Growing Pains
June 19, 2003

Around our house, the word 'garden' is never used a a verb. Sure, Art Boy and I occasionally venture outdoors armed with gloves, spade, and clippers—usually when we're stung by guilt over the state of our domestic exterior as opposed to our more nurturing neighbors, or remorse for the unfortunate plantlife entrusted to our care. But what we do is yard work: sweaty, grimy, back-breaking, knee-popping hard labor.

I don't get the cult of gardening for pleasure. Some folks escape the stressful routine of their daily lives with some peaceful puttering around in the garden. But it's tough for me to appreciate the zen of it all when I'm hunched over like a contortionist dragging out weeds by their four-foot-long roots, slicing open my fingers on hidden blackberry vines, or lumbering around like Quasimodo because my lower back refuses to return to the upright position. If I want hands-on creative therapy, I'll go into the kitchen and bake somehing. At least when I'm done, there's something good to eat. When we work in the yard all we have to show for it are blackened fingernails and sneezing fits so prolonged they belong in the Guinness Book of World Records.

My friend Gail's mom, Flossie, had a green thumb. She was such a natural in the garden if you asked her how she did it, she'd look at you like you'd just asked her how to breathe. "Just stick it in the ground!" she'd explain.

I do not have a green thumb; I'm more like the Hand of Death. I've rarely met a plant I couldn't kill, indoors or out, however hardy, drought- (or wet-) tolerant or foolproof they were supposed to be. A plant has to be idiot-proof to survive me. The ones still extant in my yard were mostly planted by other people who actually knew what they were doing. The previous homeowners had the good sense to plant the back yard with low-maintenance fruit trees that love both fog and sun. The landscape gardener who used to live next door installed a planter box of hardy roses between our two driveways.

Whatever grows in my yard has to thrive on benign neglect. Take bulbs, for instance. Bulbs are the felines of the plant world; like cats, you can completely ignore them and they keep coming back year after year, whenever and wherever it suits them. That's my idea of a plant. And those roses are all but indestructible, no thanks to me but due entirely to the care and skill with which they were initially planted. I have actually been known to prune my rose bushes once a year, but I never seem to get to it before the tiny new growth spurts begin erupting along the grey winter stalks. I feel like Morticia Addams, hacking off the blooms to preserve the thorny stems, but to my amazement they always bud and bloom again.

Flowering succulents also do pretty well for me in pots and planter boxes, usually donated as healthy cuttings from my more horticulturally-savvy friends. Their survival is a clear case of nature over nurture, since I can never seem to remember whether, as succulents, they require more or less water. Cactus, on the other hand, are more temperamental. It's as easy to drown a cactus as it is to let it die of thirst and in my agricultural career I've done both. I have the same problem with houseplants, where the symptoms of too much watering, or too little, are exactly the same —the leaves brown, the stalks droop, and they expire like an outdated carton of milk. Obviously, if merely watering plants is this complicated for me, I'm not about to chance anything more elaborate. I listen to my gardening friends discuss things like mulch, plant food, and fertilizer with the same dazed incomprehension with which one might listen to Albert Einstein explain his Relativity Theory.

My relationship to plants is sort of like Art Boy's relationship to his first car. As a teenager back in suburban Illinois, he proudly bought a used Camaro from a friend of his older brother. Not given to tinkering under the hood, he nevertheless kept the gas tank full and the tires pumped. And yet the car began to show signs of decline. At last he took it in to the garage to locate the source of its mysterious malaise. "When was the last time you put oil in this car?" the mechanic asked him. To which Art Boy replied, "Oil???" That's how I feel about feeding plants.

Most of the yard work we do boils down to one thing: battling weeds. It's a neverending job because, unlike everything else in our yard, weeds cannot be killed. Like roses, they love to be pruned and respond accordingly. Hack them down and they come back bigger next time, and twice as fast—not a year from now, not next season, but next week. Like drinking the blood of one's enemies, what doesn't kill them makes them stronger. The time our yard looks most presentable is springrtime when all the weeds are green. Squint your eyes and it could almost be mistaken for a garden.(Lisa Jensen will guest-host the TV program CinemaScene with Richard Von Busack Friday June 20 and Friday June 27 at 7:30 pm on cable Channel 4. Contact her at lisajensen@sbcglobal.net)