Mark Lane: Darwinian Gardener rolls with the heat wave

The Darwinian Gardener balanced himself atop a riding lawnmower, wrestled the lever into neutral position, hit the brake, exhaled and boldly turned the key. To his surprise, it started right up.

The Darwinian Gardener is not a riding mower kind of guy. He’s not even a gas-mower guy, so this was a first. But that weekend he was mowing his father-in-law’s yard while said father-in-law was in the hospital. As he eased off the choke, he recalled all those past years of lawn mowing for older relatives, now passed on. Here he was, back on the job again.

All those years of summer lawn mowing — service mowing, if you will — shaped his philosophy of yard care until he became known as Florida’s foremost exponent of survival-of-the-fittest yard-and-garden care. He is not sculpting Japanese boxwood into geometric shapes or detailing St. Augustine grass into a featureless carpet. No, he is zooming off on a borrowed riding mower with a nasty gleam in his eye, flattening everything in his path and moving the choke lever up, up, up until it’s even with the little pictogram of a frightened rabbit.

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And now, as afternoon temperatures creep into the 90s, it’s an excellent time to Ask the Darwinian Gardener.

Q: You’re on a riding mower in this heat? Aren’t you a danger to the community?

A: The Darwinian Gardener laughs at danger. Actually, it’s more like a nervous chuckle. He finds that driving a riding mower is a lot like working a bumper car or a go-cart. The brakes were a bit uncertain and he needed a lot of room for cornering, but he didn’t hit anything. At least not very hard.

Q: So what are your usual lawn tools?

The Darwinian Gardener uses an underpowered electric mower that hums along quietly and has a battery that cannot handle the entire yard. It will turn itself off if the battery overheats, something that’s been happening lately. He considers this a feature, not a bug. If the mower battery is overheated, chances are the Darwinian Gardener is, too, which happened again last weekend.

The Darwinian Gardener abandoned the stunned lawnmower in the driveway and stood instead in front of an open refrigerator. He is not a sport, but he reached for a sports drink. It would have been too much trouble to pass out on the lawn and he could have been injured in the process. Glad the mower forced him to quit.

He usually suffers his first bout of heat exhaustion in July or August, the hottest part of the five seasons, but this year it started hitting him in June during the first "90-90" days of summer — temps in the 90s, humidity in the 90s. His air conditioner’s compressor has been groaning like a wounded beast day and night for weeks now.

Q: What’s this five seasons bit? Another careless typo?

A: People who don’t know the place say Florida has no seasons. In fact, the state has five: spring, summer, ultra-summer, fallish and winterish. Summer lasts from Memorial Day until the Fourth of July. And ultra-summer lasts from the Fourth of July until October. Ultra-summer is when summer morphs into something altogether more intense. Just calling it “summer” doesn’t do it justice. It fails to reflect the true situation.

Fallish feels like a normal early summer and lasts from October until the Black Friday shopping holiday. Winterish lasts from Black Friday until the Rolex 24 race. Spring is from the Rolex race until Memorial Day.

Q: Ultra-summer is killing my plants left and right but at least it’s killing the bad plants, too. Right?

A: The Darwinian Gardener is unclear about the whole good/bad thing. But he is surprised at how previously hardy, don’t-need-nothing-from-you plants are starting to droop on 90-90 days. Stuff is going to die off on these hot, dry, record-breaking summer days, and is that his fault? No, it is not. He’s adapting to a long, hot summer, like everyone else and so should his plants. This is the Global Warming Era. Best to get used to it.

Meanwhile, the Virginia creepers that attack his house are undeterred. The creeps stick to his wood siding with little adhesive disks that require vigorous scraping at house-painting time, a chore he is putting off until things are more fallish.

Pokeweed, too, is perfectly happy with an intense ultra-summertime, and some of the stalks are now taller than the Darwinian Gardener. He has not declared it an enemy of the yard yet since the birds like it, but he senses it is starting to get over-enthusiastic.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is [email protected].

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mark Lane: Darwinian Gardener rolls with the heat wave