In My Garden
As an excuse for not keeping in touch with a friend, I explained recently, “My garden kept me prisoner till dark.” I meant it as a joke, certain that she would understand, because she too is a gardener. “Once I set foot in it, I find so many things to do I couldn’t get out for hours.” She laughed, and forgave me.
My blog is another neglected item on my always-too-long, overstuffed, overly ambitious to-do list, and I truly hope it will suffice to excuse me. I am a gardener, and declare it with pride. I’ve been a gardener since age 22, when the only things that germinated in the Seattle backyard patch I’d cleared of bricks and broken glass were strawflowers and carrots. The day the ground-floor neighbors moved out, they stole all the carrots.
Long before that, my mother and grandmother, both passionate gardeners, instilled in me a love of plants that has only continued to deepen. As a child I wandered among lush flower gardens, drinking in the beauty of peonies and hollyhocks, roses and honeysuckle. The vegetable garden gave bountiful harvests that included fresh corn on the cob, and big winter squashes with skins so hard and ripe they could only be split with an axe. Delectable pears and apples hung from trees planted by homesteading pioneers. I had no inkling that an interest in plants and gardening would be a consistent thread throughout my lifetime, bringing pleasures and benefits beyond measure.
A dozen years passed before I planted my next garden, during the height of the back-to the land movement in the mid ’Seventies. That garden, on a beautiful site on the shores of Puget Sound, evolved into growing vegetables and selling them at a fledgeling farmer’s market. Over time, that market garden included herbs, and eventually evolved into Silver Bay Herb Farm, which provided my livelihood (and so much more) for almost twenty years. I sold herbs, herbal products, and flowers at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and delivered fresh cut culinary herbs to chefs at top Seattle restaurants. That inspired an idea that was, all modesty aside, ahead of its time: a series of casual picnics that featured gourmet chefs preparing herb-flavored meals for guests in our lovely al fresco setting.
“They’d kill me in New York for saying this,” one chef told me, “but people in Seattle know what good food is.” I agree, having grown up with fresh vegetables from my parents’ garden, fruit from trees planted by homesteading pioneers, and Puget Sound’s bounty of fish and shellfish, plus the fabulous cherries, apricots, peaches, and melons from “East of the Mountains.” And since I love, love, love the pleasures of the palate, I’ve learned to recognize the signs of perfect ripeness and quality in all this bounty.
My hands-on experience “living and breathing herbs” also led to the publication of two well-received books on the subject, “Growing Herbs” and “The Northwest Herb Lover’s Handbook.” After that, I spent a dozen years working for Seattle Parks and Recreation, the majority as a Senior Gardener in charge of the horticultural aspects of almost fifty parks in a tremendously diverse South Seattle district.
“Oh Mary, you just can’t keep your hands out of the dirt,” a friend teased, and she was right. Now I tend my relatively large urban garden, still finding pleasure and solace among plants. It’s not a showpiece garden with clipped hedges, tidy rectangular beds or weed-free paths, and there’s nary a fountain in sight, although someday I may install one. My garden is and always will be a work in progress and a labor of love. It reflects my personality, I suppose, continuously experimental, somewhat unkempt, partly wild, full of surprises, and perhaps, in my best moments, full of love to share.
When Hubby Darling and I bought this house, the sunny garden spot was covered with freshly laid turf, which we soon rolled into bundles and gave to our next-door-neighbor. (That resulted in a surprise welcome-to-the-neighborhood party and enduring friendships.) The soil, almost pure sand, drained so quickly that water—and nutrients—washed right through it. I’ve always been committed to organic practices, and over the ensuing seasons, I added compost, worm castings, and mulches to increase the garden’s humus content. The discovery of Elizabeth Murphy’s 2016 book, “Building Soil, a Down to Earth Approach,” inspired me to try something new. Following her advice, I also sowed green manure and cover crops like buckwheat, crimson clover, and oats, cut them back just before flowering and (gasp!) laid the material right down on top of the soil and left it there for Nature to do the rest. Over the past five years, our sandy soil has been transformed into crumbly, sweet-smelling, moisture retentive black gold that produces abundant year-round harvests.
Our home-grown produce is as local as it gets, and all my labor of love—actually play—is rewarded by sensuous pleasures like the taste of a raspberry that drops into my hand at a touch, a tender, crisp cucumber, a tower of flat Romano beans, a vine ripened Sungold tomato, or a luscious, late-ripening Italian Honey Fig. I also reap the satisfaction of making a few small steps towards sustaining our precious Mother Earth.
Now it’s September, and days are shorter, evenings cooler, and the pace of harvesting has slowed after the August peak. The garden’s hold on me loosens, and though I’ve been canning, freezing, and otherwise preserving the season’s harvests, I know that will soon taper off.
My body and mind sense the season’s shift, and I feel a readiness to turn back to indoor pursuits, primarily writing. So it’s back to my long-neglected blog, a hello to anyone out there who may be interested, an invitation to connect and explore together. I hope to share the perspective from my little realm and perhaps, as encouraged by a greeting card tacked to my bulletin board, “Write more happiness into the world.”