How Does the Grass Grow, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

January 3, 2015 Martha Thomases 2 Comments

It’s been a bleak week at the end of a bleak year.  My beloved hometown seems to be hit especially hard in that whiny, hopeless but still in-your-face New York City way.

And then the seed catalogues arrived.

Is there anything more hopeful than a seed catalogue?  If there is, please send me one.

My apartment is pretty sunny, and I’m lucky enough to have a terrace that faces south.  Over the years, I have planted and killed a veritable forest of plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables.  And yet, in the depths of winter, the catalogues come and fill me with hope again.

Last year my fig tree, repotted, produced three figs.  Okay, none of them got ripe enough to eat before they fell off the branches to be stolen by sparrows, but it was three more figs than I’d seen in the years since I’d first planted it.  Will there be more this year?  Will they ripen all the way?  Should I get another so they can be friends and, maybe, pollinate?

I’ve ordered some new kinds of seeds and bulbs and a new planter.  Not enough plants to fill the planter, nor even the planters I already have.  Some of those have living plants in them, like the afore-mentioned fig tree, and a blueberry bush.  When I go to the Green Market in the spring, before even the asparagus is ready, I like to buy flowers for my planters, for the immediate gratification of color.  I hope it inspires the seeds and bulbs I’ve planted, pushing their way into the strange ecosystem that is the seventh floor.

People with taste and education plan their gardens, taking into account the amounts of sun and shade they have available, the type of soil, the weather forecast in the Farmers Almanac.  They balance tall, reedy plants with short colorful bushes.  They combine colors like Seurat painting.  They support not only seed catalogues, but an entire section of the publishing industry, studying how to best enjoy and enhance nature.

Not me.

I buy things on impulse, and then dig enough holes and put those things in the nearest planter.  I may consider whether the plant would do better on the eastern edge of my terrace, which is sheltered from the wind, or the western edge, which gets less water.

I may not.

No matter.  I will water faithfully, and then be astounded — brokenhearted, even — when some plants don’t survive.

Perhaps this fall, I will have a harvest of figs and blueberries. Perhaps this fall, my butterfly attracting plants will attract butterflies.  Perhaps I will have decided to buy tomato plants, or herbs.  This might be the year I go full Green Acres and plant corn.  Who can tell?

On a January day in 2015, anything can happen in my garden of the future.  I wish you the same happy uncertainty in your new year.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, will go back to complaining next week.  Probably.