The Power of Patience

This past week was rough. It started out fine enough with a wonderful Valentine dinner with my man and delightful day with my daughter, but the next day, all the hearts and warm fuzzies were clouded over with the dark dread of debt depression. My car got towed.

If you drive in San Francisco and you haven’t had your car towed, consider yourself lucky. There really is nothing worse than getting ready to leave the house for an anticipated destination, then walking to where you parked the car two days before, only to find that your car is no longer there. Add a fussy baby to this equation and you can very easily imagine what hell must be like. Of course, my day of purgatory did not end there.

To try and save you from too many horrid details, I will offer you a brief summary. First, I had to break the bad news to the bread winner of the house knowing that we were already low on financial funds. He did not take it well. Feeling beyond guilty, I offered to go and find the car. I tried to not seem too distraught on account that my daughter would be joining me for the bus ride to the tow lot in the Tenderloin. I told her with tears in my eyes that we were going on a ‘fun adventure’. The bus ride was an adventure, all right. Fun, no. The bus we were on ended up getting in an accident and although my daughter and I were fine physically, I was mentally aghast when I was told to leave the bus and wait twenty minutes for the next one to arrive. Twenty minutes with an irritable toddler in the Tenderloin is something I don’t even want you to imagine. After getting on the expectant second bus, I’m embarrassed to admit that I missed the stop I was supposed to get off at. Although I was only three blocks away from my final destination, toting a toddler that distance without a stroller is a true test of tenacity. We finally got to the towing facility and I faced the fact that my fate of the day was not going to get any easier. I’m not sure how long I waited for my exuberant transaction to transpire, but I will tell you that I was glad I spent the extensive time in a sequestered cell of a room because my little one couldn’t escape easily. Although our car was finally freed from the facility and both my daughter and I made it home before bedtime, the rest of the week has been dampened by this dreadful predicament of debt.

The reason I am letting you in on the details of my dramatic day/week is not because I want your sympathy, but because I find it funny that I was planning on writing about patience for a while now and it has been patience that has kept me sane during the past week. It’s quite curious how coincidental the world works, isn’t it? Because my patience has paid off and I ended my week on a positive note by planting the perennial vegetables I purchased before my week of woe, I guess I can let you know that the original title for this post was going to be: The Patience of Planting Perennial Vegetables.

Although I have been gardening, quite honestly, for as long as I can remember, I have never planted a perennial vegetable before. What makes a vegetable perennial is that unlike its more common brother, the annual vegetable, the perennial vegetable does not die after harvesting the fruit. The perennial vegetable, you could say, is a year-round responsibility. Although this permanent garden fixture sounds great at first, there is one big downside to the perennial vegetable: It usually takes two to three years before you can harvest any fruit! So, like my terrible towing experience, patience is the key when it comes to growing this slow-to-mature plant.  

For years now, I have been dreaming of planting one particular perennial vegetable: asparagus. But every time I thought of the timely investment I had to put into this plant, I quickly changed my mind about starting my own bed of these springtime shoots. I guess it didn’t seem possible to wait two or three years before I enjoyed my first harvest. To put it simply, I just didn’t have the patience.

Obviously, something changed this past year because I was finally ready to put my time in for my aspiring asparagus. I can’t really put my finger on why I now have more tolerance for time, but I’m sure it has much to do with becoming a parent. As this last week can attest, being a mom requires an infinite amount of patience.

So as a patient mother, I took the time to prepare my asparagus bed by first weeding, then turning the soil, and lastly amending the soil with some compost. I carefully set my crowns of asparagus in a well tended trench and covered my crop with what was left of my compost. I will continue to cultivate my crop until the time comes for me to cut each long awaited sweet chartreuse shoot which emerges from the earth.

It is with this patience that I plant my other permanent perennials as well. In two years time, I will not only be parenting a preschool age child, but preparing to harvest my flavorful flowers of artichoke, my tangy twigs of rhubarb, and of course, my long awaited asparagus. And I must remember this bounty I will bear the next time my day dips downward because with patience, something positive will always prevail.

My asparagus trench, artichoke transplant (bottom) and my Poppy 'seedling' (my daughter).

Legends of the Wall

When I was in graduate school, I explored the option of writing a thesis. The subject I was interested in was loosely based on the idea of enclosure and more specifically, the landscape features which often enclose a garden: walls and fences. Because I was unable to concentrate such a vast and complicated subject, I did not write the thesis, but I did become quite knowledgeable on the historical context of walls in the landscape.

                

For instance, did you know that the ‘Great Wall of China’ was not always the revered manmade marvel it is today? In fact, for many years the wall was seen as a defensive disgrace or a last resort tactic to keep the invading Mongols from gaining more ground. If it weren’t for some Western wahoos wandering upon the wall, and their ideals of historical perseveration, the ‘great’ wall might be nothing but rubble today. Can you imagine what that pile of rubble would look like from outer space? I guess not much different than the wall itself. Hmmm.

A satellite image of the 'Great Wall of China'

Also, the first historical walled garden, which I’m aware of, is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Although there is no physical evidence of this famed structure, artists, poets and musicians have been rendering its illustrious tale for thousands of years. My favorite rendition is a love story. It is said that the King during these ancient times planted a ‘pensile paradise’ because his wife was homesick for the mountainous landscape of her youth. I, of course, imagine this lovely lady wandering through her fabulous fake forest, picking fruit from trees which resemble something almost forgotten. A tear rolls down her cheek as she bites into its fleshy and fragrant skin. Oh, what a fantastic fairy tale.

Artistic rendering of the 'Hanging Gardens of Babylon'

 I can also educate you on the walled gardens popular in medieval Europe. It is often argued that these ‘secret’ like gardens represent the battle between man and nature during that time. The controlled, man-made environment within the walls is a safe haven, while what lies outside the walls is the unknowable wildness of nature. It is interesting to imagine a wall which represents the line between what was considered good and evil. It also kind of makes me want to read “The Secret Garden” again, so that I can dissect what the wall in that book really symbolized.

Medieval walled garden

Similarly, the picturesque gardens designed by followers of romantic writers like Thoreau and Emerson and their reverence of nature, contain walls whose purpose is to contain livestock without obstructing the view of the landscape. I’m not joking when I tell you that these walls, called ha-has, are very similar to the retaining walls many of us know today. The only difference is that the ha-ha, usually had a ditch on one side, rather than level ground. So, this wall represents quite the opposite of the wall of the medieval garden. Is it wrong that I giggle a little when I think of a wall which puts nature above man?

View of the Chirk Castle ha-ha found in Denbighshire, North Wales.

  

 As you can probably conclude by all this talk of walls, I have been busy with my own wall. I started building a three foot high retaining wall out of recycled concrete chunks, otherwise known as ‘urbanite’, in my back yard. Like many landscape designers and architects, who draw up plans and details as to how to construct a retaining wall, I have never actually built one before. I didn’t draw up plans or use any specifications for this wall either. I just started stacking my concrete chunks, hoping that the final result would somewhat resemble a wall that could hold back the dirt behind it. Although the process was somewhat slow at first, I soon felt like I was a true mason.

I forgot to take a 'before' photo again, but this is another part of the yard where a wall needs to be replaced.

As my wall began to take shape, the theorist in me began to wonder if this wall was more than just a pile of concrete holding back the dirt behind it. Like the Great Wall of China and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, did my wall have a story to tell? Or did it make a statement about my relation to nature as the walled gardens of our past have? As I began to ponder these questions, I instinctively tried to analyze what the word ‘retaining’ actually meant.

To retain, has many definitions. The one which usually accompanies the wall is ‘to hold in place’. But as I stood back stretching my aching arms to admire my emerging retaining wall, I realized that this wall was doing more than just holding dirt in place. It was ‘retaining’ in another sense. I was ‘obtaining possession’ of the land with each heavy slab of urbanite I placed on the wall. This, of course, doesn’t mean that I actually own the land because I am only renting one unit in a six unit apartment complex. But maybe what I am saying is that this land, my ‘shared’ yard, wasn’t really mine to garden until I decided to permanently mark it with the construction of my wall. For some reason, the physical action of placing more than plants on the land, gave me validity to turn this fallow land into my garden.

So I guess you can say that the story of my wall is still being written, but so far, it is not mournful, enchanting or very symbolic. Up to this point, building my wall has been an enlightening experience. I have learned that ‘growing’ a garden is not just about putting plants in the ground, but claiming that ground to belong to you as well.

My wall