Butt-ugly garden

I try, lord knows I try, to be the sort of mother who contributes in a meaningful way to my childrens' schools. I bake cookies for the fundraising events. I help with field trips. I go to as many of sporting events, Christmas concerts and parent nights as I possibly can. One year I even volunteered to be the assistant coach for my eldest daughter's intramural softball team; I knew nothing about softball.

And still I feel guilty about not joining the "parent organization" of Abby, Elias and Fiona's school. Since I'm a housewife, shouldn't this be part of my job description, joining the parent organization? For where would our schools be without the dedicated service and fundraising abilities of (let's face it) mostly moms?

But I just can't do it. I'm not the PTO type and furthermore I loath meetings. So I try to make up for going all MIA at the PTO but taking on other, shall we say, more esoteric tasks. For example: I spied some gardening that needed to happen in front of Elias's middle school and I volunteered -- just like that, I volunteered! no one had to ask -- to do it.

As a dedicated 20-year veteran of both flower and vegetable gardening, it's always been hard for me to witness bad gardening or its worse counterpart, no gardening at all. Elias's school ostensibly came into a small windfall and embarked on a fancy stonework project outside the front door of the building. Surrounding this fancy stonework patio are (were?) empty gardens. This sort of thing never ceases to fascinate me: why go to the trouble and expense of an elaborate improvement project if you are not going to populate areas of bare earth with plants? Hardscape with no landscape is soulless, sterile.

I hate soulless and sterile and so I was not going to stand for it. I was going to fill that space with the pluckiest of the thousands of babies my own plants here at home have made over the course of this gardening season! During the ensuing days, in my time that is growing ever more spare by the year, I scoured the extensive gardens around my house for butterfly garden volunteers. I found bee balm and echinacea, gaillardia, black-eyed Susan and nepeta, caryopteris, and baby butterfly bushes (purple and white!) galore. I dug up four large patches of a beautiful double daylily, and two large patches of an heirloom baptisia plant. I even delicately pulled up 10 tiny, tender dill volunteers from the vegetable bed, reasoning -- no doubt way too optimistically -- that they might get large enough this fall to leave seed for next year's bed that would grow into the fragrant plants that are a favorite of swallowtail butterflies.

Then after I did this, I transported everything, along with all the tools necessary to plant, over to the school and spent three hours placing everything just so and rationing water that I had brought over myself (since I could finagle no access to the spigots on the side of the building). I recorded my work via a sketch of what went where. I slipped that in the mail to the director and assistant director of the middle school. When a September heatwave hit over the next six days after planting, I found the school's facilities manager, got a "key" to the spigot, hauled over a double length of hose and watered every day for four days. I planted 150 spring bulbs. After the heatwave passed, I replanted a number of the plants that had croaked from the combination of heat and unspeakably crappy soil available in the new gardens.

I was a hero.

Except that I wasn't.

We serious gardeners are a deluded lot. And we forget -- quite frequently actually -- that most people have no clue what, exactly, we are up to. This, I suspect, is what has happened at the middle school. I look at my garden, about $2,000 worth of future landscaping art, and see color, form, and scent that that will attract delighted people (even the young ones, though they will be hard-pressed to explain it) and hungry butterflies in equal measure (see picture at left!). The people who run the school, however, look at my garden and see partially dead twigs and sub-microscopic plant matter. They are, understandably, dubious. It is difficult for gardening laypersons to visualize possibility when all the beauty is currently underground. I have tried to explain this: "Just you wait until spring," I say with a fist pump and a cheerful grin. But all I get in return are dubious looks and polite nods.

So. No one is patting me on the back or offering congratulatory high fives for a job well done. Instead, they slink by me as I work, offering wan smiles of toleration, as if to say, "We'd really like to go out and buy 14 yew shrubs and a couple holly bushes to fill in this space, but we're going to humor you Linda." I know that somewhere, at some point, there has been a hastily convened meeting held in hushed whispers about how best to get rid of the garden without offending the paying parent who planted it. As they talk, mystified at the guerilla gardening that has happened to their school, they ask one another, "Why can't she just be on the PTO?'

I suspect my garden is embarrassing the school powers-that-be. How can they offer tours of the middle school to prospective families when they must trot these people by this butt-ugly abomination that is masquerading as a garden? Consequently, I'm aware that my garden is living on borrowed time. It better perform next spring, or it's goodbye butterfly garden/hello yew and holly shrubbery.

No matter. I find myself in the undesirable position of having spontaneously committed a radom act of gardening that is now being viewed as substandard, maybe even subversive. Volunteerism for the rest of this year, until the 150 daffodil bulbs I planted make their appearance next April, will consist of me setting up a blind around the corner of the school nurse's office and defending my garden against those who would steal upon it after the late buses leave at 5 when all becomes quiet, and silently tromple and/or wrest my babies from the earth.

I take heart in knowing that soon snow will cover the earth in question. Consternation over ugly-duckling gardens will give way to worry about icy sidewalks and winter parking issues. Before they even know what hit 'em, spring will bring my garden to life and those middle school adminstrators will have people exclaiming over their fabulous butterfly gardens. I will present my back for patting; then I'll get back to work in the garden.

Comments

[debbie]

Very well done! I love this entry and I love the story. Your gardens amaze me and those school administrators are lucky to have you, and if they need me to I'll tell them that to their faces:)

[Jordan AJF8]

r u often luxuriating in sunshine in the garden?