Seeds of Destruction: My Garden, the Final Resting Place

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
. . .
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
― T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

What the friggin’ hell?  I just planted these last week!
“Drought tolerant” my ass.  Screw you, Home Depot garden center!
― K. Yakey, as repeatedly overheard by husband John.

There are places in this world where I am no longer welcome.  The first one that comes to mind is The Green Gate Garden Center in Seguin, Texas.  Now, I haven’t been back to my hometown in quite a while, mind you, but when I do pay a visit, I tend to press the accelerator a little harder when I go past said Garden Center, slightly paranoid that someone might recognize me.  Because I’m sure they know what I did.  No, I never poured bleach in their cabbage patch or set their petunias on fire.  But as a kid, wandering through the balmy interior of their nursery, I did worse.  I touched things.

On the surface, this sounds innocent, and you may be tempted to picture my tiny child fingers trailing over the leaves of various ivies and begonias as I skipped blithely down the aisles of fresh, green, and—here’s the key—“living” flora.  Sure, I did that.  I indulged in the youthful urges that any pony-tailed imp is wont to have, and I’m fairly positive I looked damn cute doing it.

But in my wake I left ruination.  And my vegetation victims, though having long ago been ripped from Mother Earth, still dig their rancid roots into my overworked subconscious.

Okay, so now you’re picturing this little blonde brat, ramming her fingers into the fragile plastic containers of sprouted seedlings, laughing with a high-pitched squeal and grinning like a malignant changeling while she screeches, “Kill, kill, kill!”

But I can assure you that I wasn’t given to random acts of batsh*t craziness.  Well, not when I was that age, anyway.  But upon returning with my mother a mere few days later and witnessing the near depletion of the contents of many of those greenhouses through which I’d frolicked, I became firmly convinced that those plants I’d petted had shriveled and been swept from sight.  The startling size of the compost heap back behind the personnel areas was proof of it, all evidence of the havoc I’d wreaked.  Though I’d decided to chalk it up to coincidence that first time, I could not ignore the second time it happened a few months later.

Again, I’d touched them.  I was to blame.  If you think I’m exaggerating, then you don’t know about the rest of my questionable past, in which most any restaurant, shopping center, or family-owned business about which I make the ill-advised declaration, “Oh man, I love this place!” inevitably ceases to be.  They either burn down not long after I’ve expressed a fondness for them, or they close under mysterious circumstances and disappear.  My husband affectionately dubs this “The Kiss of Karen.”  Yes, fans of that old wonderful and unique restaurant called “Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine” in Dallas, Texas which shut down years ago.  You can thank me for that one.  And sorry, “Country Junction,” about the catastrophic fire in 2006 at your original landmark retail location in Lehighton, Pennsylvania.  I’d shopped through your eclectic collection of goods for the first time only a month prior to that, when I’d bought an oversized Egyptian pharaoh bust (don’t ask), and had spoken the fateful incantation of “Wow, this place is one of my new favorites!”

The end result of my patronage is invariably a raging inferno or bankruptcy court.  So is it any wonder that I have the innate ability to annihilate a few rose bushes just by staring at them?  There’s evidently something within my genetic makeup that radiates doom upon certain “offenders.”  So if you’re a bouncy, healthy ficus or a small beloved ice cream shop, then I suggest you duck and cover.  This will be your only warning.

And it no doubt explains why, to this day, I continue to cut a murderous path through any unsuspecting flower patch, rendering it infertile, like salted earth, for decades to follow.  Case in point:  My garden.

No, correction:  Our garden.  My husband has a black thumb to match mine, though I cannot fathom the cosmic cruelty that unleashed a pair such as us upon the innocent denizens of the plant world.  But here we are!  The devastating duo.  And between us, we have created a raised bed-of-pain, where a lonely plot of soil is not so much about horticulture as it is about homicide.  Although, to be fair, I cannot place all the blame on our direct intervention.  Most of our stalky subjects apparently look around them as soon as they’re planted and choose to commit suicide for fear of what suffering may come.  Cowards.

My character Vanessa, in Home Beyond Hell, is somewhat of a gardening prodigy, a phenom of Nature who can impart life to the most anemic of annuals and cultivate crops that otherwise would wither by the hand of another.  (Except for juniper bushes.  No, really, it’s the damnedest thing.  She just can’t do ‘em.  But hey, everyone has their Achilles heel.)  As the writer of that story, I gladly let Vanessa do her thing and reign as mistress over her little green paradise, though secretly I grind my teeth a bit every time she plucks that perfect peach while I, myself, try not to glance at the dead potted fern in the corner.

You would think, after digging into the research, that I’d do better.  I now know the proper way to prune an apple tree, what the right ratio of fertilizer to garden soil should be for woody perennials, and how to identify the first signs of citrus greening disease.  But does that stop my little deciduous darlings from dying off in droves like a field full of sick cattle?  Hardly.  My pitiful efforts at the botanical arts quickly become a failed undertaking.  I start with a nice bed of good, rich earth and reverently bury the seeds of certain vegetables while carefully transplanting the partially grown versions of others.  I water them just enough.  I make sure they’re in the right spot for the sunlight they’ll need.  But their fate is already sealed, because I’ve already contaminated them, cursed them with The Kiss.

And so, as things progress and the veggies’ demise begins, there arises in me a seething frustration followed by desperation.  And that always leads to overreaction.  Therefore, at the first tinge of browning or disease on plant leaves, I usually either douse the poor things with unpronounceable chemicals or just start hacking off parts of them with all the care and discretion of a Civil War surgeon.  I’m surprised Mother Nature hasn’t put a bounty on my head.

But something happened once, that seemed inexplicable at the time.  An anomaly within a dark and depressingly predictable world.  Something grew.

It was a single, small pineapple, a golden little treasure peeking out from within a jumble of weed-infested ceramic pots long ago forgotten.  About two years prior to that, an old woman we’d met in a Save-A-Lot had, for some reason, taken it upon herself to educate us in the middle of the produce section by stating, “Ya know, if yooze chop off da top of dat pineapple and stick it in da ground, it’ll make anutha pineapple.”  My husband and I had looked at each other, both with the same thought: “Sure it will.  Maybe in a garden where the dirt is not poison and the caretakers aren’t the plant world’s equivalent of Dementors.”  (Okay, maybe I was the only one with that exact thought, but anyway . . .)  We’d done as she’d suggested and, against all odds, there it was.  And it was alive.

Upon carefully cutting the fruit from where it sat nestled in the long graceful green leaves of its parent, I then bore it ceremoniously into the house.  I set it on the kitchen counter, where my husband and I simply stared at it in wonder, as if Sir Walter Raleigh himself had appeared and deposited at our feet a shining bowl of ancient South American coins as long-awaited proof of El Dorado.  We dared not carve into it.  We dared not even breathe too hard on it, for fear it would dissipate like a mirage.  But it was real.  And, as we discovered when the shock eventually wore off, edible.

That was the event that led to our epiphany.  This little pineapple had sprung into existence because it had been left alone.  We had never interfered with its growth by doing the things a normal, half-way competent gardener would do.  We never watered it.  We never gave it a larger pot to expand into.  Its only hope for survival had evidently lain in our complete and unadulterated negligence.  We’d found the formula for success, and we’ve been following it ever since.

Though I may not have the power to counteract the curse within me so that my garden isn’t littered with leafy corpses like a miniature Gettysburg reenactment, I can at least keep it contained.  I’ll go so far as to chop off the top of that next Dole pineapple and plant it, or blindly fling a handful of seeds at the tilled flower bed on my way past, but my involvement ends there.  I cannot, in good conscience, inflict any further attention on Mother Nature’s children.

April may be the cruellest month for some, but, come spring, there’s a certain Yakey acreage that will serve as a haven for any haphazardly transplanted herbage.  My garden will no longer be the waste land it once was, because I’ll be doing the greatest favor to every bulb that hopes to sprout:  I’ll be staying the hell away from them.