Other People's Gardens

Before I graduated from college, I had a bountiful list formulating in my head of all the things I wanted to do with my life. Things like, travel the world and write an award-winning memoir! Become the next J. K. Rowling! Get an MFA in creative writing! Oddly enough, Live at Home in My Parents Basement was never added to my list of aspirations.

But here I am doing exactly that. My diploma is a year and a half behind me, my school loans are doing a frantic dance in front of my eyes, and yet my junior-high school ivy wallpaper is still singing me to sleep at night. It is not exactly delightful.

On the other hand, there are some perks that come with living at home, one of them being the fact that my mother is a fantastic gardener. She plants delicious vegetables, grows roses and so many other flowers that I couldn’t begin to name them, keeps the grass green, and makes our house look far more amazing than any other house on the street.



Sometimes neighbors stop by our driveway just to say, “Thank you for the beautiful work you do.”

But my favorite part of our garden is the swing. Tucked away under the filbert tree, the swing hangs in a shady, cobweb-ridden, hidden corner of the backyard. Hummingbirds vibrate their way in and out in a few short seconds, squirrels talk to each other from up above and drop discarded nut shells at my feet. A neighbor’s cat lies a few feet away in the shade of the blueberry bushes, watching me.



I do not garden. I’ll admit it. My one attempt at growing wildflowers in a pot failed miserably. But I love, love, love other people’s gardens. I could sit in them all day. And I do.

There is a healing power contained in the swing in my mother’s garden. It comes from the things I can see and hear from that spot; the quiet spiders resting in their patched webs, the way the sun shines on the white roses growing in a perfect circle of brick, even the haphazard growth of the raspberry bushes drooping with berries. The fact that no one can see me back there, staring off into space or writing in a notebook, being healed.



I might not belong forever in my parent’s basement or my childhood bedroom, but I belong in that swing. I belong in someone’s garden. Hopefully it will be my own someday. When my loans are paid……

Jessica Porter, publicity intern

Right Plant, Wrong Place

I recently attended a Get Gardening! event with Ray Rogers, author of Pots in the Garden and Coleus. He spoke about many things: Color, line, form, space, and texture. But one thing that stood out to me was something he said in his introduction. He prefaced his talk by saying that many gardeners don’t take into consideration the needs of the plants when they work in the garden--they walk into a garden center or nursery, pick a plant they like, take it home, and just plunk it into the earth without thinking about water usage, light requirements, space needs, etc.

This struck me particularly hard when I got home and looked at my own garden. I had planned it for months before actually building the box this spring, and I had sketched the “look” of it on paper deciding that the 3’ x 3’ space (9, 1’ x 1’ gridded spaces) would be designed as such:


Tomato Herbs Tomato
Eggplant Peppers Cucumber
Tomato Herbs Tomato

This seemed all well and good to me, until I realized--after the fact, of course--that I hadn’t taken into consideration that the tomato plants in the outside front positions might in fact grow too tall and shade my peppers out of the sun.



At first it wasn’t that big of a deal--everything was small--but after about a month or so, I realized that while everything in my garden was lush and green, the pepper plants hadn’t quite matured the way everything else had. Sure, they looked healthy, but that was about it. They were tiny compared to my giant tomatoes.



Next year will be different. I will consider the varying heights and light requirements of my veggies, and the peppers will definitely be front and center. For now, I’ll just enjoy my glorious tomatoes, and chalk this up to a learning experience!

Olivia Dunn, publicist

Demise and Rebirth

I’ve heard rumors that even the best gardeners kill plants. I’ve also heard that the truly enlightened don’t waste time on regret – move on, get another plant, put it in another place, see what happens.

I admire this. I picture experienced gardeners as being kind of like spies or tough detectives in novels or on television. Confident, ready for anything, letting bygones be bygones. (At least, that's how I like my detectives. None of this pesky humanity business for me. There's no room for doubt in a detective!)

I have not yet reached that enlightened state. I still go through lots of guilt when one of my plants dies because of me. I have a list in my head. Recently, there is my viburnum. Or my echinacea that I forgot to water one weekend, and that turned into a crispy array of tiny leaves. It looked like what herbs are supposed to look like when you hang them upside down in a cool dry place for three months.

As a sort of penance, I tend to water things that I'm convinced are dead. I think of it as buying my way into the good graces of the departed spirit of my plant. (Too much anthropomorphizing can do that to a girl.)

But sometimes I've called the death too soon, and the watering pays off. My viburnum? Sprouting new leaves.



And the echinacea? Tiny new growth as well!



My garden is a better place.

-Chani West-Foyle, Marketing Associate

My First Garden

I am currently researching magazines as I prepare for a trip to New York to pitch Timber Press story and segment ideas to editors and television producers. The three that I have been reading this week--Every Day With Rachael Ray, Real Simple, and Metropolitan Home--have very different editorial styles and don’t have a strong focus on gardening, though they all dabble a little bit.

You can probably imagine my surprise then when reading the July/August Metropolitan Home’s “Letter from the Editor” about the joys and trials of her gardening experiences over the past few years. Having just started my first garden this year, it is a relief to know that some of the problems I’m facing aren’t just because I’m inexperienced--insects are nondiscriminatory when it comes to gardens, beginner or experienced, and I’m just happy I don’t have horses anywhere nearby that can lean over the fence and snack on my heirloom green tomatoes!



The latter half of the letter describes how she has been too busy this year to get started on her garden. By mid May she hadn’t even turned the soil over, or ordered seeds. After a recent dinner at a farm/restaurant she comes away with one conclusion: Slow down and plant your garden.



This struck me as my summer schedule starts to heat up (pardon the pun!). With weekend barbecues with friends, trips to the beach, and general summer activities, I need to remind myself that it is okay to just slow down and work in my garden--the joys of watching my tomatoes grow and eating parsley with my nephew somehow bring all the busyness of summer into focus.

Olivia Dunn, senior publicist