Poetry Thursday: Solid Ground

"Action is eloquence," Shakespeare said. So for a while, Poetry Thursday at tth will be devoted to the poetry of actions themselves, the poetry of things and being.

This week we begin--where else?--in the garden, with landscape architect Russell Page, from his 1962 The Education of a Gardener:

" 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and love growing things."

In my tenth year as a gardener, my green fingers are only about three years old. So that's seven years of clumsy stick fingers violating various beds of soil and willfully destroying plants in a well-intentioned quest to understand them.

Not only is the road to hell paved with such intentions. So, it seems, is the path to many gardens.

My friend Anne, a mistress gardener, gave me great advice at the beginning: "No garden looks good for the first three years." And that's if the gardener knows what she's doing.

So you do the math.

I know how long it's been because I began the spring after my father died. I had no tears for him--he'd lived a good life, beyond the age he'd expected, and had done a lot of things he'd wanted to do--but I remember my first husband Gil sitting at the dining room table one night, quietly angry at all of us, at me, at himself. "Your father should be mourned," he said. "There should be tears for him."

I didn't have tears. What I had--fiercely--was the wish to become a gardener. We lived in a huge old apartment building on 16th Street, a building whose sole claim to fame was that JFK had lived there with his sister for like ten months in 1941. In one of the courtyards was a huge semicircular terraced garden gone to lawn and seed.

I liked getting up at six or earlier to go outside and get my hands dirty.

It made me feel that things continued to be possible without our help. It made me feel what Camus called "the gentle indifference of the universe."

I remember how lost I was, how little I knew about what to do for plants. How completely out of scale that first 'garden' was for me: it was really a shallow amphitheatre, and I had a small but devoted audience.

There was a little girl or boy I never saw, who lived in the apartment just overlooking the terrace, who liked to torment me gently by calling, "Hello Lady! Hello!" out the window over and over again, never answering me when I responded.

There was the toddler India and her mom Cynthia--who years later would become neighbors of mine again, here on the street where I presently live--

--and then there was the birdlike old lady named Margaret who sat on her patio each morning unfailingly, often in a soft yellow or white cardigan, looking on bemused and always willing to chat.

I made a hash of it. I didn't know how to plan beds or landscape. I didn't know what should grow beside what. I didn't even have the sense to water properly. I was way out of my depth. The only life that garden had was the life from before me: the forsythia bushes whose branches seemed to shatter into millions of tiny bright trailing shards even after the building staff had cut them back, and the dozens upon dozens of daffodils that came up that spring.

One day in that first year, I was sitting with Margaret chatting mildly about this and that, when the friend she had visiting mentioned all those daffs.

"Margaret planted them, you know," she said.

I looked at Margaret, and she just smiled. She'd never told me she'd laid a hand on the garden, much less planted it so lushly.

"Yes, Margaret used to manage this whole garden, years ago. She took up collections and planted all sorts of things. It was stunning. You should have seen it," the friend continued.

"It's all gone now, but who cares. I like daffodils the best anyway," Margaret said. "They shouldn't prune those forsythias back at all. You're not supposed to shape forsythias. You're supposed to let them grow like great Vs and flop over, like fountains."

I loved that she never made a fuss one way or another over someone else working the garden: she didn't praise or blame me. She just watched the daffodils come up dependably each spring, regardless of the gardener.

[quote via the wonderfully unfussy Spirit of Gardening web site]