A Gardener's Nightmare
Last night I dreamed I was walking in my garden, but it had been transformed. It was now a hell, a green gardener’s hell. There was a super abundance of everything I didn’t like. Mounds of sweetie grass covered the flower beds. Giant creeping charlie in the grass twined around my feet before I could move.
After I tore myself away, fancying myself free, I was pursued by slugs as fat as sewer rats, no longer skulking under rocks, but walking on two legs wearing foam knee pads to protect their tender, slimy knees. Tufts of spiky crab grass grew tall enough to rasp against my arms as I ran.
Catching my breath, I looked around. There were other gardeners in hell. My friend’s bonsai had turned into samarai. They were taking their revenge on her, cutting off her fingers with sharp surgical clippers and forcing her feet into fancy shoes three sizes too small.
In the park, the topiary animals had come to life, pouncing on the park gardeners, forcing them to submit to humiliating haircuts. Other gardeners were bent over, futilely pulling at dandelions which had steelbelted roots bolted to the bedrock.
The scene changed suddenly as it does in dreams. I was walking down a road. Stunted trees appeared in the distance. As I walked closer, I found they were giant ragweeds, lifting their leafy arms to the sky. A dun-colored cloud appeared. It turned out to be a cloud of thistle down, distributing its seeds over the landscape.
Unfortunate prisoner chain gangs of this hell were being forced, bare-chested, to walk through never ending fields of nettle, making them long for the mere itch of poison ivy. Others were perpetually turning compost piles which stank and never rotted.
It was no surprise to me that the other gardeners were bent and broken, as gnarled and twisted as Harry Lauder’s walking stick from their never ending toil.. They all had dirt wedged beneath their fingernails and some had splinters and thorns in their hands that festered and never popped out.
The lawns with the creeping charlie grew so quickly that they had to be mowed every day. There was a constant whine of lawn mowers, punctuated by the thunderous roar of leaf blowers. The pickaxes of other gardeners landed with a dull thud as they tried to penetrate the hard-pan clay of their bulb beds.
Mosquitoes swarmed about even in broad daylight, their bites leaving welts that never stopped itching and there was no Calamine in hell. Inmates were constantly swatting deerflies which left trails of blood on their faces.
Ladybugs were pursued mercilessly by stink bugs who herded them into cans filled with soapy water and left them to die. Each rose, upon a closer look, revealed a nest of five or six Japanese beetles. There were no birds in hell to eat the insects and fat worms had chewed circles around the edges of all the leaves.
My favorite plants had turned brown and wilted, undermined by giant moles who boldly came out of their tunnels and tortured those gardeners who had tried to trap them. These unfortunate humans were imprisoned in telephone booth sized traps. As they hunched down to avoid the shiny spike in the top, they were forced to eat quantities of Juicy Fruit gum.
I woke up with a start, thankful to be awake. Gardeners are the good people of this earth. How could I imagine such happenings even in my dreams? I must have been pulling weeds too long yesterday.
In truth, a couple of these imaginings are too clever for me to have thought of them. They came from a piece in Garden Design by Adam Levine called Gardening in Hell.
– Mary