Dear Fitz:
What do you do to stay sane in these crazy times?
Concerned in Tucson,
Your Psychiatrist,
Dr. Sydney Rorshack
P. S. Your payment is late.
Dear Concerned,
I garden.
Fitz
P.S. Check’s in the mail.
I love my desert garden because I need escape, exercise, and the spiritual reset I get from the experience of jabbing my thumb into a cholla needle, cursing, tripping over my rake, falling onto a thousand prickly pear spines, boomeranging back up to hit my head on a glass hummingbird feeder, spilling the red nectar and shaking loose thousands of yellow palo verde petals, creating a small blizzard of blossoms that coat my sugar-water-soaked self. Wounded, tarred and feathered. We all need moments like that.
It’s Spring. There’s a riot of color in my desert garden that is so out of control the state police had to tear gas my penstemons.
You cannot work in a xeriscape without paying the price of admission. And that price is steep.
Gardener: I’d like to work in my garden today.
Desert: That will cost you one thorn in your thumb.
Gardener: Anything else?
Desert: A splinter from the shovel handle between your thumb and forefinger.
Gardener: Is that it?
Desert: That’s it, Mr. Green Jeans.
Gardener: The scorpion in my glove?
Desert: That’s a bonus. Stop whining, pincushion. Get out there and weed.
Gardener: They’re not “weeds.” They’re “wildflowers.”
Summer will blowtorch them off the planet soon enough. I prefer the manly activity known as “clearing brush.” Real desert gardeners always look like they just tangled with an angry bobcat off his meds.
Wife: Been working in the garden?
Me: Naw. Just tripped over my hoe, fell onto a rattler, jumped back 10 feet into a giant web of black widows and fought my way out with only a hand rake, only to jam my toe into a hooked barrel cactus spine.
Wife: Thank goodness. I thought someone had crossed an idiot with a porcupine. I’ll get the tweezers.
Me: I’ll need pliers, 300 Band-Aids and something for my spring fever.
Wife: A margarita?
I love my wife.
I was thrilled when our palo verdes burst into billions of yellow blossoms a few days back and the hedgehogs answered with magenta and vermilion flowers. The cholla buds are starting to blossom. Soon the prickly pears will produce translucent canary yellow flowers and, in time, the saguaros will herald the arrival of summer with donut-sized creamy white blossoms. When the scarlet fruit ripens, the monsoons will come. Ask any Tohono O’odham. The pincushions will celebrate the gift of August rains with crowns of tiny pink flowers, tarantulas will amble across our et porch and the creosote leaves will internalize the smell of rain. Late October will bring the chill and the king snake who will emerge to discourage the pack rats. Red cardinals from the north will appear, too. A second dose of rains in December will bring color to my garden in the spring and our mesquite tree’s lacy leaves will return from winter’s frost to embrace the oven of summer.
My drought-resistant plants feed my thirst for bizarre beauty. I marvel at my octopus agaves’ pale green space-alien elegance, my Moroccan euphorbia for their brutish charm and my African adeniums, for their freak show trunks and astonishing flowers.
I grow every kind of cacti and succulent. And, according to my kids, I grow tiresome. Rolling their eyes, my children refer to me as “Mister Rocks ’n’ Flowers.” The jackrabbits, quail and mourning doves that I annoy with my constant pruning, digging, cultivating, potting and planting agree.
Surrender to the desert, hecklers. Embrace this unique place.
Wisconsin Cheesehead Newcomer: But I hate cactus.
Me: That’s like moving to the Arctic and saying you hate ice. Ever seen a cactus flower? Most amazing flowers you’ll ever see.
Cheesehead: No. Ever had cheese curds?
Me: Don’t change the subject.
The thorns and flowers of my desert garden are my teachers and my preachers. I sit and watch as dusk darkens my Gethsemane, and my Eden. Hungry bats swoop and circle. A spider patiently weaves her web. In her nest, in the rafters of my porch, a mourning dove coos at her hatchlings. Life and death churns. Out in the desert beyond my crackling pit fire a coyote yip, yip, yips at the rising moon.
I ease off my tattered garden gloves and drop them down on the desert floor, on the soil that brings forth life as surely as it claims us all as mulch. And at such times, in my garden, I know, as surely as summer will come, with or without me, I am blessed to be in this world.
