Norma, my dear departed wife of fifty years and I owned and lived in four homes. We bought our first home in 1984, a dilapidated house near the southern border of Piedmont, CA, just a block from Oakland’s Grand Avenue. We lived there for five years, fixed it up, sold it, moved to Sonoma in 1990 and bought a six-room B&B on West Spain Street, where we lived. Eight years later, as a place to get away, we purchased the cheapest house in town on 5th Street East, originally a WW2 troop shack on Mare Island; we improved it and enlarged it. We sold the inn in 2003. This year we decided to downsize and recently moved to a condo off 5th Street West, the fourth home we have owned.
What all these homes had in common was a place for me to garden. Accordingly, I’ve spent the better part of my adult life taking care of plants while creating aesthetically pleasing outdoor spaces. Looking back, I’ve been thinking about the gardens I’ve created and wondering what drives me to repeatedly alter our homes with plants and gardens?
My mother was a terrific gardener and growing up I watched her transform our suburban backyard. And for her, aesthetics was all important, both inside our home and out. She filled the house with beautiful objects and art, each placed carefully and thoughtfully. Entering a room, one experienced a sense of harmonious whole; in her words, “it works.” I took that experience to heart and create gardens that “work” for me.
In Piedmont, the garden was small, but I filled it with handmade redwood planter boxes on a gently sloping yard. A network of paths provided a way to meander, creating the illusion of greater space.
At the B&B, I created garden “rooms” associated with each inn space; they all were different, some with flowers, some with ferns, some with small fountains or succulents.
On 5th Street East, I filled a courtyard dominated by a ninety-foot tall Black Walnut tree with gardens of shade tolerant plants, timber bamboo and exotics. (Main photo) At our condo, I’ve been working hard at creating spaces for my collection of staghorn ferns and exotic plants.
For me, a garden is both a place of refuge and an artful living sculpture. My palette is comprised of the colors, textures, and shapes of living things. The plants and I age alongside each other, like members of a family, and it gives me pleasure to be in their company. Some nursery owner friends of mine coined the term “hortisexual” to explain themselves, and I embrace that designation. For me, there’s something about the life energy and expression of plants that goes beyond just liking them.
So part of the answer about my drive to garden is passion, a passion for life. But it’s only part of the answer. I am prone to impose my aesthetic on the world, in the words of my late wife, “to mark my territory,” much as a wild animal does, to declare my space. It’s all rather primitive, admittedly, primal actually: I like getting down and dirty with the world. I expect all devoted gardeners feel this way.
I will mix my wife’s ashes with the soil in the garden and when I’ve died, I want my ashes mixed into the garden soil too, where together, our old atoms can combine into the new living bodies of exotic plants.
And we’ve got to get ourselves, back to the garden. Love the idea of mixing your ashes with the soil used for your plantings and I’ve asked my ever-lovin to sprinkle mine around our place, stopping at the house of course, as it’s the first and last house we’ve ever owned and it’s “our” place in the sun.
50 years ago my wife and I were fortunate enough to find a small one bedroom house on Harrington Dr. Being avid gardeners – a major criteria was to find a place large enough to accommodate our desire for open space with plenty of room for gardening. The Harrington house definitely fit the bill. Situated on an acre of an old walnut orchard it was the perfect place to set down roots. Plenty of space for gardening, fruit trees, chickens and room for our dogs to romp. Amidst the old declining orchard sits a lone White Oak tree; a magnificent tree that must be well over a hundred years old. Over the years this tree has become the resting place for all of our pets and other animals. We call it our Burial Tree.
Three weeks ago my beloved dog Indi passed away. As I was digging her grave beneath this grand old tree I couldn’t help but reflect on the dozens of animals that I’ve interred here. Four dogs; three cats; two cockatiels; two Western Whiptail lizards; countless number of chickens; a baby hawk that had fallen from its nest; and of course quite a few rats that had fallen prey to my strategically placed traps.
Many a tear was shed while burying our pets but I always took solace in knowing that their remains will all become part of this grand White Oak.
With my wife and I both in our mid-70’s we’re certainly not considering moving from our home here on Harrington; and who knows what the future might bring, but we have both expressed a desire to have some of our ashes sped beneath our beautiful Burial Tree and to become “one” with all of our pets and all of God’s creatures again. I couldn’t ask for more…