Garden Darwinism

It's that time of year when I long for the desert - when the lush, overwhelming greenness of New England threatens to overwhelm the senses, choke off paths and driveways when untended for a week. When I'm reminded how any bare patch of dirt in these parts, left untended, will be covered in a month with scrappy Queen Anne's lace, sumac trees, bright weedy wildflowers.

When my local walking trails seems sultry and overgrown, with a steamy, closed in feeling, that would render me unsurprised should a brontosaurus poke its head around the corner.

My vegetable garden goes through the same wild process every year around this time, and I am too weary to intervene. I go away or get busy for a week or so and return to find that the tomatoes are overtaking the squash, the oregano is totally out of control, and the sweet peas are staging an invasion again the neighboring asparagus with apparent success.

Garden Darwinism, I call it.

This year's vegetables have been haphazard. I planted all my tomatoes at once and am sure they will all come ripe at EXACTLY the same moment, when my car crosses the state line on my way out to vacation.

In the back row I whimsically planted come climbing moonflowers right in front of some lovely tall sunflower seeds. Unfortunately I did not also then install string for the moonflowers to climb, so as they came of age they lurched inexorably forward and established a mutually lethal stranglehold on the sunflowers. I finally ran some string and coaxed the resultant moonflower-sunflower conglomeration up the ropes, feeling vaguely like I was violating the Prime Directive.

If they survive, I thought, it'll be lovely, if odd. The moonflowers so far seem okay.

Who would think that the fragile, tapering leaves of the moonflower - blossoming only at night, slender trumpet blooms - would overpower the thicker and sturdy trunk of the sunflower? Yet that seems to be the case.

Sometimes at this time of year I feel sympathy for the Pilgrims, who, starving, must have looked around at all of this lush, fantastic growth - not much of which, occurring on its own, seems to have the nutrients to sustain human life...yet how accommodating the land, with just a little knowledge.

I am descended from some actual Pilgrims. Growing more and more allergic every year to poison ivy, I now think of it as nature's way of saving to my ancestors: get back on the boat and keep looking.