Jun 03, 2007 - 04:07:47 CDT
The freak freeze just before Memorial Day damaged my potatoes and tomatoes. Because I live abstracted from nature and to a certain extent from life, I was unaware that there had been a freeze. For decades, until last year, my whole experience with living plants has consisted of maintaining a grass lawn. And my standard, until now, has been very low: It shall not actually die on my watch.A lawn in the age of sprinkler systems demands very little attention, though some of the folks in my neighborhood lavish the same loving care on their quarter-acre lawns that they would on bonsai trees or an expensive stamp collection. Several have mowed six or seven times already this year, and a few have taken to mowing the borrow ditch between their homes and the formerly county road. There is almost no time during the weekends when the drone of a small internal combustion engine is not breaking the silence of the neighborhood. The lawn mowers don't much bother me, but the ning-zing-wing of the weed whackers and the leaf blowers is enough to detract from the pleasure of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.
My neighborhood is like a small paramilitary unit of lawn tractors. If we could coordinate our aggressions, we could invade Lincoln or Wilton and declare the republic of John Deere. My pathetic little push mower (which cost a fortune) is looked down upon as a "starter mower," and I'm sure more than one neighbor has speculated that I will soon see the light and get myself a rig. But, for me, there is no middle ground between a mower and something heroic. I'm holding out for a Bobcat, which I believe is every man's dream. With a Bobcat, I could mow my lawn in 12 minutes (and use my regular mower as an edger) and dig some post holes too.
Grass will survive almost anything, including a late spring freeze, but a garden is a much more delicate organism, I'm discovering. The little insights of gardening are obvious to almost everyone, I know, but they are new (or renewed) to me. At this time in American life, at the pace we live, with the myriad of distractions and over-stimulations that we daily absorb, it is possible to lose touch with life and to live a kind of mediated, digitized existence, and simply to move from one laminated surface to the next. Even our lawns now, thanks to the superb (if toxic) chemical treatments of our time, are preternaturally lush, even and weed-free, and as I drive around I often have the impression that the lawns look a little - well, colorized. When we reconnect with life in some simple Thoreauvian way - planting a garden, say - it feels to me that we have to learn very basic understandings again, as if we just returned from a long sojourn on Mars. Things my grandmother did daily with effortless mastery I have to learn as if they were a foreign language.
The great Jefferson believed that gardening was the sanest thing humans can do, that when we have our hands in the soil our souls cannot be meditating mayhem or investment strategies. He wrote a famous letter to his old friend Charles Willson Peale in 1812, in which he called himself "an old man, but a young gardener." "No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden," wrote Jefferson with his characteristic grace and serenity. "Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year." In other words, a field of wheat or corn is monoculture. If the hail or blight comes, the crop is a write-off. But in a garden, the peas may miscarry but the tomatoes bury you in salsa.
For Jefferson, the variety of a garden was one of its principal delights. When I visit Monticello and see the huge gardens terraced on the red soil of the mountain, I think, "Well, of course, that's why Jefferson was Jefferson. There is no other American historical figure for whom a garden is so central to his life and achievement."
The day after the freeze, I walked out in purple Crocs (purchased by my whimsical daughter) to survey my domain, and discovered to my horror that about half of the potato leaves were black and the majority of my tomato plants were prone on the black earth. I was horrified. It was the first time in a life of five decades when it actually mattered to me that the temperature had dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I actually felt like crying as I wandered among the stricken plants, and I actually thought, "I killed them. I have failed in my stewardship responsibility. Why wasn't I out at midnight with old blankets and towels?"
I got down on my hands and knees - as one must in a garden. In the little tilled patches behind our houses, we kneel and crawl and thereby humble ourselves. We embrace the earth from which we came and to which we will return like a spent cornstalk. It's liberating because it is so overwhelmingly real and basic and undeniable.
At ground zero, it soon became clear that the freeze had been a partial one and that the potatoes would surely survive, and many, perhaps most of the tomatoes will recover, if the sun ever chooses to shine again. The onions were undaunted and the garlic (planted in the fall, like winter wheat or tulips) looked magnificent with their 8-inch spires reaching toward the heavens. Nearby, the beans were breaking through the crust of the earth with their shields folded before them. Jefferson was right.
Of the 40 trees I planted not long ago, some are probably dead, though I won't know that for a few more weeks; others are waiting for more Btus before they leaf out. The lilacs are flourishing. When I walk out to the garden, I cannot really believe that anything could thrive so quickly after being transplanted. They have been in the ground for two weeks and somehow their root structures have stabilized and begun to spread, and the leaves are proliferating like bubble bath. Lilacs are European colonists.
The cottonwoods, though native, may or may not survive. What I don't understand is how cottonwoods can flourish in the Darwinian jungle of the prairie, but have such a hard time of it in the ICU atmosphere of my backyard. I've tried to transplant them to every home I've lived in since my father died in 1995, never with any success. If one of the six survives, I'll regard it as victory.
Possibly there have been greener springs in Dakota, but I cannot remember any. I had occasion to go to Medora recently. On the drive out, when I wasn't marveling at how much serious maintenance an interstate highway seems to need, this year one long section, next year another, I just relaxed and looked around, not without some reckless careening across the broad concrete surface of the highway. We all know we live in the North American grasslands, but in a spring like this you experience that moment when you realize all over again, it's GRASSland.
Square Butte south and west of Medora was a vast green giant, never more beautiful than that afternoon.
On the drive home, I stopped at the twin buttes between Glen Ullin and Almont to stretch. The two conical hills were as green as organic green can ever be, and in the soft evening light the scoria road rolling over hill and valley and hill again to the south was as brilliantly pink-orange as scoria can ever be. The temperature was 65 degrees. A very light breeze caressed the evening. It was a magic kingdom called North Dakota.
And there was not a single plastic surface in the world.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Conact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
cjcrain wrote on Jun 4, 2007 8:10 AM:
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