I guess I have been gardening all of my adult life because I can’t help myself. I feel compelled to. I blame my father.
A refugee from the Hungarian revolution of 1956, dad was an avid gardener. The gardens of my St. Paul, Minnesota childhood were loaded with vegetables and fruits – Hungarian wax peppers, corn, green beans, cucumbers, peas, tomatoes, herbs, potatoes, kohlrabi, raspberries, blackberries.
In late winter, atop Minneapolis Star & Tribune papers spread across the kitchen floor, seeds were started in peat pots. They were babied beneath basement grow lights and hardened off in cold frames in the harsh Minnesota springs. Emerging tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths heralded the warm weather. By early summer, flowers spilled across mulched pathways. Simple marigolds and snapdragons are still majestic in my mind.
I associate stealing my first sips of beer with gardening. I knew dad was too busy watering his prized plots at the end of the long summer days to notice his youngest child slipping through the shadows to pull from his unattended cans of Meister Bräu.
Nightmares were born of the mysterious — and monstrous — compost pile hidden at the back of our property alongside our neighbor’s garage and the alleyway. The rotting kitchen scraps always threatened to escape the teetering cage built of wire fencing and latticework. I only came to understand how precious this black gold was to my father when he rented a U-Haul to move the pile to our new property out there on the edge of the prairie before relocating anything else.
The new suburban Minneapolis lot was a bonanza to my father. He now had the space to grow terraced grape vines for making wine. He built his own gardening shed on the bank of a small creek flowing through the back yard. Fruit trees: peach, apricot, plum, apple, pear, cherry, populated the property. I had to push the yellow Montgomery Ward’s mower with wonky wheels around island-beds of currants, gooseberries, cranberries and blueberries. Who but an immigrant would use asparagus as a border plant, or use pig fencing as a design feature, complete with gates hung with rope hinges? With such a visionary gardening palette to paint from, his compositional options were limitless. This no doubt horrified the linear and sterile sensibilities of so many of his suburban neighbors who preferred their lawn and gardens somewhat less earthy.
A sudden diagnosis of inoperable and terminal pancreatic cancer crushed his gardening dreams with the mindless finality of a hailstorm.
I was 12 years old when I lost my father. I think I have been gardening ever since in an ongoing attempt to connect with a world still all too often threatening to spin out of control.
Gardening brings me peace. I love the opportunity it affords to combine the orderly and the wild. There is a poetry to the practice beyond the simple mechanics of it. As much as anything, gardening offers wonderful joys and surprises. Some small, some significant.
I have learned I can share these aspects of gardening with others.
