Green Thumb? More Like All Thumbs When It Comes to Gardening
Years ago, in an effort to render my Claremont college dormitory room leafy green, I subjected several horticultural species to a quick death before seeking guidance from the good folks at nearby Rosedale’s Nursery. My inability to cultivate an indoor garden prompted the salesman to suggest I try grape ivy--a hearty, forgiving little plant, he assured me, that would thrive in the most adverse conditions.
He chose a healthy specimen, and I happily made the purchase. From its bookshelf perch in my room, the ivy enjoyed sufficient (but indirect) light, as well as my vigilant adherence to the minimal care regimen prescribed. For a while, the ivy and I kept respectful company, but it wasn’t long before it began to droop and curl. When it paled into a sickly ochre hue, I packed it off to Rosedale’s, plunked it on the counter and plaintively asked the salesman: “What’s wrong with this plant?”
He glanced at the patient momentarily, looked at me and said, “It’s dead.”
Today, as spring is in full bloom and the summer garden season approaches, I am standing in my driveway, studying the disheveled, grumpy-looking vegetation that passes for my front yard, and seriously entertaining the notion of turning it into something other than a place where weeds hone their life skills and grass goes to die. Is it a pathetic example of reach exceeding grasp that I, a person with a demonstrable inability to distinguish botanical life from death, am envisioning a full bed of summer flowers under the bay window and a vegetable garden in the backyard productive enough to supply me with salad fixings through Thanksgiving?
It must be peer pressure. My former neighbor Lisa had an enormous seed collection organized better than the Dewey decimal system; I couldn’t pick a black-eyed Susan from a lazy Susan, a Sweet William from a sour grape. (I’m pretty sure Lisa moved because the sandy content of our beach-proximate soil was not a salubrious foundation for Belgian endive.) My neighbor Joanne owns a video about pruning roses and reads whole books on the subject--you mean there’s more to it than remembering not to grasp the thorny part? Another former neighbor, Mary, tended the flowers in the patches of sidewalk dirt surrounding the city’s bottlebrush trees, a space I used to think of as a poodle potty.
It used to be on Sundays, while I was slicing my way through the overachieving bougainvillea in search of the toolshed door, my Santa Monica neighbors were worshiping at the temple of steer manure. They were crafting mosaics of living color; I was asking myself where, if I cut the grass too short, the cat would go for intestinal relief.
This is what I realized: My neighbors garden; I do yard work.
Several years ago, having made improvements to my house sufficient to remove it from the category of “eyesore,” I resolved to perform similarly, yard-wise. I learned to think of crab grass as something other than drought-tolerant ground cover. OK, so I did consider--briefly--paving the whole thing and turning it into a particularly challenging basketball court of unorthodox shape and slope. But concrete proved to be prohibitively expensive. Graveling over the yard in a Southwestern motif was out because weeds ignore stones the way grape ivy ignores love.
Aspiring to the ranks of gardeners--people who know that a soil amendment has nothing to do with legislating land rights--I remain a committed dirt dweller. I recently read a gardening catalog and learned about tools. I learned that a dibble, for example, is essentially a fat, expensive ice pick gardeners use to make holes in the ground into which seeds are deposited. (I’m still unclear, however, why anyone with the full complement of fingers would require such an implement.)
From the driveway, I survey possible locations to replant the ficus tree that spent several sad seasons hanging out in an unsightly plastic kitchen wastebasket at the side of my yard. It used to belong to my neighbor Tom, who had neglected it for months before dragging it over to my house with a grin and the lame comment, “I tried really hard to kill it.”
Suddenly, I remember a city pipe layer telling me that ficus trees rank high on his hit list for the insidious manner in which their roots insinuate themselves into sewer lines. Tom’s motivation becomes clear--he knows an agricultural assassin when he sees one.
