Excerpt

From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden

Gardens don't happen by themselves. They don't come about by accident. A few seeds blow into a backyard, or sunflowers start to grow along the highway, or a row of strawberries flourishes up and down the train tracks-but these migrations of plants, these volunteers, are not gardens. A garden is a human creation. It has to be thought of first. It has to be wished into being, planned for, like a wanted child.

At least, that's how my garden began. I am a daughter of the suburbs, where yards are for grass and grass alone; where flowers come from the supermarket in cellophane wrappers and spinach is sold in frozen blocks. I made dollhouse gardens out of green and red Legos; I went outside to the place that would have been a flower bed and I made rows of mudpies where the flowers would have been had I left the dirt alone. The one thing I didn't do, as a child, was make a garden.

I remember one garden from my childhood, a garden I saw one day when my parents took me house-hunting with them. I was about seven; my brother was five, and we were all tired of living in apartments. We want our own bedrooms, my brother and I chanted from the back seat, and we want a yard. We drove from one house to another, and each one looked just like the next-brick tract homes surrounded by patches of just-mowed St. Augustine grass. Only one house stands out in my mind, a flat ranch house like all the others, but the backyard had been transformed into a leafy, overgrown vegetable garden. I had never seen anything like it. Strawberries rambled along the ground, down low where I could see them. The old man who lived in the house was bent down among them, hiding out from the realtor, picking berries. When he saw me, he nudged me towards the strawberries, told me not to worry about the dirt, just eat. I ate them in small nibbles, letting their wild sweet flavor run around my mouth, and put the chewed-off stems carefully in my pocket.

He showed me how to eat the peas climbing the fence. Grasp one end of the pod and break it, hard but not too hard, so a string remains attached and works like a zipper to open the pod. Pick the peas out, one at a time. I traced the inside of the pod with my tongue and the peas popped away from the seam into my mouth. Their taste summoned up everything I loved about summer --grass and crickets and swimming pools, and the good warm sun itself. I kept the pea pods, stuffing them into my pocket along with the wet tails of the strawberries. I pulled them out that night, back at home, where they seemed messy and irrelevant among the toys and books that crowded my room. They sat on my dresser for a couple of days until they attracted flies and I threw them out.

I didn't think about gardening again until graduate school, when I noticed the front yards in my Austin neighborhood as I walked by on my way to class. I waved shyly at my neighbors, mostly graduate students or young professors, who stood outdoors among their flowers, watering their gardens before the sun started to beat down. What were they doing? Didn't they have to go to class? Shouldn't they be studying? The thought of allowing that kind of diversion from my own work seemed careless, irresponsible. But as I watched them tend their gardens in the evenings , on the weekends, or during an occasional stolen afternoon when I knew they must be playing hooky from school, I started to envy them. They were outdoors with their shovels and their boots, turning the earth, calling to each other from across the fence. After graduation, faced with the prospect of spending a lifetime working in an office, under the artificial lights, I yearned for what they had-a way to get outdoors and get my hands dirty, to create something, to help something grow. I met my husband Scott in graduate school, and as classes wound down for the last time, we talked about moving to California together. California, in my mind, was green and tropical all year long. Anything would grow in California. I want a garden when we get to the coast, I told Scott, a house with a yard where I can plant something.

If I had asked my neighbors at the time, they might have been able to tell me that gardening is about more than putting plants in the ground. When you set out to work on a garden, something surprising happens. The garden goes to work on you, too. In the process of bringing a patch of earth to life, your life is transformed.

I would find out about that soon enough, though, and so would Scott. When we moved to California, it didn't take us long to find a place where I could plant my first garden.