The Saga of Plot 48B: What a Community Garden Is All About

Volunteers put the finishing touches on Plot 48B

As I have written before, my role as co-manager of my town’s community garden is to be the ‘enforcer’ to Betty’s ‘garden guru’.  While she is universally loved because she freely dispenses excellent horticultural advice, gardeners hear from me when there is a problem with their plot. I’m the one who tells people to weed their aisles, cut back their vines, and tighten their fences. 

And, also as I have written, I have to do my job with a light touch.  A plot in the community garden may be a limited, sought-after town benefit; but having one ought to be fun.  Having someone continually nag you to do something is definitely not ‘fun’ and, after a while, a gardener will say to himself or herself, ‘To hell with all this.  I’m going to the Cape.’  If that happens enough times, I run out of people on the waiting list and plots begin growing up in weeds. 

It's a big garden - 76 gardeners in 70 plots

And so, I say ‘please’ and use phrases like ‘as soon as possible’ a lot, even when the transgressions are annoying to the miscreant’s rule-abiding neighboring plot holders.  I nudge people into being better gardeners.  I sign my notes, ‘Garden Ogre’; the better to draw both a smile and compliance.  But I am also persistent, especially this time of year.  

In mid-June, I began to notice one garden was developing a weed problem.  I sent an email.  A week later, I had neither received a written response (‘sorry, I’m on vacation…’) nor did I see evidence of weeding.  Another email went out.  Still no reply. 

Plot 48B had grown up in weeds

Then, the heat of late June and early July hit, and the weeds exploded.  I wrote one of ‘those’ emails: ‘Unless you get your garden under control, you’ll lose it.’  That message drew a response – an unexpected one.  The plot’s tenant wrote back to explain why she had been unable to garden.  I won’t divulge the reasons except to say they were moving, and jarring proof that the Covid-19 epidemic reaches into our lives in unexpected ways.  Like so many of our gardeners, she saw her plot as a refuge, but she did not have the hours it would take to bring it back into compliance. 

So, I did something I’ve done a handful of times:  I put out a plea to help rescue the plot.  In a simpler time (before March 2020), I would sent out my request to a dozen long-time gardeners with big hearts and open calendars.  I would name a date and time, and expect enough of them to show up such that, in some fixed number of hours, we could correct whatever problem needed to be addressed.  This year, social distancing made that impossible.  Instead, I sent my request to the entire garden, telling everyone to do what they could on their own schedule, and to keep six feet apart in doing so. 

At least 20 of the 76 gardeners responded.  Each day, the garden showed tangible improvement.  By this past Friday, I could write the plot holder and say, ‘I think you can do the rest.  You have a lot of friends here.’ A few hours later, though, I received an unexpected reply: even with the reclamation, she would be unable to continue for this season.  With regret, she was giving up her plot. 

And, I had my own dirty little secret:  by mid-July, no one wants to start gardening.  It’s too     damn hot and there’s not enough season remaining to grow the 'fun' crops.  By mid-July, everyone who might have thought about gardening in April has made other plans. 

Some stories have unexpected plot twists, and this is one of those.  That same day I also received an email from one of our gardeners – a wonderful woman who is a professor at Wellesley College –wondering if surplus vegetables might be collected for a group of two dozen food-insecure international students remaining on campus for the summer.  All on-campus food service had been shut down, supermarkets were miles away, and the students’ budgets were tight to non-existent.  

Except in 2020, we regularly put
out bins for the Food Cupboard

I will add that, for more than a decade, we have regularly put out bins for our town’s Food Cupboard.  This year, because of Covid-19 restrictions, they’re unable to accept donations of fresh produce.  I told the Wellesley College professor that not only could we put out bins bi-weekly for such a food drive, but we would also devote plot 48B to the effort.   

This morning brought the final plot twist.  As volunteers were putting the final touches on cleaning and re-planting the garden, yet another of our members came by to help out.  She is on staff at Babson College in Wellesley.  When she heard about the Wellesley College students, she said she had just been made aware of a similar number of international students at Babson who also face food insecurity until classes begin in September.  Then, half an hour later, the lady who has long coordinated the community garden collection for the Food Cupboard, also dropped by and said, yes, the Food Cupboard bins are all available and will be in place for our use. 

A proud occupation
when things like this
happen.

So, this coming week, and one day every other week until the end of the season, there will once again be bins and wheelbarrows at the front of the garden.  The recipients will be different but the need will be just as great.  And, Plot 48B is going to be devoted to that very good cause. 

It is events like these that make being a garden ogre a proud occupation. 

This afternoon I emailed everyone in the garden and told them they should take a bow.  This is what a Community Garden is supposed to be about.

The Bucket List - 2

A month ago, I wrote about the pleasure of visiting places that had been off-limits during the nearly three-month pandemic shutdown of March through May.  I wrote of feasting on fried clams at Farnham’s, spooning my first mouthful of chocolate chocolate chip ice cream at White Farms and, primarily, of seeing several gardens that could not accept visitors because of Covid-19.

A pergola in full June glory.  Double-click for
a full-screen slideshow of the garden.

The Coastal Maine Botanical Garden was at the top of our post-pandemic bucket list of places to visit.  It’s a spectacular site in an enchanted spot.  It has the best of both worlds: a beautifully conceived and executed garden, with a location that makes it a worth-a-journey destination in its own right: that proverbial rock-bound coast of Maine just up the road from Boothbay Harbor.

CMBG finally opened, however tentatively, at the beginning of June.  Our original plan was to go as close to opening day as possible; we even had tickets in hand.  But life intervened and that first journey had to be scrubbed.  We purchased a new set of tickets for late June, using their website (no walk-ins allowed) to place our order.  CMBG’s protocol allows for just 50 timed admissions every half hour from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. (the garden closes at 5 p.m.).  For those keeping tally, that’s only 650 guests per day.  In 2018, the garden hosted 200,000 guests; with a roughly 100-day season, that’s 2,000 visitors per day.  The garden is operating at about one-third of its capacity.

To get there, we had to break the law

It was perfectly legal to purchase those tickets.  Using them was a different story.  There was just one minor problem: by going to Maine, we were breaking the law. 

CMBG’s website contains this paragraph:  “Please note that all State of Maine CDC guidelines need to be met by Gardens visitors, including the State’s 14-day quarantine requirement for those coming into Maine. Please also note that Maine has lifted the quarantine requirement for residents of New Hampshire and Vermont. Beginning July 1, residents of other states who have had a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours may also visit without a quarantine period.”

In my defense let me say this: at this writing, Massachusetts is a national model for its ‘taming’ of the coronavirus curve.  After a horrific March (a major biotech company held a global conference in Boston in February that helped seed hundreds, if not thousands, of cases), Massachusetts locked itself down and slowly opened up with a rational plan that appears to have worked.  You want a statistic?  For the first seven days of July, Massachusetts has a total of 1,092 confirmed cases.  Today (July 7), the number was 140.  However, Maine recognizes only its two northern New England neighbors as kindred spirits.  Everyone else is asked to sequester themselves indoors for two weeks before going out in public.  The idea of renting a hotel room for two weeks in order to enjoy a day’s visit seems, well, a bit much.

What greets you once inside

Moreover, the Lodging Gods were telling us to stay home.  It’s 190 miles and a three-and-a-half-hour trip from Medfield to Boothbay Harbor. Technically, you can drive there and back in a day, and still have three or more hours to enjoy the site (especially with 15 hours of sunlight).  However, we’ve reached the age when driving up one day, staying overnight, and starting fresh the next is an exceptionally appealing option.

Except hotels weren’t taking guests.  Our ‘usual place’, a hotel roughly 15 miles from the garden, was apparently open only for front-line workers; and a letter of medical need was required to check in.  We finally found a hotel in Freeport, 30 miles from the garden.  They cautioned us they would not be serving meals and, by the way, they were not aware of any nearby restaurants offering takeout.

It didn’t matter.  A week before our planned departure, the hotel manager called to apologize they wouldn’t be opening before mid-July, and so had taken the liberty of canceling our reservation.  Never mind.

The new bog garden

We decided to make it a day trip.  We did so knowing full well we might be turned back at the border or at the admissions desk.  We could drive seven hours and have nothing to show for it but a lot of toll charges on our EZ-Pass statement.  But we also knew we felt fine and had been practicing social distancing and mask-wearing as a matter of course.  Other than the two of us, no one has been in our house in four months.  Also, we take our temperature daily.  Neither of us even cracked 98 degrees. 

We set out before 6:30 a.m. and, by 8:30, we were on the Piscataqua River Bridge separating New Hampshire from Maine.  Then, just over the border, we saw the first overhead sign asking us to self-quarantine for 14 days.  Nervous, we declined the opportunity to stop at the official Welcome to Maine Rest Area lest a state trooper take an interest in our red-and-white Massachusetts plate and inquire of our itinerary.

We arrived at the garden a few minutes before our 10 a.m. admission time.  The parking lot held fewer than 100 cars.  We donned our masks and, just outside the entrance hall, were greeted warmly by a docent who pointed out the remnants of several thousand tulips planted last fall in expectation of welcoming April and May visitors.  “Nobody but the staff got to see them,” the docent said ruefully.

A reminder to social distance

At the admission desk, we handed over the printout of our tickets.  No request for a negative Covid-19 test.  No demand for a quarantine certificate.  Our tickets were scanned.  That was it.  We were inside.

CMBG is an ever-expanding and evolving wonder.  Conceived in 1991 by a dedicated group of area residents, and first opened in 2007, it is now 295 acres in size (including a mile of frontage along the Back River) with 17 acres of gardens and miles of trails (the 17 acre figure is from their website and may be out of date as the map doesn’t show their newly opened ‘bog garden’). 

Garden intelligence: milkweed,
viburnum and allium grown together

The gardens are intelligently planned and beautifully maintained.  All around us, a combination of volunteers and staff were planting summer annuals even as spent spring bulbs were being cleaned up.  While going down the quite steep Haney Hillside Garden, we chanced upon one of the CMBG horticulturalists, a woman named Allison, who had only recently been 'given' responsibility for the hillside garden.  She was friendly, informative and enthusiastic about her role.  As we parted, she shouted, "Don't miss the meditation garden!"  We did indeed visit the garden and, like so many things at CMBG, it is equal parts whimsy, beauty, and thoughtfulness. 

A map of the garden.  The Meditation Garden
is at the top, right-hand side of the diagram

In visiting the garden, we had an opportunity to have impressed on us the financial tightrope many gardens are walking.  The cash flow and profits from their café and snack stands is not there.  Their revenue from gate admissions is likely down by two-thirds.  It takes deep pockets and generosity to keep everything looking good in the face of a disaster no one could have seen coming.

Yet, the many docents are out and as friendly as ever. This is an enterprise with an educational mission being fulfilled despite uncertain times.  For once in my life, I’m glad we broke the law.  Institutions like CMBG deserve our support.

The Return of the Cascade Effect

Our garden is now getting full.  This
is what it looked like on July 5, 2020.

Some years back, I proposed a modest theory: that going into the garden to do any one thing begets a need to do at least half a dozen other things before the first thing can be done.  I called it 'The Cascade Effect' and learned horticulturalists took my observation seriously.  A few noted field researchers confirmed my findings. 

But, over time, my theory was consigned to the margins.  “It may happen in a few, rare instances,” one Midwest critic wrote, “but there is no evidence this occurs outside of a handful of gardens, mostly in New England.  The vast majority of gardeners will never experience this phenomenon, and it certainly never happens in Illinois.”

Shopping for plants 
with a mask

This spring of 2020 has been like no other.  Nurseries and garden centers did not open their doors until mid-May and, even then, admitted just a trickle of customers (and some only by appointment).  Betty was offered (and turned down) opportunities to email in her order and have curbside pickup.  The idea of having someone else ‘select’ your plants gets no traction in our household. 

When Massachusetts finally opened up just a crack, the pent-up demand in our home resulted in a horticultural explosion – more than 50 shrubs, perennials, and container-bound annuals were acquired over a space of 30 days.  Naturally, they all had to be quickly gotten into the ground (a plant in a pot is an orphan in need of a home). 

Polystichum acrostichoides

The container plants went quickly, but we had also purchased roughly twenty perennials and a few shrubs.  Our garden – five years ago a sea of loam topped with mulch – has filled in.  But what has also happened is a few early decisions proved to be, well, less than prophetic.  Here is what happened when we set to plant three, small Polystichum acrostichoides (Christmas ferns):

1.     We identified an excellent, semi-shady site behind our house. The ferns would help to further define a border between a moss path and a shrub-and-perennial bed.  The pots were set in an arc, identifying where holes would be dug.

2.    Betty immediately noted several tiarellas and a hosta were in the process of being overgrown by a viburnum a few feet away from the planting site.  The tiarellas and hostas were dug out to await a new home.

Not part of the plan - removing 10
square feet of Carex pennsylvanica

3.   Roughly 10 square feet of carex pennsylvanica was dug out and soil was brought in to replace what clung to the roots of the carex.  While the grasses were not in the path of the three ferns, it was decided the carex was a mistake from the start and needed to be removed before it spread further.  As a side note, this cultivar is notoriously fickle: it usually dies or refuses to spread.  Ours, on the other hand, was lush and seeding freely.

Columbine seeds freely

4.   Also seeding freely were nearby Aquilegia (columbines).  We topped more than 50 plants - none of them close to the site of the ferns - that had completed their bloom and were getting ready for their offspring to take over the garden.

5.   Holes were dug and the first fern was planted.  It didn’t look right.  So, instead, the homeless hosta and tiarellas were planted where the ferns were to have been installed.  Colorful language was used.

6.    It was decided the ferns would look better on an adjacent walkway.  A small clump of solidago was dug out to make way for the ferns. Holes were dug.

Ripening blueberries

7.    Betty noted the five, high-bush blueberries behind the site of the ferns were laden with fruit, though still unripe.  She also noted the squirrels, chipmunks, and birds were patiently watching the bushes for every indication of ripening.

8.    We collected spun fabric, landscape staples, posts, and clothespins, and netted our blueberries.  Some items came out of our gardening inventory.  Others needed to be acquired.  I made note that blueberries were selling for $2.50 a pint at our local supermarket, and the cost of 'new' materials exceeded the value of the crop on our five shrubs by a considerable margin.

The three Christmas ferns in their new home...
plus, the blueberries with their new tents.

9.    After two mornings work to install the tents over our blueberries, we finally planted the three ferns; and went on to the next set of plants to go into the ground.

Make no mistake... the Cascade Effect is real.  But it is also the natural result of gardening in the real world with finite resources.  Sure: with a blank slate and an unlimited budget, it may be possible to create a garden on paper, hand the plan to a good landscaper, and get exactly what you want.  On the other hand, the idea of drawing up a plan and marching into an existing garden with the expectation of flawlessly executing it is the stuff of fiction.  

All 'real' gardening is ultimately done on the fly.  All plans are subject to change.  And, anyone who says different has never been the Principal Undergardener to a serious gardener.