The Secret Gardens of My Childhood
The gardens that I remember best from my childhood were all on paper. Some of them weren't so much gardens as wonderful wild spots in nature that the fortunate inhabitants of my childhood books were lucky enough to be able to play in. Others were gardens so immense and wonderful that I couldn't stretch my imagination around my own limited experience of what a garden was to be able to picture anything more than an impression of color, the buzzing of bees and the chirp of birds.
Funny about those bees. In real life I was terrified of them, but in books they always seemed to be making music and honey. They never stung.
And as hard as I tried to walk in the wooded area behind my grade school, which was almost big enough that I couldn't see the traffic on the street through the trees, I could never conjure up the kind of terror that Anne of Green Gables experienced running through the "haunted woods" of her Prince Edward Island home.
And I'd squint as hard as I could but the garden in our back yard could not transform itself into the ones belonging to St. Clair in Uncle Tom's Cabin - a picture in words that so captured my imagination that I copied it out word for word into a notebook when I had to take the book back to the library. Try as I would, I could only see what was there - a 2' deep strip around the perimeter of the small backyard (rudely made even smaller by the utilitarian and distinctly unromantic presence of a garage)
The garden in my yard had dirt showing - something I was certain did not apply to the St. Clair gardens. In fact that is something that has applied only rarely to the gardens I have created in my adult life. Instead it had a line of plants, lined up a bit like soldiers. All that saved them from military precision - something hard to avoid when planting a narrow strip in front of a chain link fence - was the different sizes and shapes of those plants. As I recall we had three rose bushes, some of the Euphorbia called Snow on the Mountain, which I wasn't suppose to touch because it was poisonous, a few bearded iris, a spirea shrub and a lot of zinnias.
I blamed my inability to turn that into the romantic gardens I read about on my own lack of imagination. Only a few years before I had tried to imagine an imaginary playmate for myself. I didn't succeed at that either. So I wasn't surprised when I failed to be able to envision paths strewn with rose petals and trees into which I could climb with a book and a plate of apples to while away a summer afternoon. The lone tree sitting like a flagpole in the middle of our yard had a trunk no bigger than 2" in diameter. Even as a child I probably would have killed both it and myself attempting to find a branch for sitting and reading. I was young, but not stupid. I didn't waste my imagination trying to do something about that tree.
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