Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (2 page)

I
HADN'T EXPECTED MUCH
from the house. Looking back now, the details run together: ugly brown-and-orange carpet, windows turned cloudy where seals had failed. The stains on the wood floors, we were told, came from pet urine. Each room rolled out, one after another, a parade of awfulness. But it wasn't the house that I wanted to see.

It was the garden—half an acre, sloping long and narrow down the hill to a high wall of blackberries in the distance. We burst out of the dank house into generous sunlight, my nieces running ahead, past a small cottage locked up tight.

Time seemed to stop. Thorny vines snaked over rhododendrons towering tall above our heads. It was so quiet. The workday world lay elsewhere, far from this neglected garden. The grown-ups laughed in delight at this secret place we had discovered, improbable and unexpected.

The girls, small, blond creatures in sundresses, ran down the
hill, their shouts ringing out. When they returned their faces were streaked purple from berry juice, arms filled with ripe Asian pears.
“Look,”
they cried.
“Look what we found.”

I did look—at sun-dried grass crunchy underfoot, at fruit trees drowning in vines and weed-strewn flower beds. Years of neglect had backed up on this place, overcome it like a wave, wiping out any order. Nature was reclaiming what had always been hers.

And yet, it felt magical. As the sun beat down on my shoulders, as my nieces' laughter floated up to the house that crouched atop the hill, I smiled. This, I thought, would be a good place to grow.

T
HE DAY AFTER WE
saw the house with the real estate agent, my mother convinced me to go back, to break into the garden to pick those luscious blackberries. There was a solid stripe on the dry lawn where the berries were falling to the ground and staining the grass purple, unpicked and uneaten.

“What if someone catches us?” I was nervous. The house was on the market; it was a weekend; we would, technically, be stealing. My mother was unmoved. She has always been bolder than me.

“No one is going to catch us—and those berries are just going to waste.”

If there is one thing my mother hates, it's wasted food. Her childhood taught her there is always someone who is hungry. We grabbed six large plastic containers and a bag to carry them in and made our way to the garden.

The house had been on the market for a year, uninhabited all
that time. Large
PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING
signs hung on each of the tall wooden gates. The first we tried wouldn't open. Through the slats of the fence, I glimpsed the heavy padlock keeping it shut. For a moment it seemed our expedition would fail.

This would have been more comfortable for me—no risk of discovery, no getting in trouble, but also no berries. Peering on tiptoes over the tall wooden fence at the weedy backyard, I could see laden vines in the distance.

The second gate, on the south side of the house, was unlocked. Trying to ignore the angry red letters of the warning sign, I swung the sturdy door open, and we entered the garden.

The grass, mowed short and dry from the late summer sun, stretched from the house down the hill. On either side of the lawn, blackberries hung on vines that had engulfed whatever lay beneath them. The slightest shake or tug and they tumbled into our outstretched hands. The house was uninhabited, the garden fenced; no one had been there to pick. My mother and I looked at each other and grinned.

In a lifetime of picking blackberries, these were the largest I had ever seen. They plunked into our containers with a deep and satisfying thud, tasting like childhood, like summer condensed and made sweet. The sun warmed our backs as we fell into the slow rhythmic pace of picking.

“Do you really think you'll buy this place?” For me the property was equal parts enchantment and horror. I suspected the only way to redeem the house was to tear it down and start over, but I knew my mother wouldn't see it that way.

“I don't know,” she said, picking steadily, always in motion. As long as my mother is busy, as long as something is being accomplished, we can talk. Otherwise she is off and running, and I am left trying to keep up.

“Do you really want to move back to Seattle?” It was the question I kept asking.
“Are you sure?”

“I'm not sure about anything,” she said, “but I
am
moving.”

My mother had tried moving to Seattle once already. It hadn't worked.

Five years earlier, when my brother and sister-in-law were expecting their first child, my mother had bought a house on an island in Puget Sound, just off the Seattle coast, with a view of Mount Rainier. She settled in and prepared to play grandmother. It seemed a good idea at the time.

This baby was the first of a new generation: anticipated with such excitement, loved long before she arrived, so many hopes and dreams embodied in this small creature. When she was born, on a gray day in late January, we all rejoiced.

An unexpected reality quickly descended. The baby had been injured during the birth. There were complications, doctor's appointments, medical decisions no one was prepared for. Differences of opinion between new grandmother and daughter-in-law soon emerged, strife no one knew how to fix. I was hundreds of miles away, still living in San Francisco then, the recipient of anguished phone calls. I sat there, unable to make things better, listening to the sound of a family coming undone.

After a year my mother packed her things and fled back to California, to the home there that she had never gotten around to renting out. She didn't like Seattle, she said. The weather was gloomy, the island isolating; the mystical mountain that was her view rarely appeared. But I knew the real reason lay deeper. It seemed we were better at being a family from a distance.

Now, five years later, I was living in Seattle, and she wanted to move back.

I thought of my mother in California, in the house surrounded by the leafy yard where I had spent my teen years. The distance made things between us easier, smoother. We were kinder to each other on the phone than we ever were in person.

And yet, in some ways, it would be good to have her close. She was getting older. It was hard for me to reconcile the woman
who had always been the solid cornerstone of my world with the idea of frailty, but when I hugged her now, she felt smaller in my arms, less steady. Like a bird that might easily be crushed. Already there had been times when I couldn't reach her on the phone and I had worried she might have fallen and been unable to get up. She had few friends and no family in California, no one to check up on her. In some ways it would be a relief to have her in Seattle, especially as time passed.

“Is it locked?” I stopped picking and rattled the doorknob of the cottage that stood halfway down the garden. It was a small two-room thing, set atop a cracked patio and painted brown with decoratively carved white trim. Moss grew on the roof, and the windows were marked with strips of tape arranged in a diamond pattern. It looked like something out of Bavaria, out of “Hansel and Gretel,” an enchanted garden cottage.

“The agent didn't know where the key was,” my mother said, peering through the dusty windows at empty rooms with faded beige carpet.

“What would you use it for?” Already I was imagining her living there.

“It could be my office,” she replied. For most of my life, my mother had seen her private practice therapy clients in an office on the lower level of our home, with my brother and me on orders to tiptoe around creaky floorboards and ignore any crying we might hear.

“You could use it as a writing studio,” she suggested, looking at me as I squinted through the windows. There was electricity in the cottage; I could see baseboard heaters and light switches. I could bring my laptop here to work surrounded by leafy green.

“The girls would love it.” I imagined handmade
DO NOT DISTURB
signs posted on the front door, no grown-ups allowed, the walls soaked through with laughter and whispered secrets. They'd be old enough for things like that in a few years.

“There's a sleeping loft,” my mom pointed out. A tall ladder
led to an open platform under slanting ceilings. I imagined them having sleepovers there, the proud and important feeling, as a child, of having a small corner of the world to claim as your own.

The garden was honeycombed with leafy bowers formed under towering rhododendrons, plenty of places to hide, and enough fruit to eat so you wouldn't have to stop for lunch. It reminded me of the semi-wild country yard I had grown up in, where apples off the tree and wild blackberries had fueled escapades of fort building and water-skeeter catching and where there was always a tree to climb to escape and read a book. This would be a wonderful place to be a child.

“Did you see the greenhouse?” my mother asked. This was what I had been most excited about: a greenhouse.

It was not an elegant greenhouse. Instead of glass, this greenhouse was made of corrugated plastic. It hadn't been well maintained either. Paving stones failed to suppress weeds now tall and yellowing in the summer sun. It didn't matter; I was thrilled.

A greenhouse would allow me to get a jump on the growing season, to sprout seeds in January or February and coddle them through the cold, wet spring. Peering into the plastic structure, looking at shelves and a venting system, I felt a bit giddy.

Beyond the greenhouse lay a long field. The blackberries were growing high there, hedges fifteen feet tall and loaded with fruit. Through a gap I could see the neighbor's yard, where chickens were running around, a rooster crowing triumphantly.

“Look, a fig tree.” My mother was standing next to a tree slightly shorter than her five-foot frame. She reached out to touch the tiny fists of green. “They're not ripe yet,” she said, disappointment in her voice. In California, a towering purple fig tree kept her in fruit through the late summer and into fall.

Beyond the fig was an Asian pear, the tree my nieces had found the day before. The fruit here had fallen to the ground, as if waiting for us to arrive and gather it.

Crunching on a juicy pear, tasting the clean, clear notes of
approaching autumn, I was reminded of Japan, the far-off country where my mother used to live and where my family had all spent time. There these pears were served peeled and cut in wedges, a surprising juxtaposition of grainy texture with sweet juice. One bite and I could almost hear the creak of feet on tatami-mat floors. It made me feel oddly at home.

“Look at this.” At the sound of my mother's voice, I turned to where she was standing, facing the tall, impenetrable hedge of blackberry brambles. There, suspended among the berry vines, hung a single red apple. If the apple was attached to a tree, we could see no sign of it.

I looked at the wall of berries, at least a decade's worth of growth. The vines were thick, jagged leaves on stems swollen and woody with age. “Are there
fruit trees
under all of that?”

“Who knows what's under there?” my mom said. There could have been anything—old garden sheds or rusty cars. Yet there hung an apple, glinting in the sun, tempting us to pick it.

It was late afternoon as we rounded the end of the yard and made our way up the south side. Large stands of pine and cedar in a neighboring yard cast shadows, and we had picked nearly six quarts of berries. Yet the garden still held a few more surprises for us.

“Is this an arbutus?” I ran my hand up the trunk of a medium-sized tree, the cinnamon-colored bark peeling away under my fingers. The more common name for these trees is madrone, but in my family we refer to them as they do in Canada:
arbutus
.

My mother looked up at me, surprised; then she smiled.

Arbutus grow on the small Canadian island where my family once lived, when I was a baby and my father hadn't yet left us. My mother loved the way the bark peeled off in sheets like writing paper. To see one here felt like a bit of serendipity, like it might have been planted just for us. As with the Asian pear, it
was a sign of our past, of where we had come from, a reminder of home. My mother reached out to touch the tree.

“Will you look at that?” she said, a slight bit of wonder in her voice.

My attention had already been drawn to a larger tree behind it, the largest tree in the garden. I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed it. I hesitated before I said anything. I knew my words had the potential to change everything.

“I think that's a tulip tree,” I said slowly.

This was the name we used for magnolias, their flowers like tulips, like saucers of pale, milky pink. These were the trees my mother sighed over.

Every spring she called me from California with her annual announcement: “The tulip tree in Larkspur is blooming.”

Each year her words transported me back to when I was a little girl with knobby knees and shoelaces that wouldn't stay tied, when my mother took pictures of me and my brother under the outstretched branches of the old magnolia tree that grew on the main road into the town of Larkspur. It wasn't our tree, but we thought of it as our own. I remember looking up into a sky filled with petals, pink and soft like damp velvet. For a moment it felt as if the tree might reach down and hug me. For a moment I wished it would.

My mother stood there and surveyed the garden, gazing down the long, sloping yard, a hand on her hip. I saw what she saw: dry grass, berry vines, ramshackle cottage, fruit trees. I also saw what wasn't visible:
potential, promise, hope
.

“I guess that does it,” she said, and sighed.

In the sunshine of that early-September day, my mother found her new home. And with it, my family found our garden.

T
HE IDEA THAT MY
family might garden together was somewhat absurd. We weren't a teamwork family, the sort that does things together. We didn't have Sunday dinners, we didn't go on family trips or hold reunions—we didn't even barbecue. We gathered dutifully for birthdays and muddled through holidays as best we could. It's not that we didn't love each other. I'm just not sure we knew what to do next.

I always hoped we could be more—but I didn't know how to make that happen. If there was an instruction manual on family unity, we hadn't received ours. Instead we were stuck making it up as we went along.

My mother left Seattle the day after our berry excursion and arrived in California the following afternoon. She then walked across the street to her neighbor, who was a real estate agent, and put her house on the market. “I don't want to fix it up,” she told him. “I don't want to do anything. I just want to sell it.”

A week later, at the broker's open house, she did just that. This left her thirty days to pack up the entire house and be gone.

Two weeks later I was in California, surrounded by boxes and the rubble of my childhood. There was a yawning dumpster in the driveway and a series of moving pods that were slowly being filled with my mother's belongings. The life that had been lived in this house for the past twenty-four years was being systematically dismantled.

Everywhere I looked there were memories: the Chinese carpet where my brother and I had staged renditions of Broadway musicals; the bushes out front where I used to hide the ugly bike helmet my mother made me wear to school. I could still navigate the downstairs hallway without need of a light. My hips swiveled to avoid the corner of the washing machine, my foot naturally stepped wide on the creaky stair. My relationship with this place defied words. Every object, every corner made me stop and sigh. I was drowning in memories and nostalgia. My mother was much more businesslike.

“Do you think you could go any faster?” She had found me stalled over an elementary school knitting project I'd unearthed in a basket in the garage: a mitten, only half-done, abandoned and forgotten years ago.

“I can't believe you still have all this.”

The garage still had everything. There was the printing set that had been used to make my baby announcements, a kendo uniform from my brother's brief stint in martial arts, racing tires for a bicycle that had once belonged to me. There were also things in the garage that predated my memory.

“Are these yours, Mom?” I was sorting through a musty cardboard box I'd never seen before.

The box was full of gardening books. There was a paperback copy of the original organic gardening encyclopedia by J. I. Rodale. The collection included
The City People's Book of Raising Food
and hand-lettered pamphlets out of Berkeley on how to
make compost. Digging below, I felt newsprint and pulled up a copy of the
Whole Earth Catalog
. As I fingered the fragile pages, a thought occurred to me.

“Hey, Mom. Were you a back-to-the-lander?”

I had heard of the back-to-the-land movement. In the late sixties and the seventies, across America, thousands of young people moved to the country to grow their own food. Some had become disillusioned with modern life; others were spurred by the energy crisis or the environmental movement. I had friends who grew up on a farm their parents had carved out of the Idaho wilderness, but I had never thought it had anything to do with us.

She glanced over at the books I was holding. “What do you mean?”

“You know—back-to-the-land. Is that why we moved to the country?”

“You mean the hippies? I was never a hippie, you know that.”

“Not hippies—farms and communes and growing your own food. There was a whole movement.”

My mother shrugged. “I don't know anything about that.”

“Then why did we move out of the city?”

She sighed, brushing back strands of wavy gray hair that had worked their way loose and now framed her face, wiping her hands on a worn sweatshirt that might once, many years ago, have belonged to me.

“I wanted you kids to grow up in nature,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb. “I wanted you to know that carrots came from the ground, not the supermarket, that eggs don't magically appear in Styrofoam cartons.” She looked small and tired.

She sighed again, before turning back to her own boxes. “I was never part of a movement. I just wanted you to have a garden.”

An anthropologist might argue the case differently. Because she moved to the country in the early seventies in order to grow food, my mother might be considered part of the back-to-the-land movement, but there is one key difference. A movement is an effort by a large number of people organized together. It implies cooperation, community. My mother might have ordered her tools from the
Whole Earth Catalog
and bought the books and pamphlets of the era, but she did not organize; she did not commune. My mother did it alone.

Not long after my father left, she moved to the country with two small children. There she chopped wood and fed chickens—and battled the raccoons that tried to attack in the night. She dealt with winter storms and frequent blackouts and a seasonal creek that sometimes overflowed its banks. None of these were things she had grown up with. She was a city girl, though a few years living in remote Big Sur and on a small Canadian island had worn off that sheen. Still, raising two children on your own is hard when you don't have to chop wood and grow your own food. Why make extra work for yourself?

The answer is survival. When my mother bought a third of an acre with room for chickens and fruit trees and a creek running through it, there was peace of mind in knowing, no matter what happened, she would be able to feed her children. The land was her sense of security.

There's a whole different story that could be told about why such security is important to my mother. It might be because of her own poor and difficult childhood, where her mother died early, and she earned her own keep, and food was a commodity not to be taken lightly. Perhaps the answers lie deeper, handed down in genes that remember what it was like to be hungry, to be hunted. My mother shares blood with those who fled the Cossacks, the pogroms, the Nazis. Ownership of land, the ability to raise food, was a shot at a future.

When we found the Seattle garden, it felt like the pendulum
had swung back to where it had been in the late sixties and early seventies: economic woes and environmental fears. People were rethinking their front lawns and considering tomatoes instead. Sales of seeds had skyrocketed; the waiting lists at community gardens were suddenly years long. Local foods were booming. Were we going back to the land again? In precarious times, was the ability to raise food still our best shot at a future?

I took the dusty books off the shelf in the garage that day. The gardening books, their covers wavy with age, the handdrawn pamphlets—all tools used to spread a message, to usher in a new age, a better way of life. I put them in a new box to take to Seattle, to the new garden.

I took something else from the garage that day, a scrap of fabric from a dress my mother used to wear when I was a little girl. It was a wraparound dress, the sort popular at the time. I still remember the long ties looped around her small waist, how the skirt flared when she turned.

I took the fabric to remember a young woman who moved to the country, alone with two small children. She might not have known what she was in for, but she dug a life for us out of local dirt and her own grit. When I think of it now, I am astounded. How hard it must have been, how we all struggled, how brave she was to even try.

In the midst of that month of packing, my mother flew up to Seattle for the inspection on the house with the garden. After it had sat on the market for a year with little interest, there were multiple offers as soon as my mother showed up. For a while it seemed possible she might have gambled and lost: sold her California house for nothing. In the end, a clever escalation clause got her offer accepted.

We arrived for the inspection on a day that was gray and overcast. The house looked worse than I remembered: small,
dingy bedrooms, a kitchen and bathroom that had been cheaply overhauled before the place was put on the market. The house had been added to over the years, resulting in an awkward layout that included a living room jutting into the garden. Here the elderly gentleman who was selling the house had spent the last few years: in bed with a view of azaleas and rhododendrons.

“This is where I am going to live when I can't get out of bed anymore,” my mother said as we walked through the empty house, footsteps echoing on wooden floors. “You can all come to pay your respects.”

That's the sort of humor my mother has, a dark and sarcastic sensibility shaped by struggle.

I was looking at the house the same way. Were the hallways wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair? At seventy-two my mother was in good health, but this was for the long haul. With the extra bedroom and family room on the lower level, the house was large enough to accommodate a caretaker living there.

“Is your mother worried about resale value?” the real estate agent asked me.

“
She's
not going to be the one selling it,” I told him. I knew this would likely be my mother's last home.

Despite the house, the property seemed like a gift—this much land in the city, fruit trees, a greenhouse. It would be a family farm we could work together, a place for my nieces to grow and run wild, a source of security my mother would pass down to me and I would eventually pass on to the girls. No one was thinking of selling.

If the worst came to pass, as economists and environmentalists were forecasting, it would be possible for our entire family to live and grow much of what we needed in this large new house and yard. I suspect other people don't plan for worst-case scenarios like this, but other people didn't grow up in my family.

All through the discussion with the inspector about water
damage and drainage issues, my attention kept shifting to the garden outside the windows. The windows whose seals had failed and would need to be replaced. The house felt like a necessary evil; it was the garden I cared about.

The night after the inspection, we talked about the garden.

“Where would you put the raspberries?” my mother asked as I stood leaning against the doorway of the room she stayed in when she visited. She was in bed already, the reading lamp next to her casting wild shadows against the walls and high ceiling.

“Down along the fence, on the left side.” I imagined a wall of raspberries, red and golden, growing in the sunshine of the south end of the yard. Bowlfuls of tender ruby thimbles to be picked on summer days, a crush of tart sweetness in the mouth.

“What fruit trees would you grow?” she asked.

It had been years since my mother had truly gardened. The winter I was eleven a storm had flooded our area, knocking down fences, carrying away picnic tables, and nearly evacuating our town. Houses slid down hillsides as the water-saturated earth gave way, and people canoed the streets on rising floodwaters the sandbags couldn't restrain. Northern California was declared a disaster zone.

When the floodwaters receded, our garden was covered with a fine sandy silt and knee-deep muck. We moved not long after that, partially to be closer to the city where my mother was then working and partially, I think, because she didn't have the heart to rebuild her garden. She tended the fig trees already growing in the leafy yard we moved to, but she hadn't planted a vegetable garden again.

Growing up, I had never liked gardening. I remembered the weeding chores of my childhood, the wait for something to grow and become ripe. Gardening seemed to belong to those more accustomed to the passage of time and less anxious about it. I was too young, too impatient. For years, however, I'd had a
sneaking suspicion that gardening was lying dormant in me and would eventually awaken. It was only with my move to Seattle that I had taken up the trowel for real.

It was an odd thing, my mother asking my opinion like this. As the lone grown-up in charge of my childhood, she had been the law. Yet I had recently completed a six-month permaculture training course, and it was possible that I now had more gardening knowledge than she did. It was more recent knowledge, at least.

Still, it was strange to have her defer to me, even in this small way. It made me feel as if the earth were shifting ever so slightly on its axis—nearly imperceptible and yet profound.

I pushed away from the doorway and walked around to the far side of the bed, pulling back the covers and slipping under them next to her. This was not something I usually did. Most of the time I tried to keep my distance with my mother, tried to keep my boundaries.

If my mother noticed, she made no comment.

We planned an orchard lying there in bed. Cherry trees for my mom who loves them, a quince and Italian prune plum for me, a persimmon, which we both like. There was enough land in the garden to dream big, wildly. There would be blueberry bushes, a potato patch, kiwi vines, strawberries. We talked about corn and tomatoes and trellises for green beans and peas. We'd plant zucchini. (“Only one,” my mom warned. “You never need more than one zucchini.”) There would be seeds to start in the greenhouse early in the year and then move outside. A fragrant and fruitful garden grew in our heads before a single weed had been pulled or speck of soil amended.

“You know we're giddy about this?” my mom said quietly, and she was right. We were both so excited about the idea of this huge garden.

Happy
is not a word often associated with my mother—never
giddy
. But this garden felt like the beginning of a new chapter for all of us. Perhaps things could be different this time.