True Life Stories: THE TRANSPLANTED GARDENER
by Joyce Maynard

Originally published in Sunset Magazine, February 2008
Added on May 10, 2008

One look at my mother's hands and you would have known she was a gardener. Living as we did in the state of New Hampshire, the only way my mother had to indulge her love of growing things, from September to May, lay in tending our house plants and starting avocado seeds on toothpick stands in our kitchen window. In March, with the ground still white and the air frigid, my mother pushed back the snow on our flower beds, in search of the first brave crocus and hyacinth spears, pushing through the frozen soil. But come Memorial Day, we'd make our long anticipated annual pilgrimage to the nursery and fill the back seat of our Buick with that year's crop of annuals -- flats of smiling pansies, three colors of marigolds, ageratum, petunias, and my mother's favorite, zinnias.

I loved the day we put the flowers in the earth -- she with her trowel, I with mine. "Never stick a plant into dry soil," she reminded me, filling each hole with a little a little puddle of water so the roots -- too long confined -- could spread out at last.

Many years later, when I was grown, with children and a home of my own -- living in that same unforgiving new England climate, where everything that happens in a garden must take place between Memorial Day and Labor Day -- it was the image of my mother planting, cultivating, watering and weeding that stayed with me (after her death, even) every time I'd start each year's new garden. Like my mother, I love perennials, but also the quick, cheap flash of annual color. Here today, gone tomorrow. Maybe it was growing up with a gardener that taught me the lesson: just because an experience won't last forever doesn't make it any less valuable. More so, perhaps. In New England, you'd better appreciate every minute of your garden while you've got it, because come frost, all you have left is the memory of what once was.

Still, I was greedy. If three months of garden glory were good, what would it be like to live someplace where I could have my hands in the dirt all year long? And so (not for the gardening alone but because of all the other ways that life in a warmer climate might serve to enrich my days), eleven years ago I left New Hampshire and moved with my children to Northern California. I hadn't even unpacked all the boxes when I made my first trip to Sloats -- the first of dozens -- to pick up the first plants for my new California beds.

Though I had purchased my copy of The Western Garden Book -- and knew that wise California gardeners consulted it as their bible, I let my heart lead me in my plant selections. I still loved pansies and marigolds, but I didn't move three thousand miles to recreate the gardens of my younger years.

So now I filled the back of my car with miniature orange trees and roses, birds of paradise and passion flower. On my exploratory missions to the Bay area, I had marveled at the gardens of houses on Mill Valley's sunnier streets, exploding with roses. Never mind that my own house was on Mt. Tam, its yard shaded by redwoods. I didn't know about microclimates then, any more than I understood why you don't make plans to travel north on highway 101 between four and six pm on a Friday afternoon. To a New Englander, it was all California. The land where growing anything should be possible.

The plant I most dreamed to grow that first summer was a gardenia -- its blossoms known to me only from hothouse corsages. So for $28 I splurged on a particularly fine specimen, covered with fat buds, and for the next six weeks, told all my friends back home about the bowl I now kept next to my bed, with gardenia blossoms from my own garden floating in it. How my mother would have loved that.

Then the last bud bloomed. No more appeared. I bought another gardenia. The $20 size this time. Consulted my garden book now, following instructions. Once again, I watched the leaves grow yellow and the blooms drop off, with none to replace them. And by now my orange tree was looking anemic too.

Ten years have passed since that first hopeful, naíve summer, when I supposed that to be a California gardener meant dancing out the door every morning, basket over my arm, to snip one exotic blossom after another from flower beds as colorful as a Diebenkorn, for the sheer reason that winter as I'd known it would never come. In those ten years, I've learned that gardening on the flats in Mill Valley is a whole different thing from on the mountain, and that San Rafael is another world from Tiburon or Sausalito, and Napa or Berkeley another world again.

Now when I come home with my load of groceries, the wonderful scent that greets me is of jasmine, not gardenia. I still keep a bowl of gardenias by my bed, when I can. But I buy them at the flower shop.

I have learned, too, that a California gardener must pace herself differently from one who grows her plants, as my mother did, in a place like New Hampshire. I can make visits to the nursery in October now, and there are plants I can put in the soil in December -- where, back in my old life, all I could do was huddle by the woodstove reading seed catalogues. But I don't go for broke in May, either. It's a marathon here, not a hundred yard dash.

Time was, I waited for the lilac blossoms to burst forth, in late May, and when they did, I practically camped out under their boughs, I was that drunk on the smell of them. Once, I was an all or nothing gardener. Now there is never quite everything, but always something. I no longer mark spring with a weekend of dawn to dusk planting, and I miss that annual ritual. But neither do I mark the fall, as I once did, with the sad task of clearing out the plants I tended all summer, killed off by a single night's frost. There is never a day I can't take out my trowel, make a little bowl in the soil to receive some small new plant, and watch it take root. Same as I have.

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