Hiding From My Gardener

Every Thursday morning I hide from my gardener. I’m usually dressed and sitting upstairs at the computer when the sound of the blower makes me close the window. But every week I forget that it is my house that the crew is attending to and I shrink behind the blind hoping that Mr. Nakata doesn’t see me.

I’m not sure why I don’t want to talk to him. I like gardens more than most people but our current garden is an embarrassment. I live in coastal Southern California where roses bloom until past Thanksgiving and pansies are a winter plant. There’s no excuse for not having our extremely efficient little patch of land be a perfect extension of our lives and an expression of our personality – true Provencal lavender, heavy heirloom tomatos, David Austin roses and Shakespearean butterfly plants. But no. The clay soil is largely ignored by me with just luck and the weekly ministrations of Mr. Nakata providing the only hope.

I can pretend there is a language barrier, but there isn’t. Mr. Nakata is only a little bit older than me, but he presents himself as a wizened old Japanese man only recently released from an internment camp. I know this makes no sense. Perhaps Mr. Nakata’s parents were children in such a place, but still I find it very difficult to communicate with him. He numbles, we interrupt each other, I grasp for plant names unsuccessfully and I always just tell him to do what he thinks is best. So I end up with yet another path lined with pink and white begonias. I know I would have better luck with his Spanish-speaking assistants, but when he is around, they silently pull the mover out of the truck and start their march across our small patch of grass.

The reason I always give for why our garden is a mess is money. I just never seem to be able to justify the money it would take to first design and then bring to life the kind of garden I want. I have children who need to go to college, regions of Italy I haven’t yet seen, bathrooms that need to be updated. Plus I have only a filmy notion of what my garden should look like, although I can recognize its feel and even the sensation of being in it even as I sit here. So it will be a long, delicious project, like a cassoulet that takes three days to cook. I know I could get books from the library about Sissington and attend optimistic spring home tours to see those Mediterranean gardens in San Marino, but I know myself well enough to know I shouldn’t get myself started. When we moved into our old southern colonial in Los Angeles six months before our first son was born all of my nesting energy went into the big square garden in the back and I made my husband plant more than fifty bare root roses in a March drizzle as I watched, benched with toxemia. I know I can get out of control on this.

I can’t even have flowering plants or flowers inside the house. We have two young cats, good hunters and jumpers, who think that flowers are living things to be taken prisoner. When they were only four months old I came home from running an errand to find both of them with bright yellow noses and a vase of sunflowers tipped over on a surprisingly high shelf. I have since watched their faces if someone brings a bouquet to me. Their eyes narrow and they crouch low to the ground, figuring out how to take out a stargazer lily, later, when everyone is gone and the kitchen will be dark and the flowers will be off guard. At this moment, I should be looking out for the pink tulips that I received as a Persian New Year gift, which I have left to fend for themselves in the kitchen.

But I can’t help myself from planning and dreaming. I carry a small, insipid camera in my purse and take pictures of houses, of gardens, of glazed blue pots on a doorstep. Someday these will all come in handy. Someday I will be able to walk outside barefoot and in a recreation of those silly 1930’s movies, pick a grapefruit from a tree with one hand and a bunch of arugula with the other. My husband doesn’t believe any of this. While he would love to have an herb garden and fresh citrus fruit within reach, he knows this would come at the expense of countless mornings when he could have been out on his bike, because this is not an undertaking a person takes on alone. But he can relax – he also knows there will always be some other way I want to spend my own time and energy.