In Essence

or The Revery Alone Will Do

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

—Emily Dickinson

A small, not particularly interesting glass bottle nestles among the fallen leaves in my garden—one of the "interactive features" I wrote about some time ago.   It is filled with dried foliage and flowers from the summer garden—the musty, honey-scented leaves of catmint and creeping germander, the mild apple of chamomile blossoms, and the clean bite of spearmint.  As I was meandering around outside over the weekend I paused to open the bottle, and like a genie released from confinement, the essence of summer drifted out to greet me.  It spoke dreamily of warm, leisurely afternoons, the feel of a breeze on bare skin, the hum of honeybees in sage blossoms.

I suppose it was the way the dried leaves acted as an aide-mémoire—and possibly the thought of bees—that called Emily Dickinson's recipe for a prairie to mind and set it spinning the last few days.  In her poem a whiff of fragrance, a sound, and inner resource come together to create a vast, fertile expanse of a world, a world as large as the Great Plains with their skies and their meadowlarks, a world of small, secret lives and endless growing grasses.  (Dickinson does not seem to be interested in making a January sort of prairie.)  I love her confidence in the power of reverie—and not only her own but her readers', too.  She fully expects you to be able to create a world from within; she offers you the prompts of clover and bee, but knows that you don't really need them.  She distills prairie life to its essence and then tells you that even that is superfluous.

To create a summer, on the other hand, a little bottle of leaves and the occasional photograph are quite helpful.  Perhaps the process of buying seeds and looking ahead to the growing season is to blame, or maybe the way the dried leaves and seed pods in the garden (the "four-season interest" ones) are starting to get weathered and misshapen, but suddenly things look more than brown here—they look dreary.  The old is ready to give way to the new, or rather, I am ready for it to do so, but patience is still in order.  In the meantime, I suppose reverie will do.

June.

Because bees are few.

Delusions of Grandeur

or In Which We Refuse to Believe That Less Is More

Small dogs have their own burdens to bear.  It can't be easy to have the instincts of a guardian, a large and noble beast, a lion-hearted predator, and then to have the body of, essentially, prey.  One of my neighbors has a toy poodle—a little dust mop of a dog who barks maniacally every time you walk past.  She sounds like she means business until the moment you turn and look at her, at which point you can see her doing some quick math problems in her little head, calculating relative sizes, force vectors, speeds, distances, and levels of irritation.  After a rather painful moment of "ah," she turns tail and runs around the corner, from which point of safety she can resume barking.  But she knows, and you know, and she knows you know, that from then on it's all show, pure bravado with no substance behind it.

When I'm working in the garden, the poodle seems more curious than territorial.  Our houses are separated by a five-foot high concrete wall, which she obviously can't see over, but she can hear me moving around.  She comes over to the wall, puts her nose to the half-inch wide gap between two of the blocks, and sniffs large, purposeful sniffs.  The gap works like an echo-chamber—it magnifies the noise and makes her sound more like a Rottweiler than like a six-pound bundle of fluff and nerves.  It is a sound that does her heart justice; she must find it incredibly satisfying.

I've been taking advantage of mild weather this weekend to wander around the garden and make plans for winter cleanup and spring planting.  In particular I was pondering the microgarden, which is a blank slate at this point.  Normally it would have some cold-weather greens overwintering in it, along with maybe a last carrot or two that I'm saving to brighten a dreary day, and some perennials like chives and bunching onions.  The aphids ran so far amok last fall, though, that I ended up emptying the bed completely and now have the pleasure of refilling the whole thing at once.  I'm contemplating soil mixtures, compost, pest control, organic fertilizers, and other things of that ilk.  Oh, and seeds.

Lots of seeds.

Keep in mind that the microgarden is a two foot by four foot raised bed, divided into about 30 growing cells of different sizes.  It is not a large space; its growing potential may be impressive for its size, but it is hardly what we would call unlimited.  And into these eight square feet, according to my current seed list, I am planning to put twelve varieties of greens; two kinds each of carrots,  radishes, and onions; peppers, squash, garlic, cucumbers, Chinese long beans, tomatillos, basil, marigolds...

I was sitting on the blue bench in the garden being serenaded by the ferocious sniffing of poodles while I looked over the seed list, when suddenly the absurdity of it hit me and I burst out laughing.  (Maniacal barking from across the wall.)  Apparently miniature dogs aren't the only ones with delusions of grandeur.  Are three varieties of chard and four of amaranth really necessary to my health and happiness?  Chinese long beans may be a good idea for a small space in principle, but is a ten-foot tall vine (starting from three feet off the ground) really going to be all that easy to harvest?  Will all of these tall plants really be able to grow in such a small area without shading each other?  Do I really expect this to be the year that squash vine borers and cucumber beetles leave my squash and cucumbers alone? 

Well, really, the answer to all of those questions is, "No."  But what does reality have to do with gardening?  Okay, with results, sure, maybe a lot, but with the hopes and dreams of seed buying?  With winter plans? With the visions of bounty that tide us through the colder months, of vine leaves spilling prolifically over the sides of the garden, of the earthy sweetness of baby carrots, of the scent of basil as you accidentally brush against a leaf, of the gleam of marigolds against the greenery?  Reality has just enough to do with those visions to keep me dreaming big dreams—Rottweiler dreams, wolf dreams.

But it's still just a miniature poodle garden.