|
March 30, 2021
The Garage
The season has begun. I am out now every day that is warm enough and dry enough, beating my April 1 starting date by some two weeks. Plants are coming up faster than I can get ready for them.
Kevin and I have had our first workday. I am seriously editing the garden this year, taking out shrubs that have gotten too big for their space and creating space for bird and bee friendly natives. Working on one particularly tough customer, Kevin snapped Sara’s 50 year-old long-handled shovel, a tool she particularly adores. Astonishment gave way to remorse, remorse to grief, and grief to worry. We told Sara when she came out to ask us if we wanted coffee. Ever resourceful, Kevin was soon on his phone and eBay, locating a replica – same white ash handle, same length, same heat-forged pointed iron spade. It will arrive this week. Meanwhile, I am looking for a blacksmith who might be able to mend the old one.
Things break in the garden, including hearts. It’s inevitable. Something is destroying my front lawn. I rake for leaves and clumps of grass come up, roots as well as dried blades. The damage is slowly progressing. The blue spruces which form the back border look dreadful, far worse than they did in the fall, so bad I may be forced to take them down. And will the Heptacodium survive the canker that disfigured it last season?
But there is so much joy in encountering my garden once again. The robins are back, the red maple tints the horizon with its buds, and my garage is cleaned up and ready to get to work.
I love my garage.
I did not always know I felt this way. My revelation occurred one January evening, some years ago. I was sitting at a long table in a cold room at the Berkshire Botanical Garden. Around me huddled seven other women in thick down jackets, each of us there for the first night of a twelve-week course called Designers’ Toolkit.
Our instructor was talking about ‘the car.’ We students didn’t care about cars, we cared about plants. When he cracked a joke – “I’m a landscape architect who loves plants, all sixteen species equally” – we laughed, but apprehensively, concerned that perhaps he really did think there were only sixteen different species of plants and would therefore be of no use to us with our hundreds. As he handed out sheet after sheet of statistics on the space different makes and models of cars require to back out of the garage, turn around in the driveway, and enter the street headfirst, our horticulturalists’ distrust of landscape architects seemed confirmed.
“You have to start with the car. People need a car to leave home, but they want to forget it when they are home. You must site the driveway and garage first. Otherwise your design is useless.” Listening to him, I thought, “Fat chance the first thing I’m going to tell a client of mine is that they must rip up their driveway and move their garage!” But then a space opened inside my head and I heard myself say, “I love my garage.”
My garage fails to meet the criteria our instructor defined as essential. I cannot back out, turn around and drive head-first into the street. Nor can I hide my car when it is not inside the garage. It sits in the driveway, the first thing one sees upon arriving at my home. Most of my neighbors made a different choice when they built their home. They chose to site their garage so that its windowed side faces the street, not its overhead front doors. This way, the garage looks like part of the house; it hides the fact of the car as well as the car itself.
I could have chosen to site my garage this way as well, but I thought a house should look like a house and a garage should look like a garage. Instructing the builder, I remarked, “You can’t start a landscape with a lie,” being more than a bit pretentious.
When I think of my garage, though, I don’t think “car.” I think “garden.” Because the doors of my garage face the street, its windows are at the back. Because there are doors in the front and windows in the back, I have light and air, good circulation, and sunlight pouring into my garage any day there is sun. I had to put the worktable at the back of the garage to get it out of the way of the car. So it sits under the windows, making it the perfect place to set out plants in the spring.
I keep my wheelbarrow, my mulch monster, my lawnmower in the garage. Bags of fertilizer, bone meal, potting soil, manure are stored on the floor. On one side there are shelves for Biotone, Root Start Up, Miracle-Gro, wasp spray, ant spray, fungicide, Lysol for disinfecting pruners, and large containers of Deer Off. On the other side are racks with nails for hanging up tools. Underneath the tools, I stack old pots and the garbage cans for collecting garden trash. An old hall tree, discovered in the basement of an apartment I once lived in and warped from a flood, serves as a hanger for my garden clothes. There is a rubber mat for my garden shoes, and a new broom for sweeping out.
When my Honda Accord reached the 200,000 mileage mark, my mechanic delivered the bad news. I had to get a new car. He also delivered the news that I would have to switch to a smaller car if I wanted to get another manual transmission. I did not want to give up my old Honda Accord. Over the years it had become my “truck.” Would I be able to stack five shrubs in the back seat of a Civic, load the front seat with perennials, and shove a small tree in the trunk? A friend suggested I keep the old Honda for my business. “After all,” she said, “you have a two-car garage.” Two cars in my garden shed? I didn’t think so. I begrudge even one the space.
That one space is now Sara’s. Her car is newer, and besides, as she is quick to point out, she does all the shopping. When I complain, as I do on occasion, that my car is older and needs some protection, Sara points out that my garage can house two cars. But you know what I say to that suggestion.
Thanks so much for reading my newsletter. If you are enjoying it, consider sharing it with one other person you think might enjoy reading it as well. I’d be grateful if you would help me reach more readers.If you aren’t already a subscriber, I’d be honored to have you as a reader.
You can sign up here.http://perennialwisdom.net.
http://www.perennialwisdom.net |