Writing

"A yard, anywhere, is an expression of one's relationship with nature, a curious border zone between the wild and the domestic in which we invite nature to come close, but not too close."

- Alison Hawthorne Deming, from her essay "Claiming a Yard"

At dusk, I spade into a haphazard carpet of uprooted herbs, hostas, and creeping sedums, splitting each in two. Though dull, my shovel severs the roots of a knot of Angelina Stonecrop, exposing a fibrous dissection of vivid ivory and emerald. I am transplanting each half into new soil.

You might call it old soil, I suppose, in this backyard that I am recreating, ground up, in the middle of Pittsburgh. Soil comprised of cement detritus, brick fragments, and other construction debris, mixed with a few new cubic yards of fresh topsoil and stray stones and clay — then sloped, just so, down from the two raised beds we built last year. Within these four hundred square feet of fairly barren land, I will eventually harvest rhubarb, strawberries, and tomatoes, begrudge a ground hog for running off with our greens, and watch my two children play. During busier years, or when my wife and I feel overwhelmed or distant, or our community work grows intense, weeds will flourish.

Since we purchased this land three years ago – and the threadbare, 1898-built house that came with it – we’ve discovered a mélange of artifacts in the old soil: nails and screws, roof shingles, crumbs of plaster and chunks of gypsum board, plastic jewelry, a rainbow of glass shards, hair combs of all shapes, a fork and a spoon and a knife (not all together), a Barbie torso, toy guns and toy soldiers and toy fragments whose original purposes remain unclear, hair beads and hair extensions, bullet casings. Since 1898, dozens of people have called this land and its many-gabled house “home.” These artifacts tell me that the occupants worked, but they also enjoyed this space, and they imagined other worlds, and they acted violently.

One of our own first acts of aggression here was to take out an 80-year-old, 40-foot silver maple. Though diseased, it had the wherewithal to reach roots into our pipes and straddle the yard so squirrels could make their way atop and into the house. Many nights, we’ve heard these squirrels scuffling in the attic, above the kids’ bedroom. During bedtime stories, I’ve find myself pounding on the ceiling until those squirrels’ little, clawed paws moved their fracas to another part of the house. Replacing that silver maple would be a pile of horsehair plaster and lathe, a pile of rotten joists, a pile of old studs and other wood planks, a pile of PVC pipe and copper pipe and terra cotta pipe, wiring and kitchen linoleum – a few dumpsters’ worth, all extracted from this old house.

That old yard has been cleared, though. Now, I rip apart sedum and succulent roots, scattering dirt formed four hours away (by highway) in southwest Ohio, soil from the five acres of land where I grew up — where as a kid I dug improvised creeks fed by a running hose, making muck fitting for a plastic Luke Skywalker’s ventures. That soil grew tall grasses where my brothers and I captured frogs and snakes.

I’d returned to Pittsburgh yesterday with a car trunk filled to the brim with these plants dug up from my parents’ flowerbeds. Now I scoop trenches out of a broad swath of ascending ground and then, holding each plant by the roots, press new life into these holes, one fibrous clod at a time. I envision vegetation streaming down this knoll someday, serving a function, holding back the earth, though the Angelina’s spindly lime-green leaves powdered in burgundy tell me these transplants are very much about charm as well.

Some of these plants will take and propagate wildly. Others will die from the trauma of being rent from their origins. Most – the thyme, for example – require little effort in the uprooting. No need, back in Ohio, to have shoveled or massaged my fingers too deeply into the soil; instead, I’d just grabbed at the tiny shoots, affixed so lightly along the humus and to one another, and then plucked them. How they’re able to survive while growing so delicately, I don’t know.

I breath in that thyme. Along my parents’ sidewalk, it provides cover and fragrance. I’ve read that in some places faraway, people use thyme to disinfect water. And when prepared with a ghee base – a kind of clarified butter that’s essentially fat – thyme soothes as a balm.

While I dig and splice and plant quietly, I think about my mother. She is 70. She just had knee replacement surgery, and the doctors have her on oxycodone and metoprolol succinate, Pradaxa and aspirin, and about a dozen other drugs for heart and head and knee. She lives in her living room. She sleeps, eats, ices down her new knee, naps, watches 1940s films about men and their housewives in their living rooms, sleeps some more. Some moments, when I’m speaking with Mom, her eyes close mid-sentence. Heart troubles have been slowing her down over the last few years, but I’m not used to seeing her quite like this.

Still, she’s happy to talk plants, and she tells me the thyme will transfer easily enough. Just nudge it into the soil, she says, then sprinkle more soil on top of the plant itself. It should take.

Fortunately, Angelina’s emerald roots are hearty, as are the oregano and chives, and those sedums, piled into a mix of tiny, busy textures. At my parents’ home, these and other flora have provided backdrop, color, aroma, but I never gave them much attention. I never even knew their names.

Thanks for reading Essays by Mark Kramer! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

In this new yard, though, I am slowly learning to identify a few plants. Like that Angelina Stonecrop. As well as the apricot trees, American holly bushes, and locust trees lining the street. And now, from Ohio, come the gold hostas and yellow splash rim hostas, the rainbow elephant bush. With knowledge of these names comes knowledge of plants’ dispositions and needs.

This weekend Mom – in a fleeting, livelier moment – eagerly shared advice on hostas. From the couch, with her leg propped up, she instructed with her hands.

“Hostas grow in a circle, so what you want to do is just cut them right down the middle, cut the circle in half, and take half. You’ll need to dig down a good five inches.” The tips of her fingers drew a circle in the air. Then, as if the edge of a spade, they thrust downward.

“Then when you get home,” she added, “don’t rip them apart. They may not take. You want to cut them with a knife, just slice right through them.”  

I’m applying these instructions carefully so that I can provide transplants a place to grow. And so I don’t kill them. Nevertheless, these plants do not, in the end, need me to survive. I’ll water them, but so will the rain.

Some backyard plants, such as the poison ivy that will soon insinuate itself from an adjoining lot, don’t cohabitate so well with humans. Though I hear that poison ivy is good for many bird species, it relies upon defenses toxic to me and my family, so we remain distant acquaintances – well, enemies, really, as I’ll attempt to kill the ivy off with a vinegar, salt, and dish soap concoction (rather than poisoning my yard, much less my children, with Monsanto’s chemicals).

Even those woody plants that I do appreciate – those locust trees, for starters – I’ll need to restrict as well, by pruning them. By next year, I’ll be mowing back some of these transplants. And we’ll cut and relocate those that outgrow their plots. Possibly I am, in all of this, over-controlling, expecting nature to conform to some set standards fitting for all these Little Boxes made of ticky tacky that all look just the same. But when I walk city sidewalks, I pass many other yards and flower gardens (especially around nearby hospitals, universities, and offices that make my city run) populated by parallel, uniform rows upon parallel, uniform rows of wax begonias or lamb’s ears or marigolds that are aligned perfectly, just so, in weedless beds of dark, monochromatic mulch. I recall the day I watched a fastidious octogenarian on his hands and knees viciously spraying single dandelion heads within a monocrop of flat-topped bluegrass. And I shake my head. At least I’m not so controlling as that, I tell myself.

After spading and scooping and pressing these plants into the earth, I set a few flat stones to serve as steps between the transplants, up the hillside. Many of them are sandstone. A few have bands of quartz. Some are nothing more than fragmented concrete, salvaged from other home projects. I also dig a gulley and line it with rocks that will, I hope, funnel away rainwater. I’d considered pouring concrete down this channel, but I want a more natural look.

Then I spread a bag of manure at the bottom of the hill. I rake soil and scatter grass seed and, on top of that, straw. I toss a few handfuls of seed amidst the sedums and succulents as well. Can’t hurt, I figure, but I’ll come to regret this messy intermingling.

Three hours have passed since I started this work, and the day is finishing. I step to the middle of the yard. With hands on hips, I inspect the results, one plant and one stone step at a time. I stare at plant nodes and internodes, wishing them into buds and new growth.

What I don’t yet know is that next year, here in this yard, my son will grab at sun-warmed cherry tomatoes, burst them within his mouth and return to the kitchen empty-handed. He’ll stain his fingers while foraging raspberries and blackberries. When Pittsburgh turns cold and slate, my wife and I will sled down this slope with the kids, tumbling precariously into the chain link fence. She’ll dye cloth immersed in that same snow, a process called “ice dyeing”; she’ll dance gleefully at the swirls and patterns created by melting crystals. I’ll soon build a small wooden seat out of pine boards, then hang it from a green nylon rope from the sumac at the back of the lot. Is there any more captivating picture of freedom than a child kicking up her legs as she swooshes by on a swing?

Then there will be, in this yard, the soccer and football games, the basketball hoop on an unfinished brick pad. Kids’ wrestling matches leading to giggling, but then tears. Then cartwheels. And water balloon fights. Errant throws of a ball from increasingly taller and stronger children, over that chain link fence, sending an adult to crawl through Japanese knotweed, an invasive species that calls to mind bamboo. Eventually, the kids will hunt down these errant balls for themselves.

I also don’t yet know that one mid-May day we’ll encounter here the tiniest of eastern cottontails, hopping among the hostas. He’ll allow my small children to tiptoe within a few feet. We’ll watch this rabbit grow for several weeks, bounding out to us each morning, till one day he’ll just stop appearing, leaving us to wonder. Deer will also visit, to eat those blackberries, but garbage trucks will startle the deer down the street – and in turn those deer will startle a neighbor, who’ll exclaim, What the hell is going on around here? Why isn’t the city doing something about all this wildlife?

In this yard, I’ll learn to listen for cardinals, mourning doves, and grackle. During the spring, we’ll have so many birds chirping songs outside of our windows each morning that they’ll wake us at 4am (our city neighborhood is actually well-treed). For two years, robins will hatch in a nest atop a brick pillar on our front porch, until the summer we adopt a cat from the shelter. Though he’ll remain indoors, Dash will watch birds intently from a window. Those robins will return and begin to nest again, but then think better of it.

In this yard, I’ll come upon three young garter snakes intertwined with one another. They’ll eventually unravel and finally leave their nest. One summer afternoon, we’ll come upon an adult garter slowly consuming a sparrow hatchling, its jaw disengaged.

But even while enjoying all this nature, this life, I can’t slip free from this climbing vine of thought: This isn’t where I expected to end up, years ago. I did the math: my backyard is 155 times smaller than the five acres of land I grew up on in rural Ohio. There, Mom and Dad cultivated saplings and perennial flowers, small butterfly gardens and a very large vegetable garden, as well as chickens, ducks, and goats. They bushwhacked trails. They built a sandbox and built a chicken coop, built flower beds and tree houses and children’s memory banks. During hot July afternoons, we’d pick buckets of raspberries that’d appear hours later in one of Mom’s pies. On Saturday mornings, my brothers and friends and I were released to walk those wooded trails, wade the creek, and climb what felt, to us, like cliffsides. We’d return mud-covered and in the “mud room” strip down to our underwear.

In the coming years, Mom will recover from that knee surgery, and we’ll walk that yard together during dewy, sunny mornings. Coffee mug in her left hand, she’ll point with her right at that volunteer sycamore she’d decided to let thrive amongst the Norway spruce. She’ll laugh about forgetting where all she’d planted those daffodil bulbs. And she’ll ask me to trim the boxwoods out front. These walks will become shorter as her hip fails and mole-riddled soil sags beneath our faltering feet.

But here in my Pittsburgh yard, I can only nip at the edges of intimacy with the natural world. I’ll hear an adage, “You are what your plants eat,” and I’ll think of the lead in my city soil and the emissions of passing vehicles. As I commit the intimate act of taking those blackberries, raspberries, and cherry tomatoes into my mouth, I’ll hesitate. I’ll doubt my decision to let my son eat so gratuitously from these canes and vines.

In this yard, my children will run, but not very far. New rains will yield from the soil yet more nails and toy parts and glass and hair beads and hair extensions and bullet casings. We’ll not end up using our fire pit as often as we’d hoped. When our large sumac becomes sickly, full of holes drilled by birds eating bugs, large upper branches will fall, and I’ll be forced to mothball the swing for a time. The strawberries won’t make it but a few years, and the rain barrels will fall into disrepair. Knotweed will take over our raised beds.

Of late, I’ve been seeing Home Depot commercials depicting couples merrily laying patio bricks and pulling weeds, and as I walk air conditioned aisles while being told that there is “More doing. More saving,” because “That’s the power of the Home Depot,” I’m primed to want what I see in those commercials. But I’ve always disliked this mingling of hyper-consumption and a worldview that centers home-buying as the American Way to financial security and happiness. This “Home Depot Effect” (as I like to call it) makes home renovation and landscaping moral imperatives, a view that I can’t espouse. I feel dissonance watching those commercial couples embracing so intimately, beaming with such self-congratulation, not a smudge of soil upon them though they’ve just completed a massive landscaping job. I’ll just never get those same results.

And yet I want a yard for my kids. I want our family to watch an eastern cottontail from our porch, and I want us to grow strawberries. So, when a Home Depot commercial says, “Let’s do this!” I do, in fact, do this.

I am still admiring my handiwork in this yard and on the hillside when my wife rounds the corner of the house. “Look” I say, nodding toward our transplants.

After several moments of glancing everywhere but this recently barren hillside, she locates the new sedums and succulents and says, “Oh, that’s great. Nice job. Looks good.”

“Yeah, I tried to mix it up, have different plants mixed in. And then the steps break it up as well.”

“Yeah.”

The grass seed and straw, some tools, and a few of the plants have come from the Home Depot in the center of our city. New grass will help layer this dirt and these rocks with organic humus and help turn plain topsoil into a yard. But the sedums and succulents, Angelina Stonecrop and those hostas, and that thyme, chives, and oregano - they’ve come from my family’s home in Ohio, and they’ve come from us.