I just saw my first monarch. They’ve arrived! It makes my chest ache and my heart hurt. I miss my garden. I miss the person I was, the one who used to watch and watch and watch and wait and check the milkweed plants, just in case. Who used to make the arrival of the monarchs her top priority, a Most Important Thing. I would capture the caterpillars of the first generation to keep them safe from birds while they ate the milkweed and made their chrysalises, transforming themselves inside and out. Now all I can do is lay in the hammock and hope they show up. There’s no milkweed here in my new yard yet.
It's hard to miss the garden. I cry when I see the neighbor’s flowers blooming. I didn’t know flowers could hurt my feelings. It started with the tulips, the crocus, then the daffodils arrived, the inevitable lilacs with their bright purple flowers and their powerful, cloying scent. Every new set of blooms on the neighbor’s bushes remind me of the garden that isn’t mine anymore. It’s a schedule of arrivals I didn’t realize I had memorized. Each new flower opening in boulevards feels like a new bright pain, bursting inside of me.
I wonder if it’s anything like missing a child that has grown to adulthood and moved away from you. I started with nothing, dirt and grass and weeds, and planted and tended and transplanted and curated my little rectangular section of the world for 17 years into a massive and gorgeous garden that felt like an overflowing, green room. You could bathe in the green, immerse yourself completely in it, the dragonflies and bees and frogs singing together. I would lay on the stone paths for hours listening to the hum, watching the butterflies float overhead.
I loved the garden to the point that it felt like it was part of me, that each plant was an extension of my own limbs. Pulling weeds was a joy, an entertaining task, something to do with my time, a place where the children would race up and down the paths, playing pretend in the pirate ship that he built for them. Later, swinging with the dog from the ancient and crooked mulberry tree. Gus would pace circles and circles on the paths, there were so many different choices of where to walk.
What are you, to a garden? Is it yours? Does it belong to you? Are you the master or the slave? The creator, yes, but also the tender, the one who reaps the rewards. Gardening is my favorite kind of magic. With a few tiny seeds, dirt, water, and patience, you can create life, food, beauty. Did I make the garden, or did it make me? I learned so much from my failures, from false attempts, from mistakes.
Gardening is a constant lesson in patience. There is no exquisite joy quite like sitting in cozy chair with a blanket on a January night with the seed catalogue, ordering 7-15 varieties of tomatoes. Once the seeds arrived, we would pot them in nursery pots on the dining room table, waiting for weeks for the tiny green heads to poke above the soil in February. By March, the little plantlings were reaching for the sky, in April we had to be patient and wait for the weather to cooperate so we could put them outside, hardening them off in the thin April sun while the snow still drips from the eaves. In May, they went into the beds and from then on it was grow, baby grow. June and July were dedicated to staking and shielding and protecting from pests. The slugs like the tomatoes, as do baby bunnies. And then, after months of work, of hoping, of checking, at the end of July the flowers come. Tiny and delicate, proof that it was all worth it. The fruits come out of the flowers, and there is nothing like the way your heart swells when you see that first little green bulb. From that January seed catalogue and months of patience, you will finally be rewarded. You watch the green bulb grow bigger and bigger and wait for it to turn ripe and red. You check daily, the first tomato is an experience you don’t want to miss, there’s nothing like a tomato sliced fresh and eaten right from the vine, still warm from the heat of the sun.
Finally, in August, the skin starts to darken and you know it’s almost time. It’s like a countdown, you check daily, hourly sometimes, to see if it’s ready to pick. And then, just when it’s almost time, you go to check the plant and you know that TODAY is the day and there’s your beautiful ripe red tomato on the ground, ripped in two by a squirrel that got to it first. The heartbreak and anger at something so unfair, gardening is a lesson in letting go. The garden didn’t just belong to me. It was as much mine as it was theirs, the squirrels and the rabbits and the slugs too. So you pin your hopes on the next little green orb, take a deep breath and continue to wait.
Returning from the grocery store with the plastic clamshell of the watery Driscoll raspberries. I miss my raspberry brambles, how I’d be watching for them, making sure they were free of the scourge of Japanese beetles, the ones that loved the ivy on the house. We could hear their wings click as they mated in the leaves growing outside the kitchen window, but they loved the raspberries too. I would carefully knock them off into a bowl of soapy water, protecting the fruit that Nova loved to pick. She would help every year, even until the last year, the summer after he died. She helped me pick the berries because she was always the one who ate them all. We’d freeze cookie sheets of them and pack them into freezer bags to enjoy mid-December when the garden was resting, buried under a layer of snow. When the way a warm berry bursts in your mouth in May is nothing but a distant memory, the frozen berries are a poor substitute but still a delicious one when you can see no end to winter. I still buy her frozen raspberries and she eats them in the tub, staining the porcelain and the bathmat with red, making me wonder if she or I or all of us are bleeding.
The lungwort always bloomed first, even before the crocus. I wonder if the new owners found the lungwort. I wonder if it’s blooming its perfect little purple flowers. It was an unassuming plant but I knew where it was hidden in the corner by the pirate ship. I knew where to check for it in the spring, I would wait for any sign that lungwort was coming because that meant it was *really* spring, no more snow this time for real. I bet the tulips are glorious this year, I worked so hard to make a tulip patch. The irises pop next, the white ones I loved so much and the iridescent yellow ones that always make me think of the preschool. There were the pink ones with the delicate white insides, they always looked so erotic to me. The year I got into marijuana during the pandemic, I would lay in the irises and photograph them, talking to them, stroking their delicate inner parts and posting the pictures on twitter. They were straight erotica to me.
The peonies come next, the ants love the peonies so you have to keep the blooms outside. I liked to cut their heads and leave them floating in bowls of water around the garden. The white one in the boulevard was a gift from Erin, our neighbor who along with her partner Tim guided us gently into gardening while we said thank you and thank you, the raspberries came from them too. Tim died a few days after Dave, I should call her and see how she’s doing. I wonder if she ever thinks of the peonies, how I miss them. The white one from their house was singular and glorious. It transplanted happily and the blooms would last and last. The peony from Paul’s house was always the first to bloom, it was hot in that corner next to the rain barrel with the yellow paint of the house magnifying the sun, and it created a little hothouse effect. It came up first and bloomed forever, the blooms were fragrant and could be smelled from inside the house. I thought Dave was insane when he insisted on digging up the peony from the burned-out wreck of the house where his brother died, but now I understand. Now I understand.
I took one plant when I moved, a lost ditch, oh-shit 5-gallon bucket heist. I had signed something saying I wouldn’t alter the garden in any way but decided the night before I left the keys that I was going to take my favorite lily with me. It was a showstopper, tall and showy, brilliant peachy flowers. The tallest and prettiest of all of my lilies, I wonder if the new owners like my lilies. The year he died, I had planted the black ones with the red edges, I couldn’t wait to see them come up. I hope they know they have to be careful, the squirrels loved to steal the lily bulbs. My lily made the trip to the rental house, but I couldn’t bring it with to my new house when I bought it in January. It was too cold to dig it up, so now it lives at the in-between house. I hope it grows tall and happy there. I hope it blooms forever, like it did for me.
The garden grows, and I am not there to watch it. I don’t feel like I created it, though technically I did. It was its own entity, a place, a being. I was part of it. It was part of me. I was maintenance crew, not mastermind. I would tell Dave when he would lose his mind over the squirrels or the rabbits or the beetles or the slugs or whatever pest was driving him mad by stealing the fruit or ruining the tomatoes: “this is their garden too” and I believed it. The plants belong to the butterflies as much as they ever belonged to me. We wouldn’t have been able to grow anything in the soil if the worms and the bugs weren’t there doing the work they do for the ecosystem, same with all the things we think of as pests – everything has a place in the garden, even though he thought the garden was his. It’s as much theirs as it was ours.
When we once found a family of possums crossing the dark in the twilight, the mama with the babies riding on her back, I drew a storybook of the generations of possums who had lived on my city block, and how lucky this generation of possy’s was to have a family who likes to plant delicious pumpkins and squashes just for them. The garden was incredible, and not just for humans. Dogs and cats and birds and bugs all called it home. Our cat, Mo, was a fantastic garden host and often had friendly neighborhood cats over to bask on the warm, sunny rocks.
After Dave died, I knew I would have a final summer there as I cleaned out the house and got it listed for sale. One last time to see everything in bloom, and I tried to be grateful for that. I got to say goodbye to the culver’s root and the roses, my happy hostas and the little blueberry bushes. I tried to relish it, even though those days brought me to my knees. I laid on the stones and watched the butterflies and the bees, I said goodbye to each flower and bird and weed and rock. I did my best to bid them goodbye. Even typing their names now brings tears to my eyes and makes my body ache. I want to lay on the paths and bask with the cat on the stones. I want to watch the monarchs arrive on the milkweed, lay their eggs and spend the summer with me. I miss singing to the goldfinches, I miss the readily available and easy to cut herbs, specifically the dill – which used to annoy me because it grew everywhere – and the parsley. I bet the strawberries are ripe right now. I hope the new owners know where to look for the strawberries, sometimes they can hide.
I know it’s ok to let it go, to let the garden grow without me. It never needed me as much as I needed it. As I move forward and through this new world I get to live in, I know I can start a new garden in my new house. I haven’t quite begun yet, but I noticed a little lilac, barely up to my knee. It’s small and I almost missed it. Next to it is a tiny peony, just one stem. It's so fun to see what is coming up here, in my new little house that’s just for me. I can’t wait to see what I will grow here.
Beautifully written....you took me there and I felt it. Thank you.
I feel the same as the previous commenters...I was in your garden, I saw your flowers and the walkway and your plants and then I saw my flowers... mostly flowers and herbs and fruits (blackberries, strawberries, etc.,,,) I have a yellow green house with a blue door so I tried to imagine what the inside of your greenhouse looked like. I bet you had a few chairs tucked away for when you wanted to sit and watch... You are a good story teller and I can appreciate what you and the children have gone through as it's a personal story for me too. Thank you.