The Plot Thickens

Garden Troopers

Sorrel

Mustard

Swiss chard and neighbors (Nasturtiums, I think.)

Tomato plant

Fennel, coming back to life after a flowering.  I love it; it looks like a Christmas tree.

I have to admit, though I adore our neat, new planter boxes, my favorite corner of the garden is a shady, bedraggled one we’d given up for dead.  It’s the corner where our corn caught a fungus and had to be torn out.  It’s where our lettuces and arugula flowered and moved on into the Great Salad Afterlife.  We’d decided to leave it be and give the climbing vines a little room to move along the fence.

But when we visited the garden today, I discovered a pleasant surprise; several former residents had colonized the spaces between the mulch.  The fennel plant came back for a second go around.  This is a plant that we uprooted from our neighbor’s abandoned plot; transplanted to our own; watched grow to the size of a creosote bush; hacked down to the ground with a pruner; then left behind as a stump because we were too lazy to take a spade to its root.

The fennel suffered all of these indignities and still decided to stick with us.  I feel a little guilty.  And a lot impressed.

Even more impressive was what I found next to and all around it:

Baby fennel plants. (They’re the ones that look like Dr. Seuss creations.)  Pea vines — two or three of them, reaching straight upward.  And cilantro, which had originally been planted several feet away.

Little revelations like this are what I like best about gardening.  You can see on a microcosmic level how easily life can get on without the interference of those pesky humans.  The engineered plants in their pretty boxes are beautiful, and I’m proud to watch them grow. But it’s the ones that survived our hacking and trampling, our careless flinging of equipment and manure sacks, that really earn my respect.

So hats off to the really hardy ones:

• Fennel
• Cilantro
• Sweet peas
• Swiss chard
• New Zealand spinach
• Chives

You guys rock.

— Kristen