Gazetteer of the Backyard (In Which Pedanius Dioscorides Takes Stock)

Luminous flowers and luminous insects. Fire lilies and fireflies. Heat confined on the Earth by the Air. Evening star in the low west. Northern flickers, starlings, phosphorus and August.

Perseids seed the 3b hardiness zone. A zone of zahara starlight zinnias. Double clusters and heliotropes, sunflowers under Swift-Tuttle showers. Orbits of high heaped cloudberries. A royal poet of a sky!

Morning cock-crows an aurora of Phoenician purple and Tyrian sea snail. By last night’s leaf the embroidery ladies talked and walked me off my legs! “The garden is a three-fold mahogany screen with hollyhock and sweet pea. A weave of violet and bindweed with a weft of aristocratic toga.” O thorn and thistle me already.

How many bags of sheep shit? How many bales of peat? Ten weeks of drought, eight weeks of deluge and gloom. The odd sunny day with a wind that knocks the beanstalks flat on their backs. And the weeds ...

My rows bode bad with wode whistle, cheatgrass, bad man’s oatmeal and yolky toadflax—a blunder garden! The missteps, the false alyssum, the 
prolifically prolix knapweed ... a pervasive invasive creep. Taproots tapping my optimism.

A yard is not a yard without birds. The front beds dense with crowfoot violet, bloody cranesbill. The lawn a face-off of gooseneck loosestrife and chickweed. Back here by Jupiter’s beard the magpies plunder my seed heads, a sharp-shinned hawk owns the view from the neighbor’s garage. Gayfeather, the sparrows, Veronica, the wandering chickadees, blue spikes and jays, flecked plumage.

On the south side of the yard, rowan berries, Siberian peashrub, ninebark slough. The fipple-winded linden (that heart-leaved stalwart) is the backyard axis mundi. Mother of thousands thrice the brindled catbird’s mewed! Gray catbird sings from the catbird seat, a high-branch fermata, a basswood basso continuo, a sustained hush-hush surveillance.

Ten degrees and counting to the waggle-forage, the waggle-run, the long-corolla bee balm, the catmint, the nasturtium. Magnanimous bees and 
magnanimous bee plants. Holy hyssop purges the soil, woos the gypsy cuckoo bumble bee. Bombus borealis whoops the virtues of Venus, the whorled mint, the wild horsemint, the mint of no remorse.

Honeyberry, sweetberry, blue-berried honeysuckle. Waxy haskap buffs bee dreams and bull’s eye vision, a dance of flicker-victory and bee’s purple. Behold the primrose and pansy, the nectar-guiding sunflower, the heliopsis summer sun.

Bamboozled as a confusing bumble bee. My bull-thistled fingers, my wilting boxelder back—I’ve become an ornamental crab! All this number-crunching and cruciferae. Sweet maudlin what a cross to bear this humble garden has! Onion-eyed I cry just to look at that back fence ... answer me, dead broccoli! A tragic trio bolts a crop of bad hair and halitosis.

True to nature the ungainly crushes the tight-fisted: the rhubarb overgrown, the garlic (after two years) unforthcoming. At the far end of the fence a pint-sized bush of pint-sized pickles, then rows of bleeding beets, vulgar 
red-cheeked chard, and the peas, the peas, the peas (rattling all night in their pods, my dreams are noisy with the poison of peas).

Bastard rhubarb ... the mock orange at the northeast corner of the shed 
lampoons me with pruning ridicule. Have I been as caustic as petty spurge, madwort and madder yet? Not as I thought a sage of virtue but an oversensitive sensitive plant?

Notwithstanding my chipped and crumbling birdbath (spurned by finch and siskin alike), a mere northwest step from the stepping stones are twelve prolific tomato cages (big beef hybrid, bodacious hybrid, bumble bee mix), copious constellations of carrots (lunar white and solar yellow), and the flowers ... moonflower, moon violet, star grass, shooting star and star-
flowered lily of the valley. Sweet virgin’s bower a virtual galaxy of a garden!

Gardens over long-gone lakes. Over fluvial plains. Over lacustrine plains. Aeolian or wind-worked. Over pitted outwash plains. Over mixed knoll and depression.

Gardens of orthic dark brown soil. Calcareous dark brown. Eluviated dark brown. Humic gleysols.

Soils moderately fine to fine-textured. Moderately calcareous usually saline. Clayey glacio-lacustrine deposits. Unsorted glacial till.

Gardens of nearly level topography. Of topography gently sloping or roughly undulating. Moderately sloping or gently rolling. Strongly sloping or moderately rolling. Steeply sloping or strongly rolling.

Gardens with perennials that mimic black coral branching like a tree. That mimic saffron-colored laminated rocks. With rows that mimic sea froth, salt flowers, a river with a crust of bicolored daylily.

Gardens with the temperament of pumice stone that stops boiling wine boiling. Of alkaline earth that restrains the tongue. With the constitution of whetstone that mollifies major and minor organs. With the antiseptic nature of adamantine spar.

Gardens of unambiguous moss. Opportunistic moss. Outbreaks of rockbrake, bear’s bed, robin’s eye. Gardens of anonymous moss and closeted moss (Iceland moss a lichen that passes as a moss). Moss that conquers lassitude. Moss that comforts the heart.

The gardens of unwanted plants and persistence. Lamb’s quarters, shepherd’s 
purse, purslane. The argumentative and self-important gardens. Prostrate knotweed, supercilious stinkweed, black medic.

What I wish you could see in this crudely rendered drawing ... 

A metrical line from plant to poet to the god of physicians. A geology of medicine and herb. Not companion planting but conviviality. Plants doting on stones, metals smitten with flowers.

Asclepius cut open the earth, restored the heart’s beat to the dead. Milkweed took the garden’s pulse, deemed it butterfly- and bee-fluent.

A diagnosis was made, of dactyls like waterweed, of rose-stanza silkweed, of a lyre heart-strung and serpent-wound.