(Editor’s Note: What is this column really about?)
My wife and I take two radically different approaches to gardening. She negotiates with Mother Nature, trying to find the perfect plants which blend with the environment. I engage in acts of malicious horticulture, using poisons and sharp implements to impose my will upon the earth.
She’s all about free-form creativity and coaxing life from the soil. I’m all about applying the latest in technology.
She’s a from a Venus Flytrap and I’m from … well, oddly enough, there aren’t any plants I can find with Mars in their name.
Maybe that’s why her efforts so much more successful than mine.
This past spring I started what has come to be known as the “War with the Roses”. It began as a simple search-and-destroy mission to eliminate some unwanted garden plants and it’s turned into an on-going struggle with no end in sight.
The roses under our kitchen window were looking bad. Powdery mildew blighted the leaves, the once orderly stems straggled across the front walk. Beauty was just a memory for these plants. They no longer met my standards for participation in my landscaping. They had to go.
Cutters in hand, I set about dismantling the bushes.
I cut.
And I cut.
And I cut.
Two hours later – scratched and bloodied by the thorns – I’d transformed the bushes into two trash cans full of mutilated plant matter. The pain didn’t matter. I’d beaten the roses.
“Whacha doin’?” a neighbor asked.
“Just finishing up eliminating some roses,” I said.
“You know you need to dig out the roots,” he said.
“They’re dead,” I said. “I’ve cut ‘em right down to the ground. See?”
“Naw. Start digging. You’ll find a big old root ball. Leave that and the plants’ll be back sure as shootin’ in a couple weeks.”
Crud! I muttered the jumbo-sized assortment of curses as I headed to the shed to fetch a shovel.
Contrast this with my wife’s approach. She wanted to rejuvenate her vegetable garden. She uprooted the old plants, turned the soil (more accurately, convinced me to turn the soil) and scattered wildflower seeds. That’s all. Like she thinks plants just grow by themselves!
Meanwhile, I excavated rose roots. This was a project on par with digging the Panama Canal. The more I dug, the more roots I found. I swear they were growing as I cut them. I ran through every dirty word I knew, applied a shovel, an ax, and a set of tree loppers.
Two hours, more scratches, and four aching limbs later I’d extracted three root balls the size of beach balls.
I smoothed out the dirt, dug four neat holes and planted brand new holly bushes. They looked ridiculously small in the newly cleared space. It’d take years for them to fill in for the rose bushes, but they were the plants I wanted.
All that remained was to water them regularly to keep them alive. A little constant attention and they’d be just fine.
While I played nursemaid to the holly, my wife pretty much ignored her wildflowers. “They’ll grow or they won’t,” she said, philosophically.
Evidently the wildflowers missed the “won’t” part. They burst forth like JiffyPop, splashing color all over the garden. The tomatoes and grapes she planted went the same way. We couldn’t have stopped them with a flamethrower. I grew afraid to lay in the back yard under the plants. Clearly my wife controlled them. Who knew what they might do.
Obviously my rip-and-strip approach to gardening wasn’t working. I had to win back some dignity. All my wife did was toss some seeds on the dirt. How hard could that be?
Harder than it looks. I tossed seeds – from the very same bag as my wife – and they came up as weeds. I cleared those off (a process a magnitude of order easier than removing the rose roots) and decided to try again. Maybe seeds weren’t my thing. What if I started with actual grown plants?
Based solely on whether or not I could pronounce their names, I picked out plants at the garden center. Lilac – good. May Night Salvia – weird, but okay. Pholx – barely tolerable, but only because a Star Trek character was named Dr. Phlox. Choriops… choreo… core… Can’t pronounce it, won’t buy it.
I arranged the plants carefully, thinking about how they’d look as they grew. Should the lilacs be in the back? Would they get tall enough? What was that growing by the holly? Roses? Roses!
Across the lawn, in the garden I’d stripped of roses, two new bushes had poked up through the soil. Infiltrators! Insurgents! How dare they!
Another trip to the garden center and I returned with a van-load of barely-legal chemical compounds. I’d tell you what they were, but just naming them has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats. No stinking rose bush was going to get the best of me. Carefully protecting my tender holly bushes, I set about poisoning the roses.
Here’s the truth. I will go to any lengths to exert my mastery over the flora in my yard. I once had a garden patch which had been allowed to go fallow. Naturally it turned to weeds. Poison, weed control ground cloth and even aggressive use of a weed whacker failed to be permanent solutions. In time I built a patio on the spot just so I’d never have to worry about the weeds again.
Despite my efforts, the rose bushes haven’t died. My holly bushes look sick, though. My technology has failed me. In the meantime my wife is harvesting tomatoes and grapes and sits out on the patio enjoying her wildflowers. I’d join her, but I have to get back to work. My lilacs and phlox aren’t looking so good, but I have a chemical that should take care of that.
