Notes On A Summer Garden:

I’m standing outside this morning watering the garden. I am such an optimistic gardener in the spring. I am so motivated by the new growth of the bushes and trees and the sturdy stems of the seeds I started in my little three-season porch back in January. This is the year I think to myself, This is the year my garden thrives. I am so confident, and so committed.

And then August comes.

Why did I think this was a good idea?

It’s six thirty in the morning, a time of day I have become less familiar with since I left my first career in education. The sun is just starting to peek out from behind the mulberry trees, and it casts a lovely pink hue over the barren ground and sunburned leaves. It’s only eighty-five degrees out, but it feels much warmer due to the skyrocketing heat index and high humidity. The humidity is what gets me. When people talk about summer heat I always thought I could handle any of it, being from Texas and all, until I spent a summer in a midwest town with eighty percent humidity. Even though the temperatures were lower, I felt like I was slowly melting every time I set food outside.

This little pocket of morning, with just myself and my goofy dog out in the backyard, is the nicest weather we’ll see all day; so this is when I come to water the garden. I am not naturally a morning person by any means, but I feel better about myself, and about the day ahead when I get this task finished before breakfast.

I started this garden for a few reasons. Firstly, for the bees. I read an article years ago outlining the current devastation that the bees are going through, and what an upheaval their extinction would cause on our ecosystem. So I added the bees to my list of things to worry about when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night and planted a few native flowers from my local nursery.

I was surprised by the difference it made. It seemed as if overnight our little yard had reentered the ecosystem. There were bees, butterflies, moths, and birds, even a few dragonflies all congregating around our little patch of flowers. I expected to feel better, knowing that I was doing something, even something so small, to try to help. What I didn’t expect was how much better I would feel mentally, and in my body, simply from tending to the earth for a few minutes each day.

Thus, the obsession began. An obsession I was struggling to refresh as I lugged the garden hose through the yard once more. I look around at the sunflowers standing eight feet tall, their stems sturdy enough to house the birds when they land, and nibble at their seeds. I see that there are new baby green tomatoes on the vine, even though I was sure the afternoon temperatures were too hot for them to keep flowering. And then I notice my pride and joy, my red Crape Myrtle has its first bloom.

If you’re familiar with the Crape Myrtle tree you may be wondering what the big deal is. Crape Myrtle trees are incredibly common in Texas, especially in my city, due to their drought and heat tolerance and ample blooms. They blend into the landscape, biding their time until the first wave of summer hits, and then they explode. Massive blooms in all shades of pink, purple, red, and white are suddenly everywhere as if the entire city has been decorated in crepe paper for a celebration.

Things may be tough in Texas right now, but for three months in the summer, we have massive pink trees everywhere, and that is something I can’t take for granted.

I planted my own Crepe Myrtle the first fall after we moved into our house. It survived the unprecedented freeze of twenty twenty-one, the severe droughts in both twenty twenty-two and three, and the tornado that hit earlier this year in the spring of twenty twenty-four.

It was only a foot or so tall when I planted it, (side note, it was one of the biggest sticker shocks of my life when I learned how much trees cost!) and has since grown to about four and a half feet tall.

It should hopefully, in about a decade or so, grow to be ten to twelve feet tall.

I often wonder if I’ll be around to see it when it’s fully grown, in all its glory. Planning for the future in the middle of multiple crises has proven to be expectedly difficult; and the young woman with a five-year plan that I was in my twenties has been replaced with a softer, more flexible woman out of necessity in my thirties. Our once surely Forever Home had become a Forever? Home and even if we still call this place home in a decade, we’ve learned how easily one bad storm or natural disaster can take out even the most sturdy of trees.

I used to struggle with this concept, that I may be gardening for the next owner's benefit. Why was I putting in all of this work if I might not be able to see the benefits down the line in five, ten, or twenty years? We just need to decide if we’re going to stay here or not I would tell myself, and then I can decide what to focus on. This way of thinking kept me in a constant state of dis-regulation. Every small decision seemed like it would snowball into a larger one, and we could never just relax, and enjoy the garden, the yard, and the life we were living just now.

Then one day in my online permaculture class my instructor said something that completely changed my way of thinking. We were discussing working with the land and another student posed a question.

I am a renter and my landlord supports my garden, but I feel silly that I am doing all of this work on land that I am only temporarily living on. Is it even worth it?

It is absolutely worth it. She answered, without missing a beat. We can’t control what happens to the land, and even if that land is loved on for a moment and then turned into a wasteland in the future, the ecosystem is still better for it.

So I water the garden, and I put up shade cloths and bee baths, and I hope tomorrow looks a little brighter.