“Thanks a lot, dear,” I said, but in fact she had a point. It is true that I’m not much of a social creature. I prefer hanging around the house (which may be why finding the right house was such an obsession), doing domestic activities: cooking, woodworking, gardening, playing with the kids. Given a choice, I’d rather spend time with a lobster in the kitchen than with neighbors at a party.
Yet it still seemed a little unfair that I was fated to be defined by my property. Not by my job, not by my place in the community, but by my property. And now, after years of being defined by the house, I was about to become defined by the garden.
FINALLY, SPRING ARRIVED. In May, well after the prime planting season for potatoes, lettuce, peas, and spinach had passed, George and crew (sans Lars) were back. Work progressed rapidly and smoothly, and within two weeks the grassy slope had been transformed into a symmetrical, terraced kitchen garden: twenty rectangular beds, averaging four by twelve feet, plus a large area for corn and another for cucumbers, squash, and melons. All in all, nearly two thousand square feet of garden, almost as large as our living space in Yonkers. And all of it was filled with truckloads of (expensive) lush, black soil from the Hudson Valley’s last brush with the Ice Age.
The garden was beautiful, the soil still fresh and black, the gravel clean. My friend Jack stopped by to survey the scene and let out a low whistle.
“Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”
I thought so, but truthfully, Anne and I really hadn’t given it a lot of thought. We were a couple of kids—forty-year-old kids, but still kids—living a dream, a dream born of days wandering botanical gardens and nights poring over glossy coffee-table books. Everyone thought we were crazy when we bought an abandoned ninety-year-old country house with missing windows and no kitchen, heat, or running water, and we had proved the skeptics wrong. We were living our country life, cooking and gardening together in our restored house, and this seemed the next logical step, doing for this field of grass and weeds what we had done for the house.
“I think you’re crossing the line from gardener to gentleman farmer,” Jack said.
“Gentleman farmer.” I liked the sound of that. Must get suspenders, I thought to myself.
A couple of decisions had been left for last, including the choice of shrubs for the border between our property and Larry and Claire’s, and how to get water into the garden, for the nearest spigot was seventy-five feet away. Supplying water to the garden was actually the easy part; how to get it to the plants was more challenging. When we had just a single bed of tomatoes, I routinely underwatered them, not having the patience to stand outside with a hose in the evenings. How on earth was I going to water two thousand square feet? The best solution, installing drip irrigation in each bed, was naturally the most expensive as well. Anne and I debated the options. The conversation, which would become so routine in the following years as to seem almost scripted, went like this:
ME: We’re already two thousand dollars overbudget. I can’t see spending another thousand on irrigation. I’ll run some extension hoses, and we’ll water it by hand.
ANNE: That’s fine. I’ll help you out.
ME [with heavy rolling of eyes]: Just when do you plan to do that? Between making dinner, running to the hospital, and helping the kids with the homework?
ANNE: I’ll work it in. I like being in the garden.
ME: Maybe we should splurge on the irrigation. It’s a onetime expense. And we’ll save on our water bill.
ANNE: Well, Billy [Uh-oh, she’s up to something when she calls me Billy], what I worry about is, we built this garden to enjoy it, and if you are not going to enjoy standing out there [You? What happened to we?] with a hose for an hour, then we should spend the extra thousand and get the irrigation.
And then she came in with the closing argument, the bone crusher, the coup de grâce, the one that never, ever fails, because there is simply no counterargument to it.
“I’ll see one extra patient a day until it’s paid off.”
If Anne really did this every time she used this argument, her office hours would regularly end at midnight, but I’m still a sucker for it.
“Well, if you’re going to make it a gift to me …”
Two weeks later, exactly one week after George had laid in the sod paths, the sprinkler contractor came in and tore up the sod paths to put in underground irrigation hoses. Instead of sprinkler heads, though, we had small spigots installed at one end of each bed, from which I could attach small, quarter-inch weep hoses to run throughout the bed. It seemed like a good idea, in fact it seemed like a really smart idea, but when he left, the garden looked horrendous. There was as yet nothing growing in the beds except faucets sticking up everywhere—eighteen of them, on skinny black plastic pipes, looking worse than the tackiest of garden ornaments.
I vented my frustration to Anne. “I said ‘a few inches.’ How could he put them up so high? They look terrible!”
Anne peered out the window. “I can hardly see them.”
I endured them that year, and the drip hoses were a great success, except our water bill shot up 100 percent over the summer months. This, of course, should not have been the case, because drip irrigation is the most efficient way to water. Unlike sprinklers, which lose a significant portion of their water to evaporation before it ever hits the ground, weep hoses send all the water directly into the soil. The problem is, because you can’t tell when they’re on—you don’t see or hear anything—we were constantly forgetting to turn them off, and they often ran for hours, even overnight.
I remember one memorable trip down the New Jersey Turnpike, on our way to Philadelphia for the weekend. The rest stops on the turnpike are named after famous (dead) Jersey residents, and to the utter dismay of my family, I can never drive past the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area without reciting the only line of verse of Joyce Kilmer’s that I (or anyone else, I suspect) knows:
I think that I shall never
see A poem lovely as a tree.
As the Joyce Kilmer gas pumps faded in the rearview mirror, a little trigger went off in my brain, and cogs started spinning. Tree … plant … water … hoses. Hoses! We had left all the hoses on! A few miles down the road, we pulled into the Molly Pitcher Rest Area, where Anne used a pay phone to ask Larry (not for the last time) to turn off the hoses, while the rest of us tried to remember who the heck Molly Pitcher was. (Later research revealed she was a local hero of the American Revolution.)
There was a good snowfall the following winter, and by March we had a snow cover of over eighteen inches. I started peeking out of the kitchen window daily, monitoring the progress of the melt, eager to start the leaf lettuces and especially the potatoes. As the snow gradually receded, I started to see brass faucets peeping up one by one through the snow, like little brass sparrows. Very cute. This was soon followed by skinny black pipes, growing longer each day, vividly stark against the white snow. Not so cute. Nothing else was visible in the garden, just eighteen black pipes topped by faucets—no longer sparrows—poking erectly, obscenely, hideously through the snow.
“It won’t look so bad once the snow melts,” Anne reassured me.
But it did. Against the starkness of an empty March garden, it looked like I was growing a crop of plastic pipes. The irony of it! Me, snobbish Mr. All Natural Materials, who prefers plaster to Sheetrock, cotton to polyester, cedar to pressure-treated wood—I had a garden that resembled an abandoned oil field.
I couldn’t take it. I went out with the pipe cutter, some couplings, and a can of PVC cement. I cut the pipes down one by one so that the spigots were just a few inconspicuous inches off the ground. Then I started to attach the hoses to the spigots. Except I couldn’t. I had forgotten that the hoses couldn’t make a ninety-degree angle under the spigots; they had to make a gradual curve. In my zeal to cut down the pipes, I hadn’t left enough room. In the end I had to scoop out handfuls of soil beneath each spigot, and I still curse under my breath every time I have to
struggle to attach a hose. As it turns out, if I had just been patient, the original height wouldn’t have been too bad. We’ve since planted a row of thyme down the edges of the beds where the spigots are, and the thyme obscures the faucets to the extent that I sometimes lose one and have to dig around in the tangly thyme to locate it.
Patience in the garden is a good thing. (I must try to remember that.)
ONE FINAL PIECE of garden construction remained before I was ready to fence it all in: the border between our garden and the neighbors’ property. The garden, lovely as it was, was lacking one important feature. Privacy. Because the garden was sunken, Larry’s property—the asphalt parking area/basketball court, the kitchen deck, and the garden shed—loomed directly over it, giving us the feeling of always being watched. We were probably more entertaining than television. I could just imagine the conversations they had.
“Hey, Claire, come watch this. Bill is replanting all the tomatoes that Anne put in this morning.”
“How can she stand it? I give this marriage another six months.”
(For your information, Larry and Claire, Anne planted the tomatoes too shallow. I had no choice.)
Anyway, ours was decidedly not the Secret Garden. So Bridget had wisely designed a hedge, a hedge of Emerald arborvitae. On the one hand, this wasn’t such a bad idea, as you can buy them already seven feet tall—instant privacy—and they grow so slowly that maintenance is almost nonexistent. And being evergreen, they provide a year-round screen.
On the other hand, there was the price tag: $3,500. And deer love them. As proof, they had gnawed to stubs the three that Larry had already planted. Even though the garden would be fenced, almost no fence is deerproof. Why invite trouble? I couldn’t see spending $3,500 to have it go to deer food. I asked Bridget about other options.
“What about privet?” I asked. “You see great privet hedges in all the English gardens, and in the Hamptons.”
“You can only buy them two feet tall,” Bridget replied, “and they are very slow growing.”
In other words, I would be dead before they made a respectable hedge.
“You mean to tell me that all of the privet on Further Lane”—I tossed out one of the haute addresses in East Hampton—“are twenty years old? Around those brand-new houses?”
Bridget just shrugged into the phone. She was not interested in privet.
I was in a quandary. We needed something low maintenance and slow growing and not too expensive. Then one morning a newspaper ad for a nursery out in the western end of the county caught my eye. It had seven-foot arborvitae at a price of less than half what Bridget had quoted us. Even though we rarely venture out into that part of the county, I got out the map and decided to go take a look. It was a miserable day, with intermittent pouring rain and poor visibility, and I didn’t know where this discount nursery was—just somewhere along the two-lane highway. And suddenly, through the drizzle and fog, there it was, immediately ahead, on the left side of the highway. To keep from driving by, I instinctively hit the turn signal and braked hard to wait for traffic from the opposite direction to clear. The car behind me braked hard. And the car behind that. And the car behind that.
I made the left turn into the parking lot and got out of the car. And that’s when I noticed the commotion. Traffic on the highway had come to a halt, people were out of their cars, and a woman was pointing at me. “It’s all his fault,” I heard her say. With a sickening feeling growing in my stomach, I took in the scene: The car directly behind me had been rear-ended, as had the next two cars behind that. I had caused a three-car accident by stopping suddenly on a rain-slicked road. No one was hurt, thank goodness. All of the drivers were out of their cars, standing in the pouring rain, fuming. I tried to look inconspicuous, but at six feet four inches, that is next to impossible. I weighed my options as sweat suddenly burst from every pore, puddling under my vinyl slicker. I could cross the street, fess up, and face the angry mob (not to mention their lawyers); I could continue innocently browsing among the arborvitae as if nothing had happened (“Who, me?”); or I could get the hell out of there.
Talk about your ethical dilemmas. I wasn’t enthusiastic about facing the mob. It would have been the honest thing, the courageous thing, even the right thing to do, but at the time it sure didn’t seem like the smartest. Besides, I told myself, the fact that the car directly behind me was able to stop without hitting me proved that I had not done anything reckless. The cars behind him were following too closely and too fast on slick roads. I may have precipitated the accident, but I wasn’t responsible for it, I told myself, though such rationalization did little to diminish the guilt.
On the other hand, hopping back in the car and running away seemed like a blatant admission of culpability, so rather by default I ended up exercising the middle option: wandering around the garden center as if nothing had happened, while I pondered my next move. My head was pounding, my stomach was nauseated, a cold sweat was drenching me. I thought, So this is what it feels like. I was thinking about Raskolnikov after he’d bludgeoned the old woman to death in Crime and Punishment. I tried to keep out of view of the highway as I looked at a couple of shrubs, but I was just going through the motions. I didn’t even know what I was looking at. I heard one of the nursery workers say, “Third accident this year.” That made me feel better; I could at least attribute some of the blame to poor highway design. “Another damn fool stopping too suddenly!” he added, looking directly at me. I nodded weakly in agreement.
Time to leave. Stoop-shouldered, I made my way to my car, ducking behind shrubs as best I could, calmly pulled out of the lot, and drove very carefully home. Half a mile down the road I passed several police cars, sirens blaring, heading toward the accident—my accident. I kept checking my rearview mirror during the forty-five-minute drive, expecting to be tracked down and pulled over at any moment, but I made it home without incident, where I stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out. What a stupid, ill-conceived venture. I never did find out what their arborvitae were like, but I swore never to venture into foreign territory again just to find a bargain. I would stay close to town from now on.
The next morning I ran out to get the newspaper at six o’clock and flipped through it furiously, looking for a story about a driver leaving the scene of an accident. Nothing. I exhaled deeply. It was, after all, just a minor fender bender (okay, three) on a day that probably saw dozens of them, not the crime of the century that my guilt and fear had built it up to be. Nevertheless, I didn’t rest easy for weeks afterward. And I still had to decide on a hedge.
“How many extra patients do you have to see to pay for thirty-five hundred dollars’ worth of arborvitae?” I asked Anne.
“As many sessions of psychotherapy as you’re going to need when the deer start eating them,” was her reply. “Don’t you think you’re spending a little too much time on this?” she added, hinting at my growing obsession. Weeks had gone by, and I still hadn’t come to a decision, which Anne had left to me while she did silly things like heal the sick.
She was right. I settled on forsythia, tightly spaced and trimmed as a neat hedge. The whole thing cost less than seven hundred dollars, and although I have to go at them with hedge trimmers two or three times a year, they grew to seven or eight feet in no time at all and provide great privacy and a brilliant wall of yellow in the spring. And the deer don’t seem interested in them.
With the forsythia installed, the kitchen garden was basically complete. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t exactly what we’d dreamed of, but as Anne and I stood overlooking it, champagne in hand, it appeared magnificent, enticing, beckoning. It seemed to say, “Come, bring me your seeds and water, and I will reward you.” And it would. And also humble me, and teach me, and become a place of solace, a battleground, a source of pride, a source of frustration, a time sink, a respite.
Anne offered a modest and unusual toast: “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I looked at her quizzically, then
offered my own: “Wonder what ever happened to Lars.”
One Man’s Weed Is Jean-Georges’s Salad
There’s only one sure way to tell the weeds from the vegetables. If you see anything growing, pull it up. If it grows again, it was a weed.
—Corey Ford, “Advice to the Home Gardener,”
Look, September 2, 1954
Alone in my new garden, kneeling over a bed filled with rich, dark brown topsoil dug from the glacial deposits of the Hudson Valley, I scooped up a handful of soil and took in its earthy, almost aphrodisiac smell. Ahh. I love the smell of earth. No perfume ever invented by man has matched the smell of rich, loamy soil. Maybe it was worth it after all—the arguments, the agonizing delays, the cost overruns. Yes, it was worth it. I scanned the empty beds and saw bloodred tomatoes, tall stalks of corn waving in the sun, snow-white heads of cauliflower. It was good. I was happy.
A disembodied voice from above startled me out of my reverie.
“Gonna be a lot of weeding.”
What the—did the garden come with its own Greek chorus? I looked up and saw Larry’s head peering down into the garden over the newly planted forsythia.
“Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. Maybe he had really said, “Gorgeous garden. It’s going to be beautiful to gaze upon it from our kitchen window.”
“Gonna be a lot of weeding,” he repeated. I let the handful of sixty-dollar-a-yard topsoil drop back into the bed.
“Cultivating,” I said under my breath. “Gonna be a lot of cultivating.”
What’s the difference?
Well, none, really. Except image. As when decades ago my sweaty teenage sister (or was it Blanche DuBois?) declared, “Ah don’t sweat; ah perspire.” Well, ah don’t weed; ah cultivate. (As it turns out, ah will cultivate a lot.) Whereas weeding evokes images of backbreaking labor, kneeling under a broad-brimmed hat while hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard, cultivating suggests nurturing, caring for tender shoots, feeding, and raising. All of which you accomplish, of course, by kneeling and hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard.
The $64 Tomato Page 4
