Long-Stemmed Neuroses
Growing up in a suburb that
was as new as I was old, I resented the short specimen saplings that dotted our
lawn and the neat rows of perky yellow daffodils that popped up from the wood
chips in the kidney-shaped beds each spring. This was nature? Where were the
ancient groves with thick canopies and filtered light whose mysteries lured the
children I read about in books? I have always been drawn to the drama of
landscape, of wild nature and grand, cultivated gardens. To be able to fashion
beauty from light, scent, earth, flora, and fauna, and then to give it over to
the uncontrollable forces of time and decay seemed an endeavor noble and
humbling. I wanted to make gardens. But I moved to the city.
Last
year, when I finally got my own piece of dirt and took a spade to it, it landed
with a thud. The act of gardening itself was joyous--rising early, smelling
earth, getting dirty, getting scratches that I wore proudly, making compost,
lugging, digging, and planting. The result of all this was something else
entirely. The garden I made was a meek little mess, a structureless collection
of plants that never grew from the size at which they entered the ground. While
the mistakes I made were not uncommon ones for a first-time gardener, I somehow
believed that I was not a first-time gardener. Each weekend morning I would go
out to toil anew, and well after dark, lit by headlights of the car, I would
realize that pleasure had turned to despair. I grew sullen and ashamed of my
surroundings. I would be found out.
While gardening is assumed to be so therapeutic that there
is even a field called horticultural therapy, it wasn't designed to help those
with horticultural problems. I was left to self-analyze. My expectations had
been too high. Worse, I recognized a disparity between my idealized self and my
actual self that I had last observed in the seventh grade when I was a gawky
girl with frizzy hair and no breasts and longed to be Laura Dessner, a girl
with a perfect Farrah Fawcett hairdo.
I waited
for the relief that winter would bring. To most gardeners, winter is merely the
anticipation of spring. They take spring gardening catalogs with them into the
tub, where they plan their coming glories. They start seeds in their basements
to get a jump on the season. I was not ready to go there yet. Instead, quite by
accident, I ended up gardening all winter, happily and in private.
It started last fall in the country when I was
invited to join a "bulb club"--a self-consciously pre-feminist all-girl group
that meets to buy bulbs in bulk at reduced rates and exchange bits of gardening
wisdom. Seduced by the descriptions in the catalog, I recklessly bought flowers
that I knew would become deer food if planted outside. Fortunately, the bulb
ladies showed me how to force them into bloom indoors in winter. Just pot them,
they explained. Jam as many into the dirt as possible, water them, and then
secure them in a Ziploc bag before sending them off to the cold, dark place
required for dormancy. After a couple of months, having been deceived into
thinking they've just slept through the winter, they can be brought inside and
made to behave as if spring has arrived.
In early
February, I brought the bulbs out slowly, a few pots at a time, gently
acclimating them to their new surroundings before offering them the winter
sunlight from a south-facing window. I lived to watch the progress of these, my
darlings. I arranged them carefully, watered them dutifully, and checked their
progress constantly, recording their growth rates and bloom times. As someone
who resents houseplants enormously for needing so much and giving so little, I
thought at first that this might be hypocritical. But these potted wonders
changed daily, stretching and budding and turning toward the sun. They did not
just sit there inert and accusatory, the way houseplants do.
Hungering for more flowers, I moved on to the woody
branches of spring-flowering shrubs, tricking them too. Outside I went for long
stems of forsythia. Noticing that a willow tree cut down last year had resisted
death, sending up dozens of shoots from its stump, I cut and forced those too.
Near the house was a badly-coifed flowering quince that had only a handful of
lovely flowers for a few days in May and one or two fruits clinging
pathetically in late summer. Removed from its body, its limbs were elegant and
stately.
It went on
for weeks, bulbs and branches rising from slumber into bloom. I would change
water, snip stems, peel back bark, arrange flowers, arrange arrangements, and
stare at them. From the woods I gathered crab apple, winterberry, and swamp
maple that looked promising. Anything with a hint of swollen bud became my
prey. I also salvaged large pieces of a broad-leaved evergreen that had toppled
in a storm, and put them in a pitcher. In came some mysterious blue berries
from the side of the road and the orange berries of an ugly pyracantha. Even
the irksome ivy by the front door looked good indoors. At the supermarket, I
stared for a long time at the delectable dark green foliage and deep red stem
and spine of Swiss chard. (I resisted.)
I was unstoppable, though. Rooms brimmed with
buckets filled with branches so large they scraped the ceiling and the walls as
I dragged them to the sink for their changes of water. Dinner came later and
later as the kitchen was covered in twigs, branches, and berries.
As I
write, the house is alive with flowers and foliage, and it is starting to snow
again. An arrangement of salmon-pink quince blossoms is set against the gray
wall of the dining room. On the dining table sit two terra-cotta pots of
deep-pink species tulips. In the kitchen is a planter of yellow tulips with
pale-green markings engulfed by a mass of purple grape hyacinths. Nearby is a
blue pitcher bursting with sun-yellow forsythia blooms. On the window above the
sink a small container is stuffed with bits of leftovers--the red berries of
barberry, small twigs of willow, cuttings of hinoki cypress with its fruits
attached, and the pendulous leathery seed pods of wisteria. On the mantle, an
old iron urn holds cascading ivy and some fragrant winter honeysuckle. Next to
that is a small black vase of cut miniature daffodils bought in the supermarket
because I could not bear to harvest any of my own. And on it goes.
The end of winter is a nebulous time for gardeners--it is
not quite one thing and not quite another. There are clear days when you can
skate on the pond and others when you can walk about without a coat. Looking
around for branches to bring home, I see the beech trees still hanging on to
their frail, colorless leaves and notice that the drooping, short-lived flowers
of the maple are about to open. While others are just dreaming of their
gardens, mine is blossoming in the house.
