the english garden

This garden hasn’t always been green. It didn’t always overflow with velvet leaves and friendly daisies and purple heather spilling out onto the walkway. It wasn’t always inhabited by bees and grasshoppers and twenty-five year old dreamers trying to stay alive.

Three years ago, the garden was a graveyard, the remnant of a summer drought that killed everything in its wake.

It was the summer of 2015 and everything died. The grass, the hedges, my unbroken streak of singleness.

I had broken up with my first boyfriend that summer. He was gracious about it and we were both a bit relieved, I think. The summer was hot and dry; we didn’t know what we were doing, and I, for one, was too scared to figure it out. 

I came home, a puddle of tears and emotions and anxiety, not because I missed him but because I was still figuring out how to take care of this twenty-two year old child on her own.

I steered my gold Camry into the driveway and gasped. The old, familiar hedges that bordered my parents' house were gone. Not trimmed back, like when mom would go on a pruning craze, but completely gone, roots and all. Only a gray, dusty excuse for soil was left. Some yellowish-brown remains of brittle hedges lay in a heap on the side of the road. It was embarrassing, really. The house looked so bad.

My mom immediately went to work in the hedge graveyard, ripping out the dead stuff, hauling it to the side of the road, digging out the roots, and making a wishlist: seeds, bulbs, bushes, blossoms. Mid-way through the summer, she put those seeds and baby plants in the patch of earth where hedges used to live. The tininess of the plants was almost more embarrassing than the gaping hole and missing hedge. Our big house swallowed what was trying to be a garden but wasn’t yet.

The following year, things happened. I worked my first big-girl job at Mississippi College. I lived in a cute neighborhood with a grad student and her cat. I often traveled to Dallas for work and had a decently fun & full life in Mississippi. At some point that year, I tumbled into a fast and furious romance, a train that gained uncontrollable speed, heading towards marriage with no brakes. I came home one weekend for a wedding shower, and noticed that the front of my parents’ house wasn’t totally empty anymore. It still looked unfamiliar without the hedges, but the seeds and bulbs and bushes were beginning to take roots & look like they actually belonged there. Slowly, a garden was forming.

By the summer of 2016, things had completely fallen apart. The train had derailed, the wedding was off, and I moved home and didn’t recognize myself.

I felt empty, confused, hopeless, anxious. I felt like I had truly wrecked my life and everything in it, yet somehow my body survived and I was still breathing.

I lived that hot summer at my parents’ house with no job, no house of my own, no plans.

I spent the first month picking up the pieces from the train-wreck, returning the scattered debris to who it belonged to: a dinner plate here, a chip & dip platter there, various Pyrex dishes, an engagement ring.

The rest of the summer was slow and motionless, like the 100 degree days we stayed inside to avoid. Every morning, much to my dismay, I'd wake up in my childhood bed. I’d remember that life felt crushing & empty at the same time. But I’d sit up. I’d swing my legs out from beneath the covers and onto the floor. I’d hear the comforting sound of my parents making breakfast in the kitchen--my rocks. I’d walk down the hallway to the kitchen for good-morning hugs, just like I was a little girl again. I’d glance at the calendar on the broom closet door: 12 days since sending de-invitations, 5 days since giving the ring back. Time was creeping by slowly, the complete opposite of life's pace a month ago. Sometimes a complete wrecking is the best thing for us.

On those mornings, I’d pour myself a cup of black coffee and sit in the beige armchair in the living room next to the window. Hedges used to grow right in front of the window, but now, nothing obscures the view of flourishing flower beds bathed in morning light.

My mom is out there pruning leaves and pulling off dead blossoms and stepping on crunchy grasshoppers. Our neighbor, Judy, walks across our front yard to say hello. Judy is a precious seventy-something widow with black hair and the most joyful spirit. She frequently hangs bags of fresh baked bread & cinnamon buns from our door knob and waves to us from the road.

“You have an English Garden!” she exclaims to my mom, practically dancing across the yard. I sleepily take a sip of coffee as I watch this interaction from my cozy spot in the armchair. Judy and my mom stand around in the flower bed, chatting about flowers and summer and, in hushed tones, “How’s she doing?” I don’t mind. I know she means well, and I know everyone else is asking the same question.

I stop eavesdropping to observe my view from the armchair. This new flower bed is still unfamiliar to me. I’m used to a hedge occupying space here, not these layers of pine straw and flowers I can’t name; dozens, tiny and tall and wide and sprawling, every color of the rainbow and every shape, every shade of green.

And I think to myself--huh, this garden that’s still coming into itself was once a boring hedge. A live hedge, but a boring one. Then the drought came and it became a graveyard--empty, dry, dusty, dead.

But a caretaker was faithful to do the work of cultivating, even in the drought. My mom took the hedge out by its roots, tilled up the dry earth, planted seeds and sprouts, and watered and waited. And then a year later, flowers. Life. Greenery. An English Garden, with dozens of different flowers and experimental seeds. And a girl, with a broken heart and a dried up spirit, looking and seeing hope. Seeing that when one thing dies, the life of something new is not far away. Where there is emptiness, there’s the hope of something to be filled.

For decades, a hedge grew in the patch of earth between the window and the walkway. A lovely, green, perfectly normal hedge. Familiar and safe, never any surprises, so predictable that we hardly noticed it anymore. Until the drought came and the hedge turned brown and the whole thing had to come out, roots and all. For a while it was empty and dry. There was nothing there and the house looked naked. It was embarrassing. Wrecked. But the drought was exactly what it needed. The emptiness made space for all kinds of new things to grow -- new colors and shapes and smells and patterns. The quirky uniqueness of life. The joy of growth and flourishing. It all happens here. It happens after a drought.