When a son reflects on a childhood of gardening with his mother, he finds clues to a

family lineage built around silences, distance, and forgetfulness. Eventually, his mother

begins to openly reveal a past that confronts the author’s own dark nature. In the history

of gardens there are great tragedies and triumphs, and in the garden we continue to

discover our truest selves.

The day before the author’s wedding, his grandmother is in a serious accident a mile from

the church. This event sets in motion a quest to discover the origins of mysterious letters sent

from strangers, hints by aunts about their father, debilitating migraines, and the ―Anderson‖

family persona—the ability to swiftly and sternly cut off an offending family member for years

at a time for a seemingly trivial matter.

MORNING GLORY: A STORY OF FAMILY AND CULTURE IN THE GARDEN

explores the wary and subdued relationship between mother and son, a relationship which

typifies our species’ own with nature. As a son grows up learning about gardening with his

mother, he eventually earns the right to ask questions about who she is, and who he is in her

shadow. Revealing her own childhood of poverty, abuse, and religious fundamentalism, two

people begin to understand themselves and their lineage of solitude and depression in a new

light—particularly for the son in a difficult and new marriage. As this son looks at diverse

cultural attempts to connect place with self, a powerful metaphor develops between gardening

and emotional balance, and how ending our violence toward ourselves and each other is

synonymous with ending our violence toward the planet. Ultimately, the only way to understand

ourselves is to understand the garden, and vice versa.

247mp – 75,000 words

MORNING GLORY: A STORY OF FAMILY AND CULTURE IN THE GARDEN

Aztec priests ground up the [morning glory] seeds as a potion which they

used in ointments to make themselves fearless, or to appease pain.

— D.C. Watts, Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore

I cup the massive head of a pink peony blossom in both my hands as if dipping them into

water, bringing up a cold splash to my heavy eyes and warm cheeks. From inside the deeply

furled petals that clamor out from the balled center, drops of dew tip-toe out and dive to the bed

of rocks below. Each drop carries on its back the secret chemical combination that licks my nose

and stings my brain into momentary euphoria. How can one explain such a smell? Only the

action of it, the result of it. This sensation—of smelling such a potent bloom from even several

feet away—is so brief it could easily be forgotten. And yet the smallest moments in our lives are

often the most intense, the ones that linger.

The weight of a peony bloom is intense compared to others in the garden; its denseness

easily makes it close to a pound, particularly after a rain when its thick spread of petals seem to

act as a sponge gathering a hundred small ponds. It’s as if glaciation has taken place, pock

marked the plant’s very heart, and left behind a crater-like landscape where it could deposit its

sweet self.

Touching my nose briefly to the hidden yellow inside where the stamen rest, I feel a

simultaneous embrace and giving way that dampens my face. I feel hungry, joyful, peaceful,

purposeful—I belong here as much as any other creature. And if from a distance someone

glances, notices me bent down into this secret place in the corner of the garden, they wouldn’t

see an oversized bee or hummingbird planted unnaturally in the ground next to the peony bush:

they’d see a fountain or waterfall coming from the rose-pink center that’s fused itself into my

skin, and for a time grazed the surface of the earth. They’d understand that for this moment, and

for many after, something of the scent, touch, and taste of two bodies would leave portions of

each in the other for years to come. Perhaps on an afternoon when I was fourteen my mother saw

me doing this. Perhaps when the three peony bushes became too large and the new garden was

put in, she kept the one that remembered me. The garden is full of ghosts, and I am one of them.

* * *

With no specific day, with no specific event marking it as extraordinary, I remember this

from my childhood: tagging along with my mother to go to the nursery. Somewhere around the

age of twelve or thirteen I did this several times over the summer, getting up ―early‖ around nine

or ten to tackle the manmade jungle among rows sheltered by half-translucent green plastic

overhead.

Nurseries are strange places. The consumer itch for immediacy and razzle-dazzle meets

the relatively naïve and simplistic beauty of plants becoming themselves. I’ve never known a

good nursery to be modern and chic, either. By this I mean pulling into the parking lot and being

wowed by clean, simplistic lines of design, the less is more strategy. In fact, I’ve never known a

nursery that’s had a paved parking lot, or a parking lot that could accommodate more than a

dozen or so cars. Even before you make it to the door—an arbor covered in clematis or ivy—the

idea that your world is really not yours hits home. The pathways between the rows of wet-leafed

plants from the morning watering are covered in thick mulch. When I went along with my

mother on big shopping days, I had to pull the nursery-provided red-flyer along through the

mulch. At first, being a skinny teenager wasn’t so bad—the wagon rolled along somewhat easily

across the wood. Later, as the plants accumulated and as the black plastic containers grew larger,

I’d find myself several rows over from my mother trying to diligently trace her snakelike path.

―Boy, where are you. C’mon up here so I can put these flowers in the cart.‖

―I’m coming Mom.‖ She winces, turns not just her head but her whole body, and meets

the cart halfway plopping the plants into the metal din of the cart.

―You’ve got to keep up with me. I need your help.‖ She didn’t smile, but turned back and

faded into the turns of another row—I knew I’d never catch up with her. We’d have this

conversation a few more times before the morning was out and eventually, planting in the

garden, I’d either be forgiven and she’d let me do the planting, or I’d be rejected into the

artificial air of my cool bedroom and video games.

The name of the garden center I remember most is, appropriately, The Garden Patch. It

was a twenty to thirty minute drive because my mother didn’t like ones closer to our house. This

nursery was off the side of a relatively busy, two lane county highway in the southern suburb of

Shakopee. As cars pulled off into the dirt parking lot they had to make a considerable effort to

slow down, so traffic behind became briefly bottle-necked. But approach the lot too fast and you

might hit a pool of mud and get stuck, or knock out your shocks from the un-graded moon-like

landscape.

This plant refectory reeked of dampness, protein, soil nutrients, stale un-circulated air and

the people who worked the sticky brown cash register. Just inside the front arbor were two lines

of twenty red-flyer wagons, lined up like shopping carts but tantalizingly playful. The first row

of plants, small ornamental trees, pines and maples, shade plants, was relatively wide and open—

inviting like a great hall or a mansion’s entryway. But once through, the rows split left and right

and were so narrow no two wagons could pass by one another. My mother stood obliviously

among them as I constantly had to angle out and make way for another poor child’s laborious

route behind his mother.

But even though the load became progressively worse, there was a solemn joy and sense

of purpose that emanated from the rows of artificially grown plants. My mother would thumb

through stacks of annuals as if it were a recipe book, and I would patiently wait a few feet

behind, if I’d caught up, fingering leaves of nearby plants, letting drips of water collect in the

middle and slide down the tip, off into the mulch below. As Mom decided which plants would

work in what amount of sunlight and in what soil and what time of year, I became mesmerized

by the shades of green accented by the black plastic shadows: light green, dark green, silver

green, frothy green, milky green, brilliant green, lizard green, vomit green, soft green, prickly

green, green green… it was too much and not enough at once. Even the idea of all that life in

such a small space is intoxicating and numbing. How could all these plants thrive in this small

space, and would they, like old lettuce in the grocery store, be tossed away if not bought before

their roots outgrew their containers? When I walk through a forest or a dense park I always get

dizzy—there’s too much to sense and observe that it becomes overwhelming. I can’t stop every

few feet to observe a stone or branch because I’d never make it home in time for the next

millennium; and if I stop for an hour or two just to take in the sense of one space and map it,

really listen and look, I feel I’d miss 99.9% of what’s there.

These aisles, my mother’s patient discoveries, the weight of my cart, warm green light

transfusing around it all, the thick smell of soil—a person might drown. Where is the car, the

asphalt road, the brick and stucco buildings selling lawnmowers and chainsaws, the Minneapolis

skyscrapers trumping the natural world around them a hundred fold. Where are the open, sterile

spaces of man’s dominance that sets me free, the reliable highway arteries and overpasses and

cloverleaves slapped down firm upon knocked down woods and open grasslands. In those

nurseries I relished in the depth and intensity of life and becoming, of color and detail, I sank in

the damp mulch and felt the bottoms of my feet warming in the insulation. But just as much I

craved the release of artificiality, as if among life and living I had held my breath until I passed

through it—just as we’d do on the school bus when it passed through the Lowry tunnel

downtown, underneath the Walker’s outdoor sculpture garden. Somewhere between the nursery,

the car’s full trunk, and the plants huddled on the grass beside the garage, I exhaled and wanted

to breathe in again, wanted to go back to the nursery. It was, in a strange way, thrilling—

deprived of nature and over compensated with it. I couldn’t wait until early evening when we’d

move through the garden slowly like maple shadows and find our way again.

* * *

Wait for a rainy day, and you’ll see a sharp change in the house. I don’t mean the typical

sadness, malaise, and boredom that can accompany a young family in mid summer when the

outside world is taken away from them. I mean deeply rooted and out-of-the-blue depression.

Often, when I was growing up, it didn’t even have to be raining.

I imagine my mom getting up around eight in the morning, walking out to the kitchen

thinking of fully waking up, noticing how dark and damp it is outside, and giving up—heading

back to bed until eleven or noon. If it’s a weekday the rest of us may get up, careful of our steps,

how soon we flush toilets and take showers, or how loudly we close doors. Simply put, the way

Mom went was the way we went. Maybe we’d get lucky and all go to the theater, or we’d talk

her into playing a board game on the kitchen table. Maybe she’d feel determined enough from

her good rest that she’d push forth and come watch television with us in the basement where we

were camped out, or at least check on us before going back to her solitude.

But only on one rainy day in ten did any of these things happen. No, it was depression.

Even the quiet the rest of us in the house practiced would only heighten and focus this malaise, a

sort of wary hope with a constricting residue that weighted down every object in the house. I

wonder where this depression came from, because it always seemed more than a response to

exhaustion or illness or weather. There were days my mom just seemed to give up, knew she had

to, and that it would soon enough be over as it had in the past.

As Mom grew older, her menopause became worse, too. Infrequent bouts of depression

were exasperated by intense cramps, hormonal swings, hot flashes, cold flashes, and ultimately

debilitating migraines that literally blacked her out. Silence and stillness were now the only

things we could do to help her recover, and we’d wait for what seemed like—and sometimes

were—several days. She tried medication after medication, had a hysterectomy, ultimately she

began giving herself shots when she felt the pain swirling above her temples, but now uses

Zomig, a successful pill that knocks her out then leaves her wired over the course of a day and a

half.

―I’m going to go lay down for a while,‖ she’d tell everyone at once when I was younger,

gathering us in the living room for a briefing. ―I’d appreciate it if you all were quiet so I can

maybe get rid of this headache before I make dinner.‖ Sometimes, we’d order pizza or warm up

frozen dinners in the oven because, after several hours, she still hadn’t come out of the bedroom.

My sister and I would convince Dad—though he said it was never a big deal—to go see if she

was awake or not, and as we waited like statues in the living room he’d carefully open the door,

tiptoe in, and within seconds come back with the report. ―Still asleep,‖ he’d whisper. ―What do

you guys want to do? Maybe we should go out.‖

My sister has the tendency to drop things—shampoo bottles in the shower, makeup on

the tiled bathroom floor, books and coins and cassette tapes precariously perched on a desk top

corner. She is, by her very nature, not a quiet person. Imagine my sister then, who had the

unfortunate luck of having her room over my parents’, as she closed dresser drawers for twenty

minutes late at night, walked across creaks in the floor, opened the closet door and shuffled

through its shelves, ran bath water after dropping an entire drawer’s contents on to the floor (or

so it seemed to us as we watched television below in the living room, often staring up at the

ceiling dumbfounded and laughing). Then, thundering from either a crack in my mother’s

bedroom door or the house’s intercom system, ―Whoever is making that racket better shut up

now!‖ This was not playful. This was not a tornado watch. It was a warning. Funnel on the

ground, one mile wide, chewing up and spitting out sharp pieces of glass and wood—we

wouldn’t be going to the theater today to enjoy a movie, but to give my mother space and to seek

a refuge of our own.

Many times I felt as if I was walking on hot coals in the house, the singe of the heat

beneath pulsing up my veins into my stomach where it settled, churned, and spiked. I’d often feel

paralyzed—in my room, in the basement, preparing lunch in the kitchen without ever really

touching a plate, the counter, or the refrigerator door. My muscles would be so tense I’d have to

lay down on my bed to relax, listening to Enya on my Walkman while counting the dried drops

of the popcorn ceiling. It was a full body Charlie horse, and was probably caused just as much

by, if not more, my own intense shyness and genetic disposition for quiet. But where did my fear

come from? Was it the result of a house that was never quiet enough at the right moments,

moments that were mercurial in their appearance? Or was my fear actually some auto immune

response my mother passed on to me in some deeper recesses of my blood? Was she herself

afraid? And of what?

When my mother was low she was low, but when she was high she was high—I suppose

I get this from her. There’s no middle, and when I try to act my way to a good or happy or

congenial attitude, I find I expend ten times more energy then if I were running a marathon. I

can’t last long at all doing that. My mom could act like this on the occasional family swim day

on Sundays in summer, a birthday party, Easter, Thanksgiving, but she wasn’t about to waste this

energy and talent on her immediate family, and why should she? This house was as much her

solace and refuge to be herself as it was ours. Still, when my mother has the flu she miraculously

gets up, works on the computer, cooks a quick dinner, and takes a walk around the house. Me? I

lay in agony for days on my bed until my flesh and moans and groans fuse into the sheets as I

give in to the solitude of pain.

This uncanny skill of hers, what else can I call it because I admire it so much, was clearly

a conquering. It was not a negotiation or a truce. It was willpower of incredible proportion.

When I was sick I’d get kicked out of bed to dizzily eat a piece of toast or swallow some pills

with my mom impatiently standing above my bent-over form in the kitchen.

―I can’t eat anything. It huuuurts too much,‖ I’d cry. And the response?

―You will eat this toast and swallow these pills if I have to wait here all day long and

cram them down your mouth with my fingers. Then you’ll really feel bad, won’t you?‖ Maybe

this is what a parent is supposed to do, what a mother does, but when she acted like this I had no

options. Not a one. She terrified me in an honestly comforting sort of way. And back up in my

bed, an hour later, feeling a pulse of life slowly threading its way back into me, I thanked her in

my mind. Without that fearful encouragement I wouldn’t be able to make myself get up and live

my life when the clouds roll in, the air turns damp like a cold steam, and I want to surrender to

my body and emotions.

On those real and metaphorical rainy days of my youth, I suppose Mom wasn’t giving in,

though at the time it appeared so. No, she was recalibrating, preparing, waiting, storing up. She

was fighting something off the only way she knew how, and even the rain was necessary for this

to happen—someday it would finally weather away whatever it was that had a hold of my

mother for so long. In the stillness of a summer shower I pause, I close down, I recalculate and

plan out tomorrow when Mom will emerge as if from a cocoon, transformed and energized until

the next breaking point, and the next, for however long she needs. And when we’d finally see her

in the garden we knew the corner had been turned. Yet outside it seemed as if she were both

burying and tending herself, a constant ceremony whose solitude became mildly mythic and left

me wondering what was out there, what was really happening. The answers always seemed to

lay in the garden just below the surface. But unsure of myself, I’ve never known how to

approach them, or where they might actually be.

* * *

At about thirteen or fourteen I was allowed a small portion of the yard to grow

strawberries. This spot was, literally, the far corner of usable space for my mother, and a place

that was last on her list for planting. It was also by the pool, so chlorinated water often found its

way into the roots of sickly looking daylilies and various shrubs which had little landscaping

value to my mom—something had to be grown by the pool, beneath the canopy of large maple

trees. My corner would get just enough sun to redden a few dozen berries. I’d show Mom.

And so she helped me buy the plants, stick them in the ground, and then stood back: this

was my patch. They took off fast, assuredly spreading and blooming with fragrant white flowers

in early summer. Weeds were also spreading assuredly. A couple times per week I’d get a kind

reminder—read, what the heck are you doing to my landscape, boy—that weeds were overtaking

the strawberry plants. I’d hustle out when the pressure became as much as I could bear, often

during a light rain shower on a sleepy weekend morning, and plunge my fingers into the mud.

Yes, indeed, the weeds were huge, say one to two inches tall, and maybe six to ten in total. It was

an invasion of the highest order, and my poor strawberries were clearly on the threshold of hell.

Needless to say, I tried thereafter to keep one step ahead of the master gardener. I, the

bumbling apprentice, was given a four by three foot plot at the corner of the pool, right at the

edge of a six foot retaining wall perched atop a steep forty foot hill, and if I failed the whole

house and garden would be lost, perhaps tumbling down to the lakeshore. I’d weed when Mom

was at the grocery store or had to make a run to Target. I’d sneak away from helping her in the

front rock garden and slip into the distant land of the backyard, slyly hugging the chain link

fence to reach my strawberries. I learned. I weeded. I got dirty. The flowers turned to white-

chocolate hearts of fruit, which turned pink, which turned red. The scent grew sweeter by the day

in the far off land of strawberries—plants that yielded not only aesthetic beauty, but actual

physical sustenance. Perhaps this was why I kneeled with my plants in this secluded and

undesirable place: Mom didn’t want the plants to replace her, and by giving me this third-rate

spot of land they would, assuredly, die. So I’d give up. Or I’d try even harder—either way I’d be

a gardener like her, and the millions that surely came before us.

Strawberries can do more than tease the tongue and satisfy the groans of a belly. Their

leaves, mixed with parsley and blueberry leaves, can be steeped to create a drink that’s good for

combating diabetes. Strawberry juice and its dried roots can effectively remove tartar from teeth

and heal the gums. Crushed, the fruit can treat ringworm, skin cancer, and sunburn. It is a skin

cleanser. It can relieve sore eyes. The Victorians believed strawberries represented absolute

perfection in their language of flowers. Researchers at Kew Gardens in England have genetically

identified that strawberries are most closely related to marijuana. In the late seventeenth century

the French laid the groundwork for strawberry cultivation: Jean de la Quintine, the royal

gardener at Louis XIV’s Versaille, kept the details on how to develop larger berries and how to

ward off pests. I could use his expertise.

Mon dieu, the squirrels and birds come by the hundred. Each morning I check the patch

to see half eaten fruit, or the last red and white remnants hanging like hacked flesh from the

stem. I try a black netting that you secure to the ground with thin, metal ―U‖ stakes. This works a

little. I try doubling up the layer, but the problem isn’t the thickness, it’s the fact that it lays on

the plants themselves, so even though squirrels can’t reach through the net with their larger

paws, birds can still delicately balance on the covering and peck their way into the fruit. I try

elevating the net, but can’t find a good support system, and the wind is no help.

Eventually, as all gardeners learn, you have to understand that plants aren’t yours, but

that you share them with the world around you. Gardening is an act of sacrifice in more ways

than one. There’d be plenty of berries for me and my family to enjoy. I wouldn’t pick the half

eaten ones, but leave them for the animals, hoping they’d come back to finish what they started

and not start anew. Still, I wanted to stand on the deck overlooking the landscape, prop a gun on

the railing, and pick off whatever I saw. In the corner of a closet Dad had a duck gun he used

decades ago. Can you imagine what the suburban neighbors would say while day and night loud

cracks and booms echoed across the lake valley? And the carnage. The strawberries would be

submerged by dead and dying robins and grey squirrels—you can’t easily wash off death from

sugary-rose-smelling fruit shaped like a heart. Maybe all they wanted was to treat their sunburns

or polish their beaks.

The netting helped just enough and for two years I had a good yield. I’d share the

strawberries, but there was really only enough for my insatiable appetite, and the few I allowed

for my dad who loved fresh fruit (we were the only men in the house, not counting two neutered

cats, so it seemed natural to share only with him). At the time, my only preferences for ―healthy

food‖ were green beans and strawberries—everything else was poison. When I came inside with

a bowl of strawberries Mom was quick to let everyone know these were mine, so when you were

snooping around in the fridge beware, and ask her son first if you wanted any—I had joined the

cultivated landscape and climbed a rung up the green-thumb ladder. These were exciting times.

Somehow it was a connection between my days in grade school growing green beans in

Styrofoam cups, and whatever future I might have experimenting with my own small garden.

Perhaps my two favorite produce products were green beans and strawberries because I was

allowed, encouraged, to grow them. If when I was six we’d planted squash and broccoli and

tomatoes, I might have had a more diverse appreciation for sustenance. Candy and french fries

did not grow on trees.

Nor did time. Which is why, during the third year of my patch when the plants lay dying

and the weeds were truly knee high, Mom tilled the corner of the garden and planted orange

daylilies, which were on the bottom rung of her perennial list—the message was obvious. That

summer strawberries kept emerging from the soil, little fingers of vines with one or two flowers,

and Mom hacked them out like weeds. I had lost my interest and energy to video games and

homework. Perhaps she was genuinely disappointed, or perhaps she had anticipated this and

accepted it long ago. Maybe the seed of gardening was all that needed planting, and at over 200

per strawberry, something was bound to stick inside of me and develop down the road. This

made the patch worthwhile, and since my mother was a gardener she knew patience and instinct

of a higher, or lower order. Something would bloom. I’d be a gardener some day.

* * *

Like any family, mine has secrets that get slowly revealed to its members through the

decades. It’s sort of an honor, I suppose, part of growing older and being recognized as an adult

and no longer a child. It’s a mixed blessing: cursed with knowledge and blessed with next-to-

impossible-to-earn respect.

Through bits and pieces I’ve come to learn my grandfather was an alcoholic and a

physical abuser. At first, some years ago, my mother hinted at such when her biological father

sent her a Christmas card after decades of silence. This event brought to light that the grandfather

I loved was a stand in of sorts. My grandmother—now a staunch Christian—gave birth to my

mom, her oldest child of five, at the age of seventeen. She, too, was an alcoholic and rather free-

wheeling, from what I gather. But again, the pickings are slim, I don’t really know, and no one

wants to talk, not even pictures—these were burned long ago by my grandmother, so the only

physical history I have to trace is on my father’s relatively normal side of the family.

When my ―real‖ grandfather sent his card, my mother had no choice but to tell her kids

phase one of many phases I doubt I’ll ever get to the end of. Years later I heard the grandfather I

knew beat his two boys, and now one has estranged himself from the family blaming his mother

for not protecting them. Not too long ago, after my grandmother’s failed trip to visit her son, my

mom explained again why he was so aloof. Leaning against the edge of the living room couch,

half on its thick arm, my mom crosses her tan arms and goes on.

―He blames your grandma for not protecting us kids from your grandpa.‖ She looks

toward the blank screen of the TV, then down to her feet. ―She couldn’t do anything of course,

and things change anyway. People grow up. It was a long time ago. It’s your mother, for pete’s

sake.‖ She says this last bit looking at me, maybe planting the seed for anything I yet don’t know

about, or for something unforeseen which might happen. ―It’s your mother.‖

But stranger in this is, as she looks to the floor, to me, around the room, to me, the floor

again—strangest of all this are the words ―protecting us kids.‖ She said this in a different way

than before. She didn’t say ―boys,‖ and her eyes became a darker black than they usually were.

They didn’t swell, but the pupils expanded. I can’t forget this one detail. Like a cat, or some

animal backed into a corner, those eyes opened and seemed to see something I couldn’t. They

were waiting, ready, simultaneously fierce and afraid. And it was brief. I imagine, as the oldest

child who cooked for the family, mended clothes that were handed down from her to her younger

siblings, she must have had to stand ground in that house in Racine that I drove by only once, as

a small child, on the way to a family reunion.

She didn’t say what I hoped she would, but I suppose I didn’t want to hear either. But I

did. I wanted to hear it. I did. I wanted to hear how Grandpa, smoking and drinking, memories of

Korea playing along like the TV in the living room, all came knocking against her arms, her face,

her back. How the children ran screaming through the house, huddled together in closets,

Grandma sitting at the kitchen table waiting for it to end as it always did after a few moments.

Just take it, she might whisper to herself. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I can’t take it for you.

I don’t know what changed. Religion. Growing up. Working things out of yourself.

Moving away. Patience. Long after whatever happened the youngest son, retired from the army,

was killed by a drunk driver. Then Grandpa got cancer after years of mourning, bearing the loss

as he was chipped away by disease. Maybe my uncle, the estranged son, rejoiced. Maybe this is

what made him who he was. But my mom, passing out bits of a life I can’t possibly imagine in

the people I love so dearly, won’t live by the memories anymore. She moves on. She takes me

out to the garden, where we silently worked together for years, and says she planted morning

glories because the scent reminds her of her grandmother’s house, how much fun it was to go

there. And without knowing it, either of us perhaps, something else comes up from the earth and

slightly opens to the light.

* * *

Eleanor Perenyi, author of the classic collection of garden essays Green Thoughts, states

that ―women invented horticulture. When men stopped hunting beasts they quickly made her

from inventor into goddess. Men were always terrified of women’s complicity with nature and

the power it gave them.‖ Such fear can be seen in the accusation of witchcraft among puritans in

America, where women who knew of herbal remedies were quickly accused of a higher (evil)

mystical power. Perenyi goes on to suggest that flowers are the least menacing plants in the

biosphere, and that their sole purpose is simply to look beautiful, which is why men give them as

gifts to women, to remind them of their place in a patriarchal society.

And yet such a possible intention was turned on its head by the Japanese art of flower

arrangement called ikebanu, whose masters are now male. It’s originally believed that this art

came from women who used flowers as a means of silent communication with stern samurai

husbands to whom spoken words would have been insulting and unacceptable.

Illiterate women in Ottoman harems created a language of flowers to subvert the enforced

ban of literacy and language placed upon them. This act was later brought to the west by

Charlotte de la Tour, who published Le Langage des Fleurs in 1819—one of many plant

dictionaries of the time—spawning the Victorian vogue of florigraphy. This art conveyed secret

messages of admiration and amorous intention beneath the established decorum and

conservatism of the Victorian society. What some of those bouquets must have said, one can

only imagine. And what would a man or woman see upon immediately opening the front door to

their home, a messenger holding a bouquet.

Perhaps such a grouping of flowers and cuttings would go something like this: snowdrop,

jonquil, bluebells. Petunia, peach, daisy, peony, sunflower, tulip, violet. P.S. dill, chamomile,

apple, fuschia. Don’t have your dictionary handy? Though there was no one standard translation,

my message comes out something like this: I hope you return my affection with constant

adoration. Never despair, I am your captive always, your loyal love, I love you purely and

eternally, my perfect lover I adore you faithfully. P.S., I lust for your exuberance, I am tempted

by your taste. I suppose this might be a quite a big arrangement, and I doubt they were ever this

elaborate or even translated so clearly, but if I were to receive a bouquet this might be a good one

to get. Unless it were inverted upside down, which would reverse the meaning.

* * *

There is a small corner of my mom’s garden near where the stream begins on the hill. It

is an angled slat of space against the wall of trellises taken up by a weeping evergreen shrub

whose long branches finger the water sliding over river rock. In cold fall mornings the needles

hold minute icicles, and the shrub becomes the water, just as the water reflects the shrub in

summer.

Though this area is no more than four feet wide by six feet long, and is open in view to

the rest of the garden and the backyard, it is a place that is solitary, that almost feels sheltered

and cloistered in some unexplainable way. I come to kneel here against the stones, to be no taller

than the shrub or the nearby irises. From here one can trace the stream, follow its implied

direction all the way to the pool, and beyond, the lake. Somehow in this place I feel the most

calm I’ve felt in months.

Landscape designer and Zen priest Shunmyo Masuno says that ―when someone decides

to create something, they are not aware of what and how they are going to make that thing up

until the moment that they actually begin. However, once they have started, they become

completely absorbed in what they are doing and the unconscious mind instantly takes over. In

other words, when the mind, hands, body, time, and materials merge into one then the

unconscious, which goes beyond the bounds of consciousness, is responsible for creating things.

This means that the spirit of the person, who has created the thing, becomes part of it.‖ Even in

the planned garden, the rules that began as guides slowly fall away in moments of inspiration.

The gardener colors outside the lines, and in this way connects to the larger world around—and

perhaps to the deeper one within. Everywhere these indelible marks exist, inspire, and instruct, if

we are silent and still enough to understand them.

The first Japanese garden treatise is known as the Sakuteiki, written sometime around

1050. It preaches to keep close to your heart the works of past masters, and not to copy nature

but to interpret it, subtly adding or taking away just a few things so it becomes your own design.

Japanese design has always been predicated on the basis of environmental awareness and

stewardship, and as such a Japanese garden can occur anywhere—as long as you use local

materials. In Japan, these are evergreens, maples, and stone, all condensed images of nearby

mountains and forests, which is where our ideas of Japanese garden appearance come from. But

a Japanese garden can also be prairie grasses, rudbeckia, liatris, and cottonwood. When you look

at a restored prairie, or the 1% left untouched in America, there is Japanese garden potential

waiting to be crafted—the Sakuteiki states that 90% of all designs are already given in the form

of the natural landscape, all you have to do is tinker. Shunmyo Masuno discusses his process in

using local material in a spiritual way: ―Buddhism sees stones and trees as having souls [the

Japanese word is kokoro, which is usually translated as heart / mind / spirit of things]…. Finding

the right stone is something like meeting a person…. When I encounter a stone that seems right,

whose voice and energy and heart are right for the garden, then I sketch it and take

measurements and find its place in the garden…. Here is one of the many instances in which

Buddhist training and practice are in complete congruence with the art of landscape design…. I

always feel at one with the plants, when I am planting them and with the stones, when I am

arranging them. This is the moment when you know instinctively that everything is right, the

moment of realization, which in Zen is called jikishitanden.‖

Tea gardens are the epitome of melding Zen Buddhist teaching with Japanese landscapes.

On a small island, penned in and cut off by mountains and valleys, the vistas are lush and

immediate, but you must be careful to watch where you are and where you are going, because

the paths skirt slopes and pass over jagged stones. This is why it is so important to have uneven

stepping stones (tobi-ishi) on winding paths, so that the garden visitor is forced to keep their

head down and watch where they are going. At a certain point, determined by the garden

designer, a large, flat stone is placed where the visitor can rest, look up, and see the intended

view. By extension, when passing over water, an eight plank bridge—yatsuhashi—is often used.

Each section turns in sharp angles, both forcing a mindful experience in the garden as well as

ensuring that evil spirits cannot follow you (these spirits can only walk in straight lines).

Gardens in the Japanese style rely not on symmetry, but spacial balance. That often

means contrasting elements used near one another, for example the sacred triad of three—often

three dimensional stones—among or near a two dimensional plane, like sand, crushed stone, or a

mossy berm which mimics snowfall. In some gardens, the sand is raked by Buddhist priests who,

in an act of meditation, are inscribing or translating the feeling of wind or water through their

motions. No matter what, no single object is dominate, and the eye is never meant to stop and

rest on anything but to always be led back to a source of the design—the path, the stream.

Ma is also important, translated from the Zen Buddhist concept of mu, or nothingness;

the space around an object influences the visitor’s experience of that space, through balance and

harmony, as much as the actual object itself—in visual art one would call this negative space.

Here, yohaku-no-bi, the beauty of paucity, can be experienced. Just as a designer may become

connected to a stone and its placement, or a shrub and its bonsai-like careful trimming decade

after decade, an experience of transference occurs. All of your emotion is let go and you allow

yourself entry into some minimalist existence, some cleansed or focused view of your place in

the landscape—one in which we hardly have any more.

In these gardens—and perhaps in my mother’s garden—absences are places to connect

ourselves to the landscape as we are reminded of our continued need to be vigilant about our

precariousness in the world, via winding pathways and non-dominate objects in the garden.

There is time for reflection and time to be opened to something more through the narrowest

vistas. In the garden, as in the tradition of bonsai, balance is achieved through letting go in

concentration, through the determined, joyful tension of focus—like a spring carefully coiled

tightly then released. The nearness of our minute and exact perception is invigorated by the

largeness of a blossoming greater perception, and the only thing left is the silence of

understanding without knowing. Perhaps this is the beginning of faith.

All of this can be summed up elegantly and efficiently, of course, in the following

proverb where a 16th

century Japanese tea garden master designed a space for a client using the

principle of Shakkei:

Sen no Rikyu built a garden enclosed by a tall hedge that blocked the view of the sea.

The client for whom the garden was built was unhappy—until he bent to wash his hands

in the water basin. The sea then became visible in a gap between the hedges and the client

smiled.

As the tea master had hoped, the client realized the intent behind the design as his mind

made the connection between the water in the basin and the great ocean, and thus

between himself and the infinite universe.

* * *

―Mind if I join you, or are you doing your solitary writer thing?‖ My mother approaches

the edge of the circular brick patio at the base of her back garden, and seems at once sincere and

sarcastic. I had had my eyes closed for just a few minutes, so I’m not sure where she came from.

―No. Go ahead.‖ I’m happy she’s come by. Usually, I feel disruptive when I corner her

outside—there seems to be simultaneous tension and complacence to my presence in the world

surrounding my childhood home. Maybe she feels the same, I’d never thought of that before.

Maybe she, a woman I’ve always taken to be strong-willed, bull-headed, and good for a kick in

the pants when needed, maybe she always feels like she’s interrupting me.

I’d been outside in the early evening before dinner just for the warm shade and the

inaudible soft mists that touch my legs, coming from the two foot waterfall just feet away. The

smell of juniper—one that piggybacks along several specific memories in my life—sweetens and

clouds the moment to the point of blissful confusion. Being in nature is like being on a merry-go-

round set at 180 rpm—so much to focus on, so much to see, smell, touch, and hear. Squirrels

perform Cirque du Soleil twirls and leaps on thin branches high above in the maple and oak

canopy; sparrows, finches, and cardinals call themselves home in the waning hours of sunlight

that begin to cool between the limbs and shadows. Mom settles into her chair without making the

slightest sound, or if she does it blends into the hesitant rustle of leaves in a light breeze.

I look at her by looking around her, into the garden we tended together when I was

younger. I glance from butterfly bush to her flower-printed shirt speckled in dirt, from the

manicured weeping spruce to her thick dark hair still combed in waves that blend into the criss-

cross pattern of the black chain link fence behind her. The curved metal legs of the glass table

mimic her recline: a head that sticks out a little from the torso, eager and patient to hold the

world around it, the curve of the thickening neck back in toward a body that settles out around it,

just wide enough to hold firm against the ground. Her tennis shoes—the sides and bottoms green

from lawn mowing—give her the mark of being partly absorbed into something other, stained by

some place, some landscape where I’d never been.

―It’s very peaceful out here this time of day,‖ she says suddenly, but the comment blends

into the pause between breezes and flighty chickadees whose feet are stuck into maple trunks. A

moment later she says, ―My favorite time of day,‖ hazarding a response from me, or maybe the

distant clouded growl of a motorboat passing down on the lake. I say nothing, but lift one leg

atop the other to give myself, unconsciously, the reposed, thoughtful and participatory look a

person might have in a business meeting. She took the hint of attention without flinching, and

without turning from her gaze over the hillside to the water. ―How are you doing?‖

―I’m fine. I think.‖ I add the latter bit simply to lighten the moment, or—looking on me

and my family’s tendency to avoid intimacy and openness—used a hint of sarcasm and humor to

detach myself from the depth of emotion growing around me.

―I mean,‖ she begins more directly. ―I mean no more stomach problems.‖ After college

I’d had issues with acid reflux disease, a newly-coined term in the medical world, that had kept

me from eating normally for months at a time and made me lose a bit too much weight—all of

this likely due to my post-college depression. But even Mom’s question surprises me. It isn’t

what I thought she meant, or was going to ask.

―I’m fine. No more problems.‖ I say. This is the truth, and I knew she knew that. We both

felt it wasn’t the question she wanted to ask, but couldn’t find the right metaphorical question to

mask the more important one. Every question has an imbedded or hidden question, and in my

family that’s the one being asked. If you answer to the obvious question it also serves as an

answer for the imbedded question no one is brave enough or forthright enough to ask. But even if

you only intend, and believe, you’re answering the simpler more obvious question, it’s always,

always taken as the other’s answer. Confused? It can all be boiled down to being asked, ―How’s

the chicken.‖ And by replying that it’s very good, you are also saying ―I feel happy, content, and

am glad to be here with you.‖ Maybe it’s like this in other families, but I’ve never seen one more

concerned with innuendos, subtleties, and roundabout attempts at saying things other families

take for granted—the ―I love you‖ or ―I have to get something off my chest‖ or ―Can we sit

down and talk.‖ Nobody just sits down to talk.

But even in my mother’s quiet gestures there’s the nurturing quality of perfection,

tinkering, deadheading the past so something new can bloom in its place. Her body might

lumber, exhausted at the end of the day, but her arms settle like feathers into the chair, a walk,

putting sheets of cookie dough into the oven—everything seems at once gentle and confidently

precise as if she were a surgeon.

So, after answering her question about how I feel, I knew this also meant that I was

happy, that my life seemed good, that things were in balance in grad school and that I was living

how and what I wanted to live. But maybe this question was also one that begged for reciprocity,

to be reflected back, to have a dialogue of questions with answers that nobody knew how to

answer correctly.

―How are you doing?‖ I ask, looking straight into the side of her eyes.

―I’m ok,‖ she says smiling into the snow-in-summer circling the patio. Bingo.

―Everything I’ve been taking has helped balance me out. I went to the doctor two weeks ago and

he seems to be confident with the hormone treatment.‖ She pauses, tastes the sun flecked through

leaves, which are like signs on a highway at night, or runway lights. ―I’ve had no headaches this

month, and I’m finally having some good nights of sleep.‖ Her protracted and intense menopause

had nearly pushed our family to the brink of annihilation over the years. There was still much to

be repaired in the wake of this, but it seemed that my mother—my parent’s relationship—had

come back up gingerly from themselves, together, was testing what it was like in the new life

that medicine provided. Sometimes though, being back here in this house more as a visitor than a

son, I have a doubly hard time of seeing the real people that have made this world, this tiny

existence—that have made me.

I don’t have a clue of who my mother really is. I don’t think I ever will, but I’m resigned

to having to pretend that I do, or at least trying to find her through other lives and other places,

through the natural landscapes that have come to define who I am as much as my mother.

―I’m very happy to hear that, Mom. Hopefully, you can start to live your life again.‖

―Me too. I just hope this stuff works and doesn’t wear off. It’s time to move on.‖ Not

being ourselves makes us understand ourselves, who we are, more importantly who we want to

be. Who doesn’t have a dozen cathartic moments after having had the flu for a week? After

attending someone’s funeral? What kind of thoughts and feelings do you have after years upon

years of not being who you are? Do you suddenly become someone else? What I want to ask is

this: Are you content. Do you still love Dad. Do you enjoy each other’s company. Do you like

living in Minnesota, in this house. Is this the life you want. Is this the person you want to be, and

if not, what is that person and what are you going to do to get to that person without sacrificing

what you have built till now. Is that possible. What do you think about what I’m doing, about

who I am, where I’m headed. Tell me these things. I might be able to use them in my own life.

―I can’t believe how that clematis has taken off this year.‖ That’s what I say. That’s my

metaphor. That’s what I’ve inherited from my mother and I think I detest it while I recognize the

power behind it—the power that I think has led me to words in my life, to the skin-deep beauty

of sound and rhythm, to how incredible words look on a page in a book, to how they feel… but

never what they mean. Metaphor.

―I’ve worked so hard on that thing,‖ she says. ―I’ve spent years fertilizing it, trying to get

it to stick, to establish. Finally, it’s grasped itself and just keeps blooming. It makes me happy to

see it doing so well.‖ She looks from the clematis bunched up, thick, wildly fragrant and alive

with dark pink buds and flowers, turns toward me and then slides her eyes back to the thick

trunks of the trees on the hill anchoring the entire landscape with their deep, complex fingers

hidden beneath the soil—anchoring the whole garden, the house, this part of the street. ―I think

I’m almost done with the garden. Almost done all I can do.‖

We sit there for another fifteen minutes, undisturbed by anyone else. The stream and

waterfall going on and on, constant, decisive, furious and calming like a heartbeat. The light

retreats from the garden to the roof of the neighbor’s house, steps up as if to see further than was

possible in the low solitude of the world my mother tends day after day. The sparrows and

cardinals and squirrels go on preparing for night, rushing toward themselves and their small

purposes that seem so profound to them, to us at this moment. My mother shifts her weight a few

times over the course of ten minutes, her head and eyes as still and patient as stone. When she

decides to get up she’s slow about it, as if she were conscious of the fact she’d left something

behind, didn’t know what it was, but couldn’t quite leave without figuring it out. She walks in an

unaware zigzag through her garden, fingering a few blooms, turning over a few leaves, tossing

twigs down the hillside before finally moving toward the top and past the side of the house.

Somewhere between me and the plants, the shade and the sun, she saw what she’d been eluding.

Benjamin Vogt is the author of the poetry collection Afterimage (SFA Press), and acolection of

garden essays, Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Nebraska Garden. He has a Ph.D.

from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University.

Benjamin’s nonfiction and poetry have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and have appeared

in over fifty journals, newspapers, anthologies, and textbooks, including American Life in

Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Diagram, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ISLE, Orion, Puerto del Sol,

Sou’wester, Subtropics, The Sun, and Verse Daily. He is also the author of the blog The Deep

Middle where he rants about writing and his 2,000 foot native prairie garden. He lives in Lincoln,

Nebraska with his wife.