Master of None

Gardening Fails

She’s baaaaack.

This is how I imagine the plants react when they see me walk through the gates of the garden store. They shrivel their fresh, green leaves to hide signs of health and vigor. They turn their blooms away hoping not to catch my eye. “Please, please not me” they plead silently, roots trembling in their little 4” plastic pots. The nursery is an Eden where the potting soil is loamy and the water flows freely. But, I’m a monster and my reputation precedes me.

Every spring, when the days get longer, and the sun shines bright, I yearn to get my hands dirty. I want to dig around in the earth. I want to don my full suit of UV protective wear and trim trees and yank weeds. I want to feel human sweat rolling down my human face as I shovel and snip and clip and rake with my human hands. I don’t care about the salty mucous dribbling from my nose as pollen-thick air bombards my respiratory system! The Betäubenstage of winter is finally behind me, and I want everything in my yard to look as renewed as I feel!

And, boy, do I ever want to go buy some new plants.

By all rights, I should have a thumb so green it glows in the dark. Both of my parents were gardeners by necessity, having grown up in the rural south during the Depression when producing your own food was the difference between having dinner or not. The lessons of survival they learned during those lean, difficult years translated into a paradise of whole foods growing in the suburban yard in which I spent my childhood. We feasted on squash, okra and corn in the summer, then nibbled on canned beans and pickled this and that during the winter. My friends and I stayed drunk on the sweet flesh of peaches and plums that grew on our trees, the scent of which I could smell on night breezes through my bedroom window. And tomatoes…so many tomatoes. Our bounty was embarrassingly abundant, and my mother gave them away to neighbors by the bushel.

Somehow, none of my parents’ gardening witchcraft was passed on to me. My father’s sorcery was rooted in emotional manipulation. He came home from work at lunch every single day to “talk to his plants.” These conversations may have involved threats or, more likely horticultural love-bombing. Both possibilities track with his MO in general, but either way, it was consistent, careful attention. This level of commitment, I have not. After the initial burst of frenzied gardening energy I get in March, my interest tapers off quickly. My mother’s success, on the other hand, came from the magic of hardcore insecticides. I refuse to go there. I have a healthy fear of that particular poison, and would like to keep my lady-bits clear of free-radicals.

So, despite years of trying and every available resource on the internet to tell me “how-to,” plants simply fail to thrive in my care. Vegetable seedlings fight the good fight—genetically engineered as they are for survival—in the soil I’ve turned and amended, until around June when they wither and wilt on their cages like a Dali timepiece. The few meager tomatoes the plants produce are ruined by horn bugs and hang in treacherous warning like heads on spikes. The pretty perennials I’ve installed in the yard stand neutral until, as if by unanimous vote, go crispy brown overnight, and it’s a veritable Armageddon to behold.

YES, I always exclusively choose the hardiest of native plant species: salvia greggii, Texas sage, rock rose. My expectations are informed by geography, and I embrace the limitations of the Central Texas conditions. Turns out, though, that plants with “low water needs” still need some water. Texas summers are brutal, drought conditions are never-ending, and I refuse to give myself the gift of irrigation technology, which I figure is for the weak, and people with rationale. I’ll just stand there in June, looking pitifully out the double-paned window from inside my climate-controlled house sipping on a tumbler of ice cold water while hundreds of dollars of plant life die an ugly death. It’s a thousand degrees in Austin and f*ck if I’m going out there to water.

Many planting seasons ago, when Bill and I were real estate shopping for our first house, we had a realtor who often touted the selling points of a property by pointing out its xeriscaped yard. He was a young–very young–cowboy and called it “zero-scaping.” ZEE-row. You could tell he loved tossing the term around and said it over and over. Bill and I would exchange knowing glances and privately make mean-spirited fun at his expense. But, you know what? In retrospect, I have to wonder if the joke was on me. Maybe that guy could tell just by looking at me that ZERO perfectly summed up my future gardening endeavors.

The most embarrassing part of my whole rocky landscaping history is—this is true—I hold the designation of Travis County Master Gardener, as bestowed upon me by the cooperative extension of Texas A&M. Qualifying for this certification was no joke. I had to attend a dozen 4 hour sessions of, not gonna lie here, pretty dull lectures by experts in the field. The other attendees were city planners, arborists, biologists and all varieties of professional nerds. And, me. Mom of toddlers. We had to pass a test at the end of course, and I studied hard to do so. I wonder now, if the coop officials performed a follow-up visit to my yard, would I be stripped of my rank? Or fined? Or maybe even expelled from the organization completely and required to return my name tag!? I might be forced, like Lance Armstrong, into a shameful exile in a far-flung state.

Look, I don’t enjoy terrorizing seedlings like I’m some scary clown at a botanical birthday party or an aggie-style Freddy Krueger. But what can I do? I just don’t have the touch. This year, as I was loading up the car with my Shoal Creek Nursery haul—because paying the tithe to the local plant hawkers will always be part of my spring ritual—it occurred to me that I already knew how this would end. I had a thought: Maybe I should go ahead and open up a few of the giant, brown leaf bags I’d just purchased, put the seedlings directly inside, and dump the bags right on the curb for trash pick up as soon as I get home. Just skip over all the “garden performance” nonsense. Instead of the digging, fertilizing, mulching, I could go directly to the “relaxing with a beer” portion of the show.

Maybe dirty fingernails and functional exercise are overrated. Maybe a scruffy yard is a perfect and acceptable reflection of my idiosyncratic mindset. Maybe I’ve got books to read and songs to write. And maybe, just maybe, zero is a number I can live with.

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I’ll be performing a little laid-back set of music Tuesday, April 22 at Hole in the Wall. 6pm FREE!! Did you hear that? I said EARLY. I said FREE. If you’re in Austin, come on down and let’s see how it goes together.

Friday, April 25, 2025 is the release date of “Cowboys,” the first single off my all-Reivers cover record, Legendary. Here’s a link to evil streaming services so you can pre-save, if you’re so inclined. It’ll also be on Bandcamp. https://artists.landr.com/056870813776

Interested in doing some personal essay writing? Consider joining us Monday, April 21 or 28 1:30-3:30 for Write with Spike live in Austin. Details here.