Gray: Gardening is a metaphor for life
there still was far too much of that European dinnerware that she’d never been able to sell.
Wabash Feed Store would come soon to pick up the remaining shelves and arbors. Drennen would put the antique birdcage into storage, and the other birdcages — maybe they’d go to a rescue group. She’d given long-time customers permission to dig up plants and take home the goldfish in the lily pond. But she still needed to find adoptive homes for three rescue cats who lived at the shop.
She couldn’t save everything. The big old live oak was doomed. The bougainvillea that spilled magenta flowers over the fence, the wisteria that put a leafy roof on the arbors — they’d disappear. She hoped the wild birds — cardinals, doves, mockingbirds, finches — would migrate away before June 1, when the land would be cleared.
She winced when she noticed a lizard on a potted plant. She didn’t like to think about the lizards. “I wish I had enough money that I could give this place to the city to be used as a park,” she said.
She thought she’d take a break before opening another, smaller store. “I tell myself that change is good,” she said. “It’s just hard to get there.” Changing season
Gardens always are about change. They make a gardener acutely aware that seasons are passing, that things are growing and dying. Seedlings erupt. Plants flower. Leaves drop. Drennen always had found that green drama comforting.
She learned gardening from her mother, whom she described, delicately, as “nonlinear.” On good days, on their the family’s acres in Birmingham, Ala., her mother found joy in the garden. On bad days, she found solace.
After graduating from the University of Texas, Drennen moved to Houston in the mid ’70s. She stayed, she said, for reasons that “involve a husband or two.” She sold real estate, and in flush times, devoted herself largely to cultivating her own lush, jungle-y garden. With the help of a full-time gardener, she kept not just plants, but animals: fish in ponds, birds and bunnies in cages. She always was rescuing things, birds and lizards and sad-looking plants. “I didn’t get to have children,” she explained.
But the flush times didn’t last. During the ’80s oil bust, her husband’s development business went belly-up, and the couple began trying to figure out a new way to pay their way in the world. “He said to me, ‘What can you do?’ I said, ‘I can garden.’ ”
She bought what was then the Village Garden Shop from the children of its proprietors, and began working seven days a week, 10 hours a day. “I was so afraid of not being able to pay the bills,” she said. “It was my own personal Depression.”
She imported the kind of European planters she’d seen in Alabama, planters that no one else in Houston sold. She built a workshop, where her staff made gates and pergolas. They did contract gardening. They planned gardens. They repaired gates and fences. And the place, she said, “grew like Topsy.”
When the ballet studio next door went on the market, Drennen bought the building because she was afraid that something awful would go in there. She did the same with the doctor’s office on the other side, and finally, with a parking lot. Without really meaning to, she’d acquired a big chunk of land and was running a big store: 24,000 square feet of retail space. It was exhausting.
It wasn’t just the Garden Gate that changed, of course. The world around it changed, too. Her husband, the developer, became her ex-husband. Drennen, known to many as Donna Lokey, returned to her maiden name. The sleepy Rice Village became a red-hot center of upscale retail, and finally, began attracting highrise development. As one of those new buildings rose behind the shop, it blocked the sunlight that had once flooded the old ballet studio.
Drennen’s property taxes skyrocketed. Developers made her offers. She dithered. But the gardener inside her, ever sensitive to changes in the environment, knew that soon, her shop would have to go. In December, she agreed to sell.
The developers gave her five months to close shop. “It wasn’t enough,” she said. “But maybe it could never be enough.”
Once the bustle of closing is over, she plans to take the summer off. Summer, after all, is the mean season for Houston gardens, the months when things die or lie fallow. Besides, Drennen finds herself no longer willing to work outside on 100-degree afternoons; her crew can take care of its garden-maintenance customers without her. Instead, for a few months, she plans to travel and to “be a better friend to my friends.” She imagines all sorts of time-off luxuries: meeting someone for coffee on a weekday morning; sharing a bottle of wine in the evening; or most decadent of all, getting together for lemonade in the middle of a workday afternoon.
After that break, she said, she’ll probably open a new, smaller garden shop, on land she hasn’t found yet. And she’ll put in another new garden, a personal one, at the new, smaller house she just bought.
When she talked about gardening, sometimes she was sometimes very specific: Maybe she’ll liven up the low-maintenance xeriscape at her new place with roses. And sometimes, she was very general. “It’s not just about the garden,” she said at one point. “It’s about the light in the sky, the way the rain sounds on the roof.” It’s about noticing life as it flickers past.
lisa.gray@chron.com