After moving to Quincy, Mass., in the fall of 2004, from Plymouth, where we had lived for twenty years, we decided to create and plant a flower garden -- from scratch -- the following summer. Anyone who has seen my recent photos knows it's a jungle -- or as I like to call it, a "rain forest" (except that we don't get any rain this summer). Very green, and everything growing on top of each other.
I recently got hold of some pictures I took in those early years, when we had a desolate semi-landfill of a failed lawn stripped off and added new soil, by the truckload, and began to lay out a semi -- or "informal" -- garden on the new, bare ground. We laid out paths, bought an ornamental cherry tree as a centerpiece and laid out some stone and brick pavers for the paths.
Lately, this odd digital service called OneDrive delivered me (unasked) some images of "the way we were" back in those early days. I was shocked. Not just by how "open" the garden space appeared, but by how much I liked it.
So, I wrote a kind of nostalgic prose poem. A kind of hankering after lost innocence. First, some more photos, then the poem.
Innocent Days in the Garden
The garden is so thin and spare, lovely and plain at the
start.
I am nostalgic for beginnings.
We bought a small ‘ornamental’ tree, planted it smack
in the middle of available space, of which there was much.
Poured dirt by the purchased truckful,
raked it flat ourselves.
We made circles of stones, then filled between with "City Hall" red bricks,
laying paths between the planting beds.
Wee plantings called “Steppables” edged the planting beds,
outlined circles
A few large cornerstone shrubs, plus borrowed lilies,
kidnapped from the Berkshire roadsides and kept moist in
plastic buckets,
brought home for display in sunny segments beyond
the arc of the circle in the shadow of the hedges,
provided brighter color.
Looking back, with architect’s (or empire-builder’s) remorse
now that “OneDrive” has returned me to the beginning of
things
with a loaded deck of online snaps…
Regard! I mean, these lovely clean Vermont-blue paving
stones
we treated ourselves to,
laid along the spare foundation line of the house –
It’s Sherwood Forest today!
The silvery-blue of the pavers marred by the dirt of
a thousand footsteps, then ten thousand more
Debris of the greenwood-groundcover encroaching both sides,
Dead-leaf remains from the endless grind of the seasons
brown-filling between the steps.
See also the blooms of our first plantings
unique statements of their primal selves, all so full and
bonny
No crowding, or elbowing for a place in the sun
Admire White Shasta Daisies, tall and light-filled,
A ranked file marching into beauty’s battle,
Long scattered now, far fewer in flower, never so clean
And the low lacy Cosmos, finely woven in their own geometry
Extirpated from ground where raspberries have long since
taken root
The tree circle itself, airy and bright, speaks of rational design.
(The French would approve.)
Note the tree itself, a sapling growing into its birthright,
and the broad dark red pile of Spirea blossoms,
surge skyward, like a perfectly
measure hairdo,
before it got away from us, so fast and tall and upward,
consuming the circle until I was forced to pick it up by the roots:
relocated now in a poorer neighborhood, kept alive on
foodstamps
And the clean look beside the old, sheet-metal shed,
later wholly destroyed by the mythic snows of the winter of 2015,
snow cycles in their endless, repeated iterations, crushing the roof.
Beside it back then, more daylilies, something pink, something
red:
Those petal days, where are they now?
And that city-hall red brick path so shapely and
light-filled
And – from the look of it – so much work to lay!...
Year by year, I have conjured for us a rain forest, jungle thick,
that crowded into the imperial spaces of a primordial
imagination –
But at what cost? –
having sacrificed something both clean and true.
[P.S. Here's a photo I took today]
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