Or, anyway, about asparagus. In any case it isn't done yet, and I was feeling awful for not having posted anything up here recently when I happened to realize I'd never put this classic Bob on the blog. Or I don't think I did. (I told you I was discombobulated.) What I did to check was Google "Bob's Little Acre," "space aliens," and "crop circles," and nothing came up. (Or nothing familiar did. Try Googling it yourself sometime. Who knows what you'll find?)
Anyway after I read it I felt even more discombobulated. It mentions my puppy then who is a 70-pound dog now and a friend then who hasn't spoken to me in over two years now, but even six years older and uglier I still find the ways of the universe just as puzzling. Hell, more so!
And furthermore, the column reminded me I haven't planted my beets ....
THE ACCIDENTAL GARDEN
By Robin Ford Wallace
“If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line.”
This is a line from a Brian Eno song that my husband is always quoting me, perhaps in an attempt to convince me he knows what “heuristics” means, or how to spell it.
is always expressing similar contempt for the not-so-straight lines I make when laying out my garden
rows.
Straight lines in the vegetable garden serve a purpose. If you plant beets in a row in the garden, what comes up, if it’s in the row, is not guaranteed to be a beet but is more likely to be than anything that is not. It’s not great odds but as good as you get in this racket. Then you keep weeds to a minimum by a wholesale slaughter of everything in between the rows, on the principle that if it’s out of line it’s probably not a beet.
But I’m not a straight-line kind of person. I set out from point A with every intention to travel to point B, but somehow I always go wrong, the road turns to dirt, and I end up in Alabama.
Thus it is no surprise that my life path has not led from the bottom straight to the top. Instead, I have zigzagged, dipped and nose-dived like a tri-plane under fire, finally crash-landing to my considerable surprise onto a dirt road in Alabama, from whence I write you this garden column. Sort of.
In any case, the straight lines in my garden tend to morph into something else, not only because of my imperfect grasp of geometry but because of my puppy, Roosevelt, the Holy Terrier, who enjoys nothing more than tumbling through the garden with a stake in her mouth, twine around her legs and evil in her heart. So rows are constantly restaked and beets stray from the straight and narrow through no fault of their own.
Fortunately, straight rows are not the only options available to the gardener. You can grow plants in patches and raised beds or even use them to create crop circles to signal to aliens in outer space. This is a free country.
My friend Paula once had a garden shaped like a kayak. Or two, rather. She had a pair of kayaks in dry dock in her back yard. They hadn’t moved for so long, their best chance for hitting the water again was global warming melting the polar caps and providing Marietta, Georgia, an outlet to the sea.
But Paula found that her lawn ornaments had a horticultural use: They had killed the grass underneath them, so she moved them and planted peppers and tomatoes in her new, ready-made plots, repositioning the boats where she wanted more arable farmland.
This accidental approach to garden design is one to which I am also addicted. I use jellyrolls of spoiled hay for mulch, and when a bale is used up it leaves behind it a black circle of beautiful compost in which I can never resist planting something.
This is why I have circles of plants everywhere, not necessarily positioned with aesthetics in mind but where the hay bale stopped rolling when it fell off the truck. Thus I have a circle of breathtaking gladiolas at the bottom of the hill where it would take the FBI to find them.
I’m not arguing in favor of circles. They just happened, and if they mean something to aliens observing us from space I don’t know what it is but I hope it’s something along the lines of Send Cash or Bring Beer. If I used square hay bales instead of round, my garden would look like a quilt and I suppose I’d be just as happy though I can’t speak for the aliens.
But somewhere I read that it is flowerbeds laid out by the Golden Mean, or Golden Ratio, that are most pleasing to the eye. I looked the Golden Mean up and it is: 1.61803399. In case you don’t know what that means, I also learned that the whole should be to the larger part as the larger part is to the smaller part.
Do what? I think it would be easier just to borrow one of Paula’s kayaks.
The Golden Mean must be something along the same lines as Feng Shui, another concept I have never grasped. Paula’s big on it, though.
Paula adores buying furniture but she can’t bear to throw any away, so when she gets new things she just puts them in front of the old ones. No one has seen her actual floor for seven years, though there are trails from room to room through stacks of books and magazines and other things in piles, so you can navigate if you know what you’re doing though I wouldn’t try it in the dark.
Anyway, in one corner of the dining room, where there was a molecule of clear space on a sideboard, Paula put a little indoor fountain, and she explained to me it gave the room Feng Shui. Personally, the tinkling just stimulated my bladder.
So maybe I’m not an aesthetic concept kind of person any more than a straight-line person. In fact, the more I work at it, the more random my garden seems to get. A space alien observing Bob’s Little Acre with its patches and circles and eccentric rows would have to conclude it developed more through chance evolution than intelligent design.
Sometimes it puzzles me just as much as I’m sure it would the space alien. Oh, not just how those gladiolas got to the bottom of the hill but how I came to be gardening this particular little acre on this particular dirt road in Alabama. Not by a straight line, I can tell you.
Maybe it’s just where I landed when I fell off the truck.
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
