The Limits of Lazy-Faire Gardening

The following essay was prompted by a comment from our son Bram on my earlier piece "Its All in How You Spin It".

It is actually not that easy being a lazy-faire organic gardener. Like its similarly named economic counterpart lazy-faire organic gardening is the policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering. And like its economic counterpart, “without interfering” doesn’t really mean, “without interfering”. It actually means minimal involvement. In fact if it weren’t for these occasional interventions it wouldn’t be gardening – it would just be sticking plants into the ground. The hard part is knowing when to step in, and how much.

For example, Mars and I place many of our perennials pretty close together. We like that natural look of overflowing abundance and contrasting colors and patterns that result from semi-crowded beds of complementary flowers – “brightly colored patches that are messy but balanced” as the gardens of the Impressionist artist Claude Monet are described by travel writer Rick Steves. (Others might say congested and confusing. I ignore the others.)
Inevitably the daisies and the sunflowers intertwine. The adjacent green shrubbery begins to create a shady roof over the area. The thin branches of the Japanese Spirea push against the green stalks of cardinal plants. And the tansy starts to nudge out the Echinacea. Hands on intervention is called for to restore the amount of space each plant needs in order to breathe. Sixty minutes of clipping and ripping and the balance of nature is restored. For the next month or so the pruned back perennials respect each other’s space. Then normal growth leads to more polite pushing and shoving, and law and order needs to be gently restored again.

And of course there are weeds to be weeded. Some of these encroachers get discovered when I am down and dirty, crawling through the flower stems, looking for candidates to be thinned out. But not all of our flowerbeds are planted wall-to-wall. Other outliers are more obvious, brazenly showing themselves in the strips of soil between their more wanted brethren. This is not the look we are going for. More kneeling, crouching, pulling and tugging and the dirt is returned to its pristine, non-distracting appearance. Such is the mannerly ebb-and-flow of minimal interference plant care.

There is however no place in the world of lazy-faire organic gardening for bindweed.

Bindweed is a vining plant that snakes its way across the ground and over fences, plants, or any other stationary thing in its path. Bindweed can grow four feet or more in length, and has deep, strong roots.
Vigilance and persistence are the two most useful weapons in your arsenal against bindweed. Watch for signs of this vine, and remove it as quickly as possible. The best way to get rid of bindweed is to cut it off at soil level. Don't bother pulling it up; it will just sprout wherever you tore the roots (and you will. It's impossible to get all of the roots out.) organicgardening/about.com

Occasional improvements are part of the vocabulary of the dedicated lazy-fairest“. “Vigilance and persistence” are not. “Bindweed” is not. It plays by its own set of anarchic rules.

We live in Connecticut where the ground is cultivated and the soil healthy. I don’t have any bindweed. (I think the genteel Yankee tradition and local zoning ordinances keep it away.) My daughter-in-law and son live in Santa Fe, New Mexico – arid growing conditions, average rainfall minus ten inches per year. (When they talk about “inches of rain” out there they are referring to the distance between each drop.) They, and many of their friends and neighbors, have bindweed – healthy, vigorous, pernicious, evil bindweed.

Fortunately this accident of geography allows me the luxury of not having to deal with this most vexatious vegetative villain – and of maintaining my hands off horticultural convictions.

If I did however, I would do exactly what they are doing – rout it with Roundup, the poisonous systemic, broad-spectrum uber-herbicide.

Lazy-fairism
needs polite participants –
not bindweed bullies.

Its All in How You Spin It

I worked with Kwame several years ago.

When I first met him his name was Cephas – the non-African name he was assigned as a part of the attempted Anglicization of his part of Ghana that was still going on during the 1950’s when he born and growing up there. I never got much of the story By the time we had met he had immigrated to the USA, become college educated (either here, there and/or somewhere else), married, fathered a daughter and a son, and settled into a career as a computer programmer at the downtown Hartford insurance company at which I was also employed. He never talked about how he ended up there.

We needed staff on my project and I was told that someone named “Cephas Irish-last-name” would be joining the team. I expected a tall red-haired, barrel-chested, boisterous Celtic. I got instead a mid-sized but muscular, square-featured, ebony-colored, thoughtfully quiet and reflective, problem solver. He shook my hand and told me softly that he was no longer going by his Christian appellation but was to be known henceforth as Kwame.

Kwame always wore a crisply ironed white dress shirt with a tie and cufflinks. And he proudly drove a large Mercedes Benz sedan. When I moved off the project to another position in the same division we became out of work acquaintances. It turned out that we were both tennis players of about equal ability each looking for someone to whack the ball across the net with. On the court he donned classic tennis whites to my baggy plaid Bermuda shorts and colored collared shirt.

Kwame was a steady backcourt tennis player who, like me, loved to put extreme spins on the fuzzy yellow orb and who, like me, took more pleasure in the complexity of the ball movement and the length of the point, than the final result. We played once, sometimes twice, weekly during the outdoor tennis season. And on every point each of us was trying to twist the arc of the returning spheroid beyond the world of the predictable into the realm of the totally unexpected and completely unforgettable.
He also had the ability to express things in a manner that shed an entirely different perspective on the situation.

For example, one time I brought into work a blueberry teacake that Mars had made with berries picked from one of the bushes in our backyard. I offered Kwame a piece.

He was reluctant to take even a taste until I assured him that I had sprayed absolutely nothing on the fruit bushes. In fact other than planting and watering them the only care that I gave them was to drape them in layers of tobacco netting.

“Ooh! Jeem. I did not know that you were an organic gardener.” he lilted, as he quickly popped chunks of the sweet crumbly cake into his mouth.

I didn’t know that either. I had thought, with some degree of certainty based upon personal experience and the opinion of others, that I was just lazy. Organic gardening, I believed, was more than just a hands-off gardening technique. It was a way of life – a calling – with its own set of labor-intensive, arcane, 100% pure rituals and practices. And an end product that said to the world “I have replicated Eden, and without the help of Dow Chemical.” In short, it was much more work than I wanted to put in to burnishing my moral standing in the horticultural universe.

But now I realized it was really just a matter of perspective. Once I had been put into the highest pantheon of plantsman by someone whose judgment I truly valued – since nothing validates someone else’s wisdom more than telling you what you want to here – I vowed to keep that lofty position by continuing to do as little as possible to influence the growth of my vegetation. A philosophy that I have assiduously followed all these years – “lazy-faire” gardening.

I was reminded of all this the other day when I was out in our butterfly garden silently bemoaning the extremely low number of Lepidoptera versus the large volume of humming-stinging insects that are attracted to that corner of our earth. I had made a similar complaint to Kwame one time when he was visiting my backyard après tennis. It was a slow patty-cake lob of a comment. The perfect set up for either a breath-stopping slam return or the most delicate finesse shot.

“In gardens and life –
if you want the butterflies
you have to have bees.”

There was, and still is, nothing more to say.

Woolly on One Side, Clipped on the Other

I read an article in the New York Times several years ago which pops back into in my mind every time that I am doing one of my regular yard landscaping chores. Unlike French author Marcel Proust the object that serves as my involuntary memory trigger is not a madeleine cookie but rather a privet hedge.

The newspaper piece is titled “Nature; As Privet Rises, Neighbors Take Sides” and it appeared in the “gray lady” in July 2003.

“SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y.‚ THE privet is blooming all over the Hamptons. And as it marches across the old potato fields, growing higher with every new McMansion, even its honey like fragrance is the subject of debate.

''’I love it!’ said Robert Dash, whose privet is blooming at Madoo, his garden in Sagaponack. ‘It's our summer lilac.’

''’I can't stand the smell,' Margaret Logan, a writer in Southampton, said. 'It's so cloying.'

“Some people let their hedges grow high and broad, billowing over the property line like a woolly mammoth. Others keep them as clipped as a stone wall. When they cannot agree, the hedge is of two minds, woolly on one side, clipped on the other.

“Discuss hedges in the Hamptons and you will hear history lessons, debates about nature versus nurture, metaphors about neighborliness, class consciousness and aesthetics and the need to create walls between McMansions. And while different philosophies of hedges have not reached the fever pitch recently reported in Britain, where in June a man shot and killed his neighbor in an incident attributed to 'hedge rage’, passions do run high here, almost as high as Bettina Milliken's Sagaponack hedge.”

The late 60’s – pre homeowner/gardener version of me would have strongly favored the laissez-faire landscaping MO – like hair “Flow it, show it. Long as God can grow it.” Although truth be told the feeling of my own locks barely brushing the top of my collar (yes I was wearing shirts with a band of material around the neck) would send me immediately to my local barber for a rapid redo. Still I liked to pretend that my inner sensibilities were pure alternative culture – cutting edge so to speak. Particularly when it came to other people’s hair – or hedges.

As I look back on the Hampton’s hedge hoopla now however I notice that the untrimmed bushes as described in the article seemed to retain their purity of species – by which I mean nowhere do I read about youthful Maple trees insinuating their way through the privet stalks and raising their distinctive leaves into the firmament. Nor do I see any mention of Solanum dulcamara, (also known as bittersweet, bittersweet nightshade, bitter nightshade, blue bindweed, Amara Dulcis, climbing nightshade, fellenwort, felonwood, poisonberry, poisonflower, scarlet berry, snakeberry, trailing bittersweet, trailing nightshade, violet bloom, or woody nightshade) twisting its tenacious vines around the defenseless hedge limbs and hiding its purple star-shaped flowers in amongst the privet’s lacey white florets. In the Hamptons there seems to be nothing but pure unadulterated Ligustrum Ovalifolium within and above itself.

Not so in the real world. And that just drives my arboriculture aesthetic apoplectic. Which is why I have sold out to the neat and trim sculptured privet point of view. That, and of course Ernest.

Ernest wasn’t his real name – I never knew until many years later what his actual appellation was – however it should have been. He looked too much like the Nobel Prize winning, macho American novelist not to have been named that. So Ernest was what I called him.

The first time I saw Ernest he was across the street doing yard-work for one of my neighbors. It was 1977.

He looked to be well past retirement age, about six feet tall, and thin. He was wearing clean, un-pressed tan chinos, brown work boots, a yellowing Irish knit sweater and a tan chino baseball hat. The hat was planted firmly on his head, at a slight angle, with the left side up. A thin stream of white hair flowed out of the sides of the hat and continued down his cheeks, merging with a short-trimmed beard and moustache. His neck was unshaven. When he removed his hat, I could see that the hair on his head was military short.

It was a sunny day, but Ernest didn't wear sunglasses. He squinted (even in the shade provided by the long peak of his cap). As he worked he removed layers. First he took off his sweater to show a clean plain-white tee shirt. Then the tee shirt came off to show an upper body, tanned and largely free of fat - but not muscular.

He worked continuously, pausing only for three things: to remove a layer of clothing, to take off his hat and wipe his forehead, or to smoke a cigarette. He sat and smoked between jobs. Between grass cutting and grass raking. Between hedge trimming and hedge raking. And before leaving.
The tools Ernest used were basic: a small, generic brand push power mower, hand operated pruning shears and a metal rake with several teeth missing. His cigarettes, I surmised from the size of the pack, were either unfiltered "regular size" Camels (my father's brand) or Lucky Strikes (my former one). The right hand that held the cigarette was always cupped. He rested that hand on his left wrist and rested the left wrist on a crossed right leg. He was very still when he smoked, except for his cupped hand slowly floating up to his mouth and back.

When he was done the lawn was uniformly short and clean, and the hedges were squared-off and flat. He put his tools away and rode off on a blue one-speed bicycle, with his Irish knit sweater stuffed into a rusty handlebar basket.

It was the hedge work that impressed me the most. This house and property was the first I had ever owned, and the landscaping burden that came with it was my first ever adventure in plant care. I needed someone to guide me along – and there he was, across the street and into the trees.

The conversion wasn’t immediate. For several years my hedging tools of choice were an electric hedge clipper and a relatively sturdy aluminum stepladder. The privet that I inherited was about eight feet tall. I am just short of six and one-half. The extra height provided by the ladder, along with the not particularly well-balanced trimmer and the always-out-of-place cord made the entire pruning process an adventure – but not much fun.

So one day I cut them down to my height and began using my hand shears with my feet firmly planted on the ground. A few years later the hedge became kind of scrawny – the result I believe of its unfortunate position under the all-day shade of our multi-story elm tree. I hacked it down to the ground in the autumn. And the next spring it came back stronger, thicker – and shorter.

Then this past year we had to put the elm tree down because of disease. Our shade yard is gone. The privet is flourishing. The lower part is thick with leaves and the top is sprouting up in a relatively symmetric pattern.

Still, it is my belief, that beyond a certain height all of that symmetry would totally fall apart.
And I would be back on my ladder trying to regain control. So, about once a week, I take my hand shears into the fray and level off the upper edge. Then with my glove-clad hands I rip out the bittersweet, maple trees, and other interlopers.

When I am done I do something that I never saw Ernest do – I step back and admire my work. The privet is my bellwether bush. When it is neat and trim then all is well in landscape land.

Then I look across the street at the yard that Ernest no longer takes care of. Privet stalks shoot up randomly while maple leaves spill out of every nook and cranny. Purple bittersweet stars sit buried within the hodgepodge of hedges.

It may be beyond even Ernest’s ability to reclaim – if he were still here – which he is not and never will be again. It bothers me so much more to see this privet in disrepair than other even more disorderly ones.

I fight to control my rapidly growing hedge rage. As Ernest said, “Courage is grace under pressure.”

Wait - Don't Throw That Away!

One thing that I have learned about gardening is that there is always something to learn, for example - several plants that Marsha and I have perennially treated as weeds, are in fact valuable commodities.

For as long as I can remember, plants resembling asters, with sturdy stems, narrow leaves, and dozens of tiny white flowers in clusters have invaded two or more of our flowerbeds. They are kind of pretty - delicate looking even - but they are always in the wrong place at the wrong time. (One of the classic definitions of a weed).

At first, probably because there were not a lot of equally attractive planned plants in my landscape, Marsha and I tolerated them. But over the years, as our vision of our backyard Eden became clearer in our minds and closer to reality, I began to hunt them down - resenting their affront, and disdaining their meager attempts at flowers. Each growing season I would rip them out. Only to have them return in different, or sometimes even the same location, year after year after year.
This year I learned at my Mens Garden Club plant sale that these previously anonymous attackers actually had a name - a fancy-schmanzy Latin name even - Boltonia. (Of course the notorious Roman Emperor Caligua also had a Latin name, so we know how much those monikers are worth.)

They also have growing instructions, and people who sell them - actual professional people who raise them at their nurseries - not amateur horticulturalists like myself and my fellow club members who uproot stuff from our own personal gardens and attempt to foist it (with some totally fictitious provenance and a few Photoshopped pictures) onto the unsuspecting customer base that comes to our event in search of our rare and valuable "homegrowns".

Then there is that fast growing, ground cover with purple spikes that appears along the outer edges of all my perennial beds - and sometimes in the middle of them. I have now learned that it is called "ajuga" or "bugleweed" (or Blue bugle, Bugleherb, Carpetweed, Carpet Bungleweed, Common bugle, or Burgundy lace). This incessant invader also has a Latin appellation - for all that's worth - "ajuga reptans". I have no idea what "ajuga" means but I think the rest of the name has something to do with disgusting, lowlife, snake stuff. Since the beginning of time I have been ripping it out of my yard. There is no room for reptiles in my Eden. It was, of course, at our plant sale.
And there are the faux Phlox. Every year Marsha and I spend countless wasted hours trying to differentiate between our potential Phlox crop and a look-alike weed that wants to share the same growing space. The goal is to eliminate the imposter before the stalks get to be higher than an elephant's eye. Usually we get it right. And then forget how we determined the differences when the next spring rolls around.
Both of these plants were available for purchase also.

All of which leads me to believe that maybe a weed is really just a plant with a bad publicity agent. With a little marketing expertise the club's plant sale could probably make a fortune just selling the contents of my garden throwaway pile.

Squirrel Starts Fire at Los Alamos

From the July 2 Albuquerque (New Mexico) Journal

Nature seems to have it out for poor Los Alamos National Laboratory. Earlier today a squirrel short-circuited an electrical transformer at the lab’s Neutron Science Center, setting off a one-acre fire that attentive crews quickly doused, according to a statement just issued by lab officials.

No word on the fate of the squirrel.

One power line felled.
One more southwest wildfire.
One flash-fried squirrel.