Gardening at Night

The garden is pushing the last, late flower burst of the season into the air. The coming frost will soon send most of them to sleep for the winter and kill the unlucky ones who were never intended as more than summer guests. The garden is an ever-changing work in progress that puts on its greatest show in from April through September.

Now, as the leaves fade and drop, stems wither and colors fade, the gardener dreams of the coming spring and wonders which of them will make it through the winter and of those that survive, which will flourish and grow to their full potential. The gardener sees not only what rests in the bed before him but what might be. One shouldn’t rely on his observations because they are always hopeful, he sees the stub of a rose crushed by summer revelers as the full and robust plant it may yet become. He imagines the lilac in full bloom, tall and rich white in the background, the lavender bushy and deeply scented, a harmonious yet seemingly random collection of living things fed and watered and whispered to, the product of a thousand gentle touchings and encouragements.

March

It is time for the planting of things

It is time to sit for an afternoon

and think about the days

so soon here and gone

of summer

of anticipating

of building

of making

I need an afternoon to think

about what must be done

and what to sow

already birds are calling me awake screeching

they are piping hot

they are shrill screaming

‘wake up mister…come outside and see

the sun shine longer

and tomorrow longer still’

I hear you

I hear you

I am inside thinking about the garden

about next steps and places

bones already walked so far

and just now starting over

it is nearly March

another April, May

Take a breath, just one

and summer powers in

summer in an afternoon

fading gold to blue-gray

light for the night till ten

then a garden filled and flowing

and thanking God for the blessing

to quiet winter

after so brief a summer passing.

Public Beds

Yesterday we spent the day in the garden, it is the time of year for planting bulbs and following a week of solid rain, the day was bright and cool and breezy, a perfect day to rake and dig and dream of spring.

HH and I set out early with our gray plastic laundry basket filled with gardening tools and bone meal and watering cans. Ours is a public garden and we share a dozen or so raised concrete beds in the center of Cologne with our neighbors and with a host of visitors who come for an afternoon or an evening or simply for five minutes in the middle of the day to sip a cup of coffee or eat and ice cream. Some of them even enjoy the flowers, so much so that souvenirs are often snipped, sometimes whole plants, but that doesn’t happen very often. Most people seem to appreciate this cool, green spot in the middle of the city.

We also share the garden with a steady stream of drinkers, mostly beer drinkers, some of whom start quite early in the morning. Yesterday, a little after 8:00AM, there was already a small group of men drinking quietly on one of the benches next to our bed. As the day wore on the group got larger and rowdier and near sunset a fight broke out. Two of the younger men in the group started at each other. The older men pulled them apart and settled them down and the drinking continued uneventfully. It’s one of the odd disconnects here in Germany – the public drinking. I realize that Germans require beer in order to function properly but I never imagined the extent to which the drinking took place in public places. People do it everywhere, at all times of the day and night, in buses, subways, trains, on the streets and in the parks. Yesterday two men pushing strollers stopped and joined the drinkers on the bench near our bed. They drank a few beers with the boys and then moved on, pushing their strollers ahead of them. It doesn’t matter to me one way or another if folks drink beer in the park or in the bus or on the train or hanging out the window of their apartments, but I do get peeved when they break their bottles and leave the shards scattered throughout the flower beds. I also find the raised voices and unsolicited gardening advice annoying: Yesterday there was a good deal of both.

Most mornings I find dozens of bottle tops in the flowerbed, along with broken bottles, greasy take-out food containers, innumerable cigarette butts and from time to time the odd weapon. A few mornings back, as I was making my way through the park, one of my neighbors found a pistol in the children’s play area adjacent to flower beds.

I had imagined the Germans to be a tidy lot – that’s one of the cultural stereotypes I carried with me when I came here. And they are, for the most part, pretty clean folks, except (and here is another one of those disconnects) in public places. There seems to be a feeling of entitlement to trash the parks at will. People unleash their dogs into the flowerbeds and watch as the hounds trample the plants and destroy hours and hours and weeks of work in an instant. If you say something to them – the reaction will likely be one of scorn and indignation: “I pay my taxes. My dog can run and crap where he pleases!”

At times I long for the in-your-face style of my fellow New Yorkers who raised so much hell about dog droppings in the streets of New York that the police actually enforce the law. I have no idea what the law is here in Cologne – I only know that dogs can stop and drop where they please and the citizenry seem perfectly at ease leaving a trail of detritus in their wake as they waddle boozed and bold through the flower beds.

Even with the peculiar challenges of urban gardening in Cologne, there is nothing quite as rewarding as getting your hands dirty in a garden and when HH is along, everything takes on a special significance. Just being with him in the garden is fun, watching him dig or struggle to put the leaves and cuttings into the trash bag. Later today we’ll go back out and finish planting the remaining bulbs. I’ll give him a small bag of crocuses and let him plant them wherever he wants. Maybe I’ll take a picture of the nearly empty bed and show it to him in late March when his small purple flowers have popped their heads up through the dirt.

A Day in the Garden

Yesterday we worked in the garden. It was a full day of pruning and planting bulbs and watering and clearing away the debris of summer’s end. HH was there, digging and watering and occasionally spraying a passerby. He has great fun in the garden and likes to be a part of it all. The whole neighborhood was out because these are community gardens, so there were big boys for him to watch and work with and I expect that fact was much on his mind. Today we will visit his Oma and I expect we will spend time in her garden, drawing water from the old well out back. He will probably have a good deal to tell her about his own garden and may have a few pointers for her. Yesterday he learned how to plant a bulb with the small end sticking up. He learned this from one of the neighbors and when I came to sit with him in the dirt he showed me how to do it properly and he was quite proud of himself, as he should be. He is growing and changing so fast and at times I wonder if I am quite ready for it.