The Gardener as Guerilla: They'll Never Take Me Alive!

       This is a "classic" Bob in the modern sense of the word, which if you haven't noticed now means "old as God."  But it's one of my faves and it was with surprise I noticed it wasn't on this blog.  It's a propos because this year, even though it's spring and I'm ravenin' for the dirt, between saving the world for democracy and financial stuff I'm having a hard time finding time to garden, much less write about it.  So some mornings I find myself simply aching for some time off, or an automatic weapon.  Anyway, I decided to post this old Bob on here as opposed to, say, writing a new one ...  

THEY’LL NEVER TAKE US ALIVE!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Spring, and we are hunkered down at Bob’s Little Acre, trowel in one hand, machinegun in the other, cigar clenched between our gritted teeth not because we like it but because we woke up in one of those Che Guevara moods you get sometimes when the Feds are after you.

            We are under siege.

            As we write, this place is surrounded by armed goons from the Health Department who are trying to shut us down, and IRS hitmen lurk by our mailbox.  A pity, because we had hoped to plant clematis down there, but that can wait.  Our hands are already pretty full what with setting out our tomatoes and starting our petunia border, to say nothing of the machinegun.

Which we wave defiantly at the T-men as, eyes squinting through cigar smoke, we determinedly pat a Purple Pirouette into place.  The Feds can wait, too, along with all the other creditors whose unopened bills clog our desk.  So can the piles of laundry that choke the house, clean and dirty becoming indistinguishable as passing cats use them for bedding, or worse. 

Not to mention the greasy dishes, the ominous black mold that threatens to engulf the bathroom, and the hungry-eyed man who keeps bleating about supper every time we go into the kitchen for another beer.  

And especially, with a cherry on top and twice on Sunday, the people who annoy us with phone calls whining about when we plan to show up at work.

            It is April!  The sun shines.  The birds sing.  The air is like wine.  The earth calls and we must obey its primordial summons.  We must plant.  We must hoe.  We must get down in the dirt and roll!

Spring is clearly a time meant for gardeners to garden.  We wait all winter for it, we dream of it through the frozen nights, and when it finally comes it hits us so hard that we lie on the ground and twitch.  Then up we get, trowel in hand, madness in our eyes, and head for the mud.  It is unnatural, nay, obscene, that we should do anything else. 

Yet the cruel world makes its nasty little demands of us just as if it were still winter.  Pay your bills!  Do your job!  File your tax return!  This place is a dump!  Aren’t we ever going to eat?

 Si, Senor, we say from behind our cigar.  As soon as you pry this trowel from our cold, dead fingers.

            The guerilla war that has us juggling seed peas and automatic weapons is caused by modern America’s sad failure to grasp the exigencies of the natural world on those of us who remain connected to it.  Spring screams to the gardener:  Carpe diem!  Seize the day and suck the juice out of it before it slips away! 

But to normal, virtuous Americans, Nature is the 30 seconds spent between house and car, car and office, and their only response to its wild siren call is to say something like, “Nice day.”

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, says virtuous America primly, whereas we gardeners are happiest caked with filth.  Render unto Caesar, we are told, when to go inside and fill out a form would kill us.  But at this time of year, the American virtue that makes us bite most savagely into our cigar is the Protestant work ethic.

We believe in the dignity of labor.  Oh, from time to time we may have made our little joke about work being the curse of the drinking classes.  We may have observed that, with spring for planting, summer so hot, fall for canning and winter taken up by seasonal adjustment disorder, the only time we have work is a couple of rainy Tuesdays in February.

However, we are not under the delusion that the world owes us a living and we are painfully aware that no one saw fit to set us up a trust fund.  We have resigned ourselves to toiling for our bread like the rest of virtuous America, though without visible enthusiasm.

But this is spring.

As our blood responds wildly to the rising sap, as the diems become exponentially more carpable, we are increasingly inclined to tell virtuous America, and our boss, where to stick it.

Taxes are for the little people, we shriek.  Cleanliness is for the stupid!  Work is for those with no hobbies!  If you’re hungry, open a can of soup!

Anyway, we are not talking full-frontal, X-rated diem-carping here.  We are talking about getting the lettuce in before it turns off hot.  So why can’t everybody just leave us alone?  We are decent, law-abiding, conscientious.  We will clean our house, pay our taxes, feed our family.  We will even go to work, sullenly, for a couple of hours.

The next time it rains.

These arguments, clear as they are, have never cut any ice with employers or the government, and we are still expected to meet work requirements, tax deadlines, and basic standards of cleanliness, whatever the season. 

That’s why those of us who are serious about horticulture must learn to accept the machinegun as a necessary and useful gardening implement, though frankly we are getting a little sick of the cigar.

END

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

Bob's Little Acre 101: An Intro to Bob

    This is a column I wrote as an "Intro to Bob" for the Chattanoogan.com, which began carrying BLA in March.  Anyone familiar with Bob is apt to recognize quite a few of the bits I Frankensteined it together from.

Welcome to Bob’s Little Acre!  Come On Down.  Have a Seat.  Not There.

By Robin Ford Wallace

There is a saying that nowhere is one closer to God than in a garden. 

Duh. 

For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, it is a statement of the obvious.  Indeed, 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 we have not yet been introduced.  How do you do? 

My name is Robin.  In my family, they call me Bob.  This patch of dirt is my garden, which my sister Laura named Bob’s Little Acre, from the nickname and from the Erskine Caldwell title “God’s Little Acre,” a novel about sin and suffering in the disgustin’ decayin’ South, which I do not suppose anyone reads these days but the name has stuck.   

So my garden has a literary name and as it happens I am a literary type of gardener.  One does not like to brag but it is a simple statement of fact that I can squeeze a Shakespeare quote out of a turnip. 

I frequently do.    

But  where are my manners?  Please sit down.  Not there.  That is the asparagus row, upon which I have just applied a generous truckload of –

Well, never mind.  I expect it will wash out. 

Of course the garden does not look like much now.  It has been winter, after all, my least favorite season.  One tries to embrace the now, as they say; but some nows are cuddlier than others and there is no point denying that in the Mystery Date lineup of seasons winter is not the Dreamboat type but perhaps his disappointing younger brother, the little runty one who breathes through his mouth and picks his nose at the dinner table.

Some people like winter but they tend to be the ones who also like shopping, and Christmas.  I’d rather be shot.  To us outdoorsy types, malls are sinister at the best of times.  Throw in holiday crowds, bell-ringers in Santa drag, and the Little Drummer Boy over the PA system and we find ourselves flopping on the tiles like salted slugs, our small, frightened eyes searching frantically for an exit sign.  Give us spring any day, and the kind of holiday that involves beer and sunshine. 

But I digress.  I was telling you about Bob’s Little Acre, my garden and by extension this feature, which is a gardening column.  Sort of.

I have always had a garden and I always will.  When I was a small, untidy child I doted excessively on dirt, my levels of happiness and filth in direct and dependent  proportion; and in the fullness of time I expect to be the kind of old woman who stumps through the garden in hip boots and housedress, booming out pronouncements like:

“There is nothing like llama excrement for the cultivation of really superior asparagus.”

(Yes, Gentle Reader, that, I fear, is the soil amendment in which you are currently nestled; but the llama as I understand it is a herbivore and as such the ultimate product of its rather complicated digestive system is of no particular olfactory unpleasantness.)        

As I was saying, I am no longer a dirty urchin nor yet a muddy crone, but rather somewhere in the middle, not old enough to cram my wisdom down the throats of the young, perhaps, but grown far too canny, thank you very much, to swallow the happy horse – er, the llama excrement routinely dealt out as accepted wisdom in the gardening world.

“Plant corn after all danger of frost is past, wearing a blue shirt,” say salesmen at hardware stores, whose only claim to horticultural expertise is the possession of overalls.

 “Young plants benefit greatly from a side-dressing of well-rotted sturgeon, which will correct any latent Ph imbalance,” write county extension agents, and get paid for it.

Ph, indeed!  Note how shiftily they throw the term out, when they are stuck for a topic, or caught in a lie.  Ph trumps every time because no one has the faintest idea what it may mean.

In fact, exposing the untruths so glibly perpetuated in conventional garden writing has become the abiding mission of Bob’s Little Acre.  The column does dispense useful horticultural information – sometimes – but at its ardently pulsing heart is the tenet that most of what we know about gardening, much less the universe, is lies and male answer syndrome.  Without outraging the confines of modesty I believe I may say that Bob’s Little Acre has become to the county extension agent what Woodward was to Nixon.

The other basic tenet of BLA is:  dirt.  People have accused the column of leaning this way or the other way or being for this or against that.  The truth of the matter is that BLA doesn’t lean one way or the other so much as it flops down and rolls, and if it has an agenda it is dirt every time.  Bob’s Little Acre is to dirt what Princess Grace was to breast-feeding.   

So.  Spring approaches, and with it the siren call of dirt.  I invite you to return to Bob’s Little Acre each week and roll with me.  I am happy for the company.  Only do stop brushing at your clothes.  As the old saying goes, stay out of the garden if you can’t stand the –

      On second thoughts, perhaps that is not the way the old saying goes at all.

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

Bob Jumps Ship!

            Ladies and gentlemen, it has come to my attention it is spring.  Therefore, I regret to inform you that you are on your own.

            All winter I have been tirelessly exposing corruption, undermining tyranny and battling the various nefarious forces that constantly threaten our cherished American freedoms.  But folks, keeping the world safe for democracy seriously eats into a girl’s time.

            Just yesterday, I noticed that spring beauty was blooming in stripy pink profusion everywhere I essayed to place my dainty foot.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  Spring beauty is not a particularly early wildflower.  What had happened to the first harbingers of the season?

            This is when I noticed – to my shock and horror – that the Bradford pears were turning green.  I hadn’t gotten used to their blooming yet!  I’d been planning to write a Bob’s Little Acre about them, but by the time I got home to the computer they’d be gone entirely.  What was happening here? 

            What was happening was that while I was chasing nooz, spring had happened without me!  I’d been waiting for it for MONTHS, and then when it finally came around I was off promulgating the free and unfettered flow of information upon which Western-style democracy depends.  It was like missing your wedding because you’d been counting train cars.

            Well, I’ve had it!  Please remember that I came to crusadin’ journalism via the garden page.  No matter how many lives depend upon my steely-eyed vigilance, no matter how many representative governments topple in favor of tyranny, I can no longer ignore the siren call of dirt!              Somehow, the world must survive without me!

            Until next week.

            This is a long-winded way, Gentle Reader, of saying I’m on vacation.  So I beg of you, if evil looms, if autocracy burgeons, if injustice twirls its greasy mustachios –

            Call the cops or something.  And in the meantime, here are some nice pictures of wildflowers we saw yesterday at Sitton’s Gulch.



Hepatica




Cutleaf Toothwort





Blue Hepatica



Spring Beauty



Trillium