As I sit in my garden studio this February morning, looking at a redbud’s seed pods gently shivering in the slight breeze, I am enjoying my own restoration of stability. A few days ago, I was lying in bed, unable to walk, laid low by an intense, unrelenting vertigo. Because of chills and vomiting, I had assumed my problem was some form of the flu, but my doctor has since informed me my dizziness was probably caused by dislodged calcium crystals in my inner ear, perhaps BPPV–Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, Bilateral.
I would have preferred a flu diagnosis. This new diagnosis foretells a more permanent breakdown of the body, another reminder of my personal decay. On the other hand, the vertigo’s timing feels fortunate: if it is going to become a recurrent guest, I would prefer it visit during the winter months when I can’t work in any garden. And at least for now, the vertigo is receding–as long as I don’t hop on any merry-go-rounds. In a few days, I will need to put on my work clothes and venture outdoors. I would prefer to tackle my gardening tasks with a relatively clear head and steady hand.
During these days when my physical legerity has been limited, I’ve found myself frequently thinking about gardeners from my childhood. While there were dozens of vegetable and flower gardens in my hometown in southeast Kansas, only a few images have been retained over the intervening 60 years, and it turns out all these memories are of older gardeners, individuals who continued gardening despite infirmities of age.
Gardener #1. My oldest memory is of Mr. S, perhaps in his 80s when I first knew him, friendly, overweight, always clad in old, faded overalls. Mr. S had the town’s only cold-frames: rectangles of black soil confined within large, wooden boxes with peeling white paint. In the raised beds were tomatoes and peppers he had started from seed, the source for any tomatoes and peppers grown in our own garden. I have no idea what varieties Mr. S chose to grow and sell to whatever neighbors came by in the evenings. We would walk around the cold frames, identifying the seedlings we wanted, and Mr. S would gently dig them out, wrapping the roots in moistened newspaper. Later that evening, they would all be planted. Our 10-15 tomato plants always produced large, red, juicy slicing tomatoes. There were certainly no yellow or purple tomatoes, nor any cherry or Roma paste varieties. Because of the hot, dry summers, most of our tomatoes were harvested in late June and July, before the arrival of August heat. Perhaps we were purchasing determinate varieties, never intended to continue producing into the fall.
Gardener #2. In the Methodist Church, which we attended every Sunday, everyone had a preferred pew in the sanctuary. My parents and I sat on the south side, 4th pew from the front, next to the stained glass windows. In the three pews behind us were a dozen single, gray-haired women, most of them widows. Although they always appeared to me much older than my parents, many of them were still alive several decades later, suggesting they were not as old as I had imagined. One of the group, Mrs. L, had the reputation as the town’s best gardener. She certainly had an impressive vegetable garden and some beautiful flowers and shrubs surrounding her home. My Dad would occasionally receive gifts of plants from Mrs. L, which would be planted along our farmyard fence and subsequently disappear within a year or two. A fundamental principle in my father’s gardening philosophy was that any flower planted in our yard should be tough enough not to require any special care. Needless to say, Mrs. L’s generous gifts could not achieve my father’s standards. Only after he died, did my mother and I visit Mrs. L in her home and discover her secret: every morning at sunrise she would do all her gardening, avoiding the hottest hours of the day. Her vegetables and flowers received daily attention–though well before any of us would be likely to observe her daily rituals.
Gardener #3. On the opposite side of town from Mrs. L’s cottage garden was a garden, located behind a brown stucco house near the fairgrounds, that consisted primarily of a large strawberry bed. My father and I would occasionally visit in order to purchase strawberries harvested earlier that day by the owner, Mrs. C. The sales were handled by her son, a friend of my father’s. For many years Mrs. C’s son–who everyone called “Doc”–was employed as a kind of night watchman, spending his evenings guarding an appliance store. Although I could not understand why this business required its own night-time security guard, even as a child I suspected this was a ploy to provide Doc with a home away from home. Occasionally my Dad would drive into town in the evenings to “shoot the breeze” with Doc in his back room while I played among the refrigerators, stoves, and TV sets. As for the trips to Doc’s mother’s garden, I remember standing in the shade of an elm tree with my Dad, selecting a container of strawberries, while watching Mrs. C tending her strawberry patch. She always wore a dress with a full skirt and long sleeves, and on her head was a large bonnet encompassing her head in a dense shade, even in the mid-day sun. A woman perhaps in her 70s, she would stand straight-legged, bending over at the waist, as flexible as a Chinese contortionist, seemingly impervious to the summer heat.
Gardener #4. Mr. A lived in a tiny, three-room house across the road from our farm. He loved rodeos and had transformed his old pickup into a camper with a bed, his home when traveling the summer rodeo circuit. He also transformed his storm cellar into a bedroom, where he would sleep whenever any spring/summer/fall storms were in the forecast. During the two years when I delivered the Independence Daily Reporter to his front porch, I always looked forward to those end-of-the-month opportunities when I could step into Mr. A’s small living room to collect my monthly payment. Occasionally he would go into his kitchen to find the $2 he owed me, and I would nervously scan his walls–walls covered with an extensive collection of photos and drawings of bare-breasted women. Once my newspaper delivery days ended, my meetings with Mr. A were usually in his garden. My March assignment was to turn over the soil in his garden, using his old spade, and to plant dozens of hills of potatoes–his primary fall and winter food source. In a small plot next to his house, I planted his okra–producing a vegetable I never ate until many years later. The summer before I left for college, Mr. A hired me to clean his kitchen. Although the kitchen had probably not been cleaned in several decades, it was an easy job because the kitchen was small and most of the shelves and drawers were empty. Except for a couple of pans, a couple of dishes, a couple of drinking glasses, and a couple pieces of flatware, all the potatoes had been eaten and his only remaining food was a can of instant coffee. What I did see, looking out his little kitchen window, was 150+ blossoming potato plants.
Gardener #5. Standing on the hillside above our farmhouse, looking west, one could see a small creek, exiting the Flint Hills and heading toward the Elk River. The creek ran through a corner of our farm and was responsible for our 12-15 acres of decent farmland. On the other side of an ancient hedgerow that punctuated our farm’s western boundary was a field, perhaps 20 acres, usually planted in wheat or corn. One acre of the field next to the creek was set aside for Rev. M, the Methodist minister. I have no idea what he raised in the garden, but I do recall that in the spring he would borrow a small, gray Ford tractor so he could plow and disc his garden plot. Although I never had sufficient curiosity to wonder what he grew in this bottomland, I was impressed that our minister had this impulse to work with the soil. I understood that someone with his kind of white collar job did not have to do manual labor. While our garden was a necessity, providing us essential sources of food, I recognized that in this creek-side garden was someone who was gardening because such labor was good for the soul.
Gardener #6. Born in the spring of 1945, I have no memories of World War II, nor did the Korean War have any impact on my consciousness–with one exception. A young farmer from our neighborhood joined the air force and flew a fighter plane in Korea, an achievement we found quite impressive. After the war, he returned to farming, married Rev. M’s daughter, and was perceived as an up-and-coming young farmer. For a variety of reasons, however, things did not work out as planned. His marriage ended in divorce, and Mr. D was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. When he was no longer able to farm, he was moved into a house on the edge of town, a short walk from where Mr. S’s cold frames had once existed. One afternoon as I was driving by Mr. D’s house, I saw him lying on the ground in his garden. Even though he could neither stand nor walk, he was still crawling down the garden row, trying to pull weeds. By the next summer he was in the local nursing home, propped up in bed, facing a black & white TV set, permanently tuned to a Wichita station, 24 hours a day, the walls of his room covered with photos of John Wayne.
Gardener #7. My last two gardeners, neither from my home town, I came to know in my adult years. One gardener lived in Ames, Kansas, a tiny village with fewer than 50 inhabitants, located near the Republican River in north central Kansas. He was my wife’s grandfather, Charles Wagner, and had immigrated with his parents from Germany when he was two years old. On one summer evening when my wife and I had come to visit him, he was nearing his 100th birthday and working in his garden. It was too large for him to maintain, but he still showed evidence of a wiry strength in his frame and a mind notably unimpaired. Always friendly and respectful, he was a man of few words and rarely spoke. His second wife was the talker, and he let her fulfill the conversational side of our meetings. On this day, while we were admiring his tomato plants, a freight train interrupted our conversation, the railroad tracks just a few yards from the edge of the garden. As soon as the train’s caboose passed by, Mr. Wagner said, “99 cars.” He then looked down and returned to his garden.
Gardener #8. And, finally, another gardener in her 90s, also from a farm in north central Kansas. When I first met Cecilia, she and her husband were farming near the Fact Church, about 20 miles north of Clay Center, Kansas. They were close family friends with my wife’s family, and we visited with them on most trips back home. Over the next three decades, the farm was turned over to a son, Cecilia and her husband moved in town (to Clay Center), the husband died, and Cecilia was living alone. Although now in her 80s, during the summer, almost daily, she drove out to the farm to take care of the vegetable garden and do other tasks, including chopping down cedar trees in the pastures. Even after the son moved to Topeka and the farm house was deserted, Cecilia maintained the garden. Eventually, in her 90s, she was forced to enter a retirement home, but she requested they provide her with a small garden plot where she could grow a few tomatoes, potatoes, and cucumbers. One evening, while tending her plot, she lost her balance and fell to the ground. Unable to get up, she spent several hours lying on the ground, looking up at the sky, and as she later commented, “looking at the moon.” I suspect she sensed there were worse ways to die. Although fortunately, near midnight, an attendant found her and helped her return to her apartment, her 90 years of gardening were now over.
Although I trust my vertigo will eventually pass, I know my gardening days are nearing their finale. Perhaps on my last day I will be crawling across the ground, determined to kill a few more weeds. Perhaps I will be lucky and at age 99, my body and mind still functioning, I can tend my tomatoes and count the train cars as they pass by at dusk. Perhaps my end will come lying on the ground, my last night as a gardener, watching the moon rise in the east, thankful for one more beautiful summer sky. While all those gardeners and their gardens are now gone, fortunately for me their images still linger. Gardens are like music--ephemeral, transitory, impermanent, always disappearing. But who can ever regret their presence, even if it be but momentary? Who would ever want to live in a world without either?