Gardening surprises

Halfway through the summer and the garden is green as you’d like. Though I can’t remember the last time it rained, the nightly trek around the yard with watering cans pays off almost as well.

Last fall I’d had plans to turn over the wilderness, previously a vegetable garden, replant it and see a harvest, and it didn’t happen. Instead there’s an enormous grasshopper sitting on the handle of a shovel by the garage; last week I saw its friend meditating on the long grass by the rhubarb. (Even in wilderness, the rhubarb still thrives.) What I thought was a rosebush is maybe a variety of apple tree, with a steadily thickening trunk and no sign of blooms. The apple tree I expected nothing from this year has clusters of ripening apples on a few branches. Nothing is growing quite as I expected, except the peonies: overgrown, flopping under the weight of their blooms, nevertheless flaunting them in the sunshine.

Another rose is stealthily spreading under the green apples, in a casual don’t-mind-me way that defies the goutweed overrunning everything else in the bed. No flowers, just prickly defiance.