"A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space - a place not just set apart but reverberant - and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry." ~ Michael Pollan Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Here at Fat Hummingbird Farm there are no flower gardens . . . as such . . . yet. When we arrived in mid-June drifts of lupins of numerous colours adorned the ditches up and down our road, tramped up rises and gathered in the natural dips of meadows and pastures. As the summer progressed other wild flowers of various ilk came and went and we have never been without colour, and the diversity has been remarkable. And I will always keep those spaces for those wild flowers to revisit year after year. But now it is time to put my own Monet- and O'Keeffe-inspired imprint on the landscape.
So the flower gardens begin. Bar has been digging beds for me and, in the process, has discovered a lot of the basalt rock origins of our North Mountain and that the roots of Black Locust trees love to roam and ramble and argue over staying in certain areas where we would rather they not be. But the soil is basically pretty good, predominantly red, and in need of earthworms. Bar says I could be the Red Dirt Girl of song - specifically that song of Emmy Lou Harris'. But the song is sad. I like the first few lines though:
Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon
Sittin' on the front porch coolin' in the shade
Singing every song the radio played . . .
I could love a blue tick hound dog named Gideon.
Over the last of the summer and now into the autumn I have been slipping bulbs and perennials into that red dirt. The names of the plants themselves are a poem -
bowman's root (also known as Fawn's Breath, a name to catch my breath),
star grass, hive vine, stork bill, butter and eggs (toadflax),
brodiea (cluster lilies), seep spring, Indian paintbrush,
olive, fig, bird's eye, goat's beard, tidy tips (platyglossa),
owl's clover, desert lantern, red birds in a tree (crimson figwort)
and Kintzley's Ghost, a climbing honeysuckle once thought to be lost forever but found again growing on the grave of the man that developed it. Every garden needs a ghost - one that will sleep around their roots during the day and stir the flower heads at night.
I like to say the names in a chant, the words spilling off my tongue like melodies. Like singing those songs the radio plays. I slip them into the soil - the melodies, the plants. I feel, as I pull soil over the breast-shaped bulbs, nipples erect, and around the tender stems of the perennials, that I will be embodied in these gardens.
I remember the enchanted gardens of my childhood. Gardens where the colours seemed brighter. Where I could delight in chasing butterflies by day and fireflies by night. Gardens where the very air was clear as our spring water and mornings moist and fragrant like our fog-draped sunrises. Where the rhubarb was sweeter because it was stolen from the McCafferty's garden under a nickel-silver moon. My breath-held tension as I moved aside the loose board and bellied up to the rhubarb patch while Mr. McCafferty smoked on his back porch - his fat, deaf Basset Hound at his feet. The smoke of his cigarette drifted up and curled round the single yellow lightbulb, befuddling the moths already intent on a death of wing-sizzling immolation. Smothering the crack-crackle noise of the breaking stem with the hem of my dress, I would tear one piece of rhubarb for me and another for my brother, waiting in the alleyway with sugar in a twist of foil in his pocket. Sometimes I stole Mrs. McCafferty tulips to give to my mother, or crushed the petals of her spicy/sweet roses and smeared them on my wrists as perfume.
Thus far these flower gardens are a leap of faith. Though the autumn chill will reduce the perennials to dry leaf and stark woody stems, and the winter snow will lull the bulbs into a bear-like hibernation, I know the spring will be an awakening. I will feel embodied in the budding blooms and the bright green impertinence of the bulb shoots cracking the soil as the winds warm. The flowers will eat light and grow strong. The soul of these gardens will run like sap in my veins, blended with the blood. Like a rose of red, pushing its thorns and roots through my heart, out of my toes into the soil. I feel it would not be untoward, on a future spring night, to lift my face to a full moon and bay, under the wide-open stare of a midnight owl.
I know these gardens will witness me. Acknowledge me. As the breeze dances through the golden nodding heads of the Kintzley's Ghost, I may dance in my gardens with naked, dirty feet. On the red dirt.
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