From today's Times and News-Star
Somebody
named August stopped by and beat my back yard flowers like a drunk farmer would
beat a rented mule.
Hurts
me.
But
experienced gardeners – I am not one – will tell you that this is the time of
year when the most valiant of efforts falls short against the late-summer sun
and all-around effects of a north Louisiana summer. This year’s was mild by our
standards but still hot enough to take a toll and make the bravest plants wilt.
Eventually,
they all holler “Uncle!” Am I right?
I
was a first-grade flower planter about 15 years ago, got out of the game for a
while, and jumped back in this year with wild abandon. But I knew my time was
limited, that coleus would fade, that begonias were not eternal. I have eyes
and a memory of yards that looked like Oz in July and like a backwoods waste
dump in August.
Pick
any parish. Mr. Sunshine is undefeated against them all.
But
what a ride it has been! If you wish to get into the flora and fauna game, you
can do it. I did. All it takes is coaching yourself up, asking your friendly
nursery worker a question or two (or a thousand), being willing to spend a
little money and accept a few failures, and gallons upon gallons of water from
a hose that will feel by the Fourth of July as if it’s surgically connected to
your hand.
Watered
45 minutes a day.
I
started with a patio hibiscus, a gardenia, and a bougainvillea. Humble. I had
only the faintest idea of what each was.
Because
our back yard dirt is clay, I had to employ pots, knowing that during the
summer I could learn the literal lay of the land. And I learned this: my dirt
is hard as a teenager’s head. Also clumpy. Mr. Clump. So I borrowed from my
brother-in-law a tiller that is big as Skylab and, at takeoff, as loud. Our
wrestling match is ongoing. Meanwhile, I have wheelbarrowed landscape mix
hither and yon. What a joy!
As
that battle continues – autumn soil prep, as they call it in the gardening
racket – the pots flourish. Ours flourished, past tense, though we do have current
minimal flourishing; some is blooming because it wasn’t supposed to until late
summer, a pleasant surprise to me. Like most of the stuff I’ve planted, I have
no real idea what it is. So what I’m trying to say is that God created so much stuff
that, if you’re willing to sweat, you can have color and texture and
hummingbirds and butterflies all the livelong day, even with minimal knowhow on
your first at-bat.
Take,
for instance, your Bat Faced Cuphea. (“What?” That’s what I said.) The flowers
are little bat faces (not the baseball kind) and surprisingly free flowering.
Coleus, in many colors, is perhaps the most amazing thing I’ve planted, as some
goes in shade and some in sun and one of them grew so much I thought it was
going to eat the house.
Salvia
has been disappointing, except for the black and blue: gorgeous. The tricked-up
begonias have been hit-and-miss too, but the hits are homers. Daisies are
late-summer heroes, like the wild berry coneflowers and calibrachoa and some
kind of periwinkle thing that’s stealing the show now. Angel “something or
other” is fading but has been a great complement. And the sweet potato vine?
Sweet.
The
lights are growing dim. Brown is making a move. But … the cavalry – what we
call pansies -- are on the way.
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