Starting to Garden

Encourage the best, beat back the worst, and assume half of what's planted will die

Artwork by Stephanie Davidson, @asiwillit

In starting to garden, I have been sampling the full spectrum of displeasures and small embarrassments that accompany trying anything new—the obvious mistakes and misplaced optimism and using the wrong tools for the job, the impossible visions of grandeur and the measly reality, and the vast, sad distance between the two.

Having inherited an overgrown rectangle of weeds with my new house, I set out with gusto to begin creating the orchard of my dreams. This would be a lush oasis dripping with fresh fruit, where I would sit on long, hot summer evenings with a plate of fresh figs drizzled in honey. Never mind my small urban backyard that can realistically support perhaps two fruit trees, or the fact that San Francisco simply does not have long, hot summer evenings but long, chilly, foggy ones. I would eat those figs, plucked from my very own fig tree, with a tiny fork, perched on a bench looking out over my ideal California garden: drought tolerant and year-round and textured, with layers of tall, spiky agave, soft tufts of blue fescue, bulbous echeveria and rugged water-preserving flagstones, all laid out artfully in a collage of serenity. There would be no harsh, linear boundaries, no square corners, the beauty residing in the chorus of textures and the soft flow from one space to another. The garden in my mind’s eye is wild and effortlessly natural like windswept hair, but also orderly and sculptural with stunning colors and shapes. All its specimens are perfectly arranged such that each sustains itself and doesn’t crowd out its neighbors and somehow also suppresses any unwanted weeds, a garden which is both in perfect harmony with the native environment, and also includes all of my favorite Australian succulents and Mediterranean bushes and French grasses, and a thirsty fig tree.

Flush with vision, I took my first spirited step towards realizing my dream garden: I made for the nursery in pursuit of a fig. There I asked an employee if this season, winter in Northern California, was an ok time to buy a new fig tree. The woman, with enviably weathered hands and a dirt-streaked green apron and hair pulled back haphazardly, told me, yes, as long as I was able to transplant the tree into the ground right away. I assured her that I was.

This wasn’t true—my garden wasn’t yet ready to host the tree, but I did have a large terracotta pot set aside on the deck. I lied to her, god knows why, when I could have just asked if the pot would do. Why lie to someone whose profession it is to help you? Oh, I don’t know, because I didn’t want her to crack my fragile new excitement about my garden, because I was ashamed of the potential wrongness of my plan, because I was in a rush to acquire the tree and get started eating figs already, because I wanted to be a seasoned gardener but was not, because I didn’t want her to know my secret. Because I was long past the point in my life where I found it acceptable to be bad at things, or worse, inefficient. Yes, I have a terrible competency at generating and completing to-do lists, have learned that there is no better feeling than a fully crossed off list, and particularly one that has been completed sooner than I expected. This author has made lists on a Saturday that issue such commands as “have breakfast,” and “pluck eyebrows,” and “take bubble bath.” That list, fully crossed off—ah! The proof of my usefulness! The hallmark of my merit! What an immense measure of control I have achieved over everything in my vicinity! I have spent thirty years training at expedient execution, which has been such a gift in the modern American workplace, organizing my life into square beds and trimmed hedgerows, attempting to have nothing ever out of place. That orderly type of garden requires the constant tending of a phalanx of hardworking gardeners, demands year round watering and trimming and tending, like a golf course in the desert.

I planted my new fig tree in the large terracotta pot with the exact right internet-approved nutrient rich soil mix and set it on the sunniest part of the deck. The young tree stood three feet off the ground, with a straight, quarter-inch wide twig of a trunk flanked by clusters of wide green leaves like the palms of hands, and, surprisingly (to me, a new gardener), dotted with ripening fruit. I couldn’t believe a tree so skinny would invest in this bounty of figs. But it did, and there it was, the beginning of my garden. Then all I could do was wait and watch. Because gardening is the act of placing down something that’s moving. You can choose the plants and the starting location, you can prune and train and fertilize, but make your moves and then what happens is out of your hands.

My little tree, in that first month, promptly dropped all its leaves and fruits except for one green fig at the top of the scrawny trunk, too unripe to be discharged. That last fruit stopped ripening and sat, a sagging little green balloon dangling off the top of a three-foot tall naked stick. And thus my fig tree passed the rest of the winter. I was, as is my habit, self loathing about it. Idiot…I should have listened to the woman at the nursery…I should have waited until summer…why had I been so impatient…I should have started with something smaller than a fig tree…what a waste of money—that familiar chorus that shames the tiniest failure and begs me to stop trying something new.

A gardener friend of mine told me that half of everything he plants dies. I wondered at this: What?! Half!? He is the type who collects rare seeds from the ground in botanical gardens and smuggles them out under his shirt. When he learned that a jungle of fancy tropical houseplants had been abandoned in his office during the first wave of the COVID pandemic, he transported them all into his four-room apartment, creating the effect of an indoor tropical arboretum with a couch squeezed in the corner. Since I have known him, he has planted and seen torn to shreds by gophers at least three different fig trees, all of which he grew from seed, none of which was a tragedy. He has mastered this particular gardening nonchalance, a voracious appetite for plants matched by a fabulous lack of attachment to any particular specimen. The joy of growing somehow outshines the impressive volume of failure and death. For an avid to-do-lister, it is a phenomenon to behold.

I inherited a large, old wisteria in my garden, an aggressive climbing vine with abundant cones of purple flowers in the spring, beloved by bees. Wisteria are often used as decorative plants, but many gardeners consider them weeds because of how quickly and easily they spread. It turned out I needed a fast plant, still so much slower than my life; a fast plant was the perfect gateway for me.

I decided in that first year that I wanted to train the wisteria over a metal hoop to create a flowered archway in the garden. Wisteria vines grow in soft, curly tendrils, studded with tiny sticky nodules that grab anything sturdy to climb. These young vines harden over time, solidifying their grasp then sprouting new soft growth to reach yet further. If you speed up wisteria growth, you see that the young tendrils revolve in circles as they grow, like limbs of an octopus, systematically searching for an armature to support their ascent. If they don’t find anything, which this wisteria hadn’t for years before my arrival, they weigh themselves down as they grow, cantilevering low over the ground, or they latch back onto themselves, branches growing in knots and tangles, chaotically wriggling inward and splaying outward like Medusa’s snakes. On the other hand, if they do find a thing—a post or a wire or another branch—they grow into an orderly spiral around the object, fitting to it neatly, placing loop after loop of fresh vine.

Once I had placed my metal hoop where I thought it ought to go, only two arms of my large scraggly wisteria reached it. I arranged the two sticky vine tips to touch the hoop, and they sat on the metal half-heartedly. Or maybe it was me who was half-hearted. What would this really come to, placing two branches of this unruly vine onto a metal circle? The misshapen wisteria had grown wild for unknown years, and there was no amount of lopping and training that would, anytime soon, make it look nice. Not the way I wanted it, at least, with long sturdy vines dangling languidly over a garden bench, thick leaves providing dappled shade and sun, heavy bunches of purple flowers overhead, and a plate of figs and honey on the side table. No, that would not happen today, or this year. You simply can’t make a vine grow right this second. So I had no choice but to place the two branches on the metal hoop and wait.

In the two weeks following, to my surprise, fresh tendrils of the wisteria grew noticeably. While they are still soft, you can unravel their knots and re-wrap them, and I started winding them together toward and over the metal hoop. Then I started going to the wisteria daily. Each morning I woke and rushed to the scene to see who had grown longer, who had unfurled, who had grasped what. I could actually see the changes each day! Teeny, tiny, impossible changes, achieved while I slept and typed emails, through some alchemy, through some wizardry, but there it was, real in front of me, evolving before my eyes. This garden was evidently not a thing done by me, but a collaboration between my small efforts and magic. Each shred of progress provided a surprising shock of joy. Time tilted and swayed as the plant’s minuscule progress struck me as immense and rapid. Going away for a week, I had the thought that perhaps I couldn’t actually keep up with the wisteria, that I would return to a jungle of feral wisteria, because I was an ephemeral force and it was steady and enduring. I never once put the wisteria on a to-do list.

There I was, in the garden, discovering for myself with the help of the philandering old wisteria what so many before me have; like Monet, like Chechov, like Virginia Wolf, like Freida Khalo, I was falling for my garden. It was presenting to me, unavoidably, another force at work besides my own dedicated, dehydrated, often miserable hustle: that rich and slow and steady life force, which grows and changes while I cook and feed the dog and sleep, which I can work with and encourage and shape, but cannot control and cannot rush. Thirty-two years old and I was seeing for the first time, really seeing, that life force acting on my wisteria, on the world, on me.

I have tried learning many new creative skills as an adult, and have succeeded at a few (which I would tell you about proudly,) and have failed at most (which I block from memory as much as I can). All of them I have invariably pursued in fits of urgency and a flurry of to-do lists and not a small dose of misery. I would be a great hobby pianist, guitarist, poet, entrepreneur, yogi, speaker of Spanish, singer, storyteller. I just had to get the right app and the right schedule and the gumption to push through. The garden is the one that fully stopped me in my efficient tracks. Starting to garden could not be, as I wanted, a large, sweeping overhaul of myself and my plot of land. It was rather the little daily moves I could make to great effect, the few plantings or clippings that, left for a year or three, yield fruits or notable shapes or a new patch of sun or shade that I wanted, or, in the best cases, a delightful surprise.

That first year, my blue star fern was poisoned by dog pee, and my pink flapjacks succulent was trampled, and raccoons dug up the carrots. Just after I set up my raised vegetable beds, proud and tall and filled with hundreds of pounds of fresh soil and dozens of seedlings that I had started indoors in old seltzer cans (like a pro), my neighbor told me that one must put mesh beneath the bed to protect from gophers, which I hadn’t done (and should have known to do, idiot). But amidst all these par-for-the-course failures that may have otherwise deterred me, I had witnessed the fingers of a wisteria grasp metal in what seemed an impossible demonstration of a different kind of progress, and so I was dosed enough with magic to continue. My gardener friend came over and planted three small pups of a giant agave, which he had clipped off a mother plant somewhere in the city. One of them shriveled into brown sticks and two, to my delight, sprouted new shoots as the summer neared. It became just a little easier to encourage the best of, beat back the worst of, to assume half of what’s planted would die, and to watch mystified and addicted as it grew.

When spring arrived in full, and the days became longer and the sun hotter, my naked fig tree was jolted awake. Up top, next to the single, static, bulbous green fig, she began work on a leaf. This leaf emerged from the head of her trunk like a crown, daily growing bigger, half an inch wide, then an inch. Figs have been used for millennia as food and medicine, clothing and shelter, and they nourish more species than any other fruit, from elephants and kangaroos to seagulls and giant tortoises and several species of fish. In part because of their outsized importance to ecosystems and enduring usefulness to humans, fig trees are worshipped in religions and cultures across the globe, the most universally sacred fruit there is. The Buddha sat beneath a fig tree to obtain enlightenment. Adam and Eve fashioned their first clothing from fig leaves. The Persian deity Mithra was born out of a rock beneath a fig and ate his first meal of figs. In Indonesia, gods formed the first couple from a fig tree, carving the woman out of horizontal slices and the man out of vertical slices. In Odisha India, the story goes that the goddess Nirantali fashioned the first human tongue from the leaf of the fig. Ancient Egyptians believed the mother goddess Hathor would emerge from a mythic fig tree to welcome them into heaven.

And then that first fig leaf was the size of a hand, and then two more leaves sprouted behind it, and she stood tall and skinny and naked, but with a crown of leaves and one green fruit at her head, emerging proud from her dormant winter, bursting again with the juices of life.

This essay was originally published in issue 51 of the Talking River Review.

✍️ Tell me…

…about your garden. Or houseplant. Or the shoots that pop up between sidewalk slabs.