Flora

I’ve always imagined myself as something of a gardener. I could see myself outside a Bavarian cottage, geraniums hanging from the windows, working on informal but well-planned landscaping. The problem is that anyone that knows me has been quite clear that I am not, despite my wildest dreams, a person who should be intimately involved with plants. The plants unfortunately usually agree. And yet I continue to persevere in my creative horticultural pursuits. Perhaps that should be “crazy” horticultural pursuits.

One of the things that attracted my mother to the house on Oakwood Avenue way back in 1970 was that the landscaping was just that – informal but well-planned. Sometime in the fifties the previous owners of this particular home laid out the garden attempting some kind of formal Japanese design with bricks. There were flowering magnolia trees, euonymus ivy, a small fountain maid of cast iron with the figure of a young girl and a frog spitting water at her. Brick walls separated the various parts of the yard helping to create level space suitable for playing croquet. Two lovely bridges spanned a burbling creek. There were two large gingko trees out front, along with several yews which served as foundation plants. Holly trees adorned the corners of the house, along with a couple of spruce. A majestic oak towered over it all along the street in the front, casting its shadow down upon the brick-lined flower beds filled with iris, peonies, and other perennials.

Sadly, the man that my parents bought the house from had been widowed for several years. While the house is not huge, especially by neighborhood standards, it was far too much for a retired gentleman to maintain. Year after year, the trees grew a little more, without any pruning. The yew bushes became bigger and bigger. The euonymus gradually extended its roots through the ground, taking over more of the formerly manicured lawns.

After five years or so of neglect leading up to the time my parents purchased this memory of paradise, things were kind of a mess. Although my parents entered into a contract on the house in August, we didn’t move in until October 27. The plants of summer were at best dwindling, the leaves thick with color falling on the ground. It was not without its own charm.

The first thing we noticed was the smell. There was this rather strong odor coming from the front yard, not unlike a dysfunctional septic tank or a dog with a digestive problem. The smell was strong. Someone ventured to go outside to investigate, and discovered that in fact, the gingkos were somewhat unusual. They were both of the female variety of that species. And all one had to do at that time of year was look a couple of hundred feet to the northeast to see another bright, golden tree, also a gingko, this one a male.

Now this bigamous male gingko across the street in the Muckerman’s yard had evidently impregnated both of the females in ours – with some abundance. They bore forth fruit. Lots and lots of fruit. Tons o’ fruit. Wheelbarrows of little purplish squishy seeds that when properly stepped upon made one instinctively reach for the Charmin. Thousands of these grape-sized stink bombs filled the front yard. Friends of mine would make their parents roll up the windows on their cars when they drove by, so they said. Why their windows were down in November is still a mystery. People would come to visit us in our new home, and they would be seen running down the street, hands over their faces, gagging.

I don’t know what year my parents finally had these trees taken down. It wasn’t soon enough. I spent too many falls shoveling – not raking, but shoveling these smelly things into a wheelbarrow and hauling them into a pile in the backyard because they were too heavy to leave for the leaf-sucking vacuum machines that would go by each week during the fall months. And of course, in the pile that I created each year, new ginkgos were born.

Meanwhile, my mother was busy with her graph paper. Remember graph paper? We used it to draw things on. My mom was using it to plan her yard. She plotted out the house and the property lines. She took the existing beds with their bricks lining them at forty-five degree angles and drew in what she wanted to plant and when. I would use the mower to try and trim the beds as best I could.

But each fall would come and go and bulbs bought would be left unplanted. Spring would arrive and small patches of dirt would be turned over with a small hand tool. Occasionally something would actually be planted. It might just have been hanging baskets bought at the store. Or perhaps some herbs. Impatiens usually adorned the flower box around the back porch. But the yard continued to get more and more out of control. Mom couldn’t really handle any of the heavy stuff. Dad was essentially working two full-time jobs and getting his Ph.D. I would mow the grass and keep the ivy at bay, but even then it was obviously a losing battle. Each year it would seem to take over a bit more.

I graduated from high school in 1978 and left to go off to school in Houston. I didn’t ever really do much about the yard after that. Neither did they. Trees grew where trees shouldn’t have been. Bushes became, well, bushier. Honeysuckles got way out of control. And always, always there was the ivy. Let us all just pause and give thanks that the gingkos were gone.

So the slightly out-of-control yard in 1970 became even more so by 1980. And the years went by. And by. And by. Bridges rotted and fell down. Chain-link fences lost their linkability. The neighbors homes gradually disappeared from view. It became more and more difficult to leave the driveway and pull into the street safely. The yard was no longer landscaped, unless someone considers Jurassic Park to be ready for the Garden Tour.

So it becomes 2009 and I’ve moved back to St. Louis. I’m not living at home yet, but I am there often enough that I see the condition of the property (hard to call it a yard or a garden) and I know something has to be done. What to do first, I ask myself. The ivy, I answer. So onto the John Deere and off we go, trimming back all that damn euonymus. A few inches on each pass. A little here, a little there. Gradually, what had turned into ground cover that extended close to twenty feet out from the house was trimmed back to a mere three feet. Of course, then there were the roots, and all that gunky dirt. Turns out that was very fertile ground for grass seed. So I continued to throw fescue as I tried to rescue that corner of the yard. Feel free to laugh at my rhyme.

It actually worked pretty damn well. A year later it is a nice lawn, thick and green. A little bumpy. Croquet would not be a good idea. But from the street it looks pretty good.

Now this is a bad thing, because it gives me confidence to keep trying to work at it. So my frustrated green thumb is trying to come out.

Back in Connecticut, we had a Wally. Everyone should have a Wally. We own a two-family house. Wally is our tenant. He loves working in the garden. I think secretly he loves paying people to work in the garden even more. But in any case, it was clear that Wally is definitely in the “Doug doesn’t know how to do squat when it comes to plants” club. He would water the plants on our deck. More than that, he transformed our grand Connecticut acreage. This magnificent New England estate had property that would have been the envy of any of the founding fathers, measuring in with a lot size of 50’ x 150’, upon which sat a house and parking for four cars. And what was left, Wally transformed. Not by himself I should say. Michael, the hot hunky landscape architect had come by years before and given us something of a master plan. And we initially followed that plan to the letter, or perhaps I should say to the plant. But Wally would claim all the credit for himself. Our work before he arrived would be “lackluster.”

So when spring came, and I’m living once again on Oakwood, I had this overwhelming fantasy about Michael. Not because he is hot and hunky. Well, not just because of that. But because he is so damn smart and talented when it comes to landscaping. I want to fly him and his posse out here from Connecticut to Missouri to give me the equivalent of a makeover. But I can’t afford that. I could afford this guy Tom, who arrived with his dad and his brother and one other guy. They spent three days doing a slash and burn, destroying much of the potential to restore the harmful greenhouse gasses to their previous levels in the process. Honeysuckle, be gone! they said. Trees growing through power lines be forever banished! they decreed. Yew bushes that are the size of eighteen-wheelers, we’ve got your number. Out you must go.

But the ivy, well. “You can’t do nothin’ ‘bout this damn ivy.”

Wait. Wait and see. John Deere, Kentucky Fescue, and me.