Posted on Sun, Aug. 10, 2008

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The Weekend Gardener: For Texans, August is surely the cruelest month of all

With apologies to T.S. Eliot.

August is the cruelest month, breeding

Charred plants out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, choking

Weak roots thirsty for rain.

I asked a friend the other day about his garden, and his hands went up to his face and covered it.

"I can’t talk about it," he croaked.

I understood.

I went away for a long weekend in late July and when I came back, I looked at my garden and saw it was dead. Well, not dead, quite. But brown. And dry. The zinnias planted in the hopeful spring rains were dead. Two Nearly Wild rosebushes had lost the green in their leaves. The sight, as a whole, was a wasteland.

With long, hot August stretching out before me like a patient etherized upon a table, things did not look good.

I called for help.

Both Tim Doogs from Tim’s Landscape in Fort Worth and John Peters, a vice president of Calloway’s Nursery, heard my cry. Or, to be more accurate, they answered my desperate phone calls.

And both garden gurus immediately spoke of water.

"First," said Tim, "you need to know when your plant needs water. A lot of people make the mistake of going out in the afternoon and seeing a wilted plant and thinking it needs water."

Yes, this was me. That’s exactly what I did.

"You need to look at your plants first thing in the morning. If it’s wilted in the morning, it needs water."

John, too, talked about the need to water in the morning. Not in the heat of the day, or late afternoon.

Yes, this was me again. Coming home from work and watering my sad, sad plants.

"And keep the water off the foliage," said John. He suggested soaker hoses that put the water right on the ground.

I had watered those brown leaves. Many a time.

"Better to water longer and give your gardens a good soaking than to water in short durations and often," John continued, noting that if you do short bursts of watering, over the long haul you’ll just encourage your plants to have shallow roots when "you want those roots down deeper, where, hopefully, it’s a bit cooler. Water long enough to soak the soil. You don’t have to water as often."

I needed to change my watering habits, this much was clear.

Mulch kept us cool, covering

Earth in purposeful bark, feeding

A little life with shredded hardwood.

The men both spoke of mulch.

"It needs to be really thick," Tim said. "It’s absolutely crucial."

Mulch. When did I last mulch? Yes, my mulch was thin, I knew. But it’s so, so hot outside.

"You want at least 3 inches," said Peters, "or more. Up to 6 inches. Mulch helps hold the water in the soil. It helps insulate the root system from the heat. And it helps retard weed growth and gradually decomposes over time and improves the soil structure in the bed."

It was clear that I had to mulch again, too.

Despite the heat. Despite the sun.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Trinity

With a blast of heat; we stopped in the garden store,

And went on in sunlight, into the back garden,

And poured aerobic compost tea, and talked for an hour.

"Tea," said Tim. "If your soil’s not perfect," (and whose is, I wondered?) "drench it with an aerobic tea compost to add microbes into the soil. It’s much more potent than plain compost."

So tea, and water. And mulch. So much work in the hot summer sun.

And what about trimming, I asked. Did I need to cut back on my perennials?

Not yet, both said.

"You don’t want to encourage soft growth now," said John. "Wait another 30 days or so."

So no trimming. But what about those brown leaves?

"Go ahead and take the brown leaves off," said Tim. And John, too, said I could get rid of any unsightly growth.

Had they seen my wasteland? So much unsightly growth.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go north in the summer.

Perhaps my garden just looked so stricken to me that July afternoon because I had just come back from Napa Valley. How green was that valley. How lush ...

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?

But not everything in my garden was a wreck. As my initial shock at my wasteland faded, and reason and hope once again took over, I realized there were some bright spots in the garden. The lantana. The lantana was almost 5 feet high. It had spread across the front beds, eclipsing the yucca plants completely. The Salvia greggii. Bright red blooms popped against the back wall. The rosemary was still green. The Knock Out roses looked divine. The butterfly bush was bloming out of control and attracting a trio of hummingbirds.

"Try Mexican feather grass, too," Tim said.

Yes, some plants love the heat. Even in August. Even in Texas.

Tim rattled off a list: Cactus, of course, and most of the yuccas. And Texas birds of paradise and crepe myrtles. John also said he loved crepe myrtles, and he waxed poetic about them.

"The hotter it gets, the better they bloom," he said, noting that at Calloway’s they love color. Summer favorites are purslane, moss rose, periwinkle and Mexican heather.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I, the Weekend Gardener, though tired, struggling to keep things alive,

A woman with arms and legs and mind, can hope.

The garden is not dead. Parts of it are just tired, like me. Some of its plants are hot and weary and sick of this thing called Texas summer.

But it will renew itself with fall’s rains, with cooler nights, with shorter days.

As will I. And meanwhile, I will mulch. And water.

Water deeply.