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Flower Children This time of year, when the light dims and the colors dull, I put my garden to bed. It’s like putting my children to bed only in the most literal sense; I cover them both to protect them from the cold. Putting the garden to bed involves no cajoling or threats, no interruptions to what I attempt to do after eight o’clock, no snuggling or stories or kisses. I go outside in a spare moment here or there to cut back the wisteria to a tidy grid on the lattice so it won’t take over the house next spring. I move the last few perennials around. (I move my plants like I move furniture.) I plant a few new bulbs – last fall, some pink cyclamen and early snow glories. I pull out the pumpkin vines and the pole beans and rake the remaining crumbling leaves into big, paper recycling bags and drag them out to the curb. The frost comes nearly every morning, white and gray and silver, crackling underfoot as my girls and I leave for school, and we settle into our winter routine indoors. It doesn’t take a clinical psychiatrist with a green thumb to figure out that most women with small children don’t have the time or the energy to take care of another single living thing that needs to be fed and held upright and kept warm. It’s the reason I don’t have a dog, or a cat, or even a goldfish whose bowl needs to be cleaned. Keeping up with the bumps and bruises, jokes and stories, homework, games and fierce desires of my two girls is plenty. So I’m not quite sure how I’ve become, maybe not a gardener, but a person who, in the safety of her own back yard, takes care of a bunch of plants. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that when my children were very small, I moved into a house that already had a nicely tended bed of shrubs and flowers in the front and a few nicely tended beds in the back. I’m the kind of person who feels an obligation to the people who have lived in my house before me. Even though it’s my house, and my husband and I are paying way too much of our monthly income to own it and its 50 feet of frontage on a suburban sidewalk. It took us two years to concede that the hot tub in the back yard, which the previous owners had so happily and laboriously installed, wasn’t going to be part of our lifestyle, and the space would be better used by a swing set. I even felt a teensy bit sorry for the preteen boy whose old bedroom, when we moved in, was immediately turned frilly with eyelet curtains and a balloon border, though he would never see it. So, the garden. It couldn’t be let go. It was September when we moved in, so there wasn’t much to do, anyway. My mother-in-law came over to identify what was there and show me how to put the garden to bed. Then, after a wickedly cold New England winter, the weather finally turned warm, and the daffodils came up. Huge clusters of them in shades of butter and cream, lemon and eggshell. Then the flashy red tulips. And, oh God, the raspberries! Every morning before breakfast for three weeks in July, we stepped outside barefoot and picked just enough berries to sprinkle on top of our cereal. On the peak day, we picked two quarts of them from the little bed of chest-high canes. And suddenly, it wasn’t just a responsibility anymore, maintaining someone else’s garden. It was my garden. The guilt and the raspberries still don’t entirely explain this phenomenon, however. I feel guilty about a lot of things, but exhaustion still trumps guilt. And a couple of weeks of fresh raspberries on my Wheat Chex? Hardly enough to justify the labor required, however minimal, since I could easily buy fresh raspberries in season. The real appeal – for me, at least – is that gardening is an ideal form of parenting. It’s much easier work, and it yields quick rewards. Like most mothers, I cling, sometimes inexplicably, to my children’s littleness. I want them always to be small and funny and adoring, which they mostly still are. But I’m also a goal-oriented person, and I certainly don’t get much of a sense of accomplishment from being their mother. All right, there were moments earlier on – sleeping through the night, potty training. Moments that almost instantaneously gave way to new challenges. And anyway, those were really their accomplishments, not mine. I can take credit for so little and blame for so much more. Like all that mature behavior I’m modeling for them. I recently chastised my seven-year-old for banging the tube of toothpaste against the wall in frustration when she couldn’t open it. “Why not? You do it!” she retorted. Her rudeness didn’t go unnoticed, but neither did the truth of her message. I had kicked the baseboard in frustration the morning before when I couldn’t get her and her sister out the door on time. My plants, on the other hand, pay no attention to me. They don’t whine when they can’t get their socks on right or push each other on the way up the stairs. They only require five, maybe six, months of care per year. They grow up with minimal effort on my part –just enough for me to feel I’ve helped them along. In March, the appearance of delicate green spears of miniature iris leaves, their tips often frostbitten white, is followed by purple-blue flowers the size of peanut shells with centers colored like the backs of tigers – orange down the center flanked by white stripes with flecks of black. They are stunning enough to stop passersby on the sidewalk. At the same time, the snouts of crocuses and daffodils and tulips are pushing aside winter’s layer of soil and mulch. They nose up and spread their leaves and then their blossoms right before our eyes; every day when we come home, we can see a subtle, yet certain change. All this happens practically without me doing a thing. The pumpkins are even more thrilling. Last summer we planted them on the 4th of July, calculating a Halloween harvest, and shortly after went away for 10 days. When we came home, their dinosaur-footprint-sized leaves were spread over the mounds of dirt in which we’d buried a few seeds. Not much later, we were stepping gingerly among the vines, searching the powdery orange blossoms the size of my daughter’s hand for the telltale female ones with a bristly knob at the base – our pumpkins-to-be. We eventually found five of them and watched them grow, with some watering through the dry spells and a little bit of fungicide, from earthy green croquet balls to hardy orange bowling balls – two jack-o’-lanterns and three more to spare. An accomplishment! A triumph! Every year the morning glories grow from tiny seeds to impossibly long tendrils meandering through the deck railing with white, pink, purple, and blue flowers that open their striped hearts on sunny mornings, and every year the wisteria fills in more gaps on the trellis and reaches its long, graceful arms searchingly into the open air over our purple picnic table. They blatantly and beautifully make progress. Like children, the plants don’t always behave themselves. The lilac has refused to bloom. The coral bells have burned and shriveled in the scorching summer sun. The smokebush has rejected attempts at pruning it down to size by shooting new branches even higher, and the squirrels have stolen apples from the apple trees and dropped them on us from the branches of a nearby maple, a game they seem to find hilarious. But when the plants (and the animals) disobey, it’s nothing personal. They’re not doing it to push my buttons or test my limits. Sometimes it’s my fault – my bad parenting of them – but they don’t care, and no one will see them as a reflection of my personal failings. If my neighbor suggests some rich compost or a sprinkle of lime, I’m grateful for the advice, while unsolicited advice on parenting my children is, frankly, not usually welcome. And if I neglect my plants, as I did last summer when I went away for 10 days, thinking, “Oh, it will rain at some point” (it didn’t), they will either make it or not. Admittedly, if I lost the $85 hamamelis ‘Diane’ that sends out funky, reddish-orange fringes of blossoms early in March, I would feel sorry. But in the greater scheme of things, it’s not much of a loss. I would probably feel worse about losing a goldfish, especially if I lost it through my own neglect. If I could come up with another $85, I could buy another witch hazel. Or I might realize that I really want to try something entirely different in that space instead. There are reasons to garden beyond the short-term gratification it gives me. Perhaps the most obvious is that the garden brings beauty and color to my surroundings. Sometimes, if I have a good chunk of time, taking care of it becomes a meditative practice. Gardening is something I can do outdoors while my kids play, and it’s something they can do with me, too. (That way they get their hands on the garden hose.) And they actually eat green beans all summer, which taste far better straight from the vine on their pole bean teepee than straight from the dinner plate. Of course, gardening isn’t really ideal parenting for obvious reasons, hugs and kisses not the least of them. It’s more like mulch parenting; it fills in the gaps that the real children leave. When teaching them feels like one step forward, three steps back, I can count on my plants making their own steady progress. When loving them feels huge and fragile, I can count on my plants weathering the tough times by plunging their roots deeper. But I have never stood in my garden and thought wistfully of the days when my tomato plants were just tiny little sprouts. They are meant to be big and bursting with ripe, red fruit. My relationship to them has everything to do with what they will eventually become, if I can only be a tiny bit patient. I hope my girls will grow up to be bursting with their own fruit, too, whatever it may be. But I don’t look forward to their maturity the way I look forward to fall’s harvest. I want them just as they are, right now. And next year I will want them just as they are then. I’m really not their gardener at all. Maybe I’m more like the sun, shining as much good light on them as I can while they do the hard work of growing themselves.
Kathy Leonard Czepiel's fiction and essays have appeared in Brain, Child; Literary Mama; Blue Moon Review and other publications. She teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.
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