A Garden is Like a River

 

                         

All right.  I decided to post this one not because of its shining brilliance but because my husband dug me up a picture of the River O’ Petunias and I’ve been gloating over it during this interminable blizzard like a lifer over a Hustler mag.

The photo shows the River O’ in perhaps its second year, not its most spectacular, which was certainly the first, when I wrote this Bob’s Little Acre about it.  Like the man says, you can’t step in the same River O’ twice.

A GARDEN IS LIKE A RIVER.  SORT OF.

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Old joke:  A wise man says to his disciple, “Life is like a river.”

            “Life is like a river,” the disciple, deeply impressed, tells a second disciple, and the second disciple passes the wisdom on to a third, who passes it to a fourth, and so on until perhaps the twentieth disciple asks the nineteenth.  “Wait a minute.  How is life like a river?”

            “I don’t know,” admits the nineteenth, and asks the eighteenth, who asks the seventeenth, and so on until the question makes its way back to the wise man.

            Who shrugs.  “So,” he says.  “Maybe life isn’t like a river.”

            Still, people are always comparing life to one thing or another, and bodies of water and horticulture figure prominently.  I can’t count the times I’ve read, “The river of life,” or “Life is like a garden.” 

Nowhere, however, have I read, “A garden is like a river,” so I’m not altogether sure where I got the idea for the mighty Petunia River that now dominates my front yard and life.  All I know is:  This thing is bigger than I am. 

I don’t say that merely because it takes two garden hoses to water it.  What I mean is, I think it’s Art.

The Petunia River is to the ordinary flowerbed what the Pyramids are to the Quonset hut.  It is Everest.  It is the Sistine Chapel.  It is an epic, cast-of-thousands Cecil B. De Mille flood in living color that meanders, cascades and undulates down the length of this little acre, finally to empty into a plunge basin of impatiens around a willow tree at the bottom of the hill. 

It is my chef d’oeuvre, my opus.  It is the crowning achievement of a life spent rolling in the dirt. 

It is also the reason for the weeds in the pea patch and the fact that the squash swells to the size of your average Wal-Mart shopper before I get around to picking it.  What is food next to Art? 

The idea of the River might have sprung from the variety of petunia I planted, Wave, a name that suggests aquatic motion.  Or it may have its genesis in the geography of this place, which is so vertical that things are always losing their moorings and rolling merrily down toward the road, including topsoil, mulch, beer cans, and, more than once, your narrator.

Or I may just be barking mad.

People tell me I am and I used to worry about it, but it has long since ceased to bother me.  In my experience, when people tell you you’re crazy it usually just means you’re driving them that way, which is regrettable but hardly the same thing.

            Besides, if you read the news you’ll notice that people who really are nuts never suspect a thing.  They just go on their way rejoicing, believing that it is perfectly normal to communicate by letter bomb or keep UPS deliverymen cut up and parceled out in freezer bags.  So worrying about your sanity is a pretty good sign that you’re sane, or so I tell myself as I twitch and slobber.

            But I will admit the River represents a possibly psychotic departure from my usual gardening style.  I’m not big on design.  Like everyone else, I admire the glossy pictures in gardening mags, but always with a certain contemptuous realism  -- nice, but it ain’t gonna happen here, I work. 

I’m more the slash-and-burn type.  I don’t plant flowers in the place they’d look best, I plant them in a bare spot left where the dog’s wading pool has killed the grass.

I do, though, have a thing about rivers.

Throughout time (which Thomas Wolfe compared to a river), poems, novels and silly testosterone-laden movies about fishing have attested to the magic and mystery of rivers.  From the Styx to the Jordan, they figure in the world’s religions, and from the Nile to the Rubicon they figure in the world’s history.  Songs have been sung about them by everyone from Homer to Otis Redding.  Rivers are important to our culture.

Some of the best times of my life have been at rivers, though I don’t mind admitting they involved less of culture than of beer and inner tubes.  Still, isn’t there a kind of poetry in happy memories, whether or not you were drunk at the time?

In any case, I feel a certain mystic reverence for rivers and am always stunned by their beauty.  So perhaps that’s why the one Grand Design of my gardening life has been the Petunia River. 

I don’t think so, though.  I think I just looked at the hill and saw a mighty confluence of pink and purply blue petunias rolling organically down its slope, precisely as Michelangelo looked at a slab of marble and saw his David prance nakedly forth. I can’t explain it any better than that.  To understand the process, you’d have to be a great artist like Michelangelo and me.

Just joking.  This has been my only brush with Art and it is seriously starting to get on my nerves.  My lettuce bolted before I even noticed it was ready to pick, and as my husband points out we can’t eat petunias.

Still, I’m not unhappy I did it.  Yard work has so commandeered my life that if somebody asked me what I’d been doing for the last 30 years I’d have to admit, “Mostly mowing grass.”  Now I can anyway say, “What?  You never heard of the Petunia River?”

Well, I will stop trying to explain Art.  You either get it or you don’t.  I will merely shrug, look wise, and say:

“So.  Why shouldn’t a garden be like a river?”

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.