Tag Archives: Gardens

There It Stood

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“Past, present, future, all appeared
In harmony united…” (“Yarrow Revisited”)

—William Wordsworth (1770–1850). English Romantic poet who saw profound meaning in ordinary life, memory, nature, and place.

There it stood, heavy with decades of growth. Ten feet or so tall, even when arching gracefully under its own weight. Five feet or so wide, triumphant on the forest edge. Fargesia Jiuzhaigou. A shade-loving, cold-hardy bamboo that could manage ten below zero.

There it stood, sentinel over the koi—swimming the depths of the little pond—whose mirror-surface broke over and over again as water cascaded down the fall’s mossy stones.

There it stood, softening the massive sandstone rocks that gave the waterfall its heft and that teased the dwarfed hand-hewn, lattice-windowed granite lantern at the top.

There it stood, blocking the view from where we sometimes sat on the little patio facing the pond and everything that stood beyond where it stood on the other side.

There it stood, hugging the flagstone pathway beside it, and bringing into question the path itself and any destiny to which it might lead.

It had not always stood thus.

I remember when it arrived, black-bucketed, six scrawny canes spanning six inches.

I remember when I troweled out a hole beside the koi pond and planted it in the hope that over time its greenness would tower and soften the stone-edged waterfall, the bank down from the forest floor, and even the pathway leading to uncertainty.

I remember when it stood there, dwarfed by Quan Yin—the goddess of compassion, mercy, healing, and peace—standing tall on the ledge jutting over the water’s edge.

I remember when it stood there, intimidated by the jade chīshǒu—a Chinese dragon-head–spouting its melody against the pond’s splashings.

I remember it through all the seasons, through all the glorious and trembling growth spurts and even through all my timid prunings.

And I remember it exactly as it stood on the morning of the very day I came to know it could stand there no more.

“Gary, it’s got to go.”

“What?”

“The bamboo standing there.”

He looked at it, then at me, understandably as reluctant to nod agreement as I was hesitant to undo what had been there for so long.

Gary and I both knew what stood beyond the bamboo and beyond the pathway whose inward curve lay hidden by the outward arching clump.

He and I had spent weeks landscaping all that was unseen on the other side of the bamboo. We extended the dry-stacked rock wall. We pruned the rhododendrons. We mulched the sloping bank beneath and the ground behind, curving the edge and weedwhacking all the way to the woods behind.

We knew exactly how all those changes looked–once we walked our way past the bamboo. And we loved its open spaciousness.

But sitting there on the little patio by the koi pond where we sometimes sat, the bamboo seemed to wrap us—cocoon us—in the protective cloak of a well-established past.

What would it feel like, sitting there without the bamboo?

What would it look like sitting there, without the bamboo but with all that lay behind it and beyond it, exposed and in full view?

“Maybe just prune it back a little?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see once I get started.”

My mind was made up, I thought, and early morning proved it. I set about the task with fierce resolve. Before long, my legs could not be seen beneath the cut canes that surrounded me.

Each time I carried a load to the Gladiator, the bamboo lowered itself closer and closer to the ground. Lower. Less. Nothing.

And in the moment of my final return to where it once stood, the landscape opened before me alive with unexpected potential.

I could see the first stone wall I built there, toppled in part from time and winter’s heavings but still secure in its footing.

I could see the pond’s block foundation stretched over with liner.

I could see tubing snaking its way up out of the pond, up the bank, behind boulders, and into the base of the waterfall.

I could see all the inner workings of a past that had served well but that had, at the same time, outgrown the landscape it was built to enhance.

I could see what needed to be done.

I kept what remained strong. The footing. The block foundation. The boulders too massive to yield to whim. I pulled away what had failed, reset what had shifted, and rebuilt the old wall stone by stone.

The work moved quickly now. Four long slabs of flagstone reached out over the pond, parallel to one another but each at its own height. The exposed tubing disappeared behind stone. Two copper cranes stepped onto the lower ledges. Quan Yin and the granite lantern, no longer dwarfed, took their places in the open landscape.

Then the water ran again. It slipped over mossy stones, fell into the pond, and broke the mirror surface just as it always had. The waterfall was not new, but now I could see its sound.

More than that, I could see where a rich and aged past met a shiny and reimagined present.

I was confident that time’s inevitable patina would marry both.

Standing near where the bamboo once stood, Gary and I could see through the garden now, through it all. All the way through. Clearly.

There it stood.

What We Tend

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Dedicated to Gary — I see without looking.

The rake lay across the heart, as if it were Cupid’s arrow. Beads of water gathered on the thermos, upright on the nearby stone bench, right beside St. Francis of Assisi. Leather gloves and pruning shears bore witness to a gardener. Gary.

I couldn’t see him, but I knew he couldn’t be far away because his seafoam, floppy hat was not on the bench with his other things.

I knew what he was up to.

The time had come for him to do what I had done down through the years since I built the garden, filling it in with tons of tan pea gravel and surrounding it with a hedge of Little Missy boxwood.

Early on, the labor of weeding was easy. The pea gravel kept unwanted growth under control and beneath the surface. But over time the Angelina Sedum, filling the two circles in the heart’s upper lobes and surrounding the Magnolia in the lower cusp’s circle, died out but not before leaping over the rings that held them. Small chartreuse-yellow clusters softened the heart but lessened its definition.

Gary, my partner—the man who now shares this mountain life me—was doing more than weeding. He had already restored the flagstone pathway leading from heart to home and back again. Now he was planting healing Ajuga that will settle in and stay within the upper rings, eventually sending up purple spikes. Now he was cleaning, making everything as pristine as the day I finished my handiwork. I sat down on the bench, surveyed the slope, and sighed,

“Well done.”

I never had any intention of building the heart garden. My late partner Allen and I had tamed our mountaintop wilderness with so many paradisiacal garden beds that we had declared a moratorium:

“No more.”

But when Allen died and I reflected on where I would scatter his ashes, as mutually agreed upon, I could not for the life of me decide upon the right spot.

We had talked about resting places on our mountaintop, usually settling on the peony garden. Once, even, Allen suggested the Koi Pond would be perfect, but amid laughter, we both exclaimed:

“Oh, no! What happens when the pond filters get cleaned.”

Then, a few months after his death, he came to me in a dream, his voice carrying into my awakening and lingering there:

“Build my heart.”

I knew where. Near the house, at road’s edge—an untamed area we thought about gardening if we ever gave our moratorium a reprieve.

I had no idea how, but I figured a little math and lots of heart would make it happen.

And it did. I marked off an area twenty feet wide and thirty feet deep, sketched a heart with a black water hose, freed the earth of weeds, and blanketed it with pea gravel running deep. For Allen’s celebration of life, I surrounded the heart with SunPatiens, alternating red and white with tears and rain. I bought a wooden Zen rake, perfect for committing Allen’s ashes to the gravel, leaving tracings that mirrored the heart’s design, growing smaller and smaller as the center neared. Later, I planted the boxwood hedge.

Thus, the heart’s beginning.

Time has been kind. But still, the heart needs Gary’s loving care and tenderness. It rests within the landscape, its presence a part of forever.

The morning after Gary finished, we decided to amble down the path, pristinely cleaned and gently curved, with the heart in clear view.

“You go ahead. I’ll be there shortly.”

“No. I’ll wait. For you.”

It was peaceful and inviting.

We talked a little less than usual, as the morning chill quickened us and a Northern Cardinal in the treetops above whistled out its own litany of little questions.

“I want your ashes to be happy here.”

They will.

And when Gary’s time comes, I’ll board the train, his weight on my lap, my hands on the box, making his final journey to Minnesota where his story began.