Cultivating Our Gardens

10.01.06

The monstrosity across the street is almost complete and we spent the night listening to its plaintive, yet pitifully puny, alarm system, activated perhaps by some stray animal or loose wire. The property was purchased for $700,000, a tear down, the contractor will have put in 300,000 and hopes to sell it for $1.9 million. This in a neigbhorhood which 13 years ago, when we bought our own home, boasted houses for $250,000. Not only is the house oversized but has been designed in this hideous faux Mediterranean style that looks like a cross between a suburban New England pre-fab and some Victorian era chapel. We can only hope that the occupants who move in are quiet, God fearing folk who enjoy inviting their neighbors over for pool parties.

With the intent of blocking the view of this new building blight, the kids brought home a tree for the Million Trees LA project that delivered lithe little forest wannabees to their school. In an effort to provide more shade to people's homes, and thereby driving down AC use, the city has been giving away long leafed trunks for a long time. This of course in a city that has long been a desert and sucks water from aueducts and water sources hundreds of miles away, so it's a bit ironic that we need to completely change our natural landscape to afford people the shade and cool they want even though they've chosen to live in this arid, sunny climate. We do seem to want things both, or all, ways. The heat but not the humidity, the sun but not the scorch, the view but not the quiet, the beach without the damp.

We humans are so incredibly complex and conflicted. This Republican member of Congress charged with some committee to protect children from lechers like himself, it turns out. Obsession with thin to the point that we use images of emaciated celebrities to, at the same time, sell magazines while excoriating the very culture that promotes impossible ideals. Bush's insistance that the world is a safer place for all his anti-terrorism policies while more and more attacks are visited around the world. Cognitive dissidence, denial, yin-yang, he-said, she-said, Freud's death/life wish. Whatever we want to call it, we do really screw things up with our split personalities.

So when I see something as simple as a fledgling tree being planted I can relax. I join the family as we dig and hoe and weed and provide a safe place for this seedling to reach out its roots and make a home in front of ours. This makes complete sense; there's no need for analysis about the deep satisfaction one gets from getting your hands in the dirt, pulling out the nasty dandelions and creating a warm, moist, fertilized pile of dirt into which seeds of shade and hope can be sown. I think back to the time (not that I was around then) when hunter-gatherers lived hand to mouth from the fruits of our labors and life was so simply oriented. Cities are now beginning to look at their built environments and recoginize how unhealthy they are with no central gathering spots, no sidewalks, few open green spaces and the virtual disappearance of the front porch. We have to give away trees to get people to remember how related we are to mother earth, how plants feed and shelter us, how we rest under a branched canopy, how we breathe our vital breathes from cholorophyl enriched air.

Gardening is not something that comes naturally to me, although my mother maintained a tiny verdant square behind our brownstone raising us in Greenwich Village. I do remember the excitement at spring time when she would order a colony of lady bugs each spring to fend off some other insects that would chew up our ivy. The box would arrive in the mail and I couldn't understand how you send live creatures through the postal system; how did they breathe, eat, poo and pee? But arrive they would, safe and sound, and we would liberate them by gently tapping the small cardboard box onto the concrete container where our simple greenery was bedded. Our ivy grew strong and vibrantly up the exterior walls that encased our garden and a rhododendron or two graced the shady corners. This little retreat from city life hosted many a barbecue and cocktail party and a miniture winter wonderland in the winters when snow filled our imaginations and the planting boxes out back. Spring witnessed daffodils and summer's lush foliage ended with autumn's carpet of leaves from the tall oak that somehow had taken root and grown to second story height by my teen years.

We plant our tiny seedling and imagine a curtain of leaves to shield us from our view across the street. The crepe myrtles stand tall and bushy nearby, finally flourishing each April in a rush of pink buds. Two neighbors' magnolias rise tall as sentinels on either side of us and dwarf our tender efforts. I look down our street at all the parkways, most of which boast a tree or planting of some sort and I smile at their incongruous origins, oak and palm trees side by side. Flocks of green parrots often visit the tallest palm and black birds caw from the mags. We have a sense of nature in this vast concrete jungle of a city, LA, even if we must import water and mulch and loam and potting soil to ammend the natural clay that would allow only Joshua Trees or scrub to flourish. We planted thousands of acres of orange groves at one point, faith in the valley's fertile plain. Now Hollywood studios produce fruits of many other sorts and we pay landscapers to put in xeriscaped, water saving plants, trying to emulate the original fauna of the area.

Despite how far we get from our roots, we seem to however remember to come back to them in some way, whether it be the Bonsai plant on one's office desk or, the roses delievered at Valntine's Day or the 1st grader's welcome guest, the Venus Fly trap. A passing babushka once stole some of our flowers from our front garden and I reprimanded her in a language she could not understand. Not only was the English foreign to her, but perhaps as well, the idea that I feigned to own these gifts of nature, that in her mind, she had every right to harvest as her own. I waved her on that day, without asking for them back, but now think, who am I to take away a moment, a scent, a memory from a soul in need? I can always plant more. And I did.