On The Trail
By Gloria Glasser
Scents and Sentimentality

Forget about global warming. It’s already happened. Right in my backyard.

The Seminole Springs Ice Shelf calved off a trailer-park-sized iceberg that years ago managed to float across oceans, then hung a left at Zuma Lagoon, bobbing and weaving its way up La Sierra Creek before sailing onto Seminole Lake—which, coincidentally, my property sits directly below—thus semipermanently icing my attempts at year-round gardening in a gracious So-Cal clime.

Spring is not the season that inspires poets hereabouts but the time of the Great Thaw, when the local glacial mass recedes, possibly eyeing an Icelandic junket to recharge its frost-fueled batteries.

So, 86 tons of raked and bagged leaves later, this denizen of the Seminole deep-freeze can better assess whether to simply call the Do-It Center and order three of everything from their nursery to be delivered pronto, or to search for survivors (aka revivers). Gardening is reckoned a patient pursuit. I’ve been at it since I was 5 and have never possessed an ounce of patience. But I’m overendowed with pity, moaning O, that poor plant! so many times my neighbor stopped in last Tuesday to clobber me with a sack of bird feed.

"Here," he said, "thought you could use this."

This was actually not too terrible a year. Nights in the high 20s finished off a lot of tender plants and damaged others. Tragically, I’m such an impatient moron I prematurely axed to the ground what had appeared dead and gone to me, only noticing when the deed was done that healthy regrowth had sprouted on old finished-looking stems, stalks, trunks. I felt like a murderer, staring down at the foliage in my hands. The plant’s last gasp—transliterated for me by a plant psychologist or green shrink, was, "If I was not dying before, I certainly am now, you boob! Who puts a pair of pruning shears into the hands of a homicidal maniac?"

So restraint (and lots of regret) becomes the order of the day. Sitting on my hands, I peruse a tangle of jasmine. The scent of true jasmine (as opposed to the more treacly pungency of star jasmine, which makes me think of orange sherbet) is to me the finest of all heavenly garden scents. It makes me reel a little, get all aflutter. I grow it primarily to obscure a neighbor’s prolific tobacco smoke stench that drifts over. This is an awfully pedestrian purpose for a plant I’m so enamored of, kind of like having some world-class dignitary as a houseguest and asking if he wouldn’t mind taking the trash out on his way to his waiting limo.

So perhaps for spite, the jasmine does not kick out enough fragrance to overpower the "Cig Alert" in my front yard. But occasionally there’ll be a waft to thrill and delight me. Since the jasmine suffers extensive frost damage annually, its long struggle to recover limits its flower production. There’s jasmine growing at our community clubhouse in a sunnier and more protected spot, and I nearly faint when I get near it, it is just the most luscious thing to inhale—minus the stale tobacco odor.

As jasmine is mistress of my nostrils, Martha Washington pelargoniums are the queens of my heart.

My butchery of the winter’s survivors left me with more guilt than my parents ever managed to elicit from me. I chopped six Martha Ws to the absolute ground, intending to dig ’em out and dump ’em the next day, and woe was me when a heat wave struck and these pathetic stumps kicked out tiny new leaves. With my pruning skills it will take them 30 years to reach blooming size again, so I opted to replace them.

The memory of their glorious show last year will long haunt me. I don’t entertain many garden guests, but one fellow who stopped in and is not much of a plantsman himself—his jaw dropped when he saw that passel of blooming beauties.

Gardener’s guilt is a very profitable thing for nurseries. I walk in, having left all willpower in my truck, and can’t decide on just a handful of Martha Ws because the blotch-like markings—think of a pansy face pinned on an azalea-shaped ruffled flower but some hippie acid-head orchestrating day-glo color hues—are simply too gorgeous for me to choose from. Last trip, I brought home 14 four-inch pots, that added to the first half dozen one-gallon Martha Ws I’d hauled home two days earlier.

Garden experts advise not to pin all your hopes on one particular species (as a blight could wipe ’em out), but I’m not real diligent about listening to experts. My gardening prowess was earned in a trial by fire—or rather, ice. I’ll take my chances on six months of hot-hot color, then when the great Seminole glacier advances menacingly once more, maybe I’ll load my wheelbarrow with my jasmine and Martha Washington pelargoniums and roll us all the way to balmy Baja for the winter.