We had Fens Fest last weekend. There’s food and music, a “white elephant table” and a raffle, and awards are given for the best gardens in various categories, and recognition is given for those who’ve pitched in. I was locked out again this year. My fellow gardener, Steve, who got not one, but TWO awards this year, kept calling me the Rene Zellweger of the Fens, likening my being snubbed by the FGS for two years running to Rene’s treatment at the hands of the Academy in 2003.

Well, I have decided to budget a couple hundred bucks for bulbs to blow them all away next Spring, and then, guess what? I’m not even gonna show up at next year’s Fens Fest to collect my bevy of awards. See how they like getting snubbed.

Anyway, the weather’s cooled off in the last couple days–it’s been gorgeous–and I’ve started making notes and sketches about what’s going where, and am limbering up for moving day.

I’ll order my tulips soon. Some of these flowers are so beautiful they just blow my mind:

The varieties here are all from Breck’s online catalog, and are, from least to most fabulous (although all are fabulous): angelique, chinatown, orange princess, and queen of the congo.

You can see I kind of like these frilly peony-looking tulips. But this is only a garden thing, I can assure you. I am not one of these blokey-looking blokes who you go home with and he all the sudden turns into a Laura Ashley queen. No, what you see is what you get with me. I just like these tulips, is all. That’s as far as it goes. There is nothing frilly about me otherwise.

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

I am finally beginning to understand tomatoes. At least that’s how it feels this year. I’ve tried growing them in page-wire cages and in stiff wire cones. One year I simply gave up and let the plants flop along the ground, the way they seem to want to do. The past few years I’ve grown them on seven-foot stakes, a single stalk working its way upward. I’ve skipped most of the modern tomato technologies: red plastic mulch and water-filled girdles that keep young plants from freezing. I don’t even try to raise the seedlings myself. A friend raises them for me — heirlooms mostly. I put them in the ground around Memorial Day and wait.

My tomato skills are these. I am a ruthless pincher. Off go the suckers — sprouting in the joint between branch and stem — and off goes any branch that looks as if it’s going into business for itself. Last week, several of the plants topped out their poles, and I pinched back the growing tips as if to say: “Vegetation is over. Time to ripen.” I wash my hands and the water is green.

My other skill is tying up tomatoes. A couple of years ago I found the knot I needed — a loose, open overhand knot around the stem and then a square knot around the stake, the whole thing shaped like an 8. I use baling twine, of which we have an infinite supply, cut into forearm lengths.

As skills go in this complicated world, these are as simple as they come. And yet I can’t explain how gratifying they are, how much pleasure it gives me to examine each stem for suckers, to know that I’ve really looked those tomatoes over. As I tie up the stalks, I think about the storms that blow through this time of year — bruising rain, sudden downdrafts — and it’s good to know that the tomatoes, at least, are safely moored. I know there’s a harvest somewhere in my calculations. I see that other people’s vines have ripe tomatoes on them. But earliness isn’t everything.

I wish I could say that I turn from the tomatoes to the squash and the sweet corn and the turnips and the beans. But it hasn’t been that kind of year. Beyond the tomato patch is a forest of weeds, apart from a few sad rows of radishes and some patches of mesclun. I have a long list of excuses: caterpillars in May and June, the steady rain, a surprising reinforcement of woodchucks. Once again, this fall, I will reorganize, put up a stout wire fence, and lay out next spring in advance.

But the truth is that I would rather grow tomatoes than anything else. Pathogens may spring from the soil in a hard rain onto the lower leaves, corrupting them, but the tomato stalk pushes upward, rampant, always probing outward, feeling its way, almost disregarding the fruit it was meant to bear.

Sunday was a gorgeous day to be out in the garden, and I was for several hours in the afternoon. Yesterday wasn’t bad, either. This week we’re looking at another mini-heatwave, though, so I doubt I’ll be able to get out too much before the weekend.

Tonight is National Night Out, apparently, so there’s been some discussion of gardeners bringing candles out to the gardens and lighting them up, and hanging out in them until nine. All I’ve got to say is, if you’re gonna bring candles, make sure they’re citronella. I was there around six last night, when my garden’s shaded, and the mosquitoes were having their own little night out. And dinner was on me. Literally.

So anyway…

Yesterday there was this fellow in the fens cruising. Well, there were a few, as always, but this one was cruising me. Little old ME! Imagine! I felt like a sweepstakes winner!

Truth is I was just minding my own business, dropped in on my way home from “work,” and really wasn’t looking for “action.”

Day-cruising in the Fenway is generally kept to the designated cruising circuit, which consisits of certain paths, nooks and crannies among the phragmites. At least before dark, and until they hook up. I think this is a good arrangement. I mean, I accept the Fens as a multipurpose park, and I certainly don’t object to a little al fresco amore on occasion.

So this fellow was hanging out obviously looking for a little afternoon delight. I went to get a wheelbarrow and saw him. He was strutting around very determinedly, shirtless, and was one of these guys, probably in his mid-forties, who’s totally ravaged from the neck up, but with the athletic physique of a twenty-something.

He stalked around (and around and around), and finally zeroed in on my garden. I was chatting with Tony when he passed by the second time, and on his third pass he finally stopped.

He leaned on the fence, and smiled a sad, ravaged smile, and said, “Hey!”

We were like, “how’s it going?”

He was like, “I want some seeds.”

I said, “what kind of seeds are you looking for?”

He was like, “Your seeds, man!”

“Mmm, nice.”

He’s like, “You gotta gimme credit for that line, man. It took me, like, ten minutes to think of it.”

Tony and I knodded in appreciation. And I rushed right over and poked my thingy through the chain-link fence, and a good time was had by all.

No. Sad to say, the mystery was gone.

You know, cruising’s a delicate balance. He was obviously horny and frustrated and thought he’d just cut to the chase. But, strange as it may seem, this is a highly ritualized exercise. And especially day-cruising takes honed instincts, charm, and tact. At night, if you’re in a cruising spot, you don’t need the charm or the tact. But in the daytime, you may be in cruise-world, but once you diverge from the path, you’re out in the real world.

I mean, I was in my garden pulling weeds chatting with my neighbor. You know? In the real world we don’t just go up to people and solicit them. It’s not like asking the time. “Excuse me, may I blow you?” “How ya doing? Would you mind poking me in the bushes over there?” That’s not how day-time society works. Sorry. If you want to cruise in the daylight of the real world, it’s a different set of rules. It takes skills, people.

Heaven forbid anyone reading this were to think I’m a prude. Far from it. We live in a slut society–not just sex sluts, but corporate sluts, drug sluts, sports sluts. Far be it from me to suggest we should hide our sluttiness under a bushel basket, or whatever. Slut it up, by all means. But even sluts go about things a certain way. That’s all I’m saying.

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:

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.

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.

Helped a buddy do some landscaping today, at his place out in the boondocks.

I love craggy old New England. When I first came Out East from the midwest, almost fifteen years ago, it was like I’d found a landscape that looked like my soul. The severe beauty of the brutal coast of Maine, just like Winslow Homer depicted it. I spent that first summer in and around Baxter State Park, on the Appalachian Trail, then came down to Boston for six very rough weeks, and headed back north to new Hampshire to work in an orchard there. Went back year after year for seven years for the harvest. The green, rolling hills. The austere architecture. Those stone walls in the woods.

And all the craggy old New Englanders, when I wintered in the little farmhouse in ‘95.

Anyway, in some respects, there’s nowhere I would rather be. The coast of Maine is incomparable. And regardless of what those armchair patriots in the red states may think, this is where it’s at.

Despite the mosquitos. And Mosquitos love me. I mean, LOVE me. What’s up with that? I remember when I was first up in the wilds of Maine, I was actually working for the AT conference up there, and there were ten or twelve of us doing trail reconstruction, erosion control, and maintenance, and living on-site in the woods, or at a place called Packard Farm outside of the god-forsaken little town of Monson (apologies to any Monsonians out there, but yee-ikes).

So, of the whole group of us only, like, two of us were bug-magnets. A guy named Scotty and me. And it was not just the mosquitos. Deer flies. I remember being out in the middle of a lake in a canoe trying to escape one of those menacing, pint-size bullies.

And when black fly season came it was…indescribable. You could easily go stark-raving mad. Easily. Any part of my body that was not completely covered was made a meal of–and those black fly bites scarred me for months. I used to have to wear one of those hats with the netting, and gloves, and long-sleeves in the muggy height of summer. And still they got me. There were bites on top of bites.

Scotty and I tried swallowing cloves of garlic, but it didn’t do either of us a bit of good, as far as I could tell. There’s apparently some research that says that the profile of the perfect human prey for mosquitos is male, overweight, with type ‘O’, only one of which applies to me. I’m male, that is. Every inch of me. And don’t you forget it. Scotty was kind of overweight, though. I don’t know what blood type, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was ‘O’.

There’s been some serious research on this recently, I guess, but still nothing conclusive. One article in US News describes a horrible, horrible study–can you imagine agreeing to participate in a study where they put you in some kind of chamber and let mosquitos feast on you? Only 28 people did, apparently. And what they found was: “There was a consistent difference in who was least attractive and who was most attractive. Some people simply produce more of compound X than compound Z.” Whatever. Some Australian study says it might be genes. This is why we need more stem cell research, people!

I am one of those people who’s deadly allergic to bees, too. But bees are much more reasonable than mosquitos, deer flies or black flies. Because bees are workers. You understand that, and try not to be a drama queen (it’s not ALWAYS about YOU, you know), and they’re about their business and leave you to yours. They don’t want any trouble. They don’t have the time. Plus, you know, they know that if they have to take you, it’s a suicide mission. And they’d rather not. Wasps are into it. Those mothers will sting you again and again out of the pure giddy pleasure of inflicting pain. But bees, knowing what’s at stake, are only going to do it if you’re acting the fool.

I’ve worked in orchards, like I said, for years, and never had the least trouble. I used to carry my anaphylaxis kit out with me, but I like bees, and respect them, and we just sort of reached an understanding. Mosquitos are blood suckers, and everyone knows once it gets that far, you can’t reason with them. I mean, somebody who wants to drink your blood–what kind of understanding can you reach with them?

Anyway, non sequitur: saw this little frog below as I was pulling some weeds. He could have balanced on my fingertip. I chased him around a little trying to get him to pose for me. I got a couple of shots, and he hopped under some dead leaves. Then my buddy shows up with the weed whacker cutting this huge swath of destruction, without the least regard for Nature’s hidden little wonders. It was like that old Pixie’s song “Wave of Mutilation.” I don’t know what happened to Mr. Frog, but I imagine he managed to clear out in time.

And check out those mating moths! They look a little bored to me. Nature’s funny.

6/22/06

My wild strawberries are about the size of pinheads, but that’s OK.

6/17/06

All the peonies are popping. I guess my tree peony was pretty early, because none of the others bloomed until last week. Unfortunately, it was during the monsoons, so by the time I was able to get in the garden yesterday, mine were all past their expiration dates. It’s a shame, but there’s always next year. there’s a lot of delayed gratification in a garden. That’s the nature of the beast.

Tony’s poppies are popping, too, now:

He’s got a couple different kinds, and we were just admiring how the pollen seems to come in a variety of colors–from a rich olive green to a deep purple–there’s even a good deal of variation in the same species, seems like.

And the roses are out all over the Fens:

And one last little surprise I somehow failed to post last week, a jack-in-the-pulpit growing out in front of my neighbor Rob’s fence, sort of nestled under some ferns. Try not to get too excited, now…

6/12/06

6/4/06