true dirt

The rose obsession continues…until the last petal drops in my soon-to-be-a-memory spring garden. A friend invited me to join her on an expedition this last Saturday to El Cerrito where the annual “Celebration of Old Roses” event is held in the community center. I have heard about this event for years from fellow gardeners and rose enthusiasts and both me and Sally were expecting something rather grand. In reality, it looks like a neighborhood BBQ held at the community pool (which is next door and was on this sunny Saturday emiting the happy shrieks of children frolicking in chlorinated bliss). There were two aisles of folding tables covered in white cloth inside the center’s main room – a utilitarian hall with sliding glass doors opening to a small patio and lawn where an actual BBQ was producing grilled items for the free lunch. There were also some vendors of roses, geraniums, and arts and crafts for garden decoration. Inside, the vendors included the Mt. Diablo Porcelain Painters and sellers of rose jelly and jam products–which I realize now I was crazy not to sample. But I was preoccupied with my camera trying to capture the roses themselves in their jelly and Mason jars laid out on the tables in their major groups: Floribundas, Teas, Chinas, Gallicas, Portlands, Bourbons, species, musks and “miscellaneous”. And with pausing to sniff and admire the celebrities up close. It’s one thing to peruse gorgeous photos of these fragile beauties and quite another to meet them in the rose flesh. The colors are not always describable in pixels or pigments, and the scents certainly are not even the same from one sniffer to another.

The event was the brainchild of Miriam Wilkins who also founded a breakaway sect of rosarians in 1975, The Heritage Roses Group. Not finding particularly interested company in the national American Rose Society, Miriam felt a new society was needed that would focus on the preservation, history, re-introduction, and identification of roses which were rarely grown commercially and are now lost to the memory of most modern gardeners. Miriam was honored in 2003 as a Great Rosarian of the World (GROW) for her championing of forgotten heritage roses at the annual lecture series hosted by the Manhattan Rose Society. Other honorees of GROW include names any rose enthusiast would recognize – like Peter Harkness of the British rose growing house (Just Joey, Ballerina, Buff Beauty). Ann Raver, columnist for the New York Times, wrote about attending the illustrious event which this year honored William Kordes III, of the famous German rose breeding family (Alchemist, Dortmund, Erfurt).

Back to El Cerrito….I stopped at the table for the Heritage Roses Group and realized that without a check book (and, as usual, short of cash) I would be unable to pay the $12 membership fee which includes four paper issues of The Rose Letter (or $10 for the pdf version). The group’s website is beginning to feature an archive of scanned back issues but there are only two available now (of 120 issues). I chatted awhile with the two women at the table after they answered my question about a very prolific “Indigo” that was sprouting up in unexpected places in my garden. They confirmed my suspicion that the rose was “suckering” and not reproducing from seed. A natty gentleman in blazer and tie joined in to wax prolific on the necessity of mulching roses in the East Bay and also encouraged me to visit Miriam Wilkin’s fabulous rose garden just a few blocks up the hill from the community center. I had been hoping to see Miriam at her signature event but she was not there, nor does she appear to be writing her personal newsletter, The Old Roser’s Digest. But then the rose group itself is pretty free-floating, choosing to neither meet regularly, elect officers, nor have a constitution. Perhaps Miriam preferred the company of her own roses that day.
Back at home (Sally got snared by a couple of 2-gallon “Cherokee” roses, and a collection of pelargoniums but my cash-less strategy saved me) I went looking for Miriam Wilkin’s rose group on the web and printed out the November 1999 quarterly letter. On the first page the editor apologizes for late delivery citing “writer’s block and the onset of holiday madness”, and I felt immediately at home. There were gems abundant in the 17-page “letter”, including a long article on fragrance in old roses and a sceptical piece on the very English David Austin’s (then) new rose growing operation in Tyler, Texas. In response to an inquiry by the Rose Letter editors as to whether the Texas Austin roses were “budded” (i.e. grafted) rather than grown on their own roots, they replied that the rootstock was coming from “…a well known large scale producer, under our control, and is all from virus free Davis stock.” The editors assumed they were talking not about a virus-free individual but the agricultural research powerhouse University of California campus in Davis. Having never heard that Davis produced rootstocks of old rose budwood (they are reknowned for wine grape rootstock), The Rose Letter editors inquired after the name of the “well known large scale producer” and Texas Austin replied that it would not be “constructive” for them to disclose the producer “at this time.” The White House press secretary could not have done better.
Under “Plants/Information Wanted” Jim Donovan of W. Bruces Place, Canyon Country, CA (I have no idea where this is) makes a plea for someone with “Louis van Houtte, the 1886-or 69 hybrid perpetual from LaCharme” to share one with him. I wonder if anyone did.

I leave you with the “Old Roses For Fragrance” author Lily Shohan’s advice for purchasing fragrant roses: “Ignore those described as having “light fragrance”; in Catalog Speak, that generally means none or very little…look for a description where the seller especially notes the fragrance. And, “remember that it is truly said, ‘a rose without fragrance is a flower without a soul.”

More has been written about them than any other flower, to the point of terminal cliche. The symbol of love and war and everything hunky dory, they have decorated the homes and objets de art and gardens of the rich and powerful, and the tiny dirt patches and chinaware of the most humble and obscure. There are more kinds and colors of roses than any other flower and more are being created – and lost to posterity – every day. Roses both fascinate and repel the gardener and there is probably no gardener who has remained totally and entirely immune to their magnetism.
Curiously, they are the easiest of plants to grow and yet many gardeners are baffled by their cultivation. They are the hardiest of plants and yet we have an entire industry devoted to the idea that they are fragile and susceptible to the least blight or bug. There is a rose for every taste, unfortunately, and many roses are downright ugly while others merely bore; they can be prolific or stingy, exquisite or gauche. And that’s just the flowers. The plants are another universe altogether: massive climbers and spindly twigs, luxurious leafers and scraggly dullards, deadly flesh rippers and thornless canopies; there is even a rose without a flower. We won’t even mention the hips.
As a completely unqualified expert on some roses in very particular circumstances (West Coast climate, adobe soils, hillside garden, coastal fog, rainless summers), here is the dirt on (my) roses….
You can’t kill ‘em. Excepting a hard freeze, or a firestorm there is nothing that will kill a rose. They may lose all their leaves to rust and black spot, be covered in mildew, and not have a drop to drink for months – and they will live on, probably still bloom too. You don’t need to spray them with anything, feed them, or prune them. In fact, for most roses, the more you ignore them the better they do.
They can kill you. Really. Though I actually do not know of any mortality stats. There is a fungus, Sporothrix schenckii, that grows on rose thorns, morphs into a yeast in the body and attacks the lymph system – causing lesions in lymph nodes. The infection is called Sporothricosis. It is treated by oral doses of potassium iodide. A gardener friend contracted this little nasty after falling into a particularly thorny rose bush (I think it was Eyepaint) and gouging her arm. However, you are much more likely to lose an eye or scratch a cornea, suffer puncture wounds anywhere (any where!) or clip your finger with the Felcos while pruning; and in the case of the climbers, ladder accidents are always a concern. My expert advice: wear elbow-length leather gloves, safety googles, and non-slip gardening shoes – and a helmet wouldn’t hurt either.
More bloom is not better. It’s just more. There are places in the garden for a continuously blooming plant and places for one that delivers an exquisite, and ephemeral, moment. The roses that bloom continuously in the growing season (they are called remontant) often have nothing else going for them because other qualities were lost in the hybridizing. Gallica roses exude a perfume more complex and intoxicating than Chanel No. 5 but they only bloom once a year. The rich dark colors and dense petaling of many roses also gets lost when they are bred for repeat bloom.
Roses have leaves too. And they often look like s—. And not because of disease or bad weather. Perhaps the worst offenders are the classic 1950s creations called “hybrid teas”, to be found in every Payless and Home Depot, and most gardening catalogs, often carrying the label of rose purveyors Jackson and Perkins. The category is characterized by huge blooms on long stems – perfect for the cut crystal vase – often in bright, toneless colors. The plants grow into large round shrubs (if they aren’t climbers) supported by thumb-width canes bearing massive thorns. Often the leaves are huge, dark green, and leathery. This is not a plant you want to show off unless it’s got an endless supply of distracting great gobs of bright blooms.
There are many roses with perfectly charming leaves that look fine when not in bloom. They can be pale green and diaphanous, golden and russet, or glossy as glass and thick as a hedge. There are also nearly leafless roses that concentrate all their energy into the top of the cane in either leaf or bloom. These plants are best tucked into a border where their nakedness will be covered by other plants.
Roses are architectural. They can roof a garage or scale a wall, be a canopy or a tower, or disappear the neighbors. Forget the “standard” rose-on-a-stick, I’m talking about a rose that can give you a whole other territory above your garden, out your second-story window, or hide a telephone pole. A house I once had a room in (a slightly seedy mansion in the Los Altos Hills occupied by a motly crew of bohemians) had a large pond in the middle of its grand circular driveway, over which draped a monstrous old live oak tree and roped about the oak’s massive limbs was an equally monstrous rose. The luminous roses were big as an Easter hat and hung suspended over the mossy pond like pale pink moons. I found the rose at the old Roses of Yesterday and Today in Watsonville years ago – colonizing a hillside. It is Belle of Portugal and you need a mansion or Rapunzel’s tower to really appreciate it.
You can never have too many. I’m up to 28 or 30 and there is always room for another pot. Yes, a pot. I have some roses that have flourished in 5-gallon containers for years. Two are in 1-foot square redwood planters. One rose is growing in the cement driveway (a wild Sierra rose); a couple are wandering off into the neighbor’s trees and may reach the next town soon. I’ve got roses cheek by jowl in several borders and lashed to the fence, windows and crude arbors constructed of rotten fence decking. An old pitchfork with a bent tine holds up a couple more. I just put some in the front yard (former container inhabitants) squeezed between pittosporum shrubs and burgeoning oak trees – and then stuck some tomato and bean plants around them. And all of this in a rented yard.
Most of my roses are not remontant and that means they are rather invisible in the garden most of the year. And I tend to forget why I have so many when I’m looking for new real estate for the latest Annie’s Annual purchases. But then May rolls around and it is la vie en rose for me.

ply your hammock among the trees, settle your skin upon springy skein, relax your mind and drift back in centuries two, three, four where

“…Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious arts of peace
But through adventurous war
Urged his active star…”

and Andrew Marvell escaped prose’aic politics in his poetic Garden, though

Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude.

and no industrious bee was yet clichéd….

How well the skilful gardener drew
of flowers and herbs this dial new!
Where, from above, the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run:
And, as it works, the industrious bee
Computes it’s time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers.

The more I despair of civilization, the more I wonder at nature. I’m sure it’s what every gardener concludes after awhile, particularly in spring when whatever it was that we mulled over in the twiddling days of winter – the inadequacies and faults and difficulties of our garden – are waved away by nature’s magic wand. I walk out the back door one morning and am stupified once more by the artless beauty of the plant world. Flora returns to her domain and all her green mignons have dressed for the ball.
The wisteria, its lavender spectacle all but forgotten, has bowed to the roses, out in fat flounces of perfumed silk barely seconds after the leafing. The clematis have twirled out their purple pinwheels and the poppies have popped off their dunce caps and called the bees out with blinding orange banners. These may be the stage hoggers, but in every terra cotta pot and down among the dying bulbs something is pushing through to remind me again why it’s there – vermillion salvia and cherry red abutilon, the mahogony stems of the Mexican dahlias, and the blue sparkle of a massive borage that is fast obscuring the compost bin. The birds are everywhere beeping and chirping and whistling and the flash yellow-and-black of a swallowtail is coloring up the air around a stack of purple and white chinese houses. The lavender has gone from a dry grey stick to a vibrant green featherball while I blinked, and there are suddenly strawberries peeking out from a shiney green vine. Even the weeds look good. But spring is not really here until his majesty the scarlet oak shivers off the last stiff autumn leaf and breathes out a mantle of chartreuse lace. There. We begin again.

Went with friends to the San Francisco Flower and Garden show this weekend, at the Cow Palace, that venerable blimp hangar of a space that has hosted everthing from prize winning cows to The Beatles in its time. For a few years now it has been the home of the annual garden show, an extravaganza of garden design showcases, lectures, and garden-related vendors. Unlike the last time I went, two years ago, this show was somewhat less crowded and had fewer exhibits but the few there were pretty spectacular.

We happened first upon a narrow meander of a garden site that immediately attracted attention by the shiney red Nash seemingly abandoned in a summer meadow. Closer inspection revealed a picnic hamper, a pile of old floras and garden books, and a bikini (top and bottom) sans the wearer. This retro idyll was titled “The Metropolitan Meadow.” Turns out the Nash, a 1955 mini car built by American Motors in Birmingham, England, was called the “metropolitan.” The meadow surrounding the Nash was composed mostly of grasses, sedges, and rushes – many of them California natives. A stunning Michellia crassipes from the bushy end of the meadow caught my eye immediately for it looked like a dwarf magnolia with it’s creamy chalice blossoms.

The whole show seemed to be in love with California native plants and native ecotones, from streams and meadows to succulent “seas” and deserts. The Tuscan villa still holds sway, however, over the California imagination and a suitably grand collection of giant urns and stonework filled one display. Two interesting designs used nothing more than a few sapling redwood trees and a swath of native Woodwardia ferns as would naturally be found in the redwood glen. One of them was actually just a foil for a wildly cantilevered white picket fence – as my friend Sally commented, it alluded to the infamous “Running Fence” that the artist Cristo installed across several miles of coastal hills north of San Francisco in the late 1970s. The fence literally took off from a brief earthbound section and flew over the heads of curious showgoers, flipping and twisting through the air before coming down on a nearby slope.

Still, that wasn’t the most unusual concept at this show. A cluster of airborne planters shaped like giant inverted umbrellas turned out to be constructions made of cast offs and junkyard flotsam, rebar, corrugated tin, wire, wood and burlap. This was a “poisoned” garden, consisting entirely of plants with poisonous properties. They were safely out of reach in their elevated planters. A tall column of corrugated pipe trickled water down its length at the center of a small patio furnished with a plain pine casket full of potting soil. A ramp leading from the upstairs tier of the exhibit floor led visitors past a grave marker and fence and down past the aerial plants, offering a view from the top of this slightly macabre little garden.

The shear stunning colors of “Under the Sea”, an all-succulent garden, were visual enough but there were also gleaming sea creatures inhabiting the undulating beds of “sea lettuce” and “string of pearl”. The master gardener appeared to be a cinamon skinned octopus with glowing red eyes. It wasn’t until later that I remembered this little ditty…..
I’d like to be under the sea
In an octopus’s garden in the shade
He’d let us in, knows where we’ve been
In his octopus’s garden in the shade
I’d ask my friends to come and see
In an octopus’s garden with me
I’d like to be under the sea
In an octopus’s garden in the shade
We would be warm below the storm
In our little hideaway beneath the waves
Resting our head on the sea bed
In an octopus’s garden near a cave
We would sing and dance around
because we know we can’t be found
I’d like to be under the sea
In an octopus’s garden in the shade
We would shout and swim about
The coral that lies beneath the waves
Oh what joy for every girl and boy
Knowing they’re happy and they’re safe
We would be so happy you and me
No one there to tell us what to do
I’d like to be under the sea
In an octopus’s garden with you
in an octopus’s garden with you
in an octopus’s garden with you

I have spent the better part of this winter obsessively checking the National Weather Service Forecast Office’s website – now bookmarked on my laptop. We plant people emerge from the dormancy of winter suddenly anxious for the proper weather to nurture our gardens and crops, fearful of too much or too little of the essential elements necessary for a timely bloom or surviving seedling. In this I am probably no less eccentric in my preoccupation than the farmers and gardeners of yore who relied upon the ancient celestial reckonings printed in their Almanacks to determine the timing of sowing and winnowing. Or to uncover a liar on the witness stand, as one country lawyer famously referenced his in the so-called “Almanac Trial”. The witness, a Mr. Allen, claimed to have seen a murder committed in the dead of night at a considerable distance due to the brightness of the moon at that hour. The lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, Esq., whipped out an almanac from his briefcase to reference the time of moonset for that late August evening of 1857 in central Illinois as 12:03 a.m., just an hour after the witness claimed visibility by full moonlight. At this, the courtroom burst into laughter, and Lincoln passed his almanac to the jurors, who promptly aquitted his client.
Though the NWS employs satellites and computer models to determine the timing of a drop of rain or a sudden hailstorm, I am not convinced it is the gardener’s only true device for knowing the weather. A quick check of NWS this morning reveals that “Lack of significant cloud cover along with the very cold airmass over the region has allowed temperatures to drop to near freezing in some of the interior valleys.” Of course, I might only have walked out the back door to find that the skies are cloudless and it is cold – about 48 degrees by the reckoning of the rusting metal-spring thermometer on the garage wall.
Yesterday, though, a thundershower and hailstorm were predicted in the afternoon, leading me to lay protective screens over the $120 worth of tender new plants I had put in last week. Sure enough, at about 4pm there was one lightening strike, one clap of thunder (that startled the cat), and 5 minutes of hail. The plants survived.

I dragged myself out from under the warm covers the other morning and donned my compost clothes – baggy old jeans and several layers of raggedy cotton knit tops – squeezed into my rubber garden clogs and tied my hair back (it ends up in my mouth and stuck to my sweaty eyelids), and went out into the chill grey mists to heave clods of new dirt onto my raised bed.
My sloping back garden is mostly a huge hunk of clay that, when mixed with the espresso brown froth of commercial soil amendments, simply rolls into a shiny grey ball and sits on top of the dirt like meatballs on rice. The backbreaking work of digging in compost can only be done piecemeal or I pay for one day of shovel mania with five of painful muscle spasms. So I’ve learned to dump a shovel of compost onto my beds here and there, week after week, month to month, and occasionally hack it into the soil around the plants.
There is one plot though that was fenced and amended before we moved in over ten years ago. Raised about 3 inches and relatively level, this 7 foot by 18 foot bed is conveniently bordered on one long side by a cement path. Shaped into faux flagstones, it was certainly the original path under the old clothesline that hung between the garage and a now rusting “T” pole that holds up the giant canes of a yellow blooming rosa Banksia. Emerging from under the redwood deck that now covers the garage end, I can manage to haul a rolling bin of dry leaves or heft the small compost bucket down this path to the 3×3 foot layered Smith & Hawkin compost bin that has for the last decade provided me with lovely black fluffy dirt from my vegetable peelings, yard flotsam, and the occasional bag of chicken manure.
The raised bed has been my garden research plot for many seasons, beginning with a precisely measured and string-divided vegetable plot a decade ago, devolving into meandering swaths of vegetables and flowers, herbs, decorative flagstones with giant terra cotta pots, and finally just flowers, flowers, flowers. Well, I can’t help but leave in a few sprawling tomatoes even though they really don’t get enough sun to produce more than a handful of small fruits.
This year I finally conceded the reality of my back garden. There is only one spot that has dirt (not clay) good enough for annuals and that is the (former) vegetable bed. And as if she had read my mind, Annie Hayes, the owner of Annie’s Annuals nursery and gardening enthusiast, took up two pages of her latest plant catalog to emphasize the importance – nay, the imperative! (Annie loves exclamation points)- of creating “soil that is easy to slide a shovel into” if you want a fabulous mass of blooming annuals commonly known as a cottage garden.
And here is the ultimate test of that “cottage garden soil”. When you walk on it does it sink under your weight like a pile of down comforters? Or does it suck your shoes – and socks – off with a glurping sound in winter, and bounce knives off the surface in summer? If the former, it’s worthy to receive $$$’s worth of tender annuals for planting. If the latter, you might as well just shovel your money into the ground (it might compost).
So after spreading last summer’s pile of compost in a layer over the raised bed, and turning over the gloopy stuff still in the bin, I put on my shopping clothes and drove out to Annie’s Annuals to load up a red wagonful of California native annuals for an early spring garden.

I pulled out my extra warm woolen sweaters from basement storage the other day, and as I was wriggling into the brown knit pullover several small white larva dropped to the floor. The wool moths were emerging. I’ve placed paper traps all over the house in hopes of catching the tiny creatures before they make swiss cheese out of all my sweaters and Peruvian hats and fine wool textiles and rugs and whatever I’ve forgotten is fine dining for moth larvae. But I never catch them all. Still, this is the first time I had met their unmetamorphosed brethren in their gourmet cycle. It had not really occured to me before that these small creatures live in distinct and separate modes, one growing, eating and barely mobile; the other quite ethereal, never eating, nearly always in flight, and in search of a mate. While the paper box trap is collecting winged specimens on top of the refrigerator, moth worms are simultaneously eating their way through great grandmother’s petit point chair cushion.
Butterflies get all the glory. They are beautiful and moths are a nuisance, or at least just mostly dull. But humans are mainly used to thinking about a linear form of existence where the eating and procreating and learning and growing are all of a piece – and all in one body. We have little understanding or appreciation of the different forms that one life cycle can take in nature, and may never even notice the metamorphoses taking place all around us.
I think about this now, because of my sweaters and also because of my friend who is working hard at dying in a bedroom not far from where I sit this evening. I say working hard because she – herself and her body – are strenuously exercising an amazing, some might say grotesque, metamorphosis. I have sat by her bed and looked upon this unwished for transformation with fear, dismay, and finally wonder. She is there just as she always was, and not there in entirely new ways. I see her beneath the veil of physical form, within her chrysalis, working toward something new. I do not doubt this new thing will spread wings and carry my friend away. In this new form she will not need to eat, or buy running shoes, or go to the office, or worry about the war in Iraq. She will have completed her metamorphosis, and that is all she is required to do.
I did not think about these things as I sat by my friend’s bed looking out the window on her garden. I did not think anything. I stared at the grey winter garden and the grey fogged sky until I noticed pink panicles hung like tiny chandeliers from the nearly bare branches of the wild currant. They came earlier than usual this year but Mary’s wild California currant was blooming.

I just don’t know what it is about trees that bugs men so much. I have observed that cutting down trees, and the use of implements of cutting things down, generally gas-powered, and in all cases noisy, is almost exclusively engaged in by men. Guy gardening, or chainsaw gardening as I like to call it depends to a very large degree on a perception that the plant world needs controlling in the worst way. Grass must be mowed, bushes must be trimmed, and trees should not be messy. Any tree that drops a leaf in the course of its natural life cycle is suspect. A tree that drops leaves and fruit? Mother Nature help us! It faces certain condemnation by the Guy Gardener. I do not mean all guys who garden (there are a few exceptions to my rule) but the regular Joe who spends weekends not otherwise dedicated to total immersion in televised sports in a brisk ordering of his vegetative domain. Case in point: my father.
And if you think I’ve gone off the deep end here on my gender-warped plank, think about the last time you called a woman-owned tree trimming service, or talked to a female Public Works employee about your unruly street tree (the kind that has roots and the unfortunate habit of spreading them under sidewalks). And don’t get me started on the “mow, blow, go” guys. Still, I never expected to go to battle with my own family over tree rights.
The silk tree in my parent’s backyard died this spring and had to be cut down. This apparently inspired my father to think about other trees that could be disappeared – to his great benefit. All of them leaf droppers. “I’ve been thinking about cutting down the paper birch” he says to me one Sunday afternoon. At that moment we were standing on the driveway at the front of the house, October light illuminating the drooping branches of the birch tree in a golden cascade. It stands high above the roof of the house now, a stunning sculpture of pale striated bark, in winter etched against the bare sky, in summer robed in shimmering glass green. I looked at him, trying hard not to explode in a St. Vitus dance of outrage. “Why would you want to cut down that beautiful tree?” I calmly asked. He began to shout, “It’s so messy. I’m constantly raking up the leaves!”
I thought about this. My dad can often be found in the yard raking things. Or sweeping the vast patios. Whether leaves or redwood bark or the various flotsom of nature, he spends a good deal of time tidying up in the yard. He tells me it’s meditative and he likes to do it. His favorite tool is a plastic-bristle broom, its bristles nearly rubbed down to nothing, and for hours it seems I will hear the swish swish swish of that broom against the patio cement as he contemplates things in his green overalls while I groom rose bushes or stake the dahlias. Somehow I am never there when things get cut down.
My brother often visits my father on weekends, now that my mother is gone and we siblings have instituted a rotating schedule of father-minding or spying more like. We want to make sure he is taking care of himself and not doing anything too crazy (like deciding to drive a friend to New Mexico as he did last winter). And we try to keep up the garden. My sister and I like to buy plants and tuck them into bare places, tend the roses and annuals, and check on the water needs of all the potted plants. My father and brother dig things up, trim things, and engage in major surgery. And then there is my father’s goal of covering all the surfaces of the yard not already cemented or bricked with black plastic sheeting and redwood chips. This began as a crusade against lawn and has moved on to include anything that comes up that he doesn’t recognize. My brother obligingly helps dump the chips onto the plastic, and trims my mother’s herb garden into geometric compliance.
I managed to talk my father out of cutting down the birch tree. And asked my brother to at least question the next time Dad asked him to help take out all the agapanthas or dig up Mom’s beloved roses (he hates the thorns). We were talking at my kitchen table over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. He was looking out the window as we talked, November light filtering through the half-leafless tangle of the Scarlet Oak’s branches. Then he says to me, “Have you ever thought about taking out this tree?”

I always was more interested in the past than in the future. The strange and wonderous discoveries of my youth had much to do with finding old things in new places. Growing up in a new suburb created in the remains of an older farming community meant that among the spanking new family homes sprouting in abandoned orchards I searched for evidence of lives that had gone before. The trees themselves were histories of other lives, plum and apricot orchards no longer pruned, picked and replaced provided bowers of contemplation while biting into warm ripe fruit, a paradise of food and thought and summer light. Empty barns hid nesting owls and rusting implements of work days utterly unlike those of my father who rode off to an unknown city each morning and an abstract occupation for which I had no description. Fields of blooming mustard in spring along the walk to school and even in the hinterland of unfenced schoolyards, beckoned to me with promises of hidden fortunes – a meadowlarks nest, humming bees and strange insects beneath the bright yellow canopy where a small person could disappear from the human world and dream away an afternoon nestled in grasses and warm earth.
The past appears to be still, dead, frozen in time but I heard the siren song emanating from colorless photographs and musty artifacts, abandoned houses and bypassed roads, “we are still here” it sang, “this is our story”. It came from within me I know now, from my desire to find something that would explain for me how the places around me and the people around me were creations of what came before them. History, I began to understand, is the genesis of place and place was my metaphor of life. When the Greeks told of Persephone, “the destroyer of light”, captured by Hades and imprisoned in the underworld, they created a place where light was banished, and life was hidden. They turned time into a place where nothing grew, nothing happened. Except in the mind of Persephone, who remembered. What Persephone remembers is the life that went before, and from memory new life springs.
It is that time of the year that in the garden is marked by a certain stillness, a feeling that things have reached an equilibrium between life and death, inhalation and exhalation, burgeoning and decrepitude, anticipation and melancholy. Unlike me, the garden is fearless, plunging into the future while I linger and pine for the failing season. It reminds me, with tinges of color, the metamorphosis of leaf and bloom into seedhead and dust, the haunting trill of a winter sparrow, that this place is time and time is change.