Sure as G-d Made Little Green Apricots: A Story of Three Gardens
Sharon May 22nd, 2008
There are tiny green apricots on my two apricot trees. I’m sure those of you from South Jersey down are thinking…so? But this is rural *upstate* New York. I live at 1400 feet, effectively zone 4, and no one grows apricots here. Whenever I mention my apricot trees, people look at me strangely, as though I’m mad to even attempt it. And I’m pretty awed myself – the first thing we did after moving here was to plant two apricot trees, which hung around looking pretty but producing nothing for a couple of years, and then died in an especially cold winter. So while it isn’t a miracle, it is perhaps the next step down – something extraordinary that gives you, if not evidence of transcendence, a tiny, tasty hint of its possibility.
But to understand the apricots, you have to know about the two gardens that came before this one. The first one was in Paramus, New Jersey, perhaps the most archetypical suburb I’ve ever visited, the kind of place that makes James Kunstler moan with pain. It was also Eric’s grandparents’ home for 20 years. They lived in a 1950s style suburban brick ranch in one of those places where there are lawn mowers going at 7 in the morning and you can’t walk to anything useful.
But that’s only part of the story. It was also another kind of suburb – one where Inge and Cyril were friends with their neighbors and the neighbors’ kids. They tutored the Russian immigrants down the road in English, shared holiday dinners with the orthodox Jewish family across the street, babysat the Pakistani family next door’s child. As they got older and less physically able, their neighbors looked out for them, came and helped them out with chores, brought over meals – as they had for neighbors before. The suburbs may have been a mad dream, but the mad dreamer came, and some of them brought their love for a place, and a house and a space, and they loved it into something beautiful.
And it was where their garden was. All my best memories of them are of their garden – if the the weather was at all warm enough, that’s where one went, out to lie in the lounge chairs or play games on the grass. It was lush, green, enclosed and miraculously peaceful. Both of them worked long hours in their garden – Cyril was the architect, and I remember him, 92 or 93, slowly but surely planting out begonias and saving me seeds from his lovely blue columbine. It was their paradise, their pride and their delight. It literally gave them life – I suspect that Cyril lived at least a year longer than he would have if he had not had his garden to get him out of his chair and into the world.
It is easy to mock suburbia, to see it as fodder for, say the suburb eating robots. But whether the idea of suburbia was always good, its execution had its troubling parts, but also its peculiar virtues and beauties as well. It is easy to forget those, as we sit judgement of what we ought have done. But I think a limited view of the suburbs is probably a mistake – at least, I can’t have one, because I remember the tremendous beauty and generosity of a host of suburban gardens, and the neighborhood they fostered. not least theirs. Because if you can love even a 1950s brick ranch and a suburban neighborhood into beauty, you can love and transform anything in the world.
When it came time for them to come live with us, one of the things they desperately wanted was a garden. By that time, Cyril was too ill and Inge too exhausted from caring for him to want to maintain anything. They simple wanted a beautiful space to rest in. So we made one. We helped them hire a landscape designer. And he made them a suburban garden in miniature, a truly beautiful one, lending shape to our vast rural landscape. The addition they lived in had its main entrance in an area enclosed on 3 sides by the house and the attached garage they wanted. It faced south, and the landscape designer hauled in far more fertile topsoil than lives on our farm, and filled it in with beautiful shrubs and low care perennials. I planted the scarlet runner beans and columbines they’d always had, since Cyril was a boy in Wales, and they rested in their gardens.
Until only a month or two before he died, Cyril was the garden designer. He said would say, “Sharon, darling, would you get me that grass seed in the garage.” And, of course, I would oblige. “What do you want to do with it, Grandpa?” I asked. “Well, I’d like to plant it, but I’m afraid I’m not up to it. Have you any thoughts about how it might get planted?” He was a clever man, and not much limited by his physical constraints.
Sadly, Eric’s grandparents lived here only a couple of years. Cyril died a few weeks before his 95th birthday, and Inge couldn’t live without him – she lasted only 4 months afterwards. And for the first year without them, we were simply too sad to do anything but go out in the garden, look at it and miss them.
In the springtime after their deaths, I had a dream. I dreamt that a grapevine and a rosebush in their garden grew all the way up to the second floor of the house, and burst in through our window one morning, blooming and scattering lush petals and fruit across the floor. And I woke up and for the very first time, looked at their garden, and thought that perhaps the garden could continue to be their memorial, perhaps be a better memorial, if I changed it a little, and made their garden bring forth not just beauty, but fruit, so that their great-grandchildren could not just enjoy the shaded beauty, but the taste of the space and gift they’d left us.
The first year I dug out a rhodedendron (I hated the thing anyway) and and a couple of viburnums and replaced them with two apricot trees and two quinces. I didn’t do much else, but that itself was enormous – at first it looked like I’d defaced their garden, removing these beautiful, productive shrubs and placing these little sticks in next to them, but they are glorious trees, and rapidly the beauty came back. The next year I took out a few more plants, added some raspberries and blackberries, comfrey, sweet woodruff, some pennyroyal as a ground cover, and a row of alpine strawberries to edge it. This year, I started out cautious, afraid that if I took out the wiegela and spirea I’d have stripped their garden altogether, but really looked at it, and saw how beautiful it was – no less, and perhaps more – and I got brave. I bought blueberries to replace the evergreen shrubs (they are all getting moved off to another part of the garden, don’t worry), hazels to go where the weigela was, and two peach trees to replace the forsythia. I planted lupins in around the blueberries, mixed in yarrows, and I’ve got two wolfberries waiting to be planted. And I bought some grapevines, and I’m going to see if I can train them all the way up to the second floor.
The apricots bloomed for the first time this year, and in our protected, south facing microclimate had their blossoms even survive a hard late frost. I was afraid they hadn’t been adequately pollinated, but yesterday the boys came running in to tell me that there were dozens of small green apricots on the tree, and so there were. As I said, it isn’t quite a miracle – just a grand unlikelihood, brought to fruition.
The garden is a fusion – the blue columbine seed brought from New Jersey, an echo of flowers from a garden in Wales, still come back every year. Fewer of the shrubs they picked out are in that part of the garden each year, but a few still are, and the scarlet runner beans race up the trellis every year, and my boys pick and eat them, calling them “Grampy’s beans.” The fruit and nut plants are mine and my idea, but Eric and the boys do all the planting this year, while I work. And the dream, well, who knows where that came from.
All gardens are fusions, hybrids, mixes of memories from our childhoods, ideas we picked up, the gifts of friends who bring chives and new thoughts, the love of people who taught you to garden, or the kindness of the strangers who help us. They contain histories so long and vast we cannot track them back – who first domesticated the potato? Who first bred this tomato, this flower? Who carried this seed across water, and how did it change when it reached these shores? What wild meadow and ancient apple combined to create this fruit? And how is it now different, in my place, in my garden?
This garden of mine is the fusion of dreams and memories, of people we loved and love still, no less that they are less proximate. It is the fusion of desires – of the suburban landscape and the food producing one. It is the linking of past and present, with the futures that run about me, nibbling and dancing. And sure as G-d made little green apricots, it will change some more under their hands, and hopefully, on and on.
Sharon
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Beautiful, just beautiful. You are a masterful writer.
Sharon, this is why you are my favorite writer on the Web. You write about so many things, in so many ways and, especially in this instance, so beautifully.
Thanks for sharing your memories and for the beautiful garden “poem”!
And btw, I, too, have mixed feelings about suburbs. Having had an idyllic childhood in a suburb of Minneapolis in the 70s, surrounded by friends and trees and shrubs and parks and beauty, I can also see the positives of the ‘burbs.
Lisa in MN
I think at their best, the suburbs can and do, create opporutnity for the best of village life (aside from that pesky car thing).
I wish I’d know your gp-in-law, Sharon.
Oh, Sharon! I’m so glad you have books coming out so I can keep your words with me more easily than I can with blog posts. Beautiful work you are doing–in the garden and in the study.
I think the suburbs at one time DID create an opportunity for village life. However, the 70s was about the end of it. As people became more and more car- and possession-obsessed, as moms went to work and kids went to daycare (not saying women shouldn’t work, this is more about both the adults in a household working and no one being home…), as life became busier and busier with “activities”, no one has been home in the suburbs and now they’re more like deserts full of blacktop and tan houses with all the people and their cars holed up inside when they are home.
I live in an older neighborhood in a small city now. People here can walk many places, and some do. But more than that, my neighbors are not as concerned about the latest car, the fanciest landscaping, the most beautiful kitchen. Many of them are not willing to spend their lives working just to have more stuff, and so many work part time or if full time at jobs they don’t “live” at. We have a better quality of life, and much more social interaction here, because of it.
Lisa in MN
You may be right, of course, but my guess is that you can find those sorts of people everywhere, Lisa. Inge and Cyril lived where they did until 2003, and their neighborhood was like that – sometimes. The people who bought the house afterwards still called them to see how they were doing. I think it got harder – but that life didn’t go away anywhere, and it could still be remade in many, many places.
Sharon
Oh yeah, I agree Sharon. It could still be remade in many places–and I sure hope it will be. The disintegration of community that I wrote about is what I’ve seen in my former suburb, and in many others around me. Also, it’s what I’ve read about in various places, i.e. Kunstler’s books. It’s also happened in many urban areas, as well as rural towns. It’s just kind of the way much of America has been in the last few decades, it seems–unfortunately to the detriment of my children and others during their growing-up years.
I sure hope we get to changing that in America in general, not just in little pockets like my current wonderful neighborhood. I think we will.
Lisa in MN
Ah, once again you’ve written something quite beautiful. While I’m over here posting about boobs and poop. Again. Oh, well
Lisa Z & Sharon
I agree — there still are Inge and Cyri’ls out there and you can still still have a community in surburbia. I think it’s easier in the sort of place I live in (a village for the men working on the railroad surround by farms that slowly was surrounded by suburbs). I can walk to the library (not alas the branch were I work), shops, post office etc. The neighbors know and help each other. But what makes it easy it partly the size and shape of the lots. They are about 50 x 175 feet, with the short side on the street. You have enough room for a garden (great talking point when getting to know people) and it’s close enough to the people down the street that you don’t feel you have to make a hike. We don’t have sidewalks everywhere, but we have streets trees. So walking along in the summer is a pleasant stroll, even if the person you are going to see isn’t in, whereas walking along a treeless street in hot weather where the houses aren’t in hailing distance isn’t much fun.
MEA
Sharon,
How about posting a few photos of your garden (and farm)? I know you value your privacy (like the rest of us), but photos can be taken so as not to reveal much, if anything, about locations.
Your garden description really made me want to see it in more than my mind’s eye.
I think that there are many community-oriented possibilities for suburbs — at least some of them. Many “housing developments” back up against shopping centers (markets and community centers) and industrial parks (jobs). Many are served by public transit (usually not enough, but that can be changed, especially using modern communication technology and good, old-fashioned jitney buses).
Many suburban yards have space for quite a lot of garden; it just takes the will to make it happen. As our economy heads downhill, many more people will have the time (and the need) to produce food in their yards.
Most suburbs are close to public parks, many of which contain plenty of space for gardens in addition to playgrounds, ballfields and nature trails.
Some suburban areas are built around small shopping centers (the frequently reviled “strip malls”) which with very little modification could become true community centers and markets as well as locations for small-scale community schools.
Churches with their large lawns and even larger parking lots are dotted throughout suburbia. The possibilities there are almost unlimited.
We may not have the fuel to bus kids to huge centralized schools, but those schools will still be very useful to the people who live near them and most suburban schools have massive parking lots and lawns around them which can become available for farming.
The buildings themselves can be utilized for workshops, swap meets, markets, cottage industries, and community centers as well as whatever school functions that are still practical.
One of the things that has made suburbia the poster child for anomie and lack of community is the constant turnover as families pack up and move to follow jobs, move from a “starter home” to a more expensive house, retire to a condo or beach house, or simply indulge their wanderlust.
With home financing becoming much harder to get and jobs harder to find, more people will stay where they are for longer and that almost automatically makes for more community.
Lacking the fuel to drive to the beach or the mountains every weekend will also contribute to the number of neighbors (and their kids) gardening and playing around a neighborhood. Hard times can definitely lead to more community, especially if people realize how important their neighbors can be to their well-being and security.
Beautiful post.
I never knew the woman who lived in my little suburban house before me. But I think of her every time I prune her rosebushes and pick her azalia flowers. She raised 7 children in my little house… now people are telling me my house is too small for my 4 boys and I!!!
Dear Sharon – love this post. However my comment is completely OT. I just discovered over at Crunchy Chicken’s blog that you, like Crunchy, AND LIKE ME, are six feet tall.
This comes to about five things you and I have in common. Plus I think you look like me when I was your age.
I don’t know what it’s all about, but you are my karmic sister. Doppelganger? Or I’m yours? Who knows. Six feet tall. Huh! (I mean, statistically, how common is it for American women to be six feet tall? and have sons born in 2000 named Elias, with I.E.P’s?)
Hey! I’m 6 feet tall too!
Lovely!
My father raised hogs in Iowa. It came to me as you described how your garden changed focus, that this is what farmers used to call ‘husbandry’. Regardless of the reason you acquire the land, or the animal, or other natural resource, you have a responsibility to use that resource wisely.
I am sure that your dream didn’t come from the Robyn McKinley book “Beauty”, which has a similar scene (great fantasy book, a re-telling of the Beauty and the Beast legend).
As for the ‘purity’ of the memorial – creating the space was the memorial. The contents are meant to reward, comfort, and inspire. By your own description, the focus and sense of the microclime shifted even from the first. Gardens grow, as should the plants that grow in them.
Well done.
This is lovely. I grow a lot of plants that are from my grandparent’s and great grandparent’s gardens. I like having the sense of connection to my family and to the places they lived. Oddly enough as my garden swings over to more and more food sources, it probably reflects my grandparent’s gardens more. I have two varieties of rhubarb from different grandparents and artichokes from my grandfather’s patch. And bean seeds that he saved. I do have roses from them too-but I think I can count them as useful rather than just ornamental!
Alan, I love your post on re-utilizing the suburbs in a low energy time. Gives me hope! One book I have on my shelf about gardening in suburbia is _Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology Of Our Own Backyards_ by Sara Stein, 1993 Houghton Mifflin. I really like the book–picked it up on a clearance table at a Wild Bird store years ago.
Lisa in MN
Lurker here. The heck with all this warm green fuzzy stuff! I want practical information! What variety are those apricots!? Anything that will make it in almost zone 4 is very interesting to me. Pretty please? Or is it a family secret?
Beautiful post – gardens can flourish anywhere if the love is there. I cherish seeds that were handed down to me by my farming and gardening mentors.
Thanks again for such a wonderful story.
Hi Rohair – they are Sunglow and Moonglow apricots. I got them from Miller nurseries. But I will note that the same varieties dropped dead when they were planted outside our home-created microclimate, so I don’t swear they can really handle anything like zone 4.
Sharon
[...] Comment on Sure as Gd Made Little Green Apricots: A Story of Three …Dear Sharon – love this post. However my comment is completely OT. I just discovered over at Crunchy Chicken’s blog that you, like Crunchy, AND LIKE ME, are six feet tall. This comes to about five things you and I have in common. … [...]
[...] Comment on Sure as Gd Made Little Green Apricots: A Story of Three …Dear Sharon – love this post. However my comment is completely OT. I just discovered over at Crunchy Chicken’s blog that you, like Crunchy, AND LIKE ME, are six feet tall. This comes to about five things you and I have in common. … [...]
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