MindSpinner

The garden doesn’t say that the tiny rosettes of sedum spreading like a green carpet come from my great great grandmother’s homeplace, now just pasture, still graced by cows, beside the motorcycle campground.

My garden doesn’t whisper that the bearded iris were my grandmother’s, growing on her hill beside the lake where I slip out onto water in the canoe come summer.

My garden doesn’t tell that the bushiest thyme now in the garden was a housewarming gift of seeds and a little pot (the only housewarming gift I got among all the letters intended to bring me back into line, from the only person who then understood) when I divorced the minister of the big Baptist church and moved to live quietly in a rented house beside a bean field, still in this small town. That year I heard Martina McBride’s “When God-fearin’ Women Get the Blues” on the car radio on a stretch of road where there was nothing to listen to but country music, and laughed and laughed until I could breathe again.

The garden doesn’t intimate what friend’s back yard the slender purple iris in the kitchen garden came from, or that I asked permission to dig up one or two, and wrapped them in moist paper towels and then foil to bring them home. It doesn’t tell how lemon yellow daylilies make gifts of themselves to friends who have gardens, too.

The garden can’t explain, either, that the Memorial Day Rose is planted in memory of my father, who is buried far away at Arlington, where I have not yet visited him after the horses and Taps and the rifles to say, though he cannot hear now, that I’m sorry, that I was mistaken not to tell him before he died, of my divorce, thinking his health too, too frail for the shock.

The garden doesn’t say that I’ll plant those heirloom yellow beans and a few stalks of corn this May to carry on the ritual of growing food as my mother and grandmother taught it to me when I was a girl, or that the eating of a little pot of beans or an ear of freshly pulled corn with butter and salt will actually be a communion that transcends time and place and even death.

The garden does not reveal that I love the purple rhododendron for all the rhododendrons that grow in the woods back home, and the dwarf peach trees for all the Georga peaches we peeled and ate, dripping with the sweetness of childhood in summer, at my grandmother’s house.

The garden does not tell why the stone path finally has to curve in a spiral to the center of the shade garden, and indeed I am only beginning to discern why. Do not ask me yet what will be at the center of the spiral. Sometimes, I think, a pool. Maybe that, but time will make it clearer. The garden will design itself. I listen for what it wants to be.

The garden is not expository; it will decline to explicate the metaphor that will become when this clematis, with its blue bells like soundless chimes, twines together this year with this fragrant rose.

It turns out that the garden isn’t just a garden, and it would not do for a landscape designer to design it for me and bring pots of plants on trucks to install on my behalf, not here or anywhere; it is an unfolding of poems with leaves for its pages and no words at all. I started to use the word “book” in the last sentence instead of unfolding, but “book” jars. This becoming garden is not linear from beginning to end, with numbers and a table of contents; it is more like a flower, petals around a center, and at the center, the secrets of the living seed and all the blooms that will be. To me, it speaks memory and metaphor and finally, perhaps, meaning; out of what was a bare half acre, I make spirit’s home.