Virginia Scharff is one of those people who makes the rest of us look bad. She is busy 24-7 hogging glory in not just one life arena, but three, at least. She is a writer of history, her publications include”Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age”, “Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement and the West.” and her latest, “The Women Jefferson Loved.” just out to rave reviews, published by Harper Collins. Virginia is also an ace teacher/director, offering courses in the history of women in the United States and the American West, environmental history, social theory, and writing as a historian. Scharff also serves as the director of the Center for the Southwest. To top it all off, she is also a mystery writer working under the name Virginia Swift. Check out “Brown Eyed Girl” – my favorite. The mysteries are set in Laramie, Wyoming. Gingy lives in New Mexico. And she writes about Thomas Jefferson. These three things (and more) come out in the following post
Three things I want you to know about gardening
First point: Gardening will teach you where you are.
I’ve gardened in six states, and every new place is an education. If you garden in Wyoming, it won’t take you more than a season to appreciate the dates of the last and first frosts. The short season (no, it’s not just July 3-5) still gives you plenty of time to grow gorgeous lettuces and spinach and luscious mountains of peas and beans, and lots and lots of zucchini. You’ll be making zucchini gratin and zucchini chocolate cake and, god help your relatives, putting up zucchini bread and butter pickles. You will be grateful for the fact that most garden pests don’t want to hang out where they’ll freeze to death before they grow up. On the minus side, for virtually all of recorded history, no resident of Laramie, Wyoming has ever been able to get a tomato to ripen on the vine. All this could change, of course, with global warming.
If you garden in Albuquerque, you will discover that all those squash bugs that couldn’t handle the weather in Laramie are murdering your little baby zucchinis right on their stalks. But you won’t mind, because all those ripe tomatoes will bring a smug smile to your face when you think about the frost-blackened vines of Labor Day in Laramie. You will remind yourself that you would still have twenty jars of zucchini bread and butter pickles in the panty if you hadn’t moved nine times since Laramie.
Second point: If you love it, don’t leave it.
Every year we learn this lesson the hard way, by planning both a garden and a summer vacation. And if, like us, you go away in the summer, you can bet that the weather, the weeds, or the critters will do a number on your garden. We leave meticulous instructions with the wonderful people to whom we entrust the watering, but they are, understandably, never as obsessed with every bit of the care and feeding of vegetables and flowers as we are. I mean, who beside me would pick french green beans twice a day, just to keep them sweet and slender, for as long as possible? Well, of course, Spring Warren might, and some of you other garden mavens. But seriously, what housesitter really wants to search for tomato hornworms, or pick off squash bugs by hand?
If the vegetable beds are on an automatic drip system, but the flower pots need hand-watering daily, plan for some sizzled snapdragons when you get back. And no matter how many times you encourage your housesitters, caretakers, neighbors and relations to help themselves to all the wonderful stuff out there on the vines or branches, they won’t be able to keep up.
And then you know what happens. Your delicate haricots verts billow into bone-dry bubbles, your zucchinis assume the proportion of zeppelins, unless, as happens here in Albuquerque, the zucchinis never make it at all: see “squash bugs.”
If you must vacation (as we evidently must), make everything as automatic as possible, and don’t sweat it if there’s some loss, some reclamation. Or else, pick your beans and your bugs, get out the lawn chairs, crank up the music, make some boat drinks and have yourself a stay-cation.
Third point: You are not in charge of everything.
A garden will no more do everything you want it to do, than your children will. Be hopeful and ambitious, but realistic, and cut yourself some slack.
Case in point: I have always held Thomas Jefferson up as my gardening idol. I was aware, from a very early age, that Jefferson kept a garden book, part ledger, part literature, in which he drew up plans for his plots, catalogued his seeds and plants, recorded when he planted and when he harvested and ate the fruits of his slaves’ labors. I loved the poetry of his first entry: “Purple hyacinth begin to bloom.”
And so, when I first began gardening, I determined to keep a garden book of my own. I mapped out my beds, plotting my rows to scale, made a key of cute symbols for each of my crops, even colored the map. I was going to chart progress weekly, or more, as everything in the garden sped up according to the growing season. I was going to write systematic poetic entries, learning my garden as I disciplined my mind.
This lasted three or four weeks, despite good intentions I still possess. I just can’t keep it up, in any regular way. I have sporadically made garden diagrams and written notes in various quasi-garden books in the thirty-five years since I began gardening, but any thought of discipline or system in this record-keeping has long since fled.
I’d feel guilty about it, except that I have had reason, in the last few years, to become intimately familiar with Jefferson’s own Garden Book. And guess what? It’s just as motley, and nearly as random a collection of drawings and jottings as my own imitative attempt. Jefferson, let it be said, had more important things to do than I ever do, but he was, after all, a compulsive recorder of data. And he—even he—could not keep up the pace.
And talk about people who went away on vacation and assumed that everyone else would be just as compulsive about weeding and watering as you are? Try taking off for five years in Paris, and see what it does to your peas! But Jefferson like me, was a big fan of great gardeners and great garden writing. And if he were alive today, I suspect he’d be spending some of the time he might have been tracking his own parsnips and peaches, in savoring the pleasure of a daily encounter with The Quarter-Acre Farm
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Thank you, Gingy!
Very nice! Thanks, from a blackened-thumb reader