The Bright Colors of a Summer Garden

Plus: Barbie, strike news, and a very special Tiny Desk

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when we said goodbye to Tony Bennett. It was the week of Barbenheimer. And it was the week when a very different Comic-Con moved forward. Let's get to it. Opening Argument Have you ever heard the phrase "bloom where you're planted"? I've always taken it to mean something like ... whatever your circumstances are, whatever is going on in your life, do your best to thrive. I've been thinking about it a lot this summer. When I moved into my house, the whole backyard was one medium-steep hill covered with your basic green lawn. I rarely used it, although obviously the dog was happy to run around back there. After a while, not being able to go up and down that hill for fear of slipping and falling got to me, and I wound up having it landscaped so there was a patio up top and then a set of steps with a couple of levels on the way down. I also had some plantings done — a few baby trees, a few hydrangeas. I don't know if you know this about hydrangeas, but they are very dramatic, and if you don't baby them when they go in (especially if it is in the hot part of a dry summer), they will swoon and depart this mortal coil. Which is what happened to ... all the hydrangeas, given that I am not a "baby all the plants" kind of person. A couple of the trees did well. But a couple did not. One was a fig tree, which it turns out is notoriously hard to take care of. In the winter, they like a sweater. And maybe a hat. Now if I wasn't good at watering the hydrangeas, you can imagine I wasn't cut out for putting a sweater on a fig tree. Two years after Landscaping Phase One, I decided to take a different approach to filling in what had become a pretty blank slate. I found a company that does native plant landscaping, and I invited them over to check the place out. "Native plants" means just what it sounds like — they are the plants that naturally grow in your region, in your climate, in your environment. As such, the idea is that they are kind of naturally inclined to grow and thrive in the conditions you have. To bloom, you might say, where they are planted. There are lots of generally pro-environment reasons to do this — they don't need fertilizer or tons and tons of water beyond what's available; they attract bees and butterflies and birds and create a little ecosystem; they support the local plant population generally rather than contributing to what are sometimes invasive plants. (I also had the invasive plants in the yard pulled out, which included some low ground cover and a big shrub or two.) I told the guys that there was another thing to consider: I wanted plants that were dog-safe, meaning if my weird dog decided to go out there and lick a plant or something, he wouldn't make himself sick. They brought back a plan. Dog-safe native plants; a few hundred of them in total. Ferns, tall things, things with purple flowers, things with yellow flowers, things that would lie low, things that would point at the sky. I told them to go ahead. The planting wound up happening in part while I was on vacation, meaning I wasn't even here to baby the plants when they were new. I was far away, and it was hot and dry, and when I got home, they looked ... sad. Very little (a few inches high at most) and very sad. Before long, some of them — the ferns especially — looked very very ... dead. Dead as in: not much more than a little pile of crispy brown leaves. The guy had told me that there might be some transplant shock, but that the roots were healthy, and there was a good chance they would rally. Not the crispy ones, I figured. Not really. Fortunately, the guys had told me that anything that didn't make it to next year, they would replace, which gave me a lot of comfort. I looked at the plants. I rooted for the plants every time it rained. A couple of them looked like they were doing OK. I figured a lot of the rest would get replaced when it wasn't so hot out, and it would turn out all right. Linda Holmes / NPR That's not what happened. The little piles of brown crispy fern leaves? They abruptly started to sprout new, vibrant green fronds from the centers of what looked like dead-as-a-doornail plants. I was shocked. The droopy-looking stalks that were sort of sprawled on the ground? They started to stand up straight. The fuzzy purple tops of the blazing stars (really — blazing stars! referred to as having "Muppet-like stalks"!) began to rise. The yellow flowers on the goldenrod started to bloom. Sturdy green shoots grew up tall. It's hard not to take lessons from something like that. I gave up trying to force something like fig trees or even hydrangeas (which I still love!) to thrive where I couldn't — where I wouldn't — do as much as it would take to support them. I took a breath and chose, in a sense, chaos. I didn't try to specify overly much what I wanted; I let the yard have what it could most easily accommodate. Everything out there is getting really fuzzy, really full. It doesn't all look neat, but it looks incredibly alive, despite having been planted in the heat of what's been a dry summer much of the time. Now, every time it pours down rain, I think of all those plants out there and how they're going to shoot higher into the air. I was watching some bees the other day buzz around the pollinators and thinking, "Huh. It worked." I often spot the dog out there sniffing stuff, or putting his mouth on a leaf, and because I planned for it, it seems ... fine. I've always had a lot of birds, but it does feel like maybe now I have more, or more that are different. There are still a few things that might not make it, and a few things that have leaves with brown spots. I'm not sure everything is going to work out exactly as planned. But where there once was an empty space, there is now a thriving garden, part of the appeal of which is that you can tell it's just getting started. Give it a year or two. Bloom where you are planted indeed. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend James Poniewozik wrote a terrific piece for The New York Times about the ways in which, as he puts it, we are all background actors. It's easy to understand why many people might have thought GWAR at NPR's Tiny Desk was extremely unlikely. But thanks to the long efforts of NPR Music's Lars Gotrich, it happened. (Caution: contains explicit ... visuals and ideas and so forth.) I was fascinated this week by the developing story of the trimmed trees by some of the WGA/SAG-AFTRA picket lines. Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More What We Did This Week Margot Robbie in Barbie. Warner Bros. Pictures  I was glad to sit down with NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans to try to hash out some of the basic outlines of the current strike, including non-transparent finances, structural problems, and negotiating with tech companies instead of movie companies. Aisha talked to Tre'vell Anderson, Cyrena Touros and Cate Young about Michelle Buteau's new show Survival of the Thickest. We could not ignore the Barbenheimer clash, so we used it as inspiration to ask our listeners to weigh in on some classic pop-culture face-offs, from NSYNC vs. Backstreet Boys to ranking the movie Chrises. Then we tried to guess how our listeners voted, and it was a lot of fun. Barbie brought me, Aisha and Stephen together with Bedatri D. Choudhury, and we dove into the question of whether its efforts to have something serious to say (even among its plentiful laughs) can work when it's approved by Mattel and marketed the way it has been. (We'll have a spoiler episode -- as well as coverage of Oppenheimer, of course! -- next week.) Aisha also wrote a terrific piece about Barbie and its balancing of marketing and art. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Bedatri D. Choudhury: Aquarium by Aqua, including the song “Doctor Jones” Aisha Harris: Earth Mama Linda Holmes: Vibe Check, "Life Has Been Lifing Lately" Stephen Thompson: The Japanese House, In the End It Always Does Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? 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