rhapsody in green

I, famously, have a brown thumb. I have killed cacti, philodendrons, Chia pets. I have planted already-growing herbs in fertile soil and they have promptly died. I have emptied more pots stuffed with yellowed, withered leaves than I really prefer to remember.

When we moved into this house, MD gave us a gift of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (yes, on purpose) in a single pot, which I put outside and tried to tend as best I could. The parsley died first; it gave a good show of trying to re-sprout the following year, but it was fooling no one. The sage remained the most reliable of the four until this past winter, when its woody, cypress-like stems refused to keep producing plentifully for no reason I understand. The rosemary died two years ago, but this year it has come roaring back, with far more output than it ever had, again to my bafflement. The thyme gave up the ghost last year, and the thyme I bought to replace it this year has already shriveled up under (probably) overwatering.

Last year I bought a big blue storage tub, punched some holes in it, and planted mint, oregano, and cilantro. No luck with the cilantro – I later learned that you have to keep farming cilantro continuously, that it will go to seed unless you replant every few weeks - but mint is apparently little more than a weed, and having fresh mint around has proved to be more useful than I could have imagined. A basil plant I raised back in 2008 did well for a while, proliferating beyond my ability to use up its leaves, but its pot was un-holed on the bottom and it drowned after a particularly heavy thunderstorm. It broke my heart and I have not tried again until this year, when I bought living purple basil, and also raised some regular basil from a pup indoors, and planted them in my blue tub along with perpetually dying parsley and friendly, lovable oregano, which keeps growing in such a dependable way that I quite adore it.

Out back, I planted some zucchini, because I have heard from numerous sources that you can’t really stop zucchini from growing, and I thought, oh yeah? Place your bets. I also raised a couple of pepper plants indoors as I did the basil, which are outside now. I rounded it out with some spring onions, which the package said to thin out, but I don’t know how to do that, so I’m going to just keep growing them to see what happens. I also have chives out there, weary, battle-hardened chives that over the years have seen the same four pots be repeatedly filled and emptied with living, then too-soon dead, compadres. I don’t know why the chives have lived where every other plant I’ve tried to raise has died, and died again. But they have, dear chives.

This year, my plants are all growing for me. The zucchini is lusty and spiky-stemmed, with lovely wide leaves, and now, little nubs that will flower and maybe even produce real edible zucchini. The pepper plants have not produced any buds yet, just more and more diamond-shaped leaves, but when I come close to them and stroke their leaves, the smell of a just-cut bell pepper unfurls and I cannot help but love them, infertile though they may be. The basil, it lives! It produces more leaves! The rosemary, ah, the rosemary…I stroke it through my fingers and the scent left on my hands is earthy, bright, intoxicating. The oregano smells like nothing mixed with mint, and the mint smells like those third and fourth chews of gum, after it’s too much but before it’s too little. I cannot stop going out into the front and back of my house where the plants are, squatting to admire them, caressing them gratefully, refraining from watering them to early graves.

I love my plants. I deeply do not want to kill them. I will miss them when winter comes.