ruthlessness, sentiments, sediments

‘I was hearing your heart beating across the road,’ the BFG said. ‘Loud as a drum.’

‘Go on,’ Sophie said. ‘Please.’

‘I can hear plants and trees.’

‘Do they talk?’ Sophie asked.

‘They is not exactly talking,’ the BFG said. ‘But they is making noises. For instance, if I come along and I is picking a lovely flower, if I is twisting the stem of the flower till it breaks, then the plant is screaming. I can hear it screaming and screaming very clear.’

‘You don’t mean it!’ Sophie cried. ‘How awful!’

‘It is screaming just like you would be screaming if someone was twisting your arm right off.’

‘Is that really true?’ Sophie asked.

‘You think I is swizzfiggling you?’

‘It is rather hard to believe.’

‘Then I is stopping right here,’ said the BFG sharply. ‘I is not wishing to be called a fibster.’

‘Oh no! I’m not calling you anything!’ Sophie cried. ‘I believe you! I do really! Please go on!’

The BFG gave her a long hard stare. Sophie looked right back at him, her face open to his. ‘I believe you,’ she said softly.

She had offended him, she could see that.

‘I wouldn’t ever be fibbling to you,’ he said.

‘I know you wouldn’t,’ Sophie said. ‘But you must understand that it isn’t easy to believe such amazing things straight away.’

‘I understand that,’ the BFG said.

‘So do please forgive me and go on,’ she said.

He waited a while longer, and then he said, ‘It is the same with trees as it is with flowers. If I is chopping an axe into the trunk of a big tree, I is hearing a terrible sound coming from inside the heart of the tree.’

‘What sort of sound?’ Sophie asked.

‘A soft moaning sound,’ the BFG said. ‘It is like the sound an old man is making when he is dying slowly.’

He paused. The cave was very silent.

‘Trees is living and growing just like you and me,’ he said. ‘They is alive. So is plants.’

I.

It falls to the gardener to be ruthless.  You can do nothing without your pruning shears, your hand-saw, your sharp-edged shovel and trowel.  You lop off spent blooms, slice into the soft earth, cut healthy limbs and branches.  You must do that for the good of the garden, sometimes for the health of the plant, sometimes for superficial reasons (to make your red twig dogwood flush even redder, to tease another round of bloom from the spent kernels of coreopsis, to gather a bouquet for the guest bedroom).  You must make choices, size up the struggling plant and decide whether to love it or toss it, as you never would with another living thing.  

As a gardener, you weed, you prune, you manipulate and judge.  You get-rid-of.

II.

My parents have been saying for years that they're going to put their house on the market, but now they really mean it.  They've put down a deposit, donated the piano and cleared the hall closet.   I came down over the holiday weekend to do my bit with the yard.  The garden's mostly been left to itself these past few years; I haven't had the time, or haven't been in the country, during the peak growing season.

When I stepped out the back door, the scent of the 'Miss Kim' lilac was voluptuous and spicy; I wanted to fill my mouth as well as my lungs.   - Voluptuous, too, were the weeds.  Spring is my favorite time of year for its possibilities, the sense that you can change things now and still reap the results in the near-term, and we are still just inside the season's rim.  Tidying the garden now brings benefits exponentially greater than if you were to wait until, say, mid-July, at which point you are fighting a rearguard action against humidity and blight; by late September, you are speaking in hypotheticals of a garden that exists on the far side of winter.

It's amazing what you can get done in just 24 hours, especially when the ground is wet from rain and there are four of you.  I filled the planters with ferns and coleus and creeping jenny; added some zinnias to the vegetable and herb garden, planted one of the front beds with white vinca, weeded around the bases of the perfectly globular allium, cut back the green froth of the boxwood.  My father and I took turns standing at the base of the tall ladder as L. balanced precariously with his chainsaw, twenty feet up, and tamed the four giant holly trees at the top of the driveway; they had been, as I remember it, one of my father's favorite things about the house when we visited it for the first time twenty-eight years ago.  My mother and I turned to the lilacs, most of which just finished blooming, and hacked away their top five feet, reassured by a garden guide that lilacs enjoy the punishment, and will bloom all the more profusely next year.   We shall see.


III.
Or we won't.  Maybe we won't be here next year.  Likely as not, we are doing all this for unknown owners.

As a teenager, I watched as a neighbor three houses down ripped up almost all the trees and shrubs that the previous owner had planted over the many decades she'd lived there.  Lilacs, azaleas, boxwood, all out to the curb.  The new owner wasn't a gardener, didn't have time for the hours of upkeep the yard would require, told me that the plants were mine for the taking.  I didn't take them.  I remember thinking that she was rather ruthless, this new owner, and I felt bad for the shrubs lying stunned and mutilated in the street after their decades of service.  But for the new owner, this was a new house, and she wasn't yet sentimental about it.  Her daughter hadn't danced at her wedding reception among the blooming rhododendron of the back yard.  (Nor would she: she moved away in just a few years, and I think, given the rapid turnover on this street, that perhaps people aren't so sentimental about their houses anymore.)   

Knowing that I may not see another spring in this house has made me both more and less sentimental.  On the one hand, I wonder about who the new owners will be, and whether they'll look at our mature trees and shrubs and perennials and appreciate them, particularly when they are in the danger zone of not-in-bloom.  Maybe the new owners will replace the hydrangeas with bland Leyland cypress and 'Knockout' roses.  Maybe they will cut down the magnificent Persian ironwood.  (And may it squash the man who tries.)  I look at our little copper beech in the front yard, brave and vulnerable.  People and plants alike can be underestimated.

On the other hand, there's something about saying goodbye to a place that makes you reckless.  If, soon enough, none of it will belong to you and yours,  you too can be cruel.  When you see a place through a stranger's eyes, you cast aside the filter that finds beauty in memories of home.  In years past, I could never bear to tear out the workaday pink rose near the living room fireplace, although it produces more blackspot than blooms.  Now I sized it up without compassion: maybe we should just rip it out.  The columbine (Aquilegia 'Biedemeier') that had self-seeded under the flowering plum, and the bee balm crowding too near the border's edge?  Tear it out, move it all, trust that it will thrive somewhere new.  

Green thumbs mean black nails.