Thwack. My shovel hit something hard and unmovable and I teetered right off the top of it with absolutely none of the grace of a 3-year-old on a pogo stick.
and other balance-challenging fitness apparati have nothing on a day of digging in clay soil. Jump on the shovel with all your weight. Jump off, rather than fall off, if you’re lucky. Lever a chunk of soil the size of your head out of the patch you’re digging. Lift it to the side and dump it. Generally speaking, it sticks to the shovel.
Repeat. And repeat again.
I’ve made a wary peace with the hideous clay of the mini-berm in my front yard. I know now that any portion of it I wish to dig up and plant will cost me a day of sweat and sneezing and under-my-breath cussing, and I can plan accordingly.
But I had forgotten the mini-berm’s history. That “thwack” was my shovel hitting the buried stump of the overgrown arborvitae my next-door neighbor removed for me. He conquered it a few years ago with a chainsaw, but asking him to toil for hours with an ax to extract the stump would have been taking advantage, especially after the tree takedown devoured a whole hot afternoon.
Gardening is like archaeology except you don’t have to preserve your finds. I couldn’t dig out the stump, but my shovel also discovered a double handful of large, smooth cobbles and a sprinkler main line, plus a tiny chunk of broken green glass, as I excavated. I tossed the rocks and glass down the driveway to pick up later and kept digging, finding only a few earthworms (but a few is, at least, not none).
Marathon gardening plugs you into the timeline of your garden, , when perennials are reawakening. The agastaches. The red birds in a tree, a xeric New Mexico native and penstemon relative that I planted last year. The prairie zinnias and sedum and the blue spirea, showing just the tiniest green buds on its branches. The bee-beloved, aggressively self-seeding catmint — you know the story, started with one plant, now I have nine.
Effectively grounded by an ailing car, I had two marathon-gardening days to ponder not just past and present, but future: Would some help me grow on the hot, sunny downslope of that berm, or would it hate the clay as much as I do? Would be a better choice? What about as a sub-shrub for the part-shade patches? The clay is so awful, I tell myself, why not plant this berm once, with species that endure, and … be done with it?
And now everyone who knows a gardener is laughing, because “finished” is the one thing that none of us can make take root.
Susan Clotfelter: 303-954-1078, sclotfelter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/susandigsin
