Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (3 page)

The next day my mother took my nieces to the garden, to play in the fall sunshine. The inspection was done, but the house was still not ours; it didn't seem to matter. In every other way, the garden belonged to us.

I met them there later to drive everyone home. I came around the south side of the house, past the weed-strewn side yard and through the wooden gate that still held the
NO TRESPASSING
sign.

I heard the laughter before I saw them, the girls' faces again streaked with fruit juice and berry stains, bare feet running across the dry grass, my mother chasing after them as they shouted and giggled.

“Let's roll down the hill!” Abby stretched out on the mild slope of the lawn, flopping over and over again as she rolled away from the house. Her sister came after, a blond ponytail that whipped around and around. Then my mother, my stern and cynical mother, followed, rolling and rolling until she sat up, dizzy, with dry grass in her hair, smiling, laughing. I had never seen her like this before.

That was the moment it all melted away: my resistance to this move, fears about what might happen, discomfort at the idea of my mother living so close.

As she had with my brother and me years before, my mother wanted to give her granddaughters a garden. It was as simple as that.

S
EATTLE IS A CITY
of gardeners; I noticed it immediately the first spring I spent there. As I left to go to the farmers' market on a sunny weekend in April, every house on the block buzzed with yard work. After weeks of not seeing my neighbors, I found that they were all outside, weeding, pruning, digging: hearty folk in fleece pullovers and muddy boots. That Wednesday, mine was the only house on the block without a green yard-waste bin at the curb for pickup.

I had arrived in Seattle from San Francisco at the end of March. I was staying in a house meant to be a rental, chosen for minimal maintenance. It had a deck off the back and a postage stamp of a lawn in the front, and wood chips had been laid along the sides, so there was no need even for weeding. It was absolutely the wrong place to try to garden. And yet, there were the raspberries.

I had seen them at a nursery stand at the farmers' market in
San Francisco before I came to Seattle. They were an old heirloom strain, I was told, planted years ago by a Dutch woman in the town of Sebastopol and passed from gardener to gardener over the years. They bore small and sweet fruit in the early summer.

I had memories of picking raspberries when I was a child, when we lived in the country on a rambling third of an acre. Our raspberry patch was too shady and had never really thrived, but there were a few small, thimblelike berries to pluck each year. I remembered the soft crush of flavor in the mouth. I wanted my nieces to have that same experience.

I bought two half-gallon pots. I couldn't resist.

The raspberries rode up with me to Seattle, nestled in the footwell of the passenger seat. I felt like those explorers and settlers from history who sailed off to new lives and new worlds, bringing seeds and cuttings they could only hope would thrive in the places they were going. I thought about how much trust and blind faith it takes to uproot and replant oneself on unfamiliar shores.

That was not what I was doing. I wasn't moving to Seattle; my plan was to come for a few months—through the summer. I had a book to write, an empty house in which to stay, and I wanted to help my brother and sister-in-law with the kids, to get to know my nieces. I never planned to put down roots. Despite the raspberries, I was not the gardening type.

We'd had a garden when I was a child, of course, but besides playing in it, I'd had little interest. I didn't like weeding. I didn't like to be hot. I couldn't understand the long-sleeve shirts my mother donned to protect herself from the acrid tomato plants. I never wanted a garden when I grew up.

And yet, there was something appealing about creating beauty. I was sixteen when my mother bought the house she'd live in for the next twenty-four years, surrounded by its leafy yard, and asked if I wanted to help with a neglected portion that
backed up against a large oleander hedge. It might have been an odd thing to entrust to a teenager, but as the oldest child in a single-parent home, I often functioned beyond my age.

I bought gardening books, did research, and discovered not much would grow in the shade of the large hedge. I settled on ferns and rhododendrons, even though I have never liked them, and took my list to a nearby garden store. When I showed the plans to my mother, they came with a cost estimate of nearly three hundred dollars. The rhododendrons I had selected were sixty dollars each.

“Oh, no, sweetie. You don't buy them full-sized,” she said. “You go to the starter nursery where you can get them small, for seven dollars.”

“But how long will it be before they get big?” I was doubtful.

“Six or seven years.”

This was an inconceivable period of time to me—nearly half my life. I didn't have that sort of patience. I wanted things to look pretty now.

Secretly, though, I suspected gardening was a seed that might awaken in me given the right set of circumstances: enough water and light, room to grow.

It might have already tried to emerge the winter before I left San Francisco. That year for my birthday, I had bought a series of window boxes at the hardware store and heavy brackets. I then spent an afternoon hanging out the window, mostly upside down, trying to mount them to the exterior of my third-floor Edwardian dining room.

It was a precarious situation. Getting the correct angle to drill into the building required me to lean so far out the window I worried I might fall. The weight of the power drill made my arm ache, and trying to brace both the bracket and the small screws was a feat in one-handed coordination. If I dropped anything down the air shaft, it would be lost forever.

At one point I looked over to see a neighbor staring at me
quizzically from his side of the space between buildings. I smiled wanly and went back to my task. Those of us who want to grow in a densely populated city have to make our own gardens.

When I was done, the boxes were crooked, uneven, but solid. I felt triumphant as I filled them with potting soil and nestled tender herbs in the earthy mixture. It smelled like a forest, dark and primitive.

All the while I was thinking of the day I would pull open the window to clip sprigs of thyme, oregano, and rosemary. I dreamed of fresh basil to layer with summer tomatoes, minced parsley and chives to sprinkle on goat cheese omelets.

After a week, however, I noticed white spots on the soft, wide leaves of the sage plant. Was it some sort of fungus? I lived on the foggy side of San Francisco; perhaps the moisture and lack of sun had led to an infection.

When I looked closer, the mystery became clear. It wasn't a fungal infection at all. That splattering of white on my sage leaves was pigeon poop, an offering from the neighborhood birds.

I knew then I wouldn't be using any of those herbs. I wouldn't be gardening in the city.

Seattle, however, felt like the sort of city where you could have a garden. In those first weeks and months, I saw many. There were other yards with raspberry canes growing in them. The owners of a house two blocks away had planted their entire front yard with blueberry bushes. And one day, while driving through the Madrona neighborhood, I passed a yard where small goats with floppy ears were eating their way across a steep hillside.

The raspberries thrived. I planted them alongside the house, in one of the few sunny spots, and watched them grow. I hadn't expected fruit that first year, but there were a few small handfuls of tiny berries, sweet and tart. My niece Abby, only two at the
time, picked them alongside me, gobbling down the fruit still warm from the sun.

“More,” she said, when she was done with the seven or eight berries we had picked that day. Her straw-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, wispy bits curling around her face. She held out a small, pudgy hand to show it was empty.
“Want more.”

“Oh, sweetie, we don't have any more today.” I knelt down next to her and looked into imploring blue eyes. “We have to wait for the plant to grow more berries, and for the sun to ripen them.” I knew this was a foreign concept to a child whose food came entirely from the grocery store, plentiful in season or out. “Maybe there will be more next week.”

I braced myself for incomprehension, for tears or tantrums, but there were none. “Grow more berries, plant!” she said encouragingly, and I wondered if perhaps nature is the best teacher of patience at any age.

The raspberries led to herbs, which led to a desire for tomatoes and arugula and to the purchase of two blueberry bushes. At that point you might as well throw in a zucchini and a cucumber. There needed to be basil—enough for batches of pesto—and radishes for their crunch and color. My garden dreams included far more plants than I had room for.

I couldn't disturb the lawn out front, and the back deck overlooked a steep wilderness of blackberry bushes. My only hope lay in the small area alongside the house. It was terraced due to the hill, covered in wood chips, and got only partial sunshine, but it would have to do. Bloom where you're planted, right?

But when I raked back the wood chips, the soil I found was awful—clay dirt mixed with gravel. I wasn't sure anything would grow in such poor conditions, certainly not bloom. My gardening urges were being foiled at every turn.

Replacing the soil seemed the only solution: to dig up each and every one of the terraced beds and fill them instead with a
mix of compost and good soil for planting. It was a daunting task but I got my shovel and started digging. Hesitation never grew anyone tomatoes.

When a friend came to visit, I excitedly showed her my “garden” thus far: the series of terraced planter areas, how much soil I had dug and replaced, how much I still had to do.

“Why don't you hire someone to do this?” she asked as we stood in our sandals looking at the partially shady, mostly unsuitable area where I was trying to garden. “Some burly guy could take care of this in a weekend.”

I was taken aback. It had never occurred to me to get help—it almost never does. Not even when digging out the poor soil and gravel inflamed my lower back and left me lying on the floor, knees up, waiting for the spasm to pass.

The truth was, I loved the digging. I loved the physicality of it. At the end of an afternoon, I had something to show for my labor: I could point to what I had accomplished. There was very little of this in my job as a writer and editor, where I often felt like I was spinning my wheels. After an afternoon of work, my in-box was only slightly less full than when I started. There was rarely any sense of achievement, little pride.

There was something deeper as well. Perhaps it was my childhood in the country, or perhaps it was the legacy of our own agricultural past, but when I placed my shovel in the dirt and used the strength of my leg to drive it deep,
it felt right
. My body knew the motions. As if, in some primitive way, this was exactly what I should be doing.

I could have hired someone else, but I didn't want to. When my neighbor caught me outside one day, still digging and puttering as the sun went down and the sky grew dark, she laughed. “You've become a Seattleite!” she shouted across the small lawn between our houses.

Even though I had told everyone I was only going to Seattle for the season, I could feel myself falling for the slower pace of
life and a city that seemed to float on water. Summer there was glorious, filled with early-morning lake swims and evenings that lingered, light shimmering endlessly on bays, islands, and mountains. Though I needed to go back to San Francisco for work in the fall, I was already wondering if I could come back the next spring, if perhaps this watery city where people planted their front yards with blueberry bushes could be home.

It was June of that first summer in Seattle when I went to the Ballard Farmers Market with a friend. We were sitting on the low curb of the sidewalk, eating quesadillas we had bought from a vendor and watching the crowd go by, their shopping bags stuffed with strawberries and lettuce, fresh eggs and flowers. There were kids and dogs and a carnival atmosphere as my friend let slip the news I had been expecting. Expecting and dreading.

I had been in love in San Francisco, a relationship that had felt comfortable and comforting, unlike any I had known before. Over time, however, things had begun to warp into bouts of drinking and self-destruction. I had never loved anyone who struggled with addiction before, and I hadn't known how to deal with it. Or how to deal with the long periods between the drinking when everything seemed good, seemed wonderful. In those periods it was easy to pretend there was nothing wrong, until it all fell apart again.

I was not blameless in the situation. I had been scared, unable to commit, unable to walk away. I couldn't understand how this connection that felt like home could, at the same time, feel so unstable, so scary. Perhaps I did not remember how unstable my own home had been. I learned early to deal with crisis: I coped, I white-knuckled it. How do you walk away when the person you love is drowning?

The eventual dissolution left me dizzy with grief and guilt. I
had
walked away, but not because I wanted to. The end had
damaged us both beyond repair. I found myself blinking in disbelief at an open blue sky. How was it possible we wouldn't grow old together?

I had been replaced, immediately—a new relationship to plug the gaping wound left by the old—but even there lines were not drawn clearly. There were late-night drunken messages left on my phone, offers of forgiveness, second chances if I wanted to come back. Things lingered on, erupting at unexpected moments.

In the back of my head, even I thought it might still work out—at some distant time in the future when we were both more healed. If it's meant to be, I told myself, maybe it still will be. It was what I needed to believe.

That day, sitting on a Seattle street corner, I heard the news: They were expecting a baby, due in the fall. The life we had talked about would now be lived with someone else.

It didn't hit me until later in the afternoon, as I was standing amid racks of plants at a local nursery. I didn't know what to do with this grief, this thing that made me question all my decisions. Surely they must all have been wrong to bring me to this place of sadness and loss. I put sunglasses on to hide my tears. I longed for exhaustion, to sleep like the dead, anything not to feel the roil of my own emotions.

Instead I bought plants. I loaded my cart with three different types of tomatoes, basil, arugula, and chard. I took them home and planted them as the day grew gray and it began to rain. I stomped my shovel into the earth and piled the dirt high, worms burrowing to get away from the disturbance. Then I settled the plants in with a grim face, patting the soil around them until I dropped my trowel and sat on the stairs and wept.

The shock of it made me feel like I was drowning in cold water, like it was hard to breathe. I cried into my gardening gloves and smeared dirt on my face. The future I had held on to would not be mine, and I was left wondering what the shape of
my life would be. Suddenly the slate felt blank and foreboding; the only thing I could focus on was the plants.