Of Tomatoes and Roses

My “gardening” over the past several years has been waist-high. In boxes.

It’s definitely a work in progress.

Tomato sandwiches keep me trying–the old-fashioned kind with white bread, thick mayo and even thicker slices of juicy red, right-off-the-vine tomato.

You know what happened last year to tomatoes, so the less said about that, the better. My peppers were more successful, then, but peppers actually like hot weather.

You can see by my choice of crop that I’m a rank amateur. Hale used to laugh a little, gently, at me and my tomato dreams.

But this year I’m out there, again. With tomatoes, peppers, various herbs, all grown in mushroom compost mix from the nursery.

Last year I had a bumper crop of accidental sweet basil, offspring from the previous year’s dying threesome. And this past February, it seemed like that windfall was going to happen again.

By now, though, the little sprouts look kind of funny. The leaves are similar to last year’s, but each group has generated a cluster of tiny round buds in its center. And none of it smells like basil.

Plant Snap says those little plants are euphorbia. And no variety of euphorbia is friendly to tomatoes. Some are even toxic.

How did this happen? That sound you hear is the spirit of Hale laughing, again. He was a good gardener, though he’d never brag about it.

Do I trust Plant Snap? Or doesn’t that matter? I do trust my nose. If those sprouts were basil, they would smell like basil.

The truth is, I’m a bit better with flowers than vegetables.

When we first came to this area, I was mad for roses.

Houston, with its high humidity and cloying heat, grew fungus more successfully than rose blooms. Winedale, therefore, presented opportunity.

And proximity to the Antique Rose Emporium.

The Emporium was as deadly to our budget as a bookstore, especially since Hale was happy to do the digging.

To say we overbought is an understatement.

For a while the result was lovely—but even antique roses have issues with drought and single digit freezes. Plus they need sun, which forty years of growing live oaks has greatly diminished in our yard.

Where the shade was unavoidable I planted azaleas, a Houston favorite.

I haven’t followed Houston’s lead in wrapping those tender plants in old bedsheets every time the temperature threatens to drop below 32 degrees. I don’t have enough old sheets for that.

Even so, the azaleas on the southern exposure of our house, unwrapped, have survived everything nature has thrown at them, even thirty-inch icicles overhead.

An eight-foot-tall pittosporum on the east side of the house froze in 2021, but after we whacked it back, I left it alone. This spring its roots have produced two perfectly healthy small bushes that are already knee high.

If I were younger I imagine I would be out there uprooting and replacing too quickly, instead of just watching.

This spring has been perfect, of course, for a laid-back, or lazy, kind of gardening.

With the season’s abundant rain and timely cooler periods, nature has been beautifully equipped to dazzle us with complex glories to which we are miraculously irrelevant.

All we have to do is notice and enjoy.

And maybe take a moment to think a little—about the rewards of persistence. About the driving force of life, itself, toward rebirth, rejuvenation.

And maybe most of all, to notice how the presence of so many silent living things, green things around us proclaiming life insistently, makes us feel.

Hopeful. It makes us smile, from the inside out.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com Her new book, This Familiar Heart, is available at The Fayette County Record office.