PLOT
Emily Hiestand

First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance | Reviews

It was a late summer day so hot that the city looked blanched: the sidewalks and canvas awnings pale, and our houses pale in their sun-drenched wooden shingles and jackets of aluminum siding. Walking at the outer edge of our neighborhood, looking for an place I’d only recently heard about, I asked directions at a filling station. The pumps at the station were undulating in sheets of hot, octane-scented air; the asphalt radiated heat; the only coolness was the station’s soda machine with its bluish photograph of ice cubes the size of car batteries and a torrent of soda cascading over the cubes like a stupendous falls.

The station attendant gave me directions pointing with the end of a fuel nozzle. "Yes ma'am," he said, “it’s two blocks down the next side street, you can’t miss it.” Young men were just starting to call me ma'am. 

Two blocks later, at the end of a sizzling street, I was suddenly walking through a large, verdant meadow of tall, airy cosmos in feathery bloom, through lanes of nodding dahlias, purple-topped turnips, trellised tomatoes, and a stand of tasseled bantam corn. Here, tucked into the urban fringe, were hybrid tea roses and fragrant old roses, also patches of basil and cayenne, the leaves cloaking slender red fingers. The bees of midsummer were murmuring by the hour in foxglove bells, exactly as Wordsworth saw them in his praise of the surprising freedom to be found in the sonnet's measured and “scanty plot of ground.” Everywhere too went white gypsy moths, a bane to plants when infants but now harmlessly lighting on petals to fan their wings. The squash vines were sticky, and, something was stirring, rustling in the green sea of this community garden. The rustling form stood up: a woman, wearing a proper urban gardener's outfit of black mini-skirt, tank top, and high heels.

•

At last count, there are now twelve community gardens in our city. The one I was discovering that day, the one where I have now planted peonies, roses, collard greens, tomatoes, basil, and rosemary for ten years, is a quarter acre that lies in the floodplain of a river, a block from three gas stations and only a few blocks from two major urban arteries. The land is divided into sixty, twelve-by-twelve-foot plots, which are assigned to citizen gardeners for an annual fee of five dollars. Over the years, I have had occasion to see many passersby respond to this quarter acre: women in work suits and running shoes who let themselves lean for restful minutes on the fence; a bent man with a walker who makes the perimeter of the garden the path of his constitutional; children who begin spontaneous dances and want to come inside the gate.

There are many differences, of course, between a private and a community garden, but in one respect they are the same. Whatever kind of garden one has, the garden means. The seeds, choices of plants, the colors and shapes, design, purpose, and tending all seethe with meaning. Consciously or not, a gardener is always entering into one or more cultural traditions that shape our ideas about gardens. One of the chief meanings of the community garden is suggested by the landscape architect Clare Cooper Marcus, who describes a study of a hundred suburban gardens in the San Francisco Bay area. The study revealed that the gardeners were less interested in discovering which plants were suited, ecologically speaking, to their locale, its climate, and soil, than in growing plants that gave them the feeling of being at home. Thus: "A man from Oregon wanted roses, gladioli, and a blue spruce. A woman of Italian descent planted the same vegetables her mother had grown … A teenaged girl, who loved 'Hawaii Five-O,' created a tropical jungle."

That is very much what happens in our community garden, except that rather than being dispersed over the greater reaches of suburbia, here all the notions of home are packed together closely, a microcosm of the pluralism and density of a modern city. Each of the plots of this quarter-acre garden is cultivated by a different person, and true to the individualism of America, each plot proposes a relatively distinctive, personal notion of what a garden is: what it should look like; what should grow in it; and why; and with what techniques and substances, following what principles, rites, or calendar. (That is to say: aesthetics, ethics, philosophy, technology, economy, and ecology.)

Stroll down any of the criss-crossing paths of our community garden and you will come upon as many ideas of order and beauty, as many ideas of a proper agriculture, and as many ideas about how to support the indeterminate vines of tomatoes as there are plots. To a European garden designer like Capability Brown (so called because he so often spoke of the "capability" of the estates in his charge), the resulting mélange might not be considered a garden at all. But to a local eye, a field composed of many squares easily recalls the artful patchwork quilts which flourished in the new world, becoming a staple in many19th C. households.

Entering this patchwork garden by the side gate, the first concept to meet the eye is a garden of perfect Cartesian rationality, wooden garden stakes placed at exact intervals, each one bearing a tomato vine neatly tied with twine, each vine labeled, and the ground mulched evenly in a soft bed of silvery, salt-marsh hay. Steps from this anthem to geometry lies a plot with Johnny Jump-Ups that are allowed to erupt each spring in random patches, an arrangement in sympathy with the new, more sympathetic ideas about chaos. Among the other 58 gardens you can find:

A shrine composed of a sprawl of leggy sweet peas and poppies curling around a seated stone Buddha, whose tapering hand points to the heart;

A seed-preserving garden with rows of rare plants, among them tomatillos that produce papery lantern-like pods. The young man who raises these species, mails their seeds around the country to other seed-savers, a far-sighted activity by which considerable genetic material is being kept viable;

A science project garden with transparent plastic cones surrounding each plant, with gauges, with a chart marked with temperatures and fluctuating pH levels. The lab director is a young woman often accompanied by a her boyfriend, who is also a scientist;

The exquisitely-tended garden of a Chinese professor who was learned to farm during the siege that sent Chinese scholars to farms, escaped to America, and gardens here to grow the vegetables his family misses from China;

A garden composed entirely of basil, eggplant, and plum tomatoes, the Mediterranean triumvirate which makes up the sauce garden of a woman whose family name is the name of a Sicilian village, and who one day gave me a copy of her grandmother's recipe for puttanesca;

A garden plot filled with runners and leaves funneling life to a single pumpkin to be entered in a contest. The two musicians nurturing this pumpkin say it could bring them up to ten thousand dollars in prize money if it grows into the nine-hundred-pound range. They call this large pumpkin scheme “Plan B in their “aggressive growth plan” for more financial security;

And the garden of Mrs. Fanny Dinkins, who grows collards — each dusty, silver-green leaf robust enough to be a roofing tile — and told me about the sweet potato crops of her South Carolina homeland: how sweet potatoes are harvested, stacked, and covered in straw and earth for winter storage; how these earthen mounds rose over the landscape of her girlhood; how to slip your hand into one of the earthen mounds and extract just enough sweet potatoes for dinner. 

Our own garden plot also contains collards, a beet called Detroit Dark Red, several peonies, and the delicious Japanese Odoriko hybrid tomato. One of Peter's journalist colleagues, Hattori-san in Tokyo, tells us that the name Odoriko is the most old-fashioned Japanese word for dancer. The modern word, Hattori-san explains, is dansaa, whereas "Odoriko" connotes an antique, nearly ancient world, something close to "Terpsichorean" in English. While our garden plot is generally among the orderly ones, recently, after a spring when we were traveling and had only enough time to throw in a handful of lettuce seeds into our garden, we returned to find our plot awash in chives, tufts of velvety pansies, and a stand of tall blue cornflowers — a ravishing garden blown in on the wind. "You've got my cornflowers," says the woman three gardens down, laughing at the way wind toys with our ideas of possession.

All these, and another 50 ideas of garden coexist, their conceptual borders slightly blurred by roving tendrils, nasturtiums flopping over lines, and by the glossy black crickets who hop from plot to plot. Situated in a dense residential zone, close to ceaseless traffic, this minor Acadia is also adjacent to a factory that did some important things to help win WW II (including making the synthetic rubber styrene-butadiene), but whose name has since been linked with terms like "toxic sludge" and “EPA lawsuits.”

Naturally, the soil of a garden located in a former, semi-industrial landscape is suspect, so someone in the community garden re-tests our garden soil every few years. One year it was me, and in the process, I learned from a sharp soil scientist at the County Extension Service that it is an extremely rare piece of urban earth that contains no lead or toxic metals such as cadmium or aluminum in its composition. She explained that the usual level of lead is about 15 to 40 parts per million parts of soil — on a scale in which 33 parts per million in the sample is low, 110 is high, and anything over 300 is so toxic that the EPA warns children and pregnant women to stay out of the area. Remarkably, the five-page report I received from the County Extension found that the soil in our community garden contains 8 parts per million, which is, incredibly, lower than the amount of lead naturally present in most soils.

This soil composition may be due to one of those confluences that we call luck. We are lucky that any remaining naphthalene sludge leaching from nearby waste lagoons and into the water table moves across the watershed in a course that misses our garden completely. Lucky that during the worst decades of auto lead emissions, our garden land lay blanketed under layers of greenhouse detritus — a contemporary midden of pot shards, un-germinated bulbs, cement blocks, and surplus plants. Lucky that since the time of its creation during the last ice age, the land of this garden has remained open. And certainly lucky that the land is owned by Ed Norberg, who is descended from a long line of excellent Swedish horticulturists. The Norberg family has run the greenhouse business directly across the road from the garden for nearly a century, filling the long, moist bays of the greenhouse with seasonal seas of poinsettias, tulips, lilies, and mums destined for florists and landscape designers in the area.

One afternoon after weeding our plot, I walked across the street and found Ed sitting at his oak, rolltop desk in the greenhouse office. We had met several times at annual garden meetings, and when Ed took walks around the garden and he had time to set aside his office work for a conversation. I had been wondering about the origin of the community garden — thinking that it might have a back-to-the-land-urban-hippie history — and realized he would certainly know.

"It all started with Jim Royster,” Ed said, “who lived just up the street in the yellow house.” "He was from Georgia, originally, or North Carolina. One day Royster came over to talk about starting a garden on our field. We had used it for our mums for many years, but then the labor costs killed us and we let it go. The field had gotten completely wild with witch grass, weeds, and cast-off gear and debris from the greenhouses, old pots, cement blocks, and to tell you the truth, we pooh-poohed Royster, we didn’t think the land could be a garden. But Jim was a friendly guy, and he was speaking pie-in-the-sky, and finally we thought, 'This is something special.'  So we said yes."

In the four decades before they abandoned the quarter-acre field, the Norbergs had enriched their chrysanthemum land with peat moss and organic matter. And it was good land to begin with: alluvial soil, washed for centuries with the bottom silt from the Menotomy River. The colonial farmers who planted this region in the 1800s and called it Watson's Plain, thought the soil was among the best in the Boston Basin. The present-day garden also lies not far from the summer villages of the first people of this region, who supplemented their diet of fish and clams with beans and corn. The women of the Massachusett tribe were the planters, and scholars who study their agricultural technique consider it quite good: the beans fixed nitrogen; the corn husks which the women left to decay restored nutrients to the soil; erosion was minimal; and yields were high. One day, while I was weeding a patch of peppery Rocket arugula, these several facts about tribes, terrain, and time floated together into one of the synapse junctions of mind, and I grasped that my garden neighbors and I are cultivating our Earligolds, Gladiators, Spacemasters, Silver Queens, and Florida Giants on land that women may have planted for — a conservative guess — seven thousand years.

But the atavism of the modern gardener does not require so very ancient a regression. I am hardly unusual in having, on both sides of my family and for hundreds of years, ancestors who were principally farmers. There is a fifteenth-century court messenger on my father's family tree, and here and there appears a minister, blacksmith, or scribe, but I am only the third generation in my family's American history not to derive my principal livelihood from the earth. Surely it is not hard to understand why we feel affection for the anchorage and nutrient reservoir called soil, savoring its moist texture in our hands, the feel of its crumbling tilth. Surely it is no mystery why we also like plants, like to hold and admire them, give them the care they need all summer, and in early fall, prance around the kitchen — or the state fair — with a bunch of purple-top turnips, cartons of strawberries, ears of corn — put blue ribbons on them, or mound them up in a bowl like still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age.

The urban pastoral now unfolding on this field operates, like the city in which it occurs, with the good manners of urban distance — manners that allow for fizzy encounters and easy retreats from same. Thus the community in community garden is a loose alliance, and for all the goods that one garden produces — tomatoes with real flavor, cutting flowers, connections, calmer minds — it is no covenant of survival like the gardens of yore. A Stop & Shop supermarket, a fine Asian grocery, and a Bread & Circus organic market are right down the street. 

I do know of other gardens in this city that have helped change whole neighborhoods, and of a prison garden where a man says, "These green things made me feel like a human being again." Our own community garden did not have so much healing work to do, but the land was once a field of rubble and now it is not. It is no small thing for city people to be able to dig in the earth, to know when the moon will be gibbous, when to expect the last frost, to nod to perfect strangers, come to know some of them, and have them sing out "Want me to leave the water on for you?"  Though we make no formal propitiation to this land, as our predecessors surely did, we are all grateful for it, and we do have one crucial ritual — as important for our tiny crofts as the long days of sun and soaking rains. 

The annual meeting of our Community Garden convenes on a Saturday morning at ten o'clock in early March, when the New England ground is still frozen and often sealed by deep snow. Lately we have begun to meet in the basement of a building constructed a hundred years ago by Jamaican immigrants as a house of worship. Empty for several decades in the early twentieth century, the church was then for a long while a custom woodworker's shop, and recently it has come nearly full circle: "Bienvenue, je vous en pris," says the sexton, as we enter the warm basement meeting room of what is now a Haitian church, a legliz ayisyen.

The longtime coordinator of our garden community calls the meeting to order. Bill is a soft-spoken, plain-spoken man who wears blue jeans, a clean white shirt, and black sneakers. He is the picture of a man with his feet on the ground, so was a surprise to learn that he spends most of his time contemplating, if not actually in, the thermosphere, which, as you may know, is that part of the atmosphere between the mesopause and the height at which the earth's atmosphere ceases to have the properties of a continuous medium. It's an exotic little sphere, way, way up there. Bill's focus is modeling the behavior of communication signals in the thermosphere, behavior that is, to summarize Bill's account, "highly unpredictable." 

For almost eight years, Bill has been the ideal leader of our garden world, the kind of leader that Lao Tsu admires in the Tao Te Ching, a leader so deft that he seems only to be following, the kind that everyone begs to stay on. Some of Bill's gift for leadership comes from his equanimity and his being a mensch. And some of it, I suspect, comes from Bill's work in the unpredictable reaches of space, work that has prepared him to interpret, perhaps even to guide, the signals of some sixty citizen-gardeners engaged in the annual discussion of the themes.

The themes are the perennial subjects that arise in this meeting each year. Only initiates can know all of the themes and discretion does not permit me to reveal the exchanges surrounding the theme of The Way Too Tall Sunflower, or the agonizing To Rototill Or Not To Rototill. But no harm can come from mentioning a few selected themes, for example, The Bad Gardener. The kind of badness changes from year to year, unpredictably, and all we can know is that someone, never the same person as before, will do something completely outré. Last year it was a gardener who, it turns out, had not only a plot in our garden, but also one in a crosstown garden. Such double-dipping is forbidden in a city with a long waiting list of citizens who wish to garden, so by unanimous vote, the energetic lady was asked to garden only at her other garden. And although this was right and just, I was sorry to see her go, for she had made a raised bed of strawberries right next to my plot of the tiniest, most intensely flavored strawberries, and generously shared them.

The subject of delinquency often leads us directly to subject of The Untended Plot. This theme addresses the question of what to do about the plots of gardeners who at some point during the season, abandon their gardens. There are many possible reasons: seemed like it would be fun; Sam said he was going to do it; transferred to Texas, etc. The nuanced question for the meeting is, “When is an abandoned plot abandoned enough that it can be given to someone else?” As you may know, this is not the sort of question you want some sixty people to consider in a consensus-style meeting, and it may be that it was questions like this one, arising among our forebears, that first gave the ancients the seemingly merciful idea of dictatorship, or at least a small, core group of deciders.     

Perhaps there can be no sustained human activity involving sixty or more human beings that does not spawn its own proto-politics, incipient bureaucracy, and deeply contrasting views of the good and moral. The divergence in this small room, on almost all subjects, is vast, and is mostly held in check because the majority of us believe that, in the long run, we will do better, will be able to grow our plants in peace, if we don’t dig in very much, and compromise as much as possible. We make a small mistake and do dig in too much on the matter of the Snaggle-Toothed Privet Hedge — which is not a usual theme, but a wild card. 

It starts out well. We all agree that the spaces in the hedge allow dogs and cats to slip into the garden and that this is not good. A motion is made that we buy more bushes to plug up the holes and keep out the animals.  It seems like an easy call until one of our number pipes up to argue that the privet hedge is ugly, has "always has been ugly," and that a chain-link fence would be more attractive — not only more efficient, more attractive. A suggestion that produces many dumbfounded looks, and murmurs across the room. Did we hear right that there is among us a person, a tiller of the earth, who prefers chain-link to green privet? Soon, we have launched into a free-for-all debate about fences — types of, costs of, virtues of — and Bill is making a mighty effort to bring the talk down from the thermosphere and to a vote, when a trembling, elderly, imperial voice — a voice that recalls the aged Katherine Hepburn — rings through the room:

"That hedge has been there for years. Years and years! Why would anyone want to take it out now?"  And with that, the hedge/fence issue is settled, or at least tabled for the year, by dint of a stirring tone and respect for an elderly garden neighbor.

Another gardener recalls that last year a great heap of salt marsh hay was trucked in, and asks if a load of hay is coming this year. To an outsider, this will sound like an innocent question, but everyone present knows that salt marsh hay is prelude to The Weedy Path. Ed Norberg, who often trucks in a load or two of salt marsh hay for the whole garden to use, says that he is sorry but he will be able to haul in salt marsh hay this year, but that we can buy it ourselves at a stand on Route 2.  He gives us the location. As we are writing that down, another gardener begins a minor manifesto about the condition of the many garden paths, and how much more handsome the entire garden would be if the paths were properly weeded and tended.

"The unweeded sections are actually dangerous!" cries an ally. 

"This subject comes up every year!" chimes another gardener, galvanized.  "What must we do to get compliance?" 

As about half the gardeners in the room buzz like bees, the other half begin to slink down in their folding chairs. Someone who has great faith in the written word says,

"There is already a rule about the paths in our garden agreement. Everyone should tend the part of the path by their plot.”

"Yes, but people ignore this rule," says a another. “We need some consequence for rule-breakers.”

Bill says, "Now, now," and that serious offenders will be asked to leave the garden but that we must try a non-punitive approach. The techniques of mulching could be described in a newsletter, for instance. 

”But we have tried stressing the virtues,” says a longtime gardener, “who also points out that we do not have a newsletter. 

"We’re thinking of having one soon,” says Bill. 

Donna proposes that pebbles be used for the paths. 

"How about asphalt?" someone murmurs. 

Scott says that we could tell Ed Norberg how much salt marsh hay we want and all chip in to buy it together. 

Ed reminds everyone he is not going to truck in any salt marsh hay this year. 

Eric says don't get any ideas, he is not volunteering to go get the hay, but he will make a few phone calls, and does everyone want hay if he can find it? 

Cathy says no, because how does she know what kind of hay Eric will get, I mean does he know how to smell hay? 

Donna, a lighthearted person, says “You have to make hay while the sun shines.” 

Jim says Eric should get the hay, but how much? 

Eric says he will figure it out, and he'll either get it right or wrong, and how does Cathy smell hay? 

Judy asks what is mulch, anyway? 

Cindy says, "Okay, this is enough talk. What will we actually do?  What we need is" — she pauses dramatically — "a mechanism." 

"There, there," says Bill. 

"The hay should smell good, no mold," says Cathy. 

Adam stands up. "This is such a nice little community," he says. "I get nervous when we start talking about mechanisms. I'd like to rely on our human ability to just talk with the people next to us." 

"But then there are all these little feuds between people," Susan observes. 

A sixtyish gentleman intones, patiently (the "Now, kids" is implied), "Keeping our garden paths clear and free of weeds is a regulation.  Let's just emphasize that we all want this." 

A forty-something woman, a psychologist, nods to the gentleman and says warmly, approvingly, "You're suggesting that we solve this by strengthening the social contract." 

Scott proposes that it would be simple enough to put the rule about the paths in bold typeface in the newsletter. 

Someone points out again that we do not have a newsletter. 

Donna, sensing the need for levity, says "I think we should all buy our vegetables at the store."

The meeting works, as it does each year, and when all the themes have been discussed, settled, or tabled, the gardeners adjourn and walk out into a cold March day. It has been snowing during the meeting, and anyone who looks down the street will see the open field of our garden covered with dozens of “wind glistens” — those small tornadoes of snow, whirling up from the field like genies out of rubbed lamps.

Two months later the garden is green with early peas. Four months later, the days are long and hot, and in the cool of the evening, my husband and I are kneeling in our small plot.  We are plucking the last of the lettuce that has not already bolted into the tall, ornate pagodas of midsummer. We still buy most of our vegetables at the store, but we come here for other reasons. Here our Festiva Maxima and Duchess De Nemours peonies have all-day sun and grow into specimens with an astonishment of blooms. Here we may hear an older woman with a bum heart singing Cole Porter songs among her plants, to them. "You're the top," she croons to some roses, "you're the Coliseum. / You're the top, / you're the Louvre museum."  Here we may talk with a family recently from Prague, who are growing sorrel for soup, whose young son is stomping along the path in a Mutant Turtle cape. Peter and I don't know sorrel soup. "It is slippery," the father says, "and … what is the word?"  He looks at his wife. "Sour? No, tart. Tart. Like lemon." Here, we can stop to study an unknown plant; it has a slender green stem that supports a shapely Romanov dome of a bulb. Here, there is a bean that neither spins nor toils and is a Kentucky Wonder. Here, there is a spider with gold legs, spinning on one of the indeterminate vines whose heavy red globes have exploded from a seed as light as an eyelash.

First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

It was a late summer day so hot that the hot the city looked blanched: the cement sidewalks and canvas awnings pale, and our houses pale in their wooden shingles and jackets of aluminum siding. Walking along the outer edge of our urban village, looking for an place I’d only recently heard about, I stopped at a Shell filling station to ask directions. The pumps at the station were undulating in sheets of octane-scented air; the only cool thing was a soda machine with a big, bluish photograph of ice cubes the size of car batteries and a torrent of soda coming over the cubes like a stupendous falls, like a natural wonder.

The young attendant answered my question and gestured with the end of a fuel nozzle.