the miserable gardener

It’s taken me all day long to plant three one-gallon rabbitbrushes. I probably wouldn’t last long working for a landscaping company.

The recent upheaval here has meant saying goodbye to a lot of old friends, but also goodbte to some plants for which I had developed an intense dislike, if not outright loathing. No names mentioned, of course. It’s nice that I have neighbors who will take the cast-offs.

I was distracted spending at least an hour trying to figure out what was making a weird meowing sound in the chokecherry; it was, of course, a catbird. Trying to determine what had upset it so much took at least another hour; the only thing I could find was a large branch of a Siberian elm, planted in the open space by my neighbor, that had grown over the fence in about a week. It upset me, too.

On our walk this morning, the only really exciting part of an otherwise uneventful day (the way life should be, if you ask me) was the realization that we were passing by the ultimate companion plant for rabbitbrush. Here it is.

This is me, bowing in absolute submission to the reality of the conditions in my back yard. The rabbitbrushes were on sale.

“The once lovely English-style border, replete with old roses, irises, crocosmias, and various other things that delight the connoisseur has been transformed into a revolting melange of straggly, scrawny things that most people would mow down to the ground. Inclusion of that stockmen’s horror, the awful rabbitbrush, strikes us as an offense to the integrity of the American garden.”

Not to mention that it needed watering once a day, and didn’t get it.

In truth, the North Border–the horticultural equivalent of the House of the Rising Sun–has been a graveyard for so many plants it frightens me to think of the money sunk into it. Rabbitbrush to the rescue, even if it means visitors shudder when they walk past.

“Pray for the safety of the mind.” —Jack Kerouac