In the Garden

Last year was the first in the time that I have known Cicely that she didn’t have a garden. We all paid a dear price for it, most of all Cicely who up to that time had seemed to be the only truly sane person, all the time, that I ever knew. She grew up in a very large garden with a terrorizing rooster, a milk cow, a beef cow, and a greenhouse. The week after I met her fourteen years ago she was planting things in the neglected flower beds in front of the cabin I was renting in her home town, the site a few months later of our wedding among blooming flowers. A certain lily traveled with us from that cabin to the Waterville Plateau where we spent eight years renovating a Catholic church into a home and bearing together two hearty children. There on four feet of fertile topsoil her gardens and flowerbeds flourished with sunflowers and corn, peas, tomatoes, and Walla Walla sweet onions.

When we moved next to Winthrop we bought a home in a very good location to protect our deposit in the cash from the sale of the church house, unsure that we’d be able to afford it the long term; an investment that might buy us some time to find a piece of land in the Methow Valley with better gardening potential. In the meantime we have been beguiled by fantastic neighbors and work prospects as good as any craftsman can hope for. The lot our home is situated on is covered with pine trees. This is where a long debate began with how many trees we had the right to cut down to get more sun, to make existing trees healthier as a primary justification.

Cicely had an easier time than I did in choosing to take down quite a few of the trees. It was a simple choice to cut down scragglers with just a few branches and mere traces of green. In their absence sunlight hit the ground for the first time in decades. Then a year later some bigger ones were dropped resulting in more sun, more native grasses springing, serviceberry bushes and balsam root stretching. Some sixty felled trees later there were still as many robust pines remaining on two-thirds of an acre with one hard choice left to go. The biggest of all of the trees was directly in the front yard craning heavily toward the open space over the house, bleeding pitch from wounds made by the previous owners’ satellite dish bolted high up on its trunk. It may never have fallen on the house, its tap root diving deep past glacial till and moon dust into the Methow River’s aquifer. But after three years of argument with our neighbors as spectators, a professional pulled the tree in the opposite direction of its lean to fell it to the ground with a mighty thump. An astonishing area of earth was now fully sunlit: a potential garden spot.

Over the winter that followed the last of the tree cutting Cicely struggled with her first ever serious depression. She was one that was never really touched by this deep blue that so many of us know, or deal with, or are conquered by. I made it my priority to be sure she had a garden again, her own, because although tending to others’ flowerbeds for hire in the first two years since our move had done her some good, there is nothing in the world for her like stepping out onto her porch and then inspecting any overnight changes or bidding the summer evening goodnight with the last of the weeds pulled and the delicate starts watered by hand.

Cicely saved clippings from Mother Earth News of every type of garden and we agreed that raised beds with imported dirt would do best for our situation. At the last minute we adopted an “E” shape, fattened by twice in the middle to facilitate two gates into the hollow spaces. The best looking available dirt came from five miles down Valley and we used 24 yards of it mixed with organic steer manure, peat moss, and compost. I had bought a truckload of cull dimensional lumber for the floor of our garage-to-studio conversion and the boards that were poor for the floor made great laminated deer fence posts and rails and raised bed sides. This city lot unfriendly to a garden should now be ample for a garden that feeds its family and beyond. More than that, it serves already to rejuvenate an earthy soul as Cicely handles this good dirt with experienced and loving fingers. She and her daughter have already, within hours of completion of the structure, tucked soaked peas two inches down and built string and ladder trellises for the stems to climb, sown carrot seeds and onion starts, and fertilized mother/daughter companionship.

Final nails driven, my son and I threw the baseball around while the girls bantered about hopes and dreams and quietly concentrated on organic precision. Now I get to watch, enjoying the garden more and more as the days get hotter and the sun touches more of Cicely’s exposed skin. Then in the fall there will be slices of warm tomatoes with slabs of Walla Walla sweet onions and a pinch of basil in a shallow bath of balsamic vinaigrette dressing, cornmeal fried zucchini medallions on the side. I suppose it is just the right time to sprinkle the first plantings with a bit of the last of this bottle of beer, just as we attended the Christening of the neighbors’ garden a few days ago, where she spared a few drops of wine into her very first garden.