Field of Greens

In the cool mist of morning, under azure skies, I summoned my courage and my equipment, put on my protective armor, and set out to do battle on a Field of Greens...with Creeping Charlie rampant.

In other words, I set out to finally weed the flower gardens. With a tank-top and a sprayed-on double coat of sunblock and bug spray. When you added in the layer of sweat that came with the adventure, if any bug came in for a landing he was going to slide right off and sprain a wing.

Remember, I am still new to this "gardening thing." Over the past four summers, sparked by loving a man who solves every landscaping challenge by planting another flower bed, vast stretches of my yard have been turned into verdant collections of flowers nestled in shredded cedar. There was that first ground-breaking bed of perennials that transformed a couple hundred square feet of river rock over weedy black plastic into a lush paradise for birds and gophers...and won my heart. The former decaying woodpile that, burned to ash and rototilled to oblivion, now hosts a collection of irises and poppies and sunflowers. The garden around the raised septic tank cap that solved the problem of how to cut around it with a lawn mower. The smaller garden surrounding the fake boulder hiding the well cap, solving THAT lawn mowing problem. It looks like I have a miniature version of the Rock of Gibraltar sitting between the house and the garage...but the butterflies that land on it aren't complaining. And we can't leave out the gardens along both sides of the house, one of them devoted to daylilies and columbines, the other to butterfly bushes and hollyhocks.

As I was putting them in, happily running to the nursery for more plants, hauling many cubic yards of mulch home from the hardware store, choosing between perky floral visors and pastel gardening gloves, nobody mentioned I was going to have to keep weeding them. Apparently a two-inch top layer of cedar chips does not have the same weed retardent property as, say, asphalt. And just as I can turn a blind eye for quite a while to the drifts of dog hair and cat fluff that collect in the corners of the living room and the angle of the stairs, I can walk right past a lot of weeds and not notice that they're there.

There is, however, always a tipping point, and that was reached this weekend. Not only had I finally disposed of the last of a quartet of projects that had kept me chained to my computer for the better part of four months as the snows finally melted, this coincided with the arrival of the dandelions, whose cheery yellow heads drew my eye toward the gardens where they were settling in. I pulled one, then another, then another. And just like stripping wallpaper, there's no such thing as just doing a little at a time.

So Sunday morning dawned, and I girded for battle. After four years of this, I've learned a few tricks. Start in the cool of the morning, and keep to the shade. Music is essential, so out came the boom box, a patio end table, and a thirty foot extension cord. It was a little early in the day for a malt cooler (and I was absolutely NOT starting with an Absolut screwdriver at nine in the morning), but an iced tea kept the boom box company. The wheelbarrow came out too, and the gardening gloves, and the skinny hand shovel for assorted miscellany. Lucky did his part too, chasing blackbirds and deer out of the yard, chewing on tough stalks of last year's daylilies, flopping down in the soft bed of dianthus, finding it more inviting this year than the lavender.

I started with the very worst of the lot, the stretch of butterfly bushes and hollyhocks. Dear god, there were strange tall weeds--and lots of them--that were more than a foot tall. Along with the dandelions, of course, and clover, and the pervasive, invasive, strangling mint called "Creeping Charlie" that had moved in seemingly out of nowhere from the lawn. Well, that wasn't entirely true, I thought. Earlier this spring, I'd taken a whole ten minutes to spray a line of Roundup around the edges of the gardens on a still day, trying to stay a step ahead of the emerging crabgrass. But Mother Nature abhors a vacuum, and while the crabgrass had indeed been beaten back, it appeared that everything else under the sun had moved in.

The work was slow, and hot, and sweat mixed with sunblock dripped off my forehead and on to my glasses. Once in a while I gave up bending over at the waist, and finally dropped to my knees to give my back a break. The pile of limp weeds in the wheelbarrow grew higher and higher, and I took occasional work breaks in a plastic lawn chair, surveying my progress. The task at times seemed endless...but oh, the discoveries! The understoryheld such a story.

Under that dense canopy layer of weeds, mint and dandelion fluff, a half dozen new butterfly bushes had seeded themselves and begun to flourish. I dug them out and potted them to share. The hollyhocks had similarly spread their bounty as well, and dozens of little sprouts beckoned to be replanted far and wide. Moving down the line to a stretch of coneflowers, I found that there were more of those than had been last fall...and that the profusion of black-eyed susans that greeted me were perfect for filling in that sparse bed. Irony abounded at the thought that the day before, I'd bought more than a dozen snapdragons to plant between the rose bushes...and hadn't checked to see how many were already growing freely from last year's seeds.

The roses were the biggest surprise of all this year, simply because they were still alive. Winter is harsh here, and the temps dip to twenty below zero at least once or twice a year. It's a place where responsible gardeners cut back their bushes in fall and swaddle them in leaves and styrofoam cones to protect them from winter's harsh bite. Unfortunately, I found myself busy and distracted last fall, and when I finally turned around and thought about covering the roses, the snow had done that already. "Oops," I thought ruefully. Well this would give me an excuse to shop for new ones in spring.

When the Jackson & Perkins rose catalog first arrived, I drooled over it, in fact, like a teenage boy with a copy of Playboy. But to my great surprise, every single one of my "Lazarus roses" actually made it through. There's a lesson there somewhere, regarding resiliance, or adversity, or never giving up hope, or perhaps all three, and I think that it applies pretty well to people too.

At any rate, I finally put away the boom box, dumped the weed collection into the "burn pile," sprayed the rose bushes to keep away the aphids that were starting to congregate on soft new stems, and parked the wheelbarrow by the garage. A hot shower stripped away all the magical chemical protections against sun and bugs, but left me suitable to sit on the living room sofa again.

I'm not done of course, yet. With a garden, I've learned, there is no such thing as "done," until winter. But for the moment, I've beaten back the invaders. And at last count, at least, the coneflowers are holding their own.

The Forest in Equipoise

With Lucky weighing in at close to sixty pounds these days and containing the spring-loaded energy of about five dogs, we’re getting out for a lot of walks in the woods and fields. Our usual off-the-leash jaunt takes us through stands of pines and along the edges of meadows, and through an ever changing tapestry of green and gold and red and brown. From the frozen cover of white the landscape emerges in spring, first just bare brown, then tinged with a faint shade of green. Then suddenly, as if God flips a switch, the meadows are covered with shiny grass that tosses like silk in the wind, and daffodils and crabapples and violets add bright splashes of color.

In a reminder that natural drama eternally surrounds us and we are just bit players in a larger dynamic picture, there is always something new to discover. The ribcage of a deer, picked clean in a meadow. Only days before it had been attached to the entire deer, which lay freshly dead next to a pasture fence. A scattering of turkey feathers and entrails. A freshly dug den—fox or woodchuck? And as the days lengthen, the sprouting of leaf buds and fresh branches and new foliage.

A few years ago, we hosted a French foreign exchange student, and I took him around the place for an introduction to the neighborhood. While I was trying to access my high school French to convey the concept of a “coyote” to Henri (pas comme un chien sauvage, mais comme un petit loup!) an explosion of noise and feathers caused our heads to snap in unison. There, across the meadow, was a red-tailed hawk in flight…being chased by a turkey hen, also airborne. The hawk wasn’t wasting any time. Like I said, there’s always something new. Try explaining THAT in French.

But for a brief spell, there is a tipping point to be found between winter and summer, and we were there just a few days ago. I’m not even going to try to throw “spring” into the mix, it just muddies the picture. Where I live, we have known blizzards on Mother’s Day, and sixty degree days on Christmas Eve. I was in a tank top three weeks ago. We’re expecting frost again tonight week. Just because the gophers are starting to come out to play and the bluebirds are hatching doesn’t mean you still don’t have to keep a watchful eye on your tomato plants. Switching from the flannel "winter" sheets to the summer ones requires a big leap of faith, and no small emotional investment.

No, this is simply between winter and summer. There is a short, perfect stretch for exploring, perhaps only a week or two, when winter’s snows have melted and the forest floor has dried up, but the trees and shrubs have barely started to bud. When the paths followed by deer and other critters are still visible, and the contours of the terrain are clear. I live in one of the areas of Wisconsin that were sculpted by the ebb and flow of great ice sheets, where the forward surge of glaciers pushing earth and rock and the following retreat of meltwater streams left formations known as kettles and kames and drumlins and eskers. A walk in the woods can be a strenuous and unpredictable adventure if you’re trying to get anywhere “as the crow flies.”

From where we stood on our usual route, however, I could see where the forest floor rose and fell away. Even better, I could see for a pretty good distance, with no scrim of leaves and brush to camouflage and disorient me like they did Hansel and Gretel. In other words, no need to think about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs! Lucky and I forged ahead noisily, dead leaves and twigs crackling underfoot.

It didn’t take long for inspiration and ambition to catch hold. It had been years since I’d walked this stretch, when the trees were a bit shorter and the brush was a little thinner, and there had been a groomed snowmobile path to follow. Now the path had disappeared from disuse, replaced with waist-high brambles. Still, the troughs and hills and slopes beckoned. After a few minutes of ambling, I could see more daylight, and remembered that a cornfield lay to the east. We picked our way down a slope to the edge of the field. A flock of turkeys scattered as we emerged from the woods. I turned north again, walking in a furrow next to the woods that fell away to a shallow ravine. There was a tremendous rustling going on in the ravine as I walked, and I wondered what forest denizens were lurking beside me. A herd of deer? Another flock of turkeys? My curiosity ran wild, but as I looked down the slope, I could see nothing with fur or feathers.

I knew that if I followed the edge of the field far enough, there was a perfect spot for sitting. At the top of the ravine, there was a rectangular black boulder about two feet high and four feet across. I pushed aside a sapling that had sprung up at the edge of the enormous rock, cutting into the spectacular view, and settled in on the warm familiar surface.

The first thing I discovered was the source of the clattering noise. Nothing so dramatic as Bambi and the Great Stag of the Forest. Nothing even as big as a fox or a woodchuck. No, the noise was the product of dozens of small birds hopping and rustling among the leaf litter on the forest floor. I had left my binoculars at home, and at this distance there was no chance of determining eye stripes or beak colors or feather patterns to narrow down just who was having all that fun. They just looked like a bunch of busy, happy sparrows, and I left it at that with a laugh. Small feet, big noise!

Lucky jumped down from the boulder and wandered around happily, following his nose down a hundred different tantalizing trails. There are times I think this dog would follow his nose into a brick wall, he sniffs with such concentration. His delicately drawn head ends in a precise, pointed nose, and when he really gets into gear, his dedication to following a scent around the front yard resembles an artist drawing a sketch without ever lifting pencil from paper. A post-modernist sketch to be sure, more Picasso than DaVinci, but you get the idea.

Without the heavy cover of summer leaves, I could see that the landscape was actually scored by parallel ridges. Not just one ravine cut the landscape, but several. I imagined an eight-point buck carefully picking his way along the top of one of the ridges. Then an idea took hold. It was a perfect day for exploring. The next time I had the time and energy, the leaves and the mosquitos and the deer flies that go hand in hand with all that splendor would surely keep me out of the woods altogether. So when we finally turned back for home, I took a detour from the cornfield and reentered the forest, looking for an entry point to the ridges that didn’t involve all fours. I found one, then another, and followed both, feeling triumphant and just a little bit like a mountain goat. The path running along the top was wider than it seemed from my spot on the boulder. Still, I thought, if any squirrel was watching me from that boulder, he would have been mighty impressed.

Curiosity slaked, I finally turned back. There were enough trees and vines between me and the cornfield that I puzzled for a while as to how to get back to where I started. Then I spied a familiar landmark—a blue and white beer can I’d passed on the way in—and got my bearings again. These were what I like to call “working woods.” Not the forest primeval, many of the trees are too young for that. Not a tended and groomed kind of place like you’d find at a British manor or in a Disney movie, either. The kind of woods where you’ll come across the occasional tree stand, and discarded shotgun shell, and a beer can or two. Sometimes all three together.

I left the beer can in place, as a marker for the next hiker.

The woods are starting to fill in by the day, the forest floor covered with violets and garlic mustard and trilliums and lush growth of all kinds. A blanket of green has fallen over the countryside, a translucent watercolor wash of chartreuse and mint green. Red maples begin to leaf, occasional maroon thumbprints on the canvas. Day by day it fills in, until the woods have achieve an impasto character of olive and emerald and huntsman greens, obscuring streambeds and stumps and drawing a curtain across the "welcome" sign. It won’t be long before I start weighing the virtues of fresh air against the smell of the bug spray needed to keep the impending mosquitoes at bay.

But I can still feel the warmth radiating off that big black rock, and imagine the noisy rustling of the birds is the ravine below.