Urban gardening provides beauty in the apocalypse
Way back in March, definitely after 15 Days to Stop the Spread; maybe during 30 Days to Stop the Spread, when we were all heading toward the realization that we had no real plan to stop the spread, I ordered a window-garden flower starter kit.
This wasn’t my inaugural attempt at urban gardening. Last year, in my first stab at growing things, I’d gone to Home Depot for tomato and eggplant and pepper plants and put them in pots on my roof deck.
This year, though, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to go shopping, or that anyone would be able to go anywhere. Better safe than sorry, I thought.
When the kit arrived, I soaked the seeds overnight. In the morning, I pushed them deep into their little cylinders of soil. I left them on the windowsill. The next morning, tiny shoots of green had poked their way into the world. It felt like a miniature miracle.
By then, my book tour had been canceled, and my kids had been told they’d be doing distance learning for the rest of the school year. My girls and my husband and I were at home, together, all day, every day, with no end in sight.
I baked and I cooked and I cleaned and I exercised, but, some days, it felt as if the only thing keeping me sane and steadied were those delicate green shoots, lassoing their tendrils around chopsticks and bamboo skewers and getting taller every day.
I bought a bag of Heirloom 55 seeds that would let me grow 50 kinds of vegetables and basically let me restart the world’s crops, if a Noah’s Ark situation arose.
I planted radishes, and pickling cucumbers, Black Beauty eggplants and Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce. I planted acorn squash and sugar pumpkins and Sugar Baby watermelons. And I bought more flower seeds; some because I’d grown them before, others because I just liked their names: Jewel Mix nasturtium and Heavenly Blue morning glory; Cosmic Glory impatiens and Velvet pansy mix.
By the end of April, every south-facing windowsill in the house looked like a miniature jungle. I bought five 16-quart bags of
Miracle-Gro potting mix and a 10-pound bag of compost. I bought a threetier raised wooden gardening bed. I hardened off my tomato and zucchini and pumpkin and cucumber seedlings, and planted them in their new beds.
Spring marched into summer. The virus burned its way across the country. The death toll mounted. George Floyd was killed. The streets filled with protesters, then tear gas. There was looting. There was a curfew. The businesses in my neighborhood boarded up their windows and painted “Black Lives Matter” on the plywood. I transplanted my morning glories to the front of my house, and watched as they climbed up the gate by my front door, covering the black iron in green.
In 1978, when I was 8 years old, a blizzard in New England closed schools for a week. I can remember my mom zipping up my green and gold snowsuit, and the snowplows coming down the block, making drifts that were taller than I was. When we went back to school it all seemed like a grand adventure, an unscheduled vacation; a story to tell our children, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
What will my children remember about this? Will they remember cars lined up for miles, waiting for food banks or for coronavirus tests? Will they recall videos of anti-mask adults throwing tantrums at Walmart or posting screeds about how the virus is fake news?
“When will this be over?” my children asked. “Will there be school in the fall? What’s going to happen?”
I told them I didn’t know, that no one knew. I told them we were all safe, and all together. I learned that it’s very hard to impress a 12-year-old who just wants to see her friends with “at least you have your health.”
Then my cosmos and marigolds began to bloom. And, again, I felt a little hopeful.
I signed up for the Better Homes & Gardens gardening newsletter. I joined two gardening groups on Facebook and downloaded an app to help me identify the plants I’d neglected to label. I collected gardening memes: “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a woman to garden, and the whole neighborhood gets zucchinis.”
On the front steps, the nasturtiums went wild, foaming out of their pot, flowering red and gold. On the roof, tomatoes and eggplants grew and ripened. The cucumber vine yielded a cuke or two every day, and not one but two Sugar Baby melons took root and ripened in the sun.
But the flowers were the summer’s stars. The zinnias blossomed in frilly profusion, in gorgeous magenta, hot pink and pale pink and orange and creamy gold. They made me happy every time I saw them.
I put flowers in every room of the house, to show that even now, even in the midst of this, there is beauty, there are cycles unfolding with miraculous regularity, from seed to plant to fruit or blossom. A beginning, a middle and an end.
What are my daughters going to remember about the plague season, which has had a beginning and an endless middle and still no end in sight?
They’ll remember the uncertainty, and the deaths; the frustration and the despair. But, maybe — I hope — the flowers, too.