Read Death of a Political Plant Online
Authors: Ann Ripley
Tags: #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction
Death of a Political Plant (7 page)
It was clear Jay’s life was to be no part of hers. She set her mouth tightly, and shook her head. Good thing she had a life of her own, and it was high time she was seeing to it. She went to the kitchen and resolutely examined the calendar. Almost immediately, she forgot her houseguest. This was Wednesday already. A broad black line was drawn through two days of next week, and overwritten with the initials P.P.S.: Perennial Plant Society. That meant two nights with three vivacious women as houseguests, who felt it their bounden duty to get acquainted with her and write her up in their newsletter before she became Plant Person of the Year. One of those days would be devoted to a long Channel Five shoot at the P.P.S. convention at the Washington Hilton. With a sudden sense of urgency, Louise looked out at her patio garden. Like the others in the yard, it had still not recovered from the incursions of little Sally.
Nose to the glass, she stared at the diminished garden and tried to fight the bothersome feelings of pride and vanity that
swept over her. What would happen to her professional reputation if the P.P.S. people saw her beds in this state? These women were professional down to their toes. Then she tried to make light of it: After all, what could they do, rescind her honor of being named Plant Person of the Year? Nevertheless, she decided, she could do a little restoration work in the garden without making herself feel like a Mrs. Babbitt, who had to keep up appearances above all else. She got herself a bowl of shredded wheat and a cup of coffee and went out on the patio. As she ate, she noted spots in the garden that needed resuscitation.
With breakfast finished, she grabbed the cordless phone, and went out to the toolshed. Here, all was neatness and precision, just as she liked it. She took down the pruning shears and cultivator from their hooks, and placed them and the phone into separate pockets of the shorts. In another pocket she stuffed a large, folded trash bag. Bill always teased that she looked like an overequipped fisherman, but it worked. It wouldn’t be easy to fix up the damage to the yard. It wasn’t as if she had sun: she merely had little patchworks of sun in the midst of dense shade. That meant she couldn’t just plop in a blooming delphinium or daisy. She had to be more subtle.
Fortuntately, the rampaging little Sally had left a few day-lilies unplucked, and they were providing accents of soft color in each of the garden areas, along with the burst of bright orange shady-hardy helenium and white echinacea that had been too rough for her tiny hands. Louise’s garden of anemone, ligularia, and hosta also remained untouched, for it was far from the beaten path.
The phone rang, and she took it out of her shorts pocket. It was Janie from Mexico City, calling collect.
“Janie, honey, how are you?”
“Ma, I have big troubles” said the sorrowful, young voice.
“Troubles?” Her voice came out like a squawk and her heart sank with a thud. She went to a nearby stump in the woods and carefully sat down to hear the news. Her mind conjured up a picture of the slight, beautiful blond girl, who had become a woman in just the past few months: having “troubles” in that big, polluted, south-of-the-border city where Louise envisioned bandits on the highways. Anything could have happened to her. “Janie,” she cried, “no one has hurt you, have they?”
“No, no, Ma,
hold
the hysteria. It’s not like that.” Louise could hear the teenaged impatience: Her mother had missed the point yet again. “It’s much more basic. And simple. I have Montezuma’s revenge, that’s all.”
Louise’s shoulders sank as she gave an enormous sigh of relief. Fortunately, her motherly screech had been deadened by the surrounding woods and mulch-covered forest floor, and now she could speak without alarming the neighbors a block away. Her baby was all right. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. Diarrhea. How painful. But what about those pills you brought with you? Don’t they work?”
“I’m taking them. It’s not that easy to get rid of, they tell me.” The girl’s voice sounded wan. “I called you, because they made me stay home from work today to rest.”
“And how is the work going?”
“It’s great. I am a regular little carpenter now, though I have some sore fingers where the hammer didn’t go where I thought it would. Maybe I’ll take up carpentry as my career. But you know, just like Martha says, there’re two worlds, the world of the rich and the poor.” Another radicalized child, reflected Louise. “You should see the poor here, Ma. They
live on the streets, under a stretched canvas, cooking there, sleeping there, making new babies there. Why, sometimes there’re ten kids all huddled around one little home in the street.”
“It must be terrible. But you’re helping, Janie. That’s why you went there in the first place.”
“What we’re doing is a drop in the bucket. You’ll never know unless you come here. And I think you and Dad should come, to find out what poverty really means. Meantime, I hope you’re all right?”
“Why, yes, I’m all right. Uh, we have a guest, my old friend from college, Jay McCormick.”
“Your old flame. The one that makes your eyes light up when you talk about him. How’s Dad handling that?”
“Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but yes. Jay’s had a hard time. He’s sort of hiding out at our house.”
“Oh,” said her daughter, and her voice changed from teasing to serious. “Ma, you’re either hiding out or you’re not: there’s no sort of hiding out. Who, pray tell, is he hiding from?”
“Honey, we don’t really know the particulars.”
“That doesn’t sound good, and I’m not even there.” It was as if the teenager believed she should be around constantly to monitor Louise’s erratic comings and goings.
“Really, Janie, the situation is very simple. The man will be here just a few days. He’s writing a story. I think it’s something about the presidential election, or else about the courts. In a few days he will be out of here, and you can come home and have your room back.”
“I bet you aren’t telling me everything, by a long shot. Try to stay out of trouble while I’m gone.”
“How are the other kids who are there with you? Do you like them as much as you did when we spoke last time?”
“Oh, more. They totally rule. Really bright. Very weird musical tastes, though. None of them are very, oh, ordinary. They’re all computer nerds, bookworms, that sort. They play all kinds of music, grunge, techno, rockabilly. Man, do we rock to rockabilly! They even like jazz. You’ll really like them when you meet them.”
“Meet them?”
Then she heard the girl gasp. “Oh, oh! I’d better go, if you know what I mean. I just called because I had nothing else to do, and I sort of miss you.”
Louise got up from the stump and tucked the phone back in her pocket. How much she missed her youngest. As for Martha, nineteen, it was as if that child had left the nest long ago and ceased being a part of her life. She had turned instead into a brooding, egalitarian-minded feminist searching for answers in urban studies, her new major at Northwestern. Martha was in equal jeopardy, working in the core city of Detroit in a program run by a Catholic priest, helping people train for jobs and a future. Louise wished her older daughter would call, too, for phoning her room in Detroit was always fruitless, with only polite strangers taking careful messages that were never answered.
On her next circuit of the yard, she had pruning shears in hand and plastic bag unfurled and slung over one shoulder to hold the clippings. With the flourish of an artist, she fine-tuned bushes that had grown too exuberantly during the summer, snipping off unwanted growth and the occasional dead twig. With the cultivator she fluffed up mulch areas that had been compacted by the summer rains. After throwing the clippings in the compost heap, she went inside to clean up a bit to
go to the gardening center over on Route One. These days, she was able to visit nurseries without guilt. It wasn’t too long ago that she had been a garden binger, knocking the family budget out of kilter with her plant purchases. Bill would sit her down like a naughty schoolgirl and show her the disarrayed accounts.
It was great to be a working woman, able to spend money as she pleased.
She had just about completed her remedial gardening. In one of the only sunny spots she tucked in the satisfying chubby forms of three green santolina, with yellow button blooms waiting to burst open. A couple of hostas planted at its feet diverted attention from the damage done to the tree peony. Strategically placed clumps of fat-leafed bergenia filled in the foreground. Still, the garden looked wounded, but it was the best she could do.
Her phone rang again, and it was Marty Corbin with good news. “Okay, Louise, you got it. We’ll do a two-part program on the environmental bill. But we gotta act quick: I’ve lined up a couple of hunks already. We can trek over to the Shenandoah and illustrate the new commitment to acquiring wilderness areas. Actually, it’s too bad we don’t have time to travel west, because that’s where the biggest federal land grabs will take place.”
“Marty, Marty,” she rebuked.
“Hey, this bill really shows the President’s chutzpah, taking that amount of acreage out of the hands of business and lumbering. Talk about wilderness regained!” She could just imagine him grinning at his little jab. “Just seeing if you were paying attention, Louise.”
“And don’t forget,” she said, “we have to do something on those incentives in the bill for private landowners to restore habitat.”
“Then we gotta handle the part about those tougher pesticide controls. But no more bringing poisons into the studio.” He chuckled, remembering the program where they had done just that, which led to the mysterious poisoning of Louise’s rival at the studio. “Research is getting an angle on dealing with the endangered species part of the bill. Something down at the Chesapeake Bay, maybe. It’d be a nice, easy run for us.”
“Great, Marty. I think our viewers will like it.”
“But just don’t think this show is going to save President Fairchild from having his pants beat off by Goodrich.”
“Marty, I don’t have a personal stake in the election. I only believe in the environment, and Fairchild stood up to a lot of people to get that bill passed. I admire him for it.”
Her producer chuckled on the other end of the phone line. “I’m puttin’ ya on, Louise. I prefer Fairchild, too, even though
I
can believe those stories about drinking and womanizing.”
She bet he did: Marty himself had been a boozer and a womanizer until he straightened himself out over the last year.
He went on: “When I see you tomorrow, we’ll work on some treatments, including that one for the perennial plant people; that’s gonna be a challenge, a big convention like that. Meantime, I wanted to let you know you have what you want.”
“Thanks, Marty. I’m so glad this thing didn’t get bogged down in Channel Five politics. I know the President will be grateful, too.”
Or, more specifically, she thought, Tom Paschen, that antsy chief of staff of the President’s. She looked forward to telling him that she had succeeded in her small part in aiding the campaign.
And without compromising principle, of course.
I
T SEEMS AT FIRST GLANCE THAT
people with bog gardens
are just over
grown children who like to play in the mud, Actually, they are shrewd people. For ornamental bog gardens are the best of everything: They are low-maintenance, and environmentally sound, cheaper than water gardens, and still they produce lush plants and flowers that cannot be found in terrestrial gardens.
Purists call them marsh gardens or damp gardens, for, strictly speaking, bog gardens are something else: very distinctive North American natural wetlands that lack mineral soils and have a deep substrata of sphagnum peat moss. They contain a high acidic content and minimal nutrition. Therefore, a limited number of plants grow there, but the ones that do are unique, and include certain orchids, the lady’s slipper, bladderwort, Indian pipe, the calla lily, and the carnivorous pitcher plant, Sarracenia.
The bog gardener can go wild, leaving the orbit of mere dry-land gardeners, and grow things in a soggy swamp that would be a struggle elsewhere: fine shows of iris in every shade and more than a dozen varieties, including the majestic Japanese iris (
Iris kaempferi
); big-leaved Ligularia dentata; the giant-leaved Astilboides tabularis; parrot feather (
Myriophyllum aquaticum
); marsh marigold (
Caltha palustris
); dwarf bamboo (
Dulichium areundinaceum
); double-flowering arrowhead, Sagittaria japonica “Flore Pleno,” with its distinctive leaves and fluffy double white blossoms; cattail (
Typha latifolia
); and rushes. People may balk at one rush, the handsome horsetail (
Equisetum hyemale
), because it is a garden invader. Those who have failed with the brilliant red Lobelia cardinalis in the perennial border will find it flourishes with its toes damp, as does its relative, Lobelia siphilitica. Tall, bold-flowered mallows; rosy joe-pye weeds (
Eupatorium purpureum
); goatsbeard (
Aruncus dioicus
); thalictrum;
Cimicifuga; astilbe; yellow flag iris (
Iris pseudacorus
); blue flag iris (
Iris versicolor
); and the brilliant scarlet Lychnis chalcedonica not only grow, they prosper.
And then there are the tender plants, Thalia geniculata; the elegant bog lily, Crinum americanum; and spider lily, Hjmenocallis liriosme; and the lush-leaved, violet-stemmed taro, Colocasia esculenta var. fontanesii; and red-stemmed Sagittaria lancifolia ruminoides with its flaring leaves and bold, carmine stems. There is the incredibly handsome variegated-leaved canna, and the biblical bulrush from which the Dead Sea Scrolls were made, right there in your own backyard: Cyperus papyrus, or its smaller form, Cyperus viviparus. Treat the tender ones as annuals, although many can come inside for the winter provided you have a mansion with a big basement. That six-foot or taller biblical bulrush, in particular, doesn’t fare well in the confines of the home.
Not only the garden itself, but its moist edges can become fertile propagating grounds for our favorite plants, including ferns, thalictrum, hostas, rhododendrons, and azaleas.
Less trouble than a water garden, a bog garden can be prepared easily by excavating the area twelve to eighteen inches deep and installing waterproof
material to cover the excavation. People debate as to whether it should be watertight, or perforated here and there to allow some water to escape. Since the bog could dry up in periods of low rainfall, a simple access to water should be provided, such as burying a soaker hose in the garden during construction. Before earth is put back in the hole, sturdy stepping-stone paths should be installed so the gardener doesn’t have to step into the bog. Cinder blocks topped with decorative flagstones are effective. The removed soil is enriched with organic matter to provide both nutrition and increased water retention. Then, it is shoveled back in the hole in a dry state, so you can step around and plant without getting mucky feet.
Plants should be placed in this new environment with their pots on, so you have plenty of chance to move things around until you find the arrangement you like. Once you’re satisfied, remove the pots, plant your specimens, and then flood the area with water. Since this is a great place for weeds to grow, the garden should be mulched heavily. A lovely smelling plant, sweet flag (
Acorus calamus
), makes a weed-deterring ground cover for a bog garden. It has bold cream-and-yellow spiky leaves.
Once established, this marshy space is easy to care for, and rewards us with all manner of robust plant growth. Just like a water garden, it will become a mecca for butterflies, dragonflies, damselflies, toads, and frogs.
There is a much more grandiose use for the bog garden: as a purifier of water for an adjacent larger water garden with fish. Certain bog plants perform the vital functions of settling sediment and encouraging positive bacterial growth. These include yellow flag iris (
Iris pseudacorus
), dwarf cattail (
Typha minima
); and, according to some studies, the umbrella palm, Cyperus alternifolius. A pump brings water from the big pool to the higher elevation bog garden, and a waterfall often is used to tumble it back into the fishpond below.
Ornamental bog gardens are moist, alive places to try new things. An example is the skunk cabbage, a unique member of the aroid family that has its own ecosystem. It provides centrally heated housing for small creatures seeking refuge from the cold. Its magnificent spathe, which is a leaflike bract that protects the flowers, is used by top flower arrangers in bouquets.
Skunk cabbage is discounted by many because when its leaves are crushed, a rotten smell results. However, this odor is interpreted differently by different people: some even like it, since it reminds them of their happy childhood days slogging through wet marshes. The experimental rewards of growing skunk cabbage from seed are great for children: in a few years, there will be a big, speckled-leaved plant that has its own temperature system and live-in pets. As it grows and produces its flower, the skunk cabbage generates enough heat to pop right out of the snow in springtime; amazingly, it keeps its temperature far above freezing—around seventy-two degrees—for weeks on end. This makes it a natural home for nearby little animals such as spiders and bees. One member of the aroid family houses 1 “arum” frogs, which find plenty of fellow resident insects on which to dine. Naturally, the attraction of insects to these plants increases their chances for effective pollination.
There is both an eastern (
Symplocarpus foetidus
) and a western (
Lysichitum americanum
) skunk cabbage, and they are quite different, the western variety growing much larger and reflecting the plant’s tropical origins. It gives forth gorgeous chartreuse and golden spathes. These
protect the spadix, a long array of tightly packed fleshy flowers. Flower arrangers cut the leaves of the plant and plunge them immediately into warm water: This removes the skunky odor.
While some are holding their noses as they read this, remember the solution to the odor problem is simple; as you would with any smelly object—for instance, an alcoholic uncle—just be sure to place it downwind of the patio on which you entertain guests.
