We’ve had a rollercoaster of a year so far, weatherwise, but the dog days have most definitely arrived. Things are getting overgrown and sticky, and all kudzu-looking.

I like that phrase, “dog days.” Do you know where it came from? Sirius, the dog star, rises and sets with the sun this time of year. The ancients actually thought, because of its brightness, that it played a role in the particularly hot, sultry weather from late July to late August. Speaking of hot and sultry, here are a couple of pics of your gardener in the state of nature (well, almost)…

I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, and I don’t care. “Love the garden, love the gardener,” right? That’s what Serpico said in the movie. You remember that?

“I like your garden,” that chick says.

Serpico’s like, “Love my garden.”

She’s like, “Okay. I love your garden.”

“You know what they say, don’t you?”

“No. What do they say?”

“If you love a man’s garden, you gotta love the man.”

(Between you and me, I think that second “love” was the euphemistic one. Didn’t he go on to say something like: “I got some zucchini planted. You love zucchini, too, right?”)

Anyway. I’m not sure if it works the other way around or not. This is one of those riddles of deductive reasoning. It’s like the great martini debate. Because you know what they say about martinis: if it’s not in a martini glass it’s not a martini, right? Well, does that mean that everything in a martini glass has to be a martini, then? Many bars and restaurants around town seem to think so.

So the question is: if you love a man, must you love his garden, too? I think you could love the man and just sort of like the garden, or maybe even just tolerate it, like when you have a new boyfriend or girlfriend who has a pet you really can’t stand, and it’s always like, “here, pet Tinkerbell! hold Tinkerbell! Love Tinkerbell!” And you can’t come right out and say, I freakin hate that freakin furball! because then you might not get your scooby snack at the end of the night if you do. You set about silently plotting Tinkerbell’s demise.

I hope no one feels that way about me and my garden. Honestly, I have not been there nearly as much as I would like. The dog days are definitely here, and, if you want to know the truth, right about now, it’s become a bit of a slog.

The flowers popping up now are pretty hardy, and you can tell by looking at them:

Categories: gardening philosophy, garden snapshots
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Ah, the joys of urban gardening!

Remember back a few weeks ago when I mentioned Merde Man–I’m assuming it’s a man, because women just don’t do things like this, do they?–who’s been systematically pooping right in front of garden gates all over the Boylston section of the Fenway Victory Gardens, for years, as far as I know? His regular rotation has brought him to my beloved Row E twice in as many weeks.

Yesterday, when I dropped in to do some weeding, there was that foul smell again. Nothing smells quite like human shit, does it? And the weather was brutal yesterday afternoon–hot and humid–which made it worse. It seemed to be somewhat localized but I could not pinpoint it, so I set off in search of the pile I knew had been lovingly left for me or one of my lucky neighbors.

Turned out to be a turd the size of a beer can plopped neatly down–perfectly centered, lest anyone thought it was not well-planned and meticulously executed–right in front of my lovely neighbor Rob’s garden gate.

I removed the offending matter as expeditiously as possible to the compost heap at the far end of the row. But something of the stink lingered.

Not least the psychic stink of the act itself. It’s hard to get my mind around the thrill Merde Man must experience in anticipation of the unseen reaction of his unknown victims. (Unless, of course, he is actually one of us, a possibility, and wanders among us gleefully awaiting mention of his nefarious nocturnal emissions the next day: I once had my locker at the gym broken into, and I am absolutely sure the perp was standing a couple lockers away when I brought the attendant in to see. I’m sure it was the perp, in fact, who came up to me after the attendant had left, introduced himself, and asked if I knew how to use a calling card, if you needed a PIN–but, you know, what can you do?)

There are sociopaths among us, that’s for sure. It’s all a part of the rich tapestry of urban life.

Categories: gardening philosophy, Urban Gardening Strategies
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So now that I have a genuine little lawn–all this rain has been good for something–I have run into the issue of how to cut it. One of my neighbors, Stevie, has a battery charged weedwacker which I have used before, but truthfully, I don’t like the sound of weedwackers in the gardens. And anyway, Steve’s battery charger got nicked from the basement of his building, so the weedwacker’s dead.

Bonnie, another neighbor in the know, told me there was one of those old push-mowers–with just the rotating blade, powered entirely by sweat (they’re called reel mowers, and you can find them at Clean Air Gardening)–in the supplies area, so I went over and had a look yesterday. My garden has gone from a mud-pit to a tropical wonderland, so it was now or never–if I waited I’d have to come back with my whole tribe armed with machetes and inoculated against dengue fever.

I had actually seen the little mower there before, but it looked pretty beat up and all rusted, so I just assumed it was dead, too. But, actually, it takes a lot to kill these things. They’re built simple and tough, like a good man.

It worked like a charm.

Someone had sharpened the blades and oiled it where it needed oiling, and it was just an utter joy to use. What a simple, elegant piece of technology this is, I thought, as it cut the grass with a competent little whirring, clipping sound that was very pleasing to the ear. And not only was there no obnoxious noise and noxious fumey waste, there was the sheer pleasure of something that you can look at and readily grasp how it works–if it broke, even I could fix it with some simple tools. It’s a good feeling using something so handy that you can actually understand, too, especially these days, when you can’t understand even basic technologies that directly impact every aspect of your daily life. Most technologies today cause at least as many problems as the ones they’re developed to solve. The old school push-mower does what it purports to do, simply and silently, and leaves nothing in its wake but a job well done.

I was so satisfied with the mower and the lawn once I had finished it, that I had to recall another clean technology that had similarly impressed me some years ago. Windmills. Of course I had seen windmills before, but I had never actually been inside one until a Hungarian soldier buddy of mine took me to see one in a place called Tés.

This wasn’t one of those great big oversized Dutch jobbies. It was modest, understated, simple, and, I have to say it: elegant. Elegantly functional. Functionally elegant. That’s what we should all strive to be, I think. Its proportions, its bleached walls, its simple wooden machinary–the axel, breakwheel–and the awesome millstones.

Maybe it was because my life at the time was such a tangle that the simplicity and elegance of it struck me with the force of a revelation. But I left Tés a little bit more of a Luddite than I had been when I arrived.

I wrote in my diary at the time:

The highlight of the day for me was seeing the windmills at Tés. How clever people are. I mean, because there was no water to power mills, they used windmills to grind corn. Even the idea of the mills is brilliant. Occam’s Razor applies. Choose simplicity. Windmills are such awesomely plain, elegant devices.

The nice thing about these windmills in Tés is that they’re just basically in somebody’s backyard. You go into their garden, pay them a couple hundred forints, and they give you a big, heavy, iron key. You walk out into the fields a little ways, and there they are. And you’ve got the place all to yourself.

The one mill, called the Held Mill, after the family who owned it, was built in 1840. It’s still got it’s original parts, and works like a charm, although there are no more millers in Tés. The last time it was used was in the early fifties.

They had all sorts of animals there, too. Horses and a mule, and these Japanese chickens (they’re smaller, but the colors of the cock were far more vibrant than its European counterpart). There was a mother hen leading the chicks around. Everyone was minding his own business, basically, following his own nature. I can’t think of a better life.

The problem today is that (a) we live unnecessary lives, and (b) we hunger for unnecessary things—and not only hunger, but strive for them. Eliminate these two factors, and everything will be all right. When I say ‘unnecessary lives,’ I mean lives without a concrete and generative purpose that contributes directly to the welfare of the community. The miller leads a necessary life, but so does the balladeer, the preacher, and the publican.

The innovations that made our current lifestyle possible, while seen in hindsight as inevitable, and looked upon as flawed but undeniable ingredients of the good life, namely electricity and the automobile, have caused at least as much harm as good.

Now I’m a fan of electricity, that’s for sure, but I do think television has had a detrimental effect on the social life of the species. But the individual automobile is probably the worst ongoing catastrophe the planet has ever known. I’m not talking only, or even chiefly, about CO2 in the atmosphere. I’m talking about social organization—the direct impact on the quality of life.

Any day of the week between the hours of seven in the morning to seven at night in any city or midsize town or village on the globe you can see plainly that whatever benefits there may be in the automobile are outweighed by the costs, in money, in time, and in quality of life. You can see that even the chief argument of convenience is a joke.

And yet we have so reorganized our lives around the automobile that it would now be very nearly impossible to turn back. So in America at least, where land is relatively plentiful, we simple build roads longer and wider, hoping that that will do the trick. But we have not only built our communities and our homes to suit them, we have integrated them into our social hierarchy as well.

Look closely and you’ll see that every benefit they bring has a cost that equals or exceeds it. The argument of convenience being moot, the freedom of a life in the suburbs is nearlyu nullified by the isolation of communities. Two hour commutes both ways give suburbanites very little time to enjoy their freedom (this is part of the reason symbols like the flag have prominance over the freedoms they’re supposed to symbolize).

TV, in a way, proposes the antidote to this isolation, but really only increases it, abstracting and perverting peoples’ sense of self and other completely in the process.

And all that from a trip to Tés.

The thing about the old-school reel mower is that it definitely limited the size of your average lawn, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Now that we have ergonomic riding mowers and plenty of Mexicans to man them, the size of a lawn is almost limitless.

We are compelled by new technologies to live beyond our personal means in every conceivable way. I think it would be better to be satisfied with windmills and reel mowers, myself, but then they were also invented for a reason, to increase yield, volume, acreage, and so on.

I guess what I mainly like about these technologies is that they produce no other waste than dead grass and chaff. We have taken many giant steps backwards with our technologies since the Industrial Revolution, when you think about it.

Categories: gardening philosophy
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Now, see, here’s what I’m talking about. Gardeners have great faith, but it’s not for nothing. Yes, you’ve got to believe, there’s no doubt. But gardeners are also big on proof. And here it is.

I mean, you look at the snapshot, above, of my garden (roughly the Northeast corner of it, at least), taken yesterday, and, like I said, it appears, to unschooled eyes to be, well, mostly a dirtpit. But gardeners spend a good deal of time, like all the faithful, on their knees, where they see what the naked eye doesn’t see.

Par exemple:

I took these shots yesterday, too. You’ve got your bleeding heart there at the top. And a peony next. The purple flowers are flox, and they’re actually quite small. Then a forget-me-not. And some rhododendron buds. And finally a tulip.

You can see it’s not a chichi exotic affair, just your ordinary garden-variety garden. Still as gorgeous now up close as I have faith it will be from a distance in the not-too-distant future.

4/20/06

Categories: Uncategorized, gardening philosophy, gardening wisdom, garden snapshots
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I am an April Fool! After that glorious weekend, I thought we were in the clear, but what’s this? Three inches of snow in some spots.

But we are assured this really is the end of the winter weather, so when it warms up a wee bit, which I hope it will this weekend, I’ll be back out there digging in the dirt.

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There’s no other way to describe yesterday than glorious. It was sunny and in the seventies, and there was that unmistakable feeling in the air. It’s Spring. I had the day off, and went to my garden in the Fenway to survey the scene. I got the garden late in the season last year, and still have a lot to do as far as mapping it out and hardscaping it, but it’s coming along.

There are few things over the past three or four years that have given me as much pure, giddy pleasure as gardening. I came to it during my dad’s illness, when I took over his garden. And making order out of the chaos in our lives at that time was a kind of affirmation of life in the face of death. The joy that it brought the both of us in his last months has stuck with me.

There are some very simple but profound reminders about the cycles of life that you get from gardening. We know these things instinctively, of course, but we need reminding. And during the course of an always too short season, you get to experience all the emotions of a full and well-lived life. The wonder of new life, the excitement of nursing it along to maturity, the satisfaction of its coming to fruition (literally), the pride and pleasure of sharing it with others, and the sweet melancholy of its passing.

In the words of one gardener: “In gardens… the main business is sex and death.” As in life, more or less.

But besides all that, there’s the mere challenge of putting it together and pulling it off, of course. Right now it looks pretty daunting, but I feel up to the challenge.

Categories: gardening philosophy
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