Hand Watering

by Donna Schoenkopf

Several years ago, as I was standing in my front yard in San Pedro hand watering my lawn under my stately and graceful trees, a man about my age on an afternoon walk through the neighborhood stopped to talk to me. The reason he stopped, he said, was because I was watering by hand.

He was glad to see me watering. He told me that he watered his lawn and flowers and trees by hand, too. He said, with pride, that he had never watered with sprinklers in all the twenty years he had been tending his own yard and that he knew that was why his garden and lawn were lush and beautiful.

I knew what he meant. Whenever I had watered with sprinklers I would see patches of yard that were over watered or under watered or in some weird way neglected, the least of which was the not saying hello to my dearies.

I had a relationship with the plants which grew on my little plot of land on that peninsula of cool, moist air. The relationship was so real that I swear I could feel my plants yearning. And not just a vague, nonspecific yearning, but a yearning at ME. They would send their cry to me like voices from a fog. “Water, please, dear Watering Person. We are needing water.” If I decided I wouldn’t oblige for some human reason or other, the waves of yearning would increase until I could no longer resist and I would pick my lazy body up off the bed or couch or chair and go out front to my crazy connections of hoses and turnoff levers and begin, albeit in a rather grouchy mood, to water. I would stand there with my cheap and very wonderful sprayer—plastic, with a small lever to control the force of the water and which sprayed like rain—and send blessed relief to my dear darlings.

The Goddess of Life. The Beneficent One. Yeah. That’s me.

As I watered, a meditative state would begin to happen in my mind. Watching the arc of beautiful water making patterns in the air seemed like painting. Let’s have a swirl there, an arch there, lovely, lovely.

I would be in the moment. Time would stand still. I would see every drop, every leaf, feel every patch of dappled sunlight.

One of the rewards of hand watering, especially if you’re in a meditative state, is noticing things, so I thought I’d share some of them with you.

I am in the north yard. It is the most neglected area of the civilized part of my property. It is really hard clay that either is like cement and has jagged cracks of one to two inches in width, or it is red clay mud so viscous that it’ll suck the shoes off your feet, or if those shoes are tightly tied on, will create four inch high soles of mud at the bottom of them. (Try balancing on THOSE babies. Hah. Goooood luck!)

My two brave little apple trees still live here. Their sweet branches and tiny leaves struggle to cling to life. I spray water against the bases of the trees, moving the sand and clay and pebbles away from the tree and then high, over their heads, letting the water fall like rain. It’s making a difference. More leaves. Greener. Good.

On to the creeping jenny, which has BOOMED into life. The little pot of it that I bought a year ago has gone through one intense winter and has come out the other side as a force to be reckoned with. Its round little leaves, its carpet of green, spreads eagerly across the gravel I hauled in my wheelbarrow to the foundation of my house two years ago to make my French drain. The creeping jenny is gorgeous. It loves the north side. It has begun to climb up the side of my steel house, softening the metal with an even deeper green, like lace. The rainbow arc of water falls on it. Nice.

I turn the sprayer slightly, sending the water twenty feet away to my experiment—my compost heap. Volunteer sunflowers twelve feet tall and all the tomato and watermelon plants that grew from seeds thrown there by Yours Truly have burnt to a crisp, even though I tried to cool the whole thing down with water almost every single day. Three weeks of 105 degree weather fried everything but the hardy Johnson grass, which nothing can kill outside of a prairie fire. The experiment continues.

Notice the morning glories? I dug them from the clay weeks ago and now they have pushed their way up the side of the house on the north side. I have jammed two large broken branches under the insulated phone wire the phone guy installed way too low. The morning glories have begun their twisty climb up them. I can’t wait for the blooming to start. They love the gravel of the french drain as much as the creeping jenny does. It’s beginning to look like a green and luscious northern landscape. Shall I plant ferns there, too? I think so. They shall go next to the piece of wood I dragged over from the forest, which has a nice blanket of moss on it. The water splashes over everything like a rain in the northwest.

The rest of the north yard is switch grass, rough and hard. Single plants of spikey leaves dot the red ground. I barely let the water hit them. They’ll survive without it and a person doesn’t want to waste precious resources.

On to the west yard. Full sun hits it every afternoon. It gets so hot one of the boards on the deck (which I admit was flawed when I screwed it to the base) has pulled away from its screw and now is in a state of weirdness. I kinda like the way it looks. I cool off the deck with waves of water. The deck breathes a big thank-you to me.

My little cottonwoods are in four sizes now. One tree is about ten feet tall, delicate, gorgeous. A fairy tree. One, next to the deck, is about four feet tall. Diego the Dog kept grabbing the swaying young branches and wrestling with them until they broke, which is why it’s so short. But the “pruning” Diego gave it has caused it to be full and mighty. The two remaining trees are tiny, having been mowed or stepped on until they were beaten into the ground. But they live on! One year all four cottonwoods were devastated by cocooned caterpillars which ate them bald, but this year only one or two leaves have been invaded. My water washes over them, cooling the leaves, soaking into the ground.

As I paint the grass with sweeps from my sprayer, I glance to the south. Look at the pond! It isn’t that horrible orange red color, its water completely clouded with clay particles. Now it is clear and dark, with duckweed lacing the edges, tall cattails at the northern shore, fish jumping out of the water to snag a dragonfly or mosquito or whatever else happens to fly by. The water is now perfectly reflective all day long, mirroring the forest and sky. Monet.

I spray water in arcs over the many kinds of grasses comprising my lawn. I SWEAR the brown literally turns green before my eyes when the water hits it. The hardiest grass is the crabgrass, soft and a glowing green. I see blotches of deep, deep green here and there where I threw manure in a haphazard way last spring. It is the diary of my feeble attempt to do the right thing. I like seeing the difference in the greens. It shows me what to do the next time I have the energy.

I water the willow tree. It’s roof height now. I trimmed the lower branches a few weeks ago and now it looks like a tree and not a bush. I can’t wait till it shades my south deck, which gets so hot in the afternoon I can’t walk barefoot on it.

I count to twenty slowly as I water each of the shrubs I planted two years ago, which are supposed to form windbreaks for the west yard. There are twenty of them. They haven’t grown much at all, but they are green and healthy and are showing new leaves. If I skip a day of watering, their mature leaves curl up and I feel huge guilt at not having responded to their cries.

New volunteer trees from the forest have started up the slope of the hill. One is at least five feet tall. They will become shade for this part of the yard in a few years. I give them a casual glance of water. They survive nicely on their own.

We have watered our way to the south yard. I water the decks to cool them off. I water the basil and the bougainvillea on the deck and the thick grass spreading across the ground. This yard is grass-rich. The bermuda loves the shade of my giant cottonwood and spreads between the stalks of the Johnson grass and the crabgrass. The baby cottonwood, which has also been “pruned” by Diego, is now protected by a tomato cage. It will shade the south deck, too, one day. I give it a good drink.

Oh! See the tree frog trapped between the screen and glass of my sliding glass door? He must have been there for some time, because his usual brilliant green has a grayish cast to it. As I slide the door open he flips out of his imprisonment and into the plumeria tree. I can almost hear his sight of relief. I adjust the sprayer to gentle rain and water the leaves and flowers and soil of the plumeria with the little frog tucked in the leaves.

There’s the phone. I run in to get it and it’s daughter Rebecca, and while I’m talking to her I notice a fly whose head is trapped in a tiny hole in the screen that my dear dead cat, Che, made. I look at the fly. He’s struggling to get out. I am filled with pity and yes, because I am the Merciful Goddess, I free him. I watch as he flops around on the door mat. I walk away because I don’t want to see him die. I am also the Goddess Who Doesn’t Care For Long.

Onto the east yard. I see the redbud tree I stole from the forest and which I planted in the middle of my morning yard. Some day the redbud will be shade for the eastern side of the house. It almost fried to death under the full sun until I put my round plastic outdoor table over it. Now it’s happy. I can tell. I crouch down and send water over and around it.

I turn to water the morning glories by the outdoor shower. Then I water the tiny elephant ear plants that have miniaturized since I planted them in the shower creek last year. They were a foot across last summer, not big for elephant ears, but this year the biggest is only two inches across. They are like little tiny versions of their former selves.

I water the lilac bushes and the rhododendron bush, too. Lilacs are doing fine although still no flowers two years after planting. The rhododendron looks sick but hangs on. It must hate the clay.

I am dripping with sweat. All my clothes are plastered to my body. I walk back to the outdoor pump, laying the lengths of hose along the border of the yard as I go, and turn off the water. I trudge over to the outdoor shower and peel off my sopping clothes and turn on the cool water.

Now it’s my turn.

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