(Birth announcement--pineapple start up!)
In a good way. Not the 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'Poltergeist' kind of way.
I believe it is haunted by Gardens past, and by the gardeners who planted & tended them.
Every time I use my 'hoe hand' (a handle-less hoe that is a very useful broken thing--patent pending) to slash open yet another bag of soil, that scent brings back the digging of beds all the way back to a rock-infested hillside in West Virginia, or earlier still to pulling potatoes with my Grandpa, walking his sidling, bow-legged gait a few steps ahead, turning the hill & pointing with his pitch fork at the X where I'd find our quarry. Or years later, whining at Mom's insistence that we pull as many rocks from the planting bed as possible, & still growing lightning bolt-shaped carrots that had to expand laterally when they ran into one of the rocks this slacker had left in their path. 
(Once you embrace rocks in the garden, it can get completely outta hand)
It was the same scent when I brought home paper grocery bags full of assorted daffodil bulbs & iris rhizomes from the summer horticulture course at Mary Baldwin in VA, planting them in the former carrot bolt bed. It was almost worth living at home & going to my hometown university to see all those spring bloomers, blanketing the hillside.
When I got married in my first year of college (& divorced before I graduated, thus erasing it from my permanent record) & we bought that little house with its communal driveway & pointy closets under the eaves, I grew big feathery dill & little red marbles of new potatoes, a combo so delicious they are permanently committed to taste memory. 
(From potatoes to pineapples in 2 gardening generations)
The loamy scent followed me when I planted bells of Ireland, their tall, alien-green spires filling the window boxes on the tiny cottage I rented as a new (and newly divorced) career girl in Maryland, in that odd place called Epping Forest. The cottage was so tiny & the window boxes so full, it appeared it would roll over at any moment. 
A few years later I was up to my elbows in peat, mulch & herbs, planting the border with those & teddy bear sunflowers at the even smaller cottage my second husband & I rented on a creek in Mayo MD. Two mallards (Phil & Don, the eiderdown brothers) insisted on nesting in my sage, giving my admonishments that they'd better stop pre-seasoning themselves lest they become dinner, as much credence as they warranted--exactly zero. A young brown rabbit I named Bertie lived in those borders too, & became so tame he would approach to within a few inches when I would lie flat in the grass & tell him nonsense in chummy, low tones.
The rocks & caliches won out in my first attempt at tropical gardening, a few years later up on Scenic Drive here in STX. The only victories there were the few things I grew in pots, arranged on the terraced stone walls I patched together from all the blasted rocks. That lemonade-from-lemons trick mom taught me is one I still use today, having finally embraced the rocks as a necessary & useful part of sloped gardening. 
When I dig into my yard after work today, the scent will be the same. Only the memories differ. Now I hear David laughing at my crazy garden schemes, at my choice of bright, Kate Spade-esque colors, at how much I overbought on magenta spray paint. His orchids, my orchids, & the ones we bought together are tied in trees all around me, most at heights so low he'd definitely make fun. 
(One of the orchids D tied in my trees himself, assuring it is at an acceptable height)
He'd probably scoff, too at my thinly veiled attempts to attach the weight & permanence of stone to this transient place, a tropical island in a hurricane belt. But he'd secretly like that I keep trying. Don Quixote with a hoe hand, that's me. I think a fig tree will look great over there...(Hush, David! I will too water it!)
(Palomitas or 'little dove' orchids, named for the bud shape)
No comments:
Post a Comment