Bumper Crop

We tend to think of the Chesapeake Bay watershed as a vast and liquid environment where we live and work and play in a lovely and relatively safe corner of the world. But amid the grandeur and natural wonder of this place which we often call “the land of pleasant living,” there are also small-plot gems, grace notes to the eternal symphony of the Bay. This year, in my humble opinion, our back yard just happens to be such a place. And at the far end of the yard, just before you get to the smoking loon, our hydrangea have produced a quantity and variety of blooms that take what little breath I have left away.

I can’t explain this year’s phenomenon, but I’m quite happy to accept it as a surprise gift from Mother Nature. She was somewhat stingy last year, and I’m not sure we did anything significantly different when it came time to prune the bushes late in the season to produce such a bumper crop of blooms this year. Maybe it was the cool, wet spring we endured, or the bit of fertilizer we sprinkled under the drip lines early in the season. Whatever the reason, when I look out the kitchen window or mow the lawn, I feel doubly blessed to live here.

Hydrangea are woody, flowering shrubs. They thrive in morning sun and afternoon shade. So do I. There’s nothing like a bright sunny morning for a second cup of coffee on the porch or a few small chores in the yard before the main event of the day, whatever that may be. But come the afternoon, a hammock nap in a cool shady sounds pretty darn good, too. And this year, with the hammock strung out there amid all those beautiful blooms, I can have the best of both worlds, the perfect combination of sun and shade for both plant and human.

It may all sound a bit idyllic, but in these times and at this stage of life, we all need some careful tending. Just like a garden. Life is the art of balancing the yins and yangs of existence. Hydrangea need constant moisture, but overwatering can cause root rot. Same is true for me. I’m all about finding the “sweet spot,” that ambiguous place between paucity and excess. This year, the exuberance of our hydrangea suggest we found it, but that doesn’t mean I’ll take it for granted. There’s no stasis in nature, and next year is always another novel.

But this year, for reasons I do not entirely understand, we somehow managed to find the perfect balance point between acidity and base, between abundance and scarcity. Middle ground. Maybe that’s the lesson of this year’s bumper crop: in an election-year environment where the fringe always makes the loudest noise, we need to tune all that out and come together somewhere in the middle, somewhere where the proper combination of sun and shade can produce a richness and variety we can all enjoy. Where we all can thrive. Pollyanna? Maybe. But I’d like to think that somehow in the maelstrom of the next few months, we can find a way to meet and bloom somewhere near the middle.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.

His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.