Conscious Choice: Random Acts of Gardening

September 2004 | BackWords

Random Acts of Gardening

by Bob McCray

“LET MOTHER NATURE BE YOUR TEACHER,” said William Wordsworth. I agree.

Life is so complicated these days. You need lessons for just about everything — for the computer, continuing education courses for your job, even to go fly fishing. Meanwhile, there are the manuals to set up DVDs, cell phones, or setting the motion detector light on the garage so it won’t go off for the possum.

So, sometime back, I decided I needed one area of my life I could skip the classes, manuals, certificates, and degrees — and always be a beginner.

I picked gardening. I decided I’d learn from Mother Nature, trial-and-error, and whatever came along. Nothing more.

Over the years, I pretty much stuck to my guns, skipping the self-help gardening books, the classes at the botanic garden, even the gardening section of the Sunday paper. As you would expect, there was some good news and some bad news.

First the bad news

We planted our first garden years ago, after we moved into our house. Our kids were ages two and four, and loved berries; so, I transplanted some purple flowers with red berries around our patio to create a border. Then, a neighbor told me I had just planted a border of deadly purple nightshade. Not a good idea.

Want a few more? I have tons of them. I tended a lush, three-leaved, ivy vine along our back fence. I was lucky. It wasn’t poison ivy. It was a poison ivy look-alike.

My first garden catalog order was a gas plant. The plant’s leaves give off a gas you can light with a match. No, I didn’t blow myself up — but the garden party I dreamed of with all natural lighting never came to pass.

Then there was the time I learned I couldn’t plant our perennials in a window box in Chicago. The roots can’t hide from Jack Frost.

But there was also some good news.

Mother Nature’s Teacher Aids

I learned a lot from Mother Nature and her “teacher aids” — the birds and wildlife.

We grew dozens of small yew bushes from the seeds left in bird droppings. The squirrels taught us about aerating our lawn. We don’t use an aerator because year-round those scampering scalawags dig up imaginary nuts in the lawn.

Every year, the rabbits nested in our Blue Rug Juniper, but our dogs, who could sniff a dried breadcrumb at 30 miles, never found them. A rabbit’s nest must give off a neutralizing chemical, because every spring, our bunnies dashed across the garden path, and lived happily ever after.

We even learned from our pets. We tried to teach our new pup, Grizzly, how to “get along” with our garden — to tiptoe through the tulips. But, she loved to sleep on the daisies. She would wake up, a mat of flowers in her hair, and trample the iris and peonies, and then tramp through the garden chasing the motorbikes along the back fence.

We tried behavior modification, Tabasco sauce, and hanging flower baskets as buffers, but she taught us. When she ploughed down the flowerbed chasing a car with a bad muffler, she always took the same path. Finally, one day, I noticed she always took the same route. I sodded a grass boulevard; in a classic “S” curve through the middle of the garden to the back fence. Problem solved. People love our “winding path.”

We learned about the food chain from our fishpond. The dogs, after eating their dog food, drank out of the fishpond. The goldfish nibbled the dog food from their whiskers. The raccoons ate the goldfish. We thought the raccoons came back and ate the tadpoles too, but the full-grown frogs hopped out of the tall grass whenever I ran the power mower.

Trial-and-error gardening

As part of my apprenticeship, I also tried “just do it,” gardening.

We bought plants at random from the catalogs — whatever looked interesting. My first purchase was a $4 mail order — twenty-five Colorado blue spruce trees. They came in the mail in a plastic bag, twisted together like a badly wrapped cigar. I soaked them in water overnight and stuck 25 brown sticks in the ground. Two summers later we had a rainforest. We gave away 19, one-foot tall evergreens. They made “enduring gifts”(a gift that grows on you). A friend, who was a bonsai enthusiast, arranged his “tree-gift” so artistically, it was stolen off his front porch in two weeks.

Pick-up gardening

I learned other casual gardening tips from friends and neighbors. We hosted a flower swap (a.k.a. “Pot Party”). Our neighbors brought surplus plants from their backyards. We enjoyed a party, a flower exchange, and all our guests went home with half-a-dozen new plants.

Flowers were labeled with Good Humor sticks and tongue depressors. One plant was called a “Challenge Peony,” because it had never bloomed. Another came with a 90-day guarantee.

Doing What Comes Naturally — Not Always

Over the years, one of the things I learned was “Doing what comes naturally” doesn’t always work. Sometimes I had to turn to the manuals and the gardening pros — especially when it came to avoiding poisons.

For the aphids on our white pine, all the store’s recommended spraying chemicals. I called the city tree expert. He said to blast the aphids off with a high-pressure hose nozzle. I feel odd standing on the top of the stepladder hosing down the branches of a 50-foot pine, but it works.

A book on organic gardening helped me avoid using poison to prevent a battalion of black ants from devouring our 20-year-old black cherry tree. I sprinkled ground-up chalk around the tree trunk. The ants can’t walk on it. It cuts their tiny feet. They never crossed the line of control, and eventually moved out of the neighborhood. It worked for our elm tree too. Who would have thought!

In Praise of the Grand Vista

We gardened at random for 20 years — transplanting tiny plants from bird droppings, buying on whims from catalogs, and planting flowerpot gifts from friends.

Then one day, my wife visited a friend who was remodeling her dining room. Her friend pointed to the wall, which faced their backyard, and said (with a gesture like she was swimming the breast stroke) “We’re going to open it up.” A week later, her husband knocked out part of the wall and put in a picture window to overlook their garden.

We copied them and opened a picture window on two decades of random acts of gardening. It was a real surprise.

After years of casual gardening, we discovered we have what in garden talk is called a Woodland Affect garden. It includes five, 50-foot Colorado Blue Spruce from our mail order catalog; a 40-foot cedar, ever-proliferating mountain snow, and various ground covers from our “pot party.”

Two $1.39 mail order river birches are my favorites. In winter their rugged, golden boughs are stunning against the snow. (Anton Checkov wrote in The Wood Demon, “When I plant a little birch tree and see how it is growing green...my soul is filled with pride that, thanks to me, there is one more life added on earth.” I wouldn’t go that far, but they are beautiful.)

All in all, I learned a new attitude from random acts of gardening — “Don’t fret, just try it.” Or, as a friend said, “The secret of success is a little ignorance and a little confidence.”

What a wonderful way to go through life. For this lesson alone, Mother Nature should get the Golden Apple award.

Bob McCray teaches writing, is a freelance writer, and can be found at random times in his Evanston garden.

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