Slightly Off the Grid

Irish third cousins are on my mind as I grab my little hedge-trimmer and venture out into the yard. Newly retired and fresh from a trip to County Donegal, I face the neglect of my little version of Wild America. It is daunting. Saplings push their way where they do not belong—popping up in flower beds and encroaching from the woods into the yard. Vines emerge secretly in the undergrowth, crawl over anything in their path, with the power to take down full grown trees.

I do not lose heart. (Yet.) I take inspiration from my cousins, sisters with very different attachments to their land.

One sister has gardens worthy of a magazine feature. An exuberant profusion of color fills her property. So many different flowers live harmoniously in a controlled chaos that I could never pull off on my own. In her garden, ferns peek magically from rock walls. At my house, weeds poke up from cracks in the driveway. The allure is not quite the same.

My cousin and my flower-farming sister spoke flower-language with each other. They may as well have been speaking Irish, for all I understood. But I did pick up one thing from our garden tour. The hedge in her backyard contains a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a little bit of something else.

Aha! I thought. She does not try to weed out this, that, and the other to maintain a monolingual hedge. Her hedge is a polyglot and it looks great because she keeps it trimmed. What a concept.

I, too, have a hedge with a little bit of this, and that, and something else. The this and the that are legitimate hedge plants. The something else is an annoyance that I cannot get control over. But maybe I can hack it into submission. So I do.

Well, I hacked. I don’t know about submission. I’d post a picture of my hedge-work, but I don’t want my cousin to see it knowing that she was my inspiration. She might not let me come back to visit.

One day, our cousin took us to Glenveigh Castle and Gardens, which stunned us with its woodland plantings as well as cultivated gardens. And a castle, of course. But it was a new castle, dating only to the 19th century, so my brother said it was a fake castle. To Americans, a castle is supposed to be so old that we say, “Wow, that is even older than our country!”

While I have no intention of landscaping our woods, my hedge-trimmer attacks have revealed interesting options for woodland trails. My woodland trails would be lacking a castle, however. Even a fake one. Or gates. Or mysterious doors to nowhere.

One take-away from Glenveigh that I am pondering is the planting of vegetables and flowers side-by-side. When I think of companion planting, I think of vegetables growing with vegetables. But with the rampant deer on our place chowing down on everything they see, would it be possible to companion plant to deter the deer by smell? They’ve devoured the black-eyed susans in the front garden, but haven’t touched the volunteer susans that have popped up in the oregano bed.

My other Irish third cousin has a plot of land in all its natural overgrown glory, and she is turning it, rock by rock, twig by twig, into her own wilderness wonderland. She is mastering the art of weaving twigs and branches into rustic shelters. Visiting her world at dusk, as the sun slowly sank in Sheep Haven bay to the west and slivers of light illuminated the woods of the ancestral homestead, we joked about malevolent fairies lurking behind the ferns to prank us. Ah, but we learned that fairies don’t come out until night, most often sighted in the dark, dark hour when the pubs close. Of course.

I took inspiration from this cousin, too. No, I am not going to craft huts out of twigs—the vines overtaking shrubs on my property have already created hut-like habitats for deer and bunnies and even bear. No, I am going to subdue this wilderness one cordless battery pack at a time.

The amount of time that my hedge-trimmer can run on one battery pack just happens to correspond to my endurance level. And it reminds me that, as the Vikings didn’t raid every village on the same day, my wilderness will be subdued one small territory at a time, so that the only change my husband is likely to notice is the ransacked, pillaged debris all over the yard. Unless some benevolent fairies come to clean up the debris, in which case he may not notice anything at all.

Oh, my grandson has arrived. He is benevolent. He will notice what I have done because he will be cleaning it up. For a fee, of course.