You Grow Girl™

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“It never crossed my mind that the experts were giving bad advice.”

All the books said buy three or five or better yet seven of every perennial so the plants wouldn’t look like green toothpicks stuck in a frosting of dirt. Well, I couldn’t afford five or seven of anything, so I’d chew my lip and purchase three. Then I’d hang over the nursery table hungering after a Meconopsis grandis which I couldn’t afford because my buggy was filled with three ho-hum pink and three so-so white astilbes. I always assumed my frustration stemmed from not having enough money. It never crossed my mind that the experts were giving bad advice. Or not bad advice, maybe, but advice meant for someone else. Someone in England. Someone with a peerage.

Sure, if I had an acre, two acres, three… Imagine the sweeps and drifts. But I only had a city lot in the usual east-side Vancouver measurement of 120 feet by 33 feet, with a century-old farmhouse galumphing smack through the middle. Did I really need six astilbes? All the books assured me I did. All the newspaper articles said so.

Gives necessary impact, the writers advised.

Never mind that by the very next year I’d figured out that I didn’t really care for astilbes, and that a year after that we dug them out and donated them to our garden club plant sale. (This year, just because I decided to hate them, the astilbes are back with a vengeance. Who needed six when one would have self-seeded just as readily?)

Oh, experts! I so took their advice to heart about buying three plants that I carted home three goutweeds, which proceeded to eat my east sun bed then my cat. Last I looked, they had managed to string one of their roots around our daughter’s ankle and were determinedly tugging her beneath the soil. I also bought three plume poppies. Yup. And planted them at the back of the sun bed. Beside the three gooseneck loosestrife the books said I should have.

” What I need is not three identical plants, but three lives, because that’s how long I’m going to be spending trying to get rid of my triads of invasive plants. “

And one time I hauled home the regulation three Oriental poppies–salmon, said the tag, with purple basal blotches. I happily planted the dears and mooned over their sites until March when the tips of their foliage feathered up through the winter cold slick of wet leaves. I was quivering with anticipation. What fertilizer is to garden plants, poppies are to me: necessary for existence.

Still, still. I have to admit to something the adequate gardener did that the perfect gardener would never have done in a billion springs. She stole out when that first three-pack of mollycoddled Oriental poppies were finally budding–rotund, green and hairy–and, checking both ways to ensure no rogue gardener (there wouldn’t be anything but a rogue in our cement neighbourhood) was looking–peeled a bud open. Which is, incidentally, how I learned that a bud unready to open is, well, actually unready to open. The buds resisted. Resisted, if you can imagine, like they were dead bolts and saw me, the adequate gardener, rollicking towards them with a lockpick.

But I am nothing if not brutal, so eventually I was able to start teasing back a slice of cold bristling green skin, hoping to expose– Oops–Joy caught me. Why did that single moment have to be the single moment she wasn’t utterly distracted by the green snouts of her eighteen thousand cannas? At least by then I didn’t care that she was scolding me because I was exposing not smooth, tight-packed salmon petals but screaming shrieking orange petals. Orange like our bad soil. Orange like an orange. Orange like a seventies countertop. Bright, snapping, popping, look-at-me-to-see-how-I-clash orange.

Our one banned colour.

While we watched in dismay, the flower unfolded like discarded scarlet Kleenex. Bloodless. Anemic. Bent in discouragement like an old tulip. I could tell it was no happier being orange than we were in having it orange. (Either that or it objected to my molestation, and of course that’s unlikely.)

Out they came. That minute, the three of them, spade shoved into ground deep as we could get it.

Guess what we learned? Dig up “buy-three” Oriental orange poppies and their thick-knotted ropes of tap roots break and then, like bindweed, shatter, so that the next year you get–you guessed it–double the already triple banned orange poppies. Which is six.

So much for the experts. All the experts ever got us was three times the problems we would have had left to our own devices. Three orange poppies in year one, six orange poppies in year two, twelve orange poppies in year three and no doubt by the time I die a billion and four orange poppies taking over every unspare inch of my measly “three-bought” city garden. Moving on to push through the neighbours’ cement pads. Moving on, I hope, to the nearest expert’s garden. Moving on to take over the globe.

We made a determination this year not to try digging up that grove of orange poppies. Rather, kingly–why, exactly as if I was actually British–I chopped off their heads and watched them roll, whitely bleeding from their severed necks, into the roadway.

What I need is not three identical plants, but three lives, because that’s how long I’m going to be spending trying to get rid of my triads of invasive plants.

Why buy five or seven of anything when you don’t have the money? When you have a small garden? When you don’t know if the tag is accurate? When you don’t know if you’ll like it?

Nope. Buy one. If it works out the way you hope, then you can get more for impact–if the plant itself hasn’t already seeded or clumped or sent runners for more impact than you planned.

I just read an article in a British magazine by a woman who had decided not to listen to the experts. She wasn’t going to buy just seven of anything. Why waste the time? She’d be ahead, wouldn’t she, if she bought nine to start out with? Or eleven? Or thirteen?

Hmm…thirteen orange poppies doubling in size every year. Wish I’d thought of that.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

” I used to try to be perfect. “

The perfect gardener, me? Hah. I wouldn’t even try. I garden on the adequate system. There’s no point in going for anything else, not if, like me, you still always come up short. Short on resources, short on energy, short on time, short on skill, and even, yes, short on perfection in the garden. Let’s face it. Life’s a lottery and my green thumbs didn’t wind up printed with a pair of sixes.

I used to try to be perfect. Twenty years ago, to me, the definition of a perfect gardener was a vegetable gardener. I was, more or less, a hippie, and the hippie rule book decreed that vegies were mandatory, whereas flowers…well, sniff. Flowers didn’t have any utility. They were okay wild in a field, or embroidered on a baggy dress, but as for growing them? My friends said, For what?

To look at? I answered.

My friends just shook their heads and regarded me with something like pity. So I thought if you didn’t grow enough zuchinnis to feed the local uranium mine protesters, well, you didn’t deserve your own secateurs. You should just use scissors. Or maybe, like my next door neighbour recently seen pruning her lilac, a meat cleaver.

So there I was with no more time than money to rub together, out hoeing between rows of carefully seeded carrots and tomatoes. Barefoot, pregnant, long hair parted in the middle, no makeup. I took up cooking, which I wanted to like but actually hated. I took up crafts, which part of me liked and part of me secretly loathed. I took up Birkenstocks.

There was a nemesis riding on my shoulder and when I looked appreciatively at a fuchsia basket she slapped me. Vegetable gardeners good, she whispered. Flower gardeners bad.

(If you’re not a giver, you’re a taker, she said. If you’re not part of the solution, she said, you’re part of the problem.)

I liked it out there in the garden. I liked the sun on my neck and the smell of the loam and the tall whisper of the corn rows. I liked how the vegetables grew from mere specks. I liked the fat orange bellies of the pumpkins. I liked the long orange snouts of carrots. I liked rolling hot peas from their pods. But I still longed for flowers.

Now what? I asked my friends in late August when things – too many things – were maturing all at once.

Why, said my friends, you just put everything up.

Up? I asked. Up where?

But they just laughed.

Up, it turned out, was not exactly up. It was in. In canning jars. Jars with complicated lids that kept springing free and whapping me. Jars with flat gold lids with soft white undersides and red rubber rims. Jars with second lids that screwed over the first lids. Watch out, admonished my advisors, for signs of bacteria, rust, dents, discolouration.

Putting food up, it was explained, meant a whole raft of things I wished I’d never heard of–not just mason jars but blue speckled canners the size of Toronto, tongs Godzilla could have fit his hands around better than I could my little ones. And in the fry heat of late August, a stove with all its burners turned to high. My hair in a scarf with humid tendrils glued to the side of my face. My baby flushed and cranky. My dog lethargic. Trying not to worry about a writing deadline so I could just “be there” with the veggies. Being there was big in those days. (We had to be there even during childbirth, when drugs were forbidden. We called our contractions “rushes” with the idea we wouldn’t notice they hurt.) Now I was expected to be there with my canning. Blanch, seal, pickle, pop.

I had ten dozen (120!) jars hot as Hades laid out on newspapers leaking dyes onto my kitchen floor filled to the brim with stewed red tomato pulp and floating yellow seeds while I hovered over them on my hands and knees listening for the ping to tell me the jar had successfully sealed and we wouldn’t be getting ptomaine poisoning. And then it occurred to me: I didn’t like tomatoes.

I didn’t like fresh tomatoes. I didn’t like tomato sauce on spaghetti. I didn’t like tomato sauce in casseroles and I didn’t really even like casseroles.

I looked across the kitchen at the daughter who’d fallen asleep with her politically correct cloth-diapered bottom in the air and realized it was a little too late for realizations.

I wanted to be good but I hated canning.

My friends said this:

Why did you can so many tomatoes?

I don’t think all those lids have sealed. You’ll notice a depression if they’ve all sealed. Is that a depression? I don’t think I see a depression. (That’s because you’re not looking at me, I thought.)

Why did you use pint jars?

Aren’t you just exhausted?

Well, yes, I was. I was a perfect, wilted gardener. And my little daughter was fed up for wanting more attention. And my back hurt. And my partner just turned up his eyes at all the new food which we didn’t have room to store, or months enough to eat before it was gardening season all over again. It took me a bunch more years before I discovered I didn’t have to be perfect–not at gardening or anything else. I didn’t have to second guess what other people expected of me and then try to accomplish it.

Nope, I figured out I could manage life on the good-enough system. No more Supermom. No more Superspade. Do a good enough job raising my kids. Do a good enough job in the garden.

As a result, not much changed. I stopped busting my butt and nothing fell apart. Things didn’t go to wrack and ruin. Sure, maybe there was a little more black spot on the roses, but as Audrey Litherland, the famed Vancouver gardener says, I like variegation.

And anyway, you’ve got to admit that five foot tall weeds are easier to spot.

Didn’t Roseanne say it best? “If my kids are alive at the end of the day,” she opined, “I’ve done my job.”

She was right. If the garden grows, if my plants aren’t shriveling up and dying, if I make an occasional mistake and rectify it later when I have time, nothing awful happens.

A friend from my hippie days just came to visit me. Flowers? she said, sniffing. But where did you put the vegetable patch?

I had to admit I didn’t have one. I just grow ornamentals. And not perfect ones, either, but adequate blooms in adequate colour combinations doing not too badly–and no matter what she or anyone else thinks, the world is a little better off for all the aimless beauty in my yard.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.