Before you know what’s happening, you’ve been drawn through the looking glass, hit 88mph in the DeLorean, swallowed the red pill, and entered another dimension. When you go to your local big box home store you unconsciously park near the Garden Center even if you’re only buying drywall screws. Especially if you’re only buying drywall screws.
You have nightmares of grappling with garden hoses all night. You have a hard time reconciling the disparity in the Gentle Spray setting between nozzle manufacturers. You find yourself during a staff meeting at work wondering if an Empress Wu hosta will be too big for that prime spot next to the deck and then you decide you’d better buy three. That bed needs to be larger. “Maybe some astilbe. Rip out that arbor vitae and just plant the whole thing in shade plants. Better start tonight after work. Why not just leave work early and get started on it?”
One day you are stunned to realize that you bleed MiracleGro green, you own five pairs of gardening gloves (you need gloves for three seasons), six pruning shears including a “really good” one that you rarely use so it will stay sharp, five different types of shovels, and you seriously consider insulating your house with mulch. What you don’t realize is that your neighbor has avoided you ever since you called her Indian Hawthorne a Rhaphiolepsis indica.
How did this happen? Most people are content to simply be the caretaker of the lawn and landscaping they took possession of with their home. These are the fortunate ones. For the rest of us we stumble blindly into a world of impossible expectations and endless frustration punctuated by fleeting moments of transfixed elation.
We can break down the taxonomy of the obsessive practitioners of yard arts and sciences into three distinct classes: the Grass Herder, the Productivity Expert, and the Verdant Visionary. All three practitioners have something positive about them, but then people loose perspective and just become wackos.
The Grass Herder
Close your eyes and think of the color green. No, really green. Really, really green. Those of you who thought of a Heineken bottle are dismissed. For the rest of you, does that mental image of a green that’s greener than green have a crisscross pattern in it, maybe a diamond shape? In February are you wondering if it’s too early for Scotts Step One? What if you shoveled the snow off the lawn and put chains on the tires on your Scotts Turf Builder Edgeguard DLX Broadcast Spreader? This is your group.
I equate the effort to achieve the ideal suburban lawn with herding cattle, or sheep, or anything else that is herdable (word?) like weary commuters waiting for the train home at the end of the day. In fact, the process of herding grass or sheep is the same: feed them, water them, shear them, and encourage them to propagate.
The goal of the Grass Herder is to attain absolute uniformity at a high level of performance throughout the lawn. Think Olympic Synchronized Swimming except in extreme slow motion and in your front yard. Any single unit of grass in the herd must mimic every other unit of grass to the highest possible standards. It won’t do to have one part of the lawn achieve perfection while a few square feet in the shade of a tree slacks off. Every square inch must be perfect or the whole lawn is a disgrace, your kids will be embarrassed and call you Uncle Bob in front of their friends.
Grass Herders are known to talk to their lawns, usually at night while the rest of the world is asleep. Grass has a short attention span and is easily distracted, so Grass Herders are the motivational speakers of the yard arts and sciences. Think Herb Brooks’ “Miracle on Ice” speech to the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. “Great moments are born from great opportunity, and that’s what we have here tonight.” After a particularly frustrating day of aerating and fertilizing with composted cow manure, a savvy Lawn Herder can always uncork George C. Scott’s famous speech from the movie Patton: “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” If that doesn’t get the attention of the reluctant grass shoots in the herd, nothing will.
Grass Herders are competitive, even cut-throat. “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying” is their motto. They don’t even try to conceal their reliance on performance enhancing substances. A neighborhood BBQ with two or more Grass Herders standing around the smoker, beer in hand, is as close to simulated warfare as a civilized suburban neighborhood can have. The sneering innuendo, accusations of sabotage, and toxic sarcasm can ruin the afternoon for the rest of the crowd but no one cares about their stupid lawns and considers them all to be overgrown adolescents.
The Productivity Expert
The Productivity Expert is the clinician of the yard arts and sciences. They are methodical, precise, secretive, anti-social, and egomaniacal. They never admit defeat but are often victimized by the incompetence of others or by the treachery of Nature. Reports of others having greater success can send them into a rage which then plummets them into despair, so they listen to Kraftwerk and electronic dance music that repeats endlessly and thumps and throbs with urgency for inspiration.
The Productivity Expert keeps journals filled with records of seeds used, the dates seeds were planted in peat pots and placed under grow lamps, a calendar for transplanting outside along with prevailing weather conditions, average day and night temperature, yield measured in units and average weight, overall visual appeal, texture, and taste, etc. The same kinds of notes kids make comparing chicken nuggets served at every single restaurant visited during a family vacation.
The Productivity Expert is driven by pride and is never above conducting surveillance operations against others. Hidden cameras, drone video, undercover spy operations against other Experts are all standard operating procedure. Sometimes it’s enough for the Productivity Expert to rule over his neighborhood or to take some of her garden’s bounty to work to show off to co-workers. But never take a simple rural county fair for granted. There is high drama, even tragedy, in the Produce Barn. “Look upon my Heatmaster Hybird Tomatoes, O ye mighty, and despair!”
With 4H kids showing off their calves and goats in the background, through the displays of homemade quilts and birdhouses, past the competitive pies and jams, look for the small group of miserable Productivity Experts waiting for the judge’s verdict. There are no gratuitous pleasantries between competitors. The atmosphere is tense, the anticipation heavy. This is the Productivity Expert’s World Series, Superbowl, and Indy 500 rolled into one. Only one tray of sweet corn, one bowl of tomatoes, one basket of eggplant will be crowned Grand Master Ruler of the Universe of All Garden Produce Throughout the Galaxy. It’s the perfect setting for a murder mystery. All evidence points to the 2nd Place Bell Pepper contestant, but Hercule Poirot knows better. We may have to wait for Fall when the largest pumpkin contest is held to trap the murderer into a confession.
Is it not possible to just grow a garden for fun? Maybe pick some homegrown cherry tomatoes, give them a rinse and toss them into a salad? Perhaps enjoy some fresh snap beans cooked up with bacon? Isn’t that possible? Yeah, but who cares? “You call that a tomato?” (Pulls out a 15-ounce Cherokee Purple) “That’s a tomato!”
Once the final yield is foisted off on neighbors (who have repeatedly said they hate zucchini), the Productivity Expert is hard at work planning for next year. “How do we increase output next year? More plants? More raised beds? How can we do better in the critical color, juiciness, and taste metrics? This is the last year I take a vacation and ask my idiot brother-in-law to mind my garden. It was only three days and my garden looked like a compost heap.”
I think home gardens are the biggest single source for kids hating vegetables. “Eat it! Eat all of it! There’s twelve pounds of zucchini here and you’re going to eat your share! Or else NO ICE CREAM!”
The Verdant Visionary
While the goal of the Grass Herder and the Productivity Expert is to force nature to submit to their will, the Verdant Visionary is the barefoot Bohemian of the suburbs, the peace/love/happiness contingent, the emotionally overwrought, cosmically grateful, blissed-out hippies of the yard arts and sciences. Careless extravagance is the ultimate goal. There is no apparent distinction between the Verdant Visionary’s happy place and an abandoned farm field. Is that “Che gelida manina” from La Bohème you hear walking past your neighbor’s jasmine? Yes. Yes, it is.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour…
William Blake
If Grass Herders are NFL Coaches and Productivity Experts are Walter Mitty (“My bell peppers will rule the world! Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa!”) then Verdant Visionaries are the Illuminati. I could show you the secret handshake but then I’d have to compost you.
Neither the Grass Herder nor the Productivity Expert will openly solicit compliments. They will wait for them, while dying inside, of course. The Verdant Visionary, on the other hand, overshares, begs you to enter their fantasy world of enchanted expressiveness, admire the bold palette of color, the endless interplay of leaf shape and hue, the legato rhythm of height and depth, the drama of asymmetrical balance, unity of theme and variation expressed in a succession of plants peaking in turn, achieving achingly stunning beauty.
Don’t be deceived by their simple, childlike wonder at the zen-like beauty of penstemon, these people are bigger threats to society than the others. The world can come crashing down around them, the garage roof may leak, the housepaint peel, their kids wear last year’s athletic shoes, and they’d be fixated on coaxing more blooms from their hydrangea. Why? Because their garden is a metaphysical nether world, an alternative universe, a portal to the cosmos, infinity in the palm of their hand.
This is not a harmless pastime. There are no built-in barriers to counteract incipient madness. These people are the direct spiritual inheritors of The Dutch Tulip Craze of the 17th Century when speculation in tulipmania rose to a fever pitch and sent tulip futures soaring, in some cases exceeding many times the average person’s annual salary for a single bulb. Eventually the tulip bubble burst, leaving speculators in financial ruin. Don’t say this can’t happen to you! The Verdant Visionary would sell their own children for that one perfect peony plant.
And so it was that my long, slow slide into the Gardening Life began. It looked harmless enough. I thought a rose might look nice next to the front steps. It did, and I enjoyed caring for it. Then I read a book and wanted to design and plant the entire yard, maybe my neighbors’ yards, too. I thought it would offer some welcome relaxation, add beauty to our home, and provide an opportunity to learn something new. Good clean fun in the dirt. But now, I’m a hopeless Verdant Visionary. Not proud of it, but it’s who I am.
I didn’t choose the gardening life. Gardening chose me (apologies to Tupac Chakur).
What Then? 