Help My Botanical Clock is Ticking

One day many years ago, as my husband and I strolled through the streets of Milan, he posed this still-puzzling observation. What is it about Italian men? One day they are strapping, tall handsome men in quilted coats; the next they are hunched over, cap-wearing old men playing boules! Where is the missing link?

In the past month, I’ve been applying this same question to North American middle-aged women. What is it about us that one day we are blurs of industry—running households, running offices, simply running—and the next we find ourselves in floppy hats, puttering about our yards and bending over small shrubs with pruning shears?

Okay, perhaps this is not quite as universal a phenomenon as the Italian men. But I am struck by my own sudden and unprecedented passion for gardening—and by the number of my female contemporaries succumbing to it as well.

For me, it started this way: Once we got through our reno last fall, I spent the subsequent months sitting in our new kitchen, sipping my coffee, and staring out the new windows at a completely devastated back yard.

Aside from the detritus left behind by our contractors—some overlooked 2×4s, bits of irrigation pipe, stones from an old fireplace—most of the lawn and beds had weathered through more than a year of tramping and hauling of heavy equipment. What hadn’t been devastated by the crews had been devastated, at great cost, by us: Over the decade we have lived in our Washington, D.C. house, assorted landscaping “professionals” had, at one time or another, “had a go” at making our yard more presentable. We still can’t speak about some of the old trees that were cut down by some genius who persuaded us it would “open up the view” (it amounted to a much better view of our neighbors). The man we’d hired to landscape an area relating to the recent renovation proved to have a great talent for sending invoices and rather less for actual work: we had to fire him finally when his bills threatened to exceed our entire garden budget, with still not a single new plant in the ground. And what hadn’t been destroyed by man had been finished off by nature. One of the massive hurricanes that blew through D.C. knocked down a neighbor’s ancient poplar: it crashed into our backyard, flattening a row of boxwood planted early in the last century, and sheering off the branches of an equally old stand of magnolias. None of it, alas, covered by our homeowner’s insurance.

So as I sat with my coffee, surveying the wreckage—so much bleaker in winter!—I decided I would have to take charge in the spring and plant the garden myself.

Except I had one big problem: I have no natural affinity for plants. None. Zero. I mean, I like to look at them and all—and I can appreciate a beautiful landscape as much as the next person—but I have no gift for gardening. Every change I’d personally overseen in our own yard had ended in disaster. What’s more, I’d never been able to keep so much as a houseplant alive. Nor was I interested in doing so. Since they always turned out to be brown, leaking, unsightly things, why bother?

But burned by the so-called pros, and left with this post-nuclear view, I figured I’d just have to learn. So learn I did—or sort of.

It’s all been completely trial and error. I became acquainted with someone I call my plant “wonk”—a walking human think tank of botany named Eric. In early spring, he kindly did a walk through my yard: He’d pause enthusiastically over small, indistinguishable shoots pushing through the mud, or absently yank out a weed as he lectured me on the merits of using local plants. At moments his enthusiasm would cause him to shove leaves at my nose, inciting me to “Smell it! Smell it!” or urge me to taste something ferny-looking. But the upshot was an amazing introductory course to my garden—not to mention an introduction to some “wild, really cool” plants I never would have otherwise met.

Along with Eric, I turned to a reliable neighborhood garden crew run by two Iraqi brothers. If you want to get a big hole in the ground dug quickly, I urge you to hire an Iraqi. I don’t press them as to how they developed this particular skill, but they assure me that they never sided with Saddam Hussein.

Now, armed with brains AND brawn, I could start sketching. I bought tracing and graph paper. I pulled dozens of photos from gardening magazines. Over the years I had taken photos of gardens we’d visited on our travels—I pored through those as well.

Then I began. The first warm weekend that came along I was outside—for two full days. I’m not quite sure how the children got fed, or the dogs walked, but I know that at one point my husband appeared with a gin and tonic, which I drank gratefully, and muddily. Any other free time I had was spent walking up and down nursery aisles, trying to teach myself to think in 3-D, light, and growing seasons (“This one comes up in June—18-inches tall—purple, full sun”—a little scratch on my drawing where it might go—“Now this one could work in a shady border …”) And so it went.

But here’s the thing: at some point during my digging and planting, pondering and planning, I realized I’d fallen completely in love with gardening. Rarely had I felt such peace or pleasure than at 6:30 a.m., with my Wellington boots on, first mug of coffee in hand, gazing out at the areas to be worked on, a quiet house behind me. Creatively it was intoxicating. I’d been playing with words for most of my life, but plants, trees, and shrubs presented an an entirely new and exciting medium. I understood a little how Matisse must have felt when, in old age, he abandoned paint for paper cut-outs.

Gradually, however, I discovered I was not original in my passion—conversations amongst my female friends were turning away from husbands, children and the politics of the day to such truly gripping subjects as… ornamental grasses.

I knew it had become dire when one of my friends—vexed by a problem with her teenage daughter, also casually mentioned that she wasn’t quite sure what to plant in front of a border of rose bushes. She kept trying to pull me back into the issue with the teenager—but my mind was racing with possible choices of low, full-sun plants, and I pelted her instead with questions about the soil, the aesthetic she was trying to achieve, etc.

Why had this all come upon us so suddenly?

Something of an answer came to me, predictably, while I was tugging at some weeds and wondering where to relocate a shrub I’d decided I’d misplanted.

All of us are moving into the second half of our forties. By now, most of us have produced all the children we’re going to have. Many of those children are now complicated, interesting individuals—and for all practical purposes, beyond our nurturing or influence. Our biological yearnings are re-directed to the not-so-distant prospect of grandchildren. And maybe, also, to these tender plants before us.

Here are living things we coax and care for from infancy. But they are living things, too, whose destiny rests completely in our care. As we watch our own children gradually float away from us like the spores of dandelions, blown and buffeted by winds over which we have no control, towards a destination we know not—here before us are beautiful flowers who promise to come up year after year, in the same spot we planted them.