by Lucy Schiller
Associative logic is what draws me again and again to the essay as a form, because it feels, often, like the "realest" part.
We all loved the Garden, and, by extension, the furred part of the state in which it sat as an emblem. The time I spent there was neither long nor fully pleasant enough to resurrect wistfully later. Still, I see myself do it, certain days, accumulating the big details first. I see the ocean, obviously, a brighter blue than I had seen elsewhere, almost acrid, and I see the wild sweet peas flopping around on the sides of the roads. The trees holding a smell of warm dust loosed by their psithurisms. The specific emotional mixture undergirding nearly everything, it felt, everywhere I went—the mixture was of pride and oncoming danger. People seemed proud to live here, in part because it was dangerous. Do not hike off-trail into hidden caches of marijuana. Thick rattlesnakes hide in the woodpiles ready to clasp your wrist in their fangs, and you might have to take your axe to the thrashing snake, and then, depending on your proximity to a hospital, to your arm, as Gordon did in desperation while the venom flooded towards his heart. Abalone diving: all the more poetically rich for its treacherousness; people died frequently this way in the rough surf, their wetsuits weighed down by the shining bounty they stuffed inside. A preponderance of motorcycle crashes and drunk drivers, logs spilling off the thundering lumber trucks, freak accidents, which seemed to happen regularly, not freakishly at all, really, except in their occasional unexpected gruesomeness. And a mountain lion, too, roaming the cliffs in the early morning. Imaginings here had a lot to do with death, because reality had a lot to do with death.
Everyone called it the Garden. I lived on the grounds of the Garden. I had imagined I liked plants, and had secured a summer job there. The Garden was a robust collection of plants on the rocky edge of the coast, and it was swept by a fine, salted mist for hours each morning. Certain plants thrived in these conditions. When the Garden hired me, I took it as a sign, of course, that I, too, could grow, could expand, into a new direction I had not before predicted. I was likely the only person to have applied to the summer job, and had no experience with plants beyond liking them, and no real skills, besides in Microsoft Word, that I could claim as my own. I liked, I knew, to stay passive, to watch as things happened around and to me. I could slip on, slip through, to the next.
Many years later, I would read about Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream, a book from 1499 created by an unknown author, though most have guessed him to be Francesco Colonna, an otherwise unpublished poet-priest. You can look at the book online and notice two things immediately: the visual floridness of the language and the clean lines of the woodcut illustrations, most of which feature plants as much as they do humans. In this book, Poliphilo wanders a dreamscape after his lover. Actually, he dreams inside the dream, and wanders around in there. “The overall literary merit of this work is debatable,” writes a librarian at the Glasgow University Library, which featured Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as their book of the month a few years before I was to work at the Garden, “and some critics have dismissed it as unreadable.” Marcel Proust’s biographer, George Painter, thought otherwise, expressing that Colonna, if he was in fact the author, “felt that reality itself is mysterious, and may legitimately be described in terms of mystery; that only perplexing symbols, labyrinthine narrative, and intentionally impenetrable prose-style can express the night-world of the unconscious mind.” I have never gotten more than few pages into the text. Colonna, or whoever, wrote in a flowery, idiosyncratic mixture of Italian and Latin that many readers across the centuries have found bizarre and off-putting, like a flourish upon a flourish upon a flourish. (It occurs to me how often we reach for the language of the plant world to describe the ornate: flowery, flourish, florid, tangled, thorny, thicket…) A dream within a dream within a dream. I have looked repeatedly at the illustrations. These—the strange but clear beauty of the gardens through which Poliphilo wanders in search of his love—are somehow even more mysterious than the text, and were drawn by a separate anonymous person, an artist who clearly loved plants, and saw how the shape of a knotty cypress could imitate the shape of a human, or vice-versa.
Is it just restating Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, not to mention the transcendentalists, to say that finding and losing can sometimes feel almost interchangeable? So many times now as a full adult, I have attempted to imagine myself at the tops of the trees, wanting out of this realm. But also, I think, wanting to find something that goes otherwise unseen. There are many people, it turns out, who lose themselves among plants in order to find something they are missing. Beyond a very small staff, the Garden was tended to by volunteer retirees, mainly elderly women, who began to hand me things they imagined I needed: a basic eggbeater I still have and use, a million brilliant abalone shells. Though I mostly worked alone, when the retirees came around, we deadheaded rhododendrons together. The Garden was known, in fact, for these rhododendrons, whose flowers announced themselves in every shade between paper-white and the dark purple of certain dogs’ tongues. Though their names are altogether lost to me, I became close with the elderly women here, two of whom shared a house in easy, happy, longtime love. I yard-sat; I watered their garden, small and gem-like, and tended to their Santa Rosa plum tree, which produced black fruit so swollen with water you barely had to touch the skin for it to break.
My housemate on the grounds of the Garden was a middle-aged man, British, the Director, whose life, though it was in close proximity to mine, remained mostly unknown. It was widely understood that Director was recovering from a death in the family over in England. I saw him only occasionally around the house. He seemed to be losing weight quickly. The Director did not seem to be a steward of any kind, but a distant god, maybe, ruling from a great ways away. How he spent his days, I didn’t know. Where he went, I didn’t know. My days, meanwhile, were often spent on a single small patch of the Garden, where I focused on weeding, deadheading, watering, before moving to a new patch the next day. Like this, I covered the Garden.
I learned how to perfectly coil a hose—the layers crossed in a particular way to avoid unprofessional tangling—and what it meant to thoroughly water a plot. One late afternoon, I was struck suddenly by how attractive heather could be, planted like this in strips of pale color, swept and nurtured in its way by the saline wind off the cold ocean. Just like in England, I imagined the Director, my housemate, thinking, as I did the thing with the hose that you do with vacuums, and spatulas in cake batter—moved it back and forth with a weird internal, mathematical urge not to leave any part untouched. That same evening, from the upstairs bathroom window, I saw the Director pee gleefully off the back deck—after all, the bathroom was in use—and into the lavender border.
Gardens are places for all people, both the petunia-heads and those who surge past the daylilies and into the sea holly, the anemones, the dripping amaranths, the lemon cucumbers. This latter tendency towards specialization, exoticism, and expertise bloomed among the ranks of the elderly women with whom I briefly roamed that summer through the cliff towns marveling at heirloom roses. They argued with real violence over the Latin names of things and they trespassed over fences to smell, like a pack of unruly grazing goats. Why they liked plants so extremely they did not feel the need to explain. We love you!, they crowed to me, also without explanation. Never leave! To admire the elderly endears you to them, yes, they love you, and crucially, you love yourself, too, for loving those who are otherwise often shunned, pushed to the side, looked away from, disregarded. I know this now, having lost someone old to a virus I could have never imagined when I worked at the Garden. I had not seen it before, but I saw a glimmer of it there, the way that eager visitors rushed invariably to the “famous” rhododendron collection, missing out, I felt, on plants like Angelica stricta “Purpurea,” a gigantic self-seeding monster prone to expansion and constructed of oxblood vascularity. Gardens are designed so that the boundaries between natural and artificial become confusing. What is emphasized can be unclear. Even weird wonders like the Angelica stricta are part of a larger whole, harder to see in their specifics.
Like a museum, the Garden was a place where a stultification could set in quickly, particularly if you worked there, but also if you visited. Something about the wind, and the largeness of the grounds, and the number of plants to look at, and the general silence of wandering through open, cultivated space. A landscape historian wrote about Poliphilo’s journey through garden dreamscapes that “like garden visitors generally, [Poliphilo] is not…able to pace or place himself appropriately, either in his movement or his thinking.” I saw guests heave themselves, exhausted, into the patio chairs we had set up for lemonade consumption. Paul, who had a long ponytail, and was one of my immediate supervisors, advised early against the kind of rest that I might be tempted to take. There is always something to do here, he told me, in the way of all supervisors everywhere. If I really had nothing to do, he said, I should gather plant specimens to photocopy in the office and create my own identification almanac.
What are you doing, asked the officepeople immediately. They were less tanned than the rest of us, though my face, I imagine, briefly turned bright white in the light of Xerox machine, the top of which I held pressed against a dirty, crumbling piece of heather. The work of the outside was not meant, they told me, to come in here. In the flash of the fluorescent light, and their eyes, I saw suddenly what I had become. The Garden’s natural soil was a fine, salty dust that got in everything, and streaked me up and down. Sun had turned my hair, which I had dyed at the beginning of the summer, a horrific orange. Each day I donned a sweatshirt advertising the Garden. I had bought it with my own money, though I had an employee discount, and what I could afford was the largest child size, which did not exactly fit. I had come here to find myself, I thought, but I did not totally recognize myself. Years later I would stare at a photograph from this time. Unnatural-haired, I stood proudly in waders and held a monstrous waterlily I had, with a machete and great difficulty, severed from the bottom of the small water feature in the Garden’s parking lot.
It was as if they saw me as up for some kind of adoption. People found me, invited me, wanted to show me things. I did not claim for myself the knowledge of how to refuse. A middle-aged local man insisted on taking me sea-kayaking one afternoon, despite the fact that we didn’t know each other. It was said in town that he was a friend to the transient people like me, someone who was “good to know.” That morning was a beautiful morning, I think, and the man friendly, but I found that I resented being there, resented being asked to bend, to be polite, to be charming, to be in (rightful) awe of the things that, without him, I never would have seen. At the shore, attempting to reel in my kayak amidst the smooth stones and locally famous seaglass, I suffered a gigantic spasm of the muscles in my back, so painful I could not speak but to scream. The man regarded me with wordless horror; I apologized for my own weakness, holding onto the shore. The elderly deadheaders did not ask such things of me.
I began to eat entire loaves of bread for dinner and nap in the thickness of the wild grass atop the cliff, where no one could see me. It was like returning to something: not to childhood, exactly, though. Something feral, meant to be unlooked at. Tasked with keeping Paul’s carefully propagated young heather specimens well-watered while he was away, I alternately drowned and baked them. I had lost something: the ability, maybe, to pretend passivity? What had happened I could not pinpoint. Paul returned and screamed. He did not talk to me then, for weeks, and I busied myself pruning the rhododendrons on the Coastal Trail until it was nearly time to leave the Garden.
Once, meaning for a long time, this entire region was known for its natural timber. Fifteen miles away from the Garden, last summer, I think, or maybe it was the summer before, a long grove of redwoods separating the coast from the inland part of the county went up in flames. I read about it from my screen, aghast. The trees had been the sign, I remembered, that you were transitioning somehow into a different place: they were a barrier of a kind between the ocean people and the valley people. The redwoods were so obviously fragrant in the way of warm redwoods, dust motes, needles, sunlight, winding road, etcetera, that you knew to roll your windows down, driving through it for those few minutes. And then out the other side stretched the Anderson Valley. Like the coast, but less touristed, the valley was a region in which life and death seemed to coexist more vividly than elsewhere, and it was between the two, here, that a language named Boontling rose. Boontling was a “deliberately contrived jargon,” according to a book that someone, once, pressed into my hands. It was dying; almost no one spoke it anymore, and the book (Boontling: An American Lingo) explained that “the popular notion in the valley [is] that the lingo should be allowed to die with the generation which spoke it…Boontling is largely, perhaps irrevocably, tied to a certain collection of people in a particular place at a particular time.”
Like the trees, the lingo had once been full-blown and was now gone or dying. It had been comprised of hundreds if not thousands of words that people spoke regularly in the early decades of the last century. Two large wars and the automobile shot through area, scattering people, disrupting the place’s sense of nestled-in-ness, in which certain things, like gardens and languages, grow. Whether they are artificial or natural it is hard, in the end, to say. Still, it was remembered enough later by the children and grandchildren of the old-timers that a dictionary could be cobbled together. Not a complete one, but an attempt at cultivation. The texture of life, in a particular place at a particular time, comes through in what remains of Boontling, even if no one speaks it fluently anymore. At the very least, there is a document. Serowlsh, from “sour owl shit,” designated “anything which is no good.” A lighthouse was a briney glimmer. Moldunes were large female breasts. Tweedish, childish. Walter Levi, a telephone, for the first man in the valley to own one. Fog-eaters lived, as I did, very briefly, on the coast.
I couldn’t exactly say why the language’s details had a felt similarity to the names of the plants, but understood it had something to do with resistance. It’s not like they gave me anything back, but even the names of the fuchsia cultivars I worked with—Danish Pastry, Son of Thumb, Devonshire Dumpling, Baron von Kettler, Salmon Cascade—maintained a kind of antagonism to reason, and to the present, and even to linguistic beauty, that I admired. It was like a dream within a dream within a dream, encountering these names, spinning a narrative between and beyond them.
I have never been good at holding onto things. That’s not right—it’s that I don’t try to hold on. I have moved from place to place like a ghost whose house has been bulldozed. All the jobs, the little corners of places, the specific languages learned, they pile up somewhere out of sight. I don’t know what I’m trying to find anymore. What I’m trying to see. It was irresponsible to lose the language I found, to lose the names of those old women I worked alongside for a few months more than ten years ago. I can’t even summon their faces. I have not visited the Garden since leaving, but I can remember its basic layout if I try, the rounds of plantings and the sour-smelling mulch, the mowed paths of grass and the rare, wind-beaten, dark bishop pines; I follow a tiny imaginary version of me, young, wandering, turning around when I can’t figure out what I am meant to see, and so finding again the familiar to hold: a field of grass, and plants, and the noise of the ocean, and a figure in the distance, maybe, slightly stooped.
Associative logic is what draws me again and again to the essay as a form, because it feels, often, like the "realest" part. The older I get, the more I look for associations to be felt, implied, even just barely sensed, rather than spelled out and neat. For a few years, I've been having this weird thing happen: out of nowhere, just a flash of a place I've been—a corner, an image, an intersection, a tree I once walked past—reappears to me for seemingly no reason. Why? How? It feels like my brain is composting, or something. But these half-memories hold strange associative power. This essay started from one. And I want to examine my own mind, I want to speculate about how I get from (in this case) a garden I barely remember to a dying lingo. I know the connection between plants and language is there—something about cultivation, something about oldness, something about the fertile place in which both grew. It seems to me that I'd much rather stay murky than clear, very often, in most ways—as a writer, as a person. I don't want to look at a tree and think "tree." I want to speculate about what it feels like to be at the very top of that tree, swaying around among lichenous branches I can't clearly imagine. As a writer, my tests and speculations don't often result in a clear answer, which I far prefer.
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Lucy Schiller is the 2020-2021 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in nonfiction writing at Colgate University, where she is finishing a nonfiction manuscript on oldness and music, among other things. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, the Baffler, the Iowa Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming from DIAGRAM and West Branch.