typologies

I.

I have been thinking about types of gardens, lately, just as I have been thinking about types of people.  As my grandmother once did - and, frankly, not to her credit then, or mine now - I draw up the differences between myself and others: I say to myself, we are alike, but you and I are not alike.  I cannot comprehend you; but with you, though a stranger, I feel a similarity.  

II.

I try not to walk the same route twice, but there are only so many combinations in which I can transverse the same six blocks to and from the subway.  And so I try to remember all that I see each day.  There was the night when it had rained and all the catalpa blossoms had fallen.  I fell upon them like they were gold.  My God, I thought, why didn't someone ever tell me that catalpa flowers were so beautiful? - ruffled white sleeves dabbed with yellow and etched in black, as exotic as orchids, and placidly waving, high over my head, the whole time.  They mass together on a branch like sorority sisters, but the truth is, they could stand on their own.  They're beautiful enough to stand on their own.

And I think to myself: this is a garden.   In and of itself, this flower, this one tree could be a garden - if by garden, you mean the sight which orients and refreshes your eyes and your mind.

III.  

Of course, there are many ways to garden.  There are the conventional gardens, with their roses and their hellebores, their mosaics of Japanese painted fern, astilbe, and coral bells underneath pink dogwoods.  But the townhouse with the rakish plastic flowers stuck into the window grills?  I suppose that this is a garden.  And then there is the house with the statue of the Virgin Mary, arms outstretched in blessing, over a heart-shaped box hedge, with plastic blue and red bird figurines flying in, attendant, on the left and right: this, too, is a garden.  It may not be my choice for a garden.  But it is a garden, and, I always say, I give people credit just for making an effort.  You just have to make an effort.  Four coffee cans lined up on a ledge, each planted with one musty, mustard-yellow marigold?  Well done, sir.

IV.  

On Saturday, I saw, from the other side of a year, the first garden I ever worked on that wasn't somehow mine.  I hadn't been able to visit it, last fall, and then arrived this past winter.  Hell lies still under ice and not ashes: though ask me again in late August.  I'd worried, "The garden will be dead, there will be nothing but weeds left growing."  In their front yard, where we'd hacked through the lawn, pulled it up like old carpet, and laid down perennials, the quince was thriving, if no longer blooming, and the three Thuja occidentalis 'Rheingold' were golden-lime spheres that, at the part in their hair, showed fresh green roots.  Low-maintenance perennials, satisfied in their station, had rooted and grown into happy clumps: orange-red yarrow and echinacea and reddish-purple euphorbia and, more reliable than a battleship, sedum 'Autumn Joy.'  The false indigo, one of my favorites, and bought for a song last summer when it was past bloom, is now just two weeks away from flowering.  About fifty percent of the heaths had made it - not bad, I thought, considering the past two winters.  Like a (real) doctor, I made my rounds to see the dwarf Nandina 'Firepower' (fresh and green) the various Korean lilacs and viburnum (doing well!), the hollies (er...), and the Himalayan sweetbox (just exactly as I'd pictured it two seasons past).  

SH and I went on an errand.  Driving down the street, he said, approvingly, that he'd noticed that their yard didn't look like their neighbors' lawns, with their their flat lawns and pinched-looking shrubs pushed up against the house.  It looked better, looser, fuller.  (On our way, with R. and I running late and our phone dying, P. had called for the address.  I had told R., "Just tell P. that once she turns onto the street, to keep going until she sees a house that doesn't look like the others.")

V. 

On Sunday, I went to the New York Botanical's Rose Garden Weekend.  I dutifully sniffed each plant, and admired their names (my favorite of all?  "Quietness").  But the truth is, I cannot imagine planting a monocultural garden anymore, least all of roses.  

VI.

Sitting on L.'s couch last week, sipping wine, we listened to Erik Satie, melancholy, deliberate, prickly.  I move on 1 July.  I could not be more excited: an apartment of my own, a garden that I share, access to a dog.  No more neighbors who sit in the stairwell, smoking in their underpants, when I come home late at night; who solicit me for sex; who snore in the hallway, passed-out drunk outside their apartments.  

L. told me that the back yard was for edibles - for tomatoes, herbs, vegetables.  But the front yard was cosmetic, and I could do what I liked.  I thought of those thriving clumps of false indigo at SN/SH's house.  I said, casually (and as false as that indigo), "I may have a few things I'd like to plant this summer."

VII.

"To get really acquainted with [these native flowers], it is not enough plant them in garden borders," Roberts and Rehmann write, decisively.  "They must be assembled as they are naturally assembled in the fields.  And to really recreate this natural field garden, it is important to keep the wild sunlit openness and the characteristic contours, to rehabilitate the enclosing hedgerows, to define the spontaneous paths as well as to reestablish the all-over pattern of its flowers..."  And so they instruct me, all the way from 1924, in the specifics for all eventualities: "All the violets and buttercups, the lupines and irises, the vervains and gerardias, can be gathered in small clumps and planted close to the path.  The lilies, too, should be brought near it so that the details of their rich reddish-orange flowers with purple spottings can be fully appreciated.  The flowers of Lilium philadelphicum that stand upright and alone upon an erect leaf-whorled stem look like carved ornaments, while Lilium canadense, with groups of nodding flowers, are even more exquisitely modeled."  Of the native plants which they mention (the robin's plantain and the native cup, the chickweeds and the pennyroyal, the heal-all and the cinque-foils, "the pink dogbane, the white vervain and the meadow rue"), I have heard of almost none.

VIII.

Walking home late at night, the honeysuckle from the neighboring community garden - seductive, indolic, even insolent - comes drifting over the raw stench of garbage in black plastic.  Garbage night: the dog would have loved this.  Honeysuckle is our northeastern jasmine - insistent, powerfully nocturnal, the lover whose calls you take, despite your better judgment, late at night.  (Running in Medusa, weeks ago, I stopped short my run to breathe in the honeysuckle rambling along the roads.)  

All up and down the block, I plunge my face into rose bushes.  Hybrid teas, floribundas, peach-colored, crimson pink: I don't care.  But you don't even like roses, R. reminded me when I mentioned, several weeks ago, that I'd be attending Rose Garden Weekend.  (R. has a way of remembering everything you've ever told her.)  I would never plant them myself, I told her.  But once a year, I'm awfully glad my neighbors do.