Fallowed fields
before lavender and lilies reappear
As a child I spent extensive time with my grandmother, a tiny Alabama country woman who grew up through the Depression and bore its marks all her life. She Did What She Wanted, a female legacy she passed down to her daughter, granddaughter, and my own girl-child as well. One time she decided to build a house with a pool inside it to provide water therapy for another daughter, my aunt, who suffered from MS. Behind the house she planted an enormous garden. A small child could get lost in the zucchini patch or under the bean plants. She had fig trees and berry bushes. She’d pressure cook turnip greens and throw a slice of ripe tomato on your plate for a snack. Everything was fresh, everything home-grown.
Before my parents’ divorce, we also had a garden in our backyard with corn and snow peas. I remember little about it other than the piles of mulch and garden implements lying about, but it was an early reinforcement that playing in dirt is a thing we do. Later, my mother had a container garden on the deck and plenty of shade plants under her oak trees out back. I didn’t so much “learn to garden” as I absorbed gardening.
Next to a house I rented on the Northside in the late 1990s was an empty lot. I commandeered it for my own garden, planting carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, and orange zinnias. I snaked the hose over the top of the dilapidated fence and called it a victory when things grew.
After I moved to Arlee, I designated a large square as a garden space in the “hot ass prairie” zone of the yard and fenced it off from dog incursions. I planted sungold cherry tomatoes, which taste like candy right off the plant, squash and the tallest sunflowers I could grow. That garden was infested with bindweed and if you didn’t manage it every few days it would overtake your tomato cages like kudzu. After several years, I gave up.
This townhouse I now occupy has the tiniest shaded flowerbed out front, which I ignored last year except for begging the lawn guy to weedeat it for me. I didn’t want the hassle of watering, weeding, or battling bindweed. This year, the plan was for my daughter to manage it. But then she got busy with her own life and I found myself in an upscale nursery one early May day, eyeballing hostas. “This is how it happens,” I sighed, and walked out with $100 worth of shade plants. Okay…I also bought some full-sun plants and hoped for the best. A couple of weekends later I was perusing the “sad plant rack” at the Lowe’s and ended up with a half-dead rosebush and some impatiens.1 Later I replaced a bird feeder (the sparrows didn’t want suet) with a hanging basket of miniature petunias. I planted gargantuan sunflowers around the shit cage2 perimeter and beg the lawn guys not to weedeat over there. The home resource place sold me a shutter and some cinder blocks for $7 to prop up planters of red and orange Iceland poppies and yellow marigolds on the alley side. Shit got real when I put myself on next year’s waitlist for a plot at the local community garden.
My townhouse neighbors have taken note. #6 and his girlfriend planted a whole bed one day and told me it was due to my influence. #1 added some fake plants to her beds which look surprisingly good. #7 put some cucumbers in a box planter. #3 apologized because she said she doesn’t know how to grow anything. I’m tempted to put a marigold in her flowerbed when she’s not looking.
On the far edge of the townhouse parking area, between the dumpster and the shit cage, there is a corner of dirt where I tried to put the rose bush but was thwarted by a triple layer of weed barrier. I gave up…temporarily. A couple of weeks later I decided FuckIt3 and started ripping that weed barrier up with my newly purchased snips and shovel. I ordered some bare-root perennial starts and now there are six pathetic daylilies trying to stay alive out there. I also have iris, poppies, tulips and daffodils on the way. In deference to my old home town of Arlee, I’ve named the spot Dirty Corner.
Then last week I received the most exciting call! The Northside community garden, 3 blocks away, had an opening! Did I want plot #56?
Yes! But it’s enormous! I am intimidated, nervous, and also concerned about WHAT am I going to plant in there? However, I’m also pleased to be returning, so to speak, to my roots: to the pansies and snapdragons of my youth, the peonies and rosebushes of adulthood. Tomatillos and squash for salsa and soup, gladiolus and lavender for beauty and scent.
For a while after the Bindweed Battles, I thought I was done with gardening. I even thought it had skipped a generation — see this gorgeous young woman’s4 high school graduation portrait, after all. It turns out, like a field that must be fallowed to regenerate and provide for the next round, I just needed to take a few seasons off.
…and pansies, phlox, some kind of flowering plant that has since gone to seed, basil, cilantro which is basically a Jurassic Park event in my herb box, and a lovely salvia.
that’s the sewage machine barn
The women in my family Do What We Want
my daughter
Love this. At our old house our tiny garden slowly inspired our neighbors to plant too! Veggies and lilies and sunflowers started sprouting up everywhere. The best sort of peer pressure 🩷