I can tell you where the grass is greenest.
It’s right in the middle of our vegetable patch. Likewise, the best trees are struggling to come up through the hedge.
Why do they do this? Do they know that’s precisely where I don’t want them?
Because if they were trying deliberately to mock me, they couldn’t do a better job.
The rest of my yard is nothing to brag about. I water it, I feed it, and still it persists in dying on me, in big embarrassing patches right out front.
In fact, I’m grateful for dandelions and crabgrass; without them, I wouldn’t have much of a lawn.
It wasn’t always so. When we bought this place, my husband and I became the proud owners of a luxurious lawn, and brick-bordered gardens overflowing with a riot of summer flowers and greenery.
There were rose bushes every five feet along the fence, with azaleas and various other plants whose names I’d been told but couldn’t remember.
What no one told us was that we had purchased a high-maintenance yard…and we were definitely low-maintenance gardeners.
The flowers were the first to go. I can’t say I was surprised when the cheerful little red and white flowers failed to come back the next spring.
As for the rose bushes, I did my best, but I just didn’t have the time to give “deep, penetrating soaks” to each of 11 shrubs.
Heck, I didn’t have time for that for myself!
The trees were an even sadder tale. The few we had seemed to sicken as soon as the property changed hands. The dogwood came down with some incurable disease.
The evergreens withered and turned brown. And the plum tree, growing inside a loop of wire attached to the fence, garrotted itself before we even noticed. We had to pay someone to cut it down and cart it away.
“So what you’re telling me,” my husband said, “is that we were snuck up on by – a tree?” I wanted to cry.
As a suburbanite I was clearly a failure.
Here I’d been given stewardship of a lovely garden, and I had run it into the ground. Worse than that, actually: one thing after another had had to come out of the ground and be carted away, after I had killed it.
Part of the problem is surely in the genes – my genes.
Every Mother’s Day, my mother begs us not to give her plants; she claims she has actually destroyed even plastic ones. I’m not much better.
One long-ago summer, a friend invited me for a stay at her cottage. I tried to repay her hospitality by weeding her vegetable garden. She was grateful – until she noticed that I had systematically pulled all her stringbean plants, and watered the weeds.
So now I leave everything in the garden strictly alone, preferring to wait until I can tell the wheat from the chaff.
Which is usually because the chaff is doing so much better.
Why is it, anyway, that whenever a plant is doing spectacularly better than its neighbors, it’s always the weed? Whose idea was it that it’s the others – the plants you can barely keep alive – that should make up the garden?
Most of all, why is it that when I finally get some grass to grow, it’s right where it doesn’t belong?
But I’m not really worried, because I have a plan. I’m going to let that grass grow, let it think it’s fooling me, till along about the middle of August.
Then, before it knows what’s hit it, I’m going to dig it up and plunk it in the middle of one of those dead patches out front.
Of course, once it realizes it’s where I want it, it’ll probably die — but at least it’ll be out of the garden.
And if that doesn’t work, I have one last trick up my sleeve. I’ll put little fences around the dead parts, and pretend that they’re the vegetable garden.
Then I’ll just sit back and wait for the grass to creep back in.
It’s bound to work. After all, I am simply counting on what the gardening books call “the natural tendencies of the plant.”
As to the question of Why do plants do this? I don’t really know.
Maybe it’s just because grass, like all the rest of us, wants to see what life is like on the other side of the fence.
