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| Mary in the garden. Image courtesy of mickiemuellerart |
“Might I,” quavered
Mary, “might I have a bit of earth?”
In her eagerness she
did not realize how queer the words would sound and that they were not the ones
she had meant to say. Mr. Craven looked quite startled.
“Earth!” he repeated.
“What do you mean?”
“To plant seeds in–to
make things grow–to see them come alive,” Mary faltered.
He gazed at her a
moment and then passed his hand quickly over his eyes.
“Do you–care about
gardens so much,” he said slowly.
“I didn’t know about
them in India,” said Mary. “I was always ill and tired and it was too hot. I
sometimes made little beds in the sand and stuck flowers in them. But here it
is different.”
Mr. Craven got up and
began to walk slowly across the room.
“A bit of earth,” he
said to himself, and Mary thought that somehow she must have reminded him of
something. When he stopped and spoke to her his dark eyes looked almost soft
and kind.
“You can have as much
earth as you want,” he said. “You remind me of some one else who loved the
earth and things that grow. When you see a bit of earth you want," with
something like a smile, “take it, child, and make it come alive.”
--From The Secret Garden, Chapter XII, by Frances Hodgson
Burnett
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| Mary, Dickon, & Colin. Image courtesy of studentfashionblog |
At our old house in Arizona, my sister and I would sometimes play in the entryway courtyard. It was the most random place—a small square of plant life off to the side of the eight-foot walkway to our front door. To get to it, someone would have to enter the wrought iron gate from outside or from inside through the front door. Now that I think about it, it was our own little “secret” green space.
But what I wanted, what I was enamored of ever since my Dad read the book to me, was a garden like Mary's in The Secret Garden, sprawling, behind a high wall where I could retreat or share in adventures with friends like Dickon and Colin.
But what I wanted, what I was enamored of ever since my Dad read the book to me, was a garden like Mary's in The Secret Garden, sprawling, behind a high wall where I could retreat or share in adventures with friends like Dickon and Colin.
Living in Arizona, though, I was surrounded by the varying browns
and reds of the desert, the sand and rocks, sturdy but thin and rough trees
with tiny short leaves and of course, a multitude of cactus species. I mean, it lacks so much true “greenery”
that when my family visited Orlando, Florida while my sister and I were in late
elementary school, my sister exclaimed “It’s so green here!” as we descended
into our landing pattern. The old people seated around us thought she was
hilarious. Then I moved to Los Angeles for undergraduate school and there was
even less green. I look out my apartment window to the Astroturf in the
courtyard below. If I’m on the rooftop, the only unpaved land I see with palm
trees and short grasses and weeds are along the sidewalks or the 110 underpass.
Of course, just across the street lies the most greenery around: on USC’s
campus, with the major exception of properties that lie in the Exposition Park
corridor on the other side of campus.
I think this continual lack of greenery drove me to make sure
my college apartments always had living color in them. My penchant for weekly
Starbucks couldn’t compete with the cheer brought by a bimonthly purchase of a
cheap grocery store bouquet. With the right amount of water mixtures and stem
trimmings, I managed to keep the bouquets looking beautiful for a couple weeks
at a time. When hardier blossoms, like roses, were in the mix, I would
sometimes hang them upside down like an old apothecary might to dry them out
and later use them in a longer lasting display.
In preparation for college life, one of my roommates,
Katherine, bought a plant from Ikea. She thought it was fake her entire
freshman year. It was a hardy tropical succulent—named Melvin—but all the same,
it needed some TLC by our sophomore year. Somehow I became its guardian. Once
we made our final move junior year to the place we live now, we
invested in a lavender plant, another succulent, and the small cactus sampler
my roommate had inherited from a fellow intern over the summer. That was a
surprising challenge. The cacti sampler was one of those souvenir dishes you
can buy at a grocery store. They are everywhere in Arizona. It was dying and I
discovered the soil was covered in a layer of gravel hot glued together. The
“soil” underneath was dusty and full of Styrofoam pieces from who knows where.
But with a little trial and error and determination, I saved the sampler but
eventually created a monster. While all the cacti thrived under the extra
attention, one did more than the others. It was like the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Over the next
month, it became stronger while the others shriveled up and died, one by one.
Each time I carefully removed a dead one and righted the rest of the sampler, I
imagined the cactus yelling, “Feed me Seymour!” One morning, I found the cactus
collapsed, snapped right at its base. I had stopped watering it about a month
prior when I thought it was reserving too much water in itself after sucking
the life from the others. It was over indulged; too fat and heavy for its
shallow dish and thus its own good. I imagine it died of happiness.
The cacti sampler was a strange phase and although the
lavender quickly died due to lack of proper light, the new succulent
(officially belonging to another roommate, Keiko) flourished alongside Melvin,
the tropical plant. When Keiko moved out this past semester, she took her
nearly one foot tall succulent with her. Melvin, is still thriving and more
lush than ever. But my pride and joy lies in the red glazed terracotta pot on
the window ledge.
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| Wall-E, the tiny lemon tree. |
One of the ways I occupied myself while I lived in L.A. over
the summer, without my roommates around to distract me, was to attempt to grow a plant from a seed. I
did it on a whim one night while making pasta, and soaked the seeds from the
lemon I was zesting in a mug of water. A day later, I prepared the seeds
according to a nursery website in a small jam jar with leftover soil from the
dead lavender plant’s tin bucket that I am so glad I kept. I covered it with
plastic wrap to create a miniature green house effect and waited. To my
surprise and extreme delight hardly a week later, one of the seeds had sprouted
and was just poking up through the soil. I was so proud of myself!
I transplanted the growing sprout from the jam jar to a
small vase and nursed it all summer and even ventured to the closest Home Depot
to pick up more potting soil and a larger container, one meant for plants this
time. I went back and forth between the sky blue and burnished red glazed pots,
settling on the latter. I found the process of raising the plant from its
humble beginnings to be extremely exciting--I still do! My lemon tree
has even been christened Wall-E, for the Disney/Pixar robot by my roommate,
Selby. To her, my lemon tree represents the hope of the tiny plant in that
movie which serendipitously sprouted in a world dominated by trash.
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| Wall-E and the plant. Courtesy of Disney Blogs |
Can a green thumb and predilection for nature run in the
family? I think it must--not only do I come from a family of farmers, but also a long line
of people who tend smaller vegetable garden patches and flower beds. I will
always remember late autumns at our house in Rochester, Minnesota, when my
parents, especially my Dad, would be working hard to cover the flower beds with
Styrofoam buckets to preserve the marigolds and roses throughout the winter. At
their old house, my grandparents had several huge plots of flowers and
vegetables. I always enjoyed the scent of earthy soil on the air when I would
play outside. Even at their townhouse, they continue to grow vegetables in a patch right outside the backdoor, which are always
so fresh and delicious.
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