This
past weekend, I broke ground on the new vegetable garden. My newly bought
townhouse has a small back yard, and I can already see that this garden will be
an adventure in rocks and compacted clay. I spent a few satisying hours shoveling
out landscaping rock and boxing it up to be hauled away, then pulling up weed
cloth and taking a few tentative stabs at the soil with the spading fork. It
will need compost and manure, probably several years of it, but I’m game.
All
the sweat and back spasms got me thinking about about the other gardens I’ve
had over the years, each with its own distinct personality. Those gardens are
like big, generous friends I once knew and then moved away from. Until now, I
always rented, and I moved a lot. And every time, as I left a garden behind, I
felt a hollow hole of regret open up inside me—who would take care of it now? Would
the next person just rip this all out? And sometimes the questions were more
existential, like: What does our work really amount to? Does it make a
difference?
I
still ask myself those questions, but even if those gardens are now (shudder) driveways
and swimming pools, I still have the memories of all the soul-soothing work I
did on them, and I have photos to prove it. So here now is installment 1 of
gardens past: the first one.
Garden Past #1: Monte Sereno,
1984–1988
Oh
my, look at that flannel shirt! I loved that shirt. This photo says “’87
Garden” on the back, so I was 25. This garden, nestled at the foot of the Santa
Cruz Mountains, pretty much taught me everything: double-digging, woodworking,
fence building, gopher-proofing, and how to lie on my back in the dirt and
watch the clouds go by. In the photo, there’s a bean tower behind me, probably
about eight feet high. On the wooden frame are sweet peas, which shouldn’t be
flowering at the same time as the beans, so it must have been a cool summer.
I
sort of inherited this garden. I was living in a one-room cottage (without a
kitchen) that was once the maid’s quarters on a sprawling 1920s estate. Nextdoor
were a broken-down greenhouse, a shed that had once held tractors and wagons, some
abandoned pigpens, and a woodworking shop. The place had seen better days, and
the gardener, who had worked there for more than 50 years, had just retired. I was renting the cottage
from some friends, and we were left to take care of the place ourselves. So I
had to learn in a hurry how to groom chrysanthemums—there were about 150 of
them, scattered between two gardens—and divide iris rhizomes and prune cultivated
blackberries. I knew zilch about gardening, so I armed myself with a
thrift-store copy of the Sunset Western
Garden Book, picked up a few tools at garage sales, and learned by the seat
of my pants.
There
were coyotes in the woods, lizards in the bougainvillea, and snakes in the
grass. But the biggest challenge was gophers; I learned to plant twice as much
as I needed and just let them have their share. Many times, in broad daylight,
I saw full-grown plants twitch and then disappear, sucked underground. One
night my cat caught a gopher, brought it inside, and dropped it, still very
much alive, into her food bowl. It sat up in the bowl and looked at us warily. I
shooed the cat into the other room and managed to trap the gopher in a jar.
Then I walked it out to the end of the driveway and let it go in the grass. To
my horror, the gopher turned around and ran after me, coked up on some sort of crazy
Don Quixote mission. It chased me all the way into the house.
I
lived there for four years and grew everything from squash and tomatoes to
wheat and amaranth. The soil was so loamy and good that you could throw
anything into it and it would grow. Crops came and went, but I always had two
things: green beans and morning glories. At night, to give myself good dreams,
I would lie in bed and think about morning glories twining up bamboo poles.
The
story didn’t end well. My little house got caught in a property-line
dispute between my landlord and a neighbor, and with just a few day’s notice, I had
to move out. A week later, the cottage and all the outbuildings were bulldozed,
and the place was eventually sold. When I visited it a couple of years later, the new owners had made it into a sort of miniature golf course, with a concrete-banked
creek and little arched bridges over it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sad in
my life, so bitter. I drove away, hoping the gophers were still there and
raising hell.
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