Spring's a Trial for the Weary

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
May 6, 1961


   THE MELANCHOLY season is generally associated with fall, but for those of us who can take nature or leave it alone spring isn't so ducky, either.  The trouble is that if you leave spring alone you lose standing in the community.  The green-thumb brigade has taken over.
   We who prefer to live casually are trapped.  Anyone who hasn't a mound of black dirt in the yard waiting to be spread hither and yon is an indolent nobody.  To establish yourself as an upstanding citizen these days you have to push a weed, feed and seed cart around.

   I HAVE no black dirt on the place, don't intend to have any, and will get behind a pushcart with dedicated reluctance.  All I've done thus far is remove the winter cover from what I refer to loosely as the perennials.  The non-blooming climber has struggled through again, as I feared it would, but the expensive stuff, iris and roses of exquisite beauty, appear as dead as they'll ever be.
   We have three no-good peony plants that cling to life for no legitimate reason.  They've never produced more than three or four weary blooms, although stoked with black dirt and plant food since 1945.  I threaten each year to root them out but my wife, in whom hope springs eternal, won't have it.

   I DON'T condemn the green-thumb boys out of hand.  Some of them are quite personable chaps and good to their wives and children.  But I'm sick of having them look down their noses at me and my kind simply because they enjoy landscaping and we don't, and are willing to spend hours currying their lawns while we aren't.  Our only sin is an inherent inability to respond to the season's promises, but they write us off as oafs.
   The fellow I pity is my next-door neighbor.  He has given gardening some of the best springs and summers of his life but his back yard resists every effort to produce grass and should be put in the soil bank.  The payoff came last summer when he worked himself to exhaustion sodding the place.  It made my back ache to watch him and I hoped fervently that success would crown his efforts.
   But this spring the area is again barren and he has given up.  "The damned ground won't even support crabgrass," he muttered.  "I'm gonna put the whole works into patio and to hell with nature."
   I've heard variants of this theme from other non-nature boys, but while such an escape has unquestioned merit I've never actually seen it done and was close to it only once myself.  This was after I'd converted my lawn into desert with crabgrass killer--which was all my fault, my wife said, because I ignored the directions.
   I now merely go through the motions of lawn care to maintain my reputation, knowing that failure is inevitable but knowing, too, that custom being what it is one can no longer loaf the weekends away and permit his mind to feast on the eternal values.

   THE TROUBLE with most fellows of my era is that we were not schooled in sophisticated landscaping as boys.  My father never pampered his lawn or fought weeds.  We considered dandelions manna from heaven.  We ate the greens.  Now I'm caught up in this complicated seed and fertilizer frenzy and can't adjust to it.
   When I explained all this to my wife the other day she brought up the name of a man a couple of houses south who could grow grass on a billiard table and whose lawn is an unblemished carpet.  "He's 20 years older than you are and seems to have made the adjustment."
   Any day now I'll be out with the pushcart.


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