I have never been to Florida in the summer. The reason for this abstention is because I have all of my faculties about me, and I have increasingly little interest in going there in the winter time, let alone in the summer time. This is because there’s no place I’d rather be than Lake Geneva in the summer, which is a statement that I’ve said throughout my life, and I mean it more today than I ever have. If I were to break the chains of sanity and travel to Florida in August, I imagine the things I’d see. I’m guessing there would be palm trees with those long, sharp leaves. I’m thinking there would be some impatiens and rhododendrons. Perhaps some dense green shrubs, with fat, thick leaves. I assume Florida in August looks just like Florida in January, and I find no fun in that.
Today, the landscape at my house is pretty decent. It’s all relative, landscaping, and my decent would be someone else’s crappy, just as it would be someone else’s incredible. There are varying ways of judging a landscape, and I’m trying to make mine a tolerable mix of wild and kept, of neat and natural, of rugged and refined. Out front, there is a vast jungle of weeds and grass, some so high they could reach a basketball rim without even trying. There is mostly grass though, the remnants of the farmer’s field that was where my house is now. The grass is nice, and earlier this season it was green. Now it’s still green down near the base, but the tops are waving seeds of gold and tan, bent from their own weight and bent in whatever direction the winds wishes them to bend. It’s nice.
Inside of that wild boundary, the one so wild that my wife asks me to move the sprinkler if it’s too near that edge because of the “wild animal sounds” that emanate from the grassy darkness, there is lawn. It’s pretty nice, this lawn, and considering I sowed it all Johnny Appleseed style, without the handsome satchel, it’s pretty nice. There was no thoughtful preparation of the soil before I scattered those seeds. Instead, a bulldozer pushed the dirt sort of smooth on a Monday and on a Tuesday I threw grass seed on top of it. A year and a bit later, it’s nice.
Against the house there are plants that I bought from the nursery on Dam Road two November’s ago. I didn’t buy what I thought would look nice, I just bought what last remnant bits she had to sell at a steep discount before winter began. I planted most of those shrubs and flowers late into the fall, or early into that winter, whichever way you prefer to see it. Nearly two years later, they are growing and flowering and bushing and vining. The Hydrangeas are sending out beautiful cone shaped heads, with ivory petals that turn to pink on the edges. The shrubs are pushing out berries, blue and red, so that the birds might eat from them this winter when there’s very little else on hand. The roses are bursting with blossoms, red and pink, but mostly red.
The cone flowers are tall now, big, showy heads of seeds and petals that the bees enjoy more than anything else I have here. The black eyed susans are my favorite, and those small one gallon plants are now many, many more gallons large. They are blooming profusely, and I love them for it. There are some other things here, too. Small deciduous shrubs that spread and bloom with pale purple blossoms, dotted with yellow in the centers. I don’t know what they are called, because when a shrub is only $5, you buy it and then figure all the rest out later. They mapley looking shrub that was very tall last year, is less tall now, but that’s because it didn’t so much enjoy the past winter, and I had to coerce it back to life. It’s fine now, the leaves turning from purple to, well, to purple.
There are grasses in this house-side garden as well. These are like the large ones that are out in the field, but they’re more civilized, and mostly contained to the clump they came in when I bought them last fall from the Shopko parking lot. They were $3, so the gamble was hardly high stakes. They look nice now, and they blend with everything else, with the blossoms and the leaves, with the petals and the stalks. Everything works right now. In August, in the Midwest, there is very little that isn’t pretty.
Even our weeds are pretty, which is why I brought home a hastily gathered milkweed arrangement for my wife the other day. I was fishing and kept finding my line tangled in these tall, purple flowers that hung from the stream side like intentional nuisances. I tore my line from them repeatedly, cursing them for being in my way. After some time of the cursing, I realized that these were, in actuality, beautiful flowers. So I clipped them, and I searched online to buy some seeds that I might scatter across the weedy/grassy portion of my very front lawn. I was cutting the milkweed arrangement when I noticed the wild daisy’s growing in huge, towering clumps. These were wild as well, and who in their right mind can walk through six foot tall flowers without cutting a few down and bringing them home to a water filled vase?
The goldenrod is out now, as well. My wife is keen on telling me that it was always out, it just wasn’t blooming. Whatever the case, the goldenrod is in bloom. Yes, it’s an allergy bomb, but the suffering is beautiful. Huge fields of this brilliant weed are found anywhere you look now, as long as you’re looking to the countryside and not to the cityscape.
The lakeside lawns today are filled with hydrangeas and showy perennial flowers of all makes and models. The grasses are tall, the shrubs vibrant and green, the lake as dazzling in whatever shade of blue you wish to see it in. As I age, I do not find myself drawn to further adventures down some far away road. I do not wonder what the alps look like in the summer, nor question the landscape of Oregon in the fall. I simply spend more time pausing now, looking at the ever changing landscape of this Midwestern county, and I can say without any equivocation, there is no prettier landscape in this world than that of Wisconsin in the summertime.