The trees are leafless sticks but
the mottled grass grows greener every morning.
Birdsong pierces the gray light of 4 am.
By 7 am robins and starlings bob and poke on the grass. Chipping sparrows, song sparrows, and common
finches swoop across the hypotenuse from the porch eaves to living room gables. High in the bare branches cardinals chortle
and tilt their heads as if to hear better.
It’s April.
I’ve packed away my 10,000 lux light
therapy device, my shield and buckler against winter depression. Bulbs have
straggled up, never as bountiful as the Dutch promise. No matter; I’m on to Burpee’s now. Gardening
season has finally come.
Time to peek under the crumbling corners
of the Styrofoam cones that cover the backyard roses and see if any tiny green
leaves have sprouted on the canes. I will scrape back the remaining straw that
covers two raised beds and learn how the strawberries have fared.
Then comes serious inventory, clinical
assessment. I will troop the yard and
inspect, imaginary clipboard in hand---the gardener’s triage. I will note the dead, the reviving, the remotely
hopeful. Treading the damp grass my feet
sink unevenly when I cross a mole runway beneath. Summer struggles with scalopus aquaticus ahead. A
non-protected mammal and formidable opponent.
Gardening knits my Mott Park
neighborhood together. April is the
month our master gardener, Ginny Braun, buys seed geraniums that volunteers will
plant in May in the four neighborhood flower beds.
The neighborhood honors gardeners
and gardening. Every summer Mott Park applauds
the prettiest garden and the most improved garden each with a $100 award. We have so many new neighbors---renters,
leaseholders, land contract residents. I want to tell them put a geranium in a
pot and we love you. You could win for
most improved garden.
Meantime, we old-timers garden to please
ourselves. We revive our spirits with
gardening, nourish our bodies with something fresh out of our own ground, even
if the carrots are oddly shaped, the lettuce bears teeth marks, or the abundant
kale proved bitter. Gardening connects us
with life.
And with history. I read once that
Louis XIV worked on building and garden projects for Versailles to the day he
died at age seventy-seven. Warfare, diplomacy,
and domination of Europe for la gloire
of seventeenth-century France? A mere sidebar
to his real passion---building and landscaping.
Gardens were outdoor rooms, integral to architecture. The tarnished panes of silvered glass in the
Hall of Mirrors look shabby today, but the regiments of trees and shrubs and
splotches of color within the hedged gardens are still breathtaking.
In eighteenth-century America, gentlemen
farmers envisioned a republic where endless land promised a self-sufficient
agrarian future. In Founding Gardeners,
author Andrea Wulf documents the life-long interest of Washington, Adams, Jefferson,
and Madison in crops and gardening. Founding
a successful republic entailed laying out its boundaries and planting it to
advance public and personal goals. Not by accident were George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson land surveyors. Their daily concerns included species and
crops for the new land they were settling (having wrested it from native
peoples who merely foraged it). They warded
off invasion and drafted a constitution while they wrote home to their estate
managers about what to have planted. Their agrarian idyll rested on slave labor,
the contradiction that would undo it.
In the 1890s American magnates
built edifices to wealth attained otherwise---in transportation, industry, and
finance. They erected enormous homes imitating European styles and crammed their
rooms with furnishings ordered from abroad.
The Vanderbilt brothers, Cornelius II and George W. , hired landscape
architects to plan the gardens of their estates. But Gilded Age ostentation sank with the
Titanic. You can visit the Newport
mansions and Biltmore House if you can manage hours of viewing imitative styles. The real value? The rare trees and shrubs imported for The
Breakers in Newport and the thousands of native azaleas gathered for the Biltmore
gardens.
And here we are---ordinary folk
with our yards and gardens. My next door
neighbor is Italian. Gardening seems to
come naturally to Carmie. She tears ivy
off the brick walls and tosses the vines onto an old bedsheet spread out on the
ground. Then she tips the sheet into the big paper bags for garden trash. Grass
cuttings and fall leaves get the same treatment.
In the late afternoon we water our
back yards and talk through the chain link fence. Carmie’s father was a gardener who grew
tomatoes. He built things too. One year she
had a garage sale to clear out stuff from her parents; I eyed a low table,
painted white, and two small push brooms.
All looked homemade. One of her
sons carried the table over to my garage---though small, it was heavy in the
way of handmade things. Too many braces for the legs, too many nails, but
indestructible. I stack my garden tools
on the handiwork of an Italian gardener.
Carmie takes a walk in the afternoon,
when it’s not too cold---the village pattern of generations. On summer Sundays
the family gathers at her place, offspring and their offspring, and sometimes a
dog. If there’s a birthday, there are more cars and it’s noisier. I love it.
Laughter and some of the talk drifts my way as I fertilize the roses in my
back yard. When the men sit outside on the
deck, they sometimes call out in my direction.
“Hey, don’t worry about our shouting---we’re just having a good
time.” I shout back that they are a joy
to hear. Swear your socks off. Have another beer. It’s beautiful.
And it’s all just beginning in
April.
