Old-Fashioned Gramma’s Garden

Lots of us dream about accomplishing something that makes others shake their heads in wonder. My funky lifetime wish has been to grow an old-fashioned gramma’s flower garden full of purple, blue, and pink larkspur and bachelor buttons; orange, red, and yellow Indian blankets; lavender cosmos; yellow and white daisies; and multi-color hollyhocks. Despite lifetime efforts and lots of money spent on seeds, it’s taken me 40 years and aspringtime of gentle, well-timed, ample rains to make my dream come true.

The irony of this beautiful flowerbed makes me chuckle. I left town and abandoned it to Mother Nature’s care for weeks. During that time, it had no encouragement. No weeding, no fertilizing, no thinning out plants, no early morning sitting on the paving stones dreaming about the pretty bouquets I hoped to harvest and  display in my kitchen window. Apparently, dirt and seeds enjoy benign neglect because I drove up after that absence to spy thriving pinks, purples, blues, lavenders, whites, yellows, oranges, and reds spilling over garden borders and waving wildly  in evening breezes. They were everything I’d hoped for all the years I’d planted store-bought seed and carefully tended previous endeavors.

So, the next irony in this story is that girlfriends gave me hollyhock and larkspur seeds a few years ago. I then harvested bachelor button and Indian blanket seeds that I’d planted two summers ago and sprinkled those among my friends’ gifts. None of this year’s crop came from miserly garden shop packets. Nope, these were homegrown. Two fellow gardeners and I collected dried pods from previous years’ growth, separated the tiny seeds, and then saved them in paper bags to share.

The hollyhocks, bachelor buttons, Indian blanket, and larkspur took a year to gain a solid foothold in my yard. Last summer, I had scraggly, hesitant blooms--nothing like the towers of frothy color dancing boldly under this spring’s sun. In addition to the rain helping, I suspect good old Kansas breezes had something to do with the expansion of my plantings. A few seeds blew south and started new growth. Then stout southerly winds tumbled the majority of them north across our driveway until they landed in a bed of wood chips. Imagine my surprise to see them take root and grow.

By allowing nature to take its course, I ended up with stunning flowers in places I didn’t sow them. Initially, I thought I’d pull the unplanned starts, but I’m glad I didn’t. Not only do I have a new bed of larkspur and bachelor buttons outdoing itself on the other side of the drive, I have hollyhocks in places I never expected to find them. They proudly belong.

Perhaps letting Mother Nature do her thing in the sowing and watering is the secret to a successful old-fashioned, Gramma’s garden. That saucy anthropomorph has done a stellar job  taking seeds friends gave me, multiplying and then tossing them in the wind, and raining on them to show me how to get the job done. I’m going to help her out by harvesting, drying, and passing on these tiny power packs of beauty to my daughters and my friends.

The Smartest Toads Live Here

            While my sixth grade classmates loved listening to our teacher read Wind in the Willows, I found it silly.  Toads talking and acting like people, no way.  This attitude toward anthropomorphic creatures was a childhood peeve.  I wanted critters natural. 

            To this day, I find stories with talking animals silly.  Despite this curmudgeonly attitude toward this genre, I do like toads. Fortunately, this summer has provided daily opportunities to observe a pair of toads residing in our patio planters.

            Looking at a toad, you wouldn’t think it overly bright, but these two must lead their class based on their behaviors.

            Before summer officially arrived, these fellows demonstrated their smarts.  Our little section of parched prairie made growing anything a challenge.  Instead of investing in a big flowerbed, I decided a few well-chosen pots with bright blooms would make it seem like summer even if I couldn’t justify the water needed to grow a lush flower garden. Those green gents determined which pots stayed cool and damp longest and moved in.  Initially, they lived separately, one in my mixed bloom bucket and the other in a geranium pot. 

As May days lengthened and warmed, the geranium toad must have checked out the mixed bloom pot because next thing I knew, I had two toads coming up for air out of the same hole when I watered.  Their toad hole was deep enough that one could rest on the other’s head and still leave the top toad covered in potting soil to his bulging eyeballs.

For a while they seemed content in the mixed bloom pot, but as it grew hotter and drier, both toads abandoned that pot for my herb garden.  I guess it was insulated a little better.  Watering time became an adventure.  I never knew exactly where I would find my garden buddies.

In addition to relishing comfortable living conditions, these guys exhibited the signs of a healthy appetite.  They are wider and longer than my palm--a result of their canny culinary skills. 

While other toads in our yard gather nightly under the yard light, these amphibians discovered the patio light draws insects equally well and  is not nearly so long a journey.  Intelligently, they waited until the cool of evening before emerging over the lip of their home one amphibian limb at a time.  Then they let the porch light work its magic. 

One night, I interrupted their fashionably late supper.  Both toads had rooted themselves directly under bright beams, gobbling beetle after beetle as insects dropped to the patio.

 While I watched, these big boys didn’t move more than a couple of inches as they went through a twelve-course meal’s equivalent.  I wish I had watched long enough to see them lug distended, white bellies back into the flower pot I found them in the next morning.

As much fun as I have had this summer watching my two patio toads, I may need to give Wind in the Willows another try.  Obviously, there is more to that story than I caught back in sixth grade.