A Funny Thing Happened While Going Out for Chinese
It’s Tuesday night and Linda has her art class, which means I’m on my own for dinner. On Tuesday evenings I prove that I’m still capable of stuffing myself with fatty, sugary, and generally unhealthy fast food, my favorites being Popeye’s fried chicken and Burger King. But lately I’ve been frequenting a restaurant offering much tastier, and healthier, fare. If you happen to be hanging out near Dorsey Search Village Center in Columbia, Md., you should try Hunan Legend, which serves up above-average Chinese food. Specifically, they have the best pepper steak I’ve ever tasted. I’ve been there so often that the server knows my order, which in my book is one of the best situations you can have. Going to a restaurant and not needing to look at the menu? Awesome. Boring, but awesome.
So, I’m walking through the parking lot, minding my own business, and I begin to realize that I’m actually recognizing and categorizing the perennials that are planted in the spaces outside the strip center. These beds were obviously planted by professional, commercial landscapers. There are large drifts of some kind of yellow coreopsis (not the Moonbeam in my garden, but a different cultivar that I recognize from my gardening books).) Next to the coreopsis are robust, tall, drifts of red yarrow plants, all of which could sprinkle my tiny potted yarrow on their Wheaties. Located near the parking lot and bathed in sunshine all day long, the list of sun perennials was long and comprehensive. There were coneflowers, of course, right next to beebalm, which was next to catmint. It dawned on me that somewhere along the line, I’ve gotten to know these plants. I didn’t acknowledge them as the “pretty red ones,” but instead knew their common names. What did this mean?
In January of 2024, I wrote one of my favorite posts, called, How to Become a Gardening Expert. The post opens with these words: “It’s easy to become a gardening expert. All you need is the willingness to look like an idiot and learn a few mysterious words.” Looking like an idiot, according to me, referenced the typical gardening outfit worn to protect yourself from too much sun, insects, etc. Notably, the outfit required a floppy, goofy-looking hat. The few mysterious words were the horticultural, or scientific, names for plants. Because hardly anyone knows what they are, referring to your plants as achillea instead of yarrow is very impressive and clearly, if subtly, communicates that you must be an expert gardener. As I took my usual booth at Hunan Legend, I began to wonder if something strange and wonderful was happening. Was it possible that after three seasons of enjoying this hobby, I might be on my way to actually becoming an expert? I’ll have to revisit this in another seven years or so. I’m still a very long way from referring to yarrow as achillea, but I won’t fight it if the feeling to do so overwhelms me.
Other news: It is easy to understand why gardeners cut their flowers and bring them into the house to enjoy them. I’m not a flower cutter, so I must go outside on garden patrol to see the results of my labor. The other day, while pulling weeds in the waterfall bed, I accidently broke a Solomon’s seal flower off at the stem and decided I would bring the fallen soldier into the house and try my hand at flower arranging. Here’s what I came up with:
I’ve been watching the seedlings from my Lenten rose all spring. They continue to grow and now I have dozens of them spreading under and around the mama Lenten rose plant. I thought I would try an experiment. I potted up the babies to see if I could grow them in pots and then replant them back into the garden as adolescents ready to handle the winter. I kept the trays from my last purchase of impatiens, so I had plenty of pots to work with. I filled them with a mix of potting soil and compost and selected a few of the baby Lenten rose plants to grow in the relative comfort of this new environment. It does not escape me that each of these puppies, if my experiment succeeds, will be worth more than $20 each retail. My dozen baby Lenten rose are now sitting outside on my deck where I check on them daily and water them occasionally. Lenten rose famously do well in shade so we will see what we will see. Look at me, everyone, I’m doing real gardener stuff!
Following up last week’s post, there are many other signs that summer is right around the corner. Yesterday I noticed that my blue veronica, or speedwell, plants, located around the firepit, are beginning to bud. I am very ambivalent about my blue veronica, for several reasons. For one, the flowers don’t stay a blue color for very long. After a few weeks (it seems to me) they go from a light blue to a light green and are far from being a showstopper in the garden. Another reason I have issues with veronica is that I wanted to plant salvia around the firepit, but my landscape designer, Sasha, was worried that there wouldn’t be enough sun. The veronica is thriving in its current location, but I still find myself grieving for what might have been. And even though my credo for the gardening season is Martha Stewart’s mantra, “if you don’t like it, change it,” I’m not going to rip out seven thriving veronica plants, especially when I don’t have anywhere else in the garden to put them.
I might as well close with the wisdom I shared at the end of the post on How to Become a Gardening Expert:“Of course, Type A gardeners aspire to become authentic expert gardeners, as opposed to just appearing to be an expert gardener. Since it will take many years to actually be an expert, you might as well have some fun and fool as many people as you can. I read somewhere, I can’t remember where, that the best technique for pretending to be a gardening expert is to write a gardening newsletter. Nah. It would never work.”
I hope you enjoyed this week’s installment of The Painful Education of a Type A Gardener. You can find even more gardening wisdom in the archives, by clicking HERE. If you care to share the wit and wisdom of this letter with friends and enemies, you can do so by clicking on the SHARE button or by sending folks a link to kensolow.substack.com. Thanks, as always, for your likes, dislikes, and comments. They are always appreciated.