Digging In

"Today we finish the garden!" I said pulling on my work boots--again--and putting on my soil-encrusted baseball cap--again.

"You said that last weekend," Mr Wonderful mumbled rubbing his shoulder. "And the weekend before that. And the--"

"Today is different."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm tired of being dirty."

We'd worked on it for a whole month. Every weekend was devoted to doing something in the front yard: 1) Creating the Pétanque court; 2) Planting the natives and drought-tolerant plants; 3) Weeping that it was taking so long.

So single-handedly I decided that today--yes TODAY!--was the final day. 

My garden design had a three-prong approach:

Close to the house I had a bed of purple lavender and a bed of purple and white lantana. In the middle we built the honey-colored Pétanque court. Along the street we planted the California natives that were so small they didn't show up in pictures now, but next year! Just wait! They'll be huge!

At the half dozen nurseries I shopped at, I picked the biggest, healthiest drought-tolerant plants. Unfortunately when I got them home and in the ground, they looked itty-bitty. 

Here's the lantana BEFORE going into the ground.

Here's the lantana AFTER going into the ground. Sigh.

Then we watered and mulched everything we'd planted. Plants love nothing better than being snuggled under a bed of rotting leaves and decomposing tree bark, which you have to disperse while doing a downward facing dog pose. Ah! Gardening is so glamorous!

Then we created a path of stepping stones to walk from the Pétanque court to the front walk sprinkling Dymondia, aka "Silver Carpet" among them.

So here's the plant list: 

Manzanita, Cleveland Sage, Salvia, Wooly Blue Curls, Verbena, Blue Fescue, Dymondia, Buckwheat, Dragon's Blood, Lavender, Yellow Bladder Pod (yes, that is a real plant) and Aloe.

As the sun was spreading pink and melon colors across the evening sky, we finished the garden. Finito. I stood up and tossed my soiled garden gloves in the wheelbarrow. Mr. Wonderful looked at me and laughed.

"You're covered in dirt," he said.

"Well get a good look because this is the end of me being dirty." 

"What do you mean?"

"Last one in the pool is a rotten egg!"

That evening the pool never felt better.

Losing Lavender

“Summertime,” I said reclining on the outdoor lounger.

“Hmm,” Mr. Wonderful said from his garden chair.

“Look at our geraniums, the bird of paradise, the rosemary—” 

“Hmm.”

“Everything’s gorgeous and blooming!”

“Not the dead lavender.”

“What?!”

I first experienced lavender traveling through the South of France with Mr. Wonderful.  Together we witnessed the endless fields blanketing the region in a purple haze and lending the air a sweetly clean fragrance.  It was there that we fell in love… with lavender.  For our honeymoon we returned to the South of France to confirm our love… for lavender.  After spending those blissful weeks together we knew it would be a lifetime love affair…with lavender.

Lucky for us Southern California’s climate was similar to that of the South of France, minus the French snobs.  Instead we had Hollywood OMG wanna-bes.  Life's full of trade-offs. 

Horticulturalists call our SoCal region “Lavender and Lazy”, which comes from their planting recommendations: 1) You plant lavender; 2) You do nothing to it ever again.  Lazy is me!  What a fun garden plan!  Vive la lavande!  After we bought The House I ripped out a whole garden bed and replanted it with lavender—an entire bed of only lavender.  Just sniffing the air transported me back to our honeymoon where we fell madly in love…with lavender. 

The plants grew in the spring and thrived until June, which is exactly when we added one more lavender plant to the bed.  That lone plant came from the nursery with some brown stems on it.  Mr. Wonderful said the brown would go away with some watering.  By August the brown stems had overtaken the entire loner plant, and spread to six others transforming them into tumbleweed skeletons.  Worst of all was that the brown was creeping toward our remaining 10 healthy plants.

OMG.  I needed a fix.  Fast. 

Online I found websites dedicated to the plant, like Lavenders-B-Us.com, which had an active community of lavender lovers who posted hourly updates about their purple plants with Instagram photos.  When I explained my dead situation and how it was spreading, the site’s posters all said the same thing, “You’re watering too much.”

“Impossible”, I said under my breath then read on—

“Maine summers are moist—”  Maine?!  I stopped in my tracks.  Maine’s rainy climate is ideal for growing rocks, in fact some of the finest rocks in North America are grown there.  But not lavender.  Scouring the website I noticed that everyone posting on Lavenders-B-Us resided along the Atlantic coast where a “Summer” in Maine was like the wettest winter in Southern California.  And a “Winter” in Maine was a dark, cold, frightful nightmare.  There’s a reason Stephen King lived and wrote in Maine and not sunny southern California. 

After another Google search I found a California gardener’s website specifically for southern California lavender.  In answer to my problem every gluten-free person posting on that site said the same thing, “You’re watering too little.” 

“Impossible,” I said biting into my gluten-free hummus pita-wrap sandwich. 

“Southern California summers are hot—”  I know but they are the same type of dry, hot summers that have been happening in the Mediterranean region for thousands of years.  Watering too little?  When was the last time anyone read a story of Zeus or Hercules where they watered their lavender?  How about in The Iliad or The Odyssey—neither one mentioned watering lavender because lavender was ideally suited to the bone dry, hot summers Italy, Greece and Turkey have known since before Zeus, Homer or Jesus ever picked up a garden trowel.

Besides Mr. Wonderful and I used a drip hose on the lavender.  They got the water they needed. 

No, another problem was afflicting my lavender and the answer originated with one root.  The loner plant we brought home from the nursery had been tainted with a virus condition called “Wilt”, which was described as a “rapid wilting, browning and dying to lavender plants during the month of August.”  The only method to deal with Wilt was to remove the infected plants, the soil surrounding them and burn them.

Who said planting lavender was lazy?  Or gardening was fun?

This week I put on my gloves, gripped the shovel and removed the (now) 12 infected plants plus the surrounding soil.  Without them my lavender garden resembled a scorched volcano site; not the frolicking grounds of Greek gods, mythological heroes or French snobs. 

What I would give to see a French snob in my garden!

Not all love stories end happily.  I fell in love with lavender and… it broke my heart.  OMG.

New Year's Superstition

“Look what I found,” Mr. Wonderful said dropping a small plastic statue in my lap as I knelt in a mound of earth.  We’d spent two days digging out the prickly, ragged, 50 year-old holly bushes from the front yard and now on a sunny day in late December, we were replanting the bed in a dozen lavender bushes. 

The statue, just three inches tall, depicted a man in robes holding a jug in his right hand and a tool in his left.  “It’s St. Joseph,” I said.  “Jesus’ step-father.”

Growing up Catholic in the Midwest the gardens of my mother, grandmother and their friends all contained saint statues.  St. Francis for the animals, the Blessed Virgin Mary for suffering mothers with teenage daughters and Jesus for everything, especially suffering mothers with teenage daughters.  The only saint statue not visible in a Catholic woman’s garden was St. Joseph because he was buried in it.

A carpenter by trade, St. Joseph was said to protect homes (not just the wooden ones) and their inhabitants.  If a resident sank a St. Joe statue outside the house he’d provide them protection and luck as long as they lived in it.

This tiny statue had been in the garden when we bought the house, moved into it and for the past few months had lived in it.  And up ‘til now we’d been safe and happy.  The statue wasn’t hurting anything and—just maybe—was protecting us. 

“Bury him again,” I said handing St. Joseph to Mr. Wonderful.

“You’re superstitious,” Mr. Wonderful said raising an eyebrow.

“Am not,” I said, Catholic guilt washing over me. 

“Gardens are for plants,” he said decisively and tossed the saint into a bucket of rocks.

Then it started.  The next day I couldn’t find my keys (the only set!) to the laundry room.  Then my beloved Steel Casey desk chair broke.  On New Year’s Day, the harbinger of what’s to come for the next 12 months, I walked out the front door and stepped into a pile of cat vomit.  Not my pet’s vomit but the sickly pink and yellow chunks of a feral cat I didn’t know. 

“Where is he?” I asked, my voice cracking with fear.  “Where’s St. Joseph?” 

“I thought you weren’t superstitious—”

“I’m not.  I’m just tired of my life falling apart!”

Rushing out to the garage I dumped out the green garbage bin and at the bottom found his white plastic form.

Beside a blooming lavender plant in the front yard I dug a hole and placed St. Joseph in it, carefully covering his pristine whiteness with fresh dark soil.  I even watered the spot so he could put down roots.

That evening dressing for a sushi dinner with friends, I slipped on a black blazer and in the left pocket my hand curled around the cold metal of the laundry room keys.  The next day, I schlepped my broken writing chair to Rose Upholstery in Hollywood, where they reaffixed the chair to its base and recovered it in a beautiful light cream vinyl making it look better than it had before the break.  Then arriving home from work I noticed dozens of feral cat footprints among our newly planted lavenders.  But no poop or vomit. 

Now St. Joseph’s roots to our house and my roots to the house were intertwined.  Thankfully, our home and garden were once again under his protection.  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  

If you don’t believe me, I dare you to try living without him yourself.