My garden has a terminal illness.
Yesterday I came home from a girls weekend at the beach to find debris littering the bean-side of the garden, and the ivy that had been growing unchecked along the back fence hanging precariously over the snap peas and eggplant. It looked like a tornado had torn through my triangle of life, breaking tomato plants in half and shaking climbing beans from their trellises.
The neighbors had cleared the foot and a half of garage that butted against our fence of its ivy, ripping sticky cleavers from their whitewashed brick and allowing the top-heavy vines to bow sickeningly over our cultivated beds. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only damage.
I picked up the broken bits of ivy last night, and hoped a day of sunshine would perk up the flowering beans and help the tomatoes straighten up. Instead, I came home to a garden even droopier than the night before. The bean leaves, with their first purple flowers just opening along two or three vines taller than me, were upside down. The climbers were all taking nose-dives instead of reaching sunward. The herbs – our six basil plants and out-of-control cilantro – were falling amongst themselves like drunk teenagers, and the lettuce patch splayed out as if a beach ball had repeatedly flounced on top of it.
It turns out it wasn’t just debris, but something much more terrible. I called my dad, the trusty ex-farmer, and told him my garden’s symptoms. Is there some sort of fungus that would attack every one of my plants?, I asked. Some kind of blight that I’ve never heard of? He asked if we were at the bottom of a hill, if some kind of poisonous runoff could have swept through the yard. I went to ask my neighbor.
Sure enough, poison was the culprit. Weeds B Gone to be exact. She had dumped a bunch on the roof of her garage, “to keep the ivy from coming back.” And then it had rained.
The ivy looks fine, by the way. It’s just the vegetables that are dying.
It’ll take a few days, but one by one these plants – almost all of which I started from seed – will yellow, and shrivel, and die. I don’t think I can bear to see that, so I’ll probably go out there early tomorrow morning and yank the whole lot of them out.
But before I do that I’ll have some time to think about what we are doing to the earth, and to ourselves. I know- this Weeds B Gone is just a bit of over-the-counter yard material. But this is also about the grasses and the flowers and the food that we live on. Eventually those chemicals will drain into the Wissahickon just down the hill, and from there into the Delaware (not to mention into our taps), then to the bay, then the ocean. So many people don’t think about how our actions affect the rest of the world, not to mention our local ecosystem or our neighbors.
I’ll start over again, this time by pulling out all that ivy and buying a bunch of pots and fresh soil. But I won’t forget the lessons this episode has to teach me, and the sight of a beautiful bursting garden simply turning over and dying.
