Bit of Earth

“Is there anything you want?” (asked Mr. Craven.) “Do you want toys, dolls, books?”

“Might I,” quavered Mary, “might I have a bit of earth?”

In her eagerness she did not realize how queer the words would sound and that they were not the ones she had meant to say. Mr. Craven looked quite startled.

“Earth!” he repeated. “What do you mean?”

“To plant seeds in—to make things grow—to see them come alive,” Mary faltered.

—The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

I’m laughing at myself. I was reading over some of my garden-notes posts, and the way I go on, “my garden” this and “my garden” that, you’d think I was describing some vast Martha Stewart-esque estate. Um, y’all know I’m talking about a small suburban backyard, don’t you? I mean, I know I’ve described where we live in other posts, how this house we’re renting is about half the size of our Virginia place, and the lot size is your standard bitty-slice-o-ground. Just before we moved in, the owners (who are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet) put down some wonderfully thick sod in the back, so we’ve got a nice place for the kids to play, and there’s a patio and a fence. But the grass was all there was in back (in a climate like this, that’s a lot!). What trees there are, are on the other side of the fence. (Also on the other side of the fence: an elementary school, which cracks me up.)

Our neighbor to the north put up a rather high concrete-block wall between our houses. It’s veryclose to the side of our house. You’ve seen it here before; remember when the kids decided to brighten it up with some sidewalk chalk? Between the grass and the back fence, running the width of the yard, is an area about six feet wide that was bare dirt and weeds when we moved in.

The owners let us put down mulch to keep the weeds at bay, and my mother helped me plant some flowers there. Whenever I talk about “my garden,” that’s what I mean. That and a long concrete planter built into the patio against the house wall. The geraniums and lambs-ear I posted a picture of the other day grow in the planter, and the poppies, and some lavender and thyme and a few other things. In the back mulch bed (that’s what we call it) are all the flowers I was gushing about yesterday. There’s a small square area on one side without mulch (where the wall meets the fence in the photo above); that’s the veggie garden my mom planted in January. It’s right up against the neighbor’s concrete wall and gets good southern exposure. The rest of the wall is bare and not what you would call attractive. I keep meaning to plant sunflower or cosmos seeds along the wall, something tall to cover it up a little, but the kids like having access to it for chalk drawings and bouncing tennis balls off of.

The south corner of the mulch bed is just bare mulch, with some determined Bermuda grass attempting to reclaim the territory. I keep meaning to plant cosmos and poppy seeds there, too. Seeds because they’re cheap and the plants are easy to remove if the homeowners should wish to, at some point. In between the bare-mulch corner and the veggie-garden corner are the sunflowers, the salvia, the ice plants and moss roses, the birdbath and bird feeder, the wandering jasmine, the daisies and cranesbill and strawberries. It sounds like a lot, but it’s all packed right in there together. So now you know when I gush about “my garden,” I’m talking about this one flowerbed.

I know it’s a cliche, but I’m a huge believer in blooming where you’re planted. Or in this case, I suppose, making things bloom. Gosh, I love to go out in the golden afternoons, the green mornings, and stand among those flowers and just breathe. Look. Listen. The thing about gardening is that it really does engage all your senses. There’s beauty to see and smell and taste and hear and feel. (Oh those velvety lambs-ear leaves! That sharp rush of cilantro on the tongue! The white stars of jasmine perfuming the evening!) There is so much peace there, where things are growing. And so many stories unfolding all around you. The busy insects, the treasured bees, the gossiping birds. The ants have been working for two days on removing a dead worm to their underground storehouses. The armies of aphids have vanished from the pincushion flowers’ stalks, and a lone ladybug quietly trundles up and down the slender stems. I could swear the mockingbird singing a rhapsody in blue on the wire above the concrete wall is showing off just for me.

I made friends with a mockingbird once, our first year in Virginia. I was digging out a flowerbed and kept coming upon fat white grubs all curled up in stasis, horrible things, and I would flick each one off my trowel onto the grass a little way away, and the mockingbird would swoop down and gobble it up. After a few days like this, it used to perch nearby whenever I was working in the yard, watching me, expecting more snacks. I felt like Mary Lennox befriending the robin. But this was no Secret Garden, just another run-of-the-mill suburban backyard. I loved helping to transform it to something unique and lovely (albeit always jungly and weed-plagued) during the five years it was ours. I am loving, now, the coming-alive of this borrowed patch of ground, loving it with a joy as raw and childlike as Mary’s joy when she was given leave to do what she liked in her own “bit of earth.” She found a secret Eden, but it wouldn’t have mattered, really, if all she’d had was a corner of the kitchen garden. There’s magic in every bit of earth.

Spring in San Diego

The signs are subtler here than on the East Coast; we’re still, after two and a half years here, learning to see. I never loved the snow except as a pretty picture outside my window, and the slush and bone-chill of a long Virginia February used to make me crazy. But oh how I loved that first glimpse of spring: the soft tips of crocuses pushing through soggy mulch, the yellow haze over a bare forsythia bush the day before it bursts into golden bloom. The return of robins. A feeling in the air, it was, that always quickened my pulse, gave me a soaring feeling. And then suddenly the grape hyacinths and daffodils would be blooming intermingled along my friend Sarah’s front steps, and my perennial bed would wake up, and the bluebirds would get busy cleaning house in the nesting box below our deck, right outside my office window where I’d be writing Martha and wishing I could push the deadline back and take a month off for spring.

It’s so different here. I don’t miss the frigid weather—haven’t worn my big red coat since we moved—but I do miss March, April, May, the gorgeous reawakening. San Diego is sharpening our senses, though. We do have seasons here, a blue one, a gray one, a gold one, a brown one, all of them bright with gorgeous bloom.

Last week we noticed the hillside along our route to piano lessons was covered, once more, with riotous orange and yellow wildflowers. I don’t know their names and last year I didn’t take note of how long they lasted. (We’re going to drive back with a camera, maybe this morning even, and pull into the Park-and-Ride parking lot to snap a few pictures so you, the Internet, can help us identify them.) Yesterday, just one week later, we saw that the grape soda lupine has joined them in bloom. That one I remember from last year. I told the girls, this year I’m going to pull over and sniff some to see if it really does smell like grape soda, and they said, Mom, you did that last year, don’t you remember?

The orange and lemon trees in our neighbors’ yards have been fruit-heavy for weeks. Yesterday I passed a table loaded with lemons in someone’s driveway, with a hopeful sign offering them five for a dollar. The orange poppies in our back yard are big clumps of feathery leaves, no buds yet. Nearby, I have an amaryllis whose shiny leaves had grown tall, promising a fat flower stalk not far behind, but Rilla and Wonderboy picked them all and turned them into leaf soup, spiced with sidewalk chalk.

There is a yard in town that looks weedchoked nine months of the year, and then for three months it’s a stunning tapestry of wildflowers. I saw the orange-and-yellow blooms there, too, yesterday. The sunflowers are tall in the schoolyard behind us. We’ve got a smaller crop coming up beneath our birdfeeder. Nobody but sparrows and house finches visit the feeder, and mourning doves picking fallen seeds out of the mulch below. Crows drop in to steal the peanuts we put out for the scrub jays. A phoebe perches on the back fence, bright-eyed, observant. I haven’t heard the noisy parrots in a while nor seen their green flutter above the neighbors’ treetops.

Our pole beans and peas are beginning to grope for their stakes; the grape tomatoes are green and Rilla is under strict orders to let them turn red this time before she picks them as presents for me. The lettuce is tender and ragged because the girls pinch bits of it all day long to nibble on. My Uncle Ray sent butterbean and White Acre pea seeds from Georgia and we are very excited about this.

I still need to find a milkweed source so we can lure some monarchs to the neighborhood. And it’s been too long since we visited the nature center; I wonder what spring is doing over there.