The Groundskeeper’s Lament

Join me, won’t you, on a leisurely stroll through my neighborhood. You’ll see craftsman style homes, some Cape Cods, some others strewn through leafy streets. Almost every home has a verdant yard, every yard an oak, maple, or dogwood, every flowerbed dazzling with hostas and shaped hollies. We’ve just missed the best part of the year, as all the irises and azaleas have bloomed already. There may be some day lilies and hydrangeas, though, and there are dinner plate-sized magnolia blossoms, like giant white stars in a shining dark green night of glossy leaves. 

If we take a closer look, though, amid all the greenness is a strange and insidious growth. Virginia creeper is slowly spreading its tendrils across the beautiful mulch under the front windows. Wild grapes are flourishing over the buttery gardenias. Invasive species, like privet and Chinese wisteria, pop up everywhere, not to mention volunteers of the more hardy trees, like elm and maple, and cedar. You’ll notice mulberry, too, if you wander around the natural areas, and poison ivy and mimosa, and liriope grass. There is wild yam (also a vine) and many other kinds of green things that are slowly taking over, covering, sprouting, trailing, creeping, and proliferating. Almost as soon as the temperature rises daily above 65 degrees Fahrenheit, the world and our neighborhood and our yard come to life with an army of plant life of wondrous assortment that refuse to be culled, plucked out, torn down, mowed, trimmed, pruned, shaped, dug up, burned, or sprayed. 

The irony of plant life is that we have obvious and blatant double standards regarding them. This past weekend, I spent two days carving into the lush growth, just to get some of our yard back. Without concern for getting enough water or sunlight, these ancient growing things extend three feet in just one day, while we spend our time plucking weeds in our garden and watering, just to make sure that our tomatoes, peppers, and herbs keep growing. The plants we want seem precarious and delicate, and finicky. The plants we don’t want can survive an eight-week drought, a nuclear winter, and still come back strong enough for me to have to go out and cut them back again. 

While griping copiously as I mowed, I noted that about 1/3 of our yard is dedicated to what my father-in-law called “natural areas”. Mainly, these natural areas are beneath our numerous magnolia trees. Unlike other deciduous trees, magnolias tend to be a little bit backward in their treeish schedules. When other trees are newly jade green in spring, the magnolia is beginning to cast off its huge, glossy leaves, which are thick and heavy, in preparation for its massive blossoms. In late summer, when other trees are bearing fruit, the magnolia drops its large cone-like seed hulls, which look for all the world like fragmentation grenades and quickly dull my mower blades.

This is forgivable, if you’ve ever smelled a magnolia blossom, you’ll know it is one of the best natural scents in the world and speaks to deeps within me that remind me of ancient summers long before humans walked in this part of the world. As the magnolia leaves clatter down, they land on an incredibly shallow root system, which makes mowing a real pain. I long ago decided to let the leaves just fall and cover the ground under the trees with crackling leaf litter. Most things are deterred by the heavy leaves, but some invasive species still grow up in those natural areas, and so, even in the twilight gloom under the magnolia's evergreen boughs, I have to spray and cut, to make sure the ivies and the creepers and privet don’t take over. 

I sometimes imagine myself like Macbeth, as he listens to the messenger tell him, 

“As I did stand my watch upon the hill,

I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought

The Wood began to move.”

In the Scottish play, this is a tale of doom for Macbeth, since the witches at the beginning told him that he would be king until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Little does he know that his enemies have cut tree branches to camouflage their advance to lay siege to his castle, signifying his end. But on a quiet day, when the birds are ducking the midday sun, I swear I can hear the vines and creepers whispering through the undergrowth and the faint keening of woody junk plants stretching under our decks. 

I work forty hours a week. When I get home, until we have dinner and clean up, it is time to think of getting ready for the next day so that we can get to bed early enough to make the next morning bearable. Our weekends are often busy, too. Whether we are off to book signing events or to visit the kids, or if we are hoping to grab lunch in our favorite cantina, downtown, then grocery shopping, or running weekend errands, doing laundry, cleaning the house, or just shattered from a very busy and dauntingly packed week, I sometimes just don’t have enough time to spend in the yard and grounds. 

Most years, I can find at least one or two days a week to get out and get ahead, but this last year has been busier than normal and more fraught with commitments. I had a good handle on the end-of-summer chores last year, and was feeling good about it, when Hurricane Helene came hurtling across our state’s western region, shunting our kids from their house to ours, from late September to late January. During that time, we were trying hard to make our home welcoming for our son and his wife and daughter, especially when he had to go back to their house during the week. We got to spend a lot of time with the baby, but it necessarily cut into yardwork time. Not that I minded, of course. Given the chance to be raking and mowing up leaf litter and sitting watching music videos and reading to the little bit, I’d choose the latter every time and twice on Thursday.

Somehow, though, after the kids were able to get home (it took four months for their Internet to be hooked up, in the daunting aftermath), we needed some time to deal with the poignant pain of missing them and transitioning back to our previous routine. Then, too, our eldest opted to move into where the other kids had been staying during the fall and winter, so there was a secondary transition. By my birthday, when I usually take a week off to get caught up on the grounds in preparation for summer, we were settling back into our quiet routine again. Except this year, instead of a week at my birthday, as usual, I opted to take the same week off as the local school system’s spring break, so that we could spend it together without really going anywhere. As glorious as that week was, though, instead of getting the yard and pool sorted, I spent it gamboling around town with my bride. Again, given the chance, I’d pick the latter every time. The green and growing things took full advantage

April streaked by and May is now waning and only by dribs and drabs have I been able to get anything close to caught up. This past weekend, plans we made were changed and so I was able to spend two whole days getting things reckoned with and uncovering the pool, but I still have so much to do. Soon, we’re headed to celebrate the long Memorial Day weekend with our kids in the mountains, and so, more time will slip by without a shred of work getting done at our house.

I say that, but our eldest has take real pride this year and tidied up a lot in the courtyard, which was a huge help and his talent for seeing things in 3D before the job is done, made taking the cover off the pool 99% easier than when I’ve had to do it myself in previous years. Nevertheless, even with a squad of helpers and the best tools, it would take me most of June to get things where I would like them.

Pop Bare says, “The grass will always have to be mowed.” It’s true enough. Just like a haircut, my vibrant, viridian lawn which looks neat and even, will soon be, to use the Pennsylvania German word, strubbly once again. No matter how many times I pull down and cut away the English ivy or the Virginia creeper from under my front windows, I’ll have to do it again. This year was somewhat off kilter and enjoyably so, but it won’t matter in the long run. Slowly, while I’m working at the library or visiting the kids, or just taking a much needed stroll with Micki to our favorite downtown haunts, the growing things will be making slow, almost silent inroads, like the sentient, carnivorous monster plant in a thriller I recently read. 

Someday, whether or not I am still as healthy and springy as I am now, I will have to hire a yard company to come out and deal with our grounds. I’ve watched one-by-one as our older neighbors have succumbed to the cookie-cutter landscaping that is the equivalent of a dollar store makeover. I will buy a riding mower sooner than give up the right to plan my own grounds. We Bares are stubborn and full of pride.

Though I will say that as I mowed recently, I was envisioning something along the lines of a vast English gardens in our North Yard. Instead of an acre of green grass, I imagined cutting the rectangle up into a series of beds, with swaths of paving stones between them and very little, if any grass present. I would plant yarrow and obedient and black-eyed susans and towering cone flowers and creeping flox, and every other kind of flowering beauty, so that, as the year progressed from early spring to late fall, something would always be blooming. It would mean less mowing, more love to our pollinators and a heaping helping of pretty for those passing through. We could even put a nice bench or a swing out there, or a table and chairs, so we could read and enjoy the beauty (if it isn't too hot).

Alas, none of that is happening soon. Not for lack of trying, but because until we’re both pensioners ourselves, there just won’t be any time. In the meantime, I’ll continue trying to keep more than a fingernail-hold on my outdoor chores and endeavor to reawaken my previous dedication to keeping things a little neater than I have this past year.