Finding Your Garden’s Path

So ephemeral and symbol-filled are gardens, they might be thought of as the stuff that dreams are made of. Dream of a fruit or vegetable garden, and it’s said your diligence in life will eventually bear fruit. By actually creating such a garden, you may be planting and tending the outer signs of your own inner life, your own stability and growth. They say that people who dream of gardens tend to nurture other people and to know what’s important in life. A friend of mine often dreams of gardens. I was over at her house for Easter this year and stood on the high front porch looking down on the neighborhood children darting about, joyfully hunting colored eggs. On that day this home garden felt like a dream. The flowerbeds were dappled with sunshine, and in the distance, over the laughter of the children you could hear the sound of the sea. Some eggs were nestled in flowerpots, others were secreted between the stepping-stones surrounding a fountain, and a few perched in the crotches of an ancient olive tree. Many brilliantly colorful eggs were lying in clear view all over the garden, even on the grass, but the children ran right past those easy ones so all this happiness wouldn’t come to an end too soon. “What a magical atmosphere this place has!” I remarked to my friend’s husband. “Well, my wife created it,” he said simply, “and it came out of her naturally as wildflowers pop out of the ground after the first rain.”

Not all gardens are such happy places. Some are sorrowful and others overgrown or unkempt to the point of being spooky. It’s a mystery to me that in some gardens almost all the cultivated plants, even drought-resistant ones, wither and die while weeds flourish. I know a front garden that has been replanted three times because everything but the weeds died. One felt this must be an unhappy place, but now a miracle has happened. Someone is watering, someone is deadheading, weeds are banished, and the house itself seems to smile again. Sometimes when the gardener grows old, the garden begins to take on some of the body’s problems. Birds drop seeds of invasive plants, and a few of them are impossible to eradicate. Neither can doctors fix everything that goes wrong with our bodies, but even in this extremity, the symbolism of gardens helps. Eventually someone will come along, bulldoze the whole thing down and start over, or maybe we’ll do it ourselves, piece by piece until energy gives out. Meanwhile, as long as it remains largely a happy place who cares about a few faults? A garden is a living, changing thing. It probably won’t outlive the gardener, and it’s certainly not meant to look like a magazine cover every day of the year.

The garden as a whole can be symbolic, but also each individual aspect of a garden can have some kind of symbolic meaning. Consider paths, for example. We talk of the path of life, the path to success, the path to perdition, the primrose path, the myriad paths in fairy tales and myths. The path Theseus followed through the labyrinth, the path of the arrow that guided the Princes of Serendip, Dorothy and her yellow brick road, which was really a path. When I was young I thought I was following a path through life and that some day I would arrive where I was going. The idea took root my head when I was eight years old in school in England where we spent a whole year reading “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The story had such vivid simplicity that, though I didn’t fully understand it, its symbolism stuck. Years later, in a friend’s library, a book by a Jungian psychologist almost leaped off the shelf into my hand. This book claimed that children who read Pilgrim’s Progress think ever afterwards that they’re on a path and that each event in life has deep significance. Perhaps the same thing had happened to L. Frank Baum. My husband used to laugh at me for thinking I too would arrive at the Emerald City. Of course I never did arrive. Instead, every time I thought I’d scaled a mountain, there was another peak ahead. It took me a long time to realize that one’s destination is here, right where one is.

It’s not like that in gardens, or shouldn’t be. The main reason for a garden path is to take you somewhere, though paths are also useful for outlining beds and delineating shapes. Add steps to your paths and they can help you up and down slopes. The choice of materials for making paths and steps is as infinite as your imagination, and appropriate choices add charm, style, and quality to a garden. Axial paths in a formal garden can be in line with the shape of your house, like city blocks, or the blocks could be laid out at a right angle from the house, creating the illusion of a diamond pattern when you look across them or down on them. But even with crossing paths like streets between city blocks, it’s a good idea if eventually they get you somewhere. Most paths need a destination. You can make your destination whatever you want. It might be a comfortable bench under a secluded arbor or it could be a small patio, a fountain, a statue, or a well-chosen urn. It’s reassuring and cheerful when, instead of wandering about from place to place in a garden as if lost, the path you are on actually gets you where you are going. By the same token, gardens that have wandering paths that never arrive anywhere can be somewhat depressing. In the garden, as in life, we need destinations and having them makes life and gardening more hopeful.

I was in my forties when I had a remarkable dream about paths and their destinations. All day long, before the night when I dreamed it, I’d been repotting and trimming the roots off some old camellias given to me by my mother’s third husband, Bill Begley. I kept those camellias alive for many years in redwood tubs by slipping each plant out of the tub once a year after it had finished blooming and with a sharp knife slicing off a few inches of the roots from two opposite sides of the root ball. When I’d finished I would slip the plant back into the tub and fill the space where I’d taken off the roots with fresh camellia and azalea soil mix, then I’d follow up with appropriate fertilizer and water. The following year I would slice off two other sides.  After several years of doing this, I got rid of the Algerian ivy on a north-facing bank where there is shade from a pine tree and acid soil from 50 years of rotting pine needles and planted Bill’s camellias where they could finally stretch out their roots into the ground in congenial company of some venerable azaleas and an African scurf-pea or blue pea shrub (Psoralea pinnata) that in spring drenches itself with azure blue pea-shaped flowers while the azaleas and camellias are still in bloom. Sometimes called Koolaid plant because it’s flowers smell like grape-flavored Koolaid, it’s a short-lived small tree or large shrub, but if it dies it usually leaves plentiful progeny to carry on. I cut mine back hard after bloom to lighten it up and make it live longer.

It was after one of those days of trimming the roots of my camellias, years ago when I still grew them in tubs, that I dreamed of paths and destinations. In my dream I found myself standing at the foot of a high mountain, shaped like Mount Fuji, though it was not a volcano. I had heard that on top of that mountain there grew an ancient tree, reputed to be 2,000 years old, in fact Jesus had planted it. “My goodness,” I exclaimed. “I would love to see that tree!” I knew sequoias and some cypress trees lived for thousands of years, but I imagined this tree to be a huge and gnarled oak with a massive trunk and enormous branches. Being the avid plant lover that I was, I simply had to find a way to get to the top of that mountain and see that tree.

Immediately, I noticed that the mountain had three well-traveled paths up it, one on each side and another in the middle. I headed straight for the middle path which I observed was built of steps but these steps turned out to be so worn down from thousands of people climbing up them that my legs couldn’t reach from one to another. Next I tried the path on the left, which was made of rock. At first glance it looked easy but when I tried to climb it I discovered its surface had been worn smooth by many feet until it was as slippery as glass. When I tried to climb it my feet skidded down again, so I turned to the third and last path on the right, and saw with relief that it was made of sand.  But to my dismay the sand was so deep and loose that when I took one step upwards, I slid back two. Finally I gave up trying and stood there, exhausted, but still gazing at the top of the mountain and wishing with all my heart that I could see that ancient tree.

Then suddenly, by golly, there I was. I was standing on top of the mountain with no idea how I got there, and right in front of me stood the tree that Jesus had planted! But this tree was a big disappointment. It was not a huge, magnificent oak tree, and it didn’t look ancient. It wasn’t even very big. In fact it looked like the camellia I had been repotting that very day, and just like that one, it was no longer in bloom. Even more astounding, this camellia was growing in a redwood tub exactly like mine. If I hadn’t known differently I’d have said it was the same plant, only not as healthy-looking. “Well, this is certainly ridiculous!” I thought. “How could Jesus have planted this tree? What a stupid story! Perhaps that one died, and this one came from a seed. But who cares anyway? The point is this tree is not doing very well and it needs my help.” Then and there I got down on my knees next to it and began to fertilize it, and that’s when I woke up.

It took me years to decipher the meaning of that dream, which when I think of it now, seems to embody the very essence of Zen. The dream is clear to me now because I’m more ready to accept its message that the meaning of life and the key to happiness isn’t found in grandiose ideas but is right beneath our noses hidden in every day tasks. In those days, however, I didn’t want to hear anything so simple. I still yearned for something larger and more important, like a huge, ancient oak. Those who create gardens and love to work in them eventually discover that the pursuit of happiness is close to home, tied up in the small, simple things of life. Often when I’m down in the garden my mind is so wrapped up in ordinary tasks—clipping, cutting, fertilizing or tying up—that I can’t think of anything else. It’s a type of meditation. Problems evaporate and time stands still. When my husband was alive he often came out into the garden to find me because I’d lost all track of time. When the design of a garden, including its paths, is harmonious and meaningful then sometimes your own life mirrors the shape of what you’ve made out of plants, rocks, soil, wood, and the sweat of your own brow. Harmonious design grows out of the character of the gardener combined the spirit of the place. And many times, instead of gardening being a process of our giving to the garden and to its plants, the garden and all the plants within it are giving their peace and contentment right back to us.