The Nihilist Gardener

Am I just a late bloomer?

By Zach Hively

Oh, did I ever have grand aspirations.

I am sitting outside right now, right where—starting six years ago—I imagined a modest if obscenely bountiful garden flourishing in this dry, inhospitable patch of sand.

A lot of love and hard work, and as always some make-or-break luck, built this space into what I see before me today: A dry, inhospitable patch of sand.

Which is not to say I have failed entirely as a gardener. Here, let me tally for you all the delicious things I have enjoyed—cumulatively, over these last six years—from lo these many efforts:
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• Three carrots.
• Half a dozen sprigs of rosemary, seasoning meals I otherwise had no hand in growing.
• The equivalent of one salad of straight red butter lettuce.
• One tiny potato, which was all that remained from planting a much larger potato.

And all this—except the potato—came from container gardening. Which is still hard! I think the ground underneath the containers is a bad influence.

Granted, I have had to deal with FACTORS.

I’ve ranted before about the pack rats who chew anything that grows here down to the stubs. They make me think it was rabbits. Spoiler: it is never rabbits. Rabbits do not build modest yet obscenely bountiful nests in the engine compartment of my pickup truck. Nor do they festoon these nests with intact, uneaten garden stakes. (Alongside spine-in prickly pear pads.)

Never mind the pack rats. And never mind that they intimidate me into pretending they don’t exist. I also have to contend with water.

I grew up in one of those increasingly rare American cities with potable water straight from the tap. It was either entirely safe, or we didn’t know any better because of the silencing power of the local military-industrial complex. Either way! We all also watered our plants with it, and the plants generally survived.

So I, privileged and oblivious, watered my first-year garden straight from the groundwater well. Not only was the water abundant, it was unmetered. It was also not discolored.

But everything—and I mean everything, except the pack rats—died.

Turns out, plants do not thrive on leaded groundwater.

So I installed a couple rain barrels.

You, astute reader, may see the fault in this plan faster than I did: Rain barrels require—and this is backed by empirical science—rain.

Which we get! Sometimes! But do you know when plants least need watered? Right after it rains.

Thus, I hoarded the water in those barrels, because watering my modest yet increasingly obscenity-generating garden used up their contents in about two goes. I drew out the supplies. Asked my lingering plants to go on austerity. (I had moved on from most delusions of edibility at this point. We were just holding out for some hardy flowers.)

Ultimately I upgraded from the original two sixty-gallon barrels to an additional pair of 250-gallon beasts. One really good downpour fills them right up.

Yet I, scarred and hardened now, as burned as my cat mint plants in July, still limped my plants along. I’m so averse to running out of water that I feel better when I leave the tanks full.

​All the while, nature taunts me: the wild datura that sprouted all on its own by the front door—and which I never once tended to—provides a full 96% of our annual flowerage, with blooms as big as my face.

This year, I gave up.

I didn’t plant a single seed. No trips to the nursery center. No starts, no plugs, no offshoots. I water the trees (which have not grown but also have not died) mainly when I remember to, which is seldom, because I have handed their fate over to Fate.

Which means, of course, that the garden has picked up the slack.

Every surviving sage plant has shot out new leaves after overwintering without a darn bit of assistance from moi. I have what I distinctly believe to be a fourth carrot growing. The containers are getting bushy with marigold greens and two rosemaries that just won’t quit.

​And then there’s these bad boys:

Bad girls? Bad plants. Good plants? Whatever. These flowers did it all by themselves. I can’t even tell you when I last put hollyhock seeds in this trough or anywhere else. It was not in a recent year.

​I think there are lessons to be learned here.

Possibly about relinquishing control. Definitely about the transformative beauty of giving up.

So remember, kids: If at first you don’t succeed, quit planting seeds. Don’t try so hard, or at all. And if you ever come over to see my flowers, best bring your own food.