A Mourning Dove and How I Became an Ungardener

Tetrapak Mini Prints and #the100dayproject

Day 12: Mourning Dove

Memory, Memory, Memory, Cheat, Cheat

This morning, a lone Mourning Dove outside my studio door. I watch him peck. It is brighter this morning, still early, still quiet. Just me and the ‘Dove. I wonder where the others are. I’ve never followed the Mourning Doves as I do Toots and Yedda, the Canadian Goose couple who live on Pond Island here at the Five Acre Wood.

He was out early pecking. The Mourning Doves here huddle into a Japanese Snowball Tree just outside my door. There are three of these trees along the path up into the woodland. Every year I want to cut them down. I’ve already cut down so many of the intruders, like Burning Bush, Autumn Olive (I love the fruit and kept a few) Multi-Flora Rose, Japanese Honeysuckle, too many Barberries, Privit, Wysteria, Grape Vine, Mile-a-Minute, and others that were shrouding the hillside and tangling woodland when we moved here. But these three trees are home to so many Mourning Doves. When I walk on the path they flap out of the tree and fly circles above me, murmuring one thing or another. I appreciate the Mourning Doves togetherness, their mourning songs, their colour, and so I leave the trees.

And here we are, the beginning of an ungarder’s ramble.

I began my journey tending to the land here as neither gardener nor undardener. I began weary of city life without realising it. We bought our house and land with very little thought — one month and one day before the pandemic and moved out of Philadelphia a few days before Christmas, into the old house whose power had been turned off during temps that dropped below freezing. We huddled around the little gas fireplace and slept there, beaneath piles of 1980’s comforters our first night. This kind of stuff is what I call magic.

And too, Five acres!

My dad told me, when looking at the house with the realtor, “this is going to be a lot of work Margaux!” Having no idea what that meant exactly, I likely shrugged him off (sorry Pop!)

It is a lot of work, my dad wasn’t wrong. But what is work? I don’t know the answer to this either. I just know that when I don’t have the work (ie, this winter I was a lump) I wither. I need the work. I need the hill walks and stretches and movement. I need the sweating and the digging, the planting. I need a place to put my pirated plants, my traded plants, and my purchased plants. I need the mowing (I’ll explain.) I need movement to allow thoughts to flourish. This morning I wandered across the land, picking up fallen limbs and sticks along the way, to visit the places where I planted so many babies — bulbs, tubers, rootstock, corms, &c — I push the leaves away and find their green nubs (and sometimes yellow) stretttching out after this long, cold, winter. When you put your hands into the earth and soak your knees in mud and limbs in thorns and thistles and prickly stickly pokey things, you remember where everything is. Even with a bad memory.

Last year I bought and planted 1250 snowdrops. The year before I dug bunches up from the site where the snowdrops and winter aconite flourished for decades but were now being destroyed with concrete — another Wawa moving in. I snuck in with my shovel — and once with my dad who taught me this type of behavior when I was younger. We’d get tickets for the cheap seats and sneak up to the front for concerts with stories of misplaced tickets and a mother up there, see, “Hey Mom!” and I’d wave. I filled my truck with thousands of plants and planted them here. Thousands of plants don’t look like much on five acres though. Not yet anyway, even with my favourite math - snowdrop math. Every 1000 bulbs should be 3000 this year, right? The clumps are fuller and lovelier, but still, they are so petite these little flowers. And so many of the others I’ve planted, like Dutchman’s Breeches, Bloodroot, Twin Leaf, Trillium, and Trout Lily — to name a few — are so tiny. Carolina Spring Beauties, one of the few natives here when we moved in — cover the hillsides and the edges of the woodland. They are tiny too. Jack-in-the-Pulpit were here — then I added a few hundred more. And then I may have killed them all. Maybe not. I don’t know how to learn this. I think I did kill them. I mowed away so much Barberry that, having decades to thrive, stood taller than me. During this time they ensured the safety of so many white-footed-mice and their nest mates — the Deer Tick. Deer couldn’t navigate the barbs — neither could I prior to using the Brush Mower — first on loan from my friends at Refugia Design, then as a gift from Walter. The Barberry didn’t go down easy. It thrashed and slashed until my flesh was crisscrossed with welts and droplets of blood from it’s abundant thin barbs. In the end, its glorious yellow macerated guts and limbs were strewn and mulched upon the woodland floor. The following Spring, the Jack-in-the-Pulpits were abundant and I patted myself on the back for the good work! “Hooray!” But the next year, so few returned, and those that did looked frail. Instead of my favourite cloaked aliens, there stood an army of Garlic Mustard. I felt defeated and foolish. I could weep again writing about it. This reminds me of another story, me and a tree and a machete in Ecuador, but I’ll save that one for another day.

I rattle on. I am without a journal and must spend the rest of today making one. And then my next post may not be so long.