Mary Lou Sanelli
Courtesy
Suppose for a minute you once wrote a book entitled Women in the Garden. And after a few decent reviews, low and behold, you are invited to sign copies of it at a prestigious garden show.
Since that initial invitation, I learned that garden shows are numerous as the charities they support. And for two summers, I packed up my books, covering freeways from Seattle to San Francisco, turning down a few because I could see myself taking on more of these “shows” than I was wired to handle. Because as lovely as some of them were, it wasn’t the gardens that most intrigued me, but the social climate entwining each, varied as the plant life. And a deepening of my understanding that just about everything that happens in this world, no matter how inconsequential, is a story.
Completely naive about garden shows, I thought the gardens on display would be similar to, say, the Community Garden near my neighborhood, a vibrant, unpretentious garden; its gardeners eager to share enthusiasm with nosey onlookers like me.
Then I found myself on the East Side of our Emerald City. And trust me, had I not been invited as an author, I’m pretty sure my life would never have intersected that life.
Those of you not familiar with the city of Medina need to know that Bill Gates lives 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 not fitting enough to be parked anywhere near her tiled piazza. She was obviously suffering from some kind of garden show performance anxiety. She shooed me off with a little wave of her hand as if to say, “It’s no big thing to move it.” Even though we both knew it was a big thing. There is no street parking in the neighborhood without a permit, so where would I park? Right before she pounced, I remember sensing the stillness of the acreage and when I opened my car door the wind made a quiet, swishing sound as it moved through the trees.
I proceeded to unload my box of books before driving off to hide my Dodge Colt, the walk back from the Community Center seeming twice as long now that I was anxious. Feeling on all counts, inferior. “I don’t want to go back,” I said to myself.
And the garden?
Well, the garden was a portal into another landscaped universe, as far from where one might say, “Hey, honey, come and see the size of my delphiniums!” and deep into the world of “Behold what a landscape architect and a lawn maintenance crew can contrive.”
To me, cordoned off gardens showcasing indigenous foliage are tidy but ungratifying. If I’m promised a show, I imagine flora that blooms with colors that reach into me. But what I mostly saw let me down in a way: fifty shades of forest green.
Maybe it’s my proletariat roots reaching deeper than appreciation can go, but I found myself wondering if the owners of the grounds gaze over their gardens with pride but from a distance, unable to grasp a hands-on, I-grew-this-from-seed kind of knowledge. More than once I asked myself, do you think these new houses need to be so large in order to house the size of the void such a lack of personal, practical involvement can create?
The next weekend, and what a relief it was, I sunned myself behind a 1920’s bungalow in Wallingford next to where a wooded lot met the green of a much-loved garden; where the owner didn’t rope off her aromatic ground cover but invited guests to step on it just so we could know the swiftness with which a scent can begin and end. The interconnection of gardener to garden? Fertile as her compost in clear sight and steaming.
And in my eyes, nothing is more satisfying than pride with a scent like that.
Mary Lou Sanelli's newest collection of essays, In So Many Words, is due out in September. A professional speaker and a master dance teacher, she has written a column for this paper for 16 years, also contributing to The Seattle Times, NPR, and other newspapers and magazines. Please join her book celebrations at Elliott Bay Book Company on Sept. 13 at 7 p.m. and at Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park) at 7 p.m. Oct. 3. www.marylousanelli.com