Zombie Gardening

As near as I can tell, the gardening industry has overlooked a vast area of marketing that has the potential to start a new gardening revolution among young folk and thus to grow a new generation of gardeners in this country.  Following in the footsteps of a current wildly successful television series, The Walking Dead, and alongside the frantic marketing spin offs such as the Airsoft semiautomatic plinker pictured here, ProfessorRoush thinks that some creative gardener needs to spin off some zombie-related gardening programs and paraphernalia to enrich our gardening experiences.  That should be me, so that I could make a zombie-related fortune and hire other people to do my digging, but it could also be you as well.  Just cut me in for some of the profit from the idea, okay? 

If you do a simple Google search on the words "zombie" and "gardening", you get some nice links to a zombiefied garden gnome named "Gnombie" ($224.99), and a resin zombie garden sculpture that resembles a corpse crawling out of the ground from thinkgeek.com ($69.99).  You also are referred to several links that will enlighten you on kitchen scraps that will regrow in your vegetable garden (celery, avocados and pineapples. among others).  All-in-all, I suppose those are all nice products and suggestions, but they're just scratching the surface of what I'm proposing.

I'm thinking of a line of Zombie Pesticides, with nice green fluorescent labels, that will paralyze Japanese Beetles so they don't squirm when you pick them up and squish them, or a Zombie Insect Spray that will cause your hornworms to blunder blindly about your tomato plants without damaging them.  I'm thinking about a group of specialized gardening implements, for instance a Zombie Repelling Hoe with a spike opposite the hoe blade so that it can be used for defense if you're attacked in the garden by zombies (or by city administrators, often difficult to distinguish from zombies, who demand that you rip up your front vegetable garden).   I envision a Zombie Compost  Fork with an ergonomic handle designed to decrease arm fatigue whether you are tossing compost or zombies.  I myself would surely purchase a Zombie Water Cannon with a sensor primed to shoot when large moving bodies such as zombie deer cross the path (I think this product may already exist, but it is missing the added zombie marketing power).

We need a garden prophet creating videos and pamphlets about plants that will fortify your grounds against zombie invasions (a nice hedge of Rosa eglanteria might suffice), or plants that will recover quickly from trampling damage caused by hordes of aimlessly rambling zombies (they would also be useful for gardens frequented by neighborhood children).  We need a writer proposing designs for garden "rooms" where we could escape and hide from zombies (or nongardening spouses).  We need Scott's to quit poisoning the environment and fund the breeding of a Zombie Grass that would stay neat and green without mowing or watering.

I suppose the latter suggestion is a little too fantastic to hope for, but any or all of the others should take the gardening world by storm and bring a few of the television-addled zombies out there back into the garden.  If some editor out there wants to put together a Zombie Garden Manual, count me in for a chapter on roses.  Is anyone out there interested in a very dark red, extremely thorny rose called 'Zombie Lover?'   Even better, it could be alternately marketed as 'Zombie Knockout'.  That will, based on my previous experience, really draw in the zombie gardening multitudes.

Crape Charisma

'Centennial Spirit'

The increased number of warmer and dryer winters in Kansas, to say nothing of the hellishly hot and arid summers, is forcing a similar slow adaptation of the gardener to the flaming reality of climate change.  From a glass-half-full perspective, it also offers some previously underperforming plants a chance to shine, a brief time of their own in the spotlight.  In my garden, it is the crape myrtles that are beginning to steal the harsh spotlight of late summer.

Fifteen years ago, I tried and lost a few crape myrtles, placed here seemingly north of their native ranges.  They would grow and look nice for a summer, and then even when they survived a winter, they struggled during the subsequent growing season and then expired the next.  Even when I attempted a more hardy variety, like the National Arboretum release 'Tonto', it froze back to the ground each winter and returned in spring as a short bush.  In contrast, over the last five years, every Lagerstroemia I've put into the ground has seemingly flourished, sometimes emerging through the winter whole, sometimes with a little die-back, but always healthy.  The big summer advantage of crape myrtles, as any good sweet-talking southern belle could tell you, is that the dainty flowers don't crinkle in dryness or fade in heat, they just bloom on and on.

'Centennial Spirit'

Lagerstroemia indica ‘Centennial Spirit’, pictured above and left, remains my favorite of the bunch for its shocking red flowers and reddish-orange fall foliage.   In early August, every eye in my garden is drawn to the bright crimson and bodies tend to stray in that direction unbidden by conscious mind but controlled by happy feet.  Take a close look at the picture to the left. This past August, in the worst of the drought, even the daylily at the foot of this bush was having a tough time of it, shedding leaves and conserving its resources, but 'Centennial Spirit' is lush and bountiful, laughing at the worst of the heat.

'Natchez'

Lagerstroemia 'Natchez' is a variety that is quickly growing on me.  This perfectly white specimen was planted 2 summers back as a one gallon plant purchased at summer's end for $2.  Despite the poor nutritional start to its young life, it has bounced back, with no winter die-back for two years, and it threatens to overshadow the witch hazel that growing nearby.  The summer centerpiece of this bed of daylilies, it seems to shine like a queen over its subjects, poor peasants at its feet.





I grow other crapes of course.  I've previously mentioned dwarf 'Cheery Dazzle' and 'Tonto', and both have their places in my garden,   I even grow an unknown variety or two, like the lavender variety pictured at the left.  This one was a purloined clone of a specimen displaced for road work, and I think it is probably the common variety 'Royalty'.   Its exact identity may never be known, but it is rapidly growing on me, like my other crapes, as the summers become longer and hotter and winter disappears into memory. 

The Missing Hart

My game camera has recently confirmed a phenomena hitherto known to me only from warnings by traffic authorities.  We've all heard that the rate of car to deer collisions increase during the Fall rutting season on roads and highways.  I've got new evidence that deer to garden visits also increase in November.  In like fashion, plant damage from deer subsequently seems to increase by at least a factor of 10 during the same period.  I am gravely worried about the 'Conrad Ferdinand Meyer' in front of the doe at the left, because she seems to visit it over and over again, night after night.

I had previously captured only three visits of solitary deer to my garden up from April through early November.  In the most recent few weeks, however, it seems that the local large furry rats have been scheduling extra time to pose for portraits.  I've now counted 8 separating visits of deer to my garden over a 20 day period, at least two of them lasting more than an hour.  They come morning and night, most often about an hour before dawn or around three hours after sunset.  And the nibbling little fiends aren't coming alone anymore, they're bringing company.  Or at least they're bringing relatives.  This little mama at the right seems to be dragging her offspring around behind her, taking advantage of a two-for-one special feast in my rose garden.

I've also captured my resident rabbit, a fox, and a coyote on their nightly rounds.  The little rabbit sitting in the middle of this bed had better hope that the thorns of the surrounding bushes provide it some protection, because it is now playing in a dark and dangerous land, away from home long after the carnivores come out to roam in search of just such tender morsels of flesh.  This particular rabbit has been around all year, but I fear that it is unlikely to see Spring unless it modifies its schedule immediately.


The most garden-damaging culprit, however, has so far escaped my game camera, but it has not gone unnoticed.  This weekend, I found damage on the trunks of three widely separated trees in the garden; damage that can only be created by the rubbing of tender velvet antlers on the trees in preparation for combat.    Somewhere in my neighborhood, the father or uncle of the yearling fawn above has rejoined the herd, hoping for a repeat of last Winter's fleeting pleasure.  This little family has been missing its Hart, but I predict a sibling for junior will soon be in the works.  Just what I need, a population explosion among the browsers. 

When they attack my prized Sycamore, I view it as neither cute nor endearing, but as a declaration of war.  Perhaps, in similar fashion to this YouTube video that I have linked for your listening pleasure, I can just move the "deer crossing" signs to a neighbor's yard and the vermin will shift their migratory pattern and leave my garden alone.  Or perhaps not.  My other annual anti-deer measures, including the placement of chicken wire around the tree trunks and the furtive scattering of pungent repellent, are now in effect.  In fact, after realizing that the caller to the radio show in the aforementioned video probably also votes in important national elections, I feel the need to go create more deer repellent right now.  This is your benevolent naturalist, ProfessorRoush, signing off.  

Memory Keepers

I don't know where the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" originated, but sometimes even a picture is inadequate to plumb the depths of thought and emotion induced by the simplest of stimuli.  Take, for example, the still life in brown pictured at the right.  An unknowing, unaware observer might recognize the presence of a little loose soil, a number of brown vegetable-origin structures, and the background of brown prairie grass, trimmed short in the late days of Fall.  A very astute observer might recognize the brown tubular structures as roots, and perhaps the most knowledgeable and experienced gardeners, looking closely, might discern some bud eyes peeking from the crowns of those roots.

I can confirm, for the curious, that these are peony roots, ready to be transplanted.   These roots are divisions that I purloined at Thanksgiving from my boyhood home, healthy survivors who were growing in good Indiana soil long before I drew first breath.   There are 5 different peony starts here from a row of peonies that always separated orchard from vegetable garden, large clumps that sagged with each rainfall and became obstacles to be mowed around during the verdant summer and then to be mowed off short at the start of Fall.  You can see, in the closeup at the left, plump buds biding frigid Winter, waiting to clone and grow again in my Kansas garden.

They are, at once, both unique peonies and common peonies, unremarkable to the average gardener, but precious everafter to me.  They are common because I suspect that the varieties are just the same tired pink and white and red peonies that our grandparents grew and that probably sell for $3.95 per 3 clumps now each Spring at Walmart.   Odds are that one is 'Festiva Maxima', and another 'Sarah Bernhardt',  and it is likely that I already grow all or most of these, purchased at local nurseries.  They are exceptional, however, these 5 peonies, because they are now weighted down with childhood memories and ghostly fields stretching as far as a boy could roam.  They bear this heavy load because this year, after 50 years of living in one place, my parents are selling the home farm.  I have only the opportunity to start them here, these keepers of memory, so they can whisper to me of family picnics in the Spring, and sweet corn grown tall in Summer, and of the peaches and apples that fell from the nearby orchard trees, destined only to rot and fertilize these roots.

 In my garden, these will be the heirlooms of my boyhood, these few ancient peonies planted by those who lived before me, to live on long after me.  They will rub shoulders with sedums and columbines from my grandmother and with trees planted by my children.  They will carry for me my memories of another place and another time, simple and carefree, when the world was new and every tree a mountain to be climbed.  I planted them here now, sprinkled them with the remnants of the good soil that nurtured them, and watered them in so they'll grow and outlast me here, transplanted with me to foreign soil.  Memory keepers of a far away place and time.

And you thought it was just a picture of a few brown roots and dirt.