Audubon Comes Calling

My family rarely lets me forget the day that my doorbell rang, and I discovered that it was the folks from the local Audubon Society…..asking if they could photograph my garden. Well, even for the most humble person, there is that nano-second when you hit a mental high-note when asked such a complimentary thing! “They like my garden!” While gathering myself together and before answering them, they continued, “… because you have such great weeds in your garden.” That effectively burst the ol’ ego bubble.

It’s true. My garden soil is an equal-opportunity supporter of every passing seed, and it’s particularly partial to the weed ones. Sigh. In that respect, I am the perfect person to write about a garden. Mine is far, far from perfect, but my garden never ceases to entertain and delight me. …and it’s not “just for pretty.” It’s to attract birds and butterflies too. It’s to teach me how different plants grow, and it’s to bring me to my mental knees when something grows right and looks spectacular all by itself.

I didn’t begin as a gardener, but as a teacher. And over the ensuing 25 years, I got married, raised three kids with my husband, moved 12 times, and continued to teach wherever we lived. In those early days, I was militantly obedient to what Doctor Spock said about scheduling kids, so I took up gardening in the early evening when our oldest refused to obey the book and cried for a solid hour after being put down after the 6:00 bottle at night. Those early gardens were escape gardens! The baby police would have run me in. Come to think of it, the garden police might have run me in too. My garden bed (the size of a bathtub) had row after row of militant little annuals ringing the space like mini-mouse-fencing. On the outside was the sweet alyssum. Then came the blue ageratum. …then marigolds. And on and on toward the inside, culminating in a few wildly unruly State Fair zinnias. Oh, and I thought it beautiful! Such control…. Such color. Such control.

My gardens are different now. While I still approach everything from the scale of a bathtub, all the control and rules have been disregarded… bent… broken… and pitched. Now I allow tall “see-throughs” (like verbena bonariensis) to grow smack in the front of the garden, and my red lettuce and yellow calendulas may well cavort with blue larkspur or white snapdragons. Laissez-faire is my politics-of-choice in the garden.

When the kids grew up and lived in houses and had gardens of their own, they used to ask me gardening questions. …..and I invariably knew the answers! Not because of brilliance on my part, though. I had soon graduated to buying Wayside Gardens’ packaged perennial gardens (now passed on to Bluestone) to begin again each time we moved. ….they at least had some knowledge to back them up! (not mine.) And all my knowledge came from pouring over the Wayside catalogue each winter. And it still does!