The Fairy Gardener: Of Fish, and Graves, and Waxy Bells...

by Jim Edminster, Chicago, IL

Let's start this glorious May Day with a seemingly gloomy item from the NY Times:  A woman, Katrina Spade, is trying to start a composting business.  For human bodies.  She has titled her enterprise the Urban Death Project & estimates the whole process would cost about $2500, much less than any burial.  Think about this a bit - I've kidded for years that I wanted to die on the dance floor & be put in my compost heap.  Cemeteries are overcrowded and even crematoria chapels (with niches for ashes in urns) are becoming too full.  Ms Spade will return about 3 cubic feet of perfectly good dirt to the bereaved for the garden or forest or park.  Dust to dust you all.

A couple more sad stories:  Horticulture magazine reports some (unlabeled) flats of flowers have been sprayed with pesticides that attract & poison bees.  Don't plant Callery (aka Bradford) pears anymore:  they have weak crotches which break easily & worse - when blooming they smell like something nasty your dog has rolled in.  (These are ornamental non-bearing plants.)

I hereby establish the "Ivy League Sub-section of the Guerilla Gardening Society."  Lately people have been putting up large windowless, unornamented red brick buildings in the hood.  These buildings need something.  Ivy comes to mind.  My house has ivy & it has ivy berries.  These berries seem to be flying to the bases of these buildings.  Imagine!

Garden notes off the top of my head - I've been planting some spring bulbs & plants.  My yard is fairly dense so I've marked their burial (this is a theme in this essay) spots with bright bendable plastic drinking straws.  The yard looks like it's full of little periscopes.  I've planted 3 packages of borage which is a foot tall herb with fuzzy jade green leaves & bright blue flowers loved by bees ( & it's not poisonous!)  I moved a trial geranium in & out of the house 3 times before it stayed warm enough for it outside.  My wonderful tenant, Brit, (helped by her white husky, Nova) helped me haul my water lilies, cannas, dahlias & amaryllis out of the basement onto the patio.  I will have to pull MANY yellow jewelweed babies out (because their parents loved the yard & multiplied!)  I've never planted a red tulip in my life but a third of my yard's tulips are red.  All my fish are having a good time in the pond.  I have an actual bed frame in the yard (for a flower bed, of course) & I found 2 old cracked but handsome chairs for plant stands.  This garden is going to be a real garden room.  Just took my sasquatch out to put on the garden path - he's my green apeman I found a couple of years ago.  Found some hardy primroses to plant along my garden path . .I have a 3 foot wide, 40 feet long stretch of dirt between my sidewalk and my neighbor's house - it has many blank spots in it.  I'm going hogwild and planting every color of heuchera (coral bells) that I can find in those spots.  I need more shooting stars along the path and where a small oak-leaved hydrangea passed away (we return to the theme) I'm going to put a yellow wax bells (Kirengoshima) as soon as I can find.