The seeds of a memoir

Unearthed: Love, Acceptance, and Other Lessons from an Abandoned Garden By Alexandra Risen Viking 304 pp; $24.95

It is remarkable how the world can dissolve in a shed tear. The story of Alexandra Risen’s father — a true story — illustrates the point. Alexandra Risen’s father was a working man born in the Ukraine who spent most of his life in Edmonton. After a fall from a tree he was pronounced “brain dead” by the doctor. Gone. But Risen insisted on talking to the body on the bed. This insistence was in some ways out of keeping with the family’s life, in which the father rarely spoke more than a word. “In the twenty years I spent at home you said maybe twenty words to me,” Risen pointed out to her father. “Once a year on average. No one would believe it if I told them.”

In the present she confesses to the reader, “After an hour of small talk I stand, feeling stupid. What am I doing, trying to reconcile with my father’s brain-dead body ... Goodbye I whisper, and squeeze his fingertips. Maybe you’ ll find peace where you’re going. I glance at his face and, incredibly, a tear escapes the corner of his closed eye. It follows a crease in the wrinkled skin. I check more closely, beyond the crinkled ventilator tube and white surgical tape. Another tear follows, and then another.”

Thus speaks the braindead body on the hospital bed, launching Risen’s memoir of gardening in Toronto. It must surely be one of the strangest — but strongest — entries in the garden memoir genre.

Unearthed commences with the purchase of a house in the middle of Toronto, which happens to be on top of a small ravine. At the bottom lies the remnants of a former garden, now a mess. With her husband Cam and their young son Max, Risen resolves to set the garden right.

Her father’s passing more or less coincides with the purchase of the house, but Risen hopes that her mother — still in Edmonton, a nearly fanatical gardener in her own lifetime — will live to see the fruits of her family’s labour.

Also around the same time Risen and her husband buy the new house, Risen’s mother suffers a stroke and commences a long slide into dementia. Risen’s monumental garden, then, in which various trees, shrubs and so on are chosen for their degrees of hardiness, beauty and symbolic properties will be a sort of vindication of the daughter’s life.

The construction of the garden remains the heart of the memoir. The narrative moves back and forth between Risen’s childhood and her own family’s experience, with Risen discovering the reason for her father’s silence — working in Nazi Germany during the Second World War imposed that kind of response — and resolving moments of genuine difficulty in her own parent-child relations without trauma.

Throughout, the garden casts its benign spell.