Scotch Moss

I've been out raking our lawn, and I see that the moss is back.

Two years ago, I made a point of getting rid of it. I won't use moss killer; my strategy is to use brute force, repeating this as often as possible until the weeds or moss or whatever green thing I'm pitting myself against is finally forced to give up. Of course, most green things never do give up; usually I am what gives up -- and out. Still, two years ago, I went out there armed with rake and intent, and I expended great energy. I went over every square centimeter of our little patch of grass out in front (our garden is, weirdly enough, divided into several different segments), and I raked out every single smidgen of moss until hardly any was left. In fact, after I did this, hardly anything was left: our lawn, I quickly learned, was over 75% moss. For the next several weeks, I stared out at the great brown patches and it just looked awful. Finally, I went out and dug up as much of the bare naked ground as I could, then I reseeded it. The robins were thrilled: I'd made their worm-finding a lot easier. The cat was thrilled too: more robins to try and catch, plus a whole new toilet space had been created for her.

I stuck bamboo poles here and there to keep the cat out; she sashayed right past them. My only consolation was that she did manage to scare away some of the £$&%*@ing birds that ate up half of my seed. The grass, when it grew in, was a pitiful thing. The moss, when it grew back in, was strong and vigorous.

I'm not sure when it clicked, but at some point it did: Moss is my friend. Not only is it wonderful, springy stuff that is pleasant to walk on, but it is pretty: you can only tell that it isn't grass when you accidentally rake some of it up with your autumn leaves, especially if your vision doesn't happen to be 100% anymore, which mine certainly isn't. It offers a comfortable padding for those with arthritic joints, myself included, and is a natural thing that costs you nothing. Perfect, really.

It is also something that I longed for as a child. When did I forget that?

When I was nine years old, I went with my father and sisters to the local county fair. Usually, I found county fairs tiresome events with boring displays, too many people, and far too much heat. Invariably my father would get caught up in some riveting conversation about avocadoes, citrus grafting and irrigation techniques, and I would stand there in the sun bored out of my mind, but on this occasion I was fascinated by a display of lawn turfs and groundcovers. There were little patches of individual turfs with labels explaining what they were and how they should be cared for. My absolute favorite was something called Scotch moss. It was a rich, verdant lime green, soft and springy to the touch (speaking of touch, you weren't supposed to, but as soon as the lady's back was turned I stuck out a greedy finger and fairly gasped at the luxuriant texture of it, the delicious coolness).

Please can we get some for our lawn, daddy? Pleeaasse! I whined, as soon as I was able to drag my father away from his fascinating discussion of the merits of different fertilizers and show him the turf and groundcover displays. He and the turf lady smiled indulgently. This one isn't practical for Southern California, the lady told me. You'd have to plant it in a shady area and water it non-stop and it would still probably die. My father echoed her sentiments, but it took him at least twenty minutes to drag me away from the display.

Once home, I stood in front of our house and balefully regarded our front yard, hating the parched, bedraggled look of it. I pictured Scotch moss growing abundantly, a delicious carpet of moist, plush green under my bare feet. What we had instead was grass that had to be watered all the time and still looked pretty pathetic.

Amazing, isn't it? For a while there, with a whole garden of the stuff I was raking it up like nobody's business.

Catch me ever doing that again.

Unwelcome Vegetarians

It rains a lot in Scotland.

Now, rain is no problem for me. I grew up in a parched, hot, dry California city, and as far as I'm concerned, the more rain I get, the better. My family greeted every rainfall the way subcontinentals greet the onset of monsoon after a prolonged dry spell: shrieks of joy, mouths open, arms outflung. Please don't misunderstand me: rain is good. But there are a few drawbacks, as everyone knows, such as slugs.

Slugs are bad.

I am a firm believer in organic gardening, so when my hosta leaves developed perforations and every single one of my marigolds disappeared overnight, seemingly sucked into the earth but for the telltale leftover stems and shimmering white-silver tracks, I tried just about every environmentally friendly means to discourage them. Everybody and her sister has got a fail-safe slug remedy, and I gave them all a shot: sharp sand mixed with ground egg shells, beer in jars, wood ashes, overturned grapefruit and orange peels, sea shells, coffee grounds, and 'hand collection.'

I'll bet everyone has tried the hand collection method -- anyone who doesn't at least feel the occasional urge to thin out stray slugs manually probably doesn't garden. But consider this: some slugs can live over two years and during a lifetime, produce 40,000 baby slugs. And slugs are hermaphrodites, so all of them can reproduce. Given their impressive reproductive ability, do you really think you are going to have an impact on your garden's slug population by collecting them individually? By all means pick them up and plop them into cans (it is very satisfying, after all), but don't tell me this works. My husband and I practiced the collection method, in conjunction with other remedies, and we lost every single runner bean, our mangetouts, and the strawberries.

Up until now I've been endlessly tolerant. Reminding myself of the goodness of Albert Schweitzer, I've been kind and gentle and organically minded. I have tried to be philosophical, too: why should I mind a few holes in the leaves? Why begrudge these creatures their own chance to live and multiply? But then I saw my ruined pumpkin vines last week and something inside me snapped. Last year I had eight of the biggest, most beautiful golden pumpkins you ever saw, the pride of the neighborhood. This year I've got a handful of bitten-off stumps to show for all of my labor, each one sitting atop a small mound, surrounded by a moat of seashells, sharp sand, coffee grounds, and crushed egg shells. Telltale slime lines ran up and down each mound with its pitiful, ruined stump, and the thought of those nasty, fat-bodied little gluttons devouring every morsel of young pumpkin seedling was just too much for me to bear. I raised each and every one of those plants with tender loving care, and their stumps spoke eloquently of grief and pain for promised joy.

So now, ladies and gentlemen, the slugs in my garden had better be very, very afraid when they see me coming. No more Mrs Nice Guy; no more copper bands and oyster shells, no more sharp sand, horticultural grit, inverted orange peels, coffee grounds or jars of beer buried in the soil. I'm saving the beer for myself, and for the slugs, I'm going for the real thing this time: ferric sulphate -- and I'm going to scatter it freely too. Don't worry: it's supposed to be organic. I'll let you know how it works.

In fact, the slugs have driven me to doggerel once again, and for them, I have composed a poem. What a pity that the little buggers can't read.


Vegetarians I Would Happily Stomp on

Now in this world so fair and fine
Are many wondrous things:
Deep crimson flowers and warm red wine
And butterflies with wings.

Sweet birds who twitter in the trees
And children’s sleepy hugs
So tell me why, oh would you, please
God went and gave us slugs?

My garden’s treasures I will share:
Each dazzling marigold
Warm yellow poppies, sweet and fair
And zinnias, bright and bold

Green beans and peas grown in the pod
So vigorous and green
Were there one day, the next by God
Just stumps and slimy sheen!

A pea, a leaf, a tender shoot
I swear I wouldn’t mind
But chomping right down to the root
Is shockingly unkind

They’ve had my beer, my eggshells too
My gravel and coarse sand
They’ve felt the wrong side of my shoe
But still don’t understand

There is no moderation for
These gluttons of the soil
For them I make my fingers sore?
For them I daily toil?

I don’t begrudge the carnivore
The hungry ladybug
I only wish they could eat more:
Each greedy, gobbling slug.

Seeing Beyond

I visited my friend Dina the other day and got depressed.

Dina is the sort of person I would hate if I could. She has been blessed with more talents and skills than any one person I know: she can sew and cook to a professional level, she can draw, paint, sculpt, and embroider. She can wire a house, plaster walls and put in her own tiles. Dina can build and fix things, she can butcher road kill, she can skin animals and raise her own vegetables. And she knows the name for every goddamn plant under the sun.

Four years ago, she and her husband bought a house. I went to see it with her before they moved in and was not impressed. It was an ugly, graceless box of a place with no distinguishing features. The kitchen stank, the floors were manky, the bathrooms were small and pokey, and the extensive back and front yards were filled with rubble and weeds. There was a view of a telephone pole in the backyard, and a row of ugly, stunted little bushes, plus a big black hole where someone had burnt a lot of junk. But the very worst thing was an ancient Victorian greenhouse which was falling down in a rather spectacular way: every single pane of glass was shattered or broken, the outer wall looked to be crumbling, and the inside was filled with rubble and weeds. The area around the greenhouse had more dock weeds and dandelions than I've ever seen in my life.

Dina stood, surveying all of this, and smiled. 'This place is great,' she said. 'Look at that little bubbling brook!' I was surprised: she was right! There was a lovely little brook a stone's throw from the house, but you could barely see it for the trees. Beyond the brook was a beautiful field dotted with gorse and heather, but you could hardly see that either. What you COULD see was a whole lot of junk and rubble. It was depressingly, overwhelmingly obvious that the place was a dump. To everyone, it seemed, but Dina.

During the past four years we have made many trips to Dina's house, and the transformation has been amazing. First she knocked out the two back windows and made them into sliding glass doors. All of the bedrooms were painted and decorated, walls were knocked down here and there, and the change was phenomenol. A huge deck was built outside, trees were chopped down, opening up a fantastic view of the neighboring fields, a hedge was established to hide the telephone pole, and the large burned area was dug out to form a fish pond. The greenhouse was demolished over a few scary weeks, and in its place is now a stunning artist's studio of glass and wood surrounded by a tiered herb garden with driftwood sculptures artfully placed.

But it is her gardens that fill me with envy. Everywhere you look there is something beautiful or interesting. Near the brook is a fairy garden with a wood-chip path surrounded by woodland flowers and whimsical touches: crystals hanging from trees, tiny hand-crafted sculptures strategically and unobtrusively placed. On the far side of the house is a wildlife garden shaded by tall trees and bursting with a splendid selection of wildflowers. The house is surrounded by every climbing vine you can imagine: wisteria, honeysuckle, climbing roses, golden hops, clematis, ivy, Virginia creeper. Her herb garden is a riot of different colors and textures: soft, wooly lambs' ears, fluffy bunches of bright green parsley, silvery green and blue catmint, variegated lemon balm in butter-yellow and green, dainty plumes of fennel, and golden clumps of marjoram. Her vegetable beds are filled with neat rows of strawberries, runner beans and Chinese broccoli. There are roses and peonies and hydrangea and azaleas -- flowers and shrubs too numerous to mention. Everything is thriving and a lot healthier than the plants I've been agonizing over in my humble garden for the past two years. For God's sake, I've paid to go into less attractive gardens than hers.

What amazes me most is Dina's vision. I saw what was in front of me: a nasty, drab, dull-as-dirt box of a place surrounded by a world of junk; she saw endless potential.

Last year, I happened to go to the beach with Dina and we found an old rope which she insisted on dragging back to the car.

"What in the world do you need an old rope for?" I asked. It smelled, after all, and it was falling apart.

"I can use this in my garden."

I should have known, but all I could think about was how much trouble she'd have getting rid of the thing once she'd realized how gross it was.

Yesterday I noticed it hanging down the side of the house from the balcony on the second floor. It is smothered in wisteria and looks like a million bucks. Driving around the area, I've noticed a fair amount of wisteria about, creeping up frames and trellises and spreading up garden walls, but you've never seen anything like Dina's wisteria-up-a-ship's-rope garden feature.

Like I said, I'd hate her if I could.

Suffering with Montbretia

I am a Montbretia sufferer. If you've got this problem too, you'll know what I mean -- and that it's no fun at all.

Monbretia can either be self-inflicted or inherited; in my case, it's the latter. When we bought our flat, I knew little about gardening, so I didn't realize what I'd be getting into. The following spring, a more knowledgable friend looked at one of the clumps of foliage that seemed to be all around our yard, in every conceivable place. "That's Montbretia," she remarked, a funny look on her face. From her tone, I realized that it wasn't a good thing.

Montbretia produce long strings of flattened corms. Try and dig these up and some of them inevitably break off and begin to send out shoots. There may be up to 14 or more of these corms on each plant, and as they break off they form new plants with corms of their own and the clump quickly thickens and spreads. Leave the clumps alone and the corms still multiply, albeit more slowly, until they are virtually growing on top of each other. Each corm is so closely connected to the ones around it that after a while the entire bunch might as well be cement. You can barely get your spade or fork into the clump, and when you do you almost wish you hadn't. Montbretia are the bulbous answer to dandelions; you can never entirely get rid of them.

Like dandelions, they are beautiful. The leaves are spear-shaped and a beautifully fresh, lime green. The flowers are a little disappointing in size, but they too are beautiful, a fiery orange that lights up an autumn day. If only they were biddable and a little less enthusiastic, they'd be perfect plants: hardy, beautiful, and adaptable, as they will live in just about any soil, in shade or light, and in dry areas or boggy ones. Like dandelion roots, the corms have a half life to rival plutonium's.

The people who lived in our flat before us, or perhaps the people who were here before them, were definitely people who sought a labor-unintensive garden. I'll bet they were looking for something cheap and cheerful when they bought those first Montbretia clumps and planted them. I can imagine their delight at discovering that the gorgeous flowers they planted actually had doubled, then tripled. "Cool, we've got more of these -- let's plant them somewhere else!" And boy, did they ever.

We've got Montbretia in the borders, Montbretia under rose bushes, Montbretia at the bottom of the stairs and Montbretia coming up through the honeysuckle. The other day I noticed those telltale green spears peeking up through the turf and I felt like dropping to my knees and shaking my fist at the sky. Our soil tends to be heavy and full of clay, and what with all the Montbretia busily reproducing itself just as fast as I can dig it out, I'll probably still be thinning it out if I make it to my eighties. I have spent long, weary, back-breaking hours digging Montbretia out of all of its various haunts, and it still comes right back in. You can't put the corms in the compost as they don't rot away but live to grow again, so each time I dig them away, I end up throwing away a fair amount of the earth around them. I have visions of digging so many of the damn things up that eventually I have dug up every inch of the garden, leaving great, gaping holes. And from those gaping holes, Montbretia will emerge, triumphant.

The other day, while at a local nursery, I happened to notice that Montbretia was on sale. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched in horror as a middle-aged couple selected several plants and discussed where they should plant them. "Don't do it!" I was tempted to cry out -- then I remembered that I wasn't living in America any longer and held my tongue. Anyway, I tried to tell myself, maybe this couple wouldn't have my problems with Montbretia. Maybe their soil would take it. Maybe they even deserved Montbretia.

Getting the Better of Dandelions

You've got to admire dandelions. They've got a tough, fibrous root like a rat's tail. If you pull up a dandelion and leave even the tiniest fragment of the root, the dandelion grows right back. It sends up a thin little root from that tiny piece you failed to remove and over time that thin little fragment thickens until it is as thick and tough as the previous root. Soon that dandelion you tried to kill is hale and hearty again and back to the business of attracting bees and making baby dandelions. They seem to live forever, too. I've got granddaddy dandelions in my garden with roots almost as thick as my wrist.

Dandelions can grow in almost any soil, under almost any conditions. We've all seen dandelions growing in cracks in the pavement and out of crevices in brick buildings. In my garden, there are dandelions growing in moss, and in dry, shady corners with next to no moisture. Really, there is much to admire in a dandelion.

This is not to say that you want to let them grow unheeded in your garden; if you do, pretty soon, that's all you'll have. When you get rid of them, you can rest easy in the thought that there will always be plenty more where they came from; dandelions won't go extinct in a hurry no matter what you do. And you needn't poison dandelions to get rid of them. Personally, I dig them up. I spend a lot of time doing this. In fact, I find digging up dandelions an interesting diversion from writing and the business of raising kids, and a marvelous way to get exercise. The fact that I am amused and entertained by digging up dandelions is no doubt a sign of just how badly I need a life, but there it is. I'm a great believer in making the most of life's small pleasures, and you've got to start somewhere.

It's easy enough to do, even in the lawn. Just position your garden fork at the base of a dandelion, sink it into the soil, and wriggle it around. If you're lucky, you can gentle the dandelion out of the soil, slowly and carefully, then pat the ground back into shape with your toe. If you're unlucky, you'll snap the root off, but never mind: it'll take a few weeks to grow back and you can try again. The most important thing is to catch the dandelions before the flowers turn into seed heads. Blowing the seeds off dandelion heads may be one of the joys of summer, but do it outside your garden if you want to save yourself some work.

God knows I have plenty of dandelions, so I never run out of opportunities to divert myself. And here's a useful tip: you can eat dandelion greens. They're tastier when they're young and tender. Find a good strong dandelion root that hasn't been treated with a herbicide, dig it up, and plant it. When all you want is a bit of green for a garnish or the odd couple of leaves to add to a fairly blah salad, your potted dandelion will come in handy.

Hardy, irrepressible, tough, edible, and absolutely free. Yes, you've got to admire dandelions.


THE DANDELION IS KING

Though we dug them out and sprayed ‘em
And we mowed ‘em into shreds
We were powerless to dissuade ‘em
From filling up our beds
They doubled and quadrupled
And it was the cruellest thing
Oh, when it comes to weeds, I swear
The dandelion is king

Yes, we dumped on glycophosphate
But they came back anyway
So we poured the vinegar on straight
(The grass died right away)
We weren’t stingy with the 2,4-D –
It hardly did a thing
For when it comes to weeds, indeed
The dandelion is king

They were impossible to beat
We reckoned we were foiled
Until we learned that we could eat
‘em finely chopped and boiled
We sautéed ‘em and we fried ‘em
And they added quite a zing
For when it comes to freebies, well
The dandelion is king

Now we gather them in bunches
As their tender leaves emerge
And they feature in our brunches
And we’re mighty proud to serve
the weed that used to drive us wild
Yes, now we welcome Spring
For when it comes to salad greens
The dandelion is king

Gardens from Hell

When I was growing up, our garden, or 'yard' as we call it in American English, was a mess of tangled shrubs and trees, all planted in a crazily haphazard fashion. Our lawn had brown patches from lack of watering, and rather boring looking succulents, as my parents tended not to go for plants that needed lots of water and coddling, like roses. I gazed longingly on the gardens of our wealthier and more traditional neighbors: great pristine stretches of manicured turf, neatly laid out beds where weeds dared not show their faces, roses spilling over trellises, and windowboxes with artfully arranged flowers.

Or soil wasn't easy to create beds in, being mostly decomposed granite with many rocks, so my father planted a large cactus garden which quickly took over a large corner of our garden, a pepper tree, the roots of which cracked and buckled our asphalt driveway, and a paper mullberry, which sprouted countless seedlings with amazingly tenacious root systems. We also had a weird hodge-podge of fruit trees: kumquats, lemons, apricots and figs grew in abundance, and we were the only people in the neighborhood with a macadamia nut tree in the front garden.

Both my parents worked hard in our garden, but with full-time jobs, a harder-than- usual gardening situation, and children who had to be bullied and nagged into doing even the smallest gardening chore, our own yard quickly got the better of them.

You've probably heard it said that the process is more important than the product; our garden was a living example of this. Our figs, lemons, and apricots notwithstanding, our dandelions and bull-thorns could have won prizes. And yet I still remember sitting outdoors with my mother in the cool of the evening as she weeded, talking. Afterwards, we sipped iced tea and gazed up at the stars as we sat on the grass. She didn't agonize about the dried up patches in the turf or the obvious health of our dandelions. I know that the weeds, broken up driveway, and runaway cactus garden bothered her, but they didn't manage to ruin her pleasure in the garden. I can still remember walking around the garden with my father as he watered the lawn, listening to his explanations of fig pollination and lemon varieties. Our garden was far from perfect, but my mother and father obviously got great joy from it. I never realized it at the time, but I was learning a valuable lesson. Even if what you've got isn't 100%, it's yours, and you might as well learn to make the best of it. And if you can have fun in the process, so much the better.

My own garden here in the U.K. is in many ways a Scottish version of theirs. I have little gardening sense. I harvest giant rocks, broken pot shards and horse shoes from beds I dug up months earlier and would have sworn were rock-free, plant the wrong things in the wrong places, and tend to have a mess to show for all my efforts. I can't get my kids to do a lick of work half the time, and as I am loath to use pesticides or weedkillers, I don't get the spectacular results of some of my neighbors. Every day I pit myself against moss, dandelions, creeping buttercup, and daisies, but what great exercise it gives me! And besides, I've got apples and red currants too. Who cares if the apples are spotty and the birds get half of the red currants?

It's not perfect, but it's mine, and I'm determined to make the best of it. Out there with my fork and gardening gloves, my dolomite and coffee grounds and egg shells and homemade compost, I feel like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Somehow I think my parents would be proud.