Cultivate Your Own Garden

Los Angeles, California

Cultivate your own garden is the existential conclusion of the journey in Voltaire's Candide. It is obviously a metaphor, and I will get to that later. But first, a little bit about my life as a gardener.

One summer, when I was quite young, my grandfather and I planted a vegetable garden. It was a large plot. Large enough to grow corn. I don't remember everything we grew, but I remember radishes, because they charged out of the soil so fast. And I recall beets, because my mother cooked the tops as greens. They were something I had never eaten before. There were tomatoes, and I shuddered seeing the fat worms they drew, which my grandfather carefully picked off.

My grandfather loved oysters, opera, and gardening. He worked quietly, though informatively, alongside me. Mostly I watched as he would use his spade or clippers in his right hand, but when tiring he would switch to his left. My father told me that Grandpa did this as well when using a hammer or other tools. He was clearly a lefthander who had been sternly required by nuns to use his right hand, as was the practice in that day.

We had rose gardens in both homes where I grew up, and we had lots of camellias. My mother loved camellias and gardenias. We had Meyer lemon trees, and in our second home in the San Fernando Valley, an olive tree as well. That garden was smaller, as the house, happily to a twelve year-old, came with a large pool and patio which took up much of the property.

A year after we married back in the late 70s, Tom and I bought our first home. There were unkempt but beautiful, old camellias lining the front of the house and about twenty rose bushes lining the property lines and patio. But the previous owners were clearly not avid gardeners, so when that first spring rolled around, my mother took me to Green Arrow Nursery to buy bedding plants. It was my first garden since that vegetable one, and what I remembered having learned from my grandfather was rudimentary at best. From her own experience, Mom pointed out annuals versus perennials, and advised me as to the hardiness of the plants I chose. I knew what I liked. Colorwise: No yellow nor orange except potted on the porch during the Fall. As then, I still love red, white, blue, purple and pink flowers, in that order of preference. And still like soft green or grey foliage. Nothing spikey, nothing stiff or menacing-looking. From gardening books, I learned to design the beds with a blanket of color, rather than a hodgepodge, crazy quilt, as we planted what I called an English garden, comprised of impatiens, alyssum, lobelia, climbing pink jasmine, irises, and, of course, gardenias, adding to the existing roses and camellias. That first winter and every winter afterwards, I replaced all the impatiens on both sides of the front walkway with pink, purple and dark red primroses, and fought with snails as a result. That battle continued through spring each year, until the evidently less-tasty impatiens replaced those primroses. Only the front lawn had a sprinkler system, so Tom installed drip watering systems, and a rainbird for the back lawn. As I would work the front beds, our Shetland Sheepdog, Taz, kept watch over me from the porch. After she was gone, Amy, the neighbor's black cat would saunter across the driveway and tuck under my arm as I was working beds while seated on the ground. On Sunday afternoons, when Tom and I gardened all day together, I would finish the day sitting on the front steps in the early evening, writing in my gardening journal and sipping a shot of tequila. That was the drill. I abided by all I had learned including Rule #1, which I still follow: Deadhead, constantly. There is nothing uglier in the garden than spent or dead blooms.

I always had the support of Tom, who learned from me where to cut plants to control direction of growth, and, of course, from the gardeners who came weekly to take care of the lawns and the remaining, tolerated shrubbery, like Indian Hawthorne. They were all well-trained to allow me to maintain the roses and camellias. I have had a string of gardeners throughout my time as a homeowner with varying degrees of success. My current gardener, Jesus, works with his sons and they are good at understanding my quirks and standards. We work well together as a team.

My father was an engineering-style gardener, precise and ordered, as he was in most things in life. As those early years in the first house passed, he dug out all of the yellow and orange roses that had come with the house, and planted the bareroot roses I had ordered from Armstrong nursery. I liked hybrid teas better than floribundas, and classics better than the David Austins, though we did plant all three. I laid out color patterns so that groupings of color were effective. My favorite rose was and still is French Lace, a cream-colored floribunda. My father's favorite was Showbiz, an abundant red floribunda. Dad suggested I buy a chalkboard which Tom nailed up on the garage wall. On it, I kept track of my feeding schedule for the different plants. I fed the roses systemically, beginning in the Spring, then alternating with a non-systemic granular and a foliar spray food which also fed most of the other blooming plants. The foliar spray was a proprietary mix that I created through trial and error. I added more camellias and also azaleas, learning that unlike most flowering plants, they are fed when dormant. I worked them into my feeding schedule along with chelated iron when leaves indicated its need. Used coffee grounds and tea leaves were mixed with water and utilized to help boost the soil around those acid-lovers.

While I would probably never use an interior designer, we did use a landscape architect when we moved to the new house. It is a large property, and challenging as the house sits between two hills. The hardscape had never been laid out, and we wanted to take the courtyard down to a lower elevation which required heavy equipment. I asked for a rose garden, so our architect laid one out in a horseshoe pattern surrounded by a gravel path. I picked new roses, as well as favorites including French Lace and Sheer Bliss. We worked a pattern so that the color would pop rainbow-like, rather than mix like confetti. In a round bed with a birdbath in the center, I chose all Showbiz roses which popped with hundreds of red blooms most of the year. Camellias didn't really belong, but I had to have at least one. I brought the chalkboard to the new garage.

Between renters at the old house, I borrowed a shovel from my neighbor there and dug up the rhizomes of the irises we had planted, bringing them to the new house for planting along the edge of the patio. For the hills, amongst the oak trees, we planted olive trees, pepper trees, lavender, rosemary, Mexican bush sage, bouganvillas, and lots of ceanothis which I love for its shiny leaves and its abundance in Carmel. The English-style garden of the old house gave way to the Mediterranean at this one.

In Southern California, while it can happen, we don't frequently have frost. We often force-prune roses, but you can prune everything lightly so you have near year-round, blooming color in your garden. It is one of many best things about living in Southern California. So when a Northern Californian friend suggested several times that I cut back the Mexican Blood Red trumpet vine, planted and espaliered on the chimney when we did the original landscaping, I was hesitant. When I talked it over with Jesus, he implored me not to do it. The vine had a substantial trunk and quite a bit of old wood. Not anywhere near so large as those wisterias in Sierra Madre which adorn homes on the historical house tours. Those have to be propped up to support their weight in order to have such spectacular growth and color. Following several weeks of deliberation and against Jesus' protestations, I decided to have him do the vine. He did a beautiful job of pruning. The upper extensions of the vine looked as it had in its first year of growing. But something about seeing it uncharacteristically barren through the winter, like skeletal remains, bothered me. My kitchen sink faces a wall of french doors and the vine is focal in the view. I was so used to seeing those blood red blooms most of the year, that I felt increasingly sad seeing it so thin and forlorn, and became anxious for it to start blooming. When blooming didn't occur in the spring, I became distressed. Spring and summer during Covid needed all the help color could bring. Every time I did the dishes, I looked at the vine as it continued to leaf out, plain damn green.

It never bloomed. Now, surely it will bloom next year, but along with remembering everything that this dreadful year has brought, I will ruefully remember that I didn't follow my instincts to cultivate my own garden, despite knowing my own nature. I take full responsibility for not listening to myself. For not listening to my gardener. For not listening to Voltaire.

I started my blog after an inspired thought occured to me that I should concentrate on three things, three activities that I both enjoyed the most, and at which I was most proficient. And, in a sense, that is Voltaire's message. If you think of the garden as life, and you think of Candide's travels as a search for meaning in that life, you might come to this conclusion. You need to cultivate your own life in both the large ways and the small. If that was an idle thought in the past, it is a necessity in this time of pandemic. Our homes are our refuge and our days are our currency. How we fill our homes right now, since they cannot be filled by loved ones, and how we spend our days, since they are devoid of all normal activities, is essentially important.

Years ago, a friend was in my kitchen and she lifted the lid on my large, red Le Creuset dutch oven which was sitting on my range top.  There was only water in it. When she looked at me quizzically, I told her that I had used it to hardcook eggs. Oh, she exclaimed. You don't need something that large to cook eggs! I responded that I cook a dozen at a time. That dutch oven was the perfect diameter and depth for that. She had thought that I was using it for an egg or two, which clearly would have been stunningly stupid. But, just as clearly, I didn't really need her advice. As everyone's garden is different, so is everyone's kitchen different. Cooks decide what works for them in terms of which cookware to use and how much clutter crowds their space. As time goes by, I find myself yearning for more zen space in both kitchen and garden. I increasingly need visual calm. But if my friends' kitchen counters are filled with containers of utensils and racks of hanging pots, or even a refrigerator covered with magnets, I get it. It is important, especially in this time, to do what works for you. My mistake in paying attention to my friend's unsolicited opinion, reminds me of what I was told when I was learning to golf: Whatever you do, don't take anyone's advice on changing your grip. I think that can also apply to other areas of our lives. Especially right now.

As summer finally gives way to fall and then winter, I will look forward to more months passing and more freedom from this pandemic in the seasons ahead. And I plan to write a post about the day that I trust will eventually come, when I will discover that first bloom on my poor trumpet vine, at last arriving to lift my heart and spirits with its blood red color. This post is about the lesson learned. That one will be a celebration. Thank you for reading my blog. I recommend reading Candide by Voltaire or reading it again. And/or listening to one of the many cast recordings of the production of same, with music by Leonard Bernstein. Just a recommendation. Don't do either if your instincts advise against. You must trust me about this...