Suppose for a minute you wrote a book entitled "Women in the Garden" and are invited to sign copies at a garden show.
Since that initial invitation, I've learned garden shows are as numer-ous as the charities they support. For two summers I've packed up my books, covered freeways from Seattle to Spokane, turning down only a few because I could see myself taking on more of these than I'm wired to handle. For it wasn't the gardens I found most intriguing, but the social climate entwining each, varied as the plant life.
Completely naïve about garden shows, I thought the gardens would be vibrant, unpretentious flowering plots tucked in between houses, with gardeners eager to share enthusiasm with onlookers like me.
Then I found myself on the Eastside of our emerald city. In Medina. Had I not been invited as an author, I am sure my life would not have intersected this show.
Those of you not familiar with Medina need to know that Bill Gates' home was an estate away from the sheared-for-golf lawn I propped my book table on. When I drove up, foremost on the owner's mind was that my car was unfit to be parked on her tiled piazza. She was obviously suffering from some kind of garden-show performance anxiety.
I proceeded to unload my boxes of books before driving off to hide my battered Dodge Colt, the walk back seeming twice as long now that I felt poor.
And the garden - ohmygod - a portal into another universe, far from where one might say, "Look at the size of my delphiniums!" and deep into the world of "Behold what a team of master designers can contrive." To me, enormous landscaped gardens showcasing indigenous foliage are tidy but ungratifying. If I'm promised a show, I expect flora that blooms.
Maybe it's my proletarian roots reaching deeper than appreciation can go, but I found myself asking: Don't the owners of these grounds seem to gaze over their land with pride ... yet from a distance? Unable to grasp a hands-on, I-grow-this-from-seed kind of knowledge? And do these homes need to be so large in order to store the size of the void such a lack of connection creates?
The next weekend, I gratefully sunned myself behind a modest bungalow in Wallingford. A plot of land with an aromatic ground cover the owner didn't rope off but invited people to step on. And when we did, we were amazed at the swiftness with which a scent can begin and end. The interconnection of gardener to garden, rich as the compost in clear sight and steaming.
Today I lounge away the afternoon in my friend's rooftop garden where a few hollyhocks sway against the walls of our vertical world. Condo living isn't exactly the greatest shared communal experience, and moisture can't seep all that deep up here, but there is some innovation and a few creative rows of bug-eaten lettuce. The point is, it seems to satisfy the gardener, who enthusiastically calls her contained plot of garden "Sofia."
And in my eyes, nothing is more exhilarating than satisfaction with a name like that.
Mary Lou Sanelli's latest book is "Craving Water."
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