There's always something to do in the garden

How do I know? Well, this afternoon I locked myself out of the apartment with a bag of recycling in one hand and a bag of garbage in the other. The neighbors weren't home so I couldn't get at a spare key. I figured I had a couple of hours to kill until somebody came home from work or school. What to do?

Well, garden, obviously. But without my keys I couldn't get to the trowels and weeders and shovels and clippers in the basement. Now, normally I leave tools strewn everywhere. There must be dozens of pairs of pruners in the top 6 inches of my garden soil. But apparently I had been seized with a spasm of entirely uncharacteristic tidiness because I checked all my usual deposits and all I could find was a pair of gloves. From the evidence, it seemed I had put all my tools away where they belonged. I'll make sure I never do that again.

As a stopgap, I scrounged a plastic picnic knife from a recycling bin down the alley and went to work. I figure it was about as much gardening equipment as my ancestors in Africa had a few hundred thousand years ago. I could deadhead daffodils and tulips. I could clean up last year's dead stalks. My little plastic knife wasn't much of a weeder, but ladybells and creeping Charlie pull up pretty easily when the soil is moist, as it is now from our several days of rain.

And that magic gardening thing happened: For an hour and a half or so I forgot all about every other thing and just concentrated on what I should do next, on the next weed to pull, on whether that sprout was a weed or a precious perennial, on noticing the swelling buds of the first lilies and the mock orange, on collecting some dead leaves to add a soupcon of carbon to the compost bin to balance the nitrogen from all the weeds I'd just pulled.

Kneeling and weeding, I spotted all sorts of new things. I had thought I was death to clematis, for example, but now I saw that two different plants I had long since given up on, one white and one lavender, are blooming in the lilac bushes. As with a lot of plants (and some people), I guess the key to success with clematis is to leave them the hell alone.

I rode a river of bright new ideas for things to divide or move. I was in no position to execute them without a trowel, any more than I could install the 50 or so plants that have been waiting for the rain to stop and me to get my head out of my resume long enough to get them in the ground or into pots. But sometimes the best bright ideas are the ones you are in no position to execute.

When a neighbor turned up with a door key it was almost a blow. I had a large mental stack of things I was supposed to be doing indoors and weighty things I needed to cope with, but I stole another half an hour in the garden (now armed with a digging knife) and got a few annuals tucked into a bed before I was reminded of a place I had to be.

This weekend, I won't be gardening either. All those plants on the patio will have to wait while I attend a gathering of garden bloggers from all over the country who are convening in Chicago this weekend. The irony is inescapable, but at least I'll be with people who can talk about gardening. It's supposed to rain again anyway.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.