Composition

My garden is my hefty Great American Novel in progress. It’s also my private notebook.

For six years, I’ve been writing it into existence, but the pages I started with weren’t blank. Thankfully, a garden is always composed in pencil—never ink—and I began my story by erasing.

I accomplished this with a sturdy shovel, a branch saw and some bypass pruners, a strong back, and force of will. With those tools, I eliminated common buckthorn, Japanese honeysuckle, barberry, multiflora rose, and burning bush. I scraped away chickweed, tugged out thistle, hunted down poison ivy, and thinned the sea of dandelions. I sorted and transported heavy stone. I arranged for tree services to remove and process what I physically couldn’t. This erasure was the prequel. In which a battle was fought and I triumphed over the invading species. In which a hero, my father, showed up, no questions asked and without a moment’s hesitation, to take down a weedy, unwanted forty-foot-tall Norway maple. In which we recaptured our small patch of earth.

My mind and our half acre a bit clearer, I embarked on the true narrative. I’d accrued small bits of text on scraps of paper, but they were dashed off, incomplete, not assembled. What they amounted to were some buds and seedlings of ideas, and some plants without a place. I didn’t know what story I wanted to tell or how I should tell it. What I’ve come up with so far is a Choose Your Own Adventure whose scenarios I haven’t yet exhausted.

That first autumn, my efforts were offhand, desultory. I collected food scraps from our kitchen and gathered up broken twigs and branches from the scruffy lawn. I raked up the oak tree’s fallen leaves and its abundance of acorns, it having been a mast year. All these I tossed into a pile, then turned it all over, trying to get something started. A little action, a little heat. Humble beginnings for a narrative, but a beautiful basis for soil. From decomposition, a composition.

I wrote a rough draft, a paragraph at a time, digging a plot here, then starting another there, pausing to consider the possibilities. It quickly became apparent that some of my imaginings would need to be edited out: I had no choice but to remove a lewisia that had rotted in sodden ground where melting snow had pooled, to rein in lemon balm I had naively allowed to self-sow, to replace a pair of shrubs that had refused to take root in our dense clay soil. There were, as well, successes I kept and quietly celebrated: a pleasing curved path, a thriving apple tree, productive elderberry bushes grown as if by miraculous birth from mere segments of root that had frozen at the back of our malfunctioning refrigerator.

The story gained traction and momentum, and I finally got to the juicy parts. The writing flowed, although not without roadblocks, and even regrettable mistakes. The part where I worked in the garden well past sunset and accidentally disturbed the ground nest of yellowjackets? It was written in error and I quickly deleted it. Also, I should probably dress my character better than I do.

Working in delicious solitude within our property’s borders as I mostly have and continue to do,  I can reasonably claim to be the author of my garden. Or maybe what I am is the main protagonist. Either way, I’m the primary driver of the action. There are other characters, though. My husband has his garden jobs, such as installing new posts when sections of our fence collapse. That’s a task I freely acknowledge I have neither patience nor aptitude for, and it keeps him out of the garden proper, which—trust me on this—is necessary. My teenage son, my other digger, is a great help, being the talented edger he is, but he’s not so often found anymore within the confines of our yard, and the days of him riding his bike on the back lawn have mostly passed: his new, six-foot frame has outgrown the space. Now he comes and goes through the side yard’s ornate but creaking metal gate, on his way to or home from bigger things. Our dog has her place in the garden too. In fact she considers it her place.

It occurs to me that maybe I have it wrong, that we aren’t characters but instead are the setting where the true main character, the garden, can live out the trajectory of its life. What I can say for sure is that I am continually nudging my garden’s narrative arc, though I confess that I don’t work from an outline. I take my cues as they come.

I consider myself a practical person, and so my garden, too, is practical—clearly laid out, expository—with fruit we can eat, unfussy mulched paths we can walk along, and tidy compost bins, as well as seeds and nectar for bees and birds, shelter and food for small furry creatures, and water for a resident family of frogs. And it’s probably not a big reveal to say that I enjoy weeding, but I do take care to carve out only as many new growing areas at one time as I think I can manage to keep well-tended. I’ll let my fingernails get raggedy, but not my garden beds.

As practicality prevails, I have, from time to time, sown seeds for lettuce or some other greens (admittedly, this is sometimes by accident, when I’ve dropped a seed packet and it spills). I don’t yet, however, have a dedicated vegetable patch or a separate kitchen garden. That will have to be next summer’s ambition. To fit in, though, it will also have to be as pretty as I can make it: I unabashedly garden for aesthetics, and the scene in front of me is undeniably ornamental. Let’s call it my little bit of utopian fiction.

I humbly, or not-so-humbly—take it as you like—say that these gardens are chiefly my creation, brought into being by my desire to have them, my hard work, my choices, my hand, albeit with sunshine and rain and the assistance of others thrown into the mix. With what I’ve culled and what I’ve selected, this place that is part public, part private, part mine, part ours, part something that is not ownable by anyone, has been transformed into something I am still shaping into what I want it to be. A garden of imperfect, incomplete alchemy.

I’ll stop there. I’d thought to say my garden is “magical,” but it isn’t, perhaps, there yet. Soon, though. In another few growing seasons. Unless I count the summer nights when fireflies, drawn to the moisture of the nearby creek and to our stacks of firewood, fill the air around us. That is pure poetry I couldn’t have written if I’d tried.