I’ve been in remembering mode recently. Mostly good things. And one of those things was our first garden, early in our marriage, while I was still a student in the 70s. We lived with another couple. Communes were good. Community was good. We found a nice big old house close to downtown Houston and turned our backyard into a garden. I was an organic gardener, too, because I’d read Silent Spring and knew that while plastics might be good career advice, chemicals might not be so hot for the planet.

It’s always interesting to me the love-hate relationship people have with plants, particularly the ones they don’t like. Crape Myrtles, for instance, are considered messy trees by some of my friends, and lantanas are equally disliked by others. We have both in our yard, and we’ve had them in every yard we ever owned. 

My run in with The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants by Charles S. Elton has stirred up a lot of sediment in the old brain. I am reminded of Earth Days gone by. I remember protests on the banks of the Houston Ship Channel. I helped remove ligustrums from the park next door. I supported movements to protect animals because a short food chain is an unstable food chain. It's as though I thought the war had been won, only to realize it’s still raging. Thanks, Charlie.

I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I’ve puzzled sometimes over what I’m beholding, especially when it comes to my gardens because I know they are in no way classical. If anything, they look like pure chaos. Plants are thrown together and sometimes plants which in other times would have been considered weeds are allowed to stay, just to see what they do. There are days when I look at  the garden and wonder what in the world am I doing.

Made a nice little discovery in the new garden along the north fence. Sunshine Mimosa (Mimosa strigillosa). How can you not like a plant with that name? It speaks of bright mornings, orange juice, and champagne. Plus, it’s got fern-like leaves and purple blooms. I’ll have to keep my eye on it and see what it does. It’s supposed to be a ground cover and it’s drought tolerant because it has deep roots, but so is khaki weed and I don’t want that in my garden.

I’m glad for the weekend because my back has decided to remind me that I’m an old man. Although, since I’m old and retired, I don’t really need the excuse of the weekend to sit around and do nothing. But old habits die hard and on most weekdays, I feel like I should be doing something and a bad back is a real hindrance. Luckily, I’m pretty much caught up on the yard word, so what needs doing is pretty easy.

I’ve decided I’m going to war against nutsedge. Not on a grand scale, just in what I now call the north fence garden. The problem I have is that the garden is currently mostly bare dirt and that’s just an invitation for everything to come grow. I can dig up the nutsedge as I dig up the coastal bermuda. Of course, there are poison options, but I’ve always preferred pulling and digging as my weed control option, even when I had a lawn in the suburbs.

I’m fond of expressing my appreciation for native plants, and castigating invasives but I wonder now if that language is appropriate or even helpful. Before the advent of humans, I’m fairly certain plants moved from place to place born on the wind or in the guts of birds or animals as seeds. That’s how any island developed its biosphere. So, no plant springs whole cloth from the ground. They just get somewhere. Like it. And grow.

When is a weed a weed? Answer. When you decide it is. This is particularly true when you like plants from the wild. Because almost every weed flowers and sometimes they look nice in the garden. And native plants are usually ones you find growing in the wild although I don’t believe I’ve ever run across a salvia greggi in the wild. Although maybe I just haven’t been looking. In the end, it comes down to taste and your willingness to pay attention.

Let’s mutter around some more in the gardens and talk about blackfoot daisies. I’ve got them planted in four spots, and they’re doing amazingly well, especially since the recent rains have fallen, and we got another inch last night. I set them up to get the soft morning sun then afternoon shade. The soil is well drained although it might be too rich for them. I’d like them to become a fixture and now that I’m once again spending time with the plants, maybe that can happen.

This is going to be the gardening equivalent of bragging about your kids, telling everyone they really knocked it out of the park in fifth or sixth grade band, as if no one has ever had a kid who did something, some time to make their parents proud. But here goes. My catmint walker low is blooming. Both plants. Bought this spring for the back porch garden, which is notoriously hard on plants.

As expected the raccoon came to the bird feeder. Climbed up the tree, walked the fence, and found his dinner. Delicate and precise. He cleaned his plate, too. I know this because I moved one of my cameras to the mesquite tree off the back porch just so I could watch. It wasn’t a great loss. I don’t put a lot of feed in the birdbath feeder. One of these days I might fill it with water again, just to see if he comes to get a drink.

A thunderstorm sent me to bed last night and another woke me in the middle. A quick peek at the rain gauge this morning shows we got a bit more than an inch of rain. And that’s how an acre of land in the middle of Texas in the southern half of the US, fared yesterday. A private report. A data point. Something to plot. No doubt the AI engines will scope it up to learn what they need to learn, and maybe we’ll be better for it. And you can use it however you choose.

I think in the short term the new garden area along the north fence is complete. I moved the bottle tree from its old spot behind the big oaks and the new gazebo to a spot by the young chinquapin. Now, when I look out the kitchen window I see a tableau. The bottle tree, the oak, an upright rosemary, a statue of St. Francis, a talavera pot, a metal buzzard, a yellow bells, a sage, and gregg’s mist flower. The living and the inanimate.

I made a mistake. I started a new garden. Stopped. Changed direction. Here was the mistake. Rather than continuing to dig up grass and turn dirt I decided to put down landscape material. I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea. But I did. Hauled in mulch. It looked nice for about three months. Then the bermuda grass did what bermuda grass does. It grew. Through the landscape cloth, over the cloth, and in the cloth.

It’s a summer morning in May. We touched 100 yesterday, and you can feel yesterday’s heat this morning. Still, there’s a special pleasure to be found in an early morning walk around the yard, feeding the cats, feeling the breeze, and looking at the plants. The Crape Myrtles, for instance, are getting ready to bloom and we have a fair collection of them around the place.

One of my gardens is freshly planted and the others are more established. In the established area beneath the big oaks, the vegetation is so thick it’s difficult to walk and I’ve given up going in after unwanted plant species. Mostly I work around the edges until the edges get established and I move the border. Occasionally, I move a plant from shade to sun as the border moves. I did that last year with two salvia greggi. They’re now flourishing.

In the time of blooming things, spring, I like blooming trees. The orchid tree is covered in white flowers as was the sandpaper tree (Ehretia anacua) early on. Now it’s the time of the golden leadball (Leucaena retusa). The latter has had a bit of a hard life in our yard. A young buck took a fancy to it early on, and wiped his velvet with it. Then the hard winds blew and thin limbs broke. But it survives, fenced, and now blooming, it’s bright yellow offerings.

I’ve had a good spring in the gardens and around the house. To prove it, I can barely lift my left arm. Now, it might be that I slept on it wrong, but it’s more likely something happened during a mulch bag lift or a turning fork throw as I dug up coastal bermuda. I  don’t know. But there it is. I went to use it the other day and it was painful. I think it’s a sign I need to slow down. Which is okay, because I’m a fan of slow, especially these days, my days of elderliness.

Big day, today. My brush pile is going away. Unfortunately, it is probably home to critters. I guess you might consider this a version of gentrification. We own the land and would like to use it as something other than a home for mice, snakes, scorpions, and whatever else might find a big brush pile an appealing place to live. It will be interesting to see what departs. Of course, whatever leaves also might be too small for us to notice, but that’s just the way of the world.