Mind-Numbing Weather

Like the inhabitants of a castle preparing against an attack, my spouse and I have shut every window, drawn down the shades, opened the basement door, and hefted the room air-conditioner onto one of the upstairs windowsills.  Hot weather is on the way.

It's the weather that I moved to Vermont to escape, the kind of heat and humidity that reduce me to molluscan status.  Every summer the heat gets stronger and stays longer. If and when the kudzu vines and the cave crickets arrive from the lower latitudes, I'm moving north.

Meanwhile, all I want to do is hibernate or rather, estivate ("a state of dormancy or torpor during summer").  This is unfortunate because, now that the ridiculously long spell of cool weather is over, the garden is exploding.

Instead of writing, I should be out there picking kale to make into pesto.  I should be picking and freezing chard, pulling up the bolted lettuces and planting something else in their space.  Straightening the tomato cages that the daily storms have felled. Weeding the front flower beds, the back flower beds, the vegetable beds.   And pruning the four big lilacs before the job gets too big for me to handle.

But these days the only job I like is picking lavender.  In the morning, after the dew has dried but before the sun unleashes its full fury, I go out with my basket and cut the spears where a single cobalt bud has opened.  It hasn't been a good year for lavender, for although the winter was cold there wasn't enough snow cover.  I lost a couple of bushes, and the survivors aren't flowering well.  But I'll take whatever they give me.

I leave the lavender in its basket on the dining room table, where it releases clouds of scent into the humid air.  I should be tying it into bunches and hanging it up to dry, but that seems like a big effort right now.

Instead, I go and sit blankly by the indoor pond and watch the goldfish play in the fountain stream. Don't ask me to lift a finger, express an opinion, or make any sense.  I'm estivating.

The Mystery Of The Peonies

When we moved to our house eight years ago, I found several peony bushes planted by the shady west wall.  They bloomed abundantly in the spring, but their huge pink flowers had no smell:

I couldn't believe that someone would plant scent-free peonies, but took consolation in the fact that they were also ant-free.

A few years later I made a flower bed by the stone wall in front of the house, and needed big plants that would look good all season long, even when they weren't blooming.  I like the looks of a peony bush, flowers or no flowers, so I walked around to the shady spot where the pink peonies lived and transplanted six or seven of them to the new bed.

The bushes rooted well, died down to the ground in the winter, and sprang to life the next spring.  Soon they were covered in buds, but when the flowers opened one sunny morning, they were almost pure white...and they gave off clouds of that unmistakable, that divine, peony smell.

Every year since then the peonies have put on their show:  pink and unscented and ant-free on the shady west side, white and perfumed and beloved of ants in the sunny spot.

How can this be?  I can imagine that a change in soil composition might cause the change in color, as hydrangea aficionados know.  And perhaps the sun exposure has something to do with it.  But the truly miraculous part, the scent that would cause me to plant peonies even if they looked like crab grass, remains a mystery.

If any of you botanists, peony-loving gardeners, or lyric poets out there have a theory, I'd like to hear from you.

Why I Never (Well, Hardly Ever) Buy Mulch

Over the last twenty-five years a tide of mulch--some shredded, some chipped, some brown, some bright orange--has spread over America.  It makes the landscaping in people's gardens, around the parking lots of malls, and in front of filling stations look calm and controlled, like a room after the bed has been made.

I have bought mulch in my time--heavy, cumbersome bags of it--though never as much as I needed to achieve that well-bedded look.  Every spring, if I were dedicated to that look or if my house were within sight of critical suburban eyes,  I would buy another dozen bags to supplement the dwindling original layers of the stuff. 

But I don't.  Instead, I combine spring clean-up and mulching into a single effort. 

First I go around the garden collecting the dried-out remnants of last summer's plants:  the baptisia branches, the peony stems, the dried sedums, and the six-foot stalks of what is either a small sunflower or a Jerusalem artichoke.  I gather armfuls of the stuff and, instead of carting it into the woods, I pile it thickly along the back of the flower beds, having first pushed the remnants of the store-bought mulch to the front.  Then I stomp on the piles to break them up and so the wind won't blow them away.

This home-grown mulch is dun-colored and, at least to my countrified eyes, fairly innocuous.  It saves me not only money and gas but many trips into the woods, which is a good thing in this busy season.  And in a couple of weeks, when the baptisia and the peonies and the giant hostas and the pachysandra and the columbines all explode, you won't be able to see my home-grown mulch unless you look really, really closely. 

Fortunately my gardening friends and I, by unspoken compact, only look closely at what is admirable--that hardy lavender!  that budding rose bush!  Our friendship-trained eyes barely register the sprouting bishop's weed, the un-harvested dandelions, and that stack of old stalks laid on the ground at the back of the flower bed. 

Blinking away the undesirables, we look each other in the face and declare that what with the crazy weather, and the absence of bees, and those horrible invasive species this is the most challenging, impossible gardening year ever, and it will be a miracle if we can get a single plant to survive until the October frosts arrive.