed. It is time to move on to the fenced garden, and ready it for the tomato plants currently waving from the upstairs window.

The fenced garden has already been producing asparagus. This is another of many fine things I enjoy as the fruit of someone else’s labor: I moved into the house one summer, and the next spring all this asparagus appeared with no effort on my part. I had never seen asparagus in its neonatal condition, and it made me laugh. It looks for all the world like someone snuck out into the garden when nobody was looking, and stood a lot of asparagus spears up in the dirt as a joke.

And then there’s the dogwood tree: another example of something wonderful that just showed up that first spring. Wanting to add my contribution to all this largesse, it pleases me no end to think of the future householders looking out the window to what was once my yard on a fine spring day – and may it be many years from now – to be greeted by the daffodils I planted and the redbud trees I have placed as understory in the woods, and see that someone loved this place, and worked to make it more beautiful.

Dogwood in May

I have done nothing to deserve this tree.
When it was planted I was far away,
and those who lived here never thought of me
as each year’s petals whitened into May,
and summer came to silently retrieve
the green it left behind when it moved on.
The planters grew into their time to leave
and gathered their existence, and were gone.
I stand here now with barrow, shovel, rake,
in contemplation of the liberty
I know that I habitually take,
receiving what was never given me,
but with a gardener’s hope, I sow the seed
to make my present what the future needs.

Landscapers and garden stores are back in business, essential or not, but I find I’m resistant to going into them. Who knows how many people fingered that pot of geraniums before I got to it? Wouldn’t a geranium die if you took it home and sprayed it all over with bleach? I decided to confine myself to sowing some chill-loving seeds, something I always mean to do and leave too long. Of course, this means I have some seeds lying about that should have been planted last year. Or the year before. We’ll see if they germinate: milkweed; campanula; violets.

cat tulip tango

One successful experiment has been my “tulip tomato tango.” I learned about this from, where else, a company that sells bulbs. In fall, when you pull the tomato plants up, you put tulip bulbs in those raised beds. Since they’re inside a fence, the deer and rabbits can’t get to them. Plant early to midseason varieties, and in spring you have gorgeous flowers that are finished blooming by the time you want to put in the tomato plants. Not only lovely, but efficient.

I like to say this is me making progress in the garden, but the garden did it mostly on its own. Yes, I planted the bulbs, but then I went inside and did nothing all winter. No weeding, No feeding. That’s my favorite, wonderful thing about bulbs: they show how the natural world makes its own progress, even when the possibility for progress elsewhere is slight.

Here in Michigan where the coronavirus has a firm grip, the governor has closed businesses deemed inessential. Including garden stores. While I’m as outraged as the next gardener that she doesn’t consider seeds and plants for warm weather crops essential, I, apparently unlike some others, have looked out the window. This is what I see.

Here’s the thing. The average last frost date for Ann Arbor is May 21^st. This means if you put warm weather plants out there on April 15^th they will die. Any time in April that there’s precipitation overnight, there’s a good chance it will be snow. I even have photographic proof: snow on my daffodils, and the fact that snow does not bother my daffodils. They expect it. People ought to, but they say things like, “Late Season Storm Barreling Down,” instead of  “Still Cold In Michigan But You Knew That, It’s Why You’re Not Out There Planting Your Tomatoes.”

Impatience tends to hang in the air as spring advances, and now there’s this virus to be tired of, too. March was 487 days long, and the first half of April went about the same way. But signs that things are creeping toward improvement only make some people even more impatient.

Upstairs in my front window, the tomato seedlings I started weeks ago are staying cozy, unfurling themselves a leaf or two at a time. Change is coming, slowly. When it gets here, my seedlings and I will be ready.

Meanwhile, in the upstairs window

Sometimes you need to back off and not think about anything for a while. Though solitaire is a game easily played with a two-dollar deck of cards, using a powerful electronic device and a fiberoptic network makes it feel more like someone else is playing it with you. For further justification, I have discovered Spider Solitaire. It requires two suits each from four decks, 104 cards in ten piles to start and eight piles to finish. Who has four decks of cards? How would I keep them all from sliding out of order and ending up on the floor? This was clearly a good use of my laptop.

It is a modest game. No one is killed, no thrones are violated, no treasure is amassed, and there are no consequences for winning or losing. I started with a feeling that competence would win out. Gradually I realized how unlikely it was that the cards I needed would turn up as I needed them. I began to suspect some entity knew what I needed and was deliberately withholding it. This used to be called paranoia. Today it’s called an algorithm.

Soon I realized it was a waste of energy to be suspicious. My object was to be playing a game. If I lost I would just play another game, which was the whole idea anyway. Did I really aspire to being a Spider Solitaire champ? Winning the game was immaterial. Therein was its charm: relief from the gloating frenzy of accusative winners mistaking accident for virtue.

When I do get all the cards in order, a banner comes up with a bright, cheery-looking “You Win!” Thank you, Spider Solitaire, for rewarding perseverance. It’s what we all need to do now. Persevere. Stay home. Play Spider Solitaire, and be safe.