Master Gardener
By Lise Funderburg
Ruminator Review
Winter 2000-2001
My neighbor Syd is a master gardener. She mixes texture, color, height, scale,
and bloom time with zeal and wit and no small amount of tenderness. She has a
way with purple. I started gardening only four years ago, when I moved into her
leafy Philadelphia neighborhood and, for the first time, had a yard. Syd and
I started talking once, as I walked by and admired her corner paradise. She was
digging in the dirt, down on her knees. We talked about the plants we loved,
the ones we hated, the ones that surprised us. And why we liked the whole enterprise,
found it capturing our hours and days. "It marks the seasons," Syd
said.
I still think of that comment, often when I'm in my own garden. I've always
assumed she meant more than that it was just another clock to go by: not
merely an add-on to the microwave, the blinking VCR, the two alarms by
my bedside (sometimes backup is required), or the wristwatch my father
wears that syncs (through radio waves) with an atomic clock in New Mexico
and is guaranteed to be forever accurate (within a billionth of a second).
The garden's marking of time doesn't need to travel out into space for
accuracy and revelation; just the opposite, really--powered by the sun,
surely, but anchored in the soil, earthbound. This marking links interior
desire to exterior forces, and I find myself simultaneously affecting the
world while giving over to its effects. The ferns will cross-pollinate;
the drought will kill the anise hyssop (the one the hummingbirds loved
so much they routinely ignored me, two feet away in my lawn chair); the
goutweed will plague me with its foot-long root spikes; and the hosta,
despite being trampled in early spring, will come back with a five-foot-tall,
vanilla-scented vengeance in late summer, that perfume lasting for weeks
on end.
In Syd's garden, every season brings satisfactions, but at this writing,
more than halfway through autumn, her garden is resplendent. Everything
is slightly overgrown. Mums, with long stems punctuated by tight little
buds, jump their bed edges and crowd the stone path to Syd's front door.
The bombastic datura, straight from The Land That Time Forgot, bullies
all the plants in its vicinity, lording over them with six-inch-long trumpeting
white flowers and spiky seed pods the size of golf balls. I see this abundance
as a defiant last stand against the inevitable onset of winter. In my own
yard, I lie in the hammock and watch one leaf fall, then another, and then
another. And I think: Death. Death. Death. This sounds maudlin; to me,
it's beautiful.
There are so many ways in which a garden's outcome cannot be controlled,
it's essential to find another motivation for year after year of schlepping,
laboring, thrills followed by disappointments (followed, frequently, by
compensatory purchases). When I started out--planning and planting and
clearing away--I thought everything was up to me, that if I did the right
things, learned the right plants, and observed rules about soil quality
and shade versus sun, I would achieve my desired results. But now I know
I'm only a piece of the whole enterprise, and, in fact, the outcome is
so long in the making, so changeable, that the gardening itself is now
more interesting than what I actually produce. The gardener's sustained
effort and constancy in the face of such relentless serendipity are everything
I want my ambition to be.
These days, the desire to immerse myself in my garden has moved from emotion
and intellect to biology. I feel it like a hunger. I feel the same hunger
at other points in the days that, sandwiched together, make up my life:
as I dig out the strength to sprint the last hundred yards of my jog, uphill;
as I struggle to make peace with the past wounds and disappointments that
scar my heart; as I cradle those sparks of ideas I know I have to write
into a story, an essay, a book--even though there's a vast, unmapped chasm
between the spark and the actual writing.
A hunger propels me through any uncertainties; why it is so sure, I don't
fully know--but that hunger has never been wrong. One of my favorite books
in childhood was Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain.
In the story, a fifteen-year-old boy runs away from his family to live
in the wilderness. As winter sets in, his joints start to ache and he wakes
up one morning with a nosebleed. He kills a rabbit and suddenly craves
its liver, not conscious that he needs the iron, but compelled to seek
the nutrition his body requires. "Hunger," he notes, "is
a funny thing. It has a kind of intelligence all its own." This was
my first understanding of drive, the first concrete illustration I'd come
across of the subconscious being smarter than the thinking mind.
My thinking mind used to get in the way. I'd worry about consequence,
what others thought, how something would play. Ambition, as I knew it (and
really, I don't think I ever thought the word), was reactive, more about
me trying to fit into the surroundings, the crowd, the relationship, the
job, than anything else. But at the end of my twenties, two things happened.
In the face of rampant, gnawing dissatisfaction, I decided to start making
choices about what I did (journalism) and where I did it (New York). In
essence, I chose to care.
For a decade, I kept my caring quiet; I cloaked it in practicality, taking
jobs that paid the rent, but all along writing--for free or almost free
and in publications with relatively tiny readerships--those pieces that
interested me. The topics varied, but they all allowed me room to think.
I could spend time wondering, which always led me to places of beauty.
Freed from any promise of remuneration or notoriety, I was free to watch
the leaves fall, to dig, weed, make a garden.
As it turns out, those pieces have come to define me, to myself and to others. When I look back at them, months or years later, I feel more pride in them than I do other assignments. They prompt more praise, too, but that is a response for which, more and more, I hunger less and less.