Making a garden is not a gentle hobby for the elderly, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole, and once it has done so he will have to accept that his life is going to be radically changed.
—MAY SARTON, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968
The garden didn’t look like much at first: bare dirt, a couple of fruit trees, and a few shrubs. The previous tenants had not bothered much with gardening, and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to take up the work that someone else had left unfinished. I wanted full credit for whatever this garden turned out to be.
The house was an old California bungalow, light brown with dark brown trim, a little drab compared to the brilliant whitewash and the pastel beach colors of the other houses in the neighborhood. There were three windows in the front: our bedroom window on the left, then the windows that wrap around what used to be the porch and later became an entryway, and on the right, an enormous living room window that filled the house with light, and faced west to frame hazy, salmon-colored sunsets in the summer. Six wooden steps led from the front door to the patio, where you could sit in the old metal glider and look across the street to the ocean.
There was no front yard, just a short strip of land under the windows, barely enough room to bother planting anything at all. All the houses on our street sat on a hill that sloped down to the river, and they were all built about five feet above the sidewalk. If you walked past our house, the garden was at eye level. Everyone planted something along their retaining walls to make the neighborhood look interesting from the street. The people at the end of our block planted a formal boxwood hedge. Our next door neighbors planted pink ivy geraniums. But we were stuck with the landlord’s choice, African daisy, an uninspiring ground cover with purple and white daisylike flowers. Boring, I thought when we moved in, freeway plants. African daisies grew on the highway median strips in Santa Cruz. They seemed far too commonplace for the kind of garden I had in mind.
The side yard was just an expanse of bare dirt, a few scraggly rosebushes, and a pink jasmine vine. This would become the perennial flower border, the place where only the toughest, woodiest shrubs would survive the onslaught of ocean wind every spring. I didn’t know that at the time. “We’re planting tulips,” I said firmly to Scott. I was fearless then. I was ready to try anything.
The backyard had not been touched in years, but some tenant, maybe twenty or thirty years earlier, had given some thought to what a garden as small as this one should have: wisteria, the first heady fragrance of the spring; an orange tree and a lemon tree, practically standard issue in California gardens; fuchsia, to entice the hummingbirds, and because—well, because if you can grow a fuchsia, you should. They grow all over Santa Cruz; they flourish in this climate. I have seen tourists walk by them and touch the flowers, cautiously, as if they were touching wet paint. “Is it real?” they ask. One time I heard someone answer, “Is anything real around here?”
I NEVER THOUGHT I’d live in a beach town like Santa Cruz. If you ever wondered whether people who live at the seashore take it for granted after a while, let me tell you: We don’t. At least, I never have. To wake up to the sound of harbor seals barking under the municipal wharf, to breathe the fishy salt air every morning—there is nothing better. The Pacific is never the same from one day to the next. Sometimes it is wild and dramatic, even inside the bay where I live. The waves rear up, taller than me, and pound against the sand, sending sea foam flying in every direction. Other days, the sea is flat and calm and almost warm enough for swimming, a study in blues: the flat glass of the ocean, the bright blue of the sky, the faded blue paint of the lifeguard stands.
I walked on the beach once with my aunt D’Anna, who was visiting me from Texas. We were talking about our jobs; we each had our own kind of job stress at the time. “But you see,” I explained, “I come here at the end of the day. No matter how bad it is, I always know that there is this waiting for me. Sort of makes everything else seem unimportant.” Some nights I see a flock of pelicans diving for anchovies, and sometimes a low tide lays sand dollars and beach glass at my feet. I come home with my pockets full of treasures, and they litter the front porch: the sea-shells, the dried-out seaweed, the beach glass in a jar. There is always sand in the entryway—you can’t keep it out. It dusts the front steps and trails inside like bread crumbs.
We live in the very center of the tourist attractions, just one block from the ocean, right across the street from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, an old-fashioned seaside amusement park. Our view of the ocean is framed by the wooden grid of the roller coaster. Because of this, our house shows up on postcards all the time. How many people can say that? I began collecting postcards as soon as we moved in. I carried them around and showed them to anyone who would pay attention. “Look!” I would say, pointing with the tip of a pen. “See there, just behind the roller coaster? Up on the hill? That’s our house! We live there! We can hear the people screaming on the roller coaster from our living room!” Usually our house appears on these postcards as a little brown blob, but once I found a calendar that showed it clearly in the background, set back from the beach, behind the Boardwalk: a light brown California bungalow, perched high above the street, the sunlight glinting off the three big windows across the front of the house. You can almost see the red geraniums on the front porch. Almost.
SCOTT AND I FOUND THIS HOUSE TOGETHER, after two years of living apart in California. We had arrived at the worst possible time, when jobs were scarce and state employees were paid with vouchers instead of cash. We could not find jobs in the same town, so he moved to Eureka, a coastal town just south of the Oregon border, and I settled in Santa Cruz. It was hard, living apart like that; even though we hadn’t yet married, we’d grown accustomed to living together in graduate school, and we felt each other’s absence intensely. We had to drive seven hours to see each other, which limited us to long weekends together every month or two. After one of those weekends, we couldn’t face the prospect of returning alone to our empty apartments. The separation had gone on too long. Making a life together had become more important than pursuing our separate careers. Scott quit his job and came to join me in Santa Cruz, and I got ready to leave my cramped little place in the mountains in favor of this house, which was big enough for the two of us and, at last, gave me a place where I could plant something. When Scott showed up in Santa Cruz, he brought an oregano plant that he’d dug up from his yard in Eureka for me to plant in my garden.
I should say here and now that it was my garden from the beginning. Good thing, too, because it was scarcely big enough for one of us, much less both of us. I have heard about marriages in which the wife takes the vegetable garden, the husband the flower garden. Or one farms the south pasture while the other tends the orchard. Nothing like that would have worked in our tiny Santa Cruz garden, which seemed laughably small compared to the wide swaths of grass that surround every house back in Texas. Still, it was a good place to start. It was just right for a first garden.
I SPENT A LOT OF TIME walking around the garden after we moved in, thinking about what I wanted it to look like. I couldn’t picture it exactly—trying to picture your future garden is a little like trying to picture the person you’ll marry—the image was blurred and constantly changing. Should there be a patio? What could I grow under the citrus trees? Where would I plant the vegetable garden—or should I just tuck the vegetables in among the flowers and let them go wild?
At least I knew what I didn’t want: a garden like the ones I remembered from the suburban Texas tract house that we finally settled on after that long day of househunting. Most of the plants I hate today grew at that house. Nandina, a dull, unimaginative shrub with leaves the color of cockroaches and stingy little berries that—when I was foolish enough to put one in my mouth—tasted like pennies. Century plants, whose fleshy gray arms grabbed me as I walked by, scraping my calves with thorns as long as fingernails. And that boring old lawn, that expanse of St. Augustine grass, where my grandfather and uncles would gather to pluck weeds during family barbecues, squatting down and pulling crabgrass in silence while they waited for the football game to come on. I wish I could say that I had some sweet memory of a childhood garden I wanted to re-create. But the fact is, there wasn’t a single plant around our house that I could love, nothing at all to inspire me as I thought about planting my first garden in Santa Cruz.
I remembered the gardens in Austin, the sweet ambitious jumbles of flowers and vegetables. Those gardens struck a chord in me. They were wild and untamed, but entirely welcoming at the same time. You could have fun in gardens like those. They were full of surprises: the poppies that went to seed in the lettuce bed, the alyssum that sprang from cracks in the sidewalk, the flowering vine that snaked its way up an oak tree and bloomed there all summer. These gardens were not afraid to be different from the rest. They spilled over their borders, they clashed with the neighbors, they ran amuck.
This was the kind of garden I wanted: a lively and boisterous place, part miniature farm, part playground, part zoo. A place where I could grow purple tomatoes and plant rainbow stripes of lettuce and let the sparrows pick seeds out of the sunflowers. A place that would abound with bugs and butterflies and the faint, rustling sound of things growing. I had no idea how I’d go about it, but I couldn’t wait to get my hands into the dirt and get started.
I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, during those first few weeks, when I had nothing but bare ground and a head full of garden fantasies. How could I have known? Who, before they begin to garden, could predict that they would ever lie awake at night worrying over a tray of seedlings, become obsessed with rotting leaves, order worms and insect larvae through the mail? Who could guess that dirt and manure and blood meal would become topics of conversation around the dinner table, or that the human dramas of love and birth and death would play themselves out between the ladybugs and the aphids, among the unfurling leaves of an artichoke?
When I looked out over the expanse of dirt, I could hardly believe that it was mine to plant. Soon, I would be outside with seeds and a shovel, making a garden.
If I had it to do over again, I would have waited a little while before I planted my first garden. I would have watched the weather patterns, noticing which parts of the yard got hit hardest by rains and salty sea winds, and I would have made a sun map of the backyard to help me figure out what to plant where. The entire garden measured no more than twelve hundred square feet, including the twenty-five- by forty-foot rectangle in the back, the eight-foot-wide side yard, and the skinny strip of land along the front. There were only a few spots anywhere that were clear of the shadows of the house, the fence, or the neighbors’ trees.
To make a sun map, go outside early in the morning with a ball of twine and some stakes or, if you want to feed the garden while you map it, use a highly visible powder like bonemeal or diatomaceous earth. Mark the boundaries of the shade cast by the house, the fence, and the trees. Repeat the process at noon and again in the late afternoon. At the end of the day, you’ll have a map of the garden that shows you the sunniest and the shadiest areas for planting. If I had done this in the beginning, I would have known to divide my vegetable garden into two medium-sized rectangles, one on either side of the citrus trees, with a border around each for shade-tolerant vegetables like lettuce and parsley. Instead, I couldn’t wait to get started, so I dug myself one large, awkward rectangle in the corner, half in the shade of the trees, and made a patio in the only other sunny spot. This is a decision that I often regretted but never got around to changing.