Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (10 page)

“
Why
didn't you check on me?”

“Why didn't you
tell me
how sick you were?”

“I
did
tell you I was sick. I told you Saturday!”

“Why didn't you call to tell me you had gotten worse?”

“I was too sick to call.”

Around and around we went, around and around until we were almost dizzy with the accusations. I was angry; he was defensive. He wouldn't apologize, and I refused to let it drop. Instead I raged. I took the horror of feeling so vulnerable, so unprotected, and I unloaded it on him. Perhaps it was unfair of me—it wasn't my brother's fault that I was living alone—but I didn't care. I needed to make him understand, and he seemed determined not to.

I yelled as I had not yelled in years. I yelled like my mother.

In the end I was crying on the couch, and he had still not relented. He took the abuse, but he would not apologize. To him it was a logic problem.
If you had called…If I had known…It's not my fault
.

It came from his head, not from his heart. He never said what I needed to hear:

I am sorry you were all alone. I am sorry I didn't call. That must have been horrible. It won't ever happen again, I promise
.

He sat there stiffly as I wiped tears and pulled myself together.
But still, I couldn't let it drop. Where was his compassion? How could the little boy whose head I stroked as he slept in my lap be this cold, this unfeeling? Hadn't I raised him better than this? I tried one last appeal.

“I'm sitting here crying, and you don't even care? You have daughters now. What if I were Abby—what if she were this upset? Would you not put your arm around her and comfort her?”

“Of course I would,” he said. “But she's my daughter. You're just my sister.”

Without much discussion, my mother and I had begun buying presents for the garden. I mentioned I wanted a croquet set, and she found one before I did. I bought a vintage badminton net and rackets when I saw them at a rummage sale. Later I found bocce balls and added those to our growing collection. I didn't even know how to play bocce.

We were buying things for a life we did not have—some Kennedyesque existence where a boisterous family plays games on a sloping lawn before tromping in for Sunday supper. We had nothing like that.

It reminded me of the first Thanksgiving after my brother and sister-in-law met. They had flown to California to spend the holiday with us in the cabin on the coast my mom rented with friends. It was small and sparsely furnished, awkward for more than two people, but perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. On a clear day, you could see from San Francisco in the south to Point Reyes in the north, and out to the Farallon Islands far offshore. We fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves and woke to a blazing dawn. If you are the sort of person that my mother is—the sort of person I am—this is worth some discomfort.

The cliff the cabin stood on was mostly wild, but a well-tended lawn lay on the inland side. It belonged to a gray-shingled house with white trim I had always admired. Compared to our
tiny cabin, this house looked solid. It looked Cape Cod. I was sure dependable people lived there; none of our wild ways.

That first Thanksgiving with my sister-in-law we walked on the beach, as we always did. For our family the holiday revolved around hanging out together and a long walk. It might be chilly in Northern California in November, but it was always sunny, the dry-grass hills a golden hue.

Walking up from the beach, we saw a touch football game being played on the lawn next to the house on the cliff. The younger members of the family were tossing the ball around while older folks sat on the deck with cocktails; they waved as we walked by. We didn't know these people, but I longed to be one of them. I longed for the friendly ease they had with each other, the rough-and-tumble team spirit.

Around our table things felt wrong. We often bickered. When my brother was around, he would get sleepy, his way of tuning it out. He seemed to prefer to stay distant from it all.

It's not that we didn't want to be a family—we honestly didn't know how to go about it. We were making it all up as we went along. But it didn't feel right; it didn't feel warm. We were awkward and clumsy with each other. Our pieces never quite fit.

It was six years after that Thanksgiving that my mother moved to Seattle and into Orchard House. It still felt like we didn't fit. It felt like we were failing—both ourselves and each other. But we went through the motions: Maybe we could fake it until it felt real.

That first year in Seattle we gathered in the garden to celebrate my mother's late-spring birthday. Seventy-three is a big deal, especially for someone who assumed she would die before thirty. I made a menu I hoped would please everyone. There was a frittata with broccoli I knew the kids would eat; a spring salad of endive and avocado, which my brother and sister-in-law like;
and a fruit pie instead of cake, because that is what my mother prefers.

The day dawned sunny, unexpectedly warm. The flowers were out—the San Geronimo irises, the deep red tulips my mother loves. The rhododendrons were blooming in pink, white, and purple, a carpet of petals on the lawn.

After we ate everyone tromped outside on the grass, and my mother unveiled her latest gift for the garden: an assortment of Hula-Hoops she had found at thrift stores. I had seen their brightly colored rounds leaned up against the house when I had come that week to garden. “I've been practicing,” my mother confided.

The children fell upon them with glee, stepping inside and bringing the plastic hoops waist-high, spinning them and swaying back and forth. Everybody clapped and cheered them on.

“You too, Grandma!” Cate called out.

My mother selected one of the larger hoops and began. My seventy-three-year-old mother, hula-hooping. You could see the dancer she had been in her younger years, graceful, flexible. We all laughed and cheered. Grandma was pretty good.

“Mommy, Daddy, come on!” My sister-in-law and brother joined in, able to do only a few rotations before the hoops fell at their feet. The girls were delighted to see their parents fail at something they found so easy.

“You too, Tea-tea,” they called to me.

“Just a minute,” I said, dashing inside to get my camera.

It was there that I looked out the window and saw it: my family, playing, laughing. My seventy-three-year-old mother and her five-year-old granddaughter were being crowned Hula-Hoop champions among the spring flowers. From a distance I could see what hadn't been clear at close range:
We looked like we were having fun
.

We looked like a family. One you might even want to be part of.

Much later, after my brother and sister-in-law had packed up the kids and all gone home, after my mother and I had cleared the birthday dishes and scrubbed the frittata off the inside of her casserole dish, we went outside to clean up the garden. The brightly colored Hula-Hoops and Frisbees were scattered over the lawn.

“So…” I began with some trepidation. “Did you have an okay time?” My mother is not one to mince words. She is not one to pretend. And I would never ask if something had been
good
. Good is more than I ever hope for with my mother.

“I guess it wasn't
too
terrible,” she allowed.

In a world of broken glasses, in the world my mother inhabits, this is almost praise.

I thought back on all the laughter, the spring flowers, the hula-hooping, the girls. I didn't know what she was waiting for
—a personal hallelujah chorus
? Couldn't she just be happy for once? There wasn't much time left.

“You might want to try enjoying it,” I told her. “This might be as good as it gets.”

N
OTHING PREPARED ME FOR
spring in a four-season climate. In Northern California winter brings the rain that coaxes goldenbrown hills back to green after the long, dry summer. It causes creeks and rivers to gush. It is a season of life.

In Seattle, winter is the season of bleak. Leaves fall, revealing branches, stark against a lowering sky, with a surprising number of bird's nests abandoned to the cold. The days are short, the sky dark even at noon. Everything feels gray for days, until spring tiptoes in.

Suddenly, after months of waiting, the city erupts in vivid yellow forsythia and purple crocuses. A riotous parade of plum blossoms gives way to blooming cherries, their fallen petals like pink snow blown into drifts on the sidewalk. Daffodils push out of the soil, trees leaf into the palest of green, and strangers smile at each other and strike up conversation. After months of hibernation,
people wander around and blink up at a clear blue sky. No one can resist the giddiness of spring in the Northwest.

The first spring in a new garden brings its own delights. There were surprises lying in wait for us. Small white clumps of snowdrops started off the season. Tulip bulbs that had been slumbering, unknown to us, stretched narrow necks and bloomed in shades of magenta and peach. The Indian plum bush we thought was dead unfurled small green leaves and pendulous white blossoms that swayed delicately in the breeze. Each new discovery felt like a gift, left behind by those who had tended this garden in the past.

“What are you looking at?” My mother rounded the corner by the driveway and caught me in what I was calling the
side garden
, a nondescript area to the south of the house that ran from the front yard to the main garden in the rear. This was the area I was beginning to think of as mine.

There was nothing impressive about the side yard. The path bordered a series of cinder blocks that had been set on their side and stacked to form a retaining wall about six feet out from the house. This resulted in what could be seen as a large garden bed—if you were the sort given to gardening. Otherwise you might see it for what it was: a weedy wasteland.

The area had been divided in two sections: An upper bed of thick grass looked like an uncombed mop of hair; a lower bed was longer, filled with poor, sandy soil and sprouting dandelions. A knobby tractor tire leaned against the wooden gate at the bottom that led to the garden. The red
NO TRESPASSING
sign was still prominently displayed.

“What are you looking at?” my mother asked again, impatient, her hands filled with rusty garden tools from the garage.

“I'm trying to imagine what it might look like—”

“You need to imagine faster,” she said as she walked by, a curt tone to her voice. “It's going to rain any minute.”

I stood in the side yard, scuffing my clogs in the sandy soil as
Seattle spring drizzle began to dampen my hair and slick my jacket. But I couldn't imagine any faster. Imagining takes time.

Being a gardener requires the ability to see possibility where none may be evident. A real gardener, I was sure, could look at this sad, weedy side yard and see flourishing grapevines and blooming lilac. There could be layers of plants—a ground cover of some sort, annuals and perennials, an overstory of trees. I tried and I tried, but I couldn't see it.

I wasn't much of a gardener yet, but that wasn't the problem.

It is not in my nature to see what is not there. I've never felt like I could create a new reality—I was too busy trying to make the pieces I had been given fit together. It didn't occur to me that I could walk away and start from scratch.

To create takes more than imagination. There is an audacity to creation, whether you are designing a new house, a new life, or a new garden bed. There must be an overriding belief in your own worth—and in a world benevolent enough to make room for your vision. To be able to create, you need to have faith.

I do not come from people who have faith. I come from people who expect to be wiped out in a freak snowstorm in July.

And yet, looking around this bedraggled side yard, I tried to imagine what it might look like. I mustered up all I had, and I began to dream and make plans.

It was the cement foundation that had drawn me to the side garden. Being on the south side of the house, it would get sunlight throughout the day. The foundation would soak up warmth, retain it into the evening, and radiate it back. Permaculture had taught me that this is called a “heat sink.” Cement, pavement, metal, and large rocks can all function this way.

Once I knew the concept, I began to notice it in the world. I saw the first ripe blackberries each summer were those growing next to a huge boulder. The stone soaked up the heat and
held it, and those berries were purple and sweet while others were still small and hard.

The farm where my permaculture class was held had created a heat sink—taken a sloping hillside and covered it in river stones. This is where they planted the trees that needed warm temperatures, varieties not necessarily suited to the Pacific Northwest: olives, lemons, almonds. They were creating a warmer microclimate. The cement foundation of the house would do the same. I could grow tomatoes here, peppers, eggplant, possibly melons—all things challenging in an area short on summer. I would be magnifying an asset, all thanks to a rather ugly cement foundation.

Before I planted, however, the soil needed to be amended.

“I think I'm going to sheet mulch the side garden,” I told my mom as we drove to my brother's house one early spring evening. The days were still so short it was dark by dinnertime, even an early children's dinnertime, and we drove through streets wet with rain.

“What is sheet mulching?”

“You basically make layers. The bottom layer is cardboard to keep the weeds down. Then you spread compost and soil and straw, one on top of the other. Some people call it a ‘lasagna bed.' Over time it all breaks down and improves the soil. It's so sandy over there, I think it needs it.”

My mother didn't blink an eye. “Okay. I'll help.”

That's when I started showing up at the garden with the back of my station wagon stuffed with cardboard. I had found a framing shop that put out large cardboard boxes for recycling. Every few days I drove past and collected whatever had been stacked up.

I didn't think anyone would mind me taking the cardboard. Permaculture teaches making use of what is available, diverting objects from the waste stream. Later I would learn there is a term for this. Rather than recycling I was
upcycling
.

Even though the cardboard had been put out for disposal—
someone
was going to remove it, and it might as well be me—taking it felt subversive. I did my runs under cover of darkness, spiriting the boxes away in the middle of the night.

Once I told my mother about it, she got into the act, stuffing her small hybrid to the gills, packing the cardboard so tightly she needed help pulling it out once she got home. The piles quickly grew, until the back patio looked like a recycling center, filled with towering stacks of cardboard the size of a refrigerator.

“You need to do something about the sheet mulching,” my mom told me on the phone one day. “When are you going to take care of that?”

I hadn't been spending much time in the garden. It had been a long wet winter, and I had been busy. My first book was about to be published, and email had become a full-time job. Messages came in faster than I could dispatch them; I was working frantically just to keep above sea level. I had a lot on my mind. Gardening was the least of it.

“I'll get up there this weekend,” I told my mom. I didn't have the time, but it was hard to say no to my mother. I didn't want to be part of the disappointment of her life.

The garden was only fifteen minutes from my house, but it felt like a different world. As I drove north, the city quickly melted into residential neighborhoods, tree-lined streets, small lakes, snowcapped mountains to the east and west. In Seattle the sun rose and set behind a jagged line of peaks cloaked in lacy white. Seeing them always took my breath away.

I'd wanted my mother to have a view of those mountains—that's why I had selected this neighborhood. It was not far from my brother's house, on numbered streets where she was less likely to get lost, with views of water and mountains.

“You know you stuck me in an old person's neighborhood,” she said when she first arrived in Seattle.

“It's
not
an old person's neighborhood.”

“Haven't you noticed the chairs next to all the bus stops? People here are so old they can't even stand to wait for a bus. Either that or they're just lazy.”

I had seen the chairs, a mismatched assortment of plastic lawn chairs someone had set out at the suburban bus stops that lacked a bench. I thought they were sweet.

“Maybe the buses don't come that often.”

“Yeah—because
old people
don't have anywhere to go!”

My mother wasn't wrong. This was the sort of neighborhood you would want your aging parent to end up in—quiet, safe, near grandchildren, with stunning views. I liked to think of her reading books, gazing off at the mountains, in a solid and comfortable home, enjoying the security that was the result of years of hard effort. I liked to think of her relaxing at last.

I had been trying to do something nice for her, though she did not see it that way.

But my mother had chosen garden over view. She had chosen work over leisure. She had bought a ramshackle house even though she could afford much better.

Now when I came to the garden, driving over the hill with the stunning views and dropping down to turn onto her mostly viewless street, my heart sank at what could have been. Instead of a view, we were left with potential—but there was so much work to get there. If we wanted grace, we would have to earn it.

The side garden was as I had left it—a large sandy patch punctuated with dandelions. I dragged the pieces of cardboard around from the back patio and began to lay them out, careful to overlap the edges. I weighted each down with large stones.

In truth, I was doing a bad job. The cardboard should have been covered by layers of compost and mulch, inches thick, to smother the weeds. Sheet mulching is not something that should be done in stages. But I didn't have the time—and my mother
was impatient—so I did what I could. I half-assed it. By the end of the afternoon, the side garden was a patchwork of different shades of cardboard.

“I'll do the rest when I get back,” I told her. It wasn't good; it was simply all I could manage.

My mother said nothing. I could tell she was not impressed.

When I came back from my book tour two weeks later, the side yard was fully mulched with layers of compost and fertilizer and straw. My mother had done it all while I was gone.

“How did you know what to use?” I asked.

“I looked it up on the internet.”

“But
what
did you use?” Sheet mulching is an inexact science—there are a variety of soil amendments to choose from. I wasn't sure myself what would have been best. I hadn't had time to do the research.

“I don't remember,” she said.

I couldn't deny the work she had done—shoveling compost and mulch, spreading it out on the large bed—not to mention the cost of purchasing materials. Don, the handyman she hired to do odd jobs, had helped. Still, it was a lot of work.

Maybe I should have been grateful; maybe I should have seen it as help when needed, as if we were on the same team, but it never felt that way.

Rather than a gift, her help felt damning. I had let her down again.

One spring, a number of years ago, my friend Jon Rowley wanted to bring strawberries to a wedding, as a gift for the friends who were getting married. Because he is the best sort of obsessive, Jon tasted every variety he could, asked all the growers he met what their favorite berry was. In the end he decided Shuksans were the best around. He arranged to buy flats of them for the wedding, and the guests all exclaimed. People bit into the berries,
closed their eyes, and sighed. Years later, they're still talking about those strawberries.

I had never heard of a Shuksan strawberry, but when I heard that story, I wanted some.

Shuksans don't show up in stores. If you see them, you might understand why. They are not a classic, cone-shaped berry. Instead long necks flare into fluted bodies, irregular and craggy; sizes vary wildly. The Shuksan is not going to win any beauty pageants.

Beyond that they are perishable in a time when berries need to be tough. It can take days for berries to travel from the growing fields of California to store shelves around the country. Shuksans need to be eaten the day they're picked. This is why store-bought berries are aesthetically pleasing but white on the inside, with little flavor; they are the ghosts of strawberries past.

These bred-for-the-supermarket berries were what my nieces were eating—tasteless things grown in fields states away. It made me sad. I knew I couldn't undo the industrial food supply chain, but I could make sure my nieces learned the difference. I could grow real berries for them.

This is why, one April day, I stood looking at the thick mop of grass that capped the top section of the side garden. I felt a small pang of grief—it takes a certain steeling of the soul to disturb a plant that is doing well, and the grass was thick and happy. But I focused my mind on the end goal. This patch of grass was destined to be my strawberry bed.

I reached down and grabbed a clump of grass and gave it a firm tug. Nothing happened.

I reached again, grabbing the stalks in an even firmer handhold. I put my body weight into it and pulled hard.

Some of the grass came off in my hand. The rest—and most important, the roots—stayed put. I stared blankly at the green blades in my hand.