Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (20 page)

The taste of asparagus just plucked from the ground is unlike anything else. It is tender and sweet, a mild flavor—clean and fresh and almost nutty—so full of water it practically melts in your mouth. There are notes of mineral in the background, something you can't quite put your finger on. Asparagus reminds me of clear skies, freshly cut grass, and daisy chains. It is the flavor of spring.

You weren't supposed to pick them all; I remember that. In the first few years, you're barely supposed to pick asparagus at all. It needs to establish its root system. Then you begin to harvest, always leaving some stalks to go to seed. From the scaly, needlelike tip of the stalk, branches emerge, impossibly thin. Eventually they grow into feathery fronds that sway in the breeze. From a distance, a forest of asparagus going to seed looks like a delicate green cloud hung with tiny red berries, an ethereal version of holiday decorations.

If you were the sort of child who grew up reading books about fairies, as I did, an asparagus patch was fertile ground for the imagination.

When it comes to asparagus, ground is important. You have to have a patch of earth you are willing to devote on a permanent basis—asparagus are perennial and, once established, will come back year after year. That patch also has to be cleared of weeds and other plants that might compete with the asparagus.

Despite having half an acre of space, we had no such spot in the garden. The vegetable beds were all taken; the side garden was strawberries and summer produce. The raspberry and herb patch took up room; we had planted kiwi vines. The rest of the garden was ten-foot-tall rhododendrons, lawn for the kids, and a big wild field of nothing but weeds. The asparagus would never make it there.

There was one spot I thought might work—a ten-foot square
behind the greenhouse. It was out of the way and could accommodate two beds of asparagus with a path down the middle. It was, however, as weedy as anything else in the meadow—quack grass, bindweed, dandelion, horsetails. All things nearly impossible to get rid of. Even if I removed every bit of root and sifted the soil, as I had for the strawberry patch, it would all come back. There was no way to separate this small patch from the wilderness it lived in.

Unless you separated it physically, unless you put up a barrier. I wasn't sure it would work, but I started looking at bamboo barrier—rolls of thick black plastic about four feet high often dug in to prevent the spread of bamboo roots, which can turn weedlike and take over.

If I could dig a trench around the asparagus patch and line it with bamboo barrier, would that keep my little kingdom relatively root-free? I could weed anything that grew on the surface; it was the underground roots and rhizomes that scared me. Nature is not to be trifled with. Nature does not mess around. When you are trying to plant an asparagus patch in an otherwise wild and weedy meadow, nature can be a witch.

We had a little help in the garden that spring. My mother, on occasion, hired men to do heavy lifting and digging projects. Her back was still recovering, and I wasn't always around to help—and never at the exact moment she wanted to get started on a project.

That spring there was a rotating cast of characters. There was one man who had a tendency to stop midway across the lawn with a wheelbarrow of wood chips, put the handles down, wipe his brow dramatically, and sigh. We called him The Poet, and I wondered what his story was. It seemed clear he had not come from a life of hard work.

My mother worked alongside these men, often growing irritated with them. “Some of them don't work very hard, you
know,” she told me one day. “Some just want to take breaks. I'm nearly seventy-five, and they can't keep up with me.”

“Perhaps you should be taking breaks as well.”

“I don't have time to take breaks,” she retorted. “I'm almost seventy-five
—I don't have much longer!
”

Our favorite of the men was Leonardo. He was older, perhaps in his fifties. He kept up with my mother, and he liked to talk to me as he worked, and he was the one to whom I explained my idea for creating a bamboo barrier moat to protect a future asparagus patch. He got it immediately.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That will work. That's a good idea.”

I wasn't sure if it was or not, but it felt nice to have a vote of confidence.

We worked together—Leonardo digging the deep trench for the barrier, me clearing the worst of the weeds. As we labored, he began to talk.

“I used to work in the asparagus fields,” he told me. “Down in California.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Asparagus grow good in Washington. When you're ready, plant them in rows like this.” He stopped and showed me the correct spacing. When he stood up, he looked at the patch we were working on. “With this much space, you can grow enough for a family of ten.”

I smiled and nodded. What he said made me want to laugh and also made me sad. How many people in Seattle these days had families of ten?

In all the world, I didn't have ten people in my family. With the addition of the three kids, I was directly blood related to five people. That wasn't nearly enough.

Leonardo left at the end of spring, bound for Alaska to work the fishing season. I hoped he would come back, but we never heard from him again. I wanted to show him how the asparagus
crowns were doing. I wanted to thank him for his help and advice. I wanted to share our asparagus with him. He had felt like part of the garden family.

The chickens grew quickly, but they were still small. They moved into temporary quarters on the deck, where they had more room but could still be brought in at night for warmth. Chicks don't lay eggs for four to five months. Because my mom wanted eggs sooner, she bought two pullets—teenage chickens—who would start laying earlier. She named these chickens herself: Domino and Snowy.

Domino was speckled black and white all over. She was a Dominique, America's oldest chicken breed, dating to the Colonial period. In my head, however, I called her The Dominatrix. She was mama hen of the chicken coop.

Domino arrived along with a smaller chicken, also a pullet, named Snowy. Though they were different breeds, Domino and Snowy looked like mother and daughter. Domino was bolder; Snowy hung back, moved slow. One day, my mother told me, she saw Snowy nestle up to Domino and Domino put a wing around her.

“I think she's going to be a really good mother,” she said.

Snowy seemed to be struggling those first days, and my mother was often on the phone to the grange where she had purchased the chickens, getting advice on how to help. She followed all instructions, but Snowy did not seem to be recovering.

Five days into her time with us, Snowy was dead.

“Dead?” I repeated when my mother telephoned me with the news. “How can that be?” Had we done something wrong? Was it our fault?

My next thought:
How are we going to tell the kids?

“The store wants me to bring Snowy in, so they can do an autopsy on her,” my mother said.

“Are you kidding—an autopsy on a chicken?”

“Yes. They only had her for a day before I bought her. They want to find out what happened, so they know if it's a problem with the farm she came from.”

When the autopsy results came back, we had our answer. Snowy the chicken had died of leukemia. “That's why she was moving so slow,” my mother explained. “Her lungs weren't fully developed; she never would have been able to lay eggs.”

My mother seemed to take the news hard, and so did Domino. Eventually the little chicks were put in the coop with her, but she never bonded with them the same way. Every time someone came walking up to the chicken yard, she trotted over and started to chatter and cluck. I always imagined her saying:
Thank goodness, a grown-up I can talk to! You have got to get me out of here. These hyper babies are driving me up the wall
.

As for the girls, they learned about Snowy on their own. Little Graham brought the news home with him from one of his visits to Grandma's house and told his sisters.

“What did he say?” I asked, curious to know how a toddler explains death. I had a hard time explaining it myself.

Ab by looked at me with clear eyes, not at all upset by the topic.

“He said: ‘Snowy dead. Grandma needs new friend.' ”

We had a family brunch in the garden that spring, with the addition of my sister-in-law's family. Her parents had recently relocated to Seattle from the East Coast, and her sister came as well, bringing her two children, just a little bit younger than Abby and Cate. My mother doesn't entertain much, so to have everyone there was a rather big deal.

I had spent the prior year looking for a good outdoor table for the patio. The ones I liked were expensive—a new teak dining set can run more than a thousand dollars, sometimes two.
Instead I kept an eye on garage sale listings. Months and months went by without my finding one I both liked and could afford.

Then, just before my mother's birthday, just before our brunch, I saw what I was looking for: an extendable wooden table with six chairs. It was late at night, and I quickly emailed the seller, hoping to be the first to respond. When I spoke with her on the phone the next morning, I asked where she was moving.

“California,” she said. “We have kids, and my husband's family lives there.”

“I understand completely,” I told her.

My obsession with dining tables was not new. My first big purchase in Seattle, before I ever thought I would live there, had been a dining table with long benches. It seemed like a symbol of the life I was yearning for—one that was slower, where we were all less busy and I could gather friends and family around for meals that lingered. The truth is I barely had any friends in Seattle at the time, and my family was held together by the most tenuous threads, but if I had the table, maybe they would come.

The table reminded me of a Dutch film,
Antonia's Line
, about a woman who returns to her village in the aftermath of World War II and builds a life for herself, befriending many of the town's quirkier characters. On Sundays they gather for a luncheon in the courtyard of her farmhouse, and over the years, the table they eat at grows longer and longer as more people join and more babies are born and life continues forward in all its sweetness and sorrow.

When I woke up early on my mother's birthday and drove across the bridge over Lake Washington to pick up this picnic table, that is what I was after. I wanted to gather the people I loved; I wanted to feed them. I wanted us together as life continued forward, in sweetness and sorrow.

We didn't all fit around the table that day—perhaps it already needed to be made longer. There were seven grown-ups and
five kids, who quickly ran off and came back with the croquet set and pounded in the wire wickets. Croquet on our lawn was an interesting proposition. So many dandelions had blown over from the field and taken root that, even when the grass had been mowed, the ball did not roll straight—a mat of dandelion leaves or a patch of moss might shoot it off unexpectedly in a new direction. A friend of mine called it the “off-road” version of croquet: a more unexpected and exciting game, dependent on luck as much as skill.

The kids weren't old enough to really play. Mostly they hacked at the ball with mallets almost as tall as they were and were pleased when it moved at all. My brother and sister-in-law brought champagne and orange juice, and I brought glasses from my apartment, and the grown-ups sat among blooming tulips and irises and sipped drinks, and I had one of those moments I sometimes have where I wonder:
Is this really us? We look so WASPy and prosperous. How did we get from that old house in the country—from a single mother just trying to keep it together—to here?

In truth, if you looked beyond the flowers, the garden was weedy. The patio of the cottage was cracked—whole pieces being pushed upward by the roots of the huge maple that had once towered over the yard. Even though the tree had been cut down years ago, and then ground down farther by an arborist my mother hired who swore he had killed it, the tree was still putting up shoots each spring, still trying to come back from what should have been irreparable damage, still trying to grow.

Perhaps that's how we got here: We never stopped trying to grow.

That day the girls showed their cousins around the garden, this place they thought of as their own. Abby had memories of a time before the garden, but Cate did not, and for Graham there had never been a time without it. As a baby he had spent afternoons napping in a woven Moses basket on this lawn where we now stood. The lawn he now ran across on short legs, sometimes
tripping and tumbling, trying to keep up with his older sisters and cousins.

“Follow me,” Cate told them, taking the lead. “Stay on the path—we're going down to the meadow. Here, I'll show you the good places to hide.” She toured her cousins around the garden.

After we had eaten the scones studded with last summer's blackberries, the frittata of new broccoli sprigs, and the salad made with fresh cilantro from the herb garden, the party broke up. As everyone got ready to leave, people wandered out to the driveway on the path that ran along the side garden with the strawberry patch at its top. The same strawberry patch I had spent so many hours laboring over, cutting out the matted quack grass block by block, sifting through the soil for any remaining bit of root.

“This is where the strawberries grow,” Cate told her cousins, gesturing to the green plants festooned with white-petaled flowers. “They're not ready yet, but just you wait, because they are the
best strawberries ever
.”

Even my sister-in-law, the one I had not been able to convince to come pick berries that first spring with the girls, had been won over by the sweet fruit.

“When are the strawberries going to be ready?” she asked. “They are my favorite.”