March 30, 2018 – Disappointment and surprise in the garden

         Wire grass!  I have to admit, it has worn me out and I give up.  I am going to “let it go home to Mombasa,” in a give-up on something when I have tried my best to get it to work. [I am alluding to the scene where the character, Karen Blixen, in the movie Out of Africa is standing in the rain and the dam is breaking and she stops her natives from shoring up the dam and acquiesces to letting the dam dissolve into the water flowing to Mombasa.]

         Well, that is how I feel about the ugly green rectangular well house in the front lawn. I hate it. Everyone on our street hates theirs – as that is where the health department placed them in relation to our septic system and leach fields.  First, I tried shrubs around it to camouflage it.  That worked okay until the shrubs go so big my husband could not mow around it. Those were yanked out and I cut out the sod, which was predominantly wiregrass and built up a two-foot wide garden around the square well house.  I tried spring tulips and iris.  Still, the wire grass persisted. It has been a running battle with the wiregrass for several years now.  You can’t spray it to kill it or deter it in any way that I have found.  It simply re-grows or sweeps in from the lawn similar to Kudzu.

         The last round – a few years ago – I put out 48 orange tiger lilies. The well house garden looked good for the few weeks around the Fourth of July for a few years.  But, still, I was weeding every month trying to keep the wire grass from encroaching.

         Then, last October, the gardens were neglected for almost a month because of my tending to my Mom’s house, breaking down her household and cleaning out the house and getting it ready for market.  Nothing was done down here for one month, then another month.

         That was all it took; two months of wire grass and swoosh – thick as an expensive Mohawk carpet right up to the well house and even mounding up in waves, as it wants to swallow the well house whole.

         Underneath that luxurious mat of wiregrass were 100 or so orange tiger lilies asleep through this wet winter. Walking the dog, I have noticed the bulbs glossy green foliage poking up out of the wiregrass mixed with contrasting clumps of soft lamb’s ears.  I studied the wiregrass knowing I would have a battle on my hands in the spring.

         Yesterday was the skirmish with the wiregrass carpet and it won.  I sat back on my heels after I’d weeded the henbit and other succulent weeds that love to run and take over the four-inch growth of the lilies and around the lamb’s ear clumps.  Two hours and all that I was able to accomplish was pulling the succulent weeds out of the well house circle. I netted a full wheelbarrow of weeds and came to a realization. “I am done with this garden.”  The now tan wire grass has a few little green tips protruding, but when you try to pull it out – it is fixed as if in cement.  I stood up and dusted off my knees and with hands on my hips I finally said aloud to no one but myself, “Forget it, let it go home to Mombasa”.  I’ve knocked my head against this problem for several years now and it is not worth the time and effort.

         It is always hard for me to swallow failure.  The rest of this season, I will be merely going along and cutting the wiregrass down, by hand in and around the lilies so that they successfully bloom and then allow the stems to mature.  In the late fall I will take a pick axe and dig up the lilies and plant them somewhere else and then leave this well house unadorned and UGLY for rest of my gardening days.  It is not worth the effort – I have to chock it up to failure.

         I walked around to another part of the garden hoping to find something to cheer me up after such a failure.

         It didn’t take long.  I went down to the Zen garden and found my Siberian Iris are coming up nicely.  I was delighted to find the Colchicums that were planted two years ago making a showing. [See my October 10, 2016 – Surprises in the Fall Garden - blog for the history of these bulbs.]

         I planted these in the fall of 2016 and in the spring of 2017, I could hardly find them.  I wasn’t sure if moles had eaten them or possibly deer.  I spotted only a handful of leaves and was about to yank them out. But, my sentimentality got the best of me and I thought, the few that are left, might actually get bigger in a few years.  Let me wait and see.

         Fast forward to yesterday.  Lush strappy green leaves, I counted 18 or 20 when I had planted 28 [to match my calendar birthday].  WOW, how nice – I hope to get a lovely show this fall when they show off their pretty pinky purple petals.

         My big failure was softened by a lovely surprise.  That is the nature of the full cycle of a gardener’s life; a disappointment on one thing, then a lovely surprise from another.

Even though I have been gardening now for decades, I’ve got to learn to take it all in stride and press on with renewed optimism.

Happy Easter to you.

A fresh spring brings forth fresh optimism

in this old gardener.