Amid the fragile glories of a garden . . .

I am as gullible and easily ensnared as they come. When the weather is just perfect (however that may be defined by me on the day) and the blooms begin to go off like temperate fireworks and all of the insects are humming benignly in delight, I am easily convinced that the garden is the only place on earth to be.

It’s not that I’m quite in the league of those master gardeners and other addicts that find true solace in being elbow-deep in dirt, for everyone who’s not been nodding off like Rip Van Winkle knows I rarely get the urge to work that hard, and gardening can be truly heavy labor. But the smell of deep loam mixed with mouldering pine or fir needles and crisp fallen leaves, blended expertly by Ma Nature with top notes of any sort of sweet flora, and perhaps just a splash of wet pavement to finish–this is the perfume of a kind of happiness found nowhere but in a garden and in the heart of a garden-lover.

The lovely rustle of leaves, the metallic buzz of a sonorous cicada, perhaps the musical flow of water over stone, this is the soundtrack of contentment. Birds can sing to it with ease, and their choruses may interweave with a depth and beauty seldom heard in the most sophisticated counterpoint and polyphony devised by human composers. Even the neighborhood dogs and cats seem inclined to dance when passing by in these marvelous moments of song. A far distant lawnmower’s roar is softened by the miles to a point where it almost has the same romance as the sound of the passing train.

Every one of the gorgeous growing things is lovely in its own peculiar way as well. Grasses stretched to bristling brushy heights in wild bursts of growth may be just brown to those not tutored in a garden’s joys, but on a close inspection can reveal a magical array of brown and yellow, ruddy, rusty, tan and bronze, and silver and gold tones in every shade. Leaves and blooms in colors ignored by all but the most discerning eyes in a rainbow’s arc are suddenly broadcast with prodigality in all the craziness and grace a garden’s bed can possibly begin to hold. Somehow even the spots that might look bare at first hide secret gifts if one has patience just to take a closer look and see what moves among the bits of soil, the scattered rocks, to lean in far enough to find that velvet dust left by a butterfly, the drifted petals of a rose. I am enchanted, too, by the silky feel of a the bold tissue-paper blooms of a tree peony or the rough warmth of a sun-baked cedar trunk, by the taste of the honeyed air when I breathe in the sweet perfections of a summer afternoon.

There is beauty enough for all the senses . . .

Here in Texas it has been a fairly brutal summer for such things to thrive. Only the profligate expenditure of water where there has been none could possibly allow for garden prettiness of such a delicate sort to live and grow. Other than trying to help our venerable oaks and full-sized Bradford pears survive with dignity intact, I’ve not been generous with water, knowing that there are more urgent uses for it at the moment than for personal pleasure’s sake. I have been working all the while to devise an appropriate native-planting-x-xeriscape new landscape plan with which to revise our yard for the long term–when we can afford to do it. I’m building a rather nice new scheme for it, I think!

Meanwhile, there came a little rain. In the last few days there’s been a little respite from the drought. It hasn’t ended the drought, of course, nor anywhere near undone the damage that’s been wrought. The dire dryness will likely continue for some time, and we know that droughts, historically, have shown the power to last for decades in a place, but for this little point in time it’s heavenly to get a sip.

So even though I know this hint of watering is likely only to lead me down some primrose path if I believe it means it’s garden time for real, I still give in. I’ll acquiesce to the false sense of springlike play this water brings and go, I’m sure, to the garden once again, only to be chased back by another wave of heat. But for this little time I cannot lie: the roses tentatively opening after a splash of rain make me want to believe in them, make me want to head out to the yard. There’s life in the old lady yet.