THIS EQUATION
WON'T HOLD WATER
Journal of Healing – June 4, 2003
By Mary Koch

"FEED ME!"

The line, uttered by a man-eating plant, comes from the "Little House of Horrors." Delivered in a reverberating basso profundo, it was hilariously amusing in the Tonasket community theater production we attended a week ago.

My own laughter was a bit on the weak side. I know what it's like to be devoured by vegetation. Only minutes before going to the play, I'd hastily filled our kitchen sink and counters with house plants for their weekly watering – the weekly watering that I tend to forget at least every other week.

"WATER ME!" they were calling in a parched, tremulous tenor.

Plant care has never been my thing. My husband tended to the plants with great devotion until his stroke. Both our office and home environments were filled with and almost overwhelmed by John's lush horticultural achievements.

After his stroke, I inherited the job of greens-keeper, both indoors and out. Ever since, I've tried to fit it in with the other job I acquired, that of caregiver. As a result, our plants have adopted the "WATER ME!" mantra.

I come from what my husband used to call "the slimy climes." Before moving to eastern Washington, I lived on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, where I was too busy wringing moisture out of the air and scraping mildew off the walls to consider watering anything.

The move to eastern Washington introduced me to a whole new world of gardening. Each spring I would plunder the checking account to buy ever more plants for patio pots and flower beds.

I noticed that every summer morning found John outside with the hose, watering, watering, watering. I figured it was just his idea of recreation. Maybe he was meditating or something. Certainly those plants didn't need all that water.

The first summer after John's stroke I learned some brutal truths about hydrology. If I watered as much as John had, the flowers grew. So did the weeds. If I was too busy to water, which I usually was, the flowers didn't grow, and the weeds grew even faster.

Then there was the lawn. We have an automatic sprinkler system, but the grass was gobbling mega-gallons of water. I could hear the water meter ticking like the meter on a taxi cab taking me for an endless cross-country ride.

"WATER ME!" complained the grass.

"WATER ME!" chided the plants.

"WATER ME!" hissed the weeds.

"PAY ME!" demanded the city utilities department.

Last summer I made an abortive attempt at lasagna-ing the yard. That's a new method of gardening designed to inhibit weeds and save water. You cover your grass and weeds with layers of newspaper and mulch. I didn't get too far, and my lasagna looked more like ratatouille.

You'd think after nine years, I'd have figured out the care-giving equation. It's as simple as two plus two, only the numbers are different: Two minus one equals minus two. Applied to gardening, means that when there were two of us doing the yard work, we kind of kept up. Take away one, who has a stroke. The one left to do the yard work is distracted by care-giving, so the result is minus two.

That's why, this morning, a professional crew was scheduled to come and remove our lawn, strip the flower beds, install drought-tolerant plants, reroute the sprinkling system to pamper the trees, and best of all, create a wheelchair path so John can move easily around our new, low-maintenance yard.