as if by magic

I was in the front yard this morn­ing, water­ing in some new native plants that I’d planted a cou­ple week­ends ago. It was a few min­utes of qual­ity time, me with the plants, crouched down, the hose on a slow trickle, the water pud­dling slowly into the lit­tle basins I’d built around each plant.

It also ended being some inter­est­ing qual­ity time with the neigh­bors. Olinda from next door pulled up in her car from hav­ing dropped her grand­son off at school. Usu­ally she waves and goes up her steps, but this time she came over to where I was watering.

Seems like some­thing weird had hap­pened overnight. When she got into her car this morn­ing her grand­son had smelled some­thing. Olinda looked down into the car’s ash­tray and saw a cig­a­rette butt. “And we don’t smoke,” she emphasized.

Yes, she’d left the car unlocked overnight, and one of the win­dows had been rolled down. But she thought it was extra-strange. The whole fam­ily hears things in and around the house all the time, she reported. “I think our house is huanted.” And a grand­son had seen a bruja, a witch, inside the house not long ago.

I am such a skep­tic with all things para­nor­mal. But Olinda’s com­ments got me thinking.

Astra­galus nut­tal­lii, pho­tographed by Beat­rice F. Howitt [ source ]

Last week­end I’d put into the ground a gal­lon plant of rattle-weed or Nuttall’s milkvetch (Astra­galus nut­tal­lii), a low lit­tle ground­cover with del­i­cate, blue-gray foliage, cream col­ored flow­ers and some out­ra­geously over­scaled seed pods. It’s a plant native to the coastal coun­ties from Los Ange­les to north of San Fran­cisco, and not one you often see see in gardens.

Within two days of my plant­ing it, John came to me with a puz­zled expres­sion. “You planted a new plant by the front walk­way the other day, didn’t you?”

“It’s gone.”

I went out to look, but it was after dark. I felt around with my hands a bit but couldn’t feel any­thing where the plant had been. Check­ing back dur­ing day­light all I saw was dirt. No nubs, no hole where the plant had been dug out. Noth­ing. The only signs of strug­gle were a few oxalis bulbs strewn on the sur­face, bulbs that I’d unearthed and then replanted in the course of plant­ing the milkvetch.

Of course a crit­ter of some sort was prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for the dis­ap­pear­ance. But it was odd that one of the plants I’d been water­ing this morn­ing was another milkvetch plant that I’d set into the ground a week before the one that had van­ished. Sited less than twenty feet away, it looked happy and com­pletely untouched.

So is the neigh­bor­hood haunted by a witch with a taste for milkvetch plants and cig­a­rettes? Or just voles or pos­sums? Or maybe a phan­tom gar­dener who’s raid­ing the street for inter­est­ing lit­tle plants? Now that last one would be really scary…

September 26 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: • • • | 2 Comments »