How does your garden grow?

 

My herb garden at a funny angle

In the spring at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.—Margaret Atwood

 

My dad was a hobby gardener. Weekdays, he was an osteopathic physician, president of the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, and administrator of the associated hospital. But weekends found him in grubby clothes on his knees in the garden. Mom always worried that students would come by and find him in those dirty, torn clothes with the ridiculous knee pads, but he didn’t care. When he bought the house in Chicago (1937, I think) he also bought the vacant lot next door, and it became his garden—a vast expanse, to my childish eyes, of green grass and flower beds, with a tiny, struggling vegetable garden.

I did not inherit that gene, though I envy those who find renewal digging in the earth. A friend recently wrote that he would not be grounded if he did not have his hands literally in dirt every day. Oh, I’ve gardened over the years, mostly pot plants. I used to have a flourishing short-lived lettuce bed in a long planter on the front porch, and I nursed the same pot of chives for years until snowmageddon did it in. But a dedicated gardener I am not. I love having beautiful flower beds, but I want someone else to do the work, especially now that I am somewhat mobility challenged.

We have a division of gardening labor at the Alter/Burton compound. Christian is an avid pot gardener (he is also an amazing cook—how lucky are we?). By early summer, he has the front porch alive with all kind of blooming plants, clustered everywhere. He also takes responsibility for the front yard where, this year, we have had a great loss. For almost thirty years, I had two huge rosemary bushes on either side of the steps to the porch. Age, plus snowmageddon plus a hard freeze early this past winter did them in, and they are no more. Christian says it looks pretty bare. I want to replace them, but not with small five-gallon plants. As I explained to him this morning, at my age I’m not enthusiastic about something that will look great in ten years. That’s not pessimism, just reality. Big rosemary bushes, however, are expensive, so I am thinking.

Meanwhile, Jordan and I have responsibility for the back yard, although Christian puts blooming plants on the deck. Every year we hold our breath to see if the bougainvillea will be as magnificent as the last year. This spring, he has successfully grown a pot of yellow Gerber daisies—I never could get them to grow for me.

The back yard is the scene I look out on every day from my desk, the patio where I entertain, the view from my cottage. Last week, I went to TJ’s Greenery, a backyard nursery in Haltom City and got lovely plants, still small but strong, and plenty of herbs for my moveable herb garden. Jordan has now planted them, but we still have a list of things to get—sweet potato vine to put around the basil, fountain grass for the big planters, a couple of planters that didn’t make my first list.

But for the heavy stuff for both yards, I have for several years now used a landscaping company owned by a local “boy.” Okay, John Filarowicz is probably not ten years younger than my youngest child, but he grew up in the neighborhood, as did his wife, and he will probably always be a boy to many of us. He has, however, a horticulture degree from Texas A&M and a thriving business, with at least two crews. He will take care of things like replacing the lantana that died by the front sidewalk (I didn’t know you could kill the stuff, but we’ve had two awful winters and an extreme drought in between). He will replace the back yard grass--we try something new every year, none of it works well, and we’ll go back to Bermuda this year. And John and his crew have put in a small native plant garden for me, which I find exciting.

For the past few years we’ve had pentas in a bed in front of the deck, but last year they were

Pitiful pentas

pitiful, so bad that John said he felt like an oncologist delivering bad news. So this year I’ve talked to him about filling that space with yellow native plants—coreopsis, gallardia, black-eyed Susan. We have yellow going in the marigolds I bought for pots by my kitchen door and in the new native plant garden. I’m a fan of yellow plants so that idea appeals to me.

Jordan is convinced the marigolds by the kitchen door are too small, and I am having to remind her it’s early April. They will grow and fill out as summer comes on. Then I have to convince myself of the same thing about the new beds.

Even though I don’t garden, I find spring, the season of new growth, incredibly exciting. How about you? How does your garden grow/