Suddenly, summer

On loving my garden, weeds and all, and not mourning the trees...

So quite suddenly, it’s summer.

While the rest of you endured tornadoes, hail, floods and all manner of destruction coast to coast through a turbulent spring, our quiet little corner of upper South Carolina got strawberry weather to go with the Strawberry Moon. A first. Cool mornings. Warm, rather than hot, afternoons. Occasionally, a whole lot of rain, but by and large just enough. For example, we’ve only just had to start watering… and that’s because quite suddenly, it’s summer.

We’ve had a run of 90 degree days, giving just a hint of what’s in store. But I’ve been obedient to the signal: I’ve been getting out early and getting back under cover. The weeding load this time of year is massive—well, the garden is massive for the two of us. We’ve also learned that the locally produced composts we’ve used to build our soils are rich in nutrients—and also in weeds. But the miracle nonetheless is happening. The soils we laid down in “lasagne” layers and “hugelkultur” beds in 2023 are coming together in 2024. Still “chunky” in parts, depending on what percentages of native clay, topsoil, compost, clippings, etc, got into the bed mix, but overall … beautifully friable.

And the place is alive. Plants vigorous! Tall! A spindly little sambucus placed at the far end of our driveway in January shot up ten feet and burst into dazzling bloom three weeks ago. The weeds are likewise enthusiastic about the apparently ideal conditions.

A “snowball” viburnum stretches its arms at right—flanked by “White Swan” echinacea, “Mystic Spires” salvia, nicotiana and cleome. The sambucus stretches over everything else at far left. Oh, yeah and see all that perennial grass? Weeding, it’s never ending—good thing it’s also addicting.

I know I keep mentioning weeds—they’re fierce… But I’ve got two things working in my favor. No. 1, the rain—it’s been generous enough that even perennial grass will come up with a tug. For the deeper-rooted buggers that don’t, say hello to my little friend: No 2, my new Japanese weeding sickle.

Japanese weeding sickles from redpigtools.com. The shorty at far left was my former favorite hand tool—but now that I have the long-handled sickle fourth from the left, it’s my favorite tool … of all time.

A deadly sharp instrument—I cut myself the first time I used it in the dumbest way possible, so use with extreme caution. But I love it like a Mississippi woman loves a bow-legged man. Because it lets me do what I love for hours, from a seated position without aggravating my knee. And my idea of living a good life these days is moving more and more in the direction things that don’t aggravate my knee.

So far, I’ve been able to keep up a good rhythm despite the vicissitudes of weather and travel. I’ll hammer back the weeds then check out the crop rotations in the veg beds, then alternate veg with perennials, moving clockwise from bed to bed, early in the morning. When I keep up the rhythm, over the course of a week I can finish the whole half acre. But of course, I’m so easily distracted—oh, look! There’s a green anole eating a dragonfly on the fence. And the wood thrushes singing down by the creek again, despite all our insults to the land.

LOL! Sorry for that, I was casting garden shade. Fact is, our garden is the result of violence. Why on earth would I be thinking such a morbid thought? you ask. Well, it’s kind of hard to avoid thinking about violence with the world as screwed up as it is. Even in the gardens we create as a refuge, those thoughts intrude. Especially when other gardeners remind us.

So full confession time: We cleared about half an acre of dense, sunless pine to refashion the land into perennial borders and vegetable beds according to our design. Heirlooms and natives. Edible, medicinal, ornamental. Ancient techniques. Modern science— Bellaflora is above all experimental— because we’ve never seen anything quite like what we intended to do accomplished in under 20 years. We’re racing to build soil and “bones” and have something of stunning beauty and utility in five… all while observing good management practices and leaving room for whimsy… It feels crazy, but we waited so long to find a place we could grow this vision…

Top left, the view from my front porch in January 2020. The sun was only able to penetrate and reach the front porch about two hours day. Only azaleas could make it in that dry shade and constant twilight (top right). Bottom left, we bit the bullet and made a clearing in November 2023. Note, this view of the house was not previously visible. Bottom right, our gangling teenager of a garden.

You know, I agonized over those trees—it grieved me. Even as late as a month or two ago, I still felt residual grief—exacerbated when a nature writer I very much admire made a blanket pronouncement that no tree ever should ever be taken down. I tried to laugh it off: News to the folks behind the Bradford pear bounty. But jesting aside, but I didn’t actually dispute her logic. She was arguing that trees are sentient, complex organisms with an essential role in the web of life. Check. To touch a tree is a form of sacrilege. I get that, too. Of course, she then went on to say that trees can remember a wrong and hold a grudge—and I have to admit it gave me a shiver imagining the forest around my house as the instrument of an ancient grudge. But wait… Did she actually say that or is memory embellishing because it sounds right?

Anyway, the point is I felt personally convicted by her words, as creating a clearing where we could grow our ideal garden was somehow a betrayal of principle… Except, of course, the fact is there’s actually more life here now that we’ve allowed our intentions meander across the landscape in bursts of form and color. Those pines …? Were dark and airless and scary. There was never a breath of air to be felt passing through them, or a bird to be seen in them. Not even the dogs would play there.

Now, the Chug army ranges sniffing and barking across our landscape every day—and every day, I’m startled by something I’ve never seen in our woods. A scurrying beetle bigger than my thumb. A velvet ant, its red and black stripes bold against the chocolate mint. A toad—the very first I’ve seen since we moved here hiding under the bottlebrush buckeye. Three earthworms in one day! (Take that, clay muck that was all that was left after the trees were felled.)

Yesterday’s surprise was a whole squadron of very, very tiny wasps—think the size of a grain of rice—foraging with single-minded attention among the strawflowers. I was worried about those strawflowers. Something I read on the internet about avoiding pompom form flowers because there was research that they were harder for pollinators to forage. Welp, I pulled pigweed shoots eyeball to eyeball with a fleet of pollinators for nearly an hour yesterday, listening to them buzz, watching their vigorous legs burrow into the petals’ tulle-stiff pleats. They were like, whatever dude. Just stay out of our way. Unbothered. So yes, I’m sure there are pollinators who dislike pompom form flowers. They’ll find something else to their liking in another bed at Bellaflora.

Wasps and bees showing some love to the strawflower and sea holly on the bottom row--the fruits of pollination on top. Rabbiteye blueberries and San Marzano tomatoes--plus my first pomegranate (top center)!

Some people are garden purists. They’ve got a platonic ideal in their heads and it might be pineapple fountains and cutwork parterre, it might be hollies shaved into lollipops and perfect Bermuda grass, hell, it might be an all-out closed-cycle permaculture food forest composed exclusively of native plants—but they’ll get an idea in their heads and damned if the world won’t burn before they can compromise the vision.

I’m not a purist. I don’t join parades or launch myself into crusades. I like to observe and think about what observe and only after I’ve thoroughly masticated—for annoyingly long periods of time—will I swallow and offer a conclusion. I’ve missed a lot of bandwagons that way and I expect to miss more if I live much longer.

But just like there’s garden science, there’s also garden sense. I got that affirmed to me a few weekends ago in a very direct fashion by Carole Reeves, who is my new favorite garden guru lady. If you ever get the chance to hear her, go! for a bracing dose of Southern cattiness crossed with common sense. And sincerity. I watched her bring a roomful of garden geeks—growers and nurserymen and plantswomen with hundreds of years of cumulative experience among them—to the point of tears at the novel notion that that gardeners of many years, working in the laboratory of their yards, should not be afraid to trust their experience and observations. That those, too, are valid and repeatable and “science.”

Looked at one way, if I hewed to the purist creed and kept the trees, I wouldn’t have the pollinators. I wouldn’t have my first pomegranate or figs from my own tree. I wouldn’t be able sit on my porch and listen to the wood thrushes or watch the cardinals at the feeder—because no birds visited before there was a meadow.

Garden sense tells me that the forest on this property was poorly managed and what we did contributed to the health of the whole. Garden sense tells me there are tradeoffs in gardening as in anything else. I didn’t put up a parking lot. I’m working with the web of life to create more life, so why am I whining? Garden sense says sit down, shut up, and enjoy the view…

So I won’t mourn the pines any more. I’ll just keep watching the pollinators.