True Dirt

a good shovel

I'm sore. Physically.

The winter garden is hard work. This week-end I planted two new roses: Charlotte, a David Austen yellow to complement an over-abundant Graham Thomas, and a Buff Beauty to grow over a low wall.

All the books tell me to dig a BIG HOLE for my new rose. In the past I've always dug the BIG HOLE and my roses have done pretty well. So I set out to dig two BIG HOLES.

Picture of gardening: Dig two big holes. Jam several massive heavy bags of manure and mulch in the wheel-barrow, and haul them around from the back of the garage (up a hill, I live in San Francisco) to the BIG HOLES. Repeat.

Fill the BIG HOLES part way up with the old sad dirt and the new happy dirt. Plant the roses and fill some more. Yes, I'm, leaving out all the details of the natural fertilizers and other horticultural amendments. They went in the BIG HOLE too.

Part way through the planting of the second rose, it started to rain (San Francisco in winter, yep). So there I am kneeling over this BIG HOLE full of muddy gooey dirt and manure, trying to make a cone for the rose to be planted onto, but the pouring rain keeps collapsing the cone into a pile of muck.

I persisted, and eventually the rose got planted. But -- did I mention kneeling over a BIG HOLE of chicken manure in the rain?

Gardening: a gentle breeze, the sweet smell of roses, a vase of cheerful bright dahlias. But all that's months off.

And in the meantime, my back, legs, arms, even my feet, hurt. How old was Gertrude Jekyll when she hired a staff to do the hard labor while she stood on and directed?

winter gardening

In spite of the eccentricities of coastal California winters--one day can be hot and dry followed by torrential rain and cold--we Left Coast gardeners loll in the same doldrums as our Midwest and Eastern seaboard colleagues. For all of us, it is catalog season. For a time we are relieved of the primal urge to be out in the dirt every moment of daylight and can sink guiltlessly into the luxurious idleness of catalog cruising.

The pleasure of cozying up on the couch with Wayside Gardens or White Flower Farm trumps even the all-season browsibility of garden web sites. I can attest to the attraction of photo-less catalogs as well. Although there is nothing quite like the lust aroused by a full-color close-up of a perfect David Austen rose, or a tantalizing new hybrid clematis, we gardeners are just as susceptible to a bit of fanciful prose.

Content to imagine the Scutellaria altissima in Digging Dog Nursery's plain paper catalog, its "...elegant dark violet hoods... and pairs of scallop shaped crimson seeds, resembling small inverted skullcaps..." are no less desirable. As is the New! Agastache "Ava" in High Country Gardens' photo-lavished spread, "Of all the hummingbird mints...this is our finest introduction. This stately hybrid between A. cana and A. barberi will be the centerpiece of any planting with its huge spikes of deep rose-pink flowers, raspbery-red calyxes and sweetly scented foliage." Roses of Yesterday and Today leaves the advertising to their customers; of the Climbing Lady Forteviot rose, Joseph T. Reynolds of Washington, D.C. writes, "At her best, she looks like a hanging garden of yellow and gold tulips."

The specialized catalogs, like Digging Dog and High Country, fill a hole in the garden catalog repertory for western gardeners. Much as I might desire the common pleasure of blooming forsythia or a raft of tulips, they are not to be in my domain. So the pages of dazzling bulb displays in White Flower Farm have, over the years, ceased to ignite my gardner's zeal. In fact, I noticed this year that the national catalogs did not arrive in my mailbox as usual with the monsoons. I can't remember the last time I ordered from them. It seems I must pay for the pleasure of window-shopping.

And I will.