The Gardner
By Guest Writer - Carolyn Murray
A soul-less Gardener clipped me too early from where I sprouted along my mother’s roots and transplanted my tender sprouts into a discarded work bucket filled with the foulest compost rubble and discarded twigs. The bucket was once pristine white plastic but under the Old Gardener’s care it became stained black and grey with cigarette burned holes and gashes on every surface and was now unusable for its intended purpose. The dilapidated bucket barely held my small roots among the rotting, molding soil in which the Gardener had encased them.
He tended me primarily with a cruel and heavy hand, providing barely enough sustenance to keep me upright and worthy to carry the name seedling. My pale, underdeveloped leaves cried out for the healing warmth of sunlight. My just-forming tendrils crawled about the loam in a continual quest for water and nutrients that my starving trunk and branches craved. I would catch glimpses of my mother’s dainty but wilting leaves trying to catch a glimpse of me through the canopy of poison ivy under which he kept me. When he was away she swayed gracefully in the morning breeze but when he was close by she cried streaming tears of precious sap from the wounds and scars his hands forced deep into her bark. From time to time, the strength of an unseen hand lifted her broken branches and held them tenderly in place until they could heal, but she never fought back against the Gardener’s blade.
It was a rare time that I could feel the comforting shade of her branches against the intense heating rage in which the Gardener enveloped our home. If she stretched her thin limbs toward me, he would chop them with a quick swipe of a blade so that they could never completely reach, only yearn to comfort her sick seedling.
As a growing sapling, the Gardener locked me away in the deteriorating tool shed lest a neighbor take notice of my lack of development and demand he be held accountable. My rings never fully formed, my roots never grew deep; they meandered aimlessly along and wound about barely breaking the surface into the soil. Every once in a while, a great storm would barrel a destructive path through our garden home, twisting my mother about, snapping her limbs and stripping her of the beautiful bright green leaves that had found enough bravery to finally grow.
I prayed to the wind to blow me over and rip me from the rotting bucket in which I was imprisoned. The damp, moldy soil held mostly disease and blight, but in my struggle to survive a few nutrients seeped in; just enough to thicken my trunk a bit, not enough to support my pitifully formed limbs. Each season, natural photosynthesis struggled to power my growth much like a gasoline engine that has been just a tiny bit flooded. I would spark to life, then whither. Tiny branches and leaves tried to break through the malleable covering of my young bark, but they only made it about half-way out before my now-rubbery trunk would give in and bend to the ground under their delicate mass. The constant hope, replaced by darkness; the constant struggle to sustain weighted down by the heaviness of survival against which I had not been tempered.
I prayed that wind would blow me over so my roots could come free of the putrid loam and mercifully dehydrate and decompose into nothing. I was sure I would be more useful as fuel for the Gardener’s fire than struggling for life in an above-ground tomb.
One storm ripped the walls and windows right out of that rickety tool shed and the Gardener disappeared with fear from this foe he could not control. Holes opened up in floorboards and small shards of brilliant sunlight somehow journeyed into my dark room. Another great burst of wind and my wish came true. The light weight of the bone-dry soil allowed my somewhat-bucket home to tip right over. I lay on the floor and struggled for breath as my roots were completely exposed, and the soil that had given me some comfort now lay strewn about and dotted my skin.
Then, another strong wind gave a great gusty bellow, and my bucket began to roll. I prepared to watch the only home and life I knew teeter away in the breeze, but somehow a few tiny filaments of my roots held tight. In their search for nourishment and light and water, they had grown out one of the bucket’s burn holes, then back in…again and again, constantly struggling to survive.
As the bucket rolled, my roots stayed wrapped around the ugly plastic, and my trunk began to slide. My thin bark was torn and riddled with splinters from the unprotected wooden floor. As if on a single-objective mission, the bucket rolled straight into one of the floorboard holes and disappeared, and its weight dragged this little pole along. The ragged edges of the hole tore about me and ripped a few small twigs from my frail form. My inadequate sap began rushing to the gashes and wounds either to heal or spill my life onto the ground.
Then, the bucket and I were on the mossy ground beneath the toolshed, the wind still propelling us onward with now-gentle gusts of breath. We rolled and we bounced; the bucket leading, my trunk and limbs begging it to stop, and my tiny little root tendrils stubbornly refusing to release their grip.
Across the dying brown grass, we rolled. An escaping board from the old tool shed had ripped a hole through the poison ivy canopy, and we barreled through it. As the tumbling bucket whipped me round and round, I caught glimpses of my mother swaying near. She, like me, had begun to whither under the Gardner’s harsh trowel, but her leaves perked up momentarily against the breeze my spontaneous travel emitted.
As the wind wandered away back to the lost lands, my bucket and I came to rest near an open iron gate. The Gardner, fleeing the storm in his drunken stupor, must have failed to secure the lock. Beyond the rust and peeling paint I could feel the penetrating warmth of life. My tiny limbs reached out and touched the greenest of luscious grass enveloping the yard beyond. There were trees and plants of various species and sizes; hues of green mixed among magnificent blooms and luscious fruit bearers scattered as far as I could see. Fat, round, worker bees maneuvered to and fro, humming as they completed their tasks. Playful squirrels all fuzzy black and brown hopped like waves rolling across a field and magnificent songs floated gently down from feathered sopranos and altos hidden in the sky.
My prayer for the wind to blow me away from the Gardener had worked, although not how I planned. The sap ran excitedly through my trunk and limbs as if preparing to inhale the healthy environment just beyond my reach. I prayed again for the wind to come and blow me beyond the fence, into the life I had just discovered. In this well-tended garden my roots could tunnel deep and anchor my flesh. I would sprout tall and luscious. I would welcome the workers and provide safety to the song makers, and we could comfort each other through the stages of our lives.
The warm sun grew more intense and began to blister my flesh the longer I laid there unable to move. I heard the rumbling of the Gardner’s old Chevy growing near, each backfire punctuating the urgency I felt. My bucket, still stuck in the black, tarry loam, would alert the Gardner to my attempted escape. His calloused hands would strangle and shake me on the way back to my tomb in the shed.
The tiny bit of life left in me cried out for the wind to come and blow, blow, BLOW me into the thriving garden! My want to survive chased away previous prayers of a silent, lonely end and I desperately poked around inside my soul to find the hope I had so carelessly discarded.
The old Gardener arrived, and I heard his exclamation of discovery clanging against the metallic slamming of the Chevy’s heavy door. He moved towards me, his body shaking with fury and the blood rising high in his eyes and forehead with each labored gasp of his nicotine-laden breath. He grabbed a dull, rusted spade and a prickly roll of twine determined to force me back in my bucket and secure me harshly in the tool shed again. My mother’s frail trunk and limbs leaned towards me, branching out and swiping furiously across the Gardener’s path to slow his determined stride. He struck at them with the spade and broke them all over again while bits of her fell to the ground behind him, already forgotten.
Then, a strange form cast a cool shadow from within the fine garden, and gently gloved hands reached out to cradle my still, limp form. Another Gardener had arrived. She had tears in her kind eyes as she assessed my pitiful condition and lifted me lovingly from the ground. With tenderness she slowly unwound my malnourished roots from the harsh holes in the overused bucket ignoring the growing frenzy of the Old Gardener approaching. At her feet sat a deep, bright-colored seedling container, solid and filled with nutrient-rich soil that was cool to the touch and soft as fur on the belly of the cheerful squirrels that hopped about.
As she crouched and laid me in my new bed, the organic orchestra of her garden went silent all at once. The Old Gardener had arrived at the yawning gate, but a hidden force held him at bay. The Kind Gardner stood to her full height, and although she was smaller than the Old Gardener, she turned and put herself in the path between him and me.
He bellowed and he threatened and he tried to stoke her fear, but she stood firm and challenged him with a determined glare and a gleaming sharp spade. He tried to look around her to see me again, but she strode at once to the gate and forced it closed upon his cruel and twisted face.
Under the Kind Gardener’s care I began to develop properly as a little seedling should. She gave me water and fed me nutrients, moving me and my bucket around her glorious garden until we both found that perfect spot where I belonged. From time to time I could see my mother’s leaves trying to stretch over that old iron fence towards me. Each time I could see the Old Gardner’s blade as he chopped her away, but I never laid eyes on his foulness again. With each harsh pruning my mother endured, her trunk seemed to grow sturdier.
On her hands and her knees, the Kind Gardener opened a hole in the welcoming ground, and callouses of love covered her hands as she worked. She prepared my new place: the one I had chosen. She placed me quietly there and covered my new roots with more life-giving soil. They burrowed deep, securing my place in the garden forever. My limbs gained strength and stretched above my base to move in harmony, not opposition, with the environment around me. When the wind blew harder my roots held tighter in the Kind Gardener’s keep. The squirrels and the workers and the melody makers welcomed me into their fun and they scurried about on my crisp, lively green leaves.
And then one day I was tall enough to see over the top of that old, iron fence, and I reached an elegant limb across to my mother. She seemed to generate a wind from deep inside her branches and leaned ever so slightly towards my grasp. I heard the Old Gardener begin to bellow, and I retracted back into the beautiful garden lest he swipe at me with his sickened blade.
There was a loud CRACK! and I watched without expression as a dead, rotten limb fell from my mother’s side and landed squarely on the Old Gardener. The weight of it pinned him to the molding, crude ground and stopped his felonious assault. He tried to move, but his worn out body didn’t have the strength to struggle his way out from under the dead parts of my mother that had fallen on him; those parts of her that he himself had killed. She stood tall and watched with the slightest sadness but I turned away. Eventually his miserable life slipped quietly from this earth’s container. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Into the mold and decaying ground where he belonged.
He was now the rotting corpse in his own garden of terror, but in his death he gave life to her and she began to grow furiously as if trying to make up for the stagnant times she would never get back. Now equally tall and equally strong, my mother and I smiled up at the sunlight together and joined the rest of nature in its play. With the old conflicts dead, the Kind Gardener tore down that old iron fence. She smiled as she saw my branches intertwined with my mother’s, and she began to expand her beautiful garden and prepare the grounds for the other small lives she would go on to save.
My mother and I lilt lightly in the warm breezes and giggle as the squirrels frolick playfully among our branches. We watch the Kind Gardener go about her diligent task, and provide shade and example for those recovering plants she heals. Among the thriving place I finally found under the Kind Gardener’s care, I have made a magnificent discovery.
My mother and I have both begun to bloom.