GARDENS SAY SO MUCH ABOUT US by Mary Lou Sanelli

 

Suppose for a minute you once wrote a book entitled Women in the Garden. And after a few decent reviews, low and behold, you are invited to sign copies at a prestigious garden show.

Since that initial invitation, I learned that garden shows are numerous as the charities they support. And for two summers, I packed up my books, covering freeways from Seattle to San Francisco, turning down a few because I could see myself taking on more of these “shows” than I was wired to handle. Because as lovely as some of them were, it wasn’t the gardens that most intrigued me, but the social climate entwining each, as varied as the plant life. And there was a deepening of my understanding that just about everything that happens in this world, no matter how inconsequential, is a story.

Completely naive about garden shows, I thought the gardens on display would be similar to, say, the Eagle Harbor Church Community Garden near my neighborhood on Bainbridge Island—a vibrant, unpretentious garden, its gardeners eager to share enthusiasm with nosey onlookers like me.

Then I found myself on the East Side of our Emerald City. And trust me, had I not been invited as an author, I’m pretty sure my life would never have intersected that life.

Those of you not familiar with the city of Medina need to know that Bill Gates lives an estate away from the sheared-for-golf lawn I propped my book table on. When I drove up, foremost on the mind of my host was that my car was not fitting enough to be parked anywhere near her tiled piazza. She was obviously suffering from some kind of garden show performance anxiety. She shooed me off with a little wave of her hand as if to say, “It’s no big thing to move it.” Even though we both knew it was a big thing. With no street parking in the neighborhood without a permit, where would I park? Right before she pounced, I remember sensing the stillness of the estate. When I opened my car door, the wind made a quiet, swishing sound as it moved through the trees.

I proceeded to unload my box of books before driving off to hide my Dodge Colt, the walk back from the Community Center seeming twice as long now that I was anxious and feeling, on all counts, inferior. “I don’t want to go back,” I said to myself.

And the garden?

Well, the garden was a portal into another landscaped universe, as far from where one might say, “Hey, honey, come and see the size of my delphiniums!” and deep into the world of “Behold what a landscape architect and a lawn maintenance crew can contrive.”

To me, cordoned off gardens showcasing indigenous foliage are tidy but ungratifying. If I’m promised a show, I imagine flora that blooms with colors that reach into me. But what I mostly saw let me down, in a way: fifty shades of forest green.

Maybe it’s my proletariat roots reaching deeper than appreciation can go, but I found myself wondering if the owners of the grounds gaze over their gardens with pride but from a distance, unable to grasp a hands-on, I-grew-this-from-seed kind of knowledge. More than once, I asked myself, Do you think these new houses need to be so large in order to house the size of the void such a lack of personal, practical involvement can create?

The next weekend—and what a relief it was—I sunned myself behind a 1920’s bungalow on the southern end of the island, next to where a wooded lot met the green of a much-loved garden. The following day, I was in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford, where the owner didn’t rope off her aromatic ground cover but invited guests to step on it just so we could know the swiftness with which a scent can begin and end. The interconnection of gardener to garden? Fertile as her compost in clear sight and steaming.

And, in my eyes, nothing is more satisfying than pride with a scent like that.

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Mary Lou Sanelli's newest collection of essays, In So Many Words, is recently out. Please order it at your favorite independent bookstore (protect what we love!). A professional speaker and a master dance teacher, Sanelli lives with her husband on Bainbridge Island. www.marylousanelli.com