September 30, 2025
I initially wrote this as one long stream of consciousness paragraph, which, upon reflection, felt like a mean-spirited way to convey the experience, though perhaps more artistically accurate. I’m not famous enough to expect people to suffer through such a confounding form, so I decided to revisit the original text with paragraph breaks, the insertion of which changed the tempo and feel, which necessitated further editing to accommodate. Not quite daydream, not quite essay, I’m not sure what to call this genre, or whether it’s ‘enough’ to simply tell the story and let you interpose meaning if you like vs trying to shoehorn a moral of the story into the garden details. Whatever it is, I hope you enjoy it.
The dahlia, descended from a tuber first planted years ago in our own backyard, later transplanted to the front bed next door, where I garden with tacit permission, always escapes the stakes we try to stab in the dirt around it. The tuber below is almost certainly overgrown. You’re supposed to dig up and divide every few years, but I have let it grow wild, metastasizing underground, fat and hungry. Many dig up and plant their dahlias annually, which both avoids this problem as well as the threat of freeze, but I have only managed this feat once. The effort hasn’t proved worth the harvest, so now come winter I leave them, trim, cover with mulch, and let the cold run rampant. Some plants do not survive, but every year this one is more monstrous, exploding again each summer, tipping over the mulched bed and cascading down the slight hill to the sidewalk, small plucky stems growing horizontally along the large center canes, dark maroon swirls of dahlia peeking out from the lush foliage, almost as if by accident, like the prettiest weed.
The flowers begin in August and continue til a deep cold sets in, sometimes through December. I keep meaning to snip them and bring them inside, these plants I once labored for and now benignly neglect. Why grow a flower at all if not to fill the house with vases, why bother if you will fail at the last to collect the whole aim of all this growing, let them fulfill their destiny as still life, a mid-sentence distraction, deliberate beauty in contrast to chaos—I often think, gasping in horror at the crown of drooping peonies in full bloom in neighbors’ yards, precious fat flowers brushing wet ground. The flowers seem to protest the disregard, plead for me to take them home as well-admired decorations. If I do not stiffen my spine in cold resistance, I know I could leverage logic to justify an envy-fueled theft. I will admit to having failed to resist the allure on occasion, but those peonies didn’t wilt as retribution, I was not struck dumb. I paid homage and admired those peonies in vases for days.
Now my own neglected flowers are a task at the bottom of a checklist never finished. At least I can take comfort that the effect is to afford my neighbors the pang of joy the peonies bring me, devoid, I hope, of the accompanying angst about the flowers’ failure to fulfill their destiny. It is a lovely equation, ridding myself of guilt for garden chore avoidance by converting it to an offering to the community. I do hope neighbors catch these small fireworks in mid-eruption on their walks home and joy is sparked. But I also mean to admire them in vases, and my failure to do so is not charity but procrastination, fear of facing the overgrown weeds that surround the monster mother plant.
Today, however, enlivened with the endorphins of my daily walk I seize upon the rush of inspiration. I dart inside for the clippers, then back to the sidewalk, snipping a trio of flowers for a small vase to perch in my office. Once the bandaid is off, it’s not so hard to keep chugging, putzing around the garden bed making micro-investments in its upkeep. I may, with perseverance, even rid it of weeds before snow covers up the mess.
I may even forage some food for our dinner table. If these dahlias are small fireworks, shining dark sparks in the earth-toned bed, the arugula plants extending long curved stems in search of sunlight is a comet, a burst of leaves exploding like a fountain at the end of the long brittle tail. One snip at the base of the stem releases a pom-pom of arugula leaves; four or five snips and I gather up an armful to bring into the house.
I don’t know where this plant came from. I did not plant it on purpose, but I recall a time, a year or two ago, when I planned to plant arugula on the upstairs deck, but the packet disappeared under my nose. I never found it. Did the wind carry it down here, to the front of the house next door? Was it a lucky bit of compost, a gift from a bird? I noticed it as I began weeding the bed at the beginning of strawberry season. Yanking out the spring purple deadnettle and crabgrass among the strawberry plants sending up tender new leaves, I pause at the tell-tale ridge pattern on early leaves, suspiciously like arugula. I choose to let it stay and find out. Months later, having done nothing to encourage this wayward plant, I’ve harvested an abundance of arugula.
Again I bend to pull a weed. Then, two. Then I become fierce, protector of these dahlias and strawberries and arugula, the clean look of mulched white space. I will clear one small sliver of the bed, maybe a four-by-four square, ignoring as long as I dare the while of the mosquitos dancing around my long linen pants. How are there still mosquitos this late in the fall? I can’t even swish them away, hands full with and dirt and deadening weeds once interloped among the strawberries. Now they’re a lifeless trash heap, towering forests of unwanted plants seeming to shrink the moment the roots are loosened from the soil, limp and meek. I often repurpose weeds as mulch, leaving them to decompose in place—but this late in the season plants are racing toward the next generation, furiously setting seed to propel the vicious cycle in a future spring. Never mind that it’s a losing battle anyway; weeds will always be with us. Even as I take care to keep this pile of seedheads from regenerating here, the soil is flush with weed seeds plotting their fresh spring sprouts, fallen from a parent I didn’t catch in time, blown in, deposited by birds. It’s not only arugula that arrives unbidden. Weeds, common name for ‘a plant I don’t want here,’ are relentless.
But maybe not meaningless? Maybe this repetitive work of bending to pull what is not necessary from the soil and clear anew a set apart place builds neural pathways to be traveled in other arenas. Perhaps these stubborn plants we do not want are teachers who offer recurring opportunity to learn. Perhaps I should not despair their presence, but give thanks for the ever-fresh reminders as I bend to remove them.
The mosquitos, though? I cannot find a way to give thanks for them. Within moments of my quest to renew the beauty of a square of garden I regret the haste in which I came outside: no gloves, no mosquito repellant, no long sleeve shirt to guard my arms. A whim is fine for gathering dahlias and arugula, but tending is troublesome work and I am not prepared. In the face of their onslaught against my bare arms, my exposed ankles, I must soon retreat. But even my impoverished spare moments of care brought transformation. I step back to admire this one patch, noting with pride how it stands distinct from the rest of the neglected bed, lovingly bestowing my full attention before walking the length of the sidewalk to inspect see what will be required of me to replicate this effort along the entire bed. All the while I trail a cloud of mosquitos. Let us pretend they admire the plants as much as I do.
I bring it all in, trim the dahlias, set the spindly arugula stems with their leaf-burst pom poms on the counter and return to my work on a screen. Later, when the kids need my presence in the afternoon, I can simultaneously be with them and continue these chores, a feature of so much of what has traditionally been women’s work, my husband’s observation while folding laundry while caring for a child home sick. I tear the long green fans of arugula leaves from the hard stems and plunge them into cold water, leaving behind speckled detritus on the white counter—a dried maple leaf swept up with the haul, rejected yellowed arugula fragments, minor assorted plant matter that rode the arugula in as a raft then sifted through the leaves. One or two small insects have unhitched themselves from the caravan and now turn about confused on the counter, only to be swept into a paper towel and released into a bowl of compost. For all I know this is their paradise, this blue plastic bowl with its butternut squash trimmings and coffee grounds, all they’ve ever dreamed true at last. Who would have thought back an hour when they rode the crest of a gentle green hill, a sea of similar hills all they had ever known, who would have guessed this abundance could possibly exist, and now after a wild and disorienting ride from garden to kitchen, here it is?
Later, I return to my work desk and find one tiny pill bug extended on its back swimming across the blue desk. Where does it think it is, what terrible nightmare has it endured to move from its hiding place in the heart of my dahlia to this forsaken ocean of unnatural teal? I pity it, and stand amazed, wondering what it must be like to have a whole new universe to discover in these few inches of an old wooden desk.
