Mariner hasn’t been a “dig your fingers in the dirt” gardener for two years. He has been too busy. Nor has he planted vegetables or engaged in the sport of keeping ahead of weeds – and rabbits for that matter. He has been busy with what Monty Don (popular gardener on YouTube) calls ‘hardscape’. Hardscape has to do with garden design and  making that design actually exist. It has nothing do do with actually handling plants.

Hardscaping involves identifying where garden beds and other activities will be laid, It involves preparing those beds by amending soil, perhaps laying borders and walkways, maybe even putting up barriers to ward off deer and rabbits. It involves building fences and storage sheds. The design may even call for arbors, gates and laying water systems. It may require moving massive amounts of dirt to establish tiered gardens.

This hardscaping has dragged on because mariner can no longer lift a 2x12x8 piece of lumber; he used to pick up two cinder blocks and chuck them in the truck, now he needs a hand truck just to move one cinder block along the ground. He has a trope he tells everyone: “Mariner belongs to a union that requires him to work eight hours a day but he has 2½ days to do it.”

For all that introduction about hardscape, this post is about paying homage and respect to those plants that already exist in his gardens. Some plants like lilies, iris, spirea, rhododendron, peonies, cone flowers and evergreens have carried on since he moved to the property a over a decade ago.. They bloom and grow in their seasons despite rambunctious weeds, punishing rabbits and disturbed soil. Spiderwort, found in a nearby park, is a slender plant with a small, lovely blue flower. It has expanded in its place despite overcrowding by other spreading plants that should have been pruned.

Cone flowers carry the untended beds through the summer as if they were part of a first-class public garden. Even Joe Pie Weed (a misnomer) grows to a splendid six feet and blooms into the fall.

Every tree has cared for itself despite lack of pruning. There are apple, pear and cherry trees; there are dozens of shrubs holding forth without TLC. Despite the grotesque abuse by humans over the centuries, plants demonstrate why they’ve been around a lot longer than animals!

Ancient Mariner

Mariner and his wife have just returned from a ‘dash in, visit, dash out’ vacation plan. We don’t recommend it. The pleasures of visiting with family and friends is diminished while packing, unpacking, repacking and driving become the dominant experience.

We did indeed enjoy our time with friends and family (and the Maryland crab cakes, gardens and an excellent restaurant overlooking a classic inlet full of sailboats). It is a bit of tradition for mariner and his wife to stop at a Cracker Barrel when we travel. His order of fried shrimp was so large it served as lunch and dinner the next day! As to gardens, every visit had a garden! He confiscated some Sweet Woodruff plants when visiting one of his friends.

It is too bad that driving dominated our vacation experience  It is mariner’s opinion that driving, with all its consternation, still is better than airplanes or trains – haven’t tried rockets yet because they are too expensive. We have sailed on cruise ships but that is subject to “been there, done that”. Instead, charter a 40-foot sloop and sail to your destination.

Back to driving, it is so intense on the interstates one dare not reach for a drink or snack on the console. There are trucks that gather in groups to dance a strange square dance; there are left-lane abusers staying in the fast lane while driving five miles under the speed limit; there are drivers darting in and out of lanes at very high speed and within inches of other vehicles; change lanes at your own risk; on some interstate routes traffic has reached the saturation point. If one likes high speed, drive in Kentucky – the slow lane crawled along at eighty miles an hour!

But the real distraction is road construction. It was so bad along route 70 across every state between Iowa and Maryland that he and his wife chose to return home through West Virginia and Kentucky, crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis. It was even worse – between Lexington and St. Louis, one side of the highway was being rebuilt from scratch; backups were close to a dead stop for twenty miles!

Unlike other future prospects which mariner sees as uncertain, he relishes the day when all cars are driverless and must obey the instructions of the interstate computer. Will the speedsters even want to drive when forced to a predetermined speed limit?

All this considered, the time with friends and family was worth it. However, we won’t try another ‘dash in, visit, dash out’ vacation plan.

Ancient Mariner

Mariner’s family and friends have experienced some shuffling in the last few years. A close family member passed away as did a few friends. Other friends have moved. The children and grandchildren live in far away places, leaving a lot of possessions in the wrong house. Family deaths have required a search through ancient mementos and meaningful collections.

But finding family photo albums isn’t enough. Today, recent photographs, correspondence and historical documentation are found on primitive computers, cassettes, CD Discs, old camera filmstrips, extracted memory cards, and old memory towers. Plus, thousands of important documents and family information still on our own computers have been lost for years. After his grandmother died, he remembers finding a small box that had dozens of handwritten correspondence between his grandmother and a broad range of family members.

Mariner’s wife recently super-cleaned the attic and found about a half dozen cassettes. We had no choice but to purchase a cassette reader and discovered a golden collection of family events recorded for posterity. This motivated mariner to go through his dusty-in-a-box CD collection. There were hundreds of forgotten jewels of family history, trips and meaningful moments. He had to buy a CD player in the process.

So his advice to readers is don’t be satisfied because you have a shelf full of photograph albums. Unlike old collections which may be lost in the attic, photographs taken by a smartphone are as safe as the smartphone is dependable. Today, smartphones capture 92.5% of all pictures; the typical smartphone user stores 2,795 photos in their camera. Further, few paper copies of important documents exist – they may be on our computers somewhere – maybe.

In today’s electronic world, written historical accounts are extremely rare – though mariner must acknowledge that his wife hand writes an account every year in a special binder. If any of us are famous, someone may write an account of our lives. Otherwise, don’t stop with albums; you may find a treasure in an old Crown Royal sack.

Ancient Mariner