The likeness of this present life is as water that
We send down out of heaven,
and the plants of the earth mingle with it
whereof men and cattle eat,
till, when the earth has taken on its glitter
and has decked itself fair,
and its inhabitants think they have power over it,
Our command comes upon it
by night or day, and We make it stubble, as though
yesterday it flourished not.
Even so We distinguish the signs for a people
who reflect.
—THE KORAN, SURAH 10:24, “JONAH”
Author’s footnote: The Koran (AD 610–629) variously uses “We,” “He,” and “Allah” to refer to God.
I AWAKEN TO GUNSHOTS. Have I fallen asleep with the television on again? No; no electronically induced gloaming emanates from across the room. As that fact of darkness registers, so does awareness that it is no longer deer season—meaning that cannot be it, either. No one is shooting, not some MI-5 character on the TV monitor, risking peril in defense of the realm; not some local hunter tromping through the woods in the predawn, hoping to fill the freezer or perhaps just bring home bragging rights with a six-pointer.
It is winter, a very cold night in winter, and the trees are talking back.
My aging skin is talking back, too, thirsty for the thick, steamy aftermath of an August sun shower, or even of the fog that settles here on fall mornings as the earth releases warmth it stored all growing season and with it moisture into a receptive, alchemical sky that completes the equation, sending down the lowest kind of cloud. Why hasn’t my species adapted better to life indoors in winter, the way many bromeliads shaped themselves to their high-in-the-sky, not-rooted-in-the-soil native treetop homes by forming their leaves in a cuplike arrangement to catch whatever droplets fall (and the occasional yummy insect, who turns the collected water to nourishing broth)? I absentmindedly scratch the dry patch on my forearm in the mist of semisleep, take a thankfully insect-free sip from the Mason jar located by groping in the general vicinity of the nightstand, and try to settle back.
Someone fires off a few more rounds.
Apparently none of us can get comfortable tonight—not the trees, and certainly not one fifty-something gardener sequestered like a piece of tinder inside a heated box she calls home in every season, not just in this brittlest one spent mostly therein confined. In here—or truthfully maybe anywhere, anytime at my age—I cannot take in enough water to plump up all dewy and fresh. I am no garden after a spring rain; I am not spring at all, any longer, except in my ever-juicy cache of recollections. Nothing lasts; just yesterday, I stood before the mirror in the dining room and pulled back my face momentarily as if a too-tight ponytail were doing the pulling, while contemplating mini-face-lifts, low humidity, and the inexorable ravaging of age. Outside, the native black locusts and maples are feeling not old or parched, exactly, but rather overstuffed—too big for their britches, or at least their bark—as sap and other liquids inside them expand beyond capacity.
Bang. Bang-bang-bang. Shoot ’em up, baby.
Nobody seems to be at ease right now, a consequence of the watery nature we living things have in common, the trees and me included. It hurts to be too dry or too cold when you are really just one of nature’s many intricate vessels, as we all are, far more labyrinthine than the jelly jar beside me perhaps, but each a mere vessel just the same.
And so I adjust again in the darkness, shifting the duvet and my hoodie and nudging at the men’s white cotton sweat socks, the ones I buy in the plastic three-packs, urging them upward one after the other with the toe of the opposite foot to please cover any gap where the cold might find me. Then I nestle in to listen to the arboreal artillery. Might as well enjoy the show; there’s no fighting back.
As another long night evaporates a drop at a time, I find myself thinking in liquid form: like how frogs and their amphibian kin seem most comfortable in their skins in a rainstorm—the bigger the better—when they move about on the hunt with positive celebratory abandon. (Slugs and insects beware!) I recall longingly how in the wake of soaking rain recalcitrant weeds become compliant, agreeing to slip, roots and all, from the ground with just a gentle tug. It’s as if they are happy to come away with me and give up their lusty ways—as if it were their pleasure, not mine. I think about days when the sweat socks stay in the drawer and bare feet press, four prints apiece, into dew-soaked grass when they step outside first thing, even before tea, to feed the fish and birds out back—the ritual like an ablution with which I baptize each new day—then make their way back home.
I contemplate the pull, and power, of water—the place where all life began, and the only naturally occurring substance found in all three states at earthly temperatures, solid to liquid to gas—until it is time to welcome another dark morning and put the kettle on to boil. As much as I can study up on water, memorizing that it weighs 8.33 pounds per gallon, for instance, or that beneath a depth of 656 feet almost no light penetrates the ocean, I do not thereby become one ounce more capable of convincing this primal element to do as I would like, tonight or anytime.
None of us can have his or her or its way, at least not now; we must simply try to lay low, each in our own manner, until it’s over—not unlike what our analogs in the driest, hottest places must do in their most severe season, in the torpor of estivation. Frozen water, no water, too much water—obstacles all for we who try to live on in spite of something. (No wonder we coined the expression “in hot water” for troubled and uncomfortable times. Ouch!) Though they have been unseen since November, I know that aquatic frogs, whose mad splashing and syncopated belching delight me when conditions allow, now lie in a semifreddo hibernation on top of the muck at the bottom of my backyard water gardens. The weeds have mostly likewise made their retreat, but they have posted rhizomes and roots and seeds like sentries on stakeouts so they can recapture territory for each of the invader species the minute conditions are deemed favorable. That will be no time soon; we all have months to go, whatever our intentions. I shouldn’t even think such thoughts, though, as they stir the start of a shiver no socks or sweatshirt can insulate against. How much longer; how many more times must we call for the gravel spreader to liberate us, or have the oil tank retopped?
We must wait, because the year ushers itself in at 42.11°N latitude and 73.51°W longitude—the center of my universe, and my center of gravity—not all fluid and cooperative and available, but typically quite inhospitably frozen, as if to say just go away. Many sometime-resident songbirds did just that, and other creatures burrowed underground or into a crevice somewhere before the current realities set in, in rock or trunk or maybe even in my penetrable old foundation and the holey basement it pretends to enclose. Brrr, baby, brrr.
On the most brutal days, sap, soil, and every surface is as solid and cold as ice, or even enclosed in or bursting at the seams with water’s winter avatar, since it’s not that things like silt or clay or sand or gravel or rocks freeze, exactly—it’s all about the pores. The water that filled the pore spaces between those particles of soil, or between bits of stone large and small or any other void it could find, has been transformed to pore ice, taking up more room as a solid than it did in liquid state. Ouch again. Up comes the fencepost; there go the Heuchera I tucked in a little too late last fall in the bed along the front walkway. Such levitation acts are going on (unsanctioned by me) behind the curtain of snow, I know they are. Ice is the puppeteer; all of us are merely its marionettes, and for my part I am inclined to lose my footing with regularity when in its not-so-nonskid grip. My bone density scan indicates this is a bad place to be right now.
I live on seasonally frozen ground this time of year, like more than half the land in the Northern Hemisphere, an equation whose main causal factors are temperature and water. But other than in such violent heaving as always befalls my Heuchera, or when the wind gets really bossy, or when I dare to try to walk over to the sand-and-salt bucket to treat the driveway when I should be crawling, we are all—living and nonliving things here alike right now—joined in a suspended animation of sorts, or at least on notice not to push it; to take things really, really slow. Trees dare not bend too far; I, too, hear my joints popping in complaint when I climb the stairs each night (or even late afternoon, when I have had it with days that go dark at four and cannot endure an upright position of attention a moment past five).
We wait, all of us—though some more quietly and uncomplainingly than others.
THIS IS MY TWENTY-FIFTH WINTER in this place, though I suppose I am stretching it a bit to say this piece of land and I have endured twenty-five winters of each other’s company. It’s only since the closing days of 2007 that we have lived together nonstop. In that time, I have spent only a single night away, to lecture in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2011. We are constant companions now, yes—truthfully, neither of us has anywhere else to go or to be—but you know how that is: Some days are frankly better than others. And some are downright rocky, even when you have paid your dues in time and attentiveness, as we both have, each in our own way.
Perhaps the garden’s and mine is a long marriage by virtue of the very fact that for most of those years we were long-distance lovers, unable to be together more than weekends and vacations. I had a job, and it fed both of us, keeping us in shovels and seeds, so off I went each Sunday night or Monday morning after another embrace or temporary fusion of a gardener and her garden, each an all-too-brief encounter. I had to support my spendthrift darling, who always had a real jones for plants that I was happy to indulge. As it goes with all such geographically challenged affairs, though, you reach a moment where either you break up or one of you must relocate, and the garden wouldn’t move. That’s why I live here today.
Twenty-five years. Looking out the window right now, I think how fitting it is that to commence our quarter-centennial, nature delivered to us a gleaming tundra—a nonstop silvery winter landscape, a gift wrapping, if not a gift exactly. Its windblown surface is wildly beautiful if also a bit overwhelming, not unlike the way I feel about the garden beneath the surface when the wrapper melts and (s)he gets naked and shows her truer, needier side.
Happy silver anniversary, baby. I’m sorry that I always try to push you around, and make you do things that don’t come naturally. I’m sorry that I am a control freak and a critic, even worse, walking around with my stupid clipboard muttering about and noting your vulnerable parts that I deem to be in need of cosmetic surgery (look who’s talking), but never making similarly bulleted, exclamation-pointed lists of your many assets. Was your life better when you had more privacy, and weekdays to yourself?
We try to make each other happy—we really do—but sometimes, well, (s)he can be a little relentless and demanding, or at least that’s my side of the story. I assume I would be accused of being distracted and even neglectful; of spending too much time staring out at the situation or writing my ridiculous to-do lists rather than taking action—of letting her let herself go. Relationships, particularly long ones, take patience and passion both, two words springing from one root—the Latin pati-, “to suffer,” whose past participle is pass-, meaning “to feel,” or “suffer,” or “endure,” or “submit.” (Makes you want to ask your doctor to start calling you a client, doesn’t it? At least the root of that word only means “to listen, follow, obey,” which beats suffering.)
“Patience is passion tamed,” wrote the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century progressive Congregationalist clergyman Lyman Abbott, who also confessed a fondness for flowers but not for dirt, preferring to buy rather than grow his blooms. Smart man; it saves a lot of heartache, laundry soap, strokes of a stiff brush—and time.
Winter, in particular, takes a taming of one’s passion and extended patience. Things are locked up tight, and there is no set day marked for the reopening, though for me summer, with its sometimes-blazing heat and potential shortage of rain resources, is the most hard-hearted time of all.
DEEP FREEZE OR NO, the garden never closes. Yes, I am upstairs burrowing—though not as productively as the local female black bear, who actually often delivers her young while in hibernation in January or February. My other fair-weather cohabitants are underground or underwater or gone south, but even in an old-fashioned winter such as this one’s proving to be, the garden never closes.
Each fall, gardening friends can be heard swapping tales of garden cleanup and whatever the year’s aberrant weather brought, while also sounding their annual lament: “The season’s almost over,” they say, the level of their voiced despair growing louder as each week passes. “Another year gone.” Maybe I am just stubborn—not a bad quality to have when you work a steep hillside in USDA Hardiness Zone 5B—but such talk rankles me. I see no evidence that the garden is ever really out of season. Not even today, at 19 degrees Fahrenheit with thirteen inches of snow on the ground. It doesn’t close up shop or shut its doors on me or to visual enjoyment. It never stops teaching, either, making its at-once spectacular, scientific, and sensual appeals for awareness. The local garden centers may need to stand idle a portion of each year, between the last Christmas tree strapped to a car roof for the trip home (fa la la la la, la la la la!) and the first flat of violas or pansies put out for sale just over three months later, but not the landscape itself.
And so, stubbornly and defiantly all these years, at first accidentally and lately more intentionally as my knowledge has grown, I suppose I have made a garden for 365 days. Good thing I did, since I now live in it year-round, having left my career, paycheck, and the relentless city for a place where not much else is on the social calendar but staring out at it or writing about it or being outside in it, depending on the time of day and year.
Hear my confession: To make a year-round garden was not my plan, or at least not a conscious one I could have explained when I began digging holes on an overgrown, bramble-infested bit of Columbia County, New York, land, a steep tract two-plus hours and a world away from Manhattan, where full wheelbarrows fight against maintaining an upright position and carefully applied mulch relocates great distances downhill at the slightest provocation in the form of a downpour. The spot had little more to recommend it horticulturally beyond a half-dozen very old apples, two big conifers, and a mismatched trio of ancient lilacs—two pale lavender Syringa vulgaris, sort of your basic old-time garden variety, and one a slightly less typical silvery-blue variant. My 365-day garden style was actually a happy side effect—but in this case my curiosity about birds was the catalyst.
Because birds’ needs vary at different times of year, I read up and intentionally filled the garden with plants to satisfy them—and in the process unintentionally surrounded myself with plants that do more than flower momentarily and then just stand there, the way a lilac does, or (shudder) a forsythia. I call that ubiquitous yellow upchuck “vomit of spring,” and prefer to look at it from a distance, like the two very large unpruned old Forsythia x intermedia far beyond my fence line that probably once marked a long-gone farmhouse’s drive. The genus Viburnum, for instance, became one of my original collectibles, as I sought among its many species a self-serve automat of summer fruit, fall fruit, and even some winter fruit to sustain avian visitors who were raising families, traveling onward, or staying here into the tough times and somehow keeping warm. Fruit comes from pollinated flowers, so (in pursuit of fruit) I got the blooms to enjoy in spring—and in some cases good fall foliage, too (though that had nothing to do with the reproductive process the way the flowers did). It was from plants like these that I learned that the garden was willing to show off without a day off—and also attract the maximum number of birds if only I helped it a little with some strategic decisions (more specifics on how to make a bird-friendly garden are in the sidebar on here).
Winter’s first major flock of cedar waxwings took on fall’s remaining supply of crabapples yesterday, for instance, and I got an even better view when they came to drink at the frog pond this morning, treating the floating deicer as a pontoon from which to launch maneuvers. Like his accidental mother, Jack is a birdwatcher. He is, for good reason—to protect songbirds—not allowed outdoors during daylight hours unsupervised. But he’s content these days to watch the feline “Discovery Channel” I have long called Cat Network TV through the windows and glass doors pretty much all day, or at least between naps and meals. These crisply painted birds with their crested heads and masked faces home in on off-season fruit in the garden, such as the hollies’ and the crabapples’ and the eastern red cedar’s (Juniperus virginiana), from which the waxwings get part of their name. I have a giant such tree in my front yard, and I can watch them from my bed each morning, which, because the site is so precipitous, is on a level with the top third of the juniper—not something I planted myself, or planned. Knowing what I know now about the pleasure of birdwatching in bed, however, I would highly recommend figuring this angle of observation into a garden design. Bed as treehouse? Dreamy.
That from-inside-out anecdote is an example of the other important thing I know about garden design, another insight I got inadvertently as well, simply because I never sit down in the garden long enough to really view it from outdoors. Out there, I am typically doing something—weeding, dragging hoses, mowing (or simply panicking, which takes a lot of time, but is good exercise if you pace or stagger about and wring your hands while in the throes). It’s from indoors that most of my garden viewing takes place—including long hours just watching in the colder-weather months such as today—a fact that motivated me to make the “off-season” scenery more inviting with massed winterberry hollies, colorful twig willows and dogwoods, or remarkable conifers, for instance, on various axes from my favorite seats. Looking out the window is where any home landscape design process must begin (see the Garden Design 101 sidebar, here).
Making any garden, but especially one with more than one-trick-pony performance in spring or summer, requires a combination of tactics, not all of them horticultural. There must be water that remains unfrozen, whatever the weather—even a little water, a trough or a birdbath or a small-scale inground pool with the right-sized floating heater to keep it open, not iced over. No other element works harder than water to sustain the garden’s community; we are all made of it. And yes, you must also select good plants with a range of features and peak moments, and site them well—easiest to accomplish by first going inside and looking out the window, imagining what the desired view is before digging any holes. But that’s all the intellectual part—make a water feature, choose multiseason plants—that’s part of the “how-to.”
I am fairly certain that to make a 365-day garden you must also learn all over again how to see—to see beyond the big blue Hydrangea and other obvious show-offs, right down to the shapes of buds and textural complexity of bark, and the way the play of light and shadow, sounds and smells, and even movement contribute to the living pictures. When I go lecture to garden groups, a process that builds to a crescendo of incessant (insane?) hand-waving as I speak, I always notice that I touch my chest reflexively when I talk about this last bit, as if to say, “You must learn to see with your heart; the eyes won’t do in the hardest months.” You must look viscerally, not somatically; it will take you in the direction of the light. This critical cultivation of the other senses forges a deeper communion between garden and gardener, and recognition of the one life cycle “it” and we are both part of. And that is where the “woo-woo” portion of my gardening equation comes into play: when that connection is made.
A dose of “woo-woo” definitely helps, particularly when you are looking out on the dead quiet of an old-fashioned snowy winter as I am now—quite a different scene from the one in May, or even October. Most days I can be patient, but at this moment I am the little girl I was on all those annual winter trips to Florida, hocking my weary parents from the backseat of the green Ford station wagon: Are we there yet?
I DO TEND TO TAKE A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW, even from my preferred vantage point on solid ground. During a break in a big storm one night, I made the ritual rounds: shovel, sweep, salt, sand the walkways—and then somehow found my way to a few special conifers in the garden, high-stepping in my tallest boots. With gentle upward strokes, I moved to lighten the snow load on those who bear their burdens badly, but whom I could not bear to lose.
Whoosh! Out from the invisible interior of one tree’s limbs burst a spray of dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis), like four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Oops, but also: Aha! What a startling reminder for uncertain times that would seek to blow us off course or ruffle our feathers: best to just hunker down and wait it out. If creatures weighing in at just over three-quarters of an ounce can find shelter in a storm, so can I.
This is how it is between me and the birds: a constant dialogue, even when they are not singing. Like my grade-school teachers bringing a wiggly class to order, or the Zen master sounding the alert anytime, birds always seem to be calling, Attention! Attention! I openly admit to paying them heed, since to do otherwise would be to forgo some of nature’s most instructive and inspiring object lessons. The birds are guides, totems, and trusted friends. I count on them, so it is a small price to grow all those hollies to provide lipid-rich wintertime fruit, or fill the feeder and keep the frog pools unfrozen all winter, where the birds don’t just drink but also bathe—feathery shades of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club.
Not wishing to disturb anyone either botanical or avian, I use a household broom on some shrubby conifers, always working with an upward action—no rough stuff, either—because the coated branches are heavy enough without me pulling them downward that way, and can be brittle if the weather’s really cold. I used to use an apple-picker with a red basketlike contraption on one end, but I seem to have misplaced it many years ago—if you can misplace something ten feet long that does not fold or otherwise voluntarily shrink from view. But a broom can only extend my reach so far, and this is not ladder weather. For the upper reaches, I have repurposed a twelve-foot length of ¾-inch quarter-round molding from the lumberyard, a piece left over from some long-ago home renovation that serves its unintended task well; adaptive reuse. It’s strong but flexible, the best combination of qualities in so many situations both botanical and otherwise—bend but don’t break, baby—and I weave the flexible piece of wood up through the branches and then kind of jiggle it as if it were a lasso minus the noose at one end. My action causes a reverberation up top that shakes loose the snow without seeming to harm anything. It’s all in the wrist.
The reincarnated molding-that-wasn’t serves for tackling beginning icicles on the eaves that would in time form dams on the roof, too, if I let them get ahead of me—or if the winter is just too incredibly mean, like this one wants to show me it can be. Bully. But I go at it anyhow, eyes ever roofward toward a harsh and frozen heaven. Think pole-vaulter without the liftoff; me and my long strong-but-flexible stick. I’ve got all the moves, but I never quite get off the ground.
I DO SLIGHTLY CRAZY THINGS, but I have my reasons—or so I tell myself on the attempted rebound from each questionable episode as I dust or dry off and apply the appropriate balm or bandage. I blame the garden, and the water gardens I dug twenty-odd years ago in the backyard are particular culprits in my many mini-demises. Lead me not into temptation? Nonsense. A girl can really take a walk on the wild side in any season when there is a large water-filled hole, plumbing parts, and electricity involved, all ringed with irregularly shaped, winter-wobbly, summer-slippery paving stones that drop off abruptly at the man-made shoreline. If I were an Olympic diver, the move I made last night would have a degree of difficulty of 3.6, though I hoped to skip the somersaults and never even hit the water, with or without a clean entry.
For this attempt to rescue my frog pond’s inhabitants from death by suffocation under ice (apparently the floating electric deicer meant to do so failed), it was almost dark, air temperature 7 degrees Fahrenheit, winds eighteen miles per hour. The approach: Snow shovel at the ready, I maneuver through thigh-high drifts maybe halfway to where I approximate the snow-covered copingstones begin at the pool’s edge, just under thirty feet from the kitchen door. I cannot be sure since this all-white moonscape renders even my familiar backyard devoid of landmarks or perspective; I could be anywhere. In that last stretch of the journey, though—maybe for the final ten feet—I stop tromping through the deep white camouflage and dig a trench wide enough for my body and then some.
Before I lower myself into what I all the while try to avoid imagining may be my grave, I gently slide my shovel back behind me in the trench. Not gently enough: Like a luge on a well-prepared track the tool travels scarily fast to the end of the icy surface, jumping up and out onto the deep snow where my excavation project ends. Note to self: Move slowly. Or else. Then I lie facedown in the glacial hollow, now filled not with fresh snow that had some traction—the stuff I’d tossed aside—but with the residue of last week’s and last month’s precipitation, compressed, collapsed layers of the freeze-thaw, freeze-thaw slippery variety. This is the first prostration; I surrender to the holy water. I am hoping my head and shoulders are positioned near the pool’s edge now, but I cannot tell what starts or ends where, pool-wise, because ice covers its surface. That’s how I knew something was wrong and embarked on this mission: I had by chance looked out the upstairs window just before dusk, and the pool’s surface was all one color—white—meaning no yin-yang dark-light blend of unfrozen-frozen, such as it remains when the floating deicer is functional. In good times, open water reads as nearly black; ice as white. All black would be all right, but not all white.
Next I stretch my left arm almost beyond its reach hoping to find the outlet I know is positioned on the low wall behind the pool. Always best to power things off before attempting a repair, even if they seem to have oh-so-inconveniently done that themselves already. If I am guessing right, it should be about here, I calculate, and I dig in the snow with a gloved, outstretched hand, not a tool, to locate the gray metal trapdoor to the ground fault circuit interrupter box. Jamming a shovel in the vague direction of a buried electrical device seems imprudent. Bingo. I have found, and pulled, the floating heater’s plug.
Oh, but shit. Where is some small electrical device—a night-light or anything I should have carried to test whether there is power getting to the duplex at all, whether it’s the plug or the appliance that’s kaput? Forgotten. No turning back now; assuming it’s live, I need to disable the box, too. (Buy one of those pen-sized voltage testers, Margaret, won’t you?) Off with a glove, and then, a Braille-like moment of running a fast-freezing finger over the face of the now-empty duplex. I’m feeling for six holes and—if I can find them—two nearly flat buttons each half as wide as my pinky fingernail but elusively set almost flush with the rest of the works. Oh where are the buttons and which one is off? Groping, groping. Ah!
Electricus interruptus.
Finally. Onward; there is other work to do. From the pockets of my warmest jacket, which is nowhere near warm enough for lying in an icy ditch—um, do breasts get frostbite?—I grab a flashlight in one hand, and in the other, a hammer.
And now, finally, the big move itself, the one I came out here for: to crack the ice somehow before it’s too late. I am lucky; it’s not too thick yet. Banging on ice isn’t very friendly to those who slumber beneath, but neither is suffocation from a lack of gas exchange. Had it been thicker—oh, right now I can’t even think about that possibility, not until I thaw myself a bit, but failure would have involved a metal mixing bowl set on top of the ice dosed up with endless refills of boiling water to gradually melt a hole. It would have required lots of trips back and forth over a glazed surface with a steaming kettle in one hand to this impossible spot on this impossible night.
I have broken through, but I am not done. Can I get the heater to work after all? I have a backup I can try—or is it in fact the plug? Seems so. My hands can’t take this kind of work for long in these conditions, so I must soon surrender. Repairs to be continued.
Low-tech Plan B, requiring many fewer trips than the mixing-bowl scenario: I repeated the hammering periodically throughout the night, setting the alarm at three-hour intervals, to protect my beloved amphibians. Who needs beauty sleep, when potential princes are at risk? Damn the complexion, and what’s another cracked and bloody cuticle among many? A gardener—especially one with a frog pond in wintertime and friends who sleep therein—must be versatile, well equipped, and ever at the window, watching for beauty, yes, but for trouble, too.
IN MY VERY FLUID IMAGINATION, one thematic current of youth long past goes like this:
No school today! Mrs. Schelling cannot torture me about my awkward penmanship, a casualty of skipping third grade when apparently the art of smoothing blocky capitals into connected shapes was taught, or the fact that I—yes, again, ma’am—seem to have left my wooden recorder home. Freedom. It is Saturday morning, and I pedal my hefty pink-and-white-and-silver Schwinn down to the pet store, streamers catching the wind of my locomotion. Two long walls of stacked glass aquariums on heavy welded-iron stands hold countless tropical fish—hundreds of gleaming neon tetras, their metallic bodies striped blue and red; silver tiger barbs, whose black markings ran top to bottom instead; vivid orange platys; kissing gouramis the color of the palest pinky-peach inside of a shell, but pearlescent. Everyone shimmers, catching rays of simulated sunlight from fluorescent hoods that delineate the artificial tropospheres of their approximated tropics.
At first I imagined it was Mona who pedaled along with me on her bike, but of course my adult-brain reality check says it could not have been, for we would have had to cross busy Northern Boulevard unsupervised to get to Mr. Van Asch’s store that sat on the city line, straddling Queens and Nassau counties. That was beyond the limits of our privileges, I realize now, and of sanity or safety. Perhaps I biked there with Vivien, whose father kept giant tanks of salt- and freshwater fish in their basement, where in another alcove the female elders of her Hungarian family stocked brine-filled jars of pickles and other canned goods on heavy shelves, each awaiting its turn at the table. Glug, glug, glug.
Vivien lived on the same side of the boulevard as the pet store, but even so, I did not—so how did this all work?—but no matter, because in the fusion of accurate images sometimes recombined inaccurately that forms my story of growing up, I rode my bike there, and often. Creative license.
However I found my way, I can state without much hesitation that Elodea and sword plants were my first attempts at growing botanical things of any kind. I buried their rubber-banded, cut-off ends in gravel long before I sliced into any soil, and I confess that I included their plastic counterparts—yes, artificial plants, and not even good, believable ones in those days—in the submersed designs. My horticultural roots are not in the landscape but as an aquascaper; the first magazine after Highlights for Children that I subscribed to: Tropical Fish Hobbyist. It would be another decade or so before I traded up, literally, to above-the-surface-focused publications such as Horticulture or the Royal Horticultural Society’s The Garden. Maybe I should have stuck to aquariums and the similarly contrived, contained terrariums that have come and gone as a passion a few times in this life to date, too. Everything looks so much more manageable in a garden where a tweezer is the biggest tool, and no one can creep (or swim) out of bounds, beyond the glass walls.
I can also say with certainty that those dozens of Saturdays and thousands of other hours spent staring into watery worlds—and the happy gurgling and splashing provided by a charcoal-and-glass-wool filter that I’d dutifully change each week without being told—was the training camp for my older years as friend of frogs. It also explains the four pet-store comets (goldfish-like, they can live in water as cold as 35° and do here out back in winter). Feeding fish is something I have almost always done each day, like drinking tea or washing my hair. Water soothes, transports, cleanses.
It is a sad time of year when the bedroom window must shut to cold, cutting me off from the sound of the water gardens. At first it’s just now and then, a chilly evening or two, and eventually for good, when seriously cold nights one after another force me to close down the pump mechanisms sometime in November, so that the just-a-bigger-diameter version of the tubing I brought home in my bike basket doesn’t freeze. Bubble, bubble, toil and (sometimes) trouble—but also pure delight.
WATER MADE ME DO IT. It was probably an upbringing beside a silt-choked bay that made me an organic gardener when I finally put shovel to soil instead of hook, line, and sinker into the drink, or an algae scraper into a twenty-gallon tank. Life beside the bay also formed me as someone who doesn’t eat fish or other seafood, despite growing up in a household where kippered herring were not uncommon breakfast fare—and in case anyone had thoughts of sleeping in, think again: There is no alarm signal quite like the smell of those nasty little filets simmering in milk on top of the range. Paella was a dinner-party specialty of my father’s, or if the weather permitted a clambake, the family even actually drank the gritty broth from the double-boiler-like granitewear contraption he had steamed the bivalves in. Each such day I—the milkman’s daughter—prayed that someone might throw me a culinary life preserver.
Long before I learned about the implied meanings of so-called “signal words” on household and gardening products—revealing whether a substance is merely worthy of “caution” or rather rates a prominent “warning,” or even “danger,” and possibly even “poison,” too—I had my own evaluating system, basically guided by my nose. I still remember my first experiences with the chemical aisle of the garden center, and how you could find it without looking at the overhead signs or asking. But what came first in olfactory memory was a whiff of what was dumping into the bay.
Giant pipes carrying storm runoff and with it presumably some effluent from hundreds of local septic systems jutted through the water side of the seawall ringing our town, pouring into Little Neck Bay where New York City meets Long Island on its north shore. Eventually, in the late 1960s, big rigs undertook a dredging project, and we finally all started to use the word “pollution” with regularity, as if it had just been discovered—or perpetrated for the very first time. Such sights taught me an early, lasting lesson about humankind’s formidable waste stream, and especially its impact on those creatures (literally) downstream from it, who can’t run, or fly, or swim away—mollusks, for example, such as the American hard-shelled clam that was once an edible prize of local waters. Equipped with one primitive “foot” more suited for burying themselves than traveling, it is hard to go anywhere, even if their habitat got clogged with deposits that didn’t make a suitable bed any longer, and loaded with toxins they couldn’t filter out with their set of long siphons the way they might a too-big chunk of something more benign.
The hard-shelled clam, also known as a littleneck or cherrystone depending on its size, was once shipped from Little Neck Bay to restaurants in New York and even Europe, but it didn’t take long for pollution to shut the industry down just before the turn of the twentieth century. (Further digression from this admitted digression: I love the quahog’s Latin name, Mercenaria mercenaria. Isn’t the language of taxonomy wonderful for christening things? I suspect it derives from a related root word that’s earlier than the one meaning “hireling,” as we imply when we say “mercenaries”—perhaps from merces, for “reward or wages.” Could it have been chosen because the shells were the stuff of Indian wampum? I wonder. Put it on my life list of things to find out someday, the list I’ll need several reincarnations and then some to ever get sorted out.) Whatever else you call the clam, you can call it a victim, and along with the resident fish, they were the first environmental victims I knew about, before I owned a garden book or a nature guide—or understood that we would become our own environmental victims, too, killing ourselves slowly with supposed progress. (A related rant, about transgenic hybrids or GMOs, and why I don’t do business with companies who don’t guard against knowingly selling them, is in the sidebar on here.)
Apparently my mother remained attached to a happy ignorance before the dredging crews arrived, and as she had during her childhood in the same town, we fished off the local dock for winter flounder, often catching horseshoe crabs or eels in the process, or the occasional bluefish from the little beaches along the shoreline. Besides a revulsion at the suggestion that I bait my own hook with a madly protesting worm, I couldn’t get past the image of the enormous pipes spilling all that mystery liquid into the bay. Trying to catch dinner by dropping a line into a noxiously seasoned bouillabaisse? Disgusting.
Even after the dredging was done, rendering the bay deeper and presumably cleaner for a moment, I had questions. Where did they put the stuff they removed? If a clam declared it uninhabitable, what do you do with it? You couldn’t put all that tainted slurry just anywhere—or could you? These were the years of land grab by landfill, with significant local salt marshes lost before the wakeup call, so I’d bet that someone lives and maybe even gardens on the discards now. There were other horrors, such as when a developer filled a former marshland in town to create a new community, including a model home. The family that bought it were all either killed or badly injured when the house exploded one night because a gas line cracked as the house settled into anything-but-solid ground. The resounding lesson: You can’t fool mother nature (though the marketing ploys on bags and boxes and bottles of gardening products seem to insist otherwise, even today).
I admit that certain such bloom-, butterfly-, and bird-covered labels tempted me into a couple of rescue missions in that vilest-smelling garden-center aisle at the start, when my beginner crops of some plant or other were limp or pekid or otherwise imperiled. Like a young mother, I went into save-them-at-any-cost mode. After all, James Underwood Crockett, the original host of The Victory Garden television program and author of my first and most formative garden book, Crockett’s Victory Garden, had said it was OK. With certain crops he preferred treated seeds—the ones to which fungicide has been applied—and used various individual chemical fungicides and pesticides, plus a so-called “all-purpose” spray containing carbaryl (often known as Sevin), Malathion, Diazinon, and dicofol. His peas, potatoes, and limas went into the fungicide captan before planting; the flower garden was sprayed early and often to keep it looking its best.
To be fair to this fondly remembered figure in our twentieth-century gardening history, Crockett did hint at the changing times, though he wasn’t ready to disarm himself—and frankly, I understand why. We are a culture that expects packaged remedies: from the drugstore, the cosmetic counter, the local nursery—even the supermarket, if you can consider a frozen entrée, ramen “bowl,” or HotPocket a remedy for supper. In the early years, facing serious, mature poison ivy, I used glyphosate (the chemical in Roundup) to knock it back, buying into the claims of safety—assertions that this relatively new kind of herbicide was nothing compared with what had come before, with short residual effects environmentally, no harm caused to humans or animals, and therefore “safe.” I doubt I have to explain that all such statements have been outed as less than accurate in the ensuing years, and the entire issue of the rise in Roundup-ready transgenic agricultural crops and their impact on the environment and its creatures has also been raised to terrifying effects. Tedious as it may seem, I now solarize (smother weedy areas with plastic sheeting and bake the unwanted vegetation and seeds to death) rather than spray, and regularly dig out poison ivy seedlings and established vines by (disposable surgical-glove-clad) hand.
With insect pests, I am pretty much live and let live—using fabric barriers to give certain vulnerable crops such as crucifers or cucurbits a chance; hand-squishing a few particular demons such as Asian lily beetles and tomato hornworms and various potato beetles and, better yet, the eggs of all of the above; and cutting off and destroying twigs of viburnums in late fall onto which egg cases of Viburnum leaf beetle have been laid. I might disturb a nest of tent caterpillars if it were in the crabapples near the house, or step on the occasional slug, but I don’t even have any horticultural soaps or oils or pyrethrins or Bacillus thuringiensis in the cupboard here, or other least-toxic remedies such as those that organic gardeners can technically avail themselves of. I just don’t bother, frankly. I figure the pests that are eating my plants are fattening up to be somebody’s dinner, so I try to keep at a minimum my intrusions into an intricate food system that I do not pretend to grasp. The biologist E. O. Wilson, who understands very well and calls the earth’s small creatures “the little things who run the world,” warns that without insects, fungi, bacteria, nematodes, and the like, the rest of life would very simply disappear. When panicking at the discovery of a chomped-on leaf or the start of powdery-mildew season, or looking at the vigor of my lawn weeds, I try to think about that—assuming it isn’t something drastic, such as the Asian longhorn beetle, that the USDA wants to know about expanded sightings of at once.
I confess to missing the voilà-ness of one product: sustained-release fertilizer beads (such as the brand Osmocote) that are so convenient for use in pots, but based on conscience, I have forsaken them, too. It is encouraging to see some organic brands trying to tackle that slow-release niche for container gardeners lately, and as I write this, I am in Year 2 of trying the ones I’ve found available locally so far. We shall see. Diluted blue liquids provide no miracles, in my opinion, when you figure in the chemical dependence and environmental impact they represent. In my rural surroundings, diluted all-natural organic liquid feeds such as fish and seaweed emulsions (both suited to container plants, though not long-acting or as convenient as timed-release) attract animal pests, especially skunks and raccoons, who dig up everything in the container, which apparently smells like a big bowl of fish dinner to them. This is irritating, of course, but they usually quit after a few rounds, once the replanted plants start to stay planted long enough to finally grow in. Thinking back on all this now, I feel certain that the various beasts would have likewise liked my family’s cooking in the formative years of life by the bay.
MARION (GRANDMOTHER, NOT SISTER) was allergic to shellfish, oranges, and some other food whose identity continues to elude me. Eggs, perhaps? It has been so very long. I will never forget, though, how she loved a man named Harold, who shipped off on September 10 to France to join the American Expeditionary Forces in 1917. His economical handwriting is as familiar to me as hers of all the flourishes, because I have been the holder of his love letters since her death in my teens. Its spare style belied the spirit of his messages to young Marion, whom he planned to marry when he returned.
He spoke openly of his fear, and of “what I think of my chances,” and expansively of his great fondness for the girl he called Snooks. Sometimes there were little extras tucked into the envelopes, now faded to an almost-military gray tan and lined with blue tissue even thinner than old-style airmail letters. Once, an ornate poker chip from a needed leave in Monaco; another time, two tiny wildflowers on a single stem.
“I’m sending a flower I picked in a churchyard a few days ago,” Harold wrote to young Marion back home in Wisconsin, where they had been together at college until he enlisted. “The church and the graves were all torn to pieces by shell fire. This flower was growing from the moss on the debris of the church roof, in February. Spring in France seems to come early. We’ve had no snow since the middle of January.”
One day, long after that French spring, Marion made a big garden around the house she and my grandfather Harold built early in their marriage. For most of her life thereafter she gardened, and then tirelessly dried the best bits in an old wooden press, the layers of cardboard and blotter paper held closed ever so tightly around the precious formerly living things by a heavy dowel mechanism threaded with substantial rope. When they were just right, she transferred the preserved gleanings to empty nylon-stocking boxes lined with tissue, and in her filing system of the stacked, shallow cardboard containers there were ones for ferns, ones for other foliage, ones for small flowers, one for her stash of larger blooms such as iris or the occasional rose. Eventually pictures were recombined from the delicate inventory, arrangements that looked like flattened bouquets on fabric under glass, as if to make their moment in the garden last forever.
I like to think she was honoring the tradition of that dried nosegay from Harold’s letters, and trying to keep their moment alive, too—his and hers—though the first of Marion’s two Harolds had never made it home. Ver perpetuum; forever spring. With this as my example, it would be hard not to have a special affection for dried things, though my taste runs to the three- and not one-dimensional, to gourds and bean pods and heads of the biggest alliums and fertile fronds of Matteuccia struthiopteris, the ostrich fern. All, and more such kin, live on indoors with me.
Grandpa Harold died when I was four, and in the rest of the years that I knew his widow there were few stories offered up to backfill around the loss, to make him real to me beyond the fact that he worked for the phone company, or how he kept smoking after the first heart attack. The Harold I came to know was the original one, the letter writer, and he was brought to life again and again, as Grandma Marion never tired of the retellings, of dusting off and displaying the precious but faded bits, ephemera made eternal.
Ephemera. The garden is all about it, loaded with things that do not last or at least don’t stay fresh for long, and so is the big two-drawer chest in my living room, which used to be in Grandma Marion’s. A recent exhumation, the loot from a binge of cleaning-out-of-boredom: a faded spiral-bound school notebook circa 1961, containing selections of my early prose. Printed in stiff, blocky letters in pencil:
“We saw the man go up in Space today.”
Though not even haiku-length, my sentence filled one entire page. This effort earned me a star (which seems just right for a penmanship exercise about space travel), and marked the day the first American, Alan Shepard (who in 1971 would walk on the moon) went up in space, which is nearly fifty years ago, as I write this. The day before, the notebook reveals my mind had been on matters more befitting a gardener in the making than someone out in the wild blue yonder. Four lines of painstaking letters, meant to be identical except that my hand was none too steady yet:
“Days are longer. Days are longer. Days are longer. Days are longer.” Yes, please; bring it on.
EACH WEEK I GET AT LEAST one blog comment or e-mail from a stranger—sometimes many more—about my beloved Japanese umbrella pine, one of two plants that traveled with my belongings in the moving van when I first bought my house as a weekend fixer-upper project twenty-five years ago. Thanks to the magic of search engines, gardeners elsewhere read about my big old plant and wonder if I can help them with theirs. When I hear the troubles people are having after transplanting one, from needle loss to branch decline to downright death, I shudder: How in the world was I spared, and what if I had not been?
Blind faith apparently has it hands-down over expertise in some aspects of horticulture.
I knew nothing at all when I heaved the then-very-rare, chest-high young Sciadopitys verticillata out of the ground in the borough of Queens in New York City and plopped it unceremoniously into a bushel basket for the trip several hours north. I picked a spot where there was nothing but one giant rhododendron standing alone in the yard behind the house, connected to nothing—and also reminding me unfavorably of all the raucous-colored Rhododendron, the kind commonly called azaleas, of the gardens of my youth. I almost offed the rhodie, almost rubbed the giant blob of a broadleaf evergreen out of the picture with my big, sharp eraser of a saw, but instead made the umbrella pine its companion, and hoped they would get along. There was no back porch then; there was no nothing but unmown grass and wild raspberries tangled throughout it, and my youthful enthusiasm. There wasn’t even a flat space like there is now, but rather simply the hillside running right into the rear of the house. The result: The house was a wreck; the back foundation, in fact, had collapsed, and a sheet of heavy, milky-looking “clear” plastic sheeting was all that formed the barrier between outside and in, below ground level, perhaps fifteen feet from where this most beautiful of conifers, the umbrella pine, now stands about twenty feet tall.
After a session of that quarter-round-molding snow-removing gyration trick, I always say thank you to the Japanese umbrella pine for holding up to twenty-five winters of uneasy snow loads and countless ice storms; for not suffering winter burn in the spot I chose with no particular knowledge of the plant’s needs or the garden’s future direction; for settling in without so much as losing an extra needle. For looking handsome every single day of all those years, even when I was not looking so good myself. Sometimes, just sometimes, we have enduring, enormous successes in this funniest of pursuits, in spite of the insane odds. I mean, what is the over-under on a thirtyish-year-old woman from Queens dragging a rare Japanese conifer in a moving truck to a spot a couple of hardiness zones colder in rural New York State—sandwiched for the ride by a crew of gorillas between the couch and floor lamps and a king-sized box spring—and the two of them living happily ever after for a quarter century and counting?
I never did anything, really, except to give it a decent home with the basics, and then delight in it. Maybe that’s the best approach. The Confucian philosopher Mencius (c. 371–289 BC), told this parable about cultivating not Sciadopitys, but chi (or qi), the life force:
One must work at it, but do not assume success. One should not forget the heart, but neither should one “help” it grow. Do not be like the man from Song. Among the people of the state of Song there was a farmer who, concerned lest his sprouts not grow, pulled on them. Obliviously, he returned home and said to his family, “Today I am worn out. I helped the sprouts to grow.” His son rushed out and looked at them. The sprouts were withered. Those in the world who do not “help” the sprouts to grow are few. Those who abandon them, thinking it will not help, are those who do not weed their sprouts. Those who “help” them grow are those who pull on the sprouts. Not only does this not actually help, but it even harms them.
My intention was for success, but I didn’t know what to expect—I had never seen a mature umbrella pine, any more than I could foretell what my own maturity would look like. In this one case, unlike some of the subjects I tortured, including myself more times than not early on, I didn’t push—or pull.
YOU’D THINK BIGGER WOULD NOT be better when you’re talking about a dwarf conifer—a plant you presumably chose for its implied smaller habit—but to the contrary, I’m loving my overgrown “dwarf” white pines (Pinus strobus ‘Nana’) more each year. After twenty-plus years in the ground, starting from mounded creatures maybe three feet across and two high, today they are close to fourteen by eight—like giant bonsai someone hasn’t clipped lately. (That would be me.)
First, the disclaimer. I said the plant is specifically Pinus strobus ‘Nana’, and that’s how the pleasantly mismatched pair came to me, but here’s the wrinkle: ‘Nana’ is kind of a grab-bag variety name for many relatively compact- or mounded-growing eastern white pines, a long-needled species native to eastern North America, from Canada to Georgia and out to Ohio and Illinois, that in its tree form can reach fifty or even eighty feet or taller. Today, you can shop for named dwarf varieties that are more compact, with distinctive and somewhat more predictable shapes, or so the catalog listings say. But what I didn’t know when I got my generic “dwarf” pines was this: “Dwarf” doesn’t mean “small forever”—they aren’t collectible miniatures on a curio shelf—but rather it connotes slow-growing, and not reaching the stature of the straight species (in this case plain old white pine, or Pinus strobus). The sense of “slow” catches up with you after twenty-some years, and not just in white pines. I’m not as young as I used to be either, you know.
Things will die in the garden, yes, but things will also grow. It has taken me so long to ready myself properly for either eventuality, to have some degree of equanimity about whichever outcome the forces prove to serve up. At least you can plan for the latter, I suppose, by leaving ample room.
I could have pinched the tips of the pines’ new growth, or candles, back by half each spring to keep the shrubs somewhat more contained, but frankly I like that they are unplanned testaments to the time line of my days here, having grown up along with me and the rest of the garden’s original plants. (Oh, and I am horribly lazy about such fussy tasks.) I did not literally nip things in the bud, but no matter, as there is not a day in the year I am not happy to look out at the two, set about twenty-five feet apart behind the house. One was meant to be the right flank of a small frog pond I’d dug early on—not the one I almost perished into the other night, but the first of the two inground pools. With the Japanese umbrella pine on the left side and a dwarf white on the right, the relative newcomers straddle the vast, unloved rhododendron I’d inherited. Now the three have largely overrun the pool, stretching their lowest limbs toward the center of their huddle, overlapping like the hands of teammates about to face the next play together. The comets who have lived in the watery hollow for years, grown crazy fat from daily offerings tossed onto the surface after I clap to call them to me, don’t seem to mind. Neither do I. Trained fish, untrained pines.
Despite being old enough and then some, and living in conditions that match their needs, the dwarf pines don’t set cones; I frankly don’t know why with certainty. I have read that some dwarf conifers have what’s called a long juvenile phase—can I resist saying I have dated some specimens with this condition?—and therefore don’t make cones, which would be a sign of achieving sexual maturity. Maybe that’s it—arrested development—but I want to know for sure. This semi-knowing irritates me, the one they called “Encyclopedia Britannica” as a child, the one who always wanted answers and still does—even when there is no answer to be had, exactly.
Like other conifers, the dwarf pair will purposely shed their least-efficient foliage each fall, when the oldest, innermost needles—having grown shaded, so they no longer photosynthesize effectively—turn brown and are let go. I don’t panic, though I confess it took many years to suppress that urge. It’s disconcerting when suddenly something we refer to as “evergreen” isn’t and they all start turning brown from the inside out. As long as what’s dead is on the inner portion of the branches or twigs, not at the tips, and it’s relatively late in the growing season, I simply give the tree a nod for knowing when to let go and lighten the load. If it’s unsightly, I rub the dead bits off with a gentle pass of my hand, the way I run my palm across the painted ochre floors inside the house between proper vacuumings to counteract the one less-than-ideal effect of life with Jack the Demon Cat, the unplanned pet who adopted me the morning of 9/11, when, in a hurry, I pulled into my then-weekend driveway from Manhattan. At this time of year, Jack’s coat is thick and at its most stable—and I can hear him just behind me on one of his many new cushioned thrones performing the crunchy routine that I call “chew-foot,” a loud and violent-looking self-manicure—but I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with the conifers’ inner needles, or the outer ones, for that matter. The relentless, enduring snow has seen to my not seeing that.
OH, HAPPY DAY. Frigid, but happy. Window-view gratitude list at midwinter, rough count (temperature 19 degrees Fahrenheit, snow cover in excess of twelve inches): 1: the aforementioned prize Japanese umbrella pine. 2, 3: a pair of dwarf white pines, ibid. 4: the golden Hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Crippsii’). 5, 6: two graceful weeping Alaska cedars (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis ‘Pendula’). 7, 8: two Korean firs (Abies koreana); 9: a Concolor fir (Abies concolor), with near-turquoise foliage. 10–15: a group of low-growing Microbiota decussata, holding the steepest bank above the frog pond, now displaying its bronze winter needles. 16–21: the gnarled silhouettes of six remaining standard apple trees from the first half of the twentieth century. 22: my tea viburnum (Viburnum setigerum), pendulous coral fruits. 23–31: a mass of yellow-fruited Viburnum dilatatum ‘Michael Dodge’. 32–34: Kousa dogwoods (Cornus kousa), with their camouflage-pattern bark. 35: a Japanese stewartia (Stewartia pseudocamellia)—good bark, too. 36, 37: two big Miscanthus stands, now faded to wheat color. 38–41: yellow- and red-twig dogwoods groupings (Cornus sericea varieties). 42: the Loebner magnolia called ‘Ballerina’, with its gray trunk and flower buds tucked away in silvery, pubescent wrappers (damn that yellow-bellied sapsucker, damn him). 43–53: eleven crabapples on the hillside, naked except for varying crops of not-yet-eaten yellow or reddish fruit. 54–56: many dozens of winterberry hollies in fruit (Ilex verticillata), in each of three big groupings. 57: that once-loathed rhododendron, now not a solitary eyesore but part of an evergreen trio. 58: an espaliered Asian pear against the south face of the house, a giant candelabra. 59: the sensuous, female shapes of this snow-covered hillside. 60: a vignette of mature white birches in the native forest beyond the fence line. 61–63: birds, birds, birds, here, there, and everywhere. 64: daylight reflected off the snow, almost two more minutes of it than yesterday.
To be continued.
WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT EIGHT, not so many years after she began piano lessons, my niece looked at me very seriously one day, a look that politely insisted upon attention.
“Aunty,” she replied, “music is like mathematics.” I could count each syllable in that last word of her earnest pronouncement, 1-2-3-4.
Oh, I see.
Actually, though I spared the uncannily numbers-savvy child this thought at the time, gardening is like mathematics, too—and not just in the way nature engineers things like the branching pattern of trees, as Leonardo da Vinci noted more than five hundred years ago, or designs patterns such as honeycombs, spiderwebs, or butterfly wings that can be described mathematically. In the garden you need to know when to giveth, and when to taketh away, or it just doesn’t amount to anything out there but an incalculable mess. There is a rhythm to the goings-on, albeit somewhat more improvisation than John Philip Sousa; it’s never the same from one season, or year, to the next, or even day-to-day. And then there is this further layer of complexity to the calculation: Forces other than yourself will be doing both adding and subtracting all the while, too, right alongside you but without the respect of advance notice, making any possible mathematical proof a moving target.
There is a higher aspect to this comparison of codas and computations. Galileo famously said nature speaks the language of mathematics, and various prominent contemporary scientists, including the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, agree. “To those who do not know mathematics,” Feynman said, “it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature.”
On this latest point, the math of really seeing, I think it helps to think as if of three minds: one part artist, one part scientist, one part honeybee—to be one part of each and to witness nature from that triple perspective if you can, and without prejudice. But don’t forget your abacus, because in much of the day-to-day of making a garden out of a tiny corner of the natural world, there is counting, lots of counting, and keeping track.
When I read my first gardening books, with their time lines and checklists, it sounded logical and doable—as systematic as setting a table or making a bed (the kind with sheets, I mean): You layer things on until the components are all present and accounted for; you eat or sleep, essentially using up the current shelf life of the elements until you’re done; and then you strip off the used bits, to be spruced up and put into service again next time.
I thought that just like that, you planted it and then in subsequent years you “opened” the garden for the season—by doing spring cleanup and some additional planting—and “closed” it again in fall, by carrying off the chopped-down, raked-up remains to the compost heap, and the tools, first carefully cleaned, to the shed. Set the table, clear the table; make the bed, change the bed. Simple. I can do that.
Perhaps I imagined it, because to imagine anything else would have been so daunting as to prevent me from ever starting. I needed to think—to believe—I’d achieve a moment when the garden was like that table or that bed: At some point in time it would be all set, the equivalent of a perfect 10 or 100, or whatever reliable measure of time my niece heard in her piano practice. I was sure if I just kept at it in spring, I’d get there—to all set—and that I could sit back at least till fall and enjoy the scenery.
Yes, gardening is mathematical, but more in the manner of one of those legendary unsolved problems that foundations and other institutions offer a lot of prestige or even a million dollars to solve—a botanical strain of the Goldbach conjecture, maybe (on the surface so obvious-seeming, though no one has been able to solve it since it was first posed in 1742), or a Riemann hypothesis. Like generations of math geniuses, we gardeners just keep trying.
My gardening math goes like this: In the columns of the balance sheet that I can pretend to have authority over—not the ones owned by woodchucks, hailstorms, or some blight or other whose origin I’ll never discover, among the many other players—there are addition months and subtraction ones, with some months featuring both activities. Prime addition time slots here are April and May and maybe early June, depending on the rising heat, then again in September and October (with small entries in the plus column all growing season long in the vegetable garden, where I might resow a short row of salad greens or carrots or beets or cilantro or even bush beans every two weeks, among many choices, to have a constant fresh supply). Outside the vegetable garden, which, as I say, has its own subset of gardening math (those calculations are on here), my subtraction starts in a big way in June with deadheads, thinning, and the first cutbacks, and continues through hard freeze. Most of the year that means I garden by reduction—then, in the coldest winter months, neither add nor subtract, remaining at a neutral balance unless my silent partners in this thing are hungry for bark, roots, or entire treasures I had hoped to see emerge intact again one day.
THE GARDEN IS A WILLING, receptive partner. That’s the position I must hold to now, all current evidence to the contrary. This I believe. Thoughts that the garden, and in fact the entire out of doors, is some ice queen whose only word is “no” might be backed up irrefutably by the view from my chair at the dining table, but must be banished as quickly as they arise. It is time to order seeds, an act of absolute and utter faith, and even defiance.
The first to-do of the new garden season starts with their purchase. I know the routine: After making my selections (my “rules” for how to decide what to order are in the box on here), I send the order forms and money away. I receive in return mostly near-weightless paper packets, envelopes that offer no special protection to the tiny living organisms inside—no vacuum seal, no climate control, no nothing that you wouldn’t provide for your phone bill or insurance-premium remittance when they are likewise en route via the United States Postal Service.
The lives in those seed packets traveling within the larger generic mailer are often so small that handling with human-sized fingers negates any prior claim to manual dexterity. They are also perilously close to death—one wrong move and I could off the whole batch, or at least drastically lower their vigor. Properly stored garden seeds may contain something like 8 or 10 percent water—just the right amount to remain viable and at-the-ready, but without much margin for error. Consistent conditions are what dormant seeds want. Too dry, and they could become hard and resist germination. Too moist—well, if that event coincides with the presence of enough oxygen and favorable temperatures, they start to think it’s time to germinate, but quickly perish if the emerging seedlings’ other needs aren’t met. Storage is most successful when seeds are kept dry and cool (below 40 degrees Fahrenheit)—meaning in a tightly sealed jar or plastic bag stashed in the refrigerator, for instance, or in my unheated mudroom closet. That’s where some harvested garden vegetables, each also a living thing and some filled with seeds of their own, likewise make it through the long stretch of shortest days without sprouting before I’ve had my way with every last delectable one of them.
A typical gardener (who herself contains something like 60 percent water by weight, by comparison) might order six or ten or twenty or more seed packets in any given winter. Each holds a dozen to many hundreds of embryos with the potential to become plants that might contain as much as 95 percent water (think lettuce) when up and growing. Then after rescuing them at the post office, she might toss the whole lot in the backseat of the car and forget them (pray for cold, dry weather, please, and that she parks in the shade). Or maybe the little ones are lucky enough to get as far as the kitchen table with the rest of the mail—hopefully not on top of a radiator or near the woodstove; even the heated house itself is anything but inviting to a seed—and then into a drawer, perhaps. So much for consistency—and do embryos really belong shacked up anywhere near a ball of saved rubber bands; two spare AA batteries and one extra for the smoke alarm; the makeshift sewing kit; a few each of thumb tacks, bull clips, and safety pins; a half-used box of colored chalk; keys I cannot remember the purpose of but am afraid to toss; a finial broken off a chair, and various other such “junk”?
Next stop: Sometime later in the winter or in spring they will be asked to perform when united with the soil or the next in the chain of purchases—sterile seed-starting medium and maybe some new cell packs and trays, or more-efficient T-5 fluorescent tubes in a reflective hood to replace the generic version in the shop-hood-turned-grow-light. But even knowing what I do, even knowing the odds, I cannot say honestly that I have actually ever gone straight home from the post office, unpacked the mailers, immediately put the packets in proper jars or other sealed containers, and then into some form of cold storage. Not once.
Doing the risk-assessment math—thinking about all the stops along the way—makes mail-order seeds sound even crazier than mail-order chicks. At least the chicks speak up for themselves, reminding the postmaster to call and say, “Come and get them”—nudging the recipient to open the box immediately once home, and transfer them to a proper spot fast. But voiceless mail-order germplasm, with not even the benefit of a “contains live cargo” message boldly stamped on the package to command attention? Preposterous—and positively fantastic. Thanks to the basically survivalist nature of seeds, another gardening season is now officially under way. Not a seed or slip has been planted, but I have already been tested, and provided with many thousands of tiny opportunities to demonstrate my gaping shortcomings as steward of this spot.
I AM NOT A HORTICULTURIST—having had very little formal training—and beyond that, there is this far more important fact: I am not a “horticulturalist,” either. That chalk-on-blackboard nonword (just ask Webster’s Unabridged or The American Heritage College Dictionary if you doubt me) is what so many people in the business of using plants professionally and managing gardens call themselves. Even the New York Times sometimes describes garden-industry professionals it profiles that way, but it’s as if the owner of your local eatery called himself a “restauranteur” when there is no “n” in the middle of the word for that food-service career path—or as if a newspaper food critic did. I admit that I confuse geriatricians and gerontologists (both are actually specialties, though, and actual words), but I don’t work anywhere close to the field of either one, so hopefully that’s forgivable.
No, I am not a horticulturist. I am (to use the phrase of the late Francis H. Cabot, the garden artist and plantsman who founded the Garden Conservancy), more of a “garden enthusiast.” Actually in my own case I’d refine that further to “plant enthusiast,” because I just love plants; I don’t even grow them better than other people or have substantial confidence in making gardens with them, but I keep trying. Enthusiasm—and a comfort with the fact that all life’s activities are merely trial and error—is what propels me forward. I am a “better to have loved and lost” type when it comes to plants (and various other experiments with living creatures). What I am blessed with: a good eye for good ones, and a heaping portion of patience.
I AM ON THE FREEZER DIET. In gentler days the regimen will be replaced by the Asparagus Diet, the Snap Pea Diet, the Green Bean Diet, the Kale and Collards Diet. For decades I have tried to eat in season, and this is freezer season, a time when the garden manages to provide anyhow, despite prevailing conditions. Make do with what you’ve got, no? I began eating locally and seasonally in my twenties, inspired by the teachings of macrobiotics, which I practiced for perhaps a half-dozen years. But Michio Kushi wouldn’t call eating from the freezer “in season,” exactly, and would especially disapprove of my store of tomato sauce, cooked up from one of those naughty, oh-so-yin nightshades, or solanaceous crops, that were basically taboo in the yin-yang macrobiotic system.
The Freezer Diet isn’t bad, really—it’s not like vintage TV dinners (though I do confess a past addiction to that little hollow that held the apple crisp, and how the mashed potatoes overflowed the boundary of their molded foil well to marry, all bubbly and hot, with meatloaf gravy). The Freezer Diet might actually be called the Give-Winter-the-Finger Diet, and I am delighting nightly in doing just that, especially pleased that I mixed it up last August through October while stocking the shelves. I am no different from the red squirrel who had ambitious caches of green conifer cones, but wasn’t satisfied yet. He’d add some fungi or perhaps an apple (first setting each foodstuff high in a tree branch to cure, his slow-tech dehydrator). Following his energetic lead, I, too, have varied and colorful choices, each a distinct taste of brighter days.
Red sauce, applesauce all pink from the bright skins, frozen herbs, soup base with tomato, vegetable stock, two finished soups (sweet potato with kale and chard at the moment, and I think I saw some lentil), some kind of stir-fry or a curry made from whatever there was too much of to keep up with when it was fresh—when supply outpaced demand, the inverse of this moment of the year. If the crystal palace of widemouthed Weck and straight-sided, shoulderless Mason jars stacked inside my two 6.5-cubic-foot repositories is any indication, I had a bumper crop of green beans and a yellow crookneck squash, in particular, the latter a warty kind that sprouts every year in nearly the same spot, defying me to say no to its increasingly enthusiastic land grab, even though I don’t know its name or where it came from. Could it be ‘Early Summer Yellow Crookneck’, a real old-timer probably grown by Native Americans, or more likely that heirloom variety accidentally crossed with a winged gourd I once tried here? It seems to really like me; something to be said for enthusiasm, no? The green and the gold pieces found their way for just a minute or so into a pot with a nearly ready, bubbling-hot mix of onion, garlic, and tomato, and then into a long winter’s nap. The undercooking of the last-minute additions (my beans and squash)—like merely blanching them, but in an impromptu red sauce—is the key to the vegetable bits arising not so mushy at reheating time. The freezer as scrapbook; each jar a memento with shreds of a lost season’s story inside.
COME TO MAMA, ‘Red Swan’ beans, with your promised sweet-tasting, flat five-inch pink pods. We’d be good together, ‘Cortland F-1’ onion; your predecessor ‘Copra’ and I lasted a blissfully long time each year—usually right through until the following summer—and I hear you are an improvement, if such a thing is possible. You are my kind of chard, ‘Argentata’, with your thick white midrib—no flashy cousin of yours, such as ‘Rainbow’ or ‘Rhubarb’, can make me look away from all your zaftig goodness. And 3 Root Grex beet—wild child of three heirlooms with your neon range of possibilities, all in a single packet—who dreamed you up? Lucky me, if you agree to give my place a try. Maybe lucky you, too? I have just the spots for every last one of you. Interested?
And so it goes as I spend a fair amount of tea breaks and bedtimes paging through the profiles and photos in the seed catalogs. They are my resources, and entertainment, and also my textbooks: I learn one night, in the Fedco Seeds catalog, that it was Dr. Alan Kapuler, the microbiologist founder of Peace Seeds, a longtime bastion of organics, genetic diversity, and a believer in breeding for the public domain, who developed that rainbow of a beet I’m craving, 3 Root Grex. He’s a man of science who gets the parable thing, who has described the garden as “a metaphor for having a place to develop an ethical way to understand life and to make a life that is ethical.” And then the Fedco listing got me thinking: What’s a grex, anyhow? Turns out it’s not a variety at all—so no single quotes around the name—but from the Latin word for “flock,” connoting a group of all the offspring of a particular hybrid cross. My beet-to-be is birdlike, and travels in a flock. Oh, joy.
These catalog adventures are the closest I come in this life I have chosen to browsing the latest crop of possibilities on Match.com. I am partial to both heirlooms and certain hybrids (see an explanation of why on here), and in both categories there are always some new faces, and others I’ve met many times before, including some real scoundrels I’m still trying to erase any trace of.
IT’S A DAY OF MUFFLED SOUNDS and lots of shoveling. A day tucked in feeling thankful the wind hasn’t taken out the power, even though it keeps devilishly re-covering walkways as fast as I can clean them, invoking its formidable power of drift. I know that means it’s a dry snow, the kind that cannot settle but keeps repositioning itself with each gust, as if it finds each surface it tries too cold for comfort and moves along.
It’s a day indoors with Jacko the Wacko, and it began at four thirty a.m. Someone, you see—someone who wasn’t a sleepover-type house cat in the first nine years, not until this winter, not until a bloody middle-of-the-night run-in with some wilder creature tamed him slightly a few months ago—has learned to open the door to the upstairs. Where I sleep. Or worse, he has learned to try to open it, involving as that does a lot of clawing at the distressed old wood to which only bits of crazed paint cling here and there, fewer with each of Jack’s predawn eruptions.
In Round 1 of this new day together, he comes out fighting. When I reach the top landing and hit the light switch, all I can see is evidence of mad desperation bursting forth from the crack between the bottom of the worn door and the first weathered step—two upstretched paws, claws bared, the feline “arms” they are attached to pumping like a boxer at a speed bag. No cat; just frantic front legs. No good morning, how’d you sleep?, but simply I want out.
I descend, taking the initial steps toward obliging the first of dozens of requests that will punctuate the hours ahead. I crack the outside door.
But no, on second thought, maybe not. It’s snowing; can you clear me a path perhaps first?
I bundle up; I get my shovel. A path plenty big for even my very big cat is hollowed out as I am buffeted in an eggbeater environment of hectic wind and snow. At least the stuff is virtually weightless, not like the last rude dump.
He inspects my work.
No, I think I’ll just wait a little while longer. I can hold it.
OK.
But I think I’ll scream pretty much nonstop while I wait.
Perfect. Maybe you’d like to claw the staircase door again awhile, or some other piece of woodwork, while you howl?
Oh, no; I don’t want to be any trouble, no. But thanks for asking.
And then, finally, at first light, out he goes—barreling headfirst into a snowbank, completely forgoing the paths I’d shoveled, and quickly digs himself a little snow cave of a restroom exactly one cat’s-length off the back porch. He pivots, and carefully backs into it.
Charming. I turn away, allowing him his privacy, and go fill the kettle.
Then: What’s that scratching noise? Is a mouse still awake and going at it inside the wall? Not again. No, that’s my semiretired wildcat, the longtime gamekeeper of the place, who, though recovered from a bloody midnight massacre last fall, may or may not deign to hunt again when spring arrives. He’s at the window now, pawing the glass so that it squeals under his damp pads, clawing the frame madly, wanting back in—more of the pumping motion, go, go, go. Do his forelegs have any other move but this one, and kneading of pizza dough on the upholstered furniture? Lately he jumps up and makes that motion on me, reaching up farther after every few rounds until he can deposit a smudge of nose juice on my neck or lick my bangs, grooming me as he does himself. Who is this animal; where is my former wild man? Beyond him, in the gathering light, I can see the top two courses of the fieldstone wall above the frog pond, and the big Indonesian buddha’s bust looking back at us from his perch on top. What must he think of this conversion I have undergone to such loyal service to my cat and master?
And then before I can even turn to get my mug, the whole scene I thought I saw is erased in another giant spin of the beater, an exhalation: Poof! Pranksters all, this cat, this statue, this wind—especially this hanger-on of an old-fashioned winter.
I WAS SMALLER THEN, but I was no child when I began cutting the first beds into my Tilt-A-Whirl tract of glacial till, which this morning looks less like land and more like the glacier that deposited it. Everything was smaller because I was relatively new to this gardening business, and tentative as those fresh to something vast and mysterious and oozing with life and death are apt to be. I imagine I would have behaved as gingerly at the start had I tried my hand at war correspondence, Lamaze class, or the volunteer ambulance corps—all of which share traits with gardening, though you’re wearing different gear.
And so I went small, frighteningly so. I cut stingy beds—cots, not kings. They seemed so big to my untrained eye that I feared I would never be able to turn them without a gas-powered tiller, and that even if I did, I would not be able to afford enough plants to fill them—and if and when I got past that hurdle, that waiting for the plants to spread would take the rest of my lifetime.
To remind myself of just how small I thought then, I have left a drift of daffodils in place that used to demarcate a stretch of one such original plot (if one can call so penurious a grouping of Narcissus a “drift”). Most of the flowers are doubles—meaning that technically they are classified as Division 4 among the thirteen possible descriptive divisions a Narcissus can find itself placed in by the adoring subset of mankind that likes putting things in proper order. It was by acquiring a box full of labeled, perforated brown-paper bags of various kinds all those years ago and then noticing the similarities and distinctions that I began to learn that there even were divisions, and which ones I favored (besides the doubles, it is the dangling, bell-like flowers of Triandrus types, such as ‘Thalia’, in Division 5, and the small-cupped types like the Poeticus ones, or ‘Geranium’, of Division 3). The bulbs I refer to in the badly drawn bed are nothing special or rare, but familiar, fragrant old faces such as ‘Cheerfulness’ and ‘Erlicheer’ and ‘White Lion’ that I simply tucked in to fill the depth of my very first border, front to back.
Which was probably about two feet.
What was I thinking?
At least in their moment sometime in April, which feels right this minute like it will come no time soon or perhaps not ever again, they sit like a tight little selvage along the back boundary of a garden now multiple times wider than their pitiful formation, filling barely one-fourth the depth of the plot as it currently exists. Only I know why this measly strip of daffodils is there, all out of proportion and otherwise looking like a mistake. For what it lacks in aesthetic effect, the ill-fitting footprint of my earliest adventures is quite effective as an ongoing reminder that (as they say) you have to start somewhere. I don’t know why I wasn’t paralyzed by such early goof-ups in gardening the way I was in school, music and art lessons, sports, and so much more, where feelings of intimidation allowed me to quit instead of push onward, failing myself. Perhaps the plants themselves were easier to be with than fellow teenagers, their silence and generally cooperative natures a great relief from the taunting and the competition.
The bed also reminds me that in the garden, it is sometimes better to overdo it, rather than plant little rows of miniature soldiers here and there about the place, each struggling to defend their own too-small encampments. This is especially true with most bulbs. For now, all evidence of my miscalculations and recalculations are concealed from view by snow cover, but even on this day I know very well how I began.
PLEASE RELEASE ME, LET ME GO. That’s what I am singing to the winter that just won’t quit after the latest ice storm overnight Sunday into yesterday. Every bud, needle, twig, trunk, vine remains totally encased, a world of glass. Even I, the 365-Day Gardener, have run out of patience.
Rhododendron leaves are curled in reverse fashion from the way my tongue can, stating their objection to prolonged serious cold. How long can they go on like that, I wonder? (How long can I stay curled up here indoors?) There are signs of winter burn on the gold Hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Crippsii’); a branch the wind played rough with is hanging by a strip of bark from the biggest of the Kousa dogwoods.
So what, the weather says in a voice much louder than any plant’s; what do you plan to do about it?
Just as I think I can bear no more, it lets go—literally. It was a noisy end: Ice that had gripped like mad to everything finally shattered—as if some frequency of sound had been reached and it all just blew apart, millions of giant glass beads or chandelier crystals suddenly exploding into the air, glinting a moment in the sunlight that had been their undoing before they crashed. I sight land, after months at sea. The latest dose (an April fool’s storm) had almost done us all in, but with the outdoor meltdown, the inner meltdown starts to improve.
A giant flock of common redpolls (Acanthis flammea), birds I never see here but that are not rare, technically, landed on the newly revealed patio outside my window, looking for nibbles in the cracks and crevices just hours after the latest halfhearted snow disappeared into the earth. A male goldfinch, already in his vivid mating plumage, flashes extra-bright against the last patches of snow. Once the slushy cold stuff gave up its hold on the stones by the frog pond, out climbed three friends, looking no worse for the winter wear. By the gate, the pussy willow catkins are all a silvery fuzz, and I swear the winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis) perforated the leaf litter and jumped up an inch to open its goldfinch-colored flowers within a half hour of being exposed to light, determined to win the race for first bloom of the new year—just this once, maybe, beating the Galanthus and Helleborus niger, a race it never captures, but that it also never stops trying to own. There is hope, and the proof is in all of it.
And then it simply starts to pour.