Life is always interesting for the spouse of an active
gardener. You have an enormous garden at
home and a 600-square-foot plot at a community vegetable garden to look
after. Even with all that to take care
of, though, my wife can never turn down a cry for help, especially if it’s from
a friend. Which is how I came to be up
to my calf in mud this past week.
‘Sally Kahn’ is a lovely lady. I know because she is the first person I ever
murdered. That was more than a decade
ago when I was writing A Murder in the
Garden Club, and I use her fictional name here to spare her unwanted
notoriety. Sally maintains one of the
most prominent wayside gardens in town and, last week, she called Betty to ask
for her help in planting a new sedum at the site. I should probably mention that Sally is
closing in on 90, though she looks and has the energy of someone twenty years
her junior.
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| Last week these were a pristine white. Then I offered to water a tree... |
Although not specifically included in the invitation,
I came along and ended up removing the mulch, digging the hole for the new
specimen, toting the water, and then looking for opportunistic weeds in the bed
while Sally and Betty did the actual planting.
As they planted, Sally described another issue bothering
her. The parking lot at one of our
town’s civic buildings has been something of a horticultural desert since its
construction several years ago. While
maintaining the foundation plantings at the building. Sally and a group of
friends have pressed for the addition of trees for the parking area. Earlier this year, Sally got her wish: four
trees were procured and planted by the town.
The problem Sally described to Betty was this: the trees were a mess. Although they bore sales tags from a highly
regarded nursery, the specimens came with dead or broken branches and had
clearly been grown with inadequate space to its brethren trees. Everything pointed skyward; nothing grew laterally. Could Betty help? And so, the next morning, I once again piled
tools into a car and drove with Betty to the site.
The role of an Undergardener is to dig holes and move
rocks. A Principal Undergardener (that
would be me) may, from time to time, be asked for advice by the Head Gardener
(that would be Betty). However, my
charter has never extended to ‘skilled labor’.
On this day, my writ would be to move Heavy Stuff (ladders and hoses)
and create mulch rings around the four trees.
In the meantime, Betty assiduously climbed the aforementioned ladder and
pruned extraneous branches from the trees; reshaping them to allow air
circulation within the tree and prevent branches from crossing and rubbing.
And so I began watering. However, I could not help noticing an odd
phenomenon: no matter how much water I put on that first tree, the water did
not puddle. And I am not talking about
water trickling out of a hose. This
water was gushing out at the rate of four or five gallons a minute. And it just disappeared into the mulch
surrounding the tree. I was standing on
pavement while watering. Intrigued, I
stepped onto the mulch to investigate.
And promptly sunk my crisp, white sneakers into more
than a foot of a thick, swamp-worthy slurry of mulch and water.
These trees had been planted in good, old-fashioned
wood mulch. There was no soil underneath
what we all assumed was a veneer of mulch.
Like the turtles that support the earth, it was mulch all the way down.
Betty gave Sally the delicate task of communicating to
our town’s Department of Public Works that a slight error had been made in the
preparation of the site. With luck, a
crew will be dispatched to the building to dig out the mulch surrounding the
trees’ root balls and replace it with something that will hold moisture and
contain nutrients to allow the tree to grow.
As for my sneaker, an afternoon in OxyClean followed
by a bath in bleach left my shoestring a dazzling white, but the canvas of the
shoe a dispiriting brown. That is the
fate of an Undergardener.
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