I have made a career of designing landscapes yes, but I more importantly have forged relationships with people and the places they live. This one may want green rooms that provide refuge, and that one may need space for children playing soccer, and another wants to evoke a memory of a favorite place, and another who wants nothing but roses and more roses-and yet another for whom trees planted in an ocean of rough grass is sublimely beautiful. If the project is successful, each of us in turn learns something about what we really want. If I have my way, there will be discussion about the responsibility of stewardship, as opposed to the rights of ownership. After all, the dirt was there before each of us put our hand to it, and it is our responsibility that the hand we put to it now will leave it beautiful and healthy after us.
As a gardener, the issues of life and death are ordinary and unremarkable. Trees have a lifespan-some much longer than others-but none the less, a lifespan. Perennials loving sun waste away and die in the shade in the same manner that rock garden plants rot and die planted in standing water. Seedlings appear in unexpected places, and thrive despite some science which suggests the contrary. A landscape seems very much like a speedboat my brother once had-no neutral, just forward or backward. As an older gardener, I have keen interest in what I really want from gardening, and I have concern that I have given back to the dirt entrusted to me. I care about what I have passed on to others. I hope a love and respect for dirt is first on that list.
What I Hope For
Dirt Part III
Later I would discover there were other kinds of dirt besides my home dirt. A visit to a beach was a marvel. This gritty, non-stick dirt, wholly unlike my home dirt, was restricted to two colors-wet and dry, and bore little resemblance to my home hardpan with its various greasy shades of brown, rust and blue.
The farmyard dirt at the children’s zoo was pungent, fumy. The spongy dirt of a cedar forest floor gave way underfoot; the prints left behind gleaming with water brought to the surface.
The dirt in a vineyard seemed not at all like dirt, but like little rocks, and rocks smaller yet.
Later than this, I would make the connection between dirt and life, that healthy soil was full of worms and other living creatures. My erroneous assumption that the grass around my ranch house in suburban Detroit was a blanket to keep the dirt out of the house was actually a medium supporting life- a mildly shocking discovery. More shocking was the discovery that there are people who feel at home with dirt, and others who assiduously avoid it. There were gardeners, and non-gardeners. Now that I am much older, I realize that even those people who do not garden, who do not love dirt as I do, can love, appreciate and respect the beauty of a garden. We get along fine.
More Dirt
Wet weather transformed my beloved dirt; I loved my mudpies in all their shapes, like any kid. This was how I became interested in recipes for dirt, a lifelong interest that I would never apply to cooking food. I am sure a child invented the benign form of the word mudslide, and its action verb companion, mudsliding. Muddy dirt games progressed inevitably to dirty water adventures.
Breaking through thin ice sitting in the bottom of a basement excavation was my first introduction to the notion that nature had its dangerous side, and why adult people build shelters. A pounding rain would make puddles and pools, then lakes; finally there would be rills, gullies and the like; the water would run . I learned to make water run myself. At the first sign of spring thaw, I would be breaking through the ice dams so the water would run- an experiment with gravity and grade that would go on until I was too soaked and cold to keep tinkering with my routes. Walking on frozen winter dirt made as good a sound as rubber boots lifting off spring mud. The frost coming out of the ground heaves it up, changing its shape and texture. The sun drying it out left it cracked, and virtually impervious to re-soaking. Snow covers it up-what a relief to see dirt visible again after months of winter white. The wind turning heavy clods of dirt to clouds of dust is as much a natural wonder as water becoming ice, or ice subliming. I have a particularly clear memory of a very cold fall day, cleaning up a garden. At lunch time, I forked out a hole just big enough for me in the compost pile. My compost cave exuded a moist fierce heat-a perfect garden moment I have never forgotten.