After having spent what seems like weeks sitting at my drafting table designing and drawing, I am thinking there is a lot to be said for just digging some holes.  Designing takes imagination, concentration, foresight, more mathematics than what you might think-and patience.  It requires a considerable expenditure of a certain kind of energy.  Sometimes it feels like I am straining my eyes, trying to see in the dark.  Or staring at something for so long I can’t see anything anymore.  I squirm, doodle, and daydream.  The whole business is exhausting, though the only thing in motion is my pencil.   

The drawing is usually in two phases.  Idle marks indicating where people might congregate, walk or park help to suggest a scheme.  I go through plastic erasers by the dozen.  I draw straight lines with a scale, as I need always to be conscious of how many feet it is from here to there.  I can tell in a moment whether I have space for lilacs, or just enough for a threesome of espaliered pears.  But what drives the pencil is an imaginary trip up the drive or front walk, through the garden to the back door, out again onto the terrace, back across the front yard, and out.  There are as many possible permutations to the route of this trip as there are hybrid daylilies.  It is like planning a trip to a city you have never visited-except that the city is not there yet.  Decisions get made, for better or for worse.  The drawing takes a more serious turn.  Lines start describing spaces that have volume.  Spaces without purposeful shapes will read on a drawing just like they read in the landscape-like leftovers.  That little piece of leftover land floating between the fence and a tree is better resolved on paper than after the fact. 

A finished drawing is as much about communicating the idea of the design, as a roadmap for an installation. Looking at a landscape design drawn on a piece of paper is a contradiction in terms.  Only the birds and the people in the planes flying overhead will ever see the landscape from this point of view.  Landscapes are sculptures teeming with the byproducts of all kinds of life-trees, flowers and falling leaves, insects, air conditioners, woodchucks, broken branches,skateboards, overgrown yews, trashcans, the neighbors-none of this shows in the drawing on a page.  But for the drawing to work, all of these possibilities and eventualities have to be taken into consideration.  Some serendipity in a garden can be charming and refreshing, but there is an equal chance it might be irritating.  Poorly planned landscapes, faulty horticulture, can openers that don’t work, shoes that are not the right size-irritating.

I understand completely the urge to visit the nursery, buy some plants, place the plants here and there, and dig holes.  There is something satisfying about stomping on the shovel, digging up the dirt, planting and watering a good looking plant.  It involves the expenditure of energy of a different sort-simple, physcial, uncomplicated by thought. Sometimes it is good not to overthink one’s moves.  After all, anything can be moved, provided one comes to one’s senses in time.

Sometimes Buck will call and say he has taken care of some problem or another.  He will say, “I have already watered the pots; it is safe to come home”, or “I have cleared the fallen branches from the drive; it is safe to come home”.  Once he called to say  “They got the guy who was breaking into cars on the street; it’s safe to come home”.  I was thinking about this yesterday, on the occasion of the 4th of July holiday.  I like this holiday, as I think it is important to celebrate the qualities that made Americans go to to war to be free,  and the day that independence was secured 234 years ago. Americans are intelligent, imaginiative and hard working. They lend a hand, when a hand is needed.  I would not want to live any where else than exactly where I live.  Americans that came long before me made it possible for me to grow up safe, and be free from oppression.  I went to school, I worked, I pursued a career-you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  I own a small urban property and a small house-that ownership is very important to me.  I may only own one zillionith of all the land covering the face of the earth, but it is mine.  Mine to be responsible for, but also mine to do with what I please. 

I live in a neighborhood where lots of other people own their own property.  They may paint their front door a color I find unappealing, or grow roses and lilies in the most vulgar colors I have ever seen, but I put little time to my disapproval beyond wrinkling my nose.  Why is that? I was raised to value my freedom, and the freedom of others.  Everyone in my neighborhood is free to decorate their property, raise their kids, attend the church or their choice, or not-in short, they are free from me, and anything or anyone else that threatens to oppress them.  I am old enough to have recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in grade school.  Having recited “one nation, under God,  indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” thousands of times, it is safe to assume that as an adult American I still believe in it.

My favorite part of the 4th of July weekend was actually Saturday night.  Buck and I were home, in the garden. We had our own quiet plans for the evening.  The neighbors to the south and the west were celebrating the holiday with big parties.  The street was jammed with cars.  My yard is completely enclosed from any views to my neighbors, but I could hear them.  The laughter, the music, the kids, the dogs-the sound of celebrations going on. It all seemed amiable, and lively.  I enjoyed hearing it all;  I liked being exposed to something I was not party to.  I like that I live in a community-we all mow our lawns, pay our taxes, and wave to our neighbors.  We live our own individual lives, but we are a group.  We get our street plowed in the winter, the mail comes every day, we share access to help from police and fire, we support the schools, the parks, and the library.  In return for fulfilling our obligations as citizens, we are free.  This is a situation I feel safe to come home to.

I suppose this has much to do with why I have done contemporary landscapes, revised and updated mid century modern landscapes, planted perennial gardens stuffed with every perennial that thrives in Michigan, designed all green gardens.  People have very different views about what constitutes a beautiful landscape, and they are free to express that. I have no interest in my landscape being anything other than what I come home to.  Part of the challenge of the shop is insuring that no matter your taste or period, you will find something to like.  This means buying with an eye not just your own, but with the eyes of others in mind.  It is not tough to appreciate a beautiful garden-even one you would not want to own.  My neighbor’s freedom is as important as my own. The real music behind the 4th of July celebration?  Let freedom ring.

When I was young, I had a dear friend named Margaret Dickson.  We met when I took a job working for Al Goldner at Goldner Walsh in the late 80’s.  She began as a client of Al’s-she went on to hybridize daylilies and plant annuals for him.  They went on to have a very special relationship the likes of which I had never seen before, or since.  I have no plans to discuss that; they have both passed on.  Suffice it to say, how they scooped me up and made it their business to school me-I was lucky.  I planted annuals on Margaret’s crew. That was just the beginning.

Al paid me 16,000.00 a year in 1984, with a 4000.00 bonus at the end of the year.  In 1985, a client of his who refused to pay 4000.00 of her bill-that bill got paid with my bonus.  I ran the crew on that job.  I recall I was more angry about some ill defined blame for some not really legitimate wrong being foisted onto me than I was about the money. The client was enormous maintenance, and astonishingly self centered and thoughtless.  The  shopping, the planting- a sonata in her honor.  She had no comprehension of the amount of work that went into trying to create exactly what she saw in her mind’s eye.  She missed the boat-plain and simple.  Our crime-the garden did not look mature when we finished.  I was taken aback to learn that not all gardens have a gardener in charge. What I learned from this was that some work needs to be accompanied by lots of discussion, so people are not disappointed, or taken by surprise.   Some work requires explanation, teaching-at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end.  When clients ask how long they should water their new boxwood-I say until you are blue in the face. I tell them that if they keep breathing regularly once they fell that blue coming on, they will be able to hold out even longer.  A strong finish is harder than a strong start-but you need both.   

   In retrospect, I think Al knew exactly what he was dealing with in me.  Though I would never dream of making any crew person working for me responsible for a disagreement about a bill, I learned something very important from him.  Relationships are difficult, and complicated.  I might spend my time time raging, or I might spend my time trying to make it all work.  The willingness to live through the blue in the face phase is an important tool I would not want to be without.     What I learned from the two of them about making things grow, and making relationships with clients grow, has stayed with me for a very long time. I feel their collective hands on, between my shoulder blades, encouraging me, every day.  This is my best description of what it means to have a mentor and a teacher. The 4k he nicked me-I got over it.  The money I spent restoring my fountain made my stomach churn-but that particular churning went away as soon as I had water.  The water representing that I come home to every day is what I think about.   

I digress.  This essay is really about Margaret, not money. Once I respectably survived working on her crew, she took me in.  She spent hours telling me everything she knew.  She had me over to not only tour her garden, but hear how she made it, what she chose to plant, and how she maintained it.  Her garden had lush hedges of Japanese painted ferns as a border; this I had never seen.  It was informal and rowdy in appearance-she knew when to stop fussing with plants, and just let them be.  She gave an extraordinary amount of time to me-how I loved her for this.  We became the best of friends.  Much late I weeded her garden when she was very sick and dying.  One day I visited her; she insisted she had seen a grey goose in her garden.  That would have been me.  March 29 of 1995, Margaret died.  Her funeral was held in a makeshift greenhouse on my property in Orchard Lake. I will admit I was so beside myself about loosing her, I was so beside myself about being asked by the family to speak about her, I drank two big glasses of wine at 10:30 am.  I spoke about her-who knows what I said.  I showed up at the appointed hour, and delivered.  I do remember half way through my talk, a big wind swept through, and showered all of us with water droplets from the condensation on plastic tunnel house roof.  I have no doubt it was Margaret, sweeping, brushing all of our collective grief away.  That would be just like her. 

She made me put my name on a garden speakers list; she told me I was able to teach.  If you are able to do, you should, she would say.  She encouraged me to start my own business, and was after me regularly about opening a shop.  I opened Detroit Garden Works one year to the day after she died.  There is a plaque on my greenhouse wall; the company that owns the shop property is called Margaret Properties.  Many years later, I hold close how she taught me to water any situation until I am blue in the face.  Whether it be a client, a job, my own garden, or your garden.  Many thanks, Margaret.