Every garden is an act of deference or defiance, Marc Treib said. People begin gardens for all sorts of reasons–sometimes to conform to a neighborhood or a social set, sometimes to oppose some prevailing mode of cultural life. My motivations are as wild as my garden itself–sometimes I imagine myself part of the comfortable bourgeoisie, sipping a diet soda amid the aroma of lilies.

But then, things are a little too unkempt and unfinished–the round garden that I amateurishly overplanted by August has become a wild melee of completing echinacea and David phlox and oriental lilies, all form and shape lost–not exactly a showpiece for the chronically respectable. I think for me the garden is more a bit of the country, a local outpost of the Front Porch Republic–an anti-mall.

I read some time ago that the shopping mall was the distinctively modern and American form of the garden. Acres and levels of material bounty, cascading escalators of consumers gliding up and down through visions of delight–temperature, humidity and light regulated to a muffled hum, soothing any distraction from the timid fantasies that keep us moving up and down and through, spending and spending.

Nature there exists as diffused radiance from the skylight, bathing the fiscus–or even simpler, a grove of potted silk palms with authentic wood trunks. . . .

 

One of the uses of gardens has always been to express a vision of how the world could be or should be. A world organized into palatial displays for catering to endless desire–no weeds, no mosquitoes, no mud. A world perfected, in a way.

Still, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. I ate a summer apple today–ripened on the tree without pesticides. It was a Lodi–an improved Yellow Transparent–that I planted some years ago because they were my youngest daughter’s favorite. I planted it in the place where she knocked down a much larger tree when she was learning to drive. Her older sister was teaching her. I had to pull the white Tercel off the knocked over tree with my truck. She had moved away before the tree bore fruit, but then she moved back–or at least not far away. There was a ladder set up under the tree, left over from when my wife stripped the tree to make apple pies. She had left one apple that she couldn’t reach. It was just out of reach for her, but a pleasant stretch for me.

As its heft filled my hand, memories emerged from my neurons and synapses somewhat the way fragrance emerges from the epidermal cells of a rose. A tree beside a path at the MacEntire dairy ranch where I was fifteen bore the same fist-sized fruit in mid-August–more than we could ever eat and free for the picking. Those summers of lifting hay bales in the August heat, diving off the bridge to the tower at Mission Dam, ranging ever wider through dappled evenings in the woods along Mission Creek, gathering the cows into the holding corral for milking every dawn and every dusk–moments that are here and not here as I climb down the ladder in an August decades later.

Malls can be nice, sometimes, but they aren’t selling what we are looking for.