A Garden Ramble

Everything doubles here. Sharpen your shears.

You’ve moved to North Florida. At some point, your imagination shifted. The visions in your daydreams filled with citrus and crepe myrtles; raised beds and Dahlias. Something in you woke up, and now you plan to grow the food you eat.

There’s only one problem. You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. This isn’t Virginia or Idaho or New York or San Francisco. This is North Florida. Everything doubles here.

Really. Everything doubles. We have two seasons for weeds: Summer and Winter. Everything doubles here–pests, fungus, humidity. The sunshine doubles here, and this is trouble, but this is also blessing. In Northern regions of America, a tree can take several years to put on the growth that our trees put on in one Summer. Everything doubles here. Sharpen your shears.

The doubleness of our seasons only means that you need double the imagination.

The first step in successfully keeping a North Florida garden is throwing whatever seasonal timeline you carry in your subconscious out. In North Florida, you have two “Winters” and two growing seasons. We don’t really have Fall.

We have the season called: too hot to do much.

Then we enter: Ooh, isn’t this wonderful.

Then: Wow. I didn’t think Florida got this cold.

And back around to: Ooh, isn’t this wonderful?

Right now, we sit at the cusp of August. August is Winter. You go outside to do what must be done and no more.

This is the season of chopping back plants, assessing what didn’t work, tossing the leftover, rotten cucumbers to the chickens, and preparing for your Fall garden.

Right now, there’s a sense of weariness in the garden. Leaves droop. Fruit production slows and eventually shrivels. Brown rust settles into the leaves. It takes me twice as long to finish a task in this heat, and I have learned the art of giving up in time to get a cool glass of water before I faint.

It’s true that this is the season of the tropics. But you don’t live in Florida. You live in North Florida. And for every tropical plant that you buy right now, 100 rot and fade into the land of: my gardener didn’t know how unlikely he was to protect me against the many freezes we get in January. You’re not going to wrap it. You know you’re not. Do not buy tropical plants. (I tease. Feel free to buy whatever you want.)

This is not the region to daydream of tropical paradises. And that’s what makes gardening so difficult here. Because we are not a tropic. And we are not where you came from. And we are probably not what you thought we were when you first came. And perhaps, the hardest element in learning to Garden well in North Florida is being content with what this region actually is.

I too feel the weariness of my garden. Plants that I held great confidence in have disappointed me. I walk through with clippers, cutting back vines, chopping tired salvia to the ground, harvesting okra. Much of what I chop back will re-surface for a second showing in just a month or two.

There’s a lump on my arm. Something bit me. The half-inch space between my shoes and the bottom of my pant leg stings with mosquito bites. Sweat soaks my tank top, drips down my forehead. If I hold my head at just the right angle, it gently flows off the top of my eyebrow. If it gets into my eyes, they smart from the salt, and my vision is blurred momentarily. I always want to give up right about now.

Bees and a host of miniature dragons, which we call bugs, organize, scavenge, and build among my plants. The goldenrod has just the slightest hint of yellow, and I know that patch will rumble day and night for the next few months with the butterflies, bees, moths, houseflies; anything with an appetite for pollen.

It all used to scare me. I still jump and strike the air like a madwoman when an unfamiliar touch brushes against my skin. I am actively watching for snakes every second in this garden right now. But I am getting used to it too. I learn to just walk by, and they mostly ignore me.

I am careful too where I put my gloveless hands, and I have the scars to prove my caution. This soil holds infinite life, and some of that life stings like a jellyfish and bites with ferocity. I’m always amazed that the God who made ants made alligators. I know they have little in common, but every ant bit leaves me thinking of the alligators. Thankfully, I do not know what their bit feels like, but I imagine something in it would feel like a horrible, monstrous ant.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed in your efforts to trace His creativity? That the rain’s cycle has something of a tree’s appetite written into it? How is that? Every time I think I’ve seen every shade of green He has to offer, a leaf trembles, and I find colors to thrill a painter’s soul. Think of the birds.

They’re downright bold this time of year. The garden’s growth is so jungly and wild and chaotic that they fear nothing. They hop through its tangles and leap through its branches and dive through its flowers like soldiers who have already won the war. Some, like the black-capped chickadee, dress like gentlemen. Others, like the brown sparrow, have the comfortableness of a Charles Dickens character, with their worn tweeds loose against feasting bellies. No two sound alike. No two feathers alike. No two bodies alike. And yet, alike.

“For I know that the Lord is great,
And our Lord is above all gods.
Whatever the Lord pleases He does,
In heaven and in earth,
In the seas and in all deep places.
He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth;
He makes lightning for the rain;
He brings the wind out of His treasuries.” Psalm 135:5-7