Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (11 page)

What was this stuff?

I'd just had my first introduction to quack grass. Our acquaintance would not be brief.

Quack grass is the Quasimodo of the grass family, monstrous and unwanted. Whereas other grasses send up stalks that put out seed to fall and sprout, quack grass spreads underground via rhizomes—fleshly white roots that can grow up to three hundred feet in a year, so strong they grow through asphalt. You might think you could get rid of quack grass by rototilling, but new plants will sprout from each and every bit of chopped up root. Instead of getting rid of the plants, you will have made thousands more.

This was not a casual weeding project. This was war.

My mother found me not long after my initial encounter with the quack grass, armed with my weapon of choice: a hori-hori shaped like a blade, one edge serrated for cutting. I was furiously attacking the quack grass.

“Here, I'll help you.” She knelt down next to where I was weeding and grabbed a handful of grass. The thin green blades came off in her hand. She tossed them in the pile and reached to grab more.

“You can't do it that way. Here, I'll show you.” I took my hori-hori and used the serrated edge to saw through the matted, carpetlike grass, prying it out chunk by chunk. Each piece was the size of a brick and nearly that heavy.

“You need to get the roots, or it will just regrow.”

My mom made a halfhearted dig with her hori-hori but was too impatient; she yanked the grass again, ripping off blades, leaving roots behind.

“That's not going to work,” I told her.

“My way is fine,” she said huffily, getting to her feet and looking at the pile of matted grass chunks. “I hope you're not going to put those in the yard waste. There's a lot of good soil in there.”

There was a lot of good soil bound up in the roots, but the
only way to separate them was to use the blade of the hori-hori to beat the matted grass into submission, pounding on the clumps over and over again. As I whaled away at the matted grass, I wondered if I could market this as the latest technique in anger management therapy.

Once I removed the clumps of roots, I sifted through the soil. The sandy loam ran through my fingers as I obsessively checked and rechecked for any remaining bit of root or rhizome that might resprout.

At the end of three hours of sawing, prying, sifting, and pummeling, I was exhausted. My wrist ached, my arms were sore, and the fine soil had lodged itself in every crevice of my body. I stood up, shakily, to survey my work. The pile of root clumps was impressive—a mountain of matted grass like carpet. But the square of soil I had reclaimed was a small fraction of the full patch.

I sighed. The war was going to be a long one.

Several times a week I headed to the garden to work on the strawberry bed, excavating, sifting, pounding. I could do only a few hours before my wrist began to complain and my arms grew sore. In the beginning I kept track of my time, but when I hit thirty hours, I gave up. The patch was about six feet squared, but reclaiming it, inch by slow inch, took weeks.

One night, after a day spent sifting through soil and painstakingly untangling thin roots, I had my first garden dream. In it I was plucking hairs from around my ankles. The hairs came out easily with a firm tug, but each one ended in the same thin dangling roots as the quack grass. In my dream I sat there, slowly pulling ghostly white roots, watching them emerge from my pores as if from soil.

It took nearly a month to finish the strawberry bed. By then my mother had left for the summer—gone to the small Canadian island where we used to live and where she now spends
summers. She wouldn't be back until September. Until then the garden was mine. My pleasure and my responsibility.

I nestled the strawberry plants in the soil, now entirely cleared of root and rhizome. Eventually I would cover the soil with straw, but for the moment I left it bare. I wanted to be vigilant in case any grass resprouted. I knew there would be future attempts at invasion and recolonization. I had won the battle, but I would be defending my borders forever.

Eventually the strawberries sprouted flowers—delicate white petals around a cheerful yellow center. I'd heard you should pinch off flowers the first year to encourage plant growth, but I didn't have the heart to do it. I pinched off the runners—stems that emerge to form new plants, shooting out and rooting. But the flower buds I left. I wanted some sweetness for all my labor. To the victors should go the spoils. Or at least the strawberries.

When I stepped back and looked at the bed, I felt a flush of pride. I built a curving path running through it—cardboard to keep the weeds down, wood chips on top. I shored up the downslope with cement blocks and large stones to prevent erosion. The strawberries were scattered all around, a few lemony sorrel plants in their midst, and in the middle stood the persimmon tree we had planted. Persimmons put out leaves late in the spring. The tree would shade the bed after the berry season, helping to protect the plants from midsummer sun. I had planned it all.

The bed looked organized, tidy, nothing like the forest of quack grass I had found there. Over time the strawberry plants would spread and fill in; the sorrel would grow; the soil would all be covered in a mass of green. I could see what it looked like today, and I could envision what it would grow to become.

It was just how I had imagined.

Once it was done, I couldn't stop looking at the strawberry bed. I watched as the flowers bloomed. I obsessively trimmed
any dead growth. By late May the fruit had formed. Come June it was ripening, each knobby berry blushing redder day by day. I was practically counting down to the first berry, the first Shuksan. After months of working toward this, hours of dirty, sweaty labor, I could hardly wait.

When the strawberries were finally ripe, I called my sister-in-law. Could the girls come over? I wanted them to taste what strawberries are meant to taste like. I wanted them to experience the delight of discovering scarlet treasure hidden among broad green leaves, to gobble them down still warm from the sun.

She called back and left a message: They were busy with swimming, playdates, afternoons at the beach. Some other time, she said. Maybe next week.

But the strawberries would not wait a week—not the Shuksans, these most perishable of all berries. I left another message. Was there really no time to spare? I could pick the kids up and bring them home. It wouldn't take long. The strawberries were ripe. They wouldn't last.

But she never called back, and after waiting a few days, I gathered the berries alone. I tasted a few, and it was all there: an explosive burst of the deepest flavor, sweet and slightly acidic, plush and velvety on the tongue. The berries were colored all the way through, a deep and tender red. I remembered the friend who, on tasting her first Shuksan, asked, “If this is a strawberry—
what have I been eating all my life
?”

It felt deflating—all that work, all those hours of digging, and what was the point if I couldn't share it with the girls?

I gathered the berries and put them in the freezer, for my mother when she returned from Canada. They were the best berries I had ever tasted, but I couldn't eat them. To me they tasted like failure.

A
NOTHER FAMILY MIGHT HAVE
collectively planned out an approach to this garden. Another family might have sat down and discussed how it was actually going to work. They might have decided, logically, whether they really had the time and energy to take on a neglected half acre overgrown with weeds.

That is what you do in permaculture—before you design an installation, you ask the most important question, the one that decides everything that will follow. It's not what vegetables you want to grow, or whether you prefer a woodland garden or want to raise cactus. The most important question in permaculture is simple:
How much effort do you want to put in?

And then you round down, because everyone overestimates how much time and work they really want to take on. Everyone.

I liked to think about the family that would have done this. I imagined them as orderly Scandinavians—the sort with organized garages and wardrobes of white, all clean lines and minimalism.
They would have sat down with graph-paper notebooks and spreadsheets and been honest about what they were willing to contribute, how many hours they could carve out of their week.

Maybe they would have said,
Yes
, we want to take on this huge, overgrown piece of land. Maybe they would have looked at their tidy calculations and said no and regretfully walked away. Regardless of the outcome, they would have been realistic about what they were getting into.

We were not that family. We did not have organized garages.

We talked about the garden—oh, yes! We talked about apricot trees and berry bushes, kiwi vines and kale. We assumed it would work. My mother would be in Seattle all winter, we'd both garden in the spring and fall, and I'd hold down the fort in the summer while she was in Canada. It sounded fine in theory.

Then she left, to be gone all summer. And it was not fine.

My mother had been out in the garden every day, weeding, amending soil, turning beds, planting kale and broccoli starts. Every time I came to the garden, it looked shaggy and rough, but I hadn't realized how much work she had been putting in just to hold the tide at bay. Once June came she left, just as Seattle summer kicked into gear. The rain stopped, temperatures rose, the garden took off running, and with it, the weeds.

Permaculture had given me a new perspective on weeds, one I appreciated. “Soil wants to be covered,” explained my teacher Jenny. You could either do it yourself, she said, with plants or mulch, or the earth would do it for you—with weeds.

Now, when I saw bits of grass or dandelion popping up in my garden bed, I knew I was falling down on the job. I needed to cover the soil with some sort of mulch. I was okay with that.

What I hadn't experienced was opportunistic weeds, the sort that don't play by the rules. It didn't matter how well I mulched or tended, these bullies were hell-bent on taking over.

With the warm weather, bindweed—also known by the more romantic and entirely misleading name morning glory—twisted tendrils out of the ground, reddish stems and heart-shaped leaves, and began to climb everything in sight.

It climbed trees and fences and burrowed under the wooden shingles of the backyard cottage. It twisted around every small, tender chard and kale plant, threatening to choke them to death. It encircled the peonies and wound up the trunk of the apple tree and laced itself through the prickly raspberry canes. At one point I found a vine growing
inside the cottage
, having bored into cracks in the foundation and through the carpet. The castle in “Sleeping Beauty” that is suddenly overgrown with vines? The story says it was roses, but any gardener will tell you it was bindweed.

Then there was the blackberry, insistent, thick, barbed with thorns. If bindweed is a stealth invader of the garden, blackberry is the crusading army: It brings its own weapons.

I had grown up with blackberry vines, but I hadn't fully understood their persistence. I hadn't noticed that some stalks are thin and eventually form berries while others are thick and aggressive. I began to think of those as an advance guard sent out to tame new land before the women and children came to colonize and settle. They forced forward with disregard, pushing up against anything in their way. They never developed flower buds; they never produced fruit; they were all fight and conquer.

I cut the aggressive stalks back—using tree-pruning loppers and sometimes my own body weight to force the blades closed. I cut them to the quick wearing canvas gloves so thick it was hard to move my fingers, and still the thorns occasionally pierced through.

I had bought the gloves in the garden department of a large home repair store. I took them to the counter, along with another pair that fit better and were more comfortable but less thick and heavy.

“Which of these do you think would be better for pulling blackberries?” I asked the two women wearing shop aprons.

“Sandpaper would be better,” one of them said, and for a moment I imagined my hands coarse, grainy, pebbled, and rough. Then I realized she was joking. I had not previously encountered gardener humor, which tends to the cynical and sarcastic. She nodded to the heavier gloves. I sighed.

“I was also wondering, is there anything you can do to get rid of morning glory?” I put the gloves on the counter and got ready to pay.

“You could try lasers,” the woman replied. Again, I wasn't sure if I should believe her, but the idea of zapping the thousands of bindweed roots that laced through the garden sounded appealing.

She caught sight of my hopeful face the second before I realized she was again joking; then she responded more gently.

“Those roots might be coming from your neighbor's yard—or some house halfway down the block. There's nothing you can do but pull them up.”

That lady is really lucky I didn't start to cry.

Suddenly it seemed ridiculous that I would be solely responsible for half an acre that threatened to go wild if you turned your back for more than two days. I had a job. I had a life. I did not want to be cooped up by myself in a garden, at war with a million weeds. I did not want to do battle against an endless and voracious invading army. What was I thinking when I decided this would be a good idea?

I say I had a job, but that summer it was debatable. After years of scut work in the publishing industry, eventually climbing up the ladder to become an editor, I had been given a contract to write a book—the contract that had allowed me to first come to Seattle. It was something I'd dreamed of doing since I was a little
girl, my own literary version of Cinderella finally getting to go to the ball.

I'd had no idea how terrifying it would be. Nobody tells you Cinderella was scared senseless.

The writing was harder than expected. My whole first winter in Seattle I tried to write, and struggled, and cried, and went for long walks, and wondered what I was supposed to do with my life—because clearly this was not it. This dream I had chased after and sacrificed for: I never expected it to turn around and kick me in the teeth.

What is wrong with you? Do you know how lucky you are? Just pull it together
.

I fell into a depression that winter, not realizing it was happening until it was over. I'd never experienced anything like a northwestern winter—it wasn't the cold or even the wet that was the problem. It was the dark, the low cap of dense clouds that hovered over the city so you never got to feel the uplift of a wide-open, expansive sky. It was the gray that felt like it was pressing down, making it seem hard to take a deep breath. No matter how I tried to pull it together, the threads kept unraveling in my hands.

The book came out the first spring my mother was in Seattle—this book I had struggled to write and never could make what I wanted. Everyone thought I should be excited, proud, but I wanted to run and hide. Instead of celebrating my book, I secretly hoped it would just go away.

It would be a long time before I learned how common these feelings are, how many artists are embarrassed by their own imperfect efforts.

When book promotion was over, I came back to Seattle shattered in a way that was hard to explain, hard even to understand. I felt like I had failed—like there must be something wrong with the person who is given their dearest wish and screws it up.

Who does that?

“Do you know how many people there are stuck in cubicles right now who would give anything to write a book?” my friend Sam said when we ran into each other in a bookstore. Sam knew how to call a spade a spade.

I imagined mindless work in an anonymous setting, gray walls that went on forever. Clocking in and out at a set time each day, a reliable paycheck every two weeks. Rather than stifling it sounded comforting; it sounded safe. I bit down hard on my inner lip, not wanting him to hear my voice quaver.

“The way I'm feeling right now, a cubicle sounds like a pretty good place to hide.”

Sam looked at me with a measured gaze. “Then maybe it's not your dream.”

I hadn't put such thoughts to words until he said it. I hadn't dared. What if the thing you think you want turns out to not make you happy?
What then?

Going to the garden had started to feel like solace, like escape from a reality that had turned sour. I cried sometimes, deep in the weeds. I thought of Isak Dinesen, who once wrote, “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.”

That summer the garden was sweat and tears—and though the water that could be partially glimpsed through the trees was not the sea, it was wide and smooth and made me feel better, as though my problems were perhaps not so big.

That summer I started thinking seriously about alternate careers. Perhaps I should become a kindergarten teacher—I used to work with kids; I had gotten burned out but I loved it. Perhaps I should put my permaculture certificate to use and design gardens. In the short run, I needed to be working. The long run was newly open and terrifying.

“I'm thinking of doing some work with kids again,” I told my friend Sarah as we walked the three-mile loop trail that encircles
Green Lake in North Seattle, weaving in and out of inlets ringed with marsh grasses and willow trees. I hadn't told her how gutting the book experience had been—I hadn't told anyone. How can you when your friends are so pleased for you?

“Really? Why would you do that?” Sarah was a writer too. She couldn't imagine not wanting to write. Writing was what we did.

“I'm thinking about doing something different. Maybe just for the summer. The idea of not sitting at a computer sounds kind of nice.”

A few weeks later my phone rang. It was Sarah.

“Were you serious about wanting to work with kids for the summer?” she asked.

“Maybe—why?”

“My friend Karen needs someone to look after her toddler two days a week—her mom usually does it, but she had a heart attack. Are you interested?”

I hadn't known how serious I was. When I went to meet Karen and Lucy, however, I liked them both. Lucy was a two-year-old, shy and inquisitive with a head of blond curls. Karen was a journalist, smart, funny, down to earth. When I emailed her a quickly-pulled-together résumé of my background working with kids—years of nannying, teaching, working as a summer camp counselor—she replied with a wry note that made me laugh.

“It appears that you're actually more qualified to watch Lucy than I am.”

Slipping into that role again was easy; it was comfortable. It didn't challenge me the way writing did. It didn't scare me. It was my version of a cubicle: a good place to hide.

The clincher, however, the factor that tipped the scales and made me say yes, was this. Out of the entire city of Seattle, a civic area stretching 142 square miles, pockmarked with lakes,
bays, and peninsulas, Karen, Lucy, and Lucy's dad lived in the same sleepy, unfashionable, off-the-beaten-path neighborhood as my mom. They lived three blocks from the garden.

In my imagination, Lucy and I would spend our afternoons in the garden. We would eat peas and cherry tomatoes; we would explore the woodsy areas, finding wild strawberries along the way. We would play with the balls and toys my mother had stocked. We would do all the lovely things I wanted to do with my nieces, whose schedule was often too busy to accommodate garden time.

The first visit started with strawberries. The Shuksans were done for the season, but my mother had bought everbearing varieties, which I had planted in the hollow centers of the cinder blocks that formed the retaining wall of the side garden. I had imagined my nieces picking berries as they walked by.

It worked exactly as I had planned: Lucy could reach out and grab them with her small fingers, her whole hand closing around the bright red fruit. When she brought it to her mouth, the flavor was a surprise. Her eyes widened and she looked at me, biting deeper into the tart, sweet fruit.

Once we had eaten our way through the strawberries, we came around the back of the house and into the garden proper. I showed Lucy the small watering cans my mother had bought for the niecelets—shaped like a rabbit and a turtle. Lucy liked to fill them up, stand on the edge of the patio, and dump water on the flower bed beside it.

Beyond the patio was the upper lawn—a portion of grass preserved as play area. Only we didn't have a lawn mower to keep it cut neatly, and my mother, in her dislike of lawns, refused to buy one. “Use the Weedwacker,” she said. “It works fine.”

But it didn't work fine. Or I didn't know how to work it. Or
perhaps our weeds were not the sort to be easily whacked. I assumed a Weedwacker would have blades in it to cut the weeds, but ours functioned via two pieces of heavy plastic filament that were supposed to rotate fast enough to cut the grass. This seemed an improbable solution. The first time I tried to use the Weedwacker, I broke it. Or the weeds broke it. Our weeds laughed at plastic filament.