Summer Stories: ‘A Mystery or a Problem or a Garden’
By Kate Lebo
The neighbors want to put a gazebo at the back of their yard, near our garage. “Sounds fun,” I say. “For who?” says Jordan, whose job it will be to build the thing.
When my husband and I bought our house an almost-decade ago, the first change we made was to tear down the rotting gazebo the owners before the owners before us had built at the back of our property. Every time I do something to make our yard a garden – smother the lawn, plant trees, whatever – I think about that gazebo and how anything we do to our house and land will be encountered by the next resident as a mystery or a problem. Their corrections to our corrections will be corrected until the house falls down. I try to find that comforting.
Jamaica Kincaid writes in My Garden (Book): that a garden dies with its gardener. “Because creating a garden is such an act of will,” she writes, “and because (if it is a success) it becomes the place of great beauty which the particular gardener had in mind, the gardener’s death (or withdrawal of any kind) is the death of the garden. In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture – it won’t accrue value as time goes on.”
“Anything you think will be a problem,” says my neighbor Ariana as we consider the hump of soil I want to shape into a squash bed, “will be a problem.” I try to find that comforting too.
My aunt died of lung cancer during the early months of the COVID pandemic, when our tulips were in the midst of their annual tulip party. She hadn’t known radon existed or that she could test for it until her doctor discovered the tumor. I still can’t get over the possibility that her house made her sick.
Zoom funerals concentrate grief but don’t release it. Maybe that’s why it feels like she’s with me every spring, especially in the garden, bossing me around as I prepare the soil. Her irrigation would be much tidier. Her compost would never smell. Nor would she be charmed by volunteers that sprout as the ground warms, the cilantro and fennel and calendula and sunflowers and borage and cosmos and amaranth that I allow to live until they crowd out the plants I intended to grow. She would never be fooled into nurturing weeds in the hope that they’ll turn out to be flowers (which does happen, but not as often as they turn out to be weeds, the difference being a matter of invasiveness and beauty – i.e. if I think they’re pretty and they don’t bully the plants near them, they aren’t weeds.) She was a practical person who delighted in the beauty of plants and knew sensible ways to grow them.
I’ve thought about making a special trip to Des Moines to visit my uncle and encounter my aunt’s loss in a way that I imagine will feel more real, but life takes me elsewhere – as it does, as it should. I was pregnant when she died; now I have a 3-year-old, a little boy who won’t eat a leaf unless I pick it from a plant and hand it to him.
A year or so after my aunt died, a new Italian restaurant opened in town. A thicket of tomato plants grows in pots near the side entrance, a little garden to suggest the sauce within. The tomatoes are decorative. The degree to which this rubs me the wrong way is unreasonable. Once while walking by, I watched a tired, sweaty man reach out, snatch a big green tomato, take one bite as if it were an apple, and throw the fruit back, and I thought this served the gardener – if not the tomato – right.
From the restaurant’s front door a person can easily walk to the Monroe Street Bridge. Walking or driving, every time I cross a bridge over the Spokane Falls, but especially in the spring when the river is high, I imagine how it would feel to be a cup of water or a droplet of mist or a basketball sailing over the rocks. To fly and bob and churn and flow. To be an element or an object instead of an animal. People not that long ago encountered the chasm between the north and south shores of the Spokane River and imagined this bridge would solve it. If any of those people were gardeners, they can be comforted that the bridge they built and the river it spans are not gardens. They are still here.
Twenty years ago my friend Frieda turned her swampy backyard into a garden by planting a willow. The tree’s thirst allowed her to terrace the soil and plant a profusion of flowers within it. She planted three quince trees, too. They reminded her of being a child in Germany after the war, when she lived with her grandparents because her parents had been killed by one of the last Allied bombings. There wasn’t much sweetness to those years, she said, but they grew a lot of quince. Frieda’s been my main supplier of the fruit for years now, and she’s getting on in years. When she and her husband die, a charity will sell their house and turn the profit into housing and food for people who need housing and food. Meanwhile, the house will pass into the hands of a new someone who may or may not be a gardener. This person will have a lot of guesswork to do. They won’t know why the willow is so important, but it is a beautiful tree so I bet they’ll leave it alone. The three quince trees, though … They are gorgeous, with graceful branches and wide, fuzzy leaves, but they produce so much fruit. I could understand why a stranger might prefer apple trees, pear trees or clear space within an otherwise high-maintenance landscape. But I would not forgive it.
Time is a garden’s enemy, Kincaid writes. “Time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.”
“I bet I have two more years,” Frieda says. She says this most times I see her. The years have gotten shorter – she used to have five. She used to bring me hostas, which I killed, and iris roots, which by some miracle I have not killed, though it’s been three years and they still haven’t flowered, which is my fault for not giving them a proper, well-irrigated home. This year, which might be the second to last year I inherit anything from Frieda’s garden, I am trying to treat these roots well by carving a bed for them from the front lawn. In addition to Frieda’s irises I plant phlox, columbine and more irises from Kat down the street, whose name I know only because she was outside dividing her plants and giving away the extras on a day when Cy and I were on a walk to the park. I thought roots were as good a reason as any to introduce myself. “I need to show you something,” Kat said, which was curious because we’d only just met. “You know what this is?” She held up a white, carrotlike root with a teardrop-shaped leaf attached to its above-ground bits. “Creeping bellflower,” she said, to warn me. I know that flower. A pretty purple, but invasive. Only a gardener’s vigilance can keep it in check. (Imagine the neighborhood thick with creeping bellflower, yellow salsify, the thousand maples Ariana’s tree attempts to sow in our vegetable beds every year, the forest that would rise in our absence, the turkeys that would rule it.)
I took every root Kat gave, a little more than an armful. I asked Cy to carry the phlox. He held the black plastic pot carefully in both hands and studied its contents as I began the walk home. “You got it?” I said. “Yes,” he said. Then he flipped the container upside down and ran to catch up.