Unstaked
On growing any way you can.
By mid-August, the garden stops pretending to be orderly. The trellis I so carefully set up in May is buckling under the weight of its climbers. The wild rows I planned in spring have dissolved into something even wilder. Tomato plants have sprawled into the dense sunflower patch, setting fruit where I’ll never reach it. Cosmos have leaned into their legginess, listing hard over their neighbors. The basil’s bolted and gone to flower.
Meanwhile, the crookneck squash has taken over an entire 20-foot vegetable bed—thoughts and prayers for the radishes and carrots that never had a chance (RIP).1
This is a season deciding for itself what matters.
The garden has shifted its own priorities from appearance to continuation. It’s stopped feeding the parts that bloom, pouring everything instead into fruit and seed, insurance for a season it won’t live to see. Beauty has become incidental. An afterthought.
Grief feels like this. Not the early, blinding pain that flattens everything, but the later stage, when the loss has taken root in your life and begun to weave itself through everything else. It isn’t something I can section off or keep neatly trained against a wall. It rambles. It makes a mess. It shades things I wanted in the sun, and sometimes it drops seeds that sprout into something almost lovely.
Losing Daisy is the wild thing in my garden. I can’t contain it. I don’t even try anymore. Some days she’s a volunteer sunflower growing out of the compost heap—sudden and radiant and taller than me. Other days she’s a trumpet vine, wrapping herself so tightly around my thoughts I can’t tell where she ends and I begin.
She shows up in odd blooms, in scents I can’t trace, in the stubborn reappearance of plants I thought were gone. She’s there when the air smells like sweet peas, or when a bee takes a break from the sun and rests on my knee. She’s everywhere and nowhere, as much a part of this place as the soil itself.
And still—James runs barefoot, sticky fingers and tomato-kissed lips, chasing dragonflies, smelling scentless flowers one by one like they each have a secret to tell him. He’s my green shoot, my proof that the garden is still in motion. He’s what grows forward even as grief tangles itself in last year’s roots. Watching him, I know there are still reasons to tend what’s here.
By late summer, the garden itself seems to know this too. It’s past its peak, past perfect—but not finished. This is when the garden remembers what it’s for: not tidiness, not my approval, but the stubborn, sprawling insistence on more life. More seeds, more roots, more green in the cracks.
Maybe grief works the same way. Maybe it’s not something to prune back until it’s “manageable,” but something that insists on growing alongside everything else—tangling itself through new joy, shading and sheltering, seeding itself into seasons we haven’t met yet.
Autumn will neaten things without my help. Frost will lay down the vines, clear the beds, send the seeds into hiding, bring the party down below the surface of the ground. But for now, in this feral hour, I’m done fussing. I sit in the grass with my nails dirty, eyes wild, letting the garden do exactly as it pleases—and letting myself do the same.
How to Stay Feral in the Garden and Life
Stop staking everything. Resist symmetry. Grow crooked.
Just let it bolt. It’s not trying to please you anymore.
Pull weeds only if they insult you directly. References to “yo mama” don’t count.
Sprawl. Into paths, under trees, across beds.
Forget what you planted where. Easy peasy.
Flower past your prime. Make it inconvenient and weird.
Seed yourself where no one expected. Let someone watch you do it. Bonus points if you can maintain eye contact the whole time.
Make peace with dirt. Track mud inside and call it holy ground.
Let something rot on the counter until it teaches you patience. Just riffing.
Share your fruit, but keep a few for yourself. Go right ahead and leave your boring summer squash bounty in neighbors’ mailboxes.2
Mildew will have its lacework. Let the tomato leaves have their Edith Wharton moment.
Don’t prune too hard. Even if it’s tangled around something tender.
🚨 P.S.
Is this giving anyone else “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers”?
(Not only because the squash looks like Donald Sutherland.)
🪱 COMPOST FOR THE SOUL
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
—Mary Oliver
🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH
Coop d’État?
It began as all coups do: at the chicken feeder.
Hen Affleck strutted in with her usual authority—hard stare, wings tucked just so. She’s ruled this flock since last fall, the sole survivor of the original 3. Queen of the run. None of the others dare test her: Yolko Ono limps in tragic circles, Benechick Cumberbatch perches in detached solitude, Eggward Norton pretends not to exist.
Order has always been Hen’s gift. But on Friday morning, Feather Locklear decided otherwise.
Our baby goth muppet, all fluff and eyeliner, perched on the edge of the feeder. He puffed up, ridiculous, magnificent, moody, and released a sound into the world—not a crow exactly, but a kind of strangled kazoo note that hung in the air.
Like a dare.
Hen froze. The flock held its breath.
Yolko muttered quietly through her broken beak, our feathered Cassandra foretelling doom. Benechick adjusted her enviably plush rear, turning away like she’d seen this coming all along and can’t bear to watch it play out. Eggward scratched blandly at the dirt, but her darting eyes told a different story: opportunist vibes, possibly a sleeper agent?
Feather fluffed himself. Another blurt of the kazoo. Louder than the first.
Everyone feels it: the prince is coming of age. And for a moment, it looked like history would turn. That Hen Affleck’s rule would end not in violence, but in some sort of honk.
But Hen just resumed eating her meal as if nothing had happened. Wow! Order restored—for now.
Just between us? The spell is broken. The coup has been attempted. And everyone knows the kazoo will sound again.
In other bird news…
It was a simple plan: become a benevolent nectar goddess. So I got a hummingbird feeder. Then I bought a bottle of nectar, didn’t read the label, and poured it straight in.
Turns out it was a concentrate. Nobody told me that!3 I basically filled the feeder with corn syrup. It molded within 2 days. It’s pretty disgusting.
On the bright side, no hummingbirds developed diabetes on my watch.
🌹🥀 WHAT’S BLOOMING & WHAT’S DYING?
Blooming: New sunflowers! New dahlias! Tithonia! Hummingbird vine! Morning glories! Did I mention the squash yet?
Dying: Coreopsis! Cornflowers! My patience with the entire premise of squash!
🤯 WHAT IF I’M THE INVASIVE SPECIES?
I will not keep calm or carry anything!!!
The other day, I was in line for an iced chai latte behind two women talking politics. One of them suddenly turned to her companion and said, unironically, “Keep calm and carry on.”
What? Is this just an accepted maxim now? I think not.
“Keep calm and carry on” is fine advice if you’re in a 1940s London bomb shelter. But now that it’s been printed on novelty tea towels and dorm room posters and used in Instagram memes about Pilates, I couldn’t help but wonder... is this the second blitz?
Keep calm? Absolutely not! Carry on? With what? To where? No! I’m putting it down. All of it. The groceries. The emotional baggage. The 2 year-old. This basket of useless squash that I’ve been pretending I’ll “spiralize” into pasta.4 If something needs to be carried, it can grow legs and follow me.
My new motto: Panic a little, drop what you’re holding, and you’ll live… for now. (You’ll die one day.)
Put that on a mug!
🥬 LETTUCE PRAY
A Psalm for the Gardener’s Nemesis 🦫
Gerald, bane of my borders,
chancellor of chard,
you shuffle out of your burrow
like a blessing I didn’t ask for.
You rise like a loaf of bread
from the earth’s
dark oven.
Your kingdom is strawberries and raised beds,
my kale an all-you-can-eat buffet,
leaving me the stems,
ragged silhouettes of leaves,
as though you are a paper-cut artist
and my garden is your gallery.
And yet, the squash—
those yellow, warty, sun-swollen torpedoes
lying around like free beer—
he ignores completely.
Doesn’t even sniff.
As though gourds were beneath him,
abundance itself an insult.
You don’t apologize.
You burp clover,
shit in my zinnias,
and waddle off
as if you hadn’t destroyed my week.
I curse you daily.
I plot your exile with chicken wire,
a fearsome hound, an old watering can
jammed in your hole—
all of it desperate, all of it futile.
Saint of entropy,
patron of chaos,
you are everything I pretend not to worship.
But when you stand upright,
chin lifted to the wind,
you are not thief,
but prophet:
your twitching nose says
that all things tender
will be eaten,
that order is a myth,
that all fences eventually fall,
that joy, like lettuce,
is best devoured whole.
In the end, what I grow
is Gerald.
Squashily yours,
x bex
Seriously, what am I supposed to do with all of this goddamn squash?
Preferably under the cover of darkness.
Other than the label I chose not to read.
Once I learn what spiralizing is.
“Saint of entropy,
patron of chaos,
you are everything I pretend not to worship.”
🤩
It’s so beautiful