Garden-Attention

What's growing out there with the weeds

Boat, tent, valley, vision. An alternate route, the way taken in dream.

Waking to rain, dark grey, sensations of closeness, camping, cabin as everything out there gets drenched in downpour, lit up by lightning, street-side tree canopy riding out the storm, this big quick one, one of many that will pass over today, and in between there’s sun and heat, porch weather, the air holding the moisture right up close to the skin, stuffing it down the rigging of lungs, making words slight and thoughts slighter, everything around easily dodging my feeble human attempts at articulation: all the species of bug busy at the milkweed—and in the days previous, busy at the raspberry flowers—that I will not transcribe here or anywhere, except the eight-spotted forester moth, kaleidoscopic white spots on black wings that flutter too fast for human perception, and the full cargo pockets of the bees.

Earlier, during raspberry flowering, the bumble bees were the size of baby mice, diligent through volunteer canes completely taken over the bed, save for a bit of sage still coming up beneath, and there’s another crop of errant canes at the base of the ailing saskatoon, and another around the side of the house that survived trampling from a new fencepost going in after storm, and another small splotch creeping up from under the shed. The canes that were under the spruce are gone, leapt away through that fence, as raspberries are wont to do. If they don’t like it here, they move.

It’s a good year for berries, and a good year for the errant sprouts coming up thick in the beds with the tomatoes and cucumbers. The garden shows so plainly what goes on inside the mind of its human, and I’m in a false-dichotomous push-pull of moral quandary re the vigorous growth of the unintended. I smother in patches with whatever mulch is at hand. I hear of a theory and test it out one morning. I protect loosely and go with what happens. I defend my plantings. I leave things for days. I let the vigorous be vigorous, let the floundering flounder. I pay attention. I play favourites. I side with the weeds in spots. I pick and thin. I draw lines, intuit limits. I make no overt aesthetic determinations. I pull by hand that which tries to monocrop. Those pushy purple flower stalks I can never remember the name of. Garlic mustard pulled and put in a salad. Motherwort, creeping Charlie, ragweed. I let them in: citified, suburbinated, crudscaped, industrial parked, living near the effluent.

Oh how the nibbling creatures love the corn and sunflowers, the young, watery roots of the gourds. I’ve imprisoned my beds in chicken wire due to rabbits. My carrot seeds haven’t done a damn thing this year. My trusty arugula and kale and hakurei turnips, seeds roughly gleaned each fall; I barely have to do anything. They’ve got me, my affection and attention. And all the beans, a treasury of beans, beans of this place, which I’m still tucking into the ground. I’m getting to know the story around here. Every quick turn of summer. Every quick tilt of the planet making me thankful for rain, thankful as species, thankful in exhaust and exhaustion.