growing through it

Exactly two days after planting my garden, I got the news: We were moving.

My fiancé, Josh, broke the tragic news when he picked me up from work. It was mid-May, peak busy season for the nursery and garden center where I’d just started, and the dogwood and redbud trees blooming obliviously along the roadside formed a harsh contrast to what was happening inside the car.

For the past several months, I’d poured myself into scheming and dreaming up a perennial herb garden that would be a permanent fixture at our current home, an adorable little cottage across the street from the town lake. I envisioned a chaotic tumble of sage and lavender and thyme, all woody perennials carefully chosen for the glaring afternoon sun that reflected off the water.

We’d been fortunate enough to rent this home from family in a nontraditional landlord arrangement that certainly had its benefits, but now apparently also had one major drawback: moving at a moment’s notice when circumstances change.

Josh named the house we would be moving into — another family-owned rental just one street away — and I recoiled.

“But that house is full shade,” I wailed. “What about my herbs?”

Leave it to a gardener to be more concerned for her plants’ living conditions than her own.

In hindsight, this move shouldn’t have come as a shock. A pastor’s daughter, I have never lived in the same house for more than six years. To this day I start feeling anxious around the three-year mark in a home, a milestone Josh and I had almost reached when this news came through.

It had even become a running joke in my family: Watch out, they’d warn ominously. Don’t plant that thing in the ground or you’ll have to move, because throughout my childhood, whenever we invested significant time and energy into beautifying the grounds of a rental property, that’s exactly what happened.

And silly, silly me — I’d had the audacity to not just plant something, but to plan for the distant future. In my mind’s eye, I could already see the home’s future tenants feasting for years to come on the rosemary and parsley that I’d grown for them.

Well, not anymore. If I was moving, my garden was coming too.

I immediately set about conducting an informal sun study. I took to dropping by the new house at odd hours of the day, snapping photos of each area inside and out, painstakingly labeling them with the corresponding times, trying to extrapolate the average sun exposure on a given day. I wasn’t wrong: There was A LOT of shade. I felt sick at the thought of Josh’s prized hibiscus trees, two enormous yellow beauties he had successfully overwintered indoors for years. How could they possibly survive such dense tree coverage?

Finally, I settled on one side of the backyard, a sad little patch of ground hemmed in by a snaggle-toothed board fence and host to hip-high weeds of all varieties and more. The first time I stepped out the back door, my foot almost landed squarely on what I took to be a rat, but turned out to be a baby bunny who scurried for safety beneath the step.

I would think of this bunny often over the next few months.

Still, I began the arduous work of carving a garden bed out of the backyard which, once mowed, turned out to be mostly ragweed, common violets, and wild strawberry. Below that were what appeared to be the remains of a previous tenant’s garbage pile. My digging unearthed HotWheels, the broken neck of a beer bottle and half a walkie-talkie, its curly cord nearly indistinguishable from the roots that grew through it.

I fumed the entire time. I had just done all this work at the previous house – had spent the entire first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic hacking up chunks of crabgrass and excavating huge slabs of flagstone from where they lay buried in order to rebuild a stone path and flowerbeds. I had counted on this year to be less prep work and more actual cultivation. In the face of this setback, all I could do was grit my teeth and keep digging violets.

Our coworkers had offered to help with this particular chore, aghast at hearing of our misfortune, but in my despair I had turned them all down.

“I’m ready to write off the garden as a loss this year,” I told Josh, “this is a throwaway year.” I was mourning the little garden I had so carefully planned and still felt stumped as to how to get those plants to work with the new space.

The first night in the new house, my friends helped us sage it from top to bottom.

“Think of the energy you want for your new home,” they advised, “set an intention of what you want for your life here.”

Still fearing for my transplanted garden, which we’d dug up and carted over in a wheelbarrow, I blurted, “We recognize growth in all its forms and welcome it into our home.” I savored the words for a moment, satisfied they would do the trick. Now, surely, my plant babes would root down well.

It didn’t take long for the blessing to start working. A week later, the large catalpa trees over the backyard suddenly burst into bloom, their huge clusters of blossoms snowing all over the property.

“I didn’t even know those trees flowered!” our neighbor gushed. I consulted Josh’s brother, who had lived in the house previously, and his parents, who owned it. All agreed: No memory of those trees ever blooming. “The sage really is working!” Josh and I told each other conspiratorially each time a new bud appeared.

But we soon realized the folly of issuing such an open-ended invitation to the universe, or at least to the flora and fauna of South Jersey.

First, there were the ants. Josh’s brother told grisly war stories of when they had invaded before, and now we were firmly behind enemy lines. Rows of tiny troops marched through invisible cracks in the walls, streaming from under closed windows to capture new territories in a take-no-prisoners approach. First, they took the kitchen in a valiant battle fought on multiple fronts: both the sink and the stovetop fell to the enemy. Next, they stormed the beaches of my desk, where they somehow found one stray M&M among my pens.

The real problem was the poison ivy. I had first noticed it in small patches scattered throughout the side yard while conducting my sun study. Then we spotted it creeping its way along the fence line where I planned to grow peppers and tomatoes.

“You’d better get it out of there,” I fretted to Josh. Eventually, we located the source of the infestation: the mysterious tree growing up the side of our house was actually a massive vine of poison ivy. It all but swallowed the chimney, sprouting ropy branches menacingly skyward from the top of the flue. I began to have nightmares of poison tomatoes, my breath coming short as though blisters already crowded my throat.

“We’ll have to spray,” Josh announced grimly. I wanted to cry. How could I possibly hope to grow a healthy garden in soil doused with poison? But spray he did and when the poison ivy grew back, he sprayed yet again.

As the poison ivy tree began to wither, yet another problem reared its ugly head. One afternoon, I glanced out the window and was shocked to find a four-foot blacksnake sunning itself on the roof near the vine-strangled chimney. He was flung front-first over the edge of the eaves, and I watched as he languidly dripped out of sight. We had spotted his sloughed skin only days earlier, behind the water heater in what should have been our laundry room, left there like a forgotten stray sock. I had hoped it was older.

The only thing that wasn’t growing, it seemed, was my garden.

I had begun to despair having any produce at all this year. My cherry tomatoes had grown fat clusters of fruit which now simply refused to turn red. My cucumbers all croaked promptly upon planting, an event so depressing that half my zucchini committed suicide later that week. The bunnies mowed my basil and parsley to the ground, prematurely pruned a rare cutting I had intended to become a focal point of the garden and munched the cardinal flower I had bought as a memorial plant on Mother’s Day.

“My garden just makes me too sad right now,” I told Josh tearily, inspecting a limp branch on my raspberry bush. Gradually, I stopped suggesting our regular garden strolls with our morning coffee. I didn’t need to see the sunburn on the Meyer lemon to know I had failed.

But by August, things were looking up. I finally picked my first cherry tomatoes, their ruddy skins stretched tight and tasting of sunshine. My raspberry was fruiting again after a month’s hiatus, and my surviving zucchini wore yellow fruits the length of my first pinky knuckle. We had to watch our step, for the sickly roma tomatoes our neighbor had given us. They had languished as a weird, vine-y ground cover and were suddenly laden with pale-green globes. The parsley was back bigger and more flavorful than ever, and the eggplants and peppers I had bought to replace the dead cucumbers were bursting with flowers.

I started to perk up, too. Gradually, Josh and I had gotten each room of the house settled enough to feel not just like home, but like our home. The deep blue funk I had been in ever since the move had slowly lifted, one good day turning into three, then five. I started to feel the tug to write again, something I hadn’t felt since the news broke.

One night, I dreamed of a garden where a huge trellis staggered under the weight of yellow squash. It flowered and fruited before my very eyes, tumbling toward me in a golden cascade.

The next morning when I checked on the garden, the shriveled yellow squash plants I had rescued from their scorching four-pack had doubled in size and now sported fat buds full of promise.

Surveying the garden, I barely recognized it as the weedy plot I had cleared three months ago. At every turn I had doubted its ability to survive, let alone thrive. I had even actively sabotaged it, refusing to water during the worst of my depression.

Yet here it was, still bravely growing anyway.

I had been so focused on the growth I wanted to see that I forgot I had welcomed it in ALL forms. I had welcomed it, but I hadn’t recognized it until now — neither the garden’s, nor my own. I had waited impatiently for flowers and fruit to appear, disregarding the steadily-thickening branches growing strong enough to bear them. I had berated myself for not being able to bounce right back into life as usual after the move, ignoring the trauma of such a sudden and major life change.

I had forgotten that when something is transplanted — like my garden; like me — it takes time to root into its new environment.

That it goes through a shock from being uprooted.

That until it reestablishes its root structure it may feel less stable; that it can benefit from extra support in the meantime. Thank goodness for Josh, who faithfully lugged buckets of water all summer.

I sipped my coffee, already planning next year’s additions: maybe beans or peas; definitely more flowers. Maybe I could stretch myself and try growing strawberries or cabbages!

I smiled and turned back toward the house. Maybe it wasn’t the garden’s growth that had needed recognition.

Chloe Brooks is from so many places, and now lives on a lake in New Jersey with one fiancé, two cats, and many plants.