My Garden (An Exercise in Garden Writing)

Back of the house as seen from the back corner of my garden. The willow arbor is floating there to the left. 

After having seen many residential gardens over the last few years I think it's safe to say that mine is rather small, a regular city lot, with areas more or less here and there in strips along the north, south, and west sides of the home. The backyard is probably more of what would be traditionally called a garden, but even it is quite small when compared to larger gardens seen in this city. It is square, roughly 30' x 30', and in its heart is my 10' x 10' living willow arbor. For me, this is the shaggy, ragged and often messy heart of my garden. It's my outdoor living room. It's cozy and a bit wild—probably a bit like me.

This area looks sort of finished but if I'd pulled the camera out a bit the illusion of order would disappear. (That's Cryptomeria japonica 'Spiraliter Falcata' there on the right and an Impatiens tinctoria on the far left. Still cannot find the tag for the really hardy evergreen fern there but I'm working on it. The grassy bunch is a lovely Carex.) 

Then there is the rest. The bits and pieces. I see swipes and swatches as I wander around watering in the heat. I see finished areas followed by piles of trash that I've not yet picked up from old ideas for projects. There are the overgrown run-on sentences of the garden—mostly vines. My garden is one that's a work-in-progress, it's an artist's studio. This place really is my mad plant scientist's laboratory. 

Antirrhinum majus 'Oriental Lanterns (TM)' grown from seed I bought from Park Seed. The color is amazing and the plant is a great plant.

My house faces west. The front yard is not really coherent. There is the tiny hell strip, cut up into three uneven pieces. There is a central area, with a privacy planting, meant to keep the eyes of those on the sidewalk away from my large front window. The parking area is there too but it's currently filled with racks and pots and is more of a staging area this summer. An edible garden once ran along the southern side of the house. It is overgrown now and a mass of tangled plants. It was created initially to be the domain of my ex, but I've not yet fully reclaimed it. I hope to soon. 

Life in the hammock on a summer evening as I dream of better times ahead.

I see the memories of each and every plant and space. I see the ghosts of plants who've come before and which are gone now. I want to garden to build a future now more than to remember the past. This will be challenging for me, but I want to do so. So much about gardening requires time and patience. I've finally learned too that gardening can be exhilarating when you rip everything out and begin again. Just like a diseased plant, it's best to rip it out. Some plants struggle in the wrong conditions, I have been one of those plants. 

The real garden here at home. The back boundary has been an eyesore for years. Here is Mona the Cat watching the apartment dwellers. Someday soon I'l have the fence I've been hoping for and planning for years.

The front garden runs along the fence and turns along with the walking path into what is my north garden. It is the access walkway and no one ever wants to go that way even when I encourage them to do so. Someday I'll actually consult someone about how to make that entryway more enticing, but for now, I'll just continue to gently encourage folks verbally. 

My engagement bike along the North Side of the house. (Yes, I'm engaged to be married.) The bike "La Dama" is now my mobile seed-collecting unit. I can bike to homes nearby and collect seeds from gardens locally to be sold in my online store. So far, the whole process has worked wonders for my health. 

I like the small northern strip. I don't like having to look directly at my neighbor's house, but he's a nice man. He just isn't as into privacy as I am. He has landscaped with English laurels (Prunus laurocerasus), Japanese privet (Ligustrum japonicum), and cedar (Cedrus)—all having grown randomly on his property from seeds dropped by birds or else they were blown in on the wind. He then plucked them and rearranged them into rows. Amazing in its own way I suppose as a lesson in patience and he has loads of that virtue. He's a great neighbor and I like to harvest from his ever-growing army of Western Sword ferns (Polystichum munitum). (My first client has also been grateful for this too.) 

Sedum morganianum in my office. I'm taking care of my indoor babies before it gets too dark and cold outside to do so in the fall. I hate transplanting houseplants when the days get shorter. It's best to care for them now. Their roots will appreciate it and they'll be far less likely to fall prey to pests and disease.

Forgive me for not writing about my plants though. Major life transitions recently have made that painful. I'm healing. I've learned a lot. So many memories were tied up in every corner of green in my space. During the past few years I've really come to understand how unusual I am in that sense. My plantings have held such sentiments. But I know that I am not the only one. There are those who garden to decorate. Some re-create a time, or a place, or a feeling. Many just want symmetry and low-maintance. Some want that impression—a replication seen in a magazine. I planted to forget. I planted to create another kind of reality. I remember far too much and I've come to realize recently that I've never forgotten nearly as much in my garden as I've remembered. 

The garden of my mother. 

My home is the home of a woman who up until recently didn't really understand she had a moderately serious case of OCD. When I was highly stressed during the past decade—for the first time in my life—the negative effects of this affliction really showed themselves. Now I'm using my "old friend" to help me to organize, clean and make sense of the chaos I'd created during so many years of unhappiness and loneliness. I've taken my life back and I no longer see OCD really at all. I had no idea that such severe and extreme stress could do this to someone. In hindsight, I have been that woman. 

I'm very detail oriented. This can be a wonderful thing—especially for making pastries. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy I have a light form of OCD but I want to use it for good. The kind I have appears to have helped me in the past with my academic achievements. I have an amazing memory and when I want to organize and categorize things, it's like breathing for me and I find it extremely relaxing. It puts me in my happy place. When I'm stressed though, things fall apart. I've lived with a lot of stress for many years now and my garden shows that still. It's the last frontier of my former life but I'm making sense of it now. I'm re-writing my garden as I'm re-writing my life. 

First harvest of the season from the Ficus carica 'Petite Negra'.

For these reasons I do not see what others see. As I walk the circle around my home I see what never was, I hear the echos of arguments, there were the joyous moments after my divorce, conversations with friends and foster kids, and I see myself wandering, wondering what to do with myself. I see myself crying in pain during times of horrible illness and swelling. In my head the refrain, "I need help," repeats over and over. It is far more difficult to ask for help than it is to prune a Japanese maple. When I walk in my garden, I see and feel the pleasure pruning the Japanese maples has given me during the worst of times. When I felt my worst emotionally, I always sought my pruners. 

The front of the house July 2013. 

You'd think that this would make for an organized garden but mine is not. There are yet many unfinished projects. I'm slowly trashing them now and am making room for a new period in my life. I'm keeping the plants that grow well and which bring me happiness. If the memories are too painful, reminding me of when I fell and broke my fingers, or when I fell and hit my head, I'm trying not to let the plants die. Instead, I am either giving things away or moving them. The memories are dying instead and things are no longer falling apart. 

Maurice the Cat in his happy zone.

I should add more pictures but I'm still ashamed to do so. With a party coming up to welcome my fiancé into his new home I'm making strides. These things take time, energy, and money and I don't have a lot of any of these right now.

I'm one of the many chronically ill divorced people who've filed for personal bankruptcy. I'm not a perfectly comfortable member of the middle class and I'm not ashamed to say so. That's what I feel and see when I see my garden but I've been learning to see so much more.  

I feel that I'm lucky and gifted to be here—to be able to continue living here. I'm loved now too—a lot!—and I'm learning to be part of a team. We plan to buy the house and stay here. These things take time, but sometimes things work out for the best. I'm learning that too and being positive makes a huge difference. I adore all of the positive green people in my life and want to thank them from the bottom of my heart. We gardeners are ever the optimists and you've all helped me feel alive during a time when I really needed the lifeline. Thank you.

Gardens are for people and this garden is a big part of me. I really look forward to sharing it more with others in the future—and I guess that means you'll get a bit more of me too.

(The Grow Write Guild is a creative writing club for people who garden. It's a series of bi-weekly writing prompts created by garden author and blogger Gayla Trail. I'm starting out late with the series but hope to catch up soon. It's just what this blogger needed for some summer fun.)

Wordless Wednesday: Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt

Argemone grown from seed.

Alpine strawberry (Fragaria vesca)—also grown from seed.

Western Columbine (Aquilegia formosa). Yes, this one is an old seedling of mine too. 

Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) snag left in a garden setting. (Just to throw you off the scent of my trail.)

Nigella seed heads: the circle of life begins again.

A Dream Garden: When I first met mine...

Antiquo jardín del Alcázar de Sevilla (Joaquín Sorolla), 1908.

Writers, dreamers, poets and artists have thought long and hard about gardens for centuries—and so have the more religious and practical among us. At least I imagine they have because I've studied such things, but I'm far from certain. So often nowadays I find that these real characters of history are just as real to me as any who are fictional. I guess I've grown and that fine line is no longer there. It all blends together. It's all a pastiche. 

I'm not religious myself, but I was raised in a Catholic family, went to Catholic school for 12 years, and I now consider myself Catholic by culture. That's how I ended up visiting España with my parents back in my early 20s. Dad wanted to go there for 10 days to take photos of churches and to visit the region of Estremadura. The three of us traveled south from Madrid during the month of December and I'd like to say that I remember a lot more than I do, but I spent most of my trip feeling unwell. 

At night my dreams were in Spanish. (Back then my Spanish-language fluency was much better, although that had never happened to me before and it felt strange—yes, foreign.) During the daytime, my mind wandered back-and-forth in the backseat. I felt between worlds.  

As we drove I thought a lot about what a cousin had recently told me concerning our Sicilian ancestry. He'd researched our family as part of his Master's thesis and had found that one of our earliest relatives was actually a Morisco from Spain. Fresh in my mind was the way my father had vehemently been unable to accept this discovery. Today he's softened and has accepted that it's likely true, but at that time, it dramatically altered how we saw ourselves.

Jardín de Carlos V en el Alcázar de Sevilla (Joaquín Sorolla), 1910.

Before I knew it we were in the beautiful city of Sevilla. We stayed there for a few nights and went to several museums, a Flamenco performance, we ate delicious food, and then one day, while walking around on my own, I stumbled upon the Alcázar of Seville. I went inside. 

The gardens of the Reales Alcázares de Sevilla changed me. I think I was transported there away from myself. They were—and still are—my dream gardens. It was there I felt so many new and wonderful things as I saw plants that seemed so unreal to me. I felt so alive and so awake. In many ways it felt more like home to me than my own home. I had never felt that way before and I haven't felt that way again.

To me that's what a dream garden is about and it's what we seek to make when we design gardens. We want what I can only describe as being a kind of religious experience. Like in meditation, we consciously count our breathing until we transcend and forget ourselves. We want gardens to give us that kind of rush too. It's deep. I know. It seems very much connected to something inside of us that's human. Many of us crave this feeling. It's spiritual whether we like to admit it or not. It's calming. It's soothing.

To Christians, it's a return to Eden, and to those who follow Islam, it's called Paradise. In Arabic the word is جنّة or Jannah—and that's short for garden. That day in Sevilla I felt like I'd visited Paradise. Ever since then, as a gardener, I've wanted to recreate that feeling.

That has been my dream.

(The Grow Write Guild is a creative writing club for people who garden. It's a series of bi-weekly writing prompts created by garden author and blogger Gayla Trail. I'm starting out late with the series but hope to catch up soon. It's just what this blogger needed for some summer fun.)

My First Plant: The Old Man Cactus

An unnamed fuzzy cactus. Not quite like my original Old Man Cactus, but cute and fuzzy nonetheless.  

The first plant I ever owned was an Old Man Cactus (Cephalocereus senilis). I must have been 8 or 9 and it was an impulse buy my mother made out of guilt. I'm not sure now what she'd been dragging me around to do that day, but I recall even now that she bought it just so that she wouldn't have to hear me complain about the day's activities. 

It was a distraction, a bribe, and it worked—at least until I killed it. 

The plant was placed on the shelf you see above, in the same place where you see the replacement plant I just plucked from Portland Nursery the other day. Many of you have probably already guessed that this placement gave the plant a death sentence. Yes. I know now. I did that but I'd wanted it to live with my most cherished possessions—my books. I just didn't know any better.

I don't recall how long I strung that plant's life out for, but I do remember how much my mother hated that plant. 

When I told her I was going to write a post about it here on my blog, she remembered that "damn thing" well. For many years my Grandma Ila had collected cacti and succulents and my mother had always found her mother's groupings—alway in mismatched kitschy planters—to be tacky. As a kid I'd found the whole setup quirky and exotic—not at all like the oatmeal palace my mom had made for us. Her worst nightmare was that I might end up being like her mother. Maybe I did end up a little bit like her, but like all good kids, I'm a lot like a lot of people and I'm myself too. 

My cactus had not been picked at random. For a time I'd admired it at the store and I was fascinated that something so cute could have such painful spines. That trigger in my imagination made me create all kinds of stories about it and one of those was the idea that it would protect me but that makes little sense now to my adult mind. 

Before the Old Man cactus entered my room I knew little of about caring for cacti. There must have been books about gardening for children but at that time I was hooked on mysteries, mythology and the classical texts my dad passed on for me to read. If I'd asked for a gardening book back then I think both of my parents would have chuckled. The fact those are what I mostly own now, and that the books are all over my home doesn't surprise my parents at all nowadays—not even a bit. Funny how we grow. 

When the plant finally rotted I must admit that I felt a bit defeated. One day it quietly disappeared from the shelf in my room and my mom and I didn't talk about it. She hated looking at it and I felt badly that I'd failed. 

It wasn't until high school that I started growing houseplants again, and that time, I quickly succeeded with the basics and felt some mastery. During college my collection continued to grow, and my mom bought me more plants, and I still have a few around the house that I've owned for nearly 20 years. 

This little fuzzy guy is set to have a long life with me now—I hope.

(The Grow Write Guild is a creative writing club for people who garden. It's a series of bi-weekly writing prompts created by garden author and blogger Gayla Trail. I'm starting out late with the series but hope to catch up soon. It's just what this blogger needed for some summer fun.)