World Piece

 Plot and plan, the infamous words behind conspiracy, seem to be the most fitting way to describe how I'm spending my summer. I've become so obsessed with my plot in life, or actually with gardening plans for it, I run to the windows as soon as I wake up. I stare into the planted spaces when I should be writing. I spend hours moving plants and earth, telling myself "this is your exercise instead of a boring gym."

I know this is ridiculous when I have really important matters to tend to, like getting rich slowly. That would definitely help me pay my bills. Frankly, they have become considerable thanks to my addiction to plants. I am unable to drive by a nursery without turning in. Even though I promise myself I won't-- I just won't succumb to temptation again, I helplessly watch my car do it. Not me, mind you, the car. And if I don't come out with plants, I end up with stacks of compost or mulch or topsoil bags that I can barely lift. People say: at least it's not drugs.

Actually, one of the reasons I truly have to go to nurseries so much is that I am a serial killer. I stick innocent, bushy plants into ground that turns out to be so acidic, with shocking speed it fries flowers like daisies and herbs like lavender that need alkaline soil. My ground is also so full of clay, I have consigned all the plants' roots to a cement prison. No wonder so many perennials and bushes stood stunted or withered. Not one strawberry off of a dozen everbearing plants. To add to the misery, I have a perpetual water shortage and no spot of full sun.

My policy is: whatever survives, buy more of it, lots more. That's how I learned hydrangeas are Nature's greatest gift to challenged gardeners: they generously thrive in shade and clay and acid to burst with long lasting bloom. I now have 14: reds, whites and blues.

But of course there has to be more to life than happy hydrangeas. It's taken time to figure out what distress dooms the other plants: the shade or the soil or the sere. I feel it's my duty to dig in to rescue what's still alive and struggling, to put it somewhere else. I feel like a true Bodhisattva. Maybe I can't save the world, but a plant is part of it.

Then I decide: no, that plants belongs over here or down there. I do so much re-arranging of re-arrangement, some of my plants move around more than a Bedouin nomad. Unfortunately, plants prefer to stay put and try to make a go of it. Immigration is not their thing. Perpetual re-lo debilitates the roots and slowly kills them, which of course "forces" me to drive back to a nursery for replacements. I'm on my fourth red lobelia but it's finally in the one shady wetspot I found, or rather the straggly one-stem remains of the fourth are.

The other problem is appearance. What looked right one day looks dreadful another, like an Arab country these days. It's the colors or the shapes or the height or the girth that suddenly seem wrong. My dictates didn't work. Sometimes the purple I expected turns out to be pinkish and clashes with the red next to it. Sometimes a plant that supposedly can tolerate a little shade distorts itself trying to reach full sun. One liatris has a swan's neck and the other has no flower stalk at all. They are demanding change.

Three Montauk daisies had the gall to grow into bushes and shade out the campanulas, which I have had to find new space for. Dung covered beetles munch away the leaves of my Asiatic lilies, so I moved bushy plants in front of them. Who knew these would up and grow taller than those lilies? They just defied expectations. Out they went. To another spot, which of course, required rearranging the astilbes.

It's amazing that there's always something else to fix. A yard is unending motion. I just had a huge tree cut down and suddenly there is full sun in spots. Of course I rushed to take advantage of that, madly moving plants into those spots. Buoyed by that home improvement, I found gypsum pellets, expensive pellets, to break up the clay soil, and now I am stubbornly digging up every plant I ever put in the ground to get them underneath. It's backbreaking work, but at least it should make a difference--supposedly. There will be more motion, the kind we call progress.

Making a difference is, I guess, the point. Getting it right has become, to quote the title of a bad old movie, a magnificent obsession. I am  fiercely determined to get my yard to look...to look...to look like it's so well arranged, there's no room for improvement. You know, the sort of thing the American government spent gazillions of our dollars trying to do in Afghanistan with results no different than mine.

After two months of struggle, I was starting to think I might at last be getting somewhere--remission accomplished, and could stop being so obsessed. Then, as life would have it, a friend took me to the botanical garden, and there was the unreachable ideal realized, heaven here on Earth--right here so damningly close to my piece of it, I had no excuse for the wrongdoing mess. At that garden, every last leaf and stem was in such harmony with every other leaf and stem in size, shape and sun or shade, the whole place screamed "inevitable." That's what perfection is: nothing more to change. I came home and immediately wanted to rip everything at my place out of the ground. 

I have so much else to worry about and accomplish but instead I'm madly reorganizing my garden. I'm once again spending too much time staring out the windows, circling on tour with coffee in my hand, ripping out of the ground, transplanting and transporting. When one of Rinpoche's most precious lamas told me to meditate more, I know this is not what he had in mind, but maybe meditation is what I am doing. 

The world is an absolute mess of wrongdoing. Minds as fixed as cement, thoughts as pernicious as fungus and pestilence, the drought of compassion that waters the roots of life, the elected President who shriveled in the acid soil of politics, the unelected moneymen who unexpectedly grew bushy enough to shade out the sun, these terrible times have kept us all from growing strong enough to bloom. But how can I re-arrange any of that to make it right?

I obsessively plan my own plot. I'm out in the garden, day after day, too many hours after hour, a conspirator at work. I am as desperate as everybody else to fix the morass we're in, but all I can do right now is keep re-arranging my little millimeter of the world, trying to achieve the inevitable harmony that means at least something is as it should be and there's no change to believe in.

 P.S. Three days after I wrote this, two days after back breaking soil turning and plant moving, just when I thought I was done, the Japanese beetles moved in. In case you don't know, Japanese beetles are the Tea Party/Taliban on the garden circuit. They arrive on the scene and immediately set about destroying everything they can get their teeth on. Theirs is a scorched earth policy and I'm now madly engaged in...in...well in...standing my ground. I've become a killing machine. But then Japanese beetles have even less redeeming social value than the likes of George Zimmerman.


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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