ANOTHER FAMILY MIGHT HAVE collectively planned out an approach to this garden. Another family might have sat down and discussed how it was actually going to work. They might have decided, logically, whether they really had the time and energy to take on a neglected half acre overgrown with weeds.
That is what you do in permaculture—before you design an installation, you ask the most important question, the one that decides everything that will follow. It’s not what vegetables you want to grow, or whether you prefer a woodland garden or want to raise cactus. The most important question in permaculture is simple: How much effort do you want to put in?
And then you round down, because everyone overestimates how much time and work they really want to take on. Everyone.
I liked to think about the family that would have done this. I imagined them as orderly Scandinavians—the sort with organized garages and wardrobes of white, all clean lines and minimalism. They would have sat down with graph-paper notebooks and spreadsheets and been honest about what they were willing to contribute, how many hours they could carve out of their week.
Maybe they would have said, Yes, we want to take on this huge, overgrown piece of land. Maybe they would have looked at their tidy calculations and said no and regretfully walked away. Regardless of the outcome, they would have been realistic about what they were getting into.
We were not that family. We did not have organized garages.
We talked about the garden—oh, yes! We talked about apricot trees and berry bushes, kiwi vines and kale. We assumed it would work. My mother would be in Seattle all winter, we’d both garden in the spring and fall, and I’d hold down the fort in the summer while she was in Canada. It sounded fine in theory.
Then she left, to be gone all summer. And it was not fine.
My mother had been out in the garden every day, weeding, amending soil, turning beds, planting kale and broccoli starts. Every time I came to the garden, it looked shaggy and rough, but I hadn’t realized how much work she had been putting in just to hold the tide at bay. Once June came she left, just as Seattle summer kicked into gear. The rain stopped, temperatures rose, the garden took off running, and with it, the weeds.
Permaculture had given me a new perspective on weeds, one I appreciated. “Soil wants to be covered,” explained my teacher Jenny. You could either do it yourself, she said, with plants or mulch, or the earth would do it for you—with weeds.
Now, when I saw bits of grass or dandelion popping up in my garden bed, I knew I was falling down on the job. I needed to cover the soil with some sort of mulch. I was okay with that.
What I hadn’t experienced was opportunistic weeds, the sort that don’t play by the rules. It didn’t matter how well I mulched or tended, these bullies were hell-bent on taking over.
With the warm weather, bindweed—also known by the more romantic and entirely misleading name morning glory—twisted tendrils out of the ground, reddish stems and heart-shaped leaves, and began to climb everything in sight.
It climbed trees and fences and burrowed under the wooden shingles of the backyard cottage. It twisted around every small, tender chard and kale plant, threatening to choke them to death. It encircled the peonies and wound up the trunk of the apple tree and laced itself through the prickly raspberry canes. At one point I found a vine growing inside the cottage, having bored into cracks in the foundation and through the carpet. The castle in “Sleeping Beauty” that is suddenly overgrown with vines? The story says it was roses, but any gardener will tell you it was bindweed.
Then there was the blackberry, insistent, thick, barbed with thorns. If bindweed is a stealth invader of the garden, blackberry is the crusading army: It brings its own weapons.
I had grown up with blackberry vines, but I hadn’t fully understood their persistence. I hadn’t noticed that some stalks are thin and eventually form berries while others are thick and aggressive. I began to think of those as an advance guard sent out to tame new land before the women and children came to colonize and settle. They forced forward with disregard, pushing up against anything in their way. They never developed flower buds; they never produced fruit; they were all fight and conquer.
I cut the aggressive stalks back—using tree-pruning loppers and sometimes my own body weight to force the blades closed. I cut them to the quick wearing canvas gloves so thick it was hard to move my fingers, and still the thorns occasionally pierced through.
I had bought the gloves in the garden department of a large home repair store. I took them to the counter, along with another pair that fit better and were more comfortable but less thick and heavy.
“Which of these do you think would be better for pulling blackberries?” I asked the two women wearing shop aprons.
“Sandpaper would be better,” one of them said, and for a moment I imagined my hands coarse, grainy, pebbled, and rough. Then I realized she was joking. I had not previously encountered gardener humor, which tends to the cynical and sarcastic. She nodded to the heavier gloves. I sighed.
“I was also wondering, is there anything you can do to get rid of morning glory?” I put the gloves on the counter and got ready to pay.
“You could try lasers,” the woman replied. Again, I wasn’t sure if I should believe her, but the idea of zapping the thousands of bindweed roots that laced through the garden sounded appealing.
She caught sight of my hopeful face the second before I realized she was again joking; then she responded more gently.
“Those roots might be coming from your neighbor’s yard—or some house halfway down the block. There’s nothing you can do but pull them up.”
That lady is really lucky I didn’t start to cry.
Suddenly it seemed ridiculous that I would be solely responsible for half an acre that threatened to go wild if you turned your back for more than two days. I had a job. I had a life. I did not want to be cooped up by myself in a garden, at war with a million weeds. I did not want to do battle against an endless and voracious invading army. What was I thinking when I decided this would be a good idea?
I say I had a job, but that summer it was debatable. After years of scut work in the publishing industry, eventually climbing up the ladder to become an editor, I had been given a contract to write a book—the contract that had allowed me to first come to Seattle. It was something I’d dreamed of doing since I was a little girl, my own literary version of Cinderella finally getting to go to the ball.
I’d had no idea how terrifying it would be. Nobody tells you Cinderella was scared senseless.
The writing was harder than expected. My whole first winter in Seattle I tried to write, and struggled, and cried, and went for long walks, and wondered what I was supposed to do with my life—because clearly this was not it. This dream I had chased after and sacrificed for: I never expected it to turn around and kick me in the teeth.
What is wrong with you? Do you know how lucky you are? Just pull it together.
I fell into a depression that winter, not realizing it was happening until it was over. I’d never experienced anything like a northwestern winter—it wasn’t the cold or even the wet that was the problem. It was the dark, the low cap of dense clouds that hovered over the city so you never got to feel the uplift of a wide-open, expansive sky. It was the gray that felt like it was pressing down, making it seem hard to take a deep breath. No matter how I tried to pull it together, the threads kept unraveling in my hands.
The book came out the first spring my mother was in Seattle—this book I had struggled to write and never could make what I wanted. Everyone thought I should be excited, proud, but I wanted to run and hide. Instead of celebrating my book, I secretly hoped it would just go away.
It would be a long time before I learned how common these feelings are, how many artists are embarrassed by their own imperfect efforts.
When book promotion was over, I came back to Seattle shattered in a way that was hard to explain, hard even to understand. I felt like I had failed—like there must be something wrong with the person who is given their dearest wish and screws it up.
Who does that?
“Do you know how many people there are stuck in cubicles right now who would give anything to write a book?” my friend Sam said when we ran into each other in a bookstore. Sam knew how to call a spade a spade.
I imagined mindless work in an anonymous setting, gray walls that went on forever. Clocking in and out at a set time each day, a reliable paycheck every two weeks. Rather than stifling it sounded comforting; it sounded safe. I bit down hard on my inner lip, not wanting him to hear my voice quaver.
“The way I’m feeling right now, a cubicle sounds like a pretty good place to hide.”
Sam looked at me with a measured gaze. “Then maybe it’s not your dream.”
I hadn’t put such thoughts to words until he said it. I hadn’t dared. What if the thing you think you want turns out to not make you happy? What then?
Going to the garden had started to feel like solace, like escape from a reality that had turned sour. I cried sometimes, deep in the weeds. I thought of Isak Dinesen, who once wrote, “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.”
That summer the garden was sweat and tears—and though the water that could be partially glimpsed through the trees was not the sea, it was wide and smooth and made me feel better, as though my problems were perhaps not so big.
That summer I started thinking seriously about alternate careers. Perhaps I should become a kindergarten teacher—I used to work with kids; I had gotten burned out but I loved it. Perhaps I should put my permaculture certificate to use and design gardens. In the short run, I needed to be working. The long run was newly open and terrifying.
“I’m thinking of doing some work with kids again,” I told my friend Sarah as we walked the three-mile loop trail that encircles Green Lake in North Seattle, weaving in and out of inlets ringed with marsh grasses and willow trees. I hadn’t told her how gutting the book experience had been—I hadn’t told anyone. How can you when your friends are so pleased for you?
“Really? Why would you do that?” Sarah was a writer too. She couldn’t imagine not wanting to write. Writing was what we did.
“I’m thinking about doing something different. Maybe just for the summer. The idea of not sitting at a computer sounds kind of nice.”
A few weeks later my phone rang. It was Sarah.
“Were you serious about wanting to work with kids for the summer?” she asked.
“Maybe—why?”
“My friend Karen needs someone to look after her toddler two days a week—her mom usually does it, but she had a heart attack. Are you interested?”
I hadn’t known how serious I was. When I went to meet Karen and Lucy, however, I liked them both. Lucy was a two-year-old, shy and inquisitive with a head of blond curls. Karen was a journalist, smart, funny, down to earth. When I emailed her a quickly-pulled-together résumé of my background working with kids—years of nannying, teaching, working as a summer camp counselor—she replied with a wry note that made me laugh.
“It appears that you’re actually more qualified to watch Lucy than I am.”
Slipping into that role again was easy; it was comfortable. It didn’t challenge me the way writing did. It didn’t scare me. It was my version of a cubicle: a good place to hide.
The clincher, however, the factor that tipped the scales and made me say yes, was this. Out of the entire city of Seattle, a civic area stretching 142 square miles, pockmarked with lakes, bays, and peninsulas, Karen, Lucy, and Lucy’s dad lived in the same sleepy, unfashionable, off-the-beaten-path neighborhood as my mom. They lived three blocks from the garden.
In my imagination, Lucy and I would spend our afternoons in the garden. We would eat peas and cherry tomatoes; we would explore the woodsy areas, finding wild strawberries along the way. We would play with the balls and toys my mother had stocked. We would do all the lovely things I wanted to do with my nieces, whose schedule was often too busy to accommodate garden time.
The first visit started with strawberries. The Shuksans were done for the season, but my mother had bought everbearing varieties, which I had planted in the hollow centers of the cinder blocks that formed the retaining wall of the side garden. I had imagined my nieces picking berries as they walked by.
It worked exactly as I had planned: Lucy could reach out and grab them with her small fingers, her whole hand closing around the bright red fruit. When she brought it to her mouth, the flavor was a surprise. Her eyes widened and she looked at me, biting deeper into the tart, sweet fruit.
Once we had eaten our way through the strawberries, we came around the back of the house and into the garden proper. I showed Lucy the small watering cans my mother had bought for the niecelets—shaped like a rabbit and a turtle. Lucy liked to fill them up, stand on the edge of the patio, and dump water on the flower bed beside it.
Beyond the patio was the upper lawn—a portion of grass preserved as play area. Only we didn’t have a lawn mower to keep it cut neatly, and my mother, in her dislike of lawns, refused to buy one. “Use the Weedwacker,” she said. “It works fine.”
But it didn’t work fine. Or I didn’t know how to work it. Or perhaps our weeds were not the sort to be easily whacked. I assumed a Weedwacker would have blades in it to cut the weeds, but ours functioned via two pieces of heavy plastic filament that were supposed to rotate fast enough to cut the grass. This seemed an improbable solution. The first time I tried to use the Weedwacker, I broke it. Or the weeds broke it. Our weeds laughed at plastic filament.
By the time Lucy and I came to the garden for our first visit, the weeds were growing tall. The grass was short—in the height of a Seattle summer, lawns actually stop growing for lack of water—but the dandelions were blooming proudly.
These were not the dandelions I was used to, which bloom in the spring and have abundant edible, jagged leaves. These dandelions had small, matted foliage and thin stems that reached upward, each capped with a bright yellow bloom. They were all over the lawn. The flowers reached my knees. On Lucy they came up to her waist; some were chest high. She got three steps into them and stopped walking.
“Go home?” she said hopefully.
“Not yet, Lucy. We’re just going to walk across the grass.”
“Noooooo.”
“Come on—we’re going to the cottage. There are games inside there.”
“No.” Lucy retreated to the patio and sat down on a small bench my mom had bought for the girls. “Go home.”
That was our first and last visit to the garden.
I went to the garden, of course. After a day spent with Lucy, at the playground, on walks, playing with crayons, and reading books, I went to the garden. I filled up watering cans and did my duty, irrigating strawberries and moving hoses from tree to tree. The watering routine alone took about an hour. Then I would stand there, on the patio, and look down the long and sloping yard at everything that needed to be done.
And then I would flee.
On the evenings I stayed in the garden, it was bittersweet. The garden was huge, there was so much to do, and there was only me. I often heard voices as I weeded or dug, conversation floating over the hedge from the neighbors at the far end of the meadow—they ate outside in the summer; they often entertained. I heard laughter and the clink of wineglasses as I squatted in the dirt, in grasses that were now up to my waist, grubby and lonely and completely overwhelmed.
What was I doing here all by myself? This wasn’t how I had imagined it at all.
It didn’t seem strange to be spending my days with a toddler. That summer it felt like everyone I knew was pregnant—six friends all due within a month of each other. Most of these were second or third children. As we moved through our thirties, it was what people did.
What was strange to me, after years of nannying as a teenager and college student, was that now Lucy could have been my child. When we went to the playground people assumed she was—but people had been assuming the child I was caring for was mine since high school. “Go with your mama,” a farmers’ market vendor had told the first little boy I nannied for. At seventeen, I had been shocked.
Now, in my thirties, it was much odder that Lucy wasn’t mine. Karen and I were about the same age. But Karen and her husband, Brian, had been together since they were sixteen. They had bought a house in their twenties, made a home. They had chosen to be a family.
I had chosen travel, adventure, writing. I’d spent more time alone than I had in relationships—and even though some had been passionate and thrilling, even though marriage and family had been discussed and considered, in the end none of them had felt right. My friends had long ago given up asking if I was dating anyone. They’d long ago given up trying to convince me I should.
One day I was looking through the website of a fellow writer. Amanda lived in Maine and was homeschooling her three children. Their days were filled with crafts and nature and books and the beach. In the winter they cozied up inside, she and her husband and their brood all in one small house.
I admired Amanda’s life and felt drawn to it—but not because I wanted it for myself. I never imagined myself mother to a large family. And yet, there was something in Amanda’s days of baking bread and walks in the woods and knitting sweaters and drawing and reading with her young ones that filled a hole in me that had long been empty.
Rather than wanting Amanda’s life, I think I wanted to be her kid.
The photo that stopped me was of her children—a puppy pile in pajamas, arms and legs a flurry of wrestling and tickling; you could almost hear the laughter. Suddenly I was in tears.
Fun. They were having fun. Family could be fun.
It was a truth I had never known. And I wept because my family had not been fun. My family had been struggle and fear and frantic attempts to somehow hold it together. It seemed no small miracle that we all survived.
I remember one day on the deck of our old house in the country when my brother and I invented a game while folding laundry. We each took a corner of a long flat sheet and put a wooden block in the middle, so that it sagged in the center like a hammock. We swung the sheet back and forth like a swing until it picked up enough speed that we could spin it around and it would make a full revolution without the block falling out. We thought this was amazing. We could do this for hours.
I don’t know how old we were. Perhaps I was nine and he was seven; maybe we were eight and six. What is striking about the memory is that there were no grown-ups around.
I know this can’t be true—we had babysitters who took us to school and cooked and did the grocery shopping. But it is there in all my childhood memories: the feeling of being alone with no one in charge, the weight of responsibility, the fear of messing things up, of making life worse for our mother.
No matter how much fun we were having, no matter how much my little brother laughed, I was the one who had to stop the game. I was the one who had to say, “No. We need to finish folding the laundry.”
When I was a child, people assumed I wanted to have a family. “You’re going to make a good mother someday,” grown-ups said when they saw me taking care of my brother or some other child in my charge. As I got older, it became a question: “Do you want to have kids?” As I entered my later thirties, the phrasing changed: “Don’t you want to have kids?”
When this happened I told the truth. It wasn’t the full story but it was enough. It kept people from asking further.
“I feel like I’ve raised a few already.”
My friend Sarah was one of the pregnant people that year. All spring we walked around Green Lake, her belly growing bigger and bigger. Come June she had her baby, a little girl. I visited shortly after they had returned from the hospital, in the middle of a rare Seattle heat wave. We sat outside on the back patio and ate the cold noodles I had brought while the hot, steamy day drew to a close.
We passed the bundle of baby around the table, her delicate fingers and elfin ears protruding from a blanket as Sarah’s older boys brought toys and books to show me and her husband worked the outdoor grill. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near a kitchen on a day like that.
“I need to get to the garden,” I told them, finally breaking my lethargy and handing back the baby.
“Oh, stay a little longer,” Sarah said, nestling her daughter onto her lap. “The boys will be going to bed soon and we can talk.”
“Yes, stay,” said her husband, Daniel. “It’s far too hot to garden.”
It was far too hot—and because their backyard had a breeze, because the water tinkling through the fountain that Daniel had installed was soothing, because new-baby time moves slow, I stayed. I stayed until it was ten o’clock.
By the time I got to the garden, the endless northern summer evening was finally at its close, a tiny bit of light still gathered at the horizon. I would have done a quick watering and come back the next day, but I was going out of town. Friends were getting married in California, and I would be gone for three days. The seedlings in the greenhouse, the ones I kept meaning to plant, wouldn’t survive. I needed to get them in the ground.
I had run out of garden bed area but thought I might make one of my own. As an experiment, I took one of the large cardboard boxes left over from sheet mulching—ten feet by five when spread open—and laid it on the grass in a sunny patch of the meadow. Then I built layers on top of it—soil, compost, and a bag of straw and chicken droppings my friends had given me from their backyard coop. I piled it all up until the bed was more than a foot high, a loose version of sheet mulching. I wanted to plant corn and beans and squash in it.
This was a “three sisters” bed—a Native American tradition of companion planting. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil and provide nutrition for the corn, a heavy feeding plant. The corn gives the beans a trellis to climb, and they in turn help secure the tall stalks. The squash produces large, prickly leaves that mulch the soil and discourage raccoons, who might otherwise eat the corn. The plants work together to help each other.
I thought of this as I built up the layers, shovelful after shovelful, watering down the soil, nestling in the small corn, bean, and squash seedlings. How many people had done this before me, for how many centuries? I felt like part of a chain reaching back generations. Digging, sowing, watering: planting the harvest. Small, vital acts to ensure our survival.
This work required many trips back and forth, from the patio where we kept the watering cans, shovels, and bags of soil, to the new bed I was building in the back field. The exterior lights illuminated the house, but to walk down the hill was to walk into darkness, to depend on the dim glow of the moon and the stars and my own growing familiarity with the land. It was still warm, even toward midnight, and I strode back and forth wearing a tank top and skirt, the dark and humidity a physical thing, a weight I could feel on my skin.
I tossed off my shoes, something I had never before done in the garden, and walked with bare feet on dry grass, feeling the damp beginning to turn into dew. With my soles I could read the land—the curvature of the path where so many had trod. In the dark I felt strong, powerful, a primal feeling of belonging. I was one with the wild grasses and the stars and the gathering breeze.
In that moment, at the end of a hot day, in the dark garden under a dim quarter moon, planting as so many had before me, there was no other place on earth I wanted to be.