Monday, April 6, 2015

On My Garden

I've been gardening more this year. A haphazard affair like any undertaking in my life. I find that too much order and planning stifles my creativity. And what I mean by stifles my creativity is that it takes time, and I am impatient. I took the advice of a Frost poem long ago, something about apple trees growing from the scattered seed and apply it liberally to my own garden. If the plants are intended to grow, they grow. If not, well they weren't worth the time.

This is, as nearly anyone could tell you, almost profoundly stupid, and yet I see no reason to change my stance. Many of our human tendencies are contingent upon our unfailing belief in certain things, which upon further examination would reveal only our stupidity. And so I plant a blackberry bush in abundant shade, or dig an insufficient hole for a grape that's never going to grow anyway because I'm impatient. I garden like a child. Throw seeds in the ground in the morning, and I expect to be eating Watermelon by afternoon.

One of the strange things about self-knowledge though, is how useless it can be. I realize that I'm a crappy gardener, in large part due to my impatience. However, this knowledge does nothing to curb my impatience or change my habits. I believe this is largely because the impatience is a part of my essential nature, while the self-reflection is merely an idle curiosity. Although, perhaps it's just another failing.

Nero was insane, and he was the emperor of Rome. This fact either cheers or saddens me. On the one hand, at least I'm not an insane person killing large swaths of people for my own pleasure. However, if even an insane person can rise to the highest position of power then what does that say about me?

No one can prove that the hanging gardens of Babylon ever existed. We wanted to have hanging plants on our front porch. We have, numerous times been out and about and admired the hanging plants at home depot, the red splash of geraniums or the blue and purple pansies crawling towards the light. And yet, like one of the eight wonders of the world, you cannot prove that we have ever had a hanging plant.

It rained the other day, and the morning sunlight refracted through clouds was covered in dust. Or rather it appeared as though it were dusty. In the yard, the berry bushes that I have just planted are crisscrossed by spider webs, glistening in the morning light, glimmering in the late summer air, bending in the gloaming.

I have a picture in my mind of an old English gardener. He is white, and he has a white mustache and a large hat, which he removes frequently to scratch at his unkempt hair, more as an affectation than anything else. I am not that gardener.

Today is a lovely kind of day, dappled light coming down through the large oak in our yard. I could lie in the grass and sleep for days, for years, for decades, I could wake up with a long white beard and wander about this city looking for the people that I used to know. 



1 comment:

  1. you need to have grandpa john move in every spring and spend his days toiling in your yard till summer arrives..then send him home..he loves gardening and now at 68 has patience..

    ReplyDelete