Gardens Come With You...

...and also wait for you on your return

A garden is a gathering of spirits, of old friends and new, of allies and companions. They are great, thronging crowds of voices whispering, cajoling, and summoning you to the life you summon for them. And when you leave a garden, they come with you, long trains of spirits singing and laughing as you lead them across the earth to their new home.

I have had many gardens in my life. This garden is my fifth, but the more I tend this one, the more I see it not as a new one, but merely a continuation of all the others.

They continue like we continue, they — like we — die back and live again.

Garden, the first

Gardens soak up sadness like rain, shine back joy in their blooming. They remind that life is more than what you have, and much, much less than what you fear.

The first garden started on the collapsing balcony of a very large and run-down house in Seattle, called by us and our neighbors “the pirate house.” Its owner, whom we affectionately called our “slumlord,” had purchased it very cheaply after an earthquake had significantly damaged it without rendering it too dangerous for habitation. He’d then split it into two large apartments, and, having paid cash for the house when he bought it, reaped enormous wealth from our rent without ever doing any maintenance.

There was black mold in the walls, the stairs to our upper-floor apartment were broken, the circuit-breakers tripped each time we used a toaster with the kitchen light on, and we also had no heat. Still, I loved that place, and especially when I began to garden there.

The first thing I’d ever successfully planted in the yard of that house was a tree, a salvaged elder discarded in the alley by a neighbor. My then-partner had found it, soaked its roots in water for a week, and to our surprise it survived quite well. The next year, I started cathedral bells to cover the splintered railing of the balcony, along with a few dwarf sunflowers and herbs in pots.

Nothing really did all that well, as I had no idea what I was doing. But you have to learn sometime, and gardens are very patient teachers.

Garden, the second

Gardens come with you when you leave, if you make place for them. Like adding an extra chair to your dining room table so that you can have a guest, the space you make for them will always be filled. And their companionship can make even the poorest of surroundings luxurious and rich.

The next year, I needed to abandon this early attempt at a garden and also leave that house. My then-partner had decided to go to grad school in Vancouver, and I chose to come with him despite how unhappy I suspected I’d be there.

We were quite poor, and could only find a small apartment owned by the aging daughter of a Mussolini-supporter who’d fled to Canada after the war. She didn’t only own but also lived in the building, and, for reasons I still cannot understand, put orange-scented urinal blocks in the stairwells as air fresheners.

That apartment was a few blocks from a fat rendering plant where Robert Pickton, the serial rapist and murderer of homeless indigenous women, had gotten rid of the bodies of many of his victims. The view from our windows was just as morbid. First, there was a parking lot where prostitutes nightly serviced their clients, often just below our balcony. Those fine ladies of the night took poorly to my request they take their business elsewhere, retailiating by lobbing their used condoms at our windows every night. Then, past that parking lot, was a remediating lot that was once a gas station. Only coarse grasses and dandelions seemed to find purchase in that worst-than-wasteland soil, and even they barely survived. And finally, past all that, there was a 24-hour convenience store whose garish florescent lights flooded the night with a sickly glow.

The balcony of that apartment became the second garden. It faced south, with no shade at all, and was surfaced with a black flooring that got hot enough in summer to melt the soles of our shoes by noon. The plants cooled it a bit, and partially blocked our view of the despair surrounding us, but more importantly, they became their own joy.

I planted vines along the railing, and purchased starts of tomatoes, rosemary, oregano, basil, and many flowers. At a florist, I found an ailing Japanese Cedar, heavily discounted, and carried it, strapped to my back, the fourteen city blocks back to our home. Under my care it grew fast and happy, and under its care I learned to see past all the misery around us.

Yes, I was miserable in Vancouver, but that garden reminded me that one need not wallow in misery. And, when things get too miserable, it’s okay to pick up and leave.

What little joy I had those days was the garden, but even that was taken away the next year. The landlord had decided to re-face our side of the building. This meant removing the balconies and sealing the windows for the entire wretchedly-hot summer, trapping us in a heat box until I’d finally had enough and decided to move back to Seattle.

Garden, the third

Gardens come with you, and also wait for you on your return. But they are different when you arrive, and so are you. They teach you that growth will always mean change, and that death will always mean life in other forms. They teach you not to hold too tightly to what was, and not to fear what comes next,

My partner had come back with me to Seattle, though I’d try to convince him not to. We returned to the previous house and our previous room with the very large, collapsing balcony. I got a job cooking again, but he couldn’t find work. He was angry at me all the time, certain he should have stayed with his studies and upset I hadn’t taken a higher paying job with benefits to support us both. “I want to be middle class,” he said, and I couldn’t possibly help him with that.

I didn’t know how to make him happy again, or even if it was really worth trying anymore. All I knew was that I needed to garden again, to coax plants from their seeds to make everything as beautiful as it could be.

That year, I grew my first burgundy amaranth, and my first tobacco. I planted cathedral bells again, and trellised them on either side of our bedroom window. I met heliotrope for the first time, and wild arugula, and planted enough herbs I didn’t need to buy any from the grocery store that year.

It was also that year I ordered eight plugs of vetiver grass from a grower in Puerto Rico, overwintering them in the house because they could not survive the Seattle chill. I’d been wearing the oil of vetiver’s roots for years before, and I wanted to finally meet the plant itself. That spirit is kind, and very unassuming, cooling frustrations and anger like skin cools in a light breeze.

The next year, my partner and I broke up, and the garden got even bigger. I stole a white currant from someone else’s yard, and planted it, thyme, calendula, and strawberries in the rock wall leading to the street. Every part of the balcony was covered in plants that summer, all the old friends joined now by fennel, ivy, black-eyed susan vine, and even a tea bush. The wood of the balcony was rotting, a small hole opened up in one side, as if the house itself was rewilding. Our slumlord told me I needed to remove some because I was hastening the balcony’s collapse. I told him I would, if he’d remove the black mold and fix the stairs, so he dropped the matter entirely.

My next partner lasted almost as long as that garden did. He actually enjoyed gardening with me, and I watched, both proud and aroused, as he dug from the lawn raised beds for us. The soil there was so poor that little did well in them the first year, but we’d made it more fertile enough that the next year it much better, as did other plots he dug along the eastern side of the house.

I remember that summer especially. Our summer evenings were perfumed so gloriously with the scent of tobacco flowers and jasmine vine that we felt as wealthy as kings even in our increasing poverty. Prices everywhere escalated in Seattle, but we ate well enough from that garden that we didn’t feel poor. Richer still were the dreams shared with the spirits of that garden, and it was then that I first began to understand what magic was.

Though he and I parted the next year, I think neither of us regretted a thing.

Garden, the fourth

The spirits dwelling in a garden do not lie, but they do not tell the truth in ways that humans tell. They whisper voiceless to the body, and to the sleeping soul. They do not push, nor do they argue, but they also will not stay silent against what they see.

That next spring, I decided to leave Seattle, and soon the United States entirely. I had no garden again for a few years, dwelling in each place for never more than a few months at a time. Everywhere I landed, I sought out others’ gardens, and especially the wildest and most ancient sorts we call forests.

It took a few years, but I I finally found a settled place again, a rented room in a house in Rennes. That house had a long walled yard with a small garden plot filled with my biker-lesbian roommate’s cannabis plants. She’d erected a plastic tent over them as a greenhouse, which worked well except that you could smell their scent for blocks when it was open. There was no room from any other plants but hers there, so I made my own space, cutting back brambles and ivy to plant salads, kale, and herbs.

But Bretagne is a wet place, and its chthonic rulers are snails and slugs, so almost nothing I planted the first year survived into summer. The second year, I got smarter, clearing out their hiding places and coaxing thrushes into the garden to feast upon the remaining escargot.

That year, the cannabis and the roommate who grew it left, and the garden exploded. I lived a short walk from a thronging weekly farmer’s market, the Marché des Lices; at the end of the day, the vendors there discount all their plant starts. I couldn’t fit all the plants I bought without tearing up the lawn, so that’s exactly what I did, against my landlord’s wishes.

I’d also met a man, and then he moved in with me. Neither he nor the garden liked each other, and I wish I’d listened to the plants. I’ve written elsewhere of this tragedy, how I eventually fled from that garden, that house, and that country in fear of him.

What I never wrote about, though, was how all the plants I grew kept me from falling apart much earlier than I might otherwise have. Each time he raged, I fled to the garden and, increasingly its kind, magical cauldron heart: the compost pile.

You can cry into compost, and it will dry your tears. You can whisper secrets and fears to its dark fires, and it will listen. Into it, all things are transformed. From it comes all that is needed for rebirth. I’d go to it when I was afraid, when I was angry, and especially when I was sad, and I have no words to translate the promises it made — and kept.

Most of all, and I cannot explain this well, the plants knew. They knew I was not in a good place, and nor were they. They lived, but with no more vigor or joy than mine. And there was not much joy in me, nor much vigor. I watered them, and tended them, but they never did any better than I did.

They were telling me what I already knew but couldn’t yet hear.

Garden, the fifth

When you leave a garden, it comes with you. You are followed by long trains of spirits singing and laughing as you lead them across the earth to their new home.

Datura. Damiana. Mandrake. Ashwagandha. Poppy. Moringa. Cannabis. Tulsi. Artemesia. These are some of the new spirits I’ve made home for in my garden, a peculiar one this year.

They’re not the only ones I’m planting, of course. All the old friends are here, too.

My parsley’s already almost ready to start harvesting, as are my salads, along with last autumn’s spinach, broccoli, and kale. I’ve more perennial oregano, chives, and thyme than I could possibly use, and it looks like I’ll have a good harvest of currants and strawberries ready by summer solstice.

A week ago, I used the remainder of last year’s huge harvest of basil, kept flash-frozen since October, for bruschetta. I also just finished the last of my fennel seeds, toasted to soften their anise-like flavor. I then mixed them into pork to make the sausage for which I’ve become a bit renowned to my friends and family. I’ll have more fennel and much more basil this year; more since I’d run out too early.

I’ve had a strong sense that we’ll have a very hot summer, so I’ve become ambitious. Dwarf cucumbers are already slowly trailing up a trellis, while three different mildly-hot peppers — lemon, cherry, and piment d’espelette — wait indoors for warmer days. I’m eager to transplant the heirloom tomatoes, so I can use their small greenhouse trays for even more heat-loving plants: watermelon, hibiscus, damiana, cumin. My moringa trees, certain not to survive winters here, have already sprouted. Corn is also planted, but I’ll wait until early June to seed the burgundy amaranth around their bases.

There’s even another Japanese Cedar, though I worry for it. Bitten hard by a surprise freeze in early April, all but a tiny handful of its branches have died. What I’ve done so far to coax it back into life seems to be working, but I still cannot be certain.

Last year, our apples and pears didn’t do very well, as it was a very strange summer with flooding. But now we have more fruit trees: plums and cherries trained horizontally across a trellis my husband built for them. He’s transplanted a few of the twenty-four cathedral bells I started at the feet of its vertical supports, but I’ve no idea where to put the others yet.

Actually, I’ve little idea where to put anything, as already our very large balcony and our many garden plots in the backyard are spoken for. I’ll need to dig up more lawn for more plots, but even then I’ll certainly need to give some starts away. Though, except for the datura and maybe tobacco, it might be hard to pawn off the magical plants to my mostly-catholic neighbors.

The magical garden is what I’m most excited for this year. I don’t smoke cannabis any longer, but it’s legal to grow here so I felt like I ought to. The datura seeds were a gift from a worker last autumn, a flower his wife grew: he thought we’d might like it also. The rest, I ordered from a non-profit seed association in France and a rare-plant nursery in Germany.

It’s been years since I’ve spent evenings with damiana, and I’ve missed its dreams. Ashwaghanda I’ve been daily taking daily for years, but I’ve never grown it, and I think it’s about time. The artemisia is Chinese wormwood, which I’m cultivating primarily to deal with the swarms of flies from our neighbor’s dairy cattle. My body doesn’t like opioids, so the papaver somniferum is only for its seeds and their violet flowers. And though I smoke tobacco, I’m growing it this year for the haunting, jasmine-like perfume its flowers release from sunset to sunup, a smell so intoxicating that every dream by an open window becomes a lush flight of enchantment. And, of course, flight is what the mandrake gifts.

When I am in this garden, I think of all the others and smile. They are all with me, all those crowds of spirits, settling into this small plot of the Ardennes just as the early Frankish and Celtic tribes did.

Here is a good place to garden, those peoples might have said, a good home for our spirits.

“Here is a good place to garden,” I tell these plants, “and a good home for your spirits.”

“And also for you,” they tell me in return.