Reflections: Growing Our Own

Reflections: Growing Our Own

James Fox-Smith

I’m babysitting this weekend, but not in the usual sense of the word. Now that our kids have drivers’ licenses and independently mobile groups of friends, the list of things they come to their parents for has become quite short. It usually consists of (a) car keys, (b) gas, or (c) money. And now that they both have summer jobs to boot, the chances of either being spotted around the house on an early summer Saturday have become about the same as my chances of stepping outside to find all the chickens in the pool, having taken up synchronized swimming.

So, instead of having children to look after while my wife is off visiting her sister in California this weekend, the life form I’ve been left in charge of is a rather unremarkable-looking potted plant named a clivia, which my wife bought from a like-minded fanatic on eBay and has been mollycoddling ever since. Although this clivia (a South African native also sometimes called a “Bush Lily”) looks pretty self-sufficient, I’ve been led to believe that it won’t possibly survive her three-day absence if I neglect the complicated hydration schedule my wife has left for me to follow. So, several times a day I go out there to turn the pot and mist the clivia’s fleshy green leaves, and also the creamy, orchid-like flower bud, which elicited shrieks-of-delight-while-running-in-circles when said wife spotted it emerging a few days ago. I’m doing my best to share her enthusiasm but have to confess that my heart’s not all there. Because although my wife and I share a passionate interest in gardening, while she’s into ornamentals, I’m all about the vegetables. I have a hard time getting excited about a plant I can’t eat, and since there’s nothing appetizing about a clivia (a member of the Amaryllidaceae family, it contains a toxic alkaloid named lycorine, ingestion of which causes nausea, vomiting, convulsions and cardiac arrhythmia), I might just slip down and see how my tomatoes are coming along. Again.

Clivia Miniata

Ashley Fox-Smith

Isn’t it strange? Here we are trying to come to terms with being in our fifties, and the moment the childcare obligations let up we slide straight into that age-old gardening cliché in which the wife grows the ornamentals while the husband does the vegetables. On one side of the house, the garden has been transformed with a profusion of whimsical, colorful, probably poisonous, annual and perennial plantings. On the other, behind a barn and a chicken coop and an eight-footfence is the fort knox I have established to exclude wild herbivores and wives alike. Within this horticultural equivalent of a man cave I grow the usual suspects: tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, eggplants; and also leeks, the occasional avocado, and currently an absolute shedload of cucumbers— secure in the knowledge that they won’t be devoured by deer, or displaced by dahlias when you-know-who tries another of her horticultural land-grabs. On the neutral ground in between we play tug of war with hoses, pinch each other’s garden implements, and negotiate over compost rights.

For a pair of people who’ve never really thought of themselves as a traditional couple, this division seems peculiar. Throughout twenty-something years of marriage we’ve shared most duties— earning a living, childcare, cooking, housekeeping, and so on—with a minimum of disagreement. But put us into the garden and we retreat into our respective camps. Is it some ancient anthropological impulse that compels me to focus my limited horticultural skills on growing fruits and vegetables (and raising chickens, come to think of it), while her interest cleaves more to the aesthetic? Or is this burgeoning obsession with raising living things a coping strategy, reflexively deployed by parents whose kids are getting ready to depart the family fold? The latter seems likely. So, while she’s away I’ll do my best to look after the clivia, all the while considering the more satisfying problem of what to do with the bonanza of tomatoes coming our way. And since this is Country Roads’ annual cuisine issue, if anyone has suggestions for what to do with the ten pounds of cucumbers I’m currently harvesting each and every day, do let me know.