Garden

Every morning we continue to be amazed by the vivid, uniform pink purplish-red that is covering our redbud trees. We have four on the slope that leads from our house down to the garden. This year they've bloomed more vividly than ever before, and, though that has already lasted for several weeks, it looks as if the green is still a distance from taking over. This has been a year like no other for the daffodils, too, and there are plenty of buds on the dogwoods, the wild azaleas, and even the wisteria vines, all waiting to burst into color in their turn -- that is, if no late April severe frosts set in at night, and every year that's a threat, especially to the wisteria.

Though severe climate change is close at hand, we have no explanation for such a great spring. This part of Virginia has had droughts the same as elsewhere, including one just last summer, but this winter and spring so far there's been just enough rain. Not in abundance but just enough.

Meanwhile it's looking as if our gardening might be coming to full circle. In the first years after I cleared one of the few small sections of flat land that we have, about half an acre along the creek, I had grown mainly vegetables. But I had a hard time keeping my rototiller going, and as we weren't doing much anyway with what we did manage to grow and meanwhile failed to starve, gradually I took down the fences that were needed to keep away the groundhogs and the deer, and the weeds that when mowed became grass took over, punctuated by plantings of interesting shrubs and special trees. Now, with a food crisis being among the many dire forecasts these days, the tomatoes, corn, squash, okara, and the rest could be making a triumphant return. But the big question will be whether I still have enough energy for that.

Meanwhile my wife and I are enjoying going into the garden every day, cleaning up the cold weather debris and engaging in that great joy of spring -- going around to see what is coming up again this year.

If you were to see my garden, you, like my friend H. down the road, probably wouldn't think much of it, because it never has the numerous splashes of color or the edibles that are ordinarily expected of gardens. H., in fact, likes to say, with a sneer, that I don't even have a garden, but it looks to me as if I do, and a very beautiful one at that. I see my garden as being beautiful because it is so integrated with the woods, weeds, and bushes that hem it in so closely, and in fact some of the weeds that insist on making themselves present strike me as being flowers like any other. Pokeweed with its splashes of purple in its berries and red in its leaves in the fall is the best example.

Actually, in my opinion, anyone's garden, no matter what its appearance, is beautiful, because the most important thing about a garden is that it's an activity more than it is a place. You've created it and you keep it going, and that's the main fact about it.

For that reason I would say that people, mainly affluent people, who hire others to garden for them can't really call it their garden, though they're paying for it and it's on their property. It's the gardeners and no one else that really have the garden, because they're the ones doing it.