Anthropologist and author Carlos Castaneda referred to twilight as the “crack between the worlds” of day and night. I think of May as the crack between the seasons.
Many people consider May a month of transition, a time when it’s late spring and early summer simultaneously, when the best of spring crops linger and the anticipation of planting summer crops excites. They seasons ebb and flow, overlapping, these observers say. Maybe. But so often it seems as if each year there is that one day, one hour, one moment, when the needle moves. It was spring. Now it’s summer. Boom. Next.
Maybe it’s a sudden thunderstorm. Or it’s the moment you realize that your spinach plants have all bolted to seed overnight. Or when you place those tomato and pepper plants on your patio to harden. It’s a feeling, a recognition of sudden change. One yields to the other. We have graduated. Bring on the main attraction: Summertime.
For some reason, I feel the transitions more smoothly and with more nuance when winter yields to spring and when fall succumbs to winter. Summer, though, sneaks up without warning and pounds on my door, and I’m grateful when it’s time to answer. I long for the searing heat and rapid plant growth and promise of big-crop harvest that summer brings. Spring wants to linger, but it just gets overwhelmed and banished by heat and bugs and the incessant onslaught of June, July and August. The cool days of early May get forgotten so quickly when the thermometer starts spiking.
It’s crowded in there! Spring lettuce is a colorful and tasty treat.
The phenomenon is not just visible in the garden. Along the roadsides and walking paths, brilliant white wild blackberry flowers explode everywhere, supplemented by early wild roses—with smaller but similar white flowers, in many cases—and by white and yellow honeysuckle. Other wild flowers appear by the day. Wild strawberries invade lawns and flower beds. It’s fast and furious.
My raised bed filled with lettuce looks like it will burst any second now. You can thin out every other plant every other day, and the remaining plants will spread eagerly in the intervening hours, filling those momentary spaces again and sucking up every remaining cool, moist moment before turning tough and bitter toward the end of the month. The crowded plants remind me of the much-too-narrow seats on the commuter bus I ride a couple days a week. I always seem to sit next to someone determined to jab his elbow into my side as he reads the paper, engaged in a silent but not-so-subtle fight for space. He apparently feels resentful that he does not have as much room as he deserves, so he’s determined to make life miserable for the guy next to him, even though I’m not encroaching a millimeter on his space. Occasionally, I push back; I paid for this seat. But often I find myself leaning away from him—even if I start to get in the way of the guy standing in the aisle. At 7 in the morning, it’s too early for a fight.
So maybe my lettuce plants are engaged in the same pushing and shoving, in slow motion, when I’m not looking. Or even when I am looking—I just don’t interpret what I’m staring at. If so, I hope they remember to get off at the right stop.
It was Saturday morning, Kentucky Derby day, when I first heard the sound. I was alert for bees. Individual bees, and bees in small groups. But nothing prepared me for the sound, and then the sight, of a swarm of thousands and thousands of frantic honey bees, whipping each other into a frenzy as they circled each other like electrons around a core of plutonium, a dark cloud of doom in perpetual, insane motion settled over almost half of my garden. Almost like a CGI movie scene: biblical and fearsome and deadly.
Wild blackberry flowers decorate roadsides in May.
Upon seeing the swarm, I moved cautiously and slowly to the far side of the garden. I tried to control my breath and assess the threat rationally. I had survived several stings in recent weeks without the severe reaction I had as a teenager, which required emergency medical treatment. I had recently bought a new kit for emergency use if stung and in danger of passing out. But this cloud of venom was beyond anything my worst nightmares could produce.
Seeing that I could not reach the garden gate without passing through the swarm, I weighed my options. I could stand still and hope the swarm simply went away. Or I could bend a metal pole, pull down the corner of the deer fence I so had carefully erected and reinforced, and crawl out of harm’s way.
Once I realized that the swarm was advancing toward me, the choice was simple. Down came the fence. I crawled to safety.
That moment provided a very sharp crack between two worlds. My days of leisurely gardening on my friend John’s horse farm spilled through that crack and drained away. I’m trying to figure out how I can just walk away from the garden plot I have loved for so many years—and which formed the basis for my gardening book, “The Seeds of Spring: Lessons from the Garden.” I had hoped to find a community garden plot in the area, but alas, all are spoken for. It’s just not meant to be, at least for this summer. I have no intent of being found dead dressed in my ratty gardening clothes and covered with stingers, sweat and sunscreen. When I go, I want a little more dignity.
By next year, at the latest, I suspect that the frantic bee activity will subside. So in a worst case scenario, I won’t be doing much gardening until then. So, dear reader, I thank you for following this blog, and I promise to resume it at some point when the world settles down for me.
Until then, happy gardening!
The Seeds of Spring BLOG 