The Heart of the Garden

M-M took this photo of nasturtiums.

Each spring, our city schedules a Saturday for Super Trash Day when people in our neighborhood can place at the curb items too large or unsuitable for regular trash pick up. Most people begin putting out items late in the week, items they have cleaned out from their attics and garages, limbs they have cut from their trees. The fun part about Super Trash Day is scavenging; people begin driving slowly in the neighborhood eyeing each other's trash. Last year I noticed a woman driving through the neighborhood in a beat-up white truck, the bed full of garden items and discarded furniture. She stopped and picked over our trash, a lot of which had been abandoned in the attic and basement by previous owners. She told me she was going to turn some of the furniture into yard art. Another man stopped and loaded his truck with scrap metal that he was planning to resell. This year, we didn't have much to put out, but on a trip around the neighborhood, Tom noticed that one of our neighbors was trimming his backyard bamboo patch. Tom knew that I had imagined using pieces of bamboo as a border around our Victory Garden. I had priced strips of bamboo tacked in two to three-foot sections at local gardening centers; I wasn't satisfied with either the price or the product. So Tom loaded up the pick-up with four-to-ten foot lengths of bamboo. I was excited when Tom drove up with the load of bamboo, so excited that I asked him to get another load. The neighbor said that if Tom wanted more bamboo, to just ask; he has to keep it cut back or it will take over his yard.

Finally, after days of rain, we had some clear weather on Sunday and thus had the opportunity to put my idea to the test. Tom cut up the bamboo into one-and-a-half foot pieces. He dug a trench around the garden, and we placed the bamboo ends in the ground. In four hours on Sunday afternoon, we had finished the border on the front, yard-side, of the Victory Garden. We'll complete the border on the back side of the garden this next weekend, or as soon as we have the clear weather and the time to do it. I'm pleased with the result. Here are some photos of our progress.

And for contrast, the photos below are of the last garden I planned and then created with Tom's help, what I called my Haiku Garden (herbs, flowers, native plants) and an extended vegetable garden next to it--in Texas, 2004-2007. I think I did permanent damage to my knees shoveling gravel for that Haiku Garden. We don't have this kind of space here in our little suburban yard in metro-Atlanta.

I realize how much I miss this garden in Texas. We put so much work and imagination into creating it. But then, I've gardened everywhere I have lived; I've left something of myself in each of the gardens I've planted or helped to plant, beginning with the gardens of my childhood in East Texas. Each place had its own requirements, its own history. In each new home, I have enjoyed waiting for that first spring to see what others had planted before me: spider lilies in Louisiana, Lily of the Valley and peonies in Minnesota, brown irises and beautiful daffodils in west-central Georgia, roses and paperwhites in Texas, and here--in Georgia again--violets and azaleas in our backyard. And I have always planted seeds, bulbs, or plants given to me by my grandmother or my parents: daylilies, purple globe amaranths, irises. This is the heart of the garden: the connections forged between gardener and earth, between gardener and plant, between gardener and gardener; the hope in the seed that miraculously becomes new life. Every gardener is a person with hope. That's what I remind myself when I mourn the gardens I've left behind: There will be another garden.