THE MARKET, THE RECESSION AND A LITTLE DOUBLETALK ABOUT TULIPS

THE MARKET, THE RECESSION AND A LITTLE DOUBLETALK ABOUT TULIPS

By Robin Ford Wallace

Today we will talk about tulips.

            Actually, today we will talk about the economy.  The fiscal situation is grave.  World depression looms.

            Nope.  Tulips.

            We insist.  In these troubled times, it would be an obscene waste of such access to the public ear as we are fortunate enough to retain to froth on about horticulture while soup lines – 

 Tulips!  Tulips!  Tulips!

            Hmm.  We seem to be of two minds.  Unfortunate, but perhaps our little problem may in any case elucidate to the reader our rationale for referring to ourself in the pleural.

 Suppose, then, that we talk about the economy within the subtext of floriculture, and make everybody happy. 

            Tulips, though we think of them in connection with Holland, are not native there.  Introduced from the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s, though, they took the place by storm, immediately becoming coveted status symbols to the flower-mad Dutch. 

            By the early 1600s, the most highly prized tulips – those in which a mosaic virus had caused colors to variegate and stripe – were in such hot demand that, according to records of the time, one bulb could be traded for 1000 pounds of cheese, a dozen fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine or 12 acres of land.  There was money in tulips, and speculators moved hungrily in. 

            Tulips bloomed in April, and the bulbs could only be dug up and sold from June to September.  So for the rest of the year, traders signed contracts for tulip futures.  Contracts were then bought up en masse and traded as a larger commodity, a process called bundling.

            Holland was by now exporting tulips, and prices soared until a bulb might fetch 16 times the annual wages of a skilled worker.  Everybody from rich merchants to kitchen maids began investing.  It was the original speculative bubble.

            And, in February 1637, it burst.  There came a point at which somebody finally said, “A dozen sheep for that?  Hello?  It’s, like, a flower.  How many hogsheads of wine have you been drinking?”

So the market collapsed, fortunes were lost, and ruined businessmen jumped to their deaths (from windmills, we presume, skyscrapers being rare at the time).  When, that spring, a professor saw a tulip blooming during his daily constitutional, he beat it to a pulp with his walking stick.

            Or so the story goes.  Some economists believe it, and use tulipmania as a paradigm for modern conditions.  Others say it’s propaganda, that markets fluctuate but correct themselves with godlike wisdom.  And some blame the Dutch government, which legislated changes to tulip contracts when things started to look really scary.

            But inevitably, it reminds us of our current economic downturn, in which some blame the government for not regulating the market while others blame it for regulating too much.  Also blamed are unscrupulous businessmen, greedy labor unions, Republicans, Democrats, the rich, and even the poor, on the grounds that they started the whole thing by buying homes they could not pay for.  That, by the way, is our favorite argument, not because it’s true but because it makes us feel included. 

As for what really caused the crash, who knows?  At Bob’s Little Acre, we do not dole out wisdom about the stock market, mostly because we do not, technically, know what it is.  From the name, we imagine it as a place inhabited by cows, oxen and possibly ducks, because when we listen to the financial news it always sounds like, “The Dow-Jones Industrial quack quack quack.”

But unschooled as we are, even we notice the contradictions.  A year ago we read pious little editorials about the evils of overconsumption.  The whole problem, we were told, was that Americans spent money we didn’t have on things we didn’t need.

            Now we are told that the recession happened because we didn’t consume enough.  The only way to save ourselves, we read, is to start shopping again, or remodel the upstairs bathroom. 

How?  For most of us, going shopping would mean losing our place in the breadline, and we don’t actually have an upstairs bathroom, having resided in a refrigerator box since we lost our job.  Which was shipped overseas by a company that considered American workers too expensive, and subsequently went belly-up because unemployed Americans could no longer afford its products.  

            Such counsel makes us glad to be a gardener.  Gardeners, more than other Americans, know that most advice we are given, whether by magazines, extension agents or our neighbor Jim, is contradictory, insane and an utter lie. 

Yes, though we gardeners are in the same grim economic boat as everybody else – we grow our own potatoes but still need somewhere to buy our beer – from long years of wallowing in the mud we are possibly a bit closer to the ground. 

And what we say is, if it was all a house of cards, why rebuild it?  Our system may not have been built on tulips, but if it was built on bling and designer coffee what’s the difference? 

Every December we listen to sanctimonious lectures on the true meaning of Christmas from the same people who then stampede the malls.   Maybe it’s time for a new model, where less really is more, where people would never dream of building a house with more bathrooms than residents to pee in them, where we trade our hogsheads of wine for neither tulip bulbs nor Rolexes but cheerfully swill them on the lawn while we watch our gardens grow..

Now we must leave because we really do have tulips to plant.  Keeping up with the Joneses is anathema to our cozy little utopia, of course; but if our flowers are not prettier than the neighbors’ come spring we will shrivel up like salted slugs.

Does that sound odd?  Well, if we have gathered nothing else from the great economic minds of our nation, we have, anyway, learned to talk out of both sides of our mouth.

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

    

Attention, Gardeners: Wholesale Slaughter is Easy and Fun!

Attention, Gardeners:  Wholesale Slaughter is Easy and Fun!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Have you ever thought how much fun it would be to be really, really mean?

Like when the waitress, who is fat and stupid, brings you a sandwich with the consistency of wet toilet paper, because she has put it on a plate with a big sloppy serving of collard greens, and you don’t want to send it back because it’s taken her 40 minutes to bring it to you in the first place.

So you eat the gloppy stuff out of the middle though it’s not very good, meanwhile covering the pulpy wet bread with a napkin so you don’t have to look at it.

And the collards suck, too.

And then not only does the waitress ignore your pained looks, she presents you with a bill so spectacularly inflated that you don’t have enough cash.  And no matter how many times you do the math for her she sticks to her guns because she really has the IQ of a rock.

What do you do in that situation?  Probably what I did – count to 10, pay with a credit card and never go back. 

But wouldn’t it be infinitely more satisfying to crush her like an eggshell? 

If you were mean, you could explain to her that she’s too stupid to live and ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road.  You could turn over some tables on the way out, maybe break up a few chairs.

But no!  You are denied that simple pleasure because there’s this unspoken code that you can’t be mean to stupid people. 

I don’t remember anybody ever saying precisely that but society pounds it into you somehow.  Stupid people are allowed to be as mean as they like, which really makes it harder for smarter people to be nice to them but you have no choice.  It’s the Rules.  There’s an onus on those of higher intelligence to stand there smiling as they take a load of crap off idiots.

You don’t even have to be that smart.  It’s a matter of degree.  Like me, I’m so stupid I was kicked out of math class in junior high school and sent to the Trailer, where Mr. Shows was teaching the retards how to add and subtract.  But I learned, and therefore had to be nice to the waitress, who had not.

My theory is that all of it, courtesy and chivalry and etiquette and such, evolved from the most basic survival instinct.  If the bigger members of a tribe – say, men – grab all the food, leaving the smaller members – say, women and children – to starve, then the human race goes extinct in one generation.

So we developed all these codes of behavior based on stronger people not bullying weaker people, and faster people pausing to let slower people get a cookie off the plate before they’re all gone, and smarter people eating sandwiches the consistency of wet toilet paper.

When actually in our black little souls we would rather be marauding through the countryside, taking what we want by force and mowing down anyone who gets in our way. 

Yes, I said “we.”  I know I’m not the only one with a heart of darkness because I’ve traveled the highways and I’ve seen the way you drive.

My theory of cars is that they haven’t been around long enough to be incorporated into the Rules.  Getting into them frees us from all morality or societal restraint.  Put the nicest man with the loveliest manners behind the wheel and poof, he turns into Genghis Khan.

When a sweet old lady hobbles down the street with her cane, people fall all over themselves trying to open doors for her and carry her groceries.  But put the same old lady into a Buick with handicap plates and she’s prey.  Tailgaters hound her off the road, truckers try to kill her and rude young men shoot birds and throw beer cans.   

Tragically, I, as the only courteous driver on the planet, don’t have this outlet, which is hard on me because beneath this mild-mannered exterior I’m perhaps twice as mean as the national average.  So I think it’s only fair that I should be let off the leash at least once a year, possibly on my birthday.  I promise not to do much damage, just, you know, slap two or three salesclerks, maybe kill a few people but nobody important.

One dreams of the day.  But until then, where better to take out our inner meanness than the killing fields of the garden?

At this time of year, horticulture affords all sorts of interesting possibilities for exploring our dark side.  Take rosebushes, for example.  By July, the darling buds of May have become nothing more than a place for Japanese beetles to have sex.

So what I do is I get the big clippers out and turn into Hitler.  Cut as much as you like, the bushes grow back and bloom again nicely in September, by which time the beetles are just a nasty memory.  Hard pruning used to break my little earth mama heart, but as I’ve aged I’ve discovered that mass carnage can be deeply fulfilling.

Weeding is another opportunity for our Hyde side.  What could be more cathartic than to sit in the dirt and lay about you with both hands until the ground around you looks like the last scene of Hamlet?  Among the corpses strewn around you after this kind of killing frenzy you will usually find some collateral damage, a few murdered beets, an onion yanked untimely from this life; but you don’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.  

I’ve already written about the anger-management benefits of lawn-mowing.  Really, I find that anything that works up a sweat, and allows me the chance to slaughter and maim, makes me immeasurably more tolerant of stupidity and wet bread.

Though waitresses, beware: 

I have a birthday coming up.

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one. 

Naked Came the Gardener: Wherein Bob "Streaks" for Survival

This was written in October 2010 when I began feeling like an endangered species.  Heck, I still feel like an endangered species.

Naked Came the Gardener:  Wherein Bob “Streaks” for Survival

By Robin Ford Wallace

Robin Ford Wallace, writer of the local gardening column Bob’s Little Acre, was arrested Friday and charged with public indecency as she ran naked across the Trenton town square.

Ms. Wallace wore only running shoes and a nervous smile  as she “streaked” the lunchtime crowd sitting at picnic tables and on the courthouse steps.  Officers from the Dade County Sheriff’s Department and the Trenton Police Department managed to take the writer into custody only after subduing her with tranquilizer darts meant for zoo animals.

“It took half a dozen doses to bring her down,” said one deputy.  “She was thundering along like a herd of bison.”

             Ms. Wallace’s age is a closely guarded secret but eyewitnesses interviewed after the event – all still pale, blinking and visibly shaken – reported that from the “sag factor,” her bare pink expanses had weathered well over 40 summers.

           “This is obviously just Robin’s way of ramping up readership for her column,” was the disgusted comment of a local newspaper owner, who asked not to be named.  “It’s nothing but shameless self-promotion.”

             In fact, Ms. Wallace was brandishing, as she hulked nakedly through the square, a banner on which were emblazoned the words:  “Bob’s Little Acre  – The Naked Truth About Gardening!”

All right, all right.  I’m making it up.  I didn’t streak and I didn’t get arrested.

I do run.  Sort of.  I have the kind of family-size, industrial-strength body that was probably intended to plough fields without benefit of mules, and sitting for a living doesn’t leave it tired enough to sleep at night.  So most afternoons I go careening through the countryside at what I used to call a dogtrot before it occurred to me this was insulting to my dog. 

My dog, Roosevelt, is poetry in motion.  Her wisps of black fur stream and flutter as she flies through the woods, one aerodynamic streak from glistening nose to feathery tail.  She disappears in front of me and reappears a little later behind me, and I’m pretty sure she does it by circumnavigating the globe.

I meanwhile lumber slowly along with the sick inevitability of those Russian tanks you see in old news footage rolling relentlessly into places like Hungary, mowing down forests and oppressed peasantries as I go.  The earth shakes.  Governments fall.  Empires are reduced to sand and I keep plodding on. 

I’ve never done it naked.  I don’t do much naked.  I suppose nakidity is all right in the shower but in my case a little goes a long way.  Everybody is naked underneath their clothes but some people are nakeder than others.

Anyway, I run about as fast as a glacier and I’m not centerfold fodder.  If I took up streaking they’d have to call it something else.    

So why was I considering becoming a late-blooming stripper?  Like the man said, shameless self-promotion.  The newspaper gardening column is getting to be an endangered species.  For Pete’s sake, newspapers are getting to be endangered species!  If Bob’s Little Acre is to survive, I need, ahem, exposure.  So sure, I’d take ‘em off if I thought it would rope in some readers.

It might actually be sort of fun.  Imagine the astonishment of the local constabulary!  I saw a video clip of cops jumping the young male streaker who recently caused such a stir in Trenton.  I can’t imagine them doing that to a naked person of my age and sex.  Rather, I picture them proffering blankets while uneasily averting their eyes:  “Er, ma’am?”      

Fortunately for the local aesthetics, a much better publicity stunt occurred to me last week after I read an article about a psychic who is suing the city of East Ridge.  East Ridge had shut down the woman’s fortune-telling booth in a local flea market pursuant to an ordinance prohibiting certain businesses the city considered unsavory.  So the psychic, with the help of the ACLU, filed a civil suit on the grounds that the town was trampling her First Amendment religious and free speech rights.

The result was:  The psychic’s smiling face, wearing enormous earrings – for some reason one does expect big earrings of people who can see the future – on page 1 of the daily newspaper.  From a $5 flea market act she was suddenly front-page news, and though I’m no psychic myself I feel safe predicting long waiting lines when she opens back up for business.

So what I’ve decided Bob’s Little Acre needs is:  persecution.  I already have earrings the size of dinner plates.  What I’m looking for now is somebody to try to close me down. 

Then I can get my face on A-1, brave little smile, earrings and all – I think I’ll wear the leopard print discs with the three-inch diameters – and ride the tide of public sympathy all the way to the New York Times. 

            So, c’mon, Dade, let me have it!  I’m not fussy and I’ll be grateful to anybody who takes a swing at me, but I had particularly high hopes of the local churches that are working so hard to crush Trenton’s proposed malt beverage ordinance. 

Churches, you know how richly I deserve to share in your righteous indignation!  Bob’s Little Acre relies for humor almost exclusively on the word “beer” and has never made any bones about the fact that more than one yellow liquid is required when cranking up the lawnmower.  So lay off the mayor and city commission and bully me!

I’m not making any threats here but I need some ink and we previewed my only other idea for getting it.  Persecute me, or Dade may see more than any county ever wanted to of “Bob’s Little Acreage.”

END 

   Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Beer and Loathing in Dade County

     This appeared in the Dade County Sentinel in summer 2010, a week or so after the staff killed the “Beer and Loathing” headline I’d written for my news article about a county beer board meeting (link)(which I had found outrageously funny).  I believe it was a matter of making the article fit into the newspaper, not of stifling my famous wit – but still, it was too good a headline to waste, so this was one of those rare instances when you write a story to go under a headline as opposed to a headline to go over a story.  In Dade County, Ga., the beer board meets infrequently, only when a new establishment opens that sells beer; but coincidentally, the city of Trenton, Dade’s County seat, was concurrently considering passing a wine-and-beer-by-the-drink ordinance.  So this was one of the few times that Bob’s Little Acre commented on issues, as opposed to squatting in the dirt swilling beer and being quietly subversive.  

Beer and Loathing in Dade County:  Wherein Bob Comments on the Issues of the Day

By Robin Ford Wallace

When he was a little boy, my nephew Carter had one joke:  “Pee-pee.”

To call it bathroom humor would make it seem more rich and multifaceted than it in fact was.  What he’d do was tell a long, incomprehensible kid joke; then, just when you had given up trying to figure out what any of the sentences he’d strung together had to do with any of the others, he’d rear back and deliver the kicker:  “Pee-pee!” he’d shout triumphantly.

And of course you’d laugh, not just to be kind to the knock-kneed, big-eared kid, but because it really was funny.  It was funny because no matter whether the joke was about a chicken, a light bulb or a guy walking into a bar, the punchline was always:  “Pee-pee.” 

            Now Carter has grown into a drop-dead, lock-up-your-daughters handsome young man, and probably his sense of humor has matured somewhat as well.  I expect he’d be puzzled as to why doddery old Aunt Bob is telling the pee-pee story now.

            I’m telling it because it finally struck me I have a pee-pee line of my own:  When I’m writing a Bob’s Little Acre and things start to drag, I tend to rear back and shout triumphantly:

“Beer!”

There.  You laughed, didn’t you?  It never fails.  I can’t explain it, but beer has an intrinsic humor value. 

I noticed it early on, as a teenager reading one of the Victorian romances girls favored in those more innocent days.  There was a scene where the heroine, a governess of course, had run away to Germany because of the usual tragic misunderstanding.  (There was only ever the one plot.  The heroine thinks the good guy, whom she loves, is a bad guy, but actually that’s his brother.)

Anyway, there’s our heroine, sitting with her parasol in a German biergarten, sampling the excellent local pilsners, when in comes the hero, his muscled chest practically bursting out of his starched white shirt, and he takes her in his manly arms and says something along the lines of:

“My darling!  I have come to take you back to England, by force if necessary!”

And I thought, wait a minute here, what about those excellent local pilsners?  We can’t have a love scene while she’s drinking beer!  I had the notion of her looking trustingly up into his steady dark eyes and saying something along the lines of:

“Hic.”

It was so hilarious I still laugh every time I read the phrase “by force if necessary.”

To say nothing of the word “beer.”  Beer is just amusing.  It makes you burp and burps are also funny (though less so than other gaseous emissions), and it’s the same color going in as coming out, which it does so quickly the joke is you don’t buy it, you rent it. 

Anyway, I have always found beer a scream and in Bob’s Little Acre I have relied upon it.  Here is a sentence from the first Bob I ever wrote, The Great Lies of Gardening:

            “To stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.”

            This summer I met a man who told me when he first read the column, he said to his wife, “This girl won’t last five minutes in Dade County talking about beer all the time.” 

            That made me glow with pride.  It’s been five years now, and not one group of angry citizens armed with pitchforks and torches has ever darkened my door!

            But then it made me sad.  No, it wasn’t pitchforks and torches that did for Bob’s Little Acre but poor Bob was dead just the same.  These days, with my much heavier news-reportin’ duties,  I manage only about one column every three months.  What slew Bob was not moral opprobrium but honest labor.

            And that’s created a new problem:  Without the outlet of the column, humor cells periodically back up and attack my brain, a condition known as BLADS (Bob’s Little Acre Deprivation Syndrome), a tendency to go for cheap laughs in wildly inappropriate situations. 

Thus, when you’re reading an article about civil litigation and you come across the sentence, “And how are them hemorrhoids, Mabel?” you know you are dealing with a BLADS outbreak.  And if you penetrate into the Ultima Thule beyond paragraph 12 or so of a county commission article, God help you, there’s no telling what you’ll find.

            Anyway, I’m not asking for your pity but please just imagine what Trenton’s proposed beverage ordinance has done to my BLADS.  I can’t walk into a room anymore where there’s not somebody shouting, “Beer!  Beer!  Beer!”  Sometimes I have to just lie on the floor and twitch.

At the special called city commission on the subject, a man said he bought beer regularly at the Ingle’s but that he knew it was a sin and thus didn’t want restaurants to serve it.  To me, he typified Dade’s attitude on the issue.  Dade wants to drink but it also reserves the right to feel terrible about it.

            It reminds me of Mad Magazine’s spoof of Lawrence of Arabia, a tortured introspective 1960s movie that depicted Lawrence as torn between civilization and bloodlust.  The Mad version had Peter O’Toole charging across the desert waving a sword and shouting, “Flesh wounds only!  Flesh wounds only!”

I have no real opinion on this issue.  I make no bones about liking beer, and especially red wine, but I love Dade the way it is and would hate to see it change. 

But whatever’s done, twere best done quickly.  If I hear one more person rearing back and shouting “Beer!” I may pee myself.

END

     Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

A Richer Dust: Wherein Bob Discusses Compost

This was one of the earlier Bobs, appearing in 2005.

A RICHER DUST

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

Shakespeare wrote:  “Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

This is a gardening column and will, thus, not unduly burden itself in arguing whether men do, in fact, die for love, or women, for that matter – though we are remembering a movie called Lady Caroline Lamb in which the last line was the lady’s maid lamenting, “She died of a broken ‘eart!”  We were not unwilling, at that point, to bid Caroline adieu, having never taken to her in the first place and in any case having finished our popcorn .
No, what interests us is the worms.  When we place our kitchen waste outdoors, cover it tastefully with mulch, and submit it to the digestive processes of worms (who are, presumably, ravening impatiently about the garden in hope of amorous fatalities), it becomes compost, the crumbly black stuff that is to the organic gardener what gold was to the alchemist.

Composting has existed in nature for a couple of million years, anyway.  Trees shed their leaves, which decay, making the forest soil into beautiful, black, friable stuff that you would hook for your garden except for problems of transport and the fact that the rangers would nail you. 

Little creatures die and add their tiny carcasses to the organic mix.  Bigger creatures, too.  The poet Rupert Brooke wrote patriotically, and rather too prophetically, of his possible death in World War I:  “There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed” – meaning Rupert, I’m afraid – “that is forever England.”

Dear me.  Here one has set out to discuss compost and one finds oneself not only frothing on about Shakespeare and Rupert Brooke but remembering that Lady Caroline was one of Lord Byron’s mistresses.  Well, if darling Rupert could write so romantically about being compost, surely we can permit ourselves to wax poetic about its virtues in the garden.

Most gardeners will agree that compost is superior to chemical fertilizers.  Not only does it add nutrients, it improves the texture of the soil.  Furthermore, compost costs nothing to make and it’s a convenient way to get rid of the salad from two weeks ago currently evolving into new life forms in the crisper.

Nor is there much disagreement about what to put into your compost pile:  All foodstuffs except meat, which is said to bring rodents.  So:  Coffee grounds, turnips you bought last January, the bread that is growing festive blue spots, the lentil loaf for which your family’s palate was insufficiently sophisticated.

Some materials take longer to compost than others.  Eggshells are so hardy one wonders at times how chickens get born.  And though some gardeners believe in composting paper coffee filters, we have found them dauntingly durable.  And peanut shells?  To expand upon our poetical theme:  Intimations of Immortality.

There is also consensus that layering your kitchen waste with mulch aids the composting process and that it keeps the compost area easier on the eye.  So:  Grass clippings, hay, leaves.  Throw a pile of autumn foliage on that yam casserole with the miniature marshmallows and forget that it ever happened.

Where there seems to be disagreement is how, precisely, to make compost.  Order one seed catalog and you will for the rest of your life find your mailbox crammed with ads for ingenious devices to manufacture “black gold.”  Wooden crates, wire mesh, bins made of square hay bales. One composter on the market consists of a barrel with air holes punched in it suspended between two poles, with a crank.  The idea is, you put your biodegradables in the barrel and every day you spin it around with the crank, looking smug and scientific.

We will, in the interest of honesty, admit that in our credulous youth we wanted one of these so bad we could taste it.  Not being able to afford it, we attempted to home-make a facsimile, consisting of a huge metal trashcan that we punctured with our Swiss Army knife, filled with rotting food, and then rolled around the yard, looking half-witted and vaguely inbred.  Result:  Well, we don’t imagine the expensive kind worked, either.

There are pundits who advise you to water your compost, turn your compost, buy additives for your compost.  Reading such stuff, we cannot imagine how these people find time to garden or hold down jobs.

In reality, we find that all one needs for composting is nature and Mr. Shakespeare’s worms.  Dump kitchen waste in a spot close to the garden, cover it with hay, repeat the process until the pile is a few feet high, then leave it for the worms to deal with.  You’ll have crumbly, wormy compost sooner or later, depending on the season. 

If you find yourself agitating it and watering it and buying it toys, it may be time to take up another hobby – cross-stitch, say, or writing poetry.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Dog's Little Acre: A Brief History of the Dog-Free Zone

t This is a picture of Roosevelt Ford Wallace, the narrator of this piece, posing in front of the "dog-free zone," which was constructed to keep her out of a beauteous stand of Homestead verbena. 

And Then You Win:  A Brief History of the Dog-Free Zone

By Robin Ford Wallace

The Alpo Lady had made the front flowerbed luxurious, finely pulverizing the dirt to a depth of 12 inches and then, as if that weren’t soft enough, covering it with another foot of fluffy hay.  The only thing that would have made it any nicer would have been a partially decayed opossum.  But Alpo doesn’t go in much for carrion and anyway you can’t have everything.  So I pushed the hay around a bit to make a dog-sized depression, dug up some fuzzy plants that were making a dent in my side, and settled down for a snooze in the sunshine. 

It was not to be.  No sooner had I entered the REM state, where I was just at the point of dispatching the rabbit I had pursued successfully – a consummation only too rare during waking hours – than my dream was shattered by Alpo’s piercing shrieks:

“My petunias!”

She was keening over the fuzzy plants as if they were corpses.  It could be argued at this point they were.  “Did you do this, Rosie?”

I tried looking innocent but it was no good; I could feel the telltale dirt hardening into a brown ring around my nose.  Well, how was I to know she was saving them for something special?

“Get off!”  she shouted.  “Bad dog!”

I slunk away, affronted.  The situation was unfortunate but in my opinion hardly grave enough to warrant such language.  I thought I’d heard my last Bad Dog when we finally reached an understanding concerning the penultimate stages of my digestion. 

As a rule Alpo and I got along rather well.  She was one of those big slobbering breeds that need a lot of exercise and that suited me down to the ground.  We spent most afternoons charging through the woods where there were squirrels to bark at, tree roots to dig under and any number of things to pee on.  Interesting place, the woods.  Lots to do.

Even inside there was never much fuss.  Alpo’s place was furnished mostly in stuff she retained from college though believe me she was no chicken.  Everything was shabby and dog-friendly and faintly redolent of cat, an animal with which I cohabit well enough though perhaps with less sentimentality than Alpo assumes.  FYI, when a dog licks a cat it is not so much a matter of kissing as of tasting. 

Anyway Alpo and I might have lived together in perfect harmony had it not been for:

Gardening.

Alpo’s house was a pleasant dump and her car a rolling sty out of the window of which I was proud to hang my head.  Why, then, should her yard look like a page from a seed catalog?  Her tidy flowerbeds were a slap in the face of my poop-rolling species, an abomination no dog could tolerate.

For now, though, I retreated to the verbena patch and watched with interest as Alpo began hammering railroad spikes around the remaining petunias.  When she ran out of those she made do with bamboo skewers from the kitchen, erecting spiky stockades around each plant. 

“That’ll fix your wagon,” she said.  I wagged my tail in courteous response, imagining the chewing enjoyment the skewers would afford me throughout the summer, and wondering if she had lost her mind.

Some people said so, but Alpo maintains that insanity is a matter of degree.  When she talks to me in falsetto, though, I’d put her up against anybody:  “Mama wuvs Woesel to pieces!  To widdle bwack pieces!  It’s widdickilous!”

But the falsetto had developed in response to a certain nervousness I’d evinced in puppyhood, when normal tones of voice induced accidents detrimental to both my self-esteem and the carpet, so I supposed it was meant kindly and did not hold it against her. 

Now, though, as she looked up and saw how my paws had absentmindedly occupied themselves, she did not speak in falsetto:

“My verbena bed!” she screamed.  “It looks like Kansas in 1935!  Bad dog!” 

Really, Bad Dog twice in an afternoon!  And she hadn’t even allowed me to finish my dust bath.  Hurt, I sought asylum beneath a rosebush.

From which position I commanded an excellent perspective of the next entertainment:  Lugging out a roll of lightweight fencing, Alpo erected a sketchy oval prison around the few verbena and irises that had escaped my depredations.  “This is now a dog-free zone,” she announced grimly, and then:

“OH ROSIE!  NOT MY IMPATIENS!”   

            I looked down at the snapped-off branches on which I reclined.  Is that what they were called?  It seemed an unattractive name for a flower that made such a charming bower.  And the pink ones, I thought, had been unusually tasty.

            I dodged the trowel she threw at me, inured by now to her histrionics, and went to root sullenly through the compost pile, and to deposit the penultimate product of my digestion in the vegetable garden. 

Alpo, meanwhile, was cutting the bottoms out of coffee cans and placing one protectively around each of the surviving impatiens.  She toiled earnestly for some hours, then straightened up, regarded the fruits of her labor and –

Burst into tears.  “It looks like Tobacco Road!” she wailed.  She repaired to the porch, sobbing noisily.

I looked with pleasure at the landscape of rusty cans, railroad spikes and chicken wire I had helped create.  I do not know much about this “Tobacco Road” but I expect the dogs there are very happy.

 The message, clearly, is that even the most powerless among us can change the world to suit us if only we persist.  It is as Gandhi said:  “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you – then you win.” 

END

Roosevelt Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove with her chauffeur, housekeeper and Alpo Lady, Robin Ford Wallace.   

The Great Lies of Gardening

THE GREAT LIES OF GARDENING

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

       There is a saying that nowhere are you closer to God than in a garden.  For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, the adage is a statement of the obvious.  To stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

But there, I have noticed, the parallel between religion and gardening does not end.  For all gardeners have their dogmas and their creeds, and they will look you straight in the eye and tell you theirs is the only way – despite the fact that each is saying exactly the opposite as the one before.  If you got together a group of gardeners to discuss how to grow asparagus, you would probably hear more contradictions than you would at a scripture interpretation forum attended by Baptists and Muslims.  

At a rose pruning seminar, I learned that you must prune your climbing roses only after the first flowering, because roses bloom on old wood.  Then we split into groups to watch the individual experts prune.  The expert I was watching stressed the importance of pruning climbing roses in early March so that they would have time to grow strong new wood for the flowers to bloom on.   When I got home to my own roses, I stood there with my clippers like a surgeon wondering which organ to remove. 

In the end, though, I remembered noticing that no matter what they said, all the experts seemed to prune by the general rule:  Take no prisoners.  Given a pair of secateurs, every one of them turned into Lawrence of Arabia during the second half of the movie, the part where you wish it was in black and white.  If their roses could survive that, I imagined mine wouldn’t mind a few timid snips here and there.  

I’ve learned by now to ignore most of the experts’ advice and there’s nothing wrong with my roses, either.  All my friends admire them extravagantly, at least the ones who are Japanese beetles. 

So I’ve become the gardening equivalent of an agnostic, mostly because of the direct contradictions that I hear from different gardeners, some of them married to each other, and read in gardening articles, some of them in the same magazine.  I call them The Great Lies of Gardening, and I will share a few here:

q       You must water only in the morning.

q       You must water only in the evening.

q       You must water (you idiot) in the afternoon.

Morning proponents say if you water in the evening you are exposing your plants to fungal infection and disease.  Evening waterers say if you water in the morning it will just evaporate during the day and do your plants no good.  Both agree that you must never, even if someone is threatening you with a gun, water in the afternoon.  It is perfectly natural, they say, for plants to conserve moisture in the hot sun by letting their leaves wilt. 

Meanwhile, afternoon waterers say what are you, stupid?  The time to water your plants is when they need water, in the hot afternoon when they’re drooping from thirst.

Now, on to some lies of tomatoes:

q       You must plant two to a cage.

q       You must plant one to a cage.

q       You must remove all suckers.

Now, here I will say that one doctrine that even I, the gardening agnostic, adhere to is that the best way to grow tomatoes is in cages.  Not the ones you buy at gardening centers, those are always too small, but big ones that you make from concrete reinforcement fencing. 

But as for spacing, I think the reason some people tell you to plant two to a cage is that they start too many tomato plants and they don’t know where else to put them.  And I think the reason others say to plant only one per cage is that they have supreme contempt for those who lack the self-control to start a sensible number of plants.    I have been in both camps, and I can tell you I don’t see much difference in one versus two, unless you plant a red variety in with a golden, in which case you’ll spend the summer hopelessly confused as to which ones are ripe.  Trust me.

Whether you plant one or two, the tomato vines grow to fill all available space – unless, I presume, you remove the suckers.  I have been growing tomatoes for 25 years and my crops are famous.  I supply my neighbors, I give them to people I don’t even like, I give them to people who beg me to stop.  And what I have to say about removing suckers is:  What are suckers?

I never have figured it out.   “Sucker” sounds bad, like a tumor or something, but whenever I ask people what it means, they say, “like, a branch,” and I end up scratching my head.  Aren’t plants supposed to have, like, branches?  

There are many more lies than I have space to tell.  Broadly, the rule is that any definite statement about how to grow anything is bound to be untrue, even if your grandfather said it.  This year, with garden phlox, I triumphantly disproved a Germinate In Total Darkness lie I read on the back of the seed packet .  They came up fine in full sunlight.

It is only fair to say, though, that the seeds also came up in total darkness – just as the old-wood and new-wood rosarians both grow lovely roses, just as morning, afternoon and evening waterers all manage to save their gardens from drought, just as other gardeners manage to grow a few tomatoes in between nervously policing their plants for suckers. 

So perhaps the Great Lies of Gardening are really not lies.  Perhaps the only lie is: This is the only way.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.