The Dead and the Dying

August has come and gone already. Shades of summer are still heavy (the thermostat is topping 94°F) but the season is busy waltzing its way out of nature’s ballroom as I sit here typing, bound to take its last slow glides in the coming weeks, the waning heat of the sun its “La Valse”. And though it may carry on for a little while longer, its potential for damage has well been done. Everywhere one looks, the grass is leeched of precious moisture, leaving blades that were once verdant and pliable into a blanched and desiccated stratum that looks of straw and pokes at bare feet like a bed of needles. Trees are dropping their leaves prematurely, an unfortunate sign that rainfall has been inadequate and is now desperately needed. My garden is also some overwhelming evidence that summer has done its worst and in watering it after a two-week bout of no watering and no rain, I came to a shameful realization: I am not the green thumb I purport to be or wish to be. I am, in fact, a pretty neglectful gardener when it comes down to it, and I’ll tell you why.

The first is the heat. Everyone who has sat through a summer in southwestern Ohio knows of the dreadful and relentless conditions of which I’m about to speak. My fellow residents and I have the misfortune of living within the belt of the Bluegrass Region, a portion of land which encompasses parts of northern Kentucky, southwestern Ohio and southeastern Indiana. The weather here is typically classified as a “humid subtropical climate” and residents will attest to that. Summers here are long, hot and humid, so hot in fact that Cincinnati issued several heat advisories and warnings this season due to high dewpoints (the average this year was 66.6 and it got as high as 77). The heat index will get you every time. Stepping outside of an air-conditioned house in the dead of summer here is like stepping into an overheated sauna – the air is thick, hot and suffocating, a room filled with invisible smoke so profuse you can damn near choke on it.

So the heat got to be too much for me. I gradually watered my flowers less and less as the mercury on the thermostat rose and then came just shy of abandoning them, confining myself indoors for the majority of August. Going outside to water everything (which took about fifteen minutes) was torture. If I had wrung the sweat out of my shirt each time I went out there, I imagine it would’ve been enough to sustain one of my plants for a day.

As a result of my willful neglect, a handful of my plants are beyond rescue. Out of sheer luck I did manage to choose some drought-tolerant species; my dusty millers, coleus, garden phlox, cranesbill, coreopsis and purple coneflowers held up well, though their droopy leaves gave me away time and time again. My roma tomato and bell pepper plants have been survivors and have produced a little bit of food but I’m certain I would’ve have more of a bounty had I watered them every day as recommended.





Other plants weren’t so lucky. My itea bushes have faded considerably, its abundant foliage once a lusty bright green now converted to an ominous yellow, shriveled and floppy on denuded branches.

My impatiens are good as dead, as are my petunias, their dry, brittle remnants creeping over the edges of my cobalt pots like small, shameful corpses eeking their last while reaching out for something, ANYTHING, that would give them sustenance. My calibrachoa out back is in similar shape, brown and crusty vines gnarled and curled like arthritic hands. I guess you could say it’s starting to look like an herbaceous graveyard around here and though half of this grisly scene is my fault, I readily blame the other half on the atmosphere.









The spiders must love it though. They have built some rather large and intricate homes all around my house in the last several weeks, perhaps in preparation to catch the late season moths that will arrive soon, their larvae the most likely culprit in the sabotage of my bell pepper plant.

Another problem is the unusually high population of mosquitoes in my neighborhood. Let me give you an idea of how bad it is: I go outside into my backyard and stand still for about, oh, um, 10 seconds. Within that minute frame of time, six to seven mosquitoes have landed on my legs and are already feasting on my blood, not to mention afflicting me with a connect-the-dots series of bites that I will be scratching with a curious combination of pleasure and pain later on. I kill them with a swift slap only to have their replacements that have been hovering close by fly in once their compadre has bitten the dust. My children go outside to play and return covered with bites, scratching so frequently and so hard that the bites break open and bleed. This relentless combo of slapping and scratching has been nightmarish. “Buy some DEET and coat yourselves head to toe!” you say. Believe me, I’ve tried. This must be a new and improved breed of mosquito; they are seemingly immune to the chemical warfare I’ve been putting up, sitting right on top of the noxious veneer of Cutter or Off! on my skin and siphoning away, no lasting harm done to them. Little bastards. And I just have to wonder as they’re engorging themselves on my plasma, “What purpose do they serve in the grand scheme of things?” I really can’t come up with an answer. I have to say that I concur with a fellow Facebooker’s supposition that they are one of the most useless insects on the planet.

The third problem (and this is entirely my own) is laziness. Sometimes I just don’t want to water the flowers. I don’t feel like wrestling with that garden hose, stretching it all out, dragging it halfway around the house and taking the time to water everything. I get dirty while doing it because the hose gets covered in soil, grass, grit and other materials and those materials get all over me while I’m coiling the thing back up after I’m done.

So you see, the unfortunate combination of extreme temperatures, bothersome insects and laziness does not make for a robust and productive garden. If not for the bugs, it might have been better, but alas, it is too late in the season to mourn that which I could have prevented by wearing pants.