How Green (and Black) is The Garden
Soon after our seasonal arrival, before boxes are fully unpacked or the pantry amply stocked, I’m drawn into my garden like a salamander to a vernal pond. With much anticipation and few misgivings so early in the season, I dig into the dirt, this patch of history that for a time I can consider mine. Palpable, the feel of attachment and active place-making as I re-connect to another summer’s rhythms.
In the garden, I’m, well, grounded. It’s where I often unearth happiness, if only by squatting at the perennial bed’s perimeter observing the newest shoots, the sun’s heat foursquare on my shoulders and neck, or while sipping the morning’s first coffee, idly pinching the spent blossoms from heliotrope and verbena.
Of course, it’s not always idyllic. Hardly. Some summers, my garden is more battlefield or coliseum than sanctuary. I duke it out with grubs and slugs, aphids and Japanese beetle. I raise my fists at rabbits and deer, or, with dried coyote urine spread among the beds, attempt an exotic and hopefully more effective means of engagement. Indoors, though I routinely attempt to capture spiders in tissue and gently toss them out the door, in the garden I know only vengeance, the quick, brutal dispatch of slugs with a shovel’s sharp blade. I’m never wounded by the demise of whitefly or aphid the way I am, say, by the sad after-the-fact recounting of the large Northern water snake that slithered out of Hub’s pond onto our road only to be clobbered by Petie with an oar. This morning, I may have deferred to a red eft I discovered beneath a heap of rotting autumn leaves and moved on to cleaning another part of the bed, but renewed my pledge to be armed to the teeth against future damage by voles that, one winter, up to their shenanigans beneath snow drifts, took down my new climbing hydrangeas with their persistent gnawing. Reluctantly, I had to declare them the victor in a battle I’d not even known had been waged.
Nature, we all know, is a formidable opponent, a sure bet no matter how handicappers might rate us gardeners as we’re coming out of the gate in June, no matter how many points we’re given entering the ring. Just as a garden is of nature and opposed to it, nature plays a dual role of friend and foe neither of which offers guarantees or certain outcomes. Our wish for moderate winter temperatures, considerable snow cover, a spring of adequate rain and an above average smattering of warm, sunny days holds little sway and is as likely to be met with an abundance of Arctic temperatures, stingy snow cover, a withholding of spring rain or an endless string of days saturated with fog and damp so that whatever attempts to grow seems to do so by having acquired gills.
Still, gladly, I persist, forgetting as I do every year at this time that regardless my first-of-the-season attempts to buttress my garden against nature’s encroachments, I will, by mid-July, grow indifferent to weeds. I’ll allow the blush of my expectations for gardening perfection dim. Less rigorous in my attempts to banish the gooseneck loosestrife I accidentally introduced among the phlox one summer, I’ll concede the fight and reconnect instead with the reminder that among a garden’s other definitions is that of the superb teacher, if what you’re after is humility or a better understanding of compromise and luck. Like mantras in a self-help book, the garden intones: Accept uncertainty, relinquish control. By mid-summer, I settle back and become more audience than participant. Bees plunder. Butterflies sip. Hummingbirds dart and dash. And though I do not set out the welcome mat for them, whatever the slugs are up to among the bee balm is of small concern to me.
But here is where I have to confess – black flies get no pardon. Never. In fact, were it my decision to make, they’d be outlawed altogether. Late spring, just when we gardeners are at our busiest with shovel and spade, they descend and unpack their bags. Though not so abundant this year, a few summers ago they arrived in hordes, every member of their extended family in tow, the result of some confluence of conditions about which I’d be forever grateful were it never to repeat itself. No bigger than one sixth of an inch long, black flies are cleverly equipped with a piercing blade-like appendage they put to fierce use, their preferred munching zones our hairlines, necks, ears and temples though they’ll gladly latch onto ankles or arms. Known in some circles as Maine’s “state bird,” it’s the Maine Blackfly Breeders’ Association – “we breed ‘em, you feed ‘em” – who are quick to point out that a blackfly’s “blood meal” measures a mere 2mg or 0.00006 ounces. More significantly, they report, that unlike mosquitoes, black flies have the good sense to breed only in the clear running water of our rivers and streams and thus are a measure of our environmental success. Both claims intended, I guess, to give the chewed-upon small comfort.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever be rid of Maine’s 40 or so species of blackfly. The best we gardeners can do is consider the aftermath of their bites – long-lasting red welts, scabs, bloody streaks – as a sort of hard-earned badge recognizable among our kind as is, too, the odd choreography of our attempted covert scratching at, say, a friend’s dinner table. The truest identity marker, however, may be our armor that involves, minimally, the protective black mesh head gear many of us have been known to wear both in and out of the garden, and which can be – let’s face it – an understandably frightening prospect.
