Just Spending Time In It
The garden according to James
I spend a lot of time looking at flowers. James spends a lot of time looking at everything else.
He’s three and a half. After months of planting, mulching, watering, weeding, staking and deadheading—after rearranging the landscape according to my own increasingly specific opinions—I assumed some of it would catch his attention. The roses, maybe. The foxgloves and lupine and giant alliums, the parts of the garden that look like they escaped from a Dr. Seuss book.
Instead, James has developed interests entirely of his own.
For example: gravel.
Every afternoon he fills a small plastic container meant for collecting bugs with stones from the driveway and carries them over to the chicken run, where he offers them through the fence to the chickens. They gather around him hopefully, despite months of evidence that he has never once produced anything edible. He finds this encouraging.
Another favorite: filling a tiny watering can at the bathroom sink, transporting it across the house and yard, and hurling the entire contents at the nearest bed.
Not onto.
At.
The water mostly lands on his shoes. The flower receives what I can only describe as a symbolic gesture. Everyone seems satisfied.
Last week I found him standing in the vegetable bed holding a baby green tomato.
“I picked it,” he announced proudly.
I explained that tomatoes are generally allowed to become tomatoes before harvesting. He took one bite of it, threw the rest over his shoulder, and ran away.
I’ve been trying to figure out what he’s actually doing out here, and I think the answer is: the same thing I’m doing. Just a different garden.
The one I see is the one I’ve been building toward. I planted seeds and worried about bloom times and spacing and color combinations. I have opinions about what goes where and why. Every flower that opens feels like the end of a sentence I started months ago. I walk through and notice what I planted—which is to say, I notice what I was waiting for.
James arrives in the middle of all of it and finds something else entirely. A pea blossom is worth examining. A clover worth holding. He stood among the sunflowers, quietly turning one between two fingers, and a minute later he was chasing the dog. Why wait months for a sunflower when you can pick it now and carry it around upside down like a flag?
I edit constantly. I walk through the garden with the plan in my head, and I see the distance between that and what’s actually here. I notice the roses because I planted them. The gravel doesn’t count. The worm doesn’t count. The feather by the coop doesn’t count.
James is keeping different accounts.
He counts the bee on the clover and the feather and the worm and the pea blossom and the flower, not because any of them are more important than the others but because none of them are more important than the others.
Sometimes I think gardening is teaching me patience. Sometimes acceptance. Sometimes I think it’s just teaching me that I can plan all I want and the peas will do what they want regardless.
James, meanwhile, has spent the season attempting to feed gravel to chickens. He may be learning something. He may not be learning anything at all. But he’s out here every day, fully in it. Not trying to finish a sentence. Not waiting for the story to arrive at its intended ending. Just spending time in it.
Sometimes I watch him from behind the grapevines on the vegetable garden fence. He doesn’t know I’m there. He’s very serious about the gravel—selecting each stone, carrying the container with both hands, presenting them one by one through the fence like they might finally be the thing that works. The chickens gather anyway. One hen pecks at the dirt beside his shoe.
I stand behind the vines longer than I need to.
🪱 COMPOST FOR THE SOUL
Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.
—A.A. Milne
🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH
Porch Chicken: A Profile
Emily Chickinson escaped again.
I was picking greens when I heard it—that particular kerfuffle of clucks that means something has gone wrong in a very specific way. I looked up. Emily was standing on the other side of the fence. Again. Looking at me with the expression of someone who has arrived exactly where they intended.
James, witnessing this from approximately four feet away, thrust one arm toward the sky.
“Emily has come to rescue us!!!!”
Then he ran away.
I sat down in the grass. Emily walked over. We cooed at each other for a moment—two creatures briefly in agreement about something. It was genuinely lovely. I’m aware of how that sounds.
Emily is not an Escape Chicken. She has no interest in the wider world, in freedom as a concept, in what lies beyond the tree line. She is interested only in me. Specifically: in being near me, at a distance slightly closer than comfortable, in a context slightly more domestic than appropriate. She is, in the truest sense of the term, a Porch Chicken.
A Porch Chicken is not a chicken who lives on or under the porch. It is a chicken who believes she should. Who has looked at that arrangement—the coop, the run, the three judgmental hens, an insecure rooster, the perfectly adequate food and water situation—and found it insufficient. Not cruel—just not the life she had in mind.
A Porch Chicken wants to accompany you. She wants to know what you’re doing in there. She wants to be consulted. If you’re weeding, she’ll weed beside you. If you’re carrying groceries, she might like to supervise. She would like to be on the same side of the fence as you at all times, simply because that is where things are happening.
She does not want to be chased. She wants to be invited.
The distinction is important to her. Apparently, it’s important to me too, a grown woman who has started timing her garden visits around a chicken’s schedule without fully admitting that to herself until just now.
She doesn’t sneak. She doesn’t exploit a gap or research the perimeter. She simply flies over the fence—four pounds of hen directly over the top—specifically when I’m in the garden, specifically to come stand near me.
Once she’s over, she walks around cooing to herself, soft and unhurried, like she’s narrating something private. If I stay still, she comes closer. If I sit down in the grass, she circles me—just out of reach, just near enough—making her small sounds, taking her time. She came all the way over the fence to be here. She will not be rushed about it.
Behind the fence, Feather Locklear is crowing—hoarse, increasingly desperate, a rooster who has lost narrative control of his own yard. The hens are conferring. Hen Affleck issues one long, sustained cluck in my direction, which I understand to mean she does not approve of any of this and would like it noted. Somewhere across the yard, James is ripping down sunflowers.
And I sit in the grass and let Emily circle me, because what else am I going to do.
Naturally, I made the catastrophic mistake of assuming that because a chicken voluntarily sought out my company, she might also tolerate—nay, enjoy—being picked up by my warm arms.
This is apparently not how Porch Chickens work. They want emotional closeness, but physical restraint sends the relationship into a very different chapter.
I stood up, and she bolted, and I spent the next five minutes running in undignified circles trying to corner her against the fence. I was outmaneuvered by an animal whose primary hobby is standing still. What finally worked involved me launching my body over her like a human net—arms out, weight forward, full commitment, the kind of movement that guarantees you’ll pull something if you’re over forty—while she emitted a sound of profound betrayal.
The important thing is that Emily is safely back where she belongs.
Until tomorrow.
I’ve started stretching before I garden.
🌹 BLOOM REPORT
Rose Darcey Bussell opened this week. Worth the wait.
Gaura has threaded itself through everything like it was always supposed to be there.
Coreopsis—I somehow forget about these every year until they bloom. Tiny little solar panels of optimism, quietly making the whole garden brighter.
Foxglove—third year self-seeder from the driveway. Didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. Officially open for bees-ness.
Shasta daisies in their happy place. Lady is in the background, as she usually is: keeping an eye on things.
🌱 WAITING FOR GROWDOT
A Star is Born
The third year’s the charm! Four moonflowers finally emerged beside the blue trellis this week.
They are two inches tall and currently responsible for my emotional well-being.
🏺 VASED AND CONFUSED
This week’s arrangement was made mostly of flowers I grew from seed—snapdragons, coreopsis, and shasta daisies—plus a sprig of yarrow for good measure.
Professional florists may have opinions.
Fortunately, I grew these, so I outrank them.
💐 CUTTINGS
summer solstice light
enough daylight for one more
thing i won’t finish
small hands, careful work
gravel offered through the fence
the hens gather close
green tomato: gone
one bite, over the shoulder
farmer James, age three
foxglove bells ringing
every room already booked
bees checked in at dawn
four pounds of poultry
straight over the fence she flies
there you are, she coos
over forty now
launched my body at a hen
a career highlight
I built a trellis
the peas found it on their own
cool cool cool cool cool
started a substack
about gardening, kinda
reader, it’s not that
🎧 BEET DROPS
The Flaming Lips—“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1”
For small, determined things that refuse to quit. This one’s for Emily.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what he’s actually doing out here, and I think the answer is: the same thing I’m doing. Just a different garden.”
Gorgeous arrangement this week
Poem at the end 11/10
Love Dirty Nails so much! 💖