When we first moved to North Carolina fourteen years ago our yard had the distinction of being the only yard for blocks in any direction that did not boast a single flower. All right, we did have one azalea bush and two daffodils—but neither of the daffodils ever bloomed. The man who lived in the house before us had owned a landscape company. His approach to this landscape—our yard—at least as I understood it from our neighbor, involved uprooting everything under twenty feet tall and laying down grass from the sidewalk right up to the foundation, so that when we first moved into our house we had tall sturdy oak trees and beech trees and wide expanses of grass but no flowers except for that brief burst of azalea bloom. Our children were young then. When I bemoaned the lack of flowers to my neighbor she told me I didn’t need the work of flowers. Grass and children, she said, that’s plenty to take care of.
I wanted flowers. Perhaps it had something to do with memories of my grandmother’s garden. A memory of the way her yard smelled in early summer—not just fresh-cut grass, but lilac too, and honeysuckle. And it was while I was imagining this garden, dreaming about it, that I came across Sara Stein’s book, Noah’s Garden, a book that changed forever the way I think about yards and gardens.
Sara Stein’s story begins when she and her husband bought a home on six acres of undeveloped land in Maine, land covered in brambles and tangled vines and tall grasses. They moved onto the land and they began then to do with it what they understood to be the right thing to do with undeveloped land—they developed it. They tamed it.
We cleared brush and pulled vines and hauled rocks and broke ground and dug beds until, after years of high hopes and hard work, we had an expanse of landscaped grounds and gardens that seemed to us like Eden. Then it hit. I realized in an instant the full extent of what we had done: we had banished the animals from this paradise of ours.
One by one, as she tells it, the animals had left their land. Grouse. Fox. Woodchuck. Toad. As the landscape became developed, habitats began disappearing, and the animals responded to this absence by taking flight. Woodpeckers left. Mockingbirds. The plethora of grasshoppers. Butterflies. I can’t help but wonder if there weren’t days—or a even one long single day—of grief or regret when she recognized what had happened. She doesn’t quite say. She doesn’t linger over this moment of recognition. It’s not that kind of book. She simply names it. The loss of Eden. How it had taken, “only a few summers of straightening up the place to degrade or destroy the habitat of most of the animals that had previously lived there.”
Then she begins to describe a long—and at times untidy—process of reclamation.
It began, first, by imagining a different landscape. In the wake of the animals’ exodus she began to imagine just what kind of landscape might welcome the creatures back. And then she and her husband set about embodying this image, creating it. Began to create what she describes as a “new landscape.” Not the original wild landscape—this was no longer possible. There was never going to be, she realized, any turning back the clock to get to some original Eden. But she no longer wanted to settle for a traditional suburban landscape either—wide expanses of neatly mowed lawn dotted with dandelions and starlings. What did she do? She began, along with her husband, to plant bushes that bear fruit—blueberries and blackberries and huckleberries and a berry with the wonderfully utilitarian name of a serviceberry. And the birds, welcomed again, began to return. She and her husband mowed less, thus providing cover for small animals. They planted wildflowers and native grasses and watched as the butterflies returned.
Her story goes on. It’s a story I highly recommend, one of those stories that has, I think, implications beyond itself. It’s a well-told tale of re-imagining and reconstruction—of trial and error—of gardening as a process. A process, it seems to me, not terribly unlike writing—or healing for that matter—where you’re trying new things all the time and often not knowing what will work until you’ve planted it and then there’s the morning you walk outside and it’s born fruit----or blooms---and a hummingbird has found it.
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Writing about this book reminds me of a dream I had while I was working on Emily’s Story—her story of trying to find a new landscape in which to heal from her eating disorder. While I was working on that piece I had a dream—just a fragment of a dream—that I was working with Habitat for Humanity. Helping to build a house or building of some sort. (Working on a Habitat for Humanity?) And not alone in the dream, but working with a number of other people, some of whom I recognized and some of whom I’d never seen before in my life.
