Revenge

by Lee C. Neff

Don Juan, Lord Byron

There are many sorts of neighbors—and an equal number of complex, attendant emotions. Some of life's neighbors challenge all our diplomatic skills, not to mention our eardrums, our property lines and our efforts to be charitable. Some make it clear we are “garden addicts” (stating the obvious with a humorless sneer), challenge us to prove we own the land on which we plan to build the new gazebo, even claim to own the hedge we have fed and pruned for years.

Other, more charitable neighbors build homes for our mason bees, race over to put out a midnight fire in a compost bin and patiently help solve property-line dilemmas, even if they, too, believe the neighboring garden shows symptoms of gardener-addiction. Amazingly, some neighbors are also gardeners and come bearing gifts, even when there is no birthday to celebrate.

These neighbors are life's treasures, the ones who deserve our best pear-pistachio jam at holidays, whose love of iris means we can't divide fragrant ‘Brown Lasso' quickly enough, the ones who should never have decided to more to Tennessee.

But that other sort of neighbor, the sourpuss sort—they are a challenge to one's maturity. We all know that “turn the other cheek” behavior is what we are supposed to aspire to, but occasionally, in our weakest moments, a little immature vengeance beckons.

Like the time, years ago and far away, when a neighbor refused to keep his scary dog leashed. A Vengeful Gardener thought hard, and with calculated study—seeing that this neighbor's love of his perfectly tended vegetable garden was his most serious character flaw—collected in a paper sack over a matter of weeks, all of the ripening dandelion seed heads within a mile's radius, and then, in the dead of night scattered them liberally among the offender's butterbeans, turnips, chard, and tomatoes. Such smug delight—delicious, sweet revenge.

Boundaries, such as property lines, make it easy to separate our splendor from their squalor, or perhaps, in all fairness, from their point of view, our squalor from their splendor. In bitter moments, we can mow or weed or edge right up to the last inch we own, shake our heads at the shot weed next door and retreat to the patio. But when we think revenge demands the scattering of dandelion seed, we best be sure the unscrupulous victim of our midnight raid is down wind of our fastidiously maintained rose garden.

Recently, uncharitable thoughts of revenge that might once have briefly flickered across my mind in occasional dark moments have begun to haunt me. For I have come to realize that I might have taken revenge on dear, innocent friends who definitely do not deserve an unexpected acre of dandelions. With cheerful generosity, I have over the past five years shared plants, such as Verbena bonariensis, Geranium nodosum, Geranium ‘Phoebe Noble,' of Haloragis erecta ‘Wellington Bronze,' obliviously sure that I was sharing the occasional offspring of a genuine treasure, rejoicing in these plants' willingness to pop up with winsome unexpectedness, in just the right spot to give the garden a whimsically uncontrolled charm.

But the past two springs in my own garden have revealed that I might have demonstrated a bit too much generosity of spirit. Tiny seedlings of ‘Wellington Bronze' run in a rusty river down the edge of the orange/bronze garden; and an entire border, almost bare a mere two years ago, is now handsomely carpeted with enough ‘Phoebe Noble' to pay off the mortgage—should every Seattle gardener care for a dozen or so of these fine, sturdy plants. Even worse, the small leaves and, presumably, the tiny tubers of Geranium nodosum are beginning to show up in the lawn. Most inexplicable, the sterile hybrid, Geranium ‘Nimbus,' even seems to have seeded in a few perfect locations. Surely I am mistaken. I am beginning to think that I might be the source of the next dreadful invasive plant scourge to overrun the once pristine Pacific Northwest!

So I am weeding, quietly, while no one is looking, hoping that his year's garden visitors won't think my remaining geraniums look too threatening. After all, they will grow where other plants just sigh and die. And they don't need much water to keep flowering all season, which is why I planted them in the first place.

I am tempted to pot up a few of these energetic souls, just in case a neighbor should need a gift or two. And if you have an acre or more of parched, partial shade and you want a few sturdy geraniums, just let me know. On the other hand, if you have a tiny plot and have somehow been the recipient of one of my gifts, I apologize for the extra hours of weeding and worry I might have caused. In the meantime, I have a lovely dianthus you might like a bit of: Dianthus deltoides ‘Albus.' It has seeded about, not too aggressively, and makes a splendid early summer ground cover in the rock garden.

I suppose this is one of those stories with a moral: Vengeance doesn't pay, no matter how your neighbors behave. Eventually, irony prevails: the weeds one sows will someday be one's own. Or as Francis Bacon wrote so wisely, years ago, “Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.”