dirt / By Amy Stewart

The Obama Garden

Honor Your Grandmother. It’s a shame that Obama’s grandmother didn’t get to live long enough to see her grandson move into the White House, but like all grandmothers she knew where the kid was headed long before he did. There’s something about grandmothers and gardens that just go together. Even if your grandmother didn’t garden, I bet she loved raspberries or sunflowers or white calla lilies. Plant something in her honor.

This Garden is Brought to You by the Letter O. Okay, this is a little silly, but it makes me laugh, and doesn’t it feel good to laugh and think about the president at the same time? Last night at the election night party, somebody brought blue allium bulbs for the hostess. The flowers weren’t quite a perfect Democrat blue — they leaned more toward purple — but in this new era of inclusiveness and collaboration, purple’s a good red/blue compromise. And those big spherical blossoms? The letter O. That’s right. You never could make a W work in the garden, but I bet you can fill a flower bed with Os. I already had quite a few alliums in my garden, but I’m going to rush out and plant a few more so that next summer the garden will be filled with cheerful Obama flowers. It’ll be a little inside joke that only you and I share.

Make Your Land More Useful. The apple tree’s a good start, but ask yourself: What else can you do to make the little patch of land under your care more useful? Can you plant a native shrub that will support bugs and birds? Put in a few vegetables? Rip out some lawn in favor of wildflowers?

During World War II, victory gardens produced an estimated 40 percent of all vegetables consumed in the United States. In 1943, 75 percent of all American women were canning. I can’t say that growing our own food will bring our troops home any faster — by running this war on credit cards, we haven’t had to sacrifice so much as a shoelace to support our troops — but raising chickens and planting potatoes and harvesting berries are all incredibly satisfying endeavors that make me feel a little more self-reliant and in touch with something larger than myself. Planting a few shrubs that feed hummingbirds or provide a home to native bees and hard-working spiders makes me feel that I’ve done some small thing for the planet.

And that’s what the Obama campaign was all about: Asking each of us to do some small thing. Donate. Volunteer. Vote. Hope.

Oh, and obsessively follow the campaign on the Internet. Did I mention the other benefit of planting an Obama garden? It gets you away from the computer. I am heading out to the garden in hopes that it will break my campaign news addiction.

As soon as I check on those last few runoffs, that is. And I’m pretty sure there’s going to be one or two more Palin videos to post to my Facebook profile. But then I’m quitting, I swear.

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