November 29, 2002
book weather
The days are too short for much gardening. It is dark now when I get home from work. The weekends confront me with a long list of tasks that I tend to ignore knowing the yard will be in shadow before midafternoon. I begin by circumambulating the garden. Descending the basement stairs I emerge at the top of the driveway—a sloping path of cement leading to the doorless, detached garage that is my tool shed. There, amassed, are the potted things I can't grow in the dirt—the aloes, succulents, cymbidiums, and various herbs—as well as new plants waiting for better weather, or plot preparation to be set out. Around the garage, across the small deck past the potted roses, Meyer lemon, and various rhododendrons, to the narrow path that runs between the back border and the raised bed.
The back border is dominated by a gnarled giant of a lemon tree through the center of which has grown a Japanese maple from a vagabond seedling. A rickety trellis that I built from scrap lumber shoulders a rambling white rose. At the end of the path an enormous Banksia rose has wrapped its exfoliating red trunks around the rusting clothesline pole, both remnants of a previous resident. I pass the compost bin, pick my way across the cement chunks spanning a dirt slope to the "lawn"—a sward of clover, yarrow, English daisy and crabgrass. Uphill of the grass, the stucco square of the house rises against the sky. A spindly rhododendron, of an age with the lemon tree, reaches ten feet or so to the bedroom window. Next to it, a towering scarlet oak breaches the roofline. About five years ago I discovered the sapling with its oversized leaves poking up from a tangle of fern fronds. I left it alone and it proceeded to push upward like Jack's beanstalk, its spreading canopy claiming the upper quadrant of the yard. Now it crowns the top of the slope, mingling with the draping branches of the paper birches that look so out of place in California gardens.
I have spent considerable effort to create in this high corner of the yard an impenetrable wall of foliage to shield my garden from my neighbor's second-storey deck. Francis Lester, an accommodatingly agressive musk rose, scaled the 8-foot trellis I had attached to the low chain-link fence in a couple of years. Binding the trees and the rose together is the Western spice bush—Calycanthus occidentalis—that I planted a decade ago and which has slowly bulked into a 10-foot by 10-foot wall of green. Standing in front of it I can look east beyond the garden fence, and over the rooftops to the hills and a broad sweep of sky. This is my favorite vista, and in the dry months a greying Adirondack chair commands the spot, a kind of garden throne from which I survey my Lilliputian domain. But the chair is folded in the garage now and the Scarlet oak's leaves are a dusty brown.
Last week a marauding East wind ripped away the jeweled fall foliage, denuding even the green shrubs, and left behind a seared and sorry looking landscape. It is enough to make one think Nature is sentient—and has a cruel streak. I look to the sky for a sign of the rain that should be falling but the sky is poker-faced. A shadow is creeping across the yard. I walk back to the driveway, pick up my garden gloves and head for the basement door. It's book weather.