Most children have a favorite book. Mine was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. What enchanted me was the beautiful garden hidden inside a stone wall. It reminded me of the Garden of Eden--- without the snake or naked people.
I romanticized the idea of gardening, not realizing that it involves sore muscles and dirt under the fingernails. Some people have a gift for enhancing nature. I can look at a plant and it will wilt. My mother planted a garden of miniature vegetables, but they weren’t supposed to be that way. Maybe it’s genetic---me not the vegetables. I have a friend, who has such a green thumb, that she told me, “I couldn’t get to the tomatoes. It was like a jungle out there.”
When my husband and I moved into our first home in Atlanta, we discovered that the previous owners were horticulturists. They had labeled all of the plants and trees in Latin and English, and our 4-year-old son ran through the yard, filled his little bucket with the labels, and presented them to us as a housewarming gift.
I was not totally ignorant. I knew the difference between a dogwood and a pine, and recognized magnolias. However, some of the plants closer to the ground were puzzlement. I called in a professional gardener to help with my education, but first I pulled some weeds around a beautiful plant with shiny leaves. When the man arrived, he looked at me and said, “Lady, do you feel okay?” “Yes,” I replied. “Why do you ask?” “Well,” he said. “Maybe you should go inside and take a Benadryl. You’ve been nurturing a patch of poison ivy.”
Now that I live in the desert Southwest, I have learned that planting a garden involves a jackhammer to break up caliche (sedimentary rock). Journalist, Clay Thompson says, “God put this hard deposit of calcium carbonate under the surface of arid soils to keep overly ambitious do-it-yourself types from digging post holes when they should be indoors out of the sun.”
My Secret Garden now consists of strange plants and trees that have thorns to keep me from picking their flowers and fruits. And what of that little boy who pulled the labels off of those trees and plants in Atlanta? Well, I never asked him what he did with his little bucket, but years later he wrote a thesis at the University of Wisconsin. It was titled, “The Development of Vegetation Theory in the United States.” I guess that those Latin and English labels came in handy after all.
Esther Blumenfeld (“A weed is a flower in disguise”--- James Russell Lowell)