2020 Garden Notes
Everyone I know is gardening as March comes to a close. Trapped in his apartment, my friend starts growing microgreens on his tiny balcony. When that space is full, he takes over the bedroom of his roommate who fled the city before it shut down. From Vermont, she calls over video to excitedly show me the asparagus breaching the just-thawed ground. In Troy, some artists I met are converting an abandoned lot into a vegetable garden. In videos, they turn the compacted dirt with a hand rake and pile soft, rich soil into new beds.
Indoors, the people I know are collecting rarer and stranger houseplants. My sister is trying to get her pothos to climb the furniture. I am starting seedlings—tomatoes, hot peppers, zinnias—under strip lights in the wooden crates that used to hold my records. Outside, I’m digging bricks out of the cold dirt.
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Before the pandemic, the sale of houseplants was booming. Trend analysts wondered why they had become so popular with millennials (my generation) in particular—maybe it’s the result of urbanization and the lack of private green space; maybe it’s an outlet for care-taking impulses we would have focused on children or pets if we hadn’t been so economically blighted. Sure, maybe, but the explanation is just they’re beautiful; they feel good; we’ve noticed.
The things we love about plants are mostly simple: they’re nice to look at, they often smell good, and—yes, especially in the urban setting—they bring the outside into the home. For me, the love of plants is minute and sensual; the velvety leaf between the fingertips, the softest crackling sound of water being absorbed into soil, the bright smell (like underripe mango?) when you pinch off a leaf. Then there is the dimension of purpose and product—the satisfaction of watching things grow and the reward that sometimes you get to eat them.
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I discover the bricks while trying to plant bushes to screen the chainlink fence between my building’s yard and the next. At first, they seem scattered, but after trying and failing in several spots to dig a hole large enough for the bush’s root ball, it becomes clear that they cover this back half of the yard. When I dig a few out, there are more underneath. In some places they seem to be piled randomly, and in others they are layered, as if they’d once been part of a structure.
When I moved in, the invasive multiflora rose was choking out the invasive ailanthus tree. Between the vining roses and the English ivy, the back of the yard was a thicket about three feet deep that climbed up nearly to the top of the big tree. It was like a landscape out of a Grimm fairytale—the multiflora’s stalks were covered in red thorns that tore through clothes; it was deep enough that your feet disappeared if you waded into it; and it seemed to be a breeding ground for fat, black spiders that scurried out when you disturbed the vegetation.
It’s a shared yard, meaning all of my seven neighbors and I shared in its neglect. A year ago, I started clearing the vines on an impulse and kept going because it felt good, even when it felt bad. Some could be tugged out by hand while others had grown as thick as the trunks of saplings. This became a year long excavation project, in which the strata of many decades were uncovered with great effort, some frustration, and some satisfaction. Under the ivy were the decaying remains of a wooden shed, which my landlady called “the little house” and told me had fallen down in the early 90s. The vines had grown over and through it, tying the planks to the ground so they couldn’t be simply carried out. I hacked it apart with a buzz saw and hauled out in contractor bags. Under the shed was dry, hard dirt; under the dirt there was slate; and under the slate there were bricks.
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It’s still too cold to plant anything but snap peas, and I have nowhere else to be, so I decide to see how far down the bricks go and if I can find the soil underneath. I dig until there’s a hole a few feet across and deep enough to reach my arm halfway into. At the bottom of the hole, about four inches of a dark, shiny surface had been revealed. “Well,” I think, “I’ve finally found the coffin,” and take a moment to look more closely at whatever I’ve unearthed before I continue digging. Much of it is still covered by bricks, and a thick orange root has grown across it. After about thirty minutes, I’ve pulled out a dozen more bricks and sawed through the root, finally revealing a smooth, rounded edge. With the point of my shovel, I pry out a perfectly square glass block—the kind stacked into translucent walls in late 70s architecture. Beneath it is another, exactly the same. This is when I decide to give up.
Aside from the practical frustration of having dug a huge hole to nowhere and being unable to plant anything in it, it feels strangely heartbreaking to discover that my backyard essentially has a floor underneath it. What I’d thought was the ground—generative, wholesome, sacred even—was really just eight inches of dirt hiding a floor made of construction trash. It feels wrong to put the bricks back in the ground, so I stack them neatly along the fence and try to fill in the hole with dirt and potting soil. Without the mass from the bricks, though, there isn’t enough and I’m left with a large crater. Through the chain link fence, the man in the next yard generously pretends not to notice me struggling as he sways in his hammock.
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Biophilia is the human desire for connection with the natural world. It relies upon the distinction between directed and involuntary attention. Directed attention is the kind we employ to work or read—the self-instruction to keep focused on one thing. Involuntary attention just happens to us—we smell lavender or hear a starling or see poppies opening, and we notice. We want to spend time in that sensation. Our brains love this—research has shown that this kind of stimulus reliably improves mood and reduces stress—and gardens provide ample opportunities for it.
In designing a garden—particularly therapeutic gardens—we try to maximize those opportunities. We try to create a sense of extent, the feeling that the space we’re in is a world unto itself. Even if it’s small, this world is faceted enough to be explored. It gives us the sense of being removed from the other, mundane world and relief from the stressors of our daily lives. The space is private and protected, a sort of sanctuary. One of the most reliable ways to create the feeling of extent is to grow screening plants in front of fences.
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In April, my abutilon grows new shoots and I’m so excited I feel like I could cry. Here in zone 7b, the flowering maple (a mallow, not an actual maple) is not winter-hardy. I had expected to grow it only as an annual. These things are changing, though, as the winters get warmer and less predictable—this one had been mild enough for my abutilon to survive. I’ve been entirely alone for almost a month, and like many others, my world has suddenly become very small. So any change—even the unexpected sprouting of tiny leaves—feels revelatory.
The leaves of the abutilon are as soft as lamb’s ear; when they bloom, their flowers are like paper lanterns in yellow, orange, red, or pink. I bought my first one five years ago—it was an Abutilon pictum “Thompsonii” or “Thompson’s Painted Abutilon” that had already grown into a small tree. I saw it on the sidewalk outside the hardware store and its peach flowers and speckled, variegated leaves stopped me in my tracks. I spent $85 that I didn’t really have to buy it and carried the gallon pot home almost a mile to the fourth floor walkup where I lived at the time. It never flowered when I kept it indoors, but it was beautiful enough regardless.
When the last frost passes, the seedlings can come outside. I buy cloth beds to transplant them into because a soil test says our post-industrial East Williamsburg dirt has over three times the safe amount of lead for growing edible crops. The snap peas are beginning to wrap their bright tendrils around the chicken-wire I’ve fastened onto the archway. I scatter wildflower seeds all over the bare dirt that covers the bricks.
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In the dirt, I’ve found some costume jewelry, a metal plaque too rusted to read, and what looks like part of an engine. I line them all up like talismans on the concrete wall next to the glass block I pulled out of the hole. Then the landlady comes and throws them out. She wants to know who brought this junk back here. Who knows?
My friend has harvested several pounds of the microgreens he’s been growing on the balcony and in the empty bedroom. He comes to my stoop and brings me two bags full of them—daikon radish, amaranth, and sunflower sprouts. I give him a few of my tomato seedlings; I’d grown far more than I needed. The snap peas are taller than I am. My sister’s pothos would not be trained to climb the furniture, but it’s looking lovely anyway, and she’s planted peppers on her fire escape.
I begin to repave the crumbling path that runs through the yard from the concrete patio. I pull away all of the old stones, dig out the shape, lay down landscaping sand, and reassemble the whole thing with the most intact of the bricks I pulled out of the ground. When it’s finished, it winds under the archway that supports the snap peas and all the way back to the part of the yard that was once covered in vines. I put a bench at the end under the ailanthus. In the far corner, the multiflora rose is sprouting vigorous new stalks from the withered stump I’d tried to dig out last year. Since it refuses to be killed, I compromise and give it a trellis.
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In the heat of June, the abutilon blooms. It’s covered in dozens of salmon-colored flowers, and one day, when I’m sitting very still, a hummingbird comes to feed on their nectar. The flowers are shaped just for this. I’ve never seen one so close. It’s maybe four feet away, bright green, and smaller than my palm; it seems like it belongs to another world.
The wildflowers have grown in thick over the back of the yard, bright crimson clover, candy-striped pansies, and a delicate, bisected flower I don’t recognize that grows tall and in many pastel pinks and yellows. They sweep over the excavated crater like it’s the tiniest valley.
With the ivy gone, morning glory grows explosively and climbs everything it touches. Soon it will entirely cover the chainlink fence.