The overseer let them in. He was moving orange trees in or out of the property; Baba couldn’t remember. But she did remember it was fall, and that bright orange leaves blew into the Hall of Mirrors when the overseer opened the balcony doors. The Hall of Mirrors was the only room without white canvas thrown over the red plush furniture — Versailles was closed for renovations, Baba said. He took them out to the gardens (he was the gardener, after all), even though it was boarded up from the public’s eye.
“It was completely wild and overgrown,” my grandmother, Baba, told me. “So much more beautiful than it is now.”
***
“You have to have a bit of wildness in your garden,” Baba went on to tell me. “For the birds, the mice, the squirrels, and the toads.” She told me the story of her hollyhocks, the flowers with tall stems that burst into blush pink and pastel yellow and wine red at the top of the flower. They were annuals, which meant they died with the first frost, and, if they were re-planted, sprouted again with the first spring melt. Baba didn’t plant the hollyhocks each year. Instead, she let the birds eat the seeds and scatter them on their own. But one year, the birds stopped spreading the hollyhock seeds. She tried, for years, planting engineered hybrids. But once they grew tall enough to bloom, a fungus began to brown the leaves until they shriveled and flew away with the wind. The hollyhocks were telling Baba that they didn’t want to be in her garden anymore. And Baba always listens.
In the grand scheme of things, the browning of the hollyhocks wasn’t a big sacrifice. Baba’s garden, located where Wilson avenue meets a sliver of forest in suburban Ontario, was vast. Hundreds of wildflowers and vegetables and trees and berries rise from her front yard. Roses and root vegetables grow in an annex garden next to her house. Pots of sunflowers line her walkway. Peonies fill hanging pots on her porch, and bright orange, edible flowers tumble out of her windowsill. Orchids fill her sunroom. At 85, she built a water garden smaller than a kiddie pool with koi fish and blooming water lilies that skim the green film lining the water’s surface.
***
When I was young enough to justify wearing a white fairy costume, I thought Baba’s garden was endless. The wildflowers rose above just above my head, and the vegetation grew so thick that my family couldn’t find me in the mass. I could spend hours finding new pathways in her jungle, or concocting a make-believe magic serum from poisonous berries. If I stood on the edge of her whitewashed front porch, it seemed like the crabapple tree at the far end of her garden, the one with the Buddha leaning placid on the bottom bough — was a lifetime away from where I stood. It was at least a football field away, which is what I told my friend when I bragged about my grandmother. Which was often.
***
Baba moved to this dead end by the forest as soon as all of her three children left their home in downtown Toronto. My father was the last to leave, having lived at home when he went to the University of Ontario for two years. But when he moved to New York City to attend Cooper Union, a school his girlfriend had dared him to apply to, Baba moved out of the city as soon as she could. For her, gardening has always been the first thing, and the most important thing. She told me that she had the need, deep in her bones, to move out of the city and to move somewhere wild, a place where she could cultivate life. “Gardening is in my genes, and yours,” Baba said. “My father was a great gardener — did you know that?”
***
Baba’s father — my great grandfather — escaped the Ukraine during the first world war. Four His father could afford to send him and three of his siblings to safety. My great-grandfather became the gardener, and eventually the overseer, of a wealthy man’s estate in Cuba. He took my great-grandmother with him. Growing up in a poor family, she was set to marry an older man, who was an alcoholic and an abuser. Baba’s dad stepped in, and soon they were married. When he’d saved up enough, the couple moved from Cuba to Toronto, where he knew there was a small, but healthy, community of Ukranians.
They settled into a fifteen-acre property in the outskirts of Toronto. My great-grandfather got a job as a factory worker and his wife got a job as a hairdresser. In the space between sleep and labor, her father grew plants, like he learned to do during his many years in Cuba. He grew rye in ten acres of the property, vegetables and orchards in the other five, and he raised two children, my grandmother Baba, and my great-aunt Edith. As Baba grew up, she became her father’s helper, and aided her father with daily gardening chores. Baba remembered, with a chuckle, that one of her daily tasks was to take a large jug of DDT and coat the round juicy flesh of her father’s tomato plants with the fluid.
Baba’s mother was a terrible gardener, Baba added, but she was a great flower arranger. Baba’s cottage was filled with fragrant blooms in the warm months.
“My father came from a very wealthy family, but my mother’s family was very poor,” she told me. “She had a rough upbringing, which, I guess, accounted for what she was like as a mother. But that’s a story for another time.”
***
One of my first tasks as Baba’s helper was to water the pots of flowers that dotted her front porch. I would take the green, plastic watering can from next to the trellis that my father built. I had to dip the watering can into the rain reservoir, and carry the heavy vessel to the front porch. Baba showed me how to nuzzle the watering spout under the peony blooms, because they became unhappy when wet, closing at the touch of moisture. She taught me how to keep the plants happy by removing shriveled flowers and browned leaves. She taught me to transplant sunflowers to bigger pots once they became adolescents, so that they would have room to breathe.
***
When Baba first bought her half-acre in Owen Sound, it was a mess. The paint was peeling on the house. The porch was rotten. Car parts scattered the front yard. But it was cheap, and she could see the potential. My dad rebuilt the porch and the upstairs cabinets. He and Baba planted ivy that crawled its way up to the second story windows. She got a job as a nurse in a regional hospital, to pay the bills. It was the perfect balance between city and country, she told me. Her kids came up and visited every Christmas to be together, and every summer to see the flowers. And when they had children of their own, the tradition continued.
***
I was eight years old when I insisted that I have a garden of my own. My dad is an architect, and together we built a 5×7 plot made of interlocking pine. We smoothed the bottom of the bed with a fabric that would keep out the weeds. I sketched out my first garden plot on some of my father’s architect paper: sweet peas (my mother’s favorite) would crawl up a metal grid in the center of the garden. Each cosmos seed would be placed one inch apart. Two inches for the sunflowers. Morning glories would grow up the sides. For the first few weeks, everything grew as planned. I took turns each day between watering and weeding my garden. The wildflowers formed identical sprouts in identical lines, like a miniature army marching into battle. It was the time of order, and perfection, just as I liked.
And then, it was the time of the morning glories. The placid flowers I’d planted on the side of my bed began to grow at a rapid pace. At first, I tried to trim them down. But eventually, the plant took over. It grew in a great, gnarled, vibrant mass. Everything underneath soon died in its shadow. A few days ago, I called my mom to ask her if it was all a rosy, childhood memory. She assured me that it wasn’t. “It was just so alive, and it grew to a size beyond what everyone imagined it to be,” she said. “Everyone who walked by stopped to look at it. You became known as the girl who planted the morning glory. It never ceased to be magical”
Flowers soon covered the green beast — huge, cornflower blue flowers that opened in the morning and closed at night. “It was hard to believe that anything in nature had these colors,” my mom said.
“My garden is so alive,” Baba would always tell me. “Every day, when I enter it, there are new surprises. It never ceases to bring me joy. It is unexpected because it is orderless.”
That Thanksgiving, a neighbor from Westmister senior living slipped a letter into my mailbox. “Dear Garden Girl,” it read, “I go for a walk every day and the hill at the end of your street is usually something I avoid, but I can credit you for making me walk longer, because I always go to see your morning glories. Thank you for bringing so much joy to my day.”
It was around Thanksgiving that the first cold snap happened, and the great organism began shriveling to brown. Soon, all that was left were two gnarled vines that rose from the earth on either side of the pine frame. My mom always called these remnants the “umbilical cord,” because according to her, it looked just like one. For many years the umbilical cord hung from a pushpin on our wall. Finally, my mom just told me, she threw it “like a ceremony” in the compost bin in the back of the house. After all, it had been more than ten years since I started my garden, and a lot can change in a decade.
***
“As you know, Eva,” Baba said in our call, “I have had a really hard time walking recently. But even so, my garden is more vibrant than ever. I have adapted to my garden, and my garden has adapted to me.” Mostly, she means that she now knows how to communicate with her plants. “I know this sounds crazy,” she said, but it is mostly about the spirits that are in the ground.
“If a plant is suffering, I will pay special attention to it for a day,” Baba told me. “And the next day when I come to it, it will always tell me what it needs.”
***
I was a freshman in high school the first (and last) time that plants talked to me. My dad picked me up from the dark nurse’s room in my public high school building, where I lay, curled into a ball and fighting the onset of my panic attack. I shook so hard that I could barely walk. When I reached home, I collapsed into the long weeds that grew on the border of my garden. I can’t tell you what they told me, but I can tell you this: that summer, I went backpacking for two weeks in the forest, my first wilderness experience. When I made it back to my grandmother’s garden, I was symptom-free. But that’s a story for another time.
***
I don’t know much about my grandfather, except for the fact that he was a pilot, and that his name was the same as my father’s. I also know that I met him when I was a newborn, because my father once told me it was one of the happiest moments of his father’s life. I think my grandfather was an alcoholic, and that’s why Baba never has wine anymore. I also think that that’s what killed him, but I’ll never ask. His ashes are scattered around my grandmother’s crabapple tree, the one with the Buddha resting on its roots. This isn’t the only plant that is sown with memory. Most of the perennials Baba owns were given to her by friends over the years. Some of those friends have passed away, but their flowers still bloom every year.
“I have a gorgeous red bud tree because of you and the times we spent together in Texas,” she told me.
***
In our phone call, I made the mistake of telling her that I was hoping to start a garden this summer. I’d forgotten about what would happen when she’d come to visit my garden in Texas. “Oh really?” Baba exclaimed. “Where are you going to stay? What will you plant? Front yard or backyard? Will there be boys in the house with you? Good, I’m glad there will be boys. That makes things more interesting.” I told her that I was planning to live in an off-campus house with other biologists and earth scientists and lovers of the outdoors. I told her that we should have a big kitchen, and I hoped I’d be able to cook food that grew just meters away. I told her about the plum tree in the front yard, and how we would probably let thru-hikers of the Appalachian trail stay there, if they weren’t too stinky or creepy. As for the rest of the garden logistics, I told her that I was in control. “I’ve been doing this for a while too, remember?”
“It’s funny how your experience hiking and backpacking and whatnot has really made you such a good gardener,” Baba replied. “There’s something about being in the forest, having that wild around you, that makes a gardener, if not just for the sake of the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.” And not just for the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees — for myself, as well, I thought.
“If I had known all of this when I was your age, Baba said, “my garden would be a virtual Versailles.” I wondered what she meant by that — whether she was talking about the the manicured one filled with throngs of tourists, like she saw in pictures, or the one that she went to with her husband in secret, the one filled with a kind of wild magic, where the birds came and nestled in the branches of the pine, and where even the fairies and spirits had a chance to wiggle their wings in the golden light. I hoped it was the latter.