Finding faith in the garden

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I am putting the garden to bed. Raking leaves. Cutting back shrubs. Pulling out yellow loosestrife. Trimming. Thinning. Transplanting. Digging up dahlias and drying them off and storing them in the cellar in paper bags. Emptying ceramic pots and lugging them to the cellar, too, so they don't crack in the cold. I am puttering and pruning and planting.

Katherine, my friend across the street, finished all these things weeks ago. She has already planted red and yellow tulips for next spring. She has already fertilized her grass. She has even grown new grass.

I am late, as usual. I stand in my backyard in the dusk of early morning, the sun slower to rise these days, the smell of fall as clean and as fresh as sheets hung out to dry, and I can feel the world, and me, slowing down. Everything is quieter suddenly - no crows cawing, no swallows trilling, no mourning doves. Just a lone cardinal whistling, a few leaves rustling. The growing season is over. And yet, amazingly, some things continue to grow.

My dahlias are in bloom, great, gaudy flowers, purple and yellow and blood-red, so full and top-heavy that they slump. And a clump of something that looks like daisies but is bigger and frillier and has fancier petals. And seeds that I bought at Christmas Tree Shops for only a dollar and scattered in mid-June, yellow and white things with thin, pale green stalks. Some flowers that bloomed in the spring have rebloomed, too: petunias and osteospermum, whole pots of them, strutting their stuff. The ivy is still growing, and on the hydrangea bush in front of the house there is a single flower that is bright blue.

Back in April, when the garden was waking up, I dug up a tree that hadn't survived the winter. It wasn't new and therefore vulnerable to the cold. It was rooted and reliable, a tree that had survived at least five winters. I cut the shoots first, hoping for signs of life. But it was all dead wood. So I got the saw and cut the thicker branches. I'd planted this tree along with two others, which I bought at the same nursery on the same day. They looked like triplets then, identical in shape and size. They grew at the same rate. They shared the same soil. They lived within feet of one another. But one died. Why? Because the cold chilled it more? Because of some infestation I didn't see? Because a mere difference in the shades of light can mean the difference between life and death?

Or was it random, the indifference of nature? Some trees live. Some trees die. Is it this simple?

Its roots were deep and strong and intertwined among rocks and other roots and I had to make a ring around them with a pitchfork, then get a shovel and pull hard to rend them from the soil. Life doesn't let go easily, I thought then. A tree was here. And now it isn’t. But it left its mark in the thicket of roots, and on the bush next to it, which is stunted on one side.

Life doesn't let go easily, I am thinking again six months later. It's fall and the days are shorter and the sun is thinner and I haven't watered or fed anything in weeks. And yet a rose blooms. And a purple gladiola. And one, skinny, bedraggled pale pink phlox.

It is an act of faith in the dead of winter to believe in spring, to believe in bulbs under the snow and seeds waiting to burst. It is an act of faith to believe even now as the sunlight fades and the nights grow long. But the proof is in the garden, always. Awake or asleep, it continues to change and it continue to grow.