Harbingers of Spring

Well, the crocuses are up. Here in Indianapolis they are, anyway; I have no way of knowing where you are reading this. So you’ll have to take my word for it. They’re up. To some, like my dear friend B__ who just can’t wait to get out in the yard, the plentiful signs of spring energize them to get out and get their hands dirty in the good earth.

Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who easily commune with the soil. It’s not that I despise those who do; it’s just that I look upon mucking about in the dirt as an acquired taste. Goodness knows, my parents tried. My mother grew up on a farm, and diligently tried to teach me the glories of being out in the fresh air, working in one’s own little plot of dirt.

To my young mind, though, the hours spent outside were merely hours that I could have been holed up in my bedroom, deeply engrossed in one of the thirty or so library books that I had just checked out. The offer of money to help weed the garden didn’t really help matters any; I decided that the gardening couldn’t be all that glorious if they had to pay me to do it.

I made forays, though: little pots of pansies that bloomed in profusion for sometimes as long as three weeks before they died; raising chickens for 4-H, chickens that made dodo birds look bright; planting roses that looked good until I neglected them for one day, after which they never fully recovered.

So it was that I made the leap into owning a home with a yard. The first two homes that held my dear husband and I didn’t require much yardwork. One was an apartment with just the merest smidge of green between the wall and the sidewalk; the next was a big house just down from a bar, with a fenced yard consisting solely of dirt, rocks, crabgrass and broken glass.

But then we bought a house. It’s a lovely yellow house, and the porch light twinkles so dearly from the end of the street when we are coming home, and it has a sweet little ornamental crab tree smack-dab in the middle of the little apron of grass that stretches to the walk. I thought to myself, ‘How perfect! The shrubs will just need pruned from time to time; the same with the trees. Very low-maintenance. Perfect!’

And indeed, for the first year we lived in the house, I was very pleased with how little we had to do to the yard. Except that I felt a little niggling of dissatisfaction each time I climbed the steps and passed the barren little brick bed that lay half-hidden in the grass in front of one big bushy evergreen. My friend, B__, had some mums that she was going to divide. Did I want some?

Mums! Of course I wanted some. Lovely little plants with lilac flowers, they would just fill the little bed. I would just pull those little weeds out of the way and water them every once in a while, and they would be fine. They were lovely, too. The splash of lilac set off the dark green shrubs quite nicely.

I should have stopped there, of course. But the thing was that after I finished walking up the steps, appreciating the delightful lilac mums, I would glance down to my left and behold a weedy patch of long grass that sloped down to the driveway behind the tall shrubs. The soil was beginning to erode from the porch, I noted. Really, something should be done, I told myself. And hadn’t I just read about using terraced beds to conserve soil?

I armed myself with decorative edging and a trowel and set about planting perennial wildflowers. Of the seeds I put out, with much labor and effort, two-thirds of them were eaten by the darling little sparrows that apparently thought that I was laying an elaborate gourmet dinner to welcome them to my home. Sadly, I did not realize this until halfway through the growing season, when I finally realized that many of the plants that I had fondly hoped would eventually blossom into a reward for my efforts were, in fact, ragweed, to which I am allergic. I could scarcely bring myself to venture out to yank all of them up, though, until another dear friend, in commenting on the wild things that were flourishing on my hillside, remarked that I could probably grow marijuana in there without anyone being the wiser.

Tired of mucking about in the front, though, I had bought yet more edging and outlined a placid kidney-shaped flowerbed in the back yard, and a rectangular bed next to the fence. And they were lovely. I had red and white and pink and purple wildflowers all summer long. Encouraged by this, I eagerly passed the cold Indiana winter dreaming of the lovely flowers that I would put out in spring.

I tackled the hill first, determined not to be outwitted by the flora or the fauna this year. That was until I removed the first spadeful of earth, to be greeted by thousands, millions, tens of millions of ants pouring from the small gash in the hillside. Gentle prodding across the surface revealed that here was a colony the side of Rhode Island, all nestled around the base of my porch.

The mums in the front flower bed died. I replaced them with geraniums, which almost immediately went leggy and sprawled out on the ground next to each other, putting a lie to my claims that I had fertilized them and watered them and spoken kindly and gently to them (I had, really).

Nor was that the end of my misfortune. I planted wildflower seeds along with a few bulbs in the backyard. I planted them in mid-spring; perfect timing, no more frost. I followed the directions exactly, spreading the seeds with their covering of mulch and fertilizer evenly on the ground. The next three days we had record rain, followed by weeks of drought. Not one flower came up. By the end of the summer, I had managed to raise volunteer corn from the squirrel food in the feeder, and one huge thistle plant.

So this March I am steering clear of the greenhouse areas in the department stores, and I am valiantly ignoring the little neglected brick flowerbed in the front yard. This year we will play croquet in between the stalks of bamboo that stubbornly return despite my ministering attentions, and we will wander past the Katherine Rowland Memorial Thistle, surrounded by the cereal grasses that the birds considerately sow for me. I am telling people that I am trying to return part of the suburban yard to its natural state, but you and I know the truth: the flora and fauna have won.