www.LifeWithBuck.com

     We all have favorite lines from the movies we love, spoken words that struck us the first time we heard them and have stayed with us forever. The line that pierces my heart and gets me to watch the film more times than I could ever count is at the very beginning of Out of Africa. In a voice over, Meryl Streep starts the movie off by saying, “I once had a farm in Africa . . .”

      The movie came out in 1985, long before I ever planted my first perennial, but the words and Meryl Streep’s interpretation of them struck a chord in me. The wistfulness in her voice, the acceptance of letting go of something you have loved dearly; it all made an impression that has stayed with me for 22 years.

     Although I’ve never owned a farm in Africa, I did have a garden. Buck dug it for me in a corner of our yard in Sandwich, Massachusetts. I was a garden columnist at the time, a new challenge for me, yet I didn’t have much of a garden to write about. I had a few potted annuals on the front steps, some honeysuckle near the back porch, and that was it. I didn’t ask for a garden, but Buck took it upon himself to give me one. He was no gardener himself, and he’d actually hated gardening ever since he’d been responsible for tending the family rose bushes as a child. But he had gone to art school and had a good eye for design.

     He dug and dug for days, a job that was probably more suited for a backhoe, but he chose to use an old shovel that had been collecting cobwebs in the tool shed. He laid winding paths and lined them with big rocks we collected by hand and carried out of the woods, pilfered from back country roads, and the beach. He spread topsoil and created little hills for me to climb, and carved out hidden nooks and crannies where I could set an old twig chair and read Vanity Fair in peace. He surrounded the whole thing with a picket fence that would give me, he said, “a sense of place.” And he attached the kind of gate that a garden should have, the kind that makes the nicest creaking sound and children will remember opening and closing for the rest of their lives.

     He built this for me, and when it was done he gave me some money and told me to go the the local plant sale in the parking lot of the church downtown, and make my garden beautiful. It was the first of many plant sales I went to over the years. I became an expert at haunting garden centers, and swapping seedlings with my sister, and ordering bulbs from catalogs that arrived from as far away as Holland. 

      And for more than a decade my garden was the most beautiful place on earth. My dogs would plod out there behind me and bask in the sun while I clipped phlox and Black Eyed Susan for the dinner table. My daughter would seat herself on the twig chair and hold court, filling me in about her day at school while I divided bee balm. My sons would chase each other down the paths and break stuff, and then stand frozen in horror and point fingers at each other when I asked who was responsible. We let our pet rat, Emily, have a good run through the raised herb bed. Afterwards, she smelled like rosemary and lemon thyme.

     We had our share of catastrophes in the garden. My son and I filled a whiskey-barrel pond with two dozen tiny goldfish, only to find they’d disappeared overnight thanks to a resourceful raccoon, who returned the second night and tipped the whole pond over in disgust that we hadn’t refilled it for him. My daughter stepped on a snake one day, and leapt into the air shrieking so loud the neighbors came running to see what was wrong. (I also caught my German Shepherd, Jimmy, napping soundly in the garden flanked on either side by big brown snakes with yellow stripes. I called him a traitor, his snake friends slithered off, and Jimmy slunk away with his tail between his legs.) I tried to grow a “sunflower house” one year so I could write about it, and it grew to be about 9-feet high and eventually toppled over and crushed every one of the nearby zinnias, killing them.

     One time I happened to dig up an underground bee hive. Before I realized what was happening, two or three of the bees got tangled in the braid that ran down my back and stung me repeatedly as I ran across the lawn screaming for my hose-loving sons to get the hell off the tire swing and hose me down. The finally did, but not before my neck was as swollen as a goiter. 

     When Buck didn’t see our youngest son playing nearby, he would  find him in the garden, just standing there looking around. These days, Max is far away in Providence, Rhode Island, a junior in college and well on his way to becoming a chef. He called me after class one morning to proudly tell me he was the only person who was able to name all the herbs in the kitchen by sight alone. ”I knew them all because we had every one of those herbs in the garden, I’d been picking them for you at dinner time my whole life,” he told me, somewhat incredulous at the valuable knowledge he’d taken for granted, and didn’t even realize he had. After we hung up, I remembered how much he loved the smell of mint when he was a little boy, and would start looking for it as early as April. He always tried to coerce Jimmy into eating a few sprigs, a holistic cure for his dog breath. But Jimmy never ate it.

     Though Buck was averse to gardening, he did pull weeds occasionally. In his bathrobe, of course, with a coffee cup in one hand, he’d make his way down the paths yanking the offending weeds from the ground and tossing them over the fence and into the woods. One morning after he’d been weeding, he handed me some money and told me to go buy some Conchord grape plants. “They’ll never grow out there,” I told him, “it’s too shady.” He insisted that they would grow, and I went off to buy the grape plants because you just can’t win an argument with Buck. And of course he was right, a fact he reminded me of every fall while I was out at the vines picking buckets of blue-black grapes.

     Over the years the rock-lined paths grew taller with the addition of “vacation rocks” we brought back from camping trips in Provincetown; from a rented cabin on a lake outside Keene, New Hampshire; from a picnic in the “Devil’s Golf Course” in Death Valley, California. To this day all five of us can’t resist pointing out a choice rock and simply saying, “That’s a good one.” Observers, I’m sure, would find this to be a curious statement, but in our family it’s understood. The eagle-eyed rock finder is always rewarded with an enthusiastic, “Yes, that one is perfect!”

     Perennials get bigger every year, just like kids. The plants get so big in fact, they have to be divided and given a new spot to set their own roots away from the mother plant, just like kids. Just like my kids, who did the unimaginable and grew up even though I asked them not to. 

     The twig chair where my daughter held court, and where I curled up with Star magazine on so many summer afternoons, finally fell apart. We tossed it on the bonfire one New Year’s Day. A pet rat named Emily, who liked to scurry through the rosemary while a little boy chased after her, was laid to rest under a lupine plant during an elaborate funeral that involved a reading of Kahlil Gibrahn and a shower of flower petals, all white, just like her. The grandson of the goldfish-eating raccoon came for a visit and ate $100-worth of freshly planted tulip bulbs and I said I will never again spend $100 on tulips, not even the exotic parrot kind.

     Reluctantly, we took down the tire swing and closed the garden gate that had just the right creak, and we wondered what to do with the second half of our lives. We’re at the very beginning part of what Buck and I refer to as Act II. We live in El Paso now, and no matter how many times I could swear I smell the ocean on the wind, or catch the faintest whiff of damp topsoil, it’s just a trick of the mind.

     Buck brings me flowers all the time, he can’t pass a cut flower display at the supermarket without grabbing a bouquet and bringing it home to me. I arrange the flowers in a vase on the kitchen table, and I take a photo of them. But it’s Meryl Streep in Out of Africa who comes to mind now when I look out the window and see our desert backyard. I sigh and think to myself, I once had a garden . . .    

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