Ghosts of Gardens Past, Part 2: "Breaking Rocks in the Hot Sun" (Saratoga, 1990–1994)

This was a Willy Wonka garden: It grew out of pure imagination. It had to, because at the start it was a big piece of nothing.

        It was early summer 1990, and I’d been house-hunting for weeks. Still smarting from the demolition of my sweet little cottage in Monte Sereno (see Ghosts of Gardens Past, Part 1), I’d been sharing an apartment with a roommate for a year and a half and it wasn’t going well. No one—not even our cats—was happy. I’d been itching to live by myself again, and I couldn’t wait to get back to gardening.

        One day I came across a little in-law cottage for rent that was still under construction. It had a funky triangular living room and wiring that wasn’t quite finished, so only half of the kitchen appliances worked. But the yard was interesting—a wide stretch of bare ground between the cottage and the main house. I asked the landlady what was going on with that big yard. “Oh,” she said, “we’ll put up a fence and divide it. You can have as much as you want.” I hastily signed a deposit check.

Pole beans in the ground—check.

Hurry-up summer

I moved in during a drought-baked June, and the bare ground in that yard was hard as an old bone. But I managed to dig out a bed and get pole beans in the ground by the 4th of July, and I kept going from there—marking off each bed with string and stakes, digging and planting one at a time. It was great having all that space, but it made for damned hard work—countless sweaty weekends wielding a pickaxe and shovel* in the hot sun, humming “I Fought the Law” (Clash version). I quickly got used to the labor (hey, I was 28) and spent a lot of happy days out there stubbled with dirt, prying rocks out of the ground and bending chicken wire into Quonset huts for the cucumbers to climb on. I draped floating row covers over the broccoli to keep out the aphids; I set up walls of tinfoil around the lettuce to keep the slugs off. The next spring, I planted peas early and got a bumper crop—way too many for weeks and weeks, a bounty I’ve never been able to repeat.

        The sheer size of the garden was wonderfully freeing—I could plant pretty much anything I wanted, including perennial space-hogs like artichokes and asparagus. But by the second year, I saw that all that feverish work had an unexpected drawback: In my drive to get all the beds planted, I hadn’t given much thought to the garden’s design. And now that it was all dug out, I realized that it had the unimaginative grid of a grocery store: one wide aisle down the middle, with perpendicular paths branching off from it. I tried to class it up with a Tuscan terra cotta birdbath in the middle, but that thing turned out to be impossible to keep clean and its conical base made a nice apartment building for black widows.

Accessorizing

A more successful addition to the garden’s ambience was a tool shed, one of those metal kits from the hardware store. After I managed to get the enormous carton home in the back of my car, I was alarmed to see that the first step in the directions was “Build a foundation.” I had to think on that for a while, and ended up cobbling one together with bricks and scrap lumber. It never felt substantial enough to keep the little building from flying away in a windstorm, but luckily we had no hurricanes and it stayed on the ground. I loved that little shed. I felt a flush of pride every time I opened the door and saw my tools hanging neatly, the odd bags of potting soil and sand obediently waiting on the shelves. I can still hear the metal pop of the walls when I stepped onto that homemade plywood floor.

            As the beds filled in with plants, the yard’s severe face began to soften. An impromptu herb bed near the front door was one of the prettiest spots, with lacy blue and purple fronds waving drowsily along the brick walkway. Over time, a mix of vegetables, annuals, and perennials grew into their adult bodies and shaped a graceful, surprising landscape.

Living, in and out

Salome.

In the four years I lived there, life marched on. A freak February cold spell froze the water pipes and forced me to leave the house and move in with a friend for a week. A relationship came and went; Bill Clinton became the only presidential candidate I’d ever voted for who’d actually won. My delicate, middle-aged cat Tara, never much of a wanderer, ran the house. The undisputed ruler of the yard was my much older, much tougher cat Salome, a fierce beauty who’d never lost her feral streak. During our third year living there, Salome began to struggle; arthritis made every step painful, and mysterious seizures left her disoriented and helpless. After a long battle, it was clearly time to put her down. Afterward, I had no doubt where she should be, so I dug a small, deep grave near the back fence, planted rosemary** over her, and set off her little memorial with white rocks. I spent a lot of time out there sitting next to her, weeding and thinking about her warm gray fur and uncompromising, hunting nature.

        And then, suddenly, I had to move. The company I worked for had decided to relocate their offices 30 miles north, making for an ugly commute, and noisy neighbors had taken the shine off my idyllic little house. I was also tired of the South Bay, with its traffic and hot summers. I was ready for some fog, some hills, some San Francisco. So I went house-hunting again and found a sweet little cabin in Woodside, a half-hour north, and started packing.

Adieux

On the last day in the Saratoga house, I was cleaning the place out and checking every corner and cupboard, well past the point where I felt like I’d puke if I found one more stray umbrella or pillowcase or stack of papers that had to be dealt with. Loading the last armload of stuff into the car, I thought, Hooray—on to the new house. I went back to lock the door, turned around…and saw the garden, laid out in front of me like a small country of roses and herbs, the shed standing stoic and empty, all of it sort of looking at me, holding its breath. My garden! I hadn’t really thought about leaving it. It was a hot summer day, like the first time I’d seen the place, but now it was all filled in and full of personality, scent, and motion.

        I walked around the yard for a long time, touching the plants. We’d finally had a decent, rainy winter, and the artichokes were fat and happy, the dianthus blazing in pink and white, the climbing rose thriving at last. It was a good garden; I felt good about it. But the satisfaction was tinged with loss and worry about what the next tenants might do to it.

        Then I saw the little grave, and a bitter grief pulled at my throat. The yard had quietly become a sort of ancestral land, now that I’d buried someone I loved in it. How can you ever leave that? I sat with Salome one last time, brushing the fronds of rosemary and straightening the white rocks. I hoped against hope that whoever moved in here next would water and tend and hold the place kindly. It was terrible, that feeling, that leaving it up to whatever would come next. I’d felt it before, and here it was again. I suddenly cursed my luck to be a gardener, with our blind hopes and often-broken dreams.***

* One time I shoveled for so long that I threw my back out and couldn’t straighten up until the next day.

** According to folklore, if you tap a branch of rosemary on a lover’s hand, he or she will never forget you.

*** That day made me think a lot about the strange business of renting, gardening, and having to leave gardens behind over and over. Already I’d done it twice—the first time in Monte Sereno, the second in Saratoga. All that work and planning, all the seed catalogs and late-night winter visions, dashed and lost and mourned. After I got settled into the new house, I dumped some of those thoughts into a journal entry and eventually turned it into an essay called “A Trail of Rosemary,” which Fine Gardening magazine picked up a couple of years later. It was one of the first pieces of writing I ever had published, and the editor nominated it for a Gardens Writers Association award. That small success put gas in my writer’s tank for years.

The neighbor's cat. I called him Pumpkin,

but he was partial to corn.

Tara and Salome. Another hot day.

The Tools’ Tales

Gardening is a solitary business, and that’s one of its charms. For me, a day alone in the yard, digging and weeding, usually cures whatever’s been ailing me. But I’m not really alone out there. Oh no—some old friends are always with me. Lots of gardeners can tell tales about their favorite trowels and pruning saws. Here are some of mine, not all of which started their lives as gardening tools.

1) The broken Sheffield Bowie knife

This relic is one of my most versatile gardening tools, and also one of my oldest possessions. It slashes open bags of manure, cuts twine, slits open seed packets, derails dandelions, and does the work of about a hundred snootier tools. And because it’s dinged up already, I don’t worry about abusing it, like calling on it to sharpen a stake when I’m too lazy to go find the “good” knife. The way it came into my life had an air of divine providence: When I was about ten, I found it while I was out horseback riding one day. It was half-buried on a trail deep in the woods. At that age, I was obsessed with cowboys and outlaws, and finding this knife—dirty, pitted, and with a smashed handle that looked like a horse had trampled it—well, I thought it was the coolest find ever. I still do.

2) The two hand hoes

These two beauties were already antiques when I bought them at an estate sale about 30 years ago. The man who sold them to me said they’d been outlawed on commercial farms because you have to stoop to use them, making them hard on the backs of farmworkers. But these hoes, especially the larger one, are by far my most-used tools. I hack out hard, compacted soil with them, dig furrows, loosen weeds, and smooth out mulch with the these babies. One of them is at my side at all times as I work in the garden. I worry about the handles—the wood is deeply grooved from wear, more so every year. The fittings are good and tight, but the handles keep narrowing, like old bones. It’s hard to say how many decades of work they put in before I met them; I think of them as old draft horses who used to labor in front of the plow and the haywagon and now are called on only for a little light duty, like pulling a kid’s cart around the farm on the occasional Sunday. The rest of the time, they doze happily in the tool basket. They’re beautifully built, and I’d be hard pressed to find anything like them again.

3) The $1 paint bucket

This yellow one is the latest in a dynasty of cheap paint buckets that have served as weed bins, compost movers, fish emulsion mixing bowls, and precarious stepstools. I prefer paint buckets over fancier trugs and pails because they’re sturdy and lightweight, their handles don’t pinch, and they’re quieter than metal pails, which is handy when I’m out working early in the morning. I’ve never bought a new paint bucket; I always find them at garage sales for about a buck. I’ve only owned three or four of these in my life; each one lasts about 10 years. Eventually, they start to photodegrade and break apart, and the chunks are as sharp as shards of china. When one finally, well, kicks the bucket, I get a little choked up as I (carefully) carry the pieces out to the trash can. Then I hit another garage sale.

4) The fancy-schmancy spading fork

Okay, this one is a snooty tool, and I paid a lot of money for it. But I paid that money about 20 years ago, and this English beauty has never, ever let me down. Before I got this, I ran through a string of shoddy spading forks. Digging out a new bed was an exercise in frustration; I still have a muscle memory of straightening out bent tines by setting the points on a brick and stepping on them, one at a time. Finally I scraped together $100 and marched over to Smith & Hawken (now defunct), a very dangerous store for gardeners, and walked out of there with this fork and, I’m sure, a half-dozen pretty things I didn’t need. I’ve used this fork so much that the brand name has completely worn off the wooden handle, so I don’t know what kind it is. But the metallic “Made in England” decal still blazes like new, and its tines are as straight as the day it was made. This one never gets left out in the rain, not even for a minute.

5) The no-name aluminum hand tools

I don’t remember when or where I got these, but it was at least 20 years ago, and I’m sure I didn’t pay more than about $10 for the set. But I’ve never wanted another trowel—this one fits me perfectly, is lightweight and tough, and never rusts, bends, or splinters. And the fork is indispensable; I’ve dug out acres of burdock and Bermuda grass with that thing. The thin little transplanter, great for putting in two-inch seedlings, is just icing on the cake.

6) The homemade soil sieve

This one isn’t old—I built it a few months ago—but it’s a replica of two old sieves I used in my first garden back in the ’80s. Those earlier sieves sort of came with the place—I found them in an abandoned shed—and, as weatherbeaten and creaky as they were, they still worked like a dream. Nothing else separates rocks from dirt quite as well: You place the sieve on top of a wheelbarrow, put a few shovelfuls of dirt in it, and shake it. The rocks stay in the sieve and the beautifully sifted soil goes in the barrow, where you can mix it with manure or whatever before putting it back in the hole. These sieves are hard to find in stores; I saw one about a year ago, but couldn’t find one again when I needed it, so I made one out of pine and ½-inch wire mesh. The secret reason why I love these sieves so much: They make me feel like an archaeologist.

7) The perfect pruning shears

I don’t have a picture of these . . . because they don’t exist. I use pruning shears constantly—aside from the hand hoes, they’re my most-used garden tool—but I’ve never found a really good pair. Oh, I’ve had pruners that lasted for years, but they’ve always been a grumbling compromise: They don’t cut cleanly, they don’t fit my hand, or they’re awkward and slippery and I keep dropping them on my foot. Right now I have a high-tech pair of Fiskars that looked like a million bucks hanging on the wall in the store. They have a sweet spot, which sounds good in theory but drives me nuts: If you don’t cut in just the right spot on the blade, they just mash whatever you’re trying to cut, and then you’ve got a fibery mess that you have to saw at two or three times. Their big selling point is an ergonomic rotating handle thingy that, via some law of physics, gives you added leverage. The result is that, if you manage to find the sweet spot, they cut through heavy branches very easily. Too easily—I live in constant fear of lopping off a finger with those things.

Ghosts of Gardens Past

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.

            

Where Have All the Green Beans Gone?

I have stumbled onto a mystery. It’s been building and building for years, until now I just feel that something’s afoot, something’s wrong in the world.

The problem is that for the past several years, green beans haven’t tasted good.

This is no small matter—green beans are, hands down, my favorite food. I crave and adore them like some people hanker after ice cream or chocolate. To me, there is nothing more heavenly than a pile of freshly picked, well-cooked, butter-sweet green beans.

For years, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about green beans—I grew up on those leathery, frozen cigarette butts that food companies passed off as green beans in the 1960s. My conversion didn’t come until my 20s, when I rented a one-room cottage on an old estate in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. On the grounds were various long-neglected gardens—a horseshoe-shaped rose garden, unruly rows of iris and chrysanthemums, thickets of blackberries, and a vegetable garden, all tended by an elderly groundskeeper who came twice a week to prune, hoe, and fall asleep in the rocking chair in the woodshed.

The gardener eventually retired—he’d worked on that estate for more than 50 years. And with my landlords busy with their own lives, I was left to tend the grounds as best I could. That first spring, to my surprise, a muscular seedling poked its way out of the ground in the vegetable garden. I bought a gardening book for a buck at a thrift store, and once the seedling leafed out, I identified it as a green bean—and, with the help of a discarded seed packet in the shed, pegged it as a Kentucky Wonder pole bean. So I drove in a three-foot stake next to it and kept an eye on it. It grew wondrously fast, not unlike that fairy-tale beanstalk, and after a few days it already needed a much taller stake. I drove in a six-footer next to the first stake, and the bean soon bounded up past both of them and was waving around for something bigger to climb. I drove in another six-foot stake next to the others and watched the tendril grow up and down and up them, making a complicated ladder of green.

Eventually it flowered, and soon I had six or eight actual green beans. I carefully picked my tiny harvest and put them in the steamer one evening. They made a meager-looking side dish, a sad pile of twigs at the edge of the plate. Then I took a bite—and all I can say is that it was a religious experience. I’d never tasted anything like them—buttery, sweet, warm, and sustaining. I swooned. I made ecstatic noises. The only thing wrong was that there weren’t more of them—lots more.

Over the next few years, I expanded the estate’s vegetable garden and became proficient at workaday crops like squash and tomatoes, and even wheat and amaranth. But my real forte was green beans. My favorite type were Blue Lakes—even more delicious than Kentucky Wonders and, at the time (the mid ’80s), somewhat rare. I perfected the bamboo bean teepee and recorded planting dates, frosts, deer raids, and cutworm attacks. And after I moved away from that estate, I had a garden wherever I lived—specifically to grow green beans. One year I grew so many of them—purple-podded and yellow wax and Blue Lakes and something speckled that I can’t remember—that my boyfriend and I had to sit down two or three times a week and work our way through dinner plates piled high with them. That probably put him off beans permanently, but I was in heaven.

Then I stopped gardening for a while—I’d moved to a rental where there was no room for vegetables, and for seven years I didn’t put a trowel in the ground. Then I moved to Oregon and picked out a house especially for its big back yard. I was back in the bean business. But that first year, something didn’t seem right—the Blue Lakes came up and climbed the teepees and looked beautiful, but when I harvested and steamed them, they were…well, they sort of weren’t there. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t particularly good. It was weird—in all those years of gardening, I had never tasted a bean that I didn’t love. But these tasted like those chewy frozen beans of my childhood. I figured I’d gotten a bad packet of seeds.

The next year, I got Blue Lake seeds from a different company and tried again. Same thing—not much flavor. Okay, I thought, maybe the soil is off. I tried different varieties—Kentucky Wonders and Domatsus and Romanos. The Domatsus were okay, but they were still a far cry from the epiphany I was after. All the others—blah.

Then I started to notice the same problem with fresh beans from the grocery store. And then with the ones from the farmer’s market. They just weren’t beany. Now it’s been years since I’ve tasted a really good green bean. And it’s nagging at me. I feel like a character in a disaster movie, the one who spots the new speck in the sky but doesn’t mention it to anyone because she doesn’t think it’s a big deal until boom!—it hits the Earth.

The other night I was talking about the green bean problem with a friend who worked summers picking beans when he was growing up. He said that now, in the age of mechanized farming, the seed companies have narrowed our choices down to just a few varieties that are bred to withstand rough handling without bruising. In short, he said, like so many other crops, beans are now being bred for ease of shipping rather than for taste.

So now, the thorniest of questions comes to mind—have they actually bred the flavor out of green beans? Is it gone forever? Am I doomed to wander the Earth, tasting this bean and that, shaking my head and grumbling, “It’s just not the same”? I swear I am not being nostalgic. I was there—I ate those beans. They danced in the mouth. They were like eating the whole sweet Earth in one bite. They were like the call of the dodo and the wingprint of the passenger pigeon—they lived once, perfect and fleeting. What has happened here? Did we literally breed them to death?