Landscapes of the Mind

Chris and I have never been particularly knowledgeable about plants. There was a brief period in our first house when I thought I might be interested in gardening, but that faded as soon as I bought my first bag of bulbs. Bulbs would be an easy way to break into gardening, I thought, and being the cheapskate that I am, I opted for the larger bag of bulbs because the price worked out cheaper per bulb.

The bulbs looked so innocent and small, huddled at the bottom of the transparent bag. But as I started digging holes, painstakingly placing one bulb in each hole, the bulbs seemed to multiply. I was hot and sweaty, and my life stretched out before me in an endless succession of bulb-planting.

Eventually I realized that I could end this hell by digging one large hole and dumping half the remaining bulbs in there. Then, as I’d been trained to do since childhood, I gave the leftovers to my father.

Since then, I’ve discovered I prefer the type of gardening that involves as little work on my part as possible. This means I never buy bulbs, occasionally I weed, and often I mow the grass. And annuals? Ha! I won’t fall into that money-sucking trap. Annuals, after all, are just plants that die even when you take care of them. Give me a perennial that I can kill the old-fashioned way–with neglect, overrwatering, and insect infestations.

Given this background, it was surprising that Chris and I had decided to embark on our first real gardening project in our new house. Or rather, I had decided to embark, and Chris was drafted to do the heavy lifting. As usual, my goal was to save money, and the only reason I decided to transplant a few bushes was because they were currently living right where our garage was going to be in a few months.

My first attempt to transplant had failed miserably, with the leaves turning brown and wilting almost immediately. A plant-savvy friend had confirmed the death of the plants and suggested I try again, but with higher-quality dirt. I had a gift certificate to a local garden shop and decided Chris and I might as well check out the neighborhood and pick up some good dirt at the same time.

Once we’d arrived at the shop, Chris and I wandered around. We were both used to Home Depot where all the gardening items were outdoors, surrounded by bags of various mulches and dirts, but I didn’t see anything like that here. We had a brief moment of excitement when we thought we saw some bags, but upon closer examination we realized the bags were fertilizer.

“Isn’t this what you want?” Chris asked. He poked a bag on the bottom with his toe.

“I don’t think so. These are all cow manure and stuff like that. I think I want the dirt that comes with fertilizer, but it should still be mostly dirt.”

We kept walking. Eventually we found bags of special bonsai dirt and bags of indoor plant dirt, but no plain old regular dirt. We headed outdoors, where the plants were carefully labelled and in tidy rows. We didn’t recognize any of the scientific names and I was starting to get nervous.

“Are these annuals or perennials?” I whispered to Chris.

“I don’t know,” he said loudly. Apparently he was getting nervous, too. While I had a tendency to get quieter as I became overwhelmed, Chris’s method involved upping his volume. “I don’t know anything about this stuff. Why don’t you ask someone?”

I looked around me. People were milling about slowly, examining plants and flowers, and everyone seemed far happier than we were. “I can’t tell who works here and who doesn’t!” I said.

By now, I was so hot and frustrated that I wasn’t even sure why I was frustrated. Was it because I couldn’t find the dirt, or because I couldn’t even complete a simple task?

Chris was evidently sharing my frustration. “They should make it easier to find things here so people don’t leave,” he said to the room in general, as we marched through another aisle of plants.

“I think people can find things,” I muttered. “Just not us.”

Normally, Chris and I found it easy to do new things. If one of us was demoralized, the other helped to make things easier. This time, though, we were both beaten down. I was feeling scared, and Chris was feeling angry.

Neither of us mentioned the possibility of aborting the mission, but secretly, I was thinking how easy it would be to just hop in the car and go home. Chris was thinking that he wanted to leave, and would have, had he been alone.

Both simmering silently, we left the outdoor area and headed back inside another of the three sprawling buildings belonging to the garden center. No bags of dirt.

Finally, while Chris was pretending an interest in bugkiller sprays, I walked up to the counter where a woman was standing alone, checking items on a piece of paper.

“Uh, excuse me,” I began.

“Yes?” she said.

“Um, I’m, ah, trying to transplant some plants…but I need some dirt. Where do I get that?”

She paused a moment, then said, “You can find samples of our topsoil just outside the cash register there.” She pointed to another woman sitting at a window ten feet away.

I ran back to Chris. “It’s there,” I whispered urgently. “It’s right there! And it’s called topsoil, not dirt.”

We walked around the corner to the cash register, and sure enough, just outside the window was a table carrying small pots, each with a pile of dirt — excuse me, topsoil — or mulch in it. Each pot held a small tag in it, with the name of the mixture on it. And above the table there was a list of each mixture and the price.

Now that we knew what we should have been looking for, we realized that every cash register around us had the same list of mixtures taped near it. A few others also had sample trays.

I walked up to the table and examined the samples carefully. What we wanted, I guessed, was the Complete Planting Mix. I stepped up to the cash register.

“One bag of Complete Planting Mix, please,” I said. I handed over my gift certificate and watched the woman ring up my purchase. Twenty dollars still remained on my gift certificate! How was I ever going to spend that?

“You’re all set,” the saleswoman said. “Just go around back to the Bag Pick-Up area.”

“Uh, how do I get there?” I said.

She gave quick directions, while I nodded and hoped Chris was listening. Even on a good day, directions meant little to me, and today I couldn’t even seem to hear the actual words.

We drove around back and picked up our one bag of Complete Planting Mix. As we headed home, we both relaxed.

“Maybe it was the spirit of the bonsai,” Chris said suddenly. We had bought a very expensive and beautiful bonsai a few years ago, with the intention of burying Pedro’s ashes in it. We still hadn’t gotten around to moving his ashes out of the cardboard box from the animal hospital.

“I think the spirit of the bonsai was warning all the other plants away, ” he continued darkly. “Sending out bad mojo, bad vibes.”

“Telling all its brethren to hide from us,” I added. “That makes sense.”

We drove a few more miles.

“I don’t think we should buy any more plants,” I confided to Chris. “We’re not cut out for this.”

“But I like having plants inside the house.”

“Well, you’re not the one taking care of them, and I just kill all of them,” I said. “I wish we could just get rid of the bonsai. It’s never really recovered from last year, when you put it outside too early. I told you it was too early.”

“But the bonsai people said it would come back this year!” Chris protested.

We both considered the bonsai. By now, several of the trees in the bonsai arrangement had died, all the moss had disappeared, and the remaining trees were a mass of exposed wires and roots.

“It’s not going to come back,” Chris concluded.

“I feel bad,” I said. “It was so expensive, and it must have taken, like, fifty years to make it. And we killed it in three. I suppose we could take it back to the store. They have a bonsai hospital there, but I don’t know how much it costs.”

“I’m too embarrassed to bring it,” Chris said. “It looks really bad.”

“I don’t even care about the money anymore,” I said, somewhat untruthfully. “But I just don’t want it anymore. It’s too much trouble. Let’s just drive up there some night after they’re closed. We’ll leave the bonsai on the steps.”

“You mean, ditch it?” Chris was horrified.

“Yes! Let’s face it, we have to abandon it. It needs someone better than us to heal it. It deserves someone better.”

“You’re right,” he sighed. “I suppose it’ll have a better life without us.”

Maybe some day we would do what was right. We’d drive up, late at night, to the bonsai store. We’d sneak up the steps and leave a forlorn bonsai at the front door, with a little tag on it saying, “Please take good care of me.”

And who knew, maybe some day we could reclaim it. After we got some practice, moved some dirt, learned to water…that kind of thing.

Posted by: Supersonic Jane | July 21, 2004 | 9:57 pm
Posted in: This Life