True Dirt

death and the garden

The local "garden center" might just as well be called the "flower cemetary" because most everything that is bought at those emporiums of cheap and colorful plant flats will die within the week. And likely nobody will mourn if they do. I remember watching a neighbor of some years ago--flush with the enthusiasm of the new homeowner--cart home flats of petunias on Saturdays for placement along the front walkway. They would be dead by Friday. Usually because he had forgotten to water them. This went on for the entire summer until he finally figured out that they were all going to die no matter what he did--so he put in lawn.

House plants are notorious death mongers. A friend once asked me about a wilting specimen--it had been a gift--of a large leaf oxalis or wood sorrel. The thing was trying to go dormant for the season but my friend thought it was dying. I explained that the plant was a sort of bulb and would come back next spring. But this is not a good trait for a houseplant and I believe it was abandoned, or perhaps planted, soon thereafter. I have been rescuing a giant philodendron from near death on a regular basis for over a decade now. Always on the verge of expiring, I reluctantly revive it with a soak in the bathtub for another month. It was a birthday present from my brother and some deep rooted familial obligation compels me to keep it alive.

When the beautiful pink-flowered albizia began to die in my parents' garden, however, it was a deeply felt tragedy. The tree had graced the patio for decades with its lacy green boughs, cooling an otherwise unbearably hot spot. It decayed and failed, year by year, to replenish its leafy branches and now looms like the Grim Reaper over the garden. My parents cannot not bear to replace it, preferring to see the old tree to its end.

I've had many small deaths in my garden, mostly experiments of short duration; flowers that couldn't take the heavy soil or lack of summer rain; native plants too sensitive to grow anywhere but their preferred rare habitat; and a mature Meyer lemon that up and succumbed one summer to what I think was oak root fungus. But no major losses have left me bereft.

This spring, the wettest in a hundred years, has affected my garden in contradictory ways with some plants thriving on the abundance of water and others delaying their normal growth period or seeming to fade away altogether. I began to notice that one of my two Ribes (R. sanguineum var. glutinosum) or pink-flowering currants was wilting. The new leaves just pushed out at the branch tips and froze in time, seemingly petrified while its sister plant six feet away was busily pushing out lush new growth. The currant was one of my first plantings over ten years ago, the reliable March robin of my garden, its drooping pink panicles signaling to the rest of the plants that spring was near. Now the dead currant is a brittle skeleton rising above my blooming Heucheras.

The second tragedy this April is another old friend, the Oyama magnolia (Magnolia sieboldi). It was my first significant garden "structure" plant. I was too ignorant then to really know where it should go and stuck it in an awkward corner where the dirt was particularly heavy. It never thrived but persisted in its charming way, delighting me with its graceful presence and, sparingly, its exotic flowers. Now it too is dying. Only two of its slender branches have leafed out. The others are stiff and leafless, the wood lacking that visible pulse of life that spring brings to deciduous trees.

While my old plant friends expire, the scarlet oak is pushing off its mantle of dead leaves and unfurling the pale green lace of a new gown. The Japanese maples are chartreuse with new life. And the rose canes are sporting the distinctive russet of new leaf. Just as they do every spring.

The garden, however, will not be the same garden. There is an intimacy that grows between a gardener and a garden. It may be my garden but the plants are themselves, entities of their own realm. I may plant another Ribes but it won't be the same individual that died. And although I have planted and protected these plants, worried about them, fed and watered them, shaped them and admired them, they have in some way merely acquiesced to being my garden. When they go, some of my gardener's heart goes with them.

The old elm at Crawley, by Jacob George Strutt

Posted by briggs at April 24, 2006 1:05 PM