I work quickly as dusk quietly melts the light, and robins begin repeating their short melodic riff signaling time for bed. The dirt is rich and the air sweet as a gentle, tender darkness slowly engulfs me. The centers of the shrubs grow dark and soon all the plants are simple silhouettes in the warm night. I think of my grandfather Vic’s ranching life and thank him for my love of this good earth.
I don’t want to go in for the night. Every molecule of my being is an exquisite balance of energy and peace. Joyous and thankful for the plants, the birds and the pleasures of gardening I dreamily imagine ancestors, their rustic tools digging the soil like I do tonight.
I am a creature of the early night’s garden traveling on a higher plane than my conscious being. This moment in time is in harmonic layers. I’m floating above the neighborhood voices, traffic and friendly barking dog.
My body is a smile. Not a broad charismatic smile with bright white teeth. It’s a personal, Mona Lisa smile; a suggestion of an upward turn on the corners of the lips and a knowing look in the eyes that make you want to know what she knows.
Reluctantly, I tidy the walkway and put away my spade and mismatched garden gloves. I move ethereally, one fiber in the fabric of this young night. I stop on the cobble stone path between the garage and the house and view two sharp rectangles of bright light shining from the windows of my empty kitchen. I am an alien, a voyeur, an outsider of my daytime self, happy to be outside looking in.
This magical June night in my garden was a dozen years ago, an apex of my life-long avocation. I have never completely duplicated that dreamy evening again, though gardening is still like a runner’s high for me, not the work many people equate with gardening. At about that time in my life I became weary of my late mother’s bitter complaints about the arthritic aches and pains caused by gardening in her 80’s. She had introduced me to gardening when I was a bored grade schooler. She assigned me to deadhead the common, prolific pansies in the flowerbeds of my youth. I spent hours over-thinking where to cut the stem of each withered blossom. Gardening became such a part of my early persona that Mom snapped a black and white photo of me that she had me pose for with my favorite doll. My haired is pulled tight into a blond ponytail. I’m wearing a pastel cotton dress that she had sewn. The skirt is spread out into a circle like a ballerina’s tutu onto the bed of pansies, the precise spot at my childhood home where I began gardening.
I was in my early 50’s when I bought a home where I could create garden beds from my dreams. Ironically, a painful divorce caused me to sell a house that sat in the shade of tall trees and buy a brick tutor by Puget Sound that gave me unimaginable joy. It had perfect southern and western exposure to the sun, exactly what was needed to grow my favorite lilacs, roses, tulips and hydrangeas. It not only had great sunlight, it was free of the dreaded garden monster: glacial till, commonly known as clay.
The 4,500 square-foot lot was nearly a blank slate with sad remnants of iris beds tended long ago when its original owner was in her prime. The back yard was a patchwork of concrete connecting the driveway, clothes-line pad and sidewalk so two cars could pull up to the back porch and park. My priority was plants, not parking, so for the first time in my life I spent money on a landscape design and a crew with a backhoe to create a sentimental garden inspired by photos clipped from magazines and the work of my parents and grandparents. Brick, cobble-stone pavers, paths and rock walls that echoed parts of my neighbor’s meticulously groomed, French-inspired yard. But mine had a more carefree flounce of flowers and a wave of branches from dogwood, lilac, magnolia and red vine maple trees.
I created lush, secluded garden vignettes with arbors, variegated leaves, fragrant heirloom flowers and vintage chairs and benches so I can sit quietly and be in Zen with my universe. I planted flowers in colors of sunrise and sunset, all selected for fragrance and their future role in beautiful bouquets. I nurtured dahlia bulbs from a plant my mother got from a co-worker twenty years earlier. I added a patch of luscious raspberries that tasted like roses smell, a nod to my grandfather’s garden. Then, like a fairytale, buzzing bees and delicate butterflies found my gardens. Black-capped chickadees, Anna’s hummingbirds and robins began nesting and fledging babies in my yard and next door.
Although, my neighbor David had a difficult time understanding why I refused to clip my shrubs into ridged topiaries like his, harmony was rarely broken even when my two new kittens, Chloe and Amelia, stalked butterflies and tumbled in the grass. One day a woman appeared in my yard from the West Seattle Garden Club saying someone had nominated both my and my neighbors’ gardens to be on the annual garden tour. We were so flattered, for the next nine months we threw ourselves whole-heartedly into to weeding, mulching and prepping our yards in anticipation of the tour. We couldn’t believe our bad luck when recording-breaking buckets of rain fell from a dark sky the July day of the tour. But that didn’t stop nearly one thousand people from tromping through our yards, many stopping at the neighbor children’s lavender cookie and lemonade stand.
As I aged and was diagnosed with MS, I began to empathize with my Mother’s ‘oh-my-aching-back’ complaints and I hired a gardener to help, and then to do it all. When the real estate market grew hot, I sold my house and my beloved garden and moved to a condo. I had thought hard and long about the pros and cons before letting go. The four-bedroom house was too big and I was only using part of it. My daughter had finished college, had a good job, was engaged and no longer needed a room. The yard was beautiful but in addition to a small view of Puget Sound, on the other side of the front hedge were cars lined up on the street waiting for ferries to Vashon Island and the Kitsap Peninsula.
Traffic bogged down when a ferry unloaded 130 cars into our neighborhood. Every year on New Year’s Day, we enjoyed watching 500 or more motorcyclists in formation, with flags and banners flying, roar by as they head for the Vashon ferry dock. Unfortunately, Vashon was a favorite motorcycle-group ride on weekends and many commuters switched to motorcycles in the spring for the cheaper ferry fare. The ferry system groups all motorcycles at the front of the ferry and they drive off first—together—when the ferry docks. We neighbors of the ferry dock didn’t need alarm clocks to wake up in time for work when 75 Marlon Brando clones roared off the 5:05 a.m. boat—and again every half-hour or so—on weekdays. I don’t understand how someone can enjoy the cracking BLAT of an engine minus its muffler. Fun for them but it broke my garden reverie.
One evening when the sunset colored the sky fuchsia, pink and gold, I went looking for a secluded waterfront condominium property I had looked at 12 years earlier. I remembered the condominium location was quiet and sat on the shore with an unobstructed view. I couldn’t quite remember the street it was on so wandered a little on streets that dead-ended. I eventually found it just a mile from my house in an area of greenbelts on a narrow dead-end road and a steep driveway to the beach. I was right, the sunset was even better at the condominium property.
Oddly, or maybe presciently, the ground-floor unit with a garden that I had looked at all those years ago was for sale. Even with ferry boats and cargo ships offshore, the area was remarkably serene. The silence was a sharp contrast to the sounds of the city I lived with just a mile away.
I bought the condo a week later, dug up starts of some of my favorite plants, got rid of lots of furniture, packed the rest and left without regrets. Now, with a bum knee, arthritic hands, tremors, and heat intolerance, I sit on my patio like an old timer on the front porch of the store in a small town. I smile subtly and remember white French lilacs, old antique roses, baby birds and cobble stones. I reminisce about the perfume of artful bouquets arranged in prized vases and standing at the berry patch with my friends eating warm raspberries.
I still marvel at the stunning colors of sunrise and sunset but not just the color scheme of flowers in my garden. I see the colors in astonishing sunrises that reflect from behind my home onto the Olympic Mountains in front of me. Night after night I am graced with a sky filled with a mélange of gold, pink and fuchsia as the sun sinks behind Mount Constance, The Brothers and Mount Washington. On clear nights the moon’s reflection shimmers across the shipping lanes in front of my home. I’m retired and if I want, I can sit for hours entranced by the twinkling galaxy above, the gentle lap of waves on shore, and the sparkle of lights on the Vashon ferry dock four miles across the shipping lanes.
Summers, my neighbors and I paddle in our kayaks and cool off in the swimming pool near my patio door. I don’t see my favorite little chick-a-dees but my flower beds are home to warbling wrens, melodic white-crown sparrows, and zippy barn swallows that nest in the eaves of the garage. Among the babies that fledge each year are one or two gangly Great Blue Heron who provide a little comedy as they awkwardly learn to fish and fly and grow into elegant adults. Osprey, eagles and terns dive for fish. Seals, otters and sea lions hang out. Orca pods or a lone humpback occasionally swim by. Cargo ships 1,000 feet long head out to the Pacific, colorful spinnakers dot the water during weekend sailing regattas and every year dozens of Native Americans paddle ornate, hand-hewned, canoes headed to their annual gathering.
Yes, I once lived in a brick house with a blissful garden. It still is a jewel in my life—my own little Camelot. While I still savor the Fauntleroy garden memories, I find new joys walking the beach, collecting agates, shells and driftwood; and painting and sketching the mountains, flowers, birds and creatures from the sea. I’m fortunate that plants can be moved and that I am still able to admire the beauty and history of my Mom's large, velvety purple dahlia bloom resting in my Grandmother’s favorite vase. It’s a 90-year-old vase that once held tulips, peonies and roses from my Grandmother’s yard high in the Rocky Mountains and now sits on my sea-level dining room table. The flowers in the vase add sentimental connections from my past to my new, quiet life on the beach.
Author: Carolyn Duncan
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