Still Life in the Garden
DANIELLE SEDBROOK
A veritable graveyard of deadheaded marigold blossoms lies in the grass that borders the raised bed. Like all graveyards this one has specimens from every life stage: new buds—snipped off accidentally before they bloom; spent blossoms—browned, dried, clumped around the ovary; mature blossoms—approaching pale yellow, drained of crimson; blossoms at the edge of full bloom—whose inner petals have yet to reveal themselves, whose undersides crawl with aphid larvae, whose stems have been nibbled away. A group of aggressive wasps, drawn to their scent, menace, hover, and dive. You cannot know if they rage at the loss of perfectly good pollen, or out of desperation, because there are fewer of their kind this year than last, just as there were fewer last year than the year before.
The French marigolds are companions for the tomatoes, they trap the aphids and ward off nematodes from the soil. The unkempt wildflowers—chicory, daisies, poppies, calendula, alfalfa, wild carrot, bird’s foot trefoil, starflowers, common evening primroses—attract bees and butterflies and provide a home for the beetles you pluck from the vegetable leaves. The white-rimmed violet petunias tempt the snails away. Deadheading the petunias is a scavenger hunt. If you wait too long the blossoms fall off the seedpod, and you must find them all before they brown and drop their seeds. Some petal crowns dry and crunch as you pick them off. Some stick to the leaves and stems and neighboring blossoms and give off a pleasant, sickly-sweet smell of rot. Some only wilt and wrinkle and close around the seedpod. You always seem to find more rotting blossom ends than the seedpods that used to hold them, because you cut away the seedpods in a frenzy--filled with satisfaction with each snip, you will not realize just how many you have cut away. At times you clip off the whole end of a new stem drooping with buds and you mourn it, even though the amputation of that stem allows the plant to send out more shoots, but you mourn it all the same, and think about the flowers that might have grown from the tight green buds cradled amidst the leaves. You wonder when the time will come when no new shoots emerge at all.
Your older children water the garden with you. Each is becoming a person. Two small boys with sun-bleached hair, sun-glared glasses, and big, round bellies, you scold them for spraying the patio (wasting water) or the zucchini leaves (beckoning mildew). Of course, it will probably be the blossom end rot that gets the zucchinis (incomplete pollination) or the slugs (invasive) that take chunks out of squash and strawberry alike and leave trails on the cucumbers’ skin. When a boy discovers a slug, he will stomp on it, even if--especially if--you try to stop him, to teach him it is wrong to take pleasure in killing other creatures, this garden belongs to all of us, we are connected to one another. Besides, you can move the slugs to the compost bin. Their eggs will be destroyed when you turn the pile in the fall, and your children will feel betrayed by you and all your lessons when they are old enough to understand.
If you abandon the garden for a while, a week, or maybe two, because the rains were too heavy, or you broke the habit when the baby refused her afternoon nap for four days straight, it will require hard work to bring it back to order. A garden is not a natural thing. It is engineered. You are bending nature to your will, and it has submitted for now. You are constantly terrified that all the plants will die at once; they are not hearty enough, or the soil you planted them in is diseased, or the weather is cold, or there are not enough insects around to pollinate them so they will just give up. You will walk into the garden, and that tomato plant, whose leaves looked a little yellow yesterday, is suddenly weighed down with rotting fruit. The zucchinis will succumb to the powdery mildew you have been fighting off since spring, and with them will disappear any hope of a bounty like the year your mother died, when she couldn’t give them away and baked so much zucchini bread that your father would thaw a loaf for breakfast every time you visited for a year after the funeral.
But not this year. This year the garden survives. It thrives. The August heat sets off a flurry of growth, and you give into it, let the tomatoes branch and grow seven feet tall, let the cucumbers form a net so thick you struggle to pick the fruit before it goes to seed. The black-pepper-scented zinnias bloom between the zucchinis, hot pink ray florets beneath a coronet of minute, yellow disk florets. Little volunteer tomatoes pop up, the next generation of the plants you grew last year. You pull up most, but leave a few, and these bear fruit, hybrid types, never seen before, never to be seen again. You discover a surprise sprig of marjoram flowering amidst the Thai basil. The eggplants produce new blossoms, the peppers too, even the zucchinis. Sunflowers grow from birdseed tossed by the boys into the drainage rocks surrounding the house.
A bounty. Whole dinners from the garden. Vegetables that should never have met, whose seeds first sprouted on ocean-divided continents, thrown together in curries. Salads teeming with fresh-picked herbs, coated in olive oil and lemon juice. You discover germinated seeds in a fresh cut lemon, and you plant them in a little black plastic pot in your kitchen. Most die, but one grows into a lemon tree seedling. Its tiny, delicate leaves glow in the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. The boys pick raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, currants, cherries, chives, mint, dill, basil, and shove them into their mouths. They bite into tomatoes as if they are apples. Then they grow jealous of the care you put into the garden, and when you turn your back, they cover the baby in grass and clover and marigold blossoms, and she grabs fistfuls of these and shoves them into her mouth, and marigold petals will stick to her lips and chin. You turn the mister on the boys. They run away squealing and back with delight, then stop to observe the rainbow that forms in the cloud of droplets.
The lawn that encircles the raised beds and stretches out toward the plum and cherry trees is a mess of grass and weeds and clover. You let it grow too thick so the clovers bloom. Honeybees, bumblebees, and bee-imitating hoverflies fill it. Your neighbors cast narrowed, sideways glances as they fight the losing battle against the clover growing on their own browning lawns. Then a boy steps on a bee, and you are forced to mow it. You see two wasps roll in the air and crash into the clover. The baby darts forward on all fours, tries to grab them, and you grab her ankle to hold her back. One victorious wasp flies off leaving the other curled on the ground, and you poke it with a clover flower, roll it over with the stem from a mowed down weed. When you turn your head for a moment, you do find it again, as if it has sunk into the clover, which grew up and over and absorbed it into its roots. A small centipede scurries past between blades of grass.
A cross spider spins her webs amidst the tomatoes. Iridescent blue-green-gold: European rose chafers, dragonflies, a fly with plated, cherry-red eyes and crisp-cellophane wings lands on the petunias as you prune them. It looks right at you, regarding you regarding it, unmoving, waiting for you to look away, unaware that you mean it no harm. You catch a nickel-sized potato beetle on the eggplants and crush it between the curb and the underside of a wilted eggplant leaf, lifting the leaf just enough to see that the job is done. You feel guilty and monstrous and aware of your own power: to decide what is important and what is not, what you value and what you do not, what lives and what does not. But the eggplants already had a hard enough time of it this year. When they are old enough to understand, your children will look upon you in horror when they see what you have wrought, and then they will look upon themselves in horror when they see exactly what they are. Or maybe they will only be embarrassed that you are so melodramatic.
But not this year. This year they look at you as a poor kind of god, and in the garden they are happy and innocent, exist merely for the sake of it, go through their own particular motions, no more awake to the fragility or impact of their own existence than the beetle or the fly. And then, at dinner one night, your three-year-old son says out of nowhere:
When all the days are over all the people will be gone.
You ask him what he means, where he heard that, how he thought of such a thing. And he will repeat himself:
When all the days are over all the people will be gone.
As if it is self-evident, as if he does not understand how you do not understand. You and your husband laugh, and so the boy laughs and repeats it over and over again.
When all the days are over all the people will be gone.
When all the days are over all the people will be gone.
When all the days are over all the people will be gone.
And his brother and sister laugh at his laughter and at yours and you continue to laugh long after you stop finding it funny. Your children do not yet know what it means that each slug and beetle is gone, that their grandmother is gone, that their mother and their father will one day be gone, that one day they will be gone, and that when they are gone, none like them will ever be seen again. After they are asleep your husband tells you:
Well, when we’re gone, then there’s no one left to feel sad about it. When you’re gone, you won’t care.
You do not know how to answer, so you rest your elbow on the table and your chin on your hand and reply:
Hmm.
The fall will come. You will not truly believe that it can come to an end, but it comes when suddenly the temperature drops and the fruits stop ripening and the plants stop flowering because the buds wane and snap off. The garden sputters along for a time. An 18-inch-long cucumber suddenly appears behind the net of crumbling leaves. Stumps of the chicory stalks you cut down the month before send out new shoots, blossoms flower ultramarine each morning, then gray and drop by mid-afternoon. You harvest more tomatoes than you can possibly eat and trade them for zucchinis from friends whose plants are more prolific than yours. Then a windstorm blows in from the mountains, knocks over the trellised planters that hold the beans and strawberries, which flatten the strawberry shoots that rooted themselves to a dusty patch of earth too dry for the grass to grow and crush the magnolia seedling you planted two years earlier, before it ever had a chance to bloom. The winds rip the tomatoes up by their roots, snap the sunflower stems, tear gaping holes in the zucchini leaves. You are forced to admit that the time has come to cut it all down.
You want to find comfort in the notion that it was only ever just a garden. You want to find comfort in the belief that, even if it is not now, this year, this garden, next year, life will reemerge, because it always does, it always has. You want to find comfort in the possibility of a life like this one in the lands where spring is just beginning, in the deep future and past, far off galaxies, other universes. It happened here. It happened before. It can happen there. It can happen again. But you will not know whether or not the odds are greater than the size of our universe, and maybe we are more capable of destruction than you are of understanding.
