Night Gardening
Recently it has been popular to say that Emily Dickinson gardened at night because for a few years in middle age the sun stung her eyes. I feel certain it was more complicated than that. The woman was a recluse. Her garden was important to her thinking and being out there at night would have given her a chance to think while invisible, not just to the world but also to her family. She stayed away from people so she could be herself and when she was in the garden at night she could be another self, which is, interestingly, Aristotle’s definition of a friend. Something about the night work appealed to her.
The ice mound in front of the El Puerto promenade was long gone, but it was July now and Leo still hadn’t put anything in his planters. I didn’t know if he was discouraged or disinterested, but I did know I hadn’t encouraged him and I wanted to fix that.
I went to my favorite nursery, the Garden Keeper, which is down a hill from a new development of enormous houses. Sometimes I drive around up there and check on some of my favorites, like the house that looks like a stone castle with a veranda. It’s the first house on Ski Club Drive, though there isn’t a ski club in Anneville.
Today, though, I pulled straight into the Garden Keeper’s lot. I knew from my father that the rehabilitation center across the street was where Beth Gould was recovering from her stroke. I left Bonnie running while I considered driving over to visit her. I wouldn’t be able to do it after I bought the plants because they’d wilt in the trunk. I sat for several minutes, ultimately deciding I wasn’t a close enough friend. I pictured Beth surrounded by all of her real friends, the ones who gave her the silver plate, and turned off the car. I decided I would send flowers when she was home.
The university receives most of its plants from several large commercial nurseries, so there was no need to frequent the local places and I hadn’t been to the Garden Keeper in some time. The day was hot and the cicadas, the sound of surf for the landlocked, were thrumming. In addition to disliking petunias, they are a flower I have never been able to grow well. They get long and spindly on me. Nevertheless, I was determined. I greeted the flats of them respectfully and asked that we give each other another chance. A light breeze ruffled their thin petals.
Edith Wharton’s philosophy of room decoration matches mine on container gardening: “Concerning the difficult question of color, it is safe to say that the fewer the colors used, the more pleasing and restful the result will be. A multiplicity of colors produces the same effect as a number of voices talking at the same time.” I bought three flats of Easy Wave shell pink petunias plus a small English boxwood (Buxus sempervirens “Suffruticosa”) for the center of each pot to provide vertical and year-round interest. For texture I bought some creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia), which cascades beautifully and its golden, coin-shaped leaves would pick up the yellow centers of the petunias. It was a simple but elegant design, I thought, just like Leo’s promenade.
ALL THE WAYSIDE SHOPS were closed when I drove into the parking lot that night. It was midnight and traffic was sparse; the summer students weren’t yet partying. Streetlamps cast cones of light through the humid air and I could hear crickets and peep frogs in the dell. Leo had added a couple of strings of fairy lights over the promenade early in the summer, but they were off now.
Everything I needed was in my trunk, so I backed up to the planters and got to work. A few cars drove into the lot, probably hoping someone at El Puerto would still make them a burrito, but they left quickly when they saw it was closed. One car stayed awhile, and I thought maybe someone was watching me garden. When the engine switched off, I looked up and saw a couple of students making out in the front seat.
I was placing the last pale pink petunia in the second planter, my back to the parking lot, when Leo said hello. I jumped straight into the air.
“I’m sorry!” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing here?” I must have sounded angry.
“I was working late in the garage,” he said defensively.
I scrutinized the darkness in that direction.
“In the office. Paperwork.”
I nodded.
“When I saw someone over here, I grabbed a flashlight.” He shined the light on the pots.
“You said your grandmother had petunias.”
“She did. They were pink.”
“I guessed.”
“Good guess,” he said.
“I like pink. I don’t like red, but I like pink.” I looked around. “Well, I’m all finished. I was just about to clean up. The plants are small now, but if they’re happy here, they’ll trail over the sides by the end of the summer. It should look nice.”
“They’re perfect. Thank you.” He shined his flashlight on the promenade’s red table umbrellas. “You don’t like red?” he asked.
“Red flowers. I don’t mind red on other things.”
“Oh, good.”
Leo aimed the flashlight back at the petunias and we stood there looking down at them.
“I did like one red flower,” I started. “One year my father brought back a cardinal flower—Lobelia cardinalis—from my grandmother’s and planted it behind our house. He tried to approximate the streambed or lowland environment the plant needs with a milk carton full of water and a tiny pinhole in the bottom. It seemed to work for a time.” I paused, a little breathless from all the words.
“What happened?” Leo switched the flashlight off and we stood there in the dark.
“He painted the carton green so it wouldn’t distract from the garden. It was quite a feat to keep that plant alive in our backyard and he did it for a few years. But eventually he lost heart, or interest, I don’t know. My mom started needing more care, I was getting ready to leave for college. It was hard to watch him give up something he’d enjoyed. For a while, I kept the milk jug full myself, but when I came home from school my first summer, the plant was dead.”
Leo was quiet.
“And that’s why I don’t like red flowers.”
“When did your mother die?”
“The year after I graduated. I came home that spring, she died in September. She fell down the stairs, but she’d been ill for a while.”
Leo shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
He helped me put all my gardening supplies back in the trunk. Then we stood next to my car, facing each other.
“Before I went to college, my mom and I drove together a lot, around town and sometimes out into the country. She’d spend the whole day inside, but she’d come out in the evening for a drive with me. Sometimes I drove, sometimes she did. It was nice being in the car with her. We had an easier time talking when we were both facing straight ahead.”
“Maybe that’s why she wanted to teach you to drive.”
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, Newton’s Third Law of Motion, by which he meant forces come in pairs. With my gift of time from the university, I’d been trying to reach out, as they say, trying to make a family of friends. Just now it occurred to me what the opposite force was, the anchor to my year of visiting.
Leo raised his hand to cup the side of my neck and cheek, a gesture I love in movies, and I kissed him.