Beautiful Nature

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When it comes to gardening, my philosophy is to let nature add the beauty where I lack the artifice.  Repeating patterns please the eye and sometimes unplanted “weeds” form a pleasing patchwork of ground cover, as long as they don’t get too high.  I trust nature to be beautiful in its own time.  There are some places, many actually, were the beauty simply shines.  The best we can do as humans is to try to imitate it.  We all know of scenic overlooks, scenic by-ways, scenic attractions.  When I was young I flattered myself at being handy with a pencil.  I still love to draw, but my years of neglect in favor of words has left whatever skill I had depleted.  Or rusty from disuse.  Our artificial lives (9-2-5, 9-2-5, 9-2-5) prevent much time from being spread between various forms of self-expression.  But I appreciate beauty.

The more academic among us with call it aesthetics.  I tend to think of it in Faustian terms.  I remember well learning in high school that should Faust ever say, “verweile doch, du bist so schön” (remain, you are so beautiful) Mephistopheles will have won.  There are many moments in my life when beauty nearly overwhelms.  As humans, however, we know that should we see it every day it will become prosaic.  We’ll feel the need to find something even more sublime.  Such things lead to concepts of Heaven.  That certainly isn’t the case for my front garden.  Time to spend weeding is about as rare as time to spend drawing, particularly, for the former, when it’s not raining, or too hot, or when a weekend is otherwise not too busy.

We’re nearing the end of the growing season.  The melancholy beauty of autumn is the most poignant turning point in the year.  My mind tends to go to extremes, so when I have to bundle up a little to start my morning jog I begin to worry about heating bills and being chilly until next May.  I’m not one to wish away any season, however.  There’s beauty in the abundance of summer, just as there is in the bleakness of winter.  At a recent art show I was once again reminded that I’m most attracted to painting that capture the essence of autumn or winter.  That hint of snow on the ground under clear blue skies, announcing that change is coming—that too is beauty.  I still have to harvest the weeds that got out of control these last few weeks, looking for the beauty in their persistent existence.

Weeding Lessons

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Weeding can be a spiritual exercise.  This summer has been particularly challenging for my communing with the earth because of heat spells, soupy, rainy days for a week at a time, and generally just being busy with other things.  Yesterday I went out to the front garden and received a shock.  A couple of caveats, in my defense: like many people we tend to use the back door instead of the front.  With our parking space behind the house, this is understandable.  Another excuse is that I’m too exhausted after work to do weeding.  At that time of day the unadulterated sun is having its way with the front garden, and, hey, three’s a crowd.  We planted our garden in the hopes of reducing the mowing by a little bit.  It did that, but we soon learned that the expensive plants you buy tend to be shy.

And “ground cover?”  There’s three year mantra: first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.  Ours slept a couple summers and seems to be in its second summer of creeping.  In the midst of all this: weeds.  Weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  Life is extremely tenacious.  It doesn’t take “no” for an answer.  My amateur adventures in gardening have taught me that weeds grow next to those paving stones you put down.  Then they start growing over said stones.  If you let them go long enough (as I say, the weather has been awkward), they create their own soil over the stones.  Meanwhile, cars line up at the hardware store to buy bag after bag of soil.  Weeds can make their own.

I’m actually an admirer of weeds.  I enjoy the aroma of raw earth when they force me to my hands and knees in front of the house.  I do envy that their 9-2-5 is just being.  Growing.  Soaking up the sunshine, rain, and carbon dioxide.  If there’s a hint of soil, or something that can help them create their own soil, they’re not shy at all.  I don’t mind that they make me go outdoors on a pleasant weekend morning.  There’s peace in the air and I don’t mind the exercise.  I am surprised at just how many plants can grow in such a small amount of space.  I do wonder how our neighbors put up with us, but yesterday it was rejuvenating for my soul to be out there.  Everyone is sleeping in on a Saturday morning, and I’m learning some free life lessons from the amazing plants we call weeds.

Hopeful Weeds

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Our approach to our front garden has been to buy the perennials we can afford and hope the beauty of nature does the rest.  Nature, we quickly learned, loves weeds.  Tough, tenacious, even if not always pleasing to the eye, weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  A friend of mine, now departed, used to say that a weed was just a plant where we didn’t want it to be.  To put a more lexical sounding spin on it, a weed is “a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation” (according to Wikipedia).  Opportunistic plants, but those with a strong desire to survive.  I have noticed, in our eight years in this house, that each year different weeds predominate.  We have a front lawn that is difficult to finagle a mower onto, so we put down ground cover and mulch and planted several store-purchased non-weeds.

Some of these survived, and others haven’t.  Some hung on for a few years and then died.  It’s difficult to say if we just don’t have green thumbs or if the brutal, full summer sun did them in.  Weeds, however, thrive no matter what.  And they find any location with the smallest bit of promise.  Tired of wrestling the lawn mower down the front steps, a couple years back I put weed-blocking ground cover on the verge.  I went to the hardware store and bought many bags of sand and gravel and some paving stones.  First the sand on top of the ground cover.  Then the heavy paving blocks.  The gravel covered the sand, and I pushed it off the paving blocks to make a somewhat pleasing, if simple hop-scotch track.  (I’m delighted whenever I see kids using it that way.)  I hadn’t realized that weeds don’t mind sand.

That first year was good.  The second summer, however, weeds had begun to sprout and grow, tenaciously.  Instead of mowing, I was now kneeling on paving blocks and pulling weeds.  Mowing took less time.  Still, the weeding can be done every few weeks rather than the weekly ritual with the mower.  I decided for our front garden that any non-spiky plant that was shorter than what we’d planted would be left alone.  There aren’t enough hours in a weekend—even a three-day one—to weed properly, not with books to write and a 9-2-5 breathing down my neck all the other days.  Not to mention the mowing and grocery shopping and other errands that eat up weekends like popcorn.  Still, fresh in from pulling the latest batch of weeks I have to confess that they give me hope.  All it takes is a place to settle down, no matter how marginal, and the will to survive.

Remembering Holidays

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Memorial Day is an important stepping stone to get through the capitalistic year.  Not only does it mark the unofficial beginning of summer, it’s also the first holiday after the long, long drought of March, April, and nearly the whole month of May.  That’s a long stretch of unbroken work.  My ideal holiday may be one where I could hole up in my study with books and endless time to write, but that kind of situation isn’t really realistic.  There’s a lot to do.  Around these parts, however, getting outdoors to take care of those weeds has proven difficult.  Every day since last Tuesday (nearly a full week, as of today) it has rained at least a little.  Sometimes a lot.  And the temperatures dropped on Wednesday, back to early April levels, as if May were vying for the title of the cruelest month this year.

We’ve been making the best of it, getting out to see local attractions while dodging raindrops.  The weeds, I’ve noticed, love this kind of weather.  And I have a visceral reaction to putting on a heavy jacket to go out pulling weeds while watching each passing cloud for a potential downpour.  On the plus side, we have rainbows.  In fact, two nights in a row, about the exact same time, near sunset, we had a rainbow in the exact same spot in the sky.  That’s a sign of hope.  And indeed, the summer takes on a more relaxed atmosphere at work and a few holidays start creeping back in.  Until the stretch of September-October, the second annual drought.  But by then, however, off in the distance I can see the holiday season that starts in November and I know I can make it through to December.

It’s an odd way to live, isn’t it?  Experts talk about how work will be different in the future, but I have a mortgage due in the present, so I step from holiday to holiday, grateful for the time to recover.  With a government trying its best to eliminate benefits to seniors I may have chosen a bad time to reach my sixties.  At least I’m young enough to still pull weeds and push a mower.  (Once the grass dries, that is.)  The main point is not to waste this rare gift of a holiday.  There’s no rain in today’s forecast (but there is for Wednesday, every day through next weekend).  Seeing the sun buoys me up.  And if I can’t have that I can always hope that at least I can have rainbows.