Honeyberry, sweetberry, blue-berried honeysuckle. Waxy haskap buffs bee dreams and bullseye vision, a dance of flicker-victory and bee’s purple. Behold primrose and pansy, spectrum-nectared rudbeckia, heliopsis summer sun.

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Bamboozled as a confusing bumblebee. My bull-thistled fingers, my wilting boxelder back—I’ve become an ornamental crab! All this number-crunching and cruciferae. Sweet maudlin what a cross to bear this humble garden has! Onion-eyed I cry just to look at that back fence … Answer me, dead broccoli! A tragic trio bolts a crop of bad hair and halitosis.

True to nature the ungainly crushes the tightfisted: the rhubarb overgrown, the garlic (after two years) unforthcoming. At the far end of the fence a pint-sized bush of pint-sized pickles, then rows of bleeding beets, vulgar red-cheeked chard, and the peas, the peas, the peas (rattling all night in their pods, my dreams are noisy with the poison of peas).

Bastard rhubarb … the mock orange at the northeast corner of the shed lampoons me with pruning ridicule. Have I been as caustic as petty spurge, madwort and madder yet? Not as I thought a sage of virtue but an oversensitive sensitive plant?

Notwithstanding my chipped and crumbling birdbath (spurned by finch and siskin alike), a mere northwest step from the stepping stones are twelve prolific tomato cages (big beef hybrid, bodacious hybrid, bumblebee mix), copious constellations of carrots (lunar white and solar yellow), and the flowers … moonflower, moon violet, star grass, shooting star and star-flowered lily of the valley. Sweet virgin’s bower a virtual galaxy of a garden!

Part 2. A Perennial Saga (Before the Blue Lake Bush Beans, the Bolero Hybrid Carrots, the Maestro Peas, the Ruby Queen Beets)

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Gardens over long-gone lakes. Over fluvial plains. Over lacustrine plains. Aeolian or wind-worked. Over pitted outwash plains. Over mixed knoll and depression.

Gardens of orthic dark brown soil. Calcareous dark brown. Eluviated dark brown. Humic gleysols.

Soils moderately fine to fine-textured. Moderately calcareous usually saline. Clayey glacio-lacustrine deposits. Unsorted glacial till.

Gardens of nearly level topography. Of topography gently sloping or roughly undulating. Moderately sloping or gently rolling. Strongly sloping or moderately rolling. Steeply sloping or strongly rolling.

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Gardens with perennials that mimic black coral branching like a tree. That mimic saffron-colored laminated rocks. With rows that mimic sea froth, salt flowers, a river with a crust of bicolored daylily.

Gardens with the temperament of pumice stone that stops boiling wine boiling. Of alkaline earth that restrains the tongue. With the constitution of whetstone that mollifies major and minor organs. With the antiseptic nature of adamantine spar.

Gardens of unambiguous moss. Opportunistic moss. Outbreaks of rockbreak, bear’s bed, robin’s eye. Gardens of anonymous moss and closeted moss (Iceland moss a lichen that passes as a moss). Moss that conquers lassitude. Moss that comforts the heart.

The gardens of unwanted plants and persistence. Lamb’s-quarters, shepherd’s purse, purslane. The argumentative and self-important gardens. Prostrate knotweed, supercilious stinkweed, black medic.

Part 3. Asclepiads

What I wish you could see in this crudely rendered drawing …