In the Garden - Julie Farrar

It’s 92° at ten o’clock in the morning. Sweat drips from the band of my straw gardening hat, my eyes into my eyes and runs down my neck to soak the back of my shirt. I’m being swarmed by mosquitoes, sweat bees, and gnats. A thin layer of dirt clings to my arms and legs like a light dusting of cocoa powder on a vanilla-iced cake. I plunge the Garden Hog into an expanse of weeds, stomp down on the top of the prongs to force it down to the roots, and wrench it to the right. Grab the clump of dirt just loosened and knock it against the ground to send the good dirt and worms back where they belong. Toss the weedy remains in the yard bag to be hauled away for mulch. Repeat a thousand times.

Gardening in St. Louis in the summer is an exercise in futility. A natural hothouse for beefy tomatoes, it’s also a paradise for mugwort, Bermuda grass, wild garlic, field violets, and giant dandelions that have to be remnants of the Jurrasic Age. They fill a garden bed overnight. Constant vigilance to keep nature under control in June gives way, incrementally, to mild neglect during the 100% humidity in July, and then complete abandonment in the searing sun and at least one 100°+ week of August.

But a gardener can’t help it. When lilacs and forsythia wave their long, welcoming arms at you in May and the evening air is scented by viburnum blossoms, a gardener thinks not of the oppressive heat of the summer garden. Instead, visions bloom of her own personal Jardin du Luxembourg. She dreams of a riotous bed of color rising above a deep emerald expanse of lawn, woven through with meandering pebble paths that transport her to the 6th arrondissement of Paris’ Latin Quarter. Her own concrete birdbath sitting forlornly in the midst of the heat-zapped daylilies should rival Marie de Médici’s dancing fountain under the shade of giant oaks. Hummingbirds should flit in and out of the tangle of blossoms gathering their nectar, with weightless butterflies resting on the long branches of Russian sage. She will pull up her own moss green metal chair just like the hundreds that invite a visitor to the Paris garden to sit and read or chat or dream (mosquito-free) on a Sunday morning.

But somewhere during the heat of August, a gardener will remember her visit to Jardin du Luxembourg in the autumn. A team of workmen, a back hoe, and a Bobcat were busy lifting the last of the summer annuals out of the earth. Nearby sat a small truck with mulch, dirt, and an already-blooming load of plants that would convert it from a summer garden to an autumn one in just a matter of days. Any weeds that had tried to set up permanent residence would be disposed of as easily as the summer annuals were. Alas, this gardener has no option, though, but to put her knees and back into the slow process of taming nature, one mauvaise herbe at a time.