A Walker in the Suburbs

For the last week or so I’ve been slipping into the backyard when inside chores are done to plant iris, allium and daffodils.  I usually miss the sunniest part of the afternoon, so it’s a wintry chore as I dig into the hard clay soil. 

But it has a spring purpose. It’s a vote of confidence, a leap of faith made in deep winter, when boughs lie leafless, that green will come again, that these packets of potential will send down roots and bring forth flowers. 

Today I barely finished before sunset. But nine more narcissus bulbs are in the ground, and at five minutes a bulb, I figure we are 45 minutes closer to spring.

The end of a gardening season is a good time to ponder next year’s plan … and next year I’ll plant more zinnias. Next year, I’ll welcome their hues and warmth into my life. Next year I’ll be bolder.

This year, I sowed a few zinnia seeds out front and back. But it was late in the season, a half-hearted attempt. This was the only survivor, a stalk that craned its neck toward the sun and produced one forlorn flower that bloomed a few days ago. 

Next year, I’ll start seeds indoors in egg cartons. I’ll nurture those babies with sprinkles and grow lights. And when the soil is warm I’ll transplant them into sunny spots in the garden I’ll prepare soon. 

It’s October, spring promises are easy to make — and the imaginary garden has no end of delights.

(Zinnia bouquet photo courtesy Drilnoth, Wikimedia Commons)

“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost’s neighbor says to him, though the poet believes the opposite is true: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That sends the frozen ground-swell under it/And spills the upper boulders in the sun.” 

But when it comes to deer, good fences do make good neighbors — or at least they have this summer. Some of these day lilies haven’t bloomed in years. They’ve been nibbled off at the stem by a hungry mob of does and fawns.

This year, we put up chicken wire and caution tape (the latter is for Copper, who kept trying to run through the fence without it), and, voila, here are creamy yellow day lilies, lovely rose red ones, too. Here are the cone flowers in pink and white and russet. Here are black-eyed Susans, too. It’s a bounty, a visual feast. 

For years I’ve relied on something called Liquid Fence to protect the flowers. But a heavy rain can wash it off during the night and a marauding herd of deer can eat every bud in sight in one unprotected evening. 

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out,” Frost says.

I don’t need to ask. I know. 

Years ago, there was an iris and day lily farm a few miles from here. Gardeners would flock to the farm this time of year to enjoy the blossoms and perhaps buy a few bulbs, which would be delivered weeks later in a brown paper bag. 

Margaret Thomas was the gardener. She was a relic of the old days, of small farms and neighborliness. She lived in a green house with a picturesque shed out back, half falling down. Artists would set up their easels in her garden and paint the iris with the ruined shed in the background. 

Our Siberian iris come from Margaret, and though they share the garden with their showier cousins, they are the ones that catch my eye every spring, their delicate beauty I seek when winter’s done. 

As for Margaret’s garden, it’s now a subdivision: Iris Hills.