A commentary by English gardener Charles Elliott on gardening as "the most
ephemeral art" started me remembering gardens I knew from my childhood,
gardens which could have been to some degree eternal, but land ownership
is not, & things do change, not often for the better.

My great-grandmother planted a granny smith apple that was already old &
twisted & beautiful when I was a tiny preschooler, & I had a very early
love of trees specifically due to this one apple tree, which I believed
was sentient & a friend. As a preschool tot, I travelled with my mom &
stepdad in a carnival in circles that overlapped gypsies & itinerant
farmworkers, but in off-seasons, or just for no reason, I'd be with my
great-grandparents for varying lengths of time. Though the carnival &
bizarre side-show acts seemed in those days a daily banality to me, my
stays on the farm with grandma's flowers & guinea hens & chickens, &
grampa's rabbits & the family cow, with acres of orchard trees & flower
gardens & veggie gardens, all seemed partly to be a fairyland of joy.

That old apple tree reached a long thick arm to a bathroom window, by
which route all of the grandkids & cousins that betimes visited Grandma
Elva & Grampa Perry for overnights would come & go secretly. Beyond the
big apple was a little plum orchard, then some wild trees. Around a big
stump in a nearby field was a garden belonging to all the grandchildren &
cousins -- grandma would set us planting yarrows or nasturtiums & many
such easy things to surround the stump. Another stump was completely
engulfed in an enormous wild-looking rose with small pink flowers, still
in my memory the most beautiful rose that ever existed, I've never seen
one exactly like it as an adult.

Some of the earliest photos of my sister & I (at the barely-walking stage
& still diapered) are in Elva's garden eating rose petals. We were
fortunate in our choices, as grandma had a lot of foxgloves we could've
eaten. In fact, I'm fairly certain we did eat those too at one time or
another, but we didn't get sick. She was also fond of gladiolas, which I
remember as ten times taller than us children, though of course memory
exaggerates their enormity. I didn't inherit her fondness for gladiolas,
but many of my present-day gardening choices are directly because I fell
in love with things in her gardens -- torch lilies, an old ash tree that
often reappears in my dreams, grassy wild iris, a tulip tree, native
shrubs for edible berries, stonecrops, & her enclosed gardening porch with
many awesome orchid cacti.

Meanwhile great-grampa Perry, a Yakama Indian, had an enormous strawberry
field, but a few years later, he got rid of the strawberries & became one
of the more famous dahlia growers in King County, with many flower club
visitors & buyers, & many awards both for in-garden flowers & cuttings
shown at Puyallup & other fairs & exhibitions. He grew the dahlias the
way he grew corn, so it wasn't much of a garden in form, but the flowers
reached extremes of size & color.

All that remained of their gardens & orchard when last I drove by the old
place were a couple old plum trees. But some of their plants were still
growing in the 1980s, twenty or thirty years after they were both dead.

Then there was the Garden of Mr. Lambert, the recluse down the road. He
knew my grandparents so was friendly to me & my oldest sister, but mostly
he was a grump to kids who lived along that country road, & there were
legends of him as a sorcerer who buried children under his flowers. He had
huge fruiting bing cherry trees, & several smaller cherries, & pear &
apple trees galore. His back yard was thick with flowering shrubbery &
spring bulb flowers. His roadside was a row of crabapples which he
permitted my great-grandparents to harvest for jellies & pickles. His
property came to a sudden drop-off into a canyon, the edge of which had
more flowering shrubs under old-growth Douglas firs.

When he died, his land lay unattended for twenty years. His house was torn
down & lumber recycled, but daffodils & the fruit trees remained striking
presences. I would drive out to his place when still in my twenties &
harvest cherries & apples. Then one year I drove out for the free harvest
& to remember Mr Lambert, but it was all cleared, a vast expanse of mud.
Not a hint of Mr. Lambert's gardens & orchard remained. The land got
carved up & a cul de sac of a dozen homes appeared, each house having some
pathetic thing or another growing weakly in front, though mostly lawns.
The canyon edge had become a dumping ground for lawn-clippings, & if
anything growing down the slope was Mr. Lamberts, must've been the ivy
that naturalized & climbed what old trees could not be removed because it
was too steep a hillside to ever build on.

And then there was the inner city garden of my stepmom, a Thai buddhist
bikuni (priestess/nun). She had a small but highly productive garden on an
otherwise vacant lot in Freemont. I learned Thai peasant irrigation
methods & we had plenty of fresh produce all the time. One never expects
a veggie garden to be permanent, but it would be so romantic if it were
today a neighborhood pea patch, one that I could boast my stepmom first
founded with her own garden. Instead, the whole block was leveled & new
buildings fill up every bit of the area.

The only garden of my childhood that survives is my great-aunt's; her
property was back-to-back with my great-grandparents, & she inherited
their land & grew veggies in an absurdly large area that had once been
grampa's dahlias. But her own property was all decorative & deeply shaded
by trees & shrubs, &amp every corner on all sides of the house filled with
smaller shrubs & perennials & vines. Toward the end of her life she
"retired" to the front property that had belonged to her parents (my
great-grandparents), & she sold her gardens & her run-down old house to
me, very cheaply too. So for a while I owned a very long-established
garden with plenty of the woody shrubs such as have remained my favorite
things to this day.

This was in the 1970s when I restored & added to her gardens, which in her
old age she could not keep ahead of any more, so I took over many
long-unpruned things that had become dense & wild. Some parts of it I
never pruned either, as I liked it wild-looking, but much needed
underlimbing & ground-level clean up & restoration. Where possible I
restored things just as Cora had had them when she was able. I added a
garden patio with recycled bricks salvaged from a house in a nearby "town"
called Sylvia Pines that had completely burned to the ground & been
reclaimed by forest, but with fallen chimneys of the vanished town
providing me the bricks.

I loved that garden, & I loved chopping wood for the airtight, &
everything outside & around that house I loved. But the house itself was
in terrible condition & though we replaced the roof, mostly it was a
"money pit" sort of place. My partner & I never adjusted to being so far
from city events, & every time we turned around something emergency needed
fixing on the house, so we sold it profitably & returned to Seattle. I
still pine for the gardens but I sure don't miss the house. I took with
me only starts of some favorite things that transplant easily in a small
garden, & I built up a tiny inner city garden, plus created raised
irrigated beds like my step-mom's, but then lost even the few things I
brought with me from Cora's old gardens, in moves that were to follow,
less & less taken with each move until there was none.

But luckily the family who bought the house did value the old gardens.
They restored the house as my partner & I had been unable to afford to do,
& they did so without doing much harm to the surrounding areas. They
removed some things such as big trees too near the house & a row of
laurels that completely shaded in a lengthy driveway & dropped crud on
cars, & extended the patio area I'd constructed with old bricks, & their
changes required one substantial garden be removed. But at least a third &
perhaps over half of great-aunt Cora's trees & shrubs persist, & some of
the smaller flowers may well be descended from her plantings, it's hard to
know. A few things I added while I owned the place are still there. The
big area of adjoining land which had been consecutively strawberry field,
cornrows of dahlias, then veggie garden big enough to feed the whole
neighborhood & all members of an extended family, is today divided & has a
couple houses on it, no gardens any more, but at least Cora's
shrub-surrounded house is still there. I've never had the nerve to knock
on the door to thank the current owners for not levelling all of it for
the sake of a duffer's boring lawn.

A vast percentage of my gardening methods I learned form Aunt Cora, & many
of my flower favorites were hers. Some of the family thought she was nuts,
because she'd go out on a rainy day to water her shade gardens under big
trees, & the image of her in rain hat & raincoat standing in the pouring
rain with watering hose in hand struck less radical gardeners as crazy.
She'd point out that THEIR trees never had anything growing under them.

Given the ephemeral nature of the art I suppose it's surprising that even
one of the gardens of my childhood & youth still exists. And I imagine my
own present garden, which is beginning to look quite old already though
it's not, could vanish in a trice when some future owner decides it's
impractical to have all these plants to care for when a flat green lawn
would be so much more useful. Though accepting that this is an Ephemeral
Art, part of me wishes I owned a bit of forest the understory of which I
could transform into an enormous shade-garden of flowering shrubs, then in
a last will & testemont give over the land into perpetuity as an eternal
garden. But gardening is rarely a task for posterity; we have to live for
ourselves with our individual gardens, without too much concern for the
disposition of beloved plants when we are each of us gone.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/