Geekrant vs the Language of Gardening

Greetings Geekranters!

And So, it has come to pass that our modern civilisation, that we all have a tendency to feel is so invincible, has fallen to the machinations of a subversive collection of sub-microscopic molecules called a virus. When I write it like that it does sound incredibly post-apocalyptic and epic. For those of our society who have caught this terrible disease, those who have survived and sadly, those who have died, it is an incredibly frightening and life changing moment. The same is true for their families. 

The trouble is, as with all of the challenging moments in history, we all experience them differently. Some of us have been greatly hurt by these times, some of us have lost friends and family, some of us work on the frontlines or we know people who do. Some of us are essential workers and look enviously at those of us who aren’t, wishing that we too could have that time of seclusion away from the dangers of the virus. Some of us aren’t essential workers and are stuck at home, wishing we could work, as we don’t know where the next pay packet is going to come from, or when. I say, us, because we are all in this together and we are the unwilling participants of this moment in history, reluctant partners in the virus’ dance if you will.

My point is, I’m just a writer and I’m not sure I’m all that good. So I've refrained from writing my blog in this moment, even though I now have much time on  my hands, in case by doing so, I merely add to the plethora of opinions and attitudes that this chaos has brought upon us which are negative and serve simply to cast blame on this person or that group of people for how this virus may have treated us personally. I always want to encourage when I write and hopefully I do so, as a result, my pen has been silent of late.

Having said all that and keeping all of these things in mind, I have to write something, if only to save myself from stir crazy cabin fever. Still I do not feel myself qualified to write about anything that relates to the silent foe that is the Coronavirus. So I’m going to write about gardens. Now, I hear you ask, what does a British ex-pat with no adult qualifications past a Certificate of Higher Education in History and a One Star Award in Kayaking know about gardens. The answer is I know very little. Save that I like them and I want to have a nice one. Ah! But there does the interest, I would argue, in my story lie.

 I arrived in the United States for good, that is to live, in September of 2015 and at that time the idea of having a garden had hardly crossed my mind. From that point until December 2018, we lived in a smallish second floor apartment on Madison’s East Side, with access to a balcony and a small storage unit in the basement. Not really a great place to stimulate an hitherto unknown desire to develop a green thumb. We were happy enough, we had good neighbours, we got on well with our landlord and we found a greater sense of community at our church, Damascus Road, on Park Street (truly, without the friendships of many people there, I’m not sure I would have survived the transition to another country with relatively little homesickness) which is located on the near West Side of Madison. 

We were, and are, very happy, but we decided the time had finally come to find a house to live in. A home to truly call our own. This was a task that we thought would take a long time and much searching but with the help of a realtor (that’s an estate agent for all my British readers who don’t know) friend of ours, we seemed to find a house, signed everything, moved in and settled down in the blink of an eye. It really was pretty quick I’m told, in comparison to how these things often go. 

So there we were, the brand new owners of a forty year old house, with forty year old gutters, a twenty year old roof, many smaller items to update and a quarter acre of land on a corner lot in a quiet, leafy, suburban neighbourhood called Heritage Heights. 

This is where gardening, home improvement and landscaping comes in, and also where the different expectations, ideas and even words that separate the British and Americans serve to cause some confusion, differences of opinion and, dare I say, even arguments between my wife and I. It really doesn’t occur to you, when you spend the first 14 months of your marriage separated by an entire ocean, that communication can be harder for you when you’re in the same room than it was when you were in different continents but sometimes it is. Most of the time it's much, much, better but upon the odd occasion, it's harder. 

It has been noted by someone, somewhere in the past, that the British and Americans are like “one people separated by a common language” which is, in my opinion, about as well as anyone can say it. That language though, is not just made up of words, but of culture and ideas, shared history and shared dreams or sometimes the lack thereof. That is not to say that I don’t enjoy living here or that I wish I was living in the UK, it just means that sometimes its easy to misunderstand what the other person means.

Take the word “garden” itself, for instance. In the UK, in general usage anyway, a garden pretty much refers to the whole of the usable land that goes along with your house and is not part of your driveway. We call them, for the most part, front and back gardens and although there are regional differences throughout the UK, it is pretty much universally accepted that if you refer to your garden and refer to having “a garden”, you’re referring to the whole thing. An area that will have probably have a lawn, maybe with some flowers and a shed, possibly with a patio and maybe some herbs in pots and a vegetable patch, if you have room. This is where the confusion started.

When I told my wife that I wanted to have a garden at beginning of last year, January 2019, she was enthusiastic for me, but she also may have had a slightly bemused look on her face which I might have missed at the time. She told some regulars who frequent the coffee shop she manages about this and they suggested we went to the Wisconsin Gardening Expo at the Alliant Energy Center. It sounded great, but I should have been more aware that I had seriously got the wrong end of the stick, or garden cane in this case, after I had been there.

 I sat through a seminar on soil health to reap the best harvest from your vegetables, I listened to a seminar on the growing of vegetables and herbs in containers, I took notes on a seminar about how small spaces are no barrier to getting great yields from your vegetables (are you detecting a theme here, dear reader? For I must confess I was clueless to the obvious implication found in the subjects of these seminars) and I shopped for plants.

 I was lost in dreams of Wordsworth’s daffodils and there I was like Rupert Brooke imagining

“The lilac is in bloom,
 all before my little room;
 And in my flower-beds, I think,
 Smile the Carnation and the pink;
 And down the borders, well I know,
 The poppy and the pansy blow…”.

("The Old Vicarage, Grantchester")

 It didn’t occur to me that there were very few flowers being sold at the Expo, I just told myself it wasn’t the season for them yet. I was too caught up in the words and dreams of the Romantic poets.

 So I grew lettuce, which died, and chives, which died, and basil, which died, and oregano, which also died, and peppers, which, you’ve guessed it, died and I grew tomatoes of which a few hardy examples resisted my best attempts at horticultural homicide and survived. I was waiting for flower season and when all the vegetables died and I got upset and told my wife that all I’d asked for is some flowers she got very upset. Still I didn’t understand.

 It was pretty much a loss in terms of the outdoor situation until my parents visited and my mother went with us to Menards and helped pick out petunias, foxgloves and zinnias for planter boxes in our front garden and basil, oregano, citronella and a beautiful little Dianthus (pinks)plant for the flowerpots on our back deck. It helped a lot and the tomatoes that survived grew well in raised beds and one of Kelly’s co-workers gave us pepper plants which produced good fruit and in the sun dappled, tree shaded light of late summer, it suddenly occurred to me what I had missed in all that time.

 I realised why my wife looked bemused and upset with me when I said that I’d be asking for flowers since January, why there were no flowers at the Expo and why when I told people about wanting to have a gardern all they could talk about was what the Americans call “produce”. I realised, at some point, that in American English, a garden refers to a vegetable plot, nothing else. That when I said I wanted to garden, my wife heard that I wanted to raise vegetables, when I told my friends about having a garden, they wanted to know what vegetables I was going to grow and when I went to a state wide Expo, of course, they only talked about vegetables. 

Sometimes the hardest thing about being married to someone from another culture, is that you can reaffirm your point in the clearest terms either of you know and often you completely agree with each other on a subject and you still end up either misunderstanding each other or arguing. All I wanted last year was flowers, I thought vegetables was a bonus and I must admit that I got upset when my wife seemed to think that I had changed my mind and messed up all the hard work she did to help me. She was right in the end and so, for that matter, was I. We just had to learn what the other person actually meant.

This year, I planned better and understood what certain terms mean and I got a little grow light to start plants indoors. And my tomatoes are still alive, so are my peppers. The chives and basil are beginning to emit their strong fragrances and I even planted some dianthus to see if they would grow from seed indoors. My mother in law’s found some peonies and phlox that someone doesn’t want in Minnesota and when the “safe-at-home” is finished, I’m going to get some more petunias. This year we know what I mean by a garden and what my wife means by a garden and we’re learning to understand each other’s ideas all the more.

Sometimes I wonder if things like the problems that the Coronavirus cause aren’t a little bit like me, my wife and our garden. We both wanted something to grow, we both wanted the best out of the ground but we misunderstood what each other was saying. Maybe, the one thing we should remember in these times, is we’re all in this together and we all want it to end, we just have different opinions on how to end it. Maybe we just need to agree that we all want good things to grow and start “planting some petunias” together.