Author Archives: The Manic Gardener

In Which It Is Proven that you may get the Person out of the English Department, but you cannot get the English Department out of the Person

Warning: The following entry elides (or descends, depending on your point of view) into vaguely philosophical meanderings, touches on autobiographical events of no relevance to gardening, and alludes to several books, including Moby Dick and Winnie the Pooh.

Back in October, I spent approximately half-an-hour one afternoon sitting on my back step in the watery sun, staring at a piece of plastic.

Be specific, said my English teacher’s mind. What kind of plastic? But I couldn’t be specific, because I didn’t know. Polyurethane? Vinyl? Words, just words. It doesn’t matter. Get on with it.

It’s a sheet of “clear” flexible plastic, and I was trying to figure out how to make a door to the greenhouse my husband just built of it. At the moment, I was getting in and out by removing the brick that holds down one “wall” of the structure and sliding between the house wall and the plastic one. It’s not a very neat or elegant means of ingress or egress, but the half hour before the one I spent staring, I spent going in and going out. I went in to check on the tomatoes the structure was protecting (they were doing fine), and out because I was done looking, and in to look again, and out to get a chair, and in with the chair, and out again with the chair, and in to move one of the barrels because there wasn’t room for the chair, and back in with the chair, back out for my coffee, and in with the coffee, and out for my book, and in with the book—you get the idea. There was always a reason to go in or to go out, but really I was going in and going out merely for the pleasure of doing so, like Eeyore, who was so taken by the house built for him by Pooh and Piglet because he had been complaining about how “it’s not so warm in my meadow at two in the morning,” that when it was done, he went in and out, in and out.

Why? Because to do so defines the inness of the inside, to pass between the two places defines their difference, and it is that difference that defines each place, giving each its identity. (Thank you, Ferdinand de Saussure oh father of modern linguistics (who argued that no letter or sound had absolute value; each was defined only by its relationship with, its difference from, other sounds and letters, as the inside of the greenhouse is defined only by it’s difference from the outside) and to Jacques Derrida oh great deconstructionist master (who would spell it "différance," to illustrate the difference between speech and writing, for as every English grad student and most majors these days knows, "différence" and "différance" sound the same in French, despite their graphological divergence))
not to mention Herman Melville

And it was Melville who put it best, I swear, (so betraying a preference for literature over criticism that even grad school couldn’t beat out of me) for, when Queequeg is in bed with his "clean, comely looking cannibal" early in Moby Dick, warm and comfortable despite–indeed because of–his still-chilly nose, Melville says that “truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.” How can you be clearer about having a house than by stepping outside of it to experience its absence? How can I better enjoy my new greenhouse, or prove to myself its existence, than by passing through the wall that creates it?

Wow. As Garrison Keillor has proven, once an English major, always an English major, but apparently it’s even more true of English graduate students. I haven’t been one for decades, but as the paragraph above shows, the stuff I absorbed there has a truly insidious grip on my language, my thinking (and what’s the relation between those two, hmm? Does the first in fact shape the second, à la Saussure, or can we think independently of the words we use?) Oh help. I really need that garden. Not to mention the door.

All dialogue is approximate, and I apologize in advance to those whom I accidentally misquote and otherwise misrepresent.

So there I am at what I think of as my local organic gardening outlet Planet Natural, waiting to pay for my non-toxic weed-killer and my hemp twine, and just as the young woman behind the counter finishes with some sort of bookwork, a guy with his shirt hanging out over his shorts comes clattering down the stairs and shoves a piece of paper under her nose.

“What do you think?”

She reads, shakes her head, and hands it back.  “Uh-uh.”

“Why?”

She’s already scooped up the papers she’d been working on, but pauses a moment to consider before filing the folder and making her answer:  “It’s too–”

And I wish I could remember exactly what she said then.  It wasn’t “pro-forma,” but it might have been “formulaic;” it wasn’t as predictable as “predictable,” or as dull as “dull,” and I doubt, having heard her pithy style since, that it was as wordy as “sounds like everyone else,” but that’s what it meant.  “Sounds like a toothpaste ad” gets the flavor right.

“Huh,” says the guy, and weaving between tables covered with organic pesticides and fertilizers, he marches the paper across the big, wooden-walled room to another young woman (it would be a while before I got them sorted out) calling, “What do you think, Shannon?”

There’s a pause while Shannon looks at the paper.  I consider suggesting that the woman behind the counter actually ring up my intended purchases, but she’s watching Shannon read.  I’m not in that much of a hurry, and I’m curious to see what Shannon thinks, so I watch too.

“Like Katrina said.  It’s just–not original.”

“Huh,” says the guy again.  “Well, what about the second one?”  He’s already halfway back through the organic obstacle course of round wooden tables to Katrina.

“I dunno, I just looked at the first one.”

She’s reaching for the paper–my potential purchases are still on the counter between us–when I lose it.

“I can’t stand this,” I announce, “let me see.”  By way of excuse, I add, “I’m a writer and an editor.”

The guy looks at me with more interest and less animosity than might be expected under the circumstances, and swipes the paper back from Katrina, who has had time to announce that the second one was better.  Over the next five minutes, I learn that the guy is Eric, owner of the business, that the short paragraphs on the paper are drafts for the key description that will go up on the business’s web-site, and that Eric is in need of writers for that web-site and others.  He, in turn, learns that I, too, prefer the second one.  He also learns my name.

“Hey,” he yells, vastly amused, “her name is Gardner!”

We agree to talk more, but not now, I say; I’m already late for an appointment.

In the end, I leave with the paper and with my twine and weed killer, but without having paid for them; because I’m late and he held me up, Eric lets me have them on credit.

He knows I’ll be back.

So, to briefly recap my first post, there are lots of trees in our yard. Way too many for good gardening. To make things even more fun, the dirt here (it doesn’t deserve the name of ‘soil’) got itself mixed up with cement at some point, and in its desire to emulate that substance it resists tools with a stubbornness I might admire if I had any energy left over after a round of ‘digging’ that more closely resembles hacking away at, you got it, cement. In the back by the alley, we can abandon the metaphor, for the dirt there quite literally got mixed up with cement. Dig there (if you can) and you’ll find chunks and chips of cement. Also bricks, bits of bricks, and lots and lots of rocks. According to my ninety-year-old neighbor to the north, who’s lived there since the fifties when she and her husband bought the two lots north of ours from the then-owner of our house, a brick-making facility used to be on our block. The evidence bears her out.

That alley strip is so inhospitable that we decided to go for raised beds, which my husband built for me our second year here. Our first year we spent trying to fix up the house to the point where some bank somewhere would be willing to issue a mortgage on it, which meant taking on — or off — the shag carpeting from the seventies and below that linoleum from the thirties when the original log cabin was built, not to mention moving the kitchen, building a new floor in the addition, refinishing the finally exposed fir floors in the old part of the house, putting in new windows, repainting everything, and having the roof redone (the only thing we hired out) to fix the leaks under which the previous owner, in all other ways a great guy, had been parking buckets for ten years (thank god this was Montana, with its super-dry climate, or there’d have been rot to contend with not just a roof to replace). Talk about your fixer-upper.

Not much gardening got done that year, but by our second summer in the house we had the mortgage, and the gardening itch had to be scratched. Since only the alley (as amply demonstrated in the earlier entry) gets several continuous hours of sunlight, the raised beds were a priority. Steve used leftovers of the log siding that covers the seventies addition to the house. (The siding was a great choice aesthetically, as the new part of the house blends pretty well with the original log cabin, but as we have learned to our sorrow, it doesn’t hold a candle to real logs as an insulator.)

To fill the beds we had to buy soil, and in a misguided fit of economy I went for the cheapest earth advertised. The term "sandy loam" had been used in the ad; I probably could have won a suit for false advertising.& A friend (a lawyer, actually) suggested I return it, but in the grip of the encouraging claim in a gardening book that any soil could be made workable, I didn’t.

Over the five summers since, I’ve dug tons (and that may almost be true) of compost and peat moss and gypsum ("works like millions of tiny crowbars!") and crushed bricks ("great for clay soils!") into those plots, with the result that they are apparently earthworm heaven, but they still harden over the season to the point where it’s not only impossible to pull up carrots, it damn near impossible to dig them up.

My latest strategy is sand. Unfortunately, the situation’s so bad that digging sand in coats dirt clods while leaving them intact. There are clumps of clay in that dirt so dense that they don’t crumble when pressed, they just squash; they deform, like clay. The only way to break them up, I’ve found, is to rub them on a stone with a handful of sand. Now there’s a way to spend an afternoon.

So now you know my dream: to be able to pull up carrots. To that end, I will now go outside and squash a little more sand into a few more clods of clay.