The Garden of My Discontent
by Ronald Gift Mullins

Having a garden plot in the common gardens on Roosevelt Island for three years taught me a lot about choosing the right location, the perverse power of Mother Nature and the peculiar behavior of my fellow gardeners. Finally, it reminded me of a lesson I had forgotten.

Why the call of farming pulled me to take up a spade three years ago, I cannot say. After all, I had eagerly left the farm in Iowa where I had grown up right after college, but perhaps the passage of 50 years had softened my dislike of the agrarian life. Now the time was right for me to return to the earth, sow the seeds, watch them sprout, grow tall and then, humming Bringing in the Sheaves, harvest my plenty in the golden autumn.

After preparing the earth and planting tomatoes and some flowers, I waited for the bounty of nature to overwhelm me. As the summer wore on, I realized high bushes shaded my plot and sunlight didn’t reach the plants until about 11 a.m. The tomatoes grew but there was little fruit and zinnias and marigolds went to stalks. For show, I had planted some hybrid field corn (imported from Missouri where my sister and her husband farm) which grew impressively tall, but the few ears were knobby and only partially filled out. This corn is not for human consumption, but I was going to use the stalks and ears as decoration at Halloween. But just when the corn was ripe, the vigilant squirrels (I was told by a neighboring gardener who witnessed the raid) attacked it, gnawed off the ears, and ate every last kernel.

The next year, I asked for a plot more in the center of the garden. With this new one, I struggled mightily to reclaim the soil by digging up and moving huge boulders that had been planted there by some gargantuan during the ice age, and pulling millions of weeds that had been allowed to flourish for years without being disturbed. This garden plot, I discovered during the growing season, lay between two gardens that exploded into jungles overflowing into my garden.

A towering tree kept the full power of the sun from hitting my garden during the shank of the day. The rains then set in. Day after day dark clouds covered the sun. The tomatoes never produced as well as I had hoped and what flowers came from the sun-starved zinnias and marigolds were spindly and small. The wildflowers I sowed in front of the plot sprouted into a mass of unruly and unattractive vegetation. Still, when I visited my garden I did get a thrill when I looked to the west and spied the skyscrapers of Manhattan rather than the tall, white towers storing corn and soybeans in Iowa.

The expectation of having friendly chats with fellow gardeners while leaning on my hoe, face red and sweaty from cultivating, my straw hat pushed jauntily back on my head never materialized. Rather, I saw unneighborly examples of the territorial imperative at work in its most primitive form.

Apparently some gardeners, driven by envy, anger, or fear of mosquitoes spreading the West Nile virus (malaria?), had taken to secretly throwing chemicals on the few ornamental ponds in the garden. Other gardeners disgusted by the infestation of the feral cats in the gardens set out poison for them. These cats are castoffs from apartment dwellers on the Island who bought them as cute kittens, then became disgusted when they grew into demanding, full-grown cats and sent them out to fend for themselves on the Island. The wild felines usurped the gardens as their home. They continually fertilize the soil, much to the dismay of human tillers. Others, cat lovers with quiet determination, fed the animals, which kept them coming back for more. The Garden Club’s president felt obliged to send out a letter reminding members not to throw chemicals on ponds or to feed/poison the cats.

Though a fence surrounds the garden and the gates are locked most times, during Garden Club meetings, between queries as to where a supply of chicken manure could be found or why wasn’t the compost pile turned more often, clamorous gardeners complained that vandals in the dead of night were scaling the fence, stealing flowers and vegetables, destroying bushes and generally wreaking havoc. To fend off the thieves, a few militant gardeners installed spiked fences around their small plots. Again, the club president warned that these types of fences are dangerous.

The profusion of the beautiful flowers (not mine) especially in the spring and summer throughout the gardens is mostly left to "waste its sweetness" on the deserted air. Much better for them to be cut and delivered to nearby Coler Hospital to brighten the rooms of the shut-in patients. But I suppose this act of benevolence would be construed by the gardeners as encroaching on their territory and send them to brandishing their gardening tools to fend off any such action.

While my wife and I did enjoy the too-few tomatoes fresh off the vine and some dopy-shaped zinnias, after three years of gardening I was rudely reminded of a truism I had learned in my youth and had chosen to forget: Farming remains highly dependent on the weather; is a lot of work for, often, too little return. My disappointment with my gardening career wasn’t because there was not much to show for my labors – after all, we would not go hungry because the tomato crop was puny or the squirrels ate all the corn. Bringing in a good harvest wasn’t a matter of life or death, not a chapter out of Grapes of Wrath.

But I guess I had spent too many years in my youth living the disappointment that came too often from poor crops or a steep drop in prices. I did not relish being reminded of those long ago bitter harvests. I relinquished my garden of discontent and turned my back once again on farming.