Not a Gardener

            I am not a gardener. Since I have a garden and spend a lot of time dealing with it, what I must mean is that I am not a good gardener. Part of the problem, it must be said, is Houston. Houston has over 300 growing days, but only a few things grow here. “Grow” is an inadequate word to describe what happens when you find a plant that does not mind the heat and humidity, the sticky clay-y soil that local gardeners somewhat oddly call gumbo, and the wild oscillation of rain and drought, and you place it in a Houston garden. When I visit such plants on summer evenings, they will sometimes have become visibly bigger since morning. As I speak, the pink turk’s cap, theoretically, at least, so attractive to hummingbirds, is marching its way across my front bed, mowing down the roses and pentas (no slouches either) in its path. When I water this plant, as I will soon have to do twice a day, I can almost hear it drinking. On summer mornings, bleary with sleep and wary of the encroaching heat, I go with my coffee cup and my dogs to inspect the shrinking beachhead that is the rest of my garden bed. Each morning, I pull out much of what has grown the night before. ‘Hummingbirds,” I say bitterly to myself as I stoop, for in reality I have only seen them hovering near the turk’s cap once, and then I had misplaced my binoculars and they looked like red smoke above the pink blossoms.

            The rhythms of gardening in Houston belie the neat arrangement of seasons with which I grew up: it was ingrained in me by all the children’s books I read that there are four of these. Most of these books were produced in (sometimes New) England. This is also true of the “Four Seasons”, the art nouveau tetraptych that used to hang on my wall: four women, each with headdresses heavy with fruits and flowers appropriate to a temperate climate and a neatly dived calendar.  The summer in Houston famously lasts forever, threatening choices of Halloween costumes. Spring is also endless, with its wave after wave of renewal that begins with the appearance of unforced paperwhites in January and ends with the heavy scent of spent jasmine in May. There is no fall to speak of, except as it is represented in home decorations and in few specimen trees with leaves that rise to the level of “foliage.” We had such a tree on the front lawn of our first house; cars would slow down to look as if on a minimalist foliage tour without sweaters or apples. Winter—well, as we know from the infamous hard freeze of a few months ago—winter can take almost any shape, although it is usually a wonderful time to be in the garden.

The yearly roll call of seasons also makes for a feeling that time is compressed. There is no waiting in Houston gardening, no anticipation, no deferral of desire. Every September I plant bulbs that I buy at the annual Bulb Mart--irises, daffodils, ranunculus, and anemones. Although the Mart sells tulip bulbs, people in the know and without a fulltime gardening staff know not to buy them: they must “over-winter” in your fridge and you will likely forget about them or mistake them for a root vegetable with unhappy results. Two weeks after planting, I see the tender green shoots that further North would signal the end of a long period of latency, hope, forgetting and remembering again.

            Tomatoes in Houston are a tragedy; the good news, I suppose, is that there are two chances for heartbreak: fall and spring crops. The spring crop must go in the ground in February: it is then a race between the plants (that swell to unseemly proportions overtaking their cages and overshadowing whatever else you might have planted in their beds) and the heat (that interferes with the setting of blossoms). In the fall, the race is different—shorter and more intense. You are not so much dueling with the cold as with the shortening days and diminishing light. If all goes well, in either season, there will be tomatoes for a while, and then there suddenly won’t be, and the giant plants will go barren (spring) or shrivel (summer). My husband and I have our tomato stories, but they are incompatible. Uncharacteristically, characteristically mine are happier, although always set back in time. I remember one winter crop, 19 years ago--measured by the distance from the year we got our older cat--when we had winter tomatoes from January through the spring. I remember caprese salads in February, stuffed tomatoes with rice and pine nuts well before the switch to daylight savings time.

I remember eating heirlooms New-Jersey style out of my hand like the fruit they sometimes claim to be. In this nostalgic story of kittens and crops, there were even enough tomatoes to “waste” them in sauce; we could afford to let them dissolve among others, to lose their individuality, to stop counting and hoarding them. Scott thinks I am making all this up, and, since this was before my entry into Facebook and my practice of obsessively documenting what I eat and cook, I have no proof other than the remembered taste of sweet and acid on my tongue.

            There is, however, only so much that I can blame Houston for. After all, I have local friends who perennially grow beautiful and unlikely plants, who rein in the exuberance of Houston natives, who gracefully make what for me is the almost impossible move from plant to place, from specimen to environment. Their gardens are beautiful, places to explore and linger, artifacts of intelligent (human) design. I resist the labor that these results require, first and especially, the preparation of the soil. When I hear the word “amend” applied to dirt, I feel an enormous weight, as if of one of those large bags of compost, on my chest. I do not want to aerate, to acidify, to lighten or loosen, to do the dirty work of turning the clumpy into the friable. All these verbs—and even the adjectives that hide the labor behind them—make me tired. 

Sometimes my reluctance to do the work puzzles me. I am not really a lazy person; in fact most people find me (pleasingly or unpleasingly) energetic. There is no other area of my life that I can think of where I refuse to put in the time. If you translate the preparatory labor of gardening into, say, cooking, I am by no means reluctant. I spend many hours a week making what to me are the fundamentals of cooking: broth (vegetable, chicken, shrimp, pork); oils (garlic, rosemary, basil) and condiments (jams, preserved lemons). I recognize in the faces of my friends whom I tell, cheerily, to save their vegetable scraps and onion skins to make soup, what must be the mulish expression on my own face when being told about the importance of soil. “You don’t even have to peel anything,” I say, eliding for the sake of persuasion, the straining and the stinkiness. My friends will not make broth, and I will not make compost, even though the materials for these products are startlingly similar. I will stick with one kind of gumbo, and they will never make the other from scratch.

            Soil aside, my gardening always starts with hope. I buy little notebooks with floral covers  to sketch plans for beds; I troll the internet for plant and design ideas. Every season, I go to a local nursery or three and buy too many plants. They are not the ones I have carefully listed on an index card or on my phone, because Houston nurseries never have what you want, unless it is an azalea. “Oh, well, , I say as I spend too much money on a “coral drift” rose when I wanted a pink one. “It might look great.” When the rose blooms and the flowers are “coral” only in the sense that all colors are really nail polish colors and besides, coral beds are dying no one knows what they look like any more, I leave it there because I also hate planting. 

  I hate planting because I don’t like to dig. Some would note that this problem is related to, and indeed the predictable consequence of, my refusal to produce good soil; digging in unamended Houston ground is no fun for anyone. But surely there are other impediments at work here: every yard I have ever gardened in is snarled with roots, wires, and other less identifiable objects sunk deep into the subsoil. If I were gardening in Rome, or rural England, I would think there were entire cities below my garden beds—mosaics perhaps, fragments of ancient olive oil jars, or entire ancient baths-- but my spade scrapes what usually turns out to be all-to-modern construction detritus and the bones of other people’s pets. 

All these obstacles contribute to bad design; almost no plant has ever gone where I had carefully marked it in the fold out page of my flowery notebook. My plants are forced to squeeze between bricks and roots, to flourish (or not) in places for which they are too tall or too short, where they get too much sun or not quite enough. My beautiful “Belinda’s dream” rose with its enormous furled flowers cannot be seen from any vantage point on the back yard because it is hidden behind the plastic pool basketball goal. (I included a picture of it above so it can be seen and admired.) The epazote I bought at the Mexican market is turning yellow in the shade, while epazote volunteers from last summer explode from cracks in the patio and between stones in the driveway. It was only after I bought—and probably killed—the new plant that I smelled the smoky scent of epazote on the air and looked more carefully at what I thought were weeds. Luckily, as it turned out, I was lazy and hate weeding;  now we have enough epazote for months of my son’s cooking and delivery project. But I think I am not special here; everyone hates weeding, even those who call it “spending time with my plants.”

If I have made my peace with gardening, it is finally, with herbs like the epazote. Unlike flowers, which must be aesthetically placed, and vegetables, which are far too needy, herbs seem to have read Darwin and to have taken the survival part seriously. Although Houston can be cruelly strict—no mint in the summer unless you nurse it on a porch and flood it with water—you can grow some herb here almost every day of the year. It also helps, of course, that I can think of growing herbs as preparing to cook. Mostly, I grow those that are hard to find in stores: oja santa, epazote, lemongrass, six different kinds of basil. Although it is technically not an herb, I also grow kaffir lime trees for their leaves and fruit. For the past few years I have branched out to different kinds of peppers for Mexican cooking, although the nurseries never have just the right kind and I am usually disappointed by the plants I order on the internet. Three years ago, I imagined a Mexican garden, with the colorful ceramic pots I can buy around the corner, neatly arranged in rows and labelled according to heat and recipe. I would have guajilloes and anchos and tabascos. In what remains of this fantasy, the pots don’t match in size, design or aesthetic. I never have enough cute labels, which turn out to be strangely expensive. My most successful pepper right now is a “gypsy” of which I had never heard when I bought it, and which is neither hot, nor sweet, nor colorful. It is about to be overtaken and perhaps fatally shaded by the giant tomato plants which are teasing us with blossoms and tiny fruits, but which will inevitably disappoint. Between herbs and peppers, however, I have Things to Put in Broth, and that may be enough for me.