I Fall on Grass: Not that grass, Buddy!

INSNARED WITH FLOWERS

The honeybees have vanished, along with other pollinators. My flowers should be alive with them, but not a single one has shown up this year. Honeybees throughout the continent are struggling to survive an epidemic of tracheal mites. So too are our native pollinators (bumblebees and their like), according to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences.

I imagine some of the neighbors have gone overboard with the bug spray, and finished them off.

Gardening grows ever hotter. Nurseries and seed companies are flourishing, as baby boomers, accumulating age and responsibilities, forego nightclubs and recreational drugs to tend the earth. Smith & Hawken's catalog of English spading forks and teak garden furniture was the Sharper Image of the nineties, and only recently went belly up. The venerable Burpee's, acquired offers preplanned packaged flower gardens and yuppie greens like arugula alongside its marigolds and Kentucky Wonder pole beans.

In my suburban neighborhood, every summer brings a brighter show of flowers, as shaggy patches of nondescript shrubs and weeds are rooted up for rosebeds and perennial borders. Peonies, irises, and phlox replace clumps of daylilies. Threadbare lawns grow lush.

The impulse is a fine one. There is no more ravishing vision than Andrew Marvell's garden:

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach,

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I pass,

Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

But Marvell missed the Baby Boom by more than 300 years. He wouldn't believe how much weight we throw around without even trying, by virtue of our numbers, our wealth, and our penchant for herds. We turn whatever we touched into a Big Thing. It is a sad litany: Our experiments with drugs in the 60s led eventually to narcoterrorism and teenage gunmen. Wood stoves‑-which seemed so virtuous in the energy-conscious seventies‑-polluted the air and threatened woodpeckers with homelessness, until we turned them into planters. Hot tubs turned out to transmit venereal disease. Our cozy homes turned into McMansions and the housing bubble.

Will we screw up gardening too?

Undoubtedly. Most of us are too squeamish to haul manure or hand-pick Japanese beetles, and too busy to notice garden diseases or infestations until they're epidemics. We hesitate to get on our knees to pull weeds (though Kipling likened it to prayer). So we attack. On the highest shelf in nearly every garage or garden shed is a stock of killer chemicals, including organophosphate nerve toxins, fish-killing fungicides, carcinogenic weed killers, and fertilizers whose runoff is killing the Bay. We feel a little guilty, but we use them, turning gardening into war.

And it's not just finicky flowers that receive this kind of treatment. I'm always amazed at the things people spray on their tomatoes and spinach. I'd rather eat the bugs themselves. The lawn services that indiscrimately apply an all-purpose brew of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and weed-killers to every lawn‑-turning whole blocks the uniform green of Captain Hook's poison cake‑-are a little nervous-making too, aren't they? ("Fall on grass," indeed! Not your grass, bub. Studies show high rates of cancer in dogs exposed to 2,4,D, a widely used lawn pesticide; we don't know about children. Yet.)

I'm no Luddite. I use fertilizer from a bag now and then. Every couple of years I squirt an unpronounceable herbicide on the poison ivy that creeps out of the woods into my backyard. I'm all for electric hedge trimmers, which have released more latent creativity than anything since the electric guitar, by placing topiary, once reserved for millionaires, within the reach of nearly everyone, so every other suburban block has a display of corkscrew yews and poodle-cut junipers.

I'm just arguing for a comfortable balance of elbow-grease and laisser-faire. Give diplomacy a chance before mobilizing the arsenal. Find out what your garden really needs. Those hybrid tea roses, for example, are trying to tell you they don't want to be here. The most plague-ridden of all common garden plants, they refuse to thrive in our climate unless dusted, sprayed, and fertilized nearly constantly. If you saw their lusty 6-foot sisters, nearly wild, in Pacific Northwest alleys you'd be ashamed of your puny, pampered plants. There are hundreds of other better, more vigorous flowering plants.

Some of the best are weeds. Many--milkweed, jewelweed, Virginia creeper, clover, pokeweed, dandelion, Joe-Pye weed‑-are beautiful and useful to wildlife. Some are edible. Nearly all are better for the soil than bluegrass or fescue. Pull them only after careful thought.

Compost piles are cheerful things, easier and cheaper than peat moss mined from Canadian bogs, and relieve pressure on the landfill by processing garbage. Bone meal is great for planting bulbs and perennials, and won't get into the water like triple super phosphate. Sulfur dust kills blackspot and powdery mildew about as well as [(trichloromethyl)thio]-4-cyclohexene-1,2-dicarbomoxide, and isn't nearly as dangerous to people, pets, and fish.

If you feel you really need insecticides, use them with discrimination. Don't spray just for the hell of it, or because the product's label says to use it once a week; wait until you have a problem. Spray at twilight, after the bees have gone to bed, and avoid spraying flowers themselves. Sevin and malathion, two of the most popular of pesticides, are deadly to many friendly insects. So is rotenone, an insecticide made of root extracts that many of us consider benign, and use freely.

Fall on grass, instead of on a mail-order garden bench of teak (certified dubiously as "plantation grown" or "sustainably harvested," but likely the product of rainforest rape). But first fire the chemical lawn service, and wait a week or two.