From Blunder to Bloom

by Dorothy Foltz-Gray, special to HGTV.com

My response, of course, was to get some information, especially after a neighbor asked where the irises were (tacky but jolting). I had some old gardening books---the former owner's, I think--that smelled of mildew and basement and read to me a little bit like a computer manual. If I only understood the language--tuber, perennial, deciduous, peat moss--I might get somewhere. What I did glean, however, was that irises had to be dug up and replanted periodically to keep flowering. This was my first big project. The irises spread across one wall of the house and by the time I was done, iris bulbs lay heaped in the yard. So was I. I replanted a third, perhaps; it seemed there were hundreds. And never again did I see an iris bloom while I lived at that house.

This was my first inkling that gardening is a bit like cooking. You have to read the recipe--the whole thing--and you have to kind of know some basics, which I didn't. I also found out that most garden failures don't reveal themselves immediately. I had a year or two of great hopes for my irises--and hence for the entire plot they resided in. What, I thought, if I bought a bunch of flowers, stuck them around the irises, and defined the whole area with mulch? That very afternoon, I stood, amazed. In a few short hours, I had turned my garden of iris humiliation into a lovely, albeit iris-less, spot.

The beauty lasted about a week. Some of the flowers thrived; some lay down dead. Had I paid a moment's attention to sun and shade, to soil, to watering? No, no, and no. This sounds funny to me now, almost unbelievable. But I knew nothing. I was at the equivalent, say, of learning to boil an egg.

My prize, however, was my Russian sage, whose purple haze beat out Jimi Hendrix's. Captivated by its delicacy, I put one in a sunny spot. Each year it rewarded me by growing thicker and higher. By now I was cultivating, fertilizing, mulching. And I had acquired ambition, discovering to my parsimonious glee that many plants could be divided. What I'd paid for in the first place could be mine, over and over. Cocky with success, I plucked my sage from the ground and took a knife to its throat. Somehow I realized immediately that I'd killed it. I also knew I'd crossed into new gardening territory: grief. Every day, the sage's hole was a reproach.

But it was also a lesson. To become a better gardener--like becoming a better anything--requires failure, in fact turns failure to value. Will I ever try to divide a Russian sage again? Not likely. More important, the experience made me realize that gardening's thin-edged mortality is what draws me. Every single spring, I can't wait to see who made it over the winter, who's going to peek his head up--and alas, whom I've killed. I wouldn't part with gardening's melange of wild successes and bruising disasters.

Understanding what I love about gardening edged me away from my starting role of Killer. Because it set me free. If I could survive the death of my Russian sage, couldn't I also dare to set out two dried up rose-of-Sharon cast-offs, prune them close to the ground, and see what news they held for me next spring? Couldn't I divide the hosta root, and see what it did with itself in the next month or two? Couldn't I cut back my wisteria to train its embracing spread?

Discovering the answer was yes, yes, and yes was, well, both intoxicating and overwhelming. Now I had no end of things to dig up, to divide, to train, to prune. I had a hundred choices and a hundred new paths toward failure at all times.

But I also realized I was reaching a kind of peace--or maybe I should say acceptance--necessary to someone who nurtures rather than kills. My garden would never be perfect, in part because it would never be static or complete. It could develop any which way, and every choice I made affected every other choice. So it turns out that nobody else gardens--or could garden--quite like I do. Sometimes I hate my choices, dig them up, and move them to another spot--and another, and another--and finally to the crematorium. But other moments I feel a delivery room sits right there on my lawn. Either way I know whatever I set in motion is not about death but about what the earth is, and all that shifting.

--Dorothy Foltz-Gray is a contributing editor for Health, Alternative Medicine, and Arthritis Today magazines. She is writing With and Without Her, a memoir about being and losing a twin.

--Illustrations by Steven Olexa