SOMETHING THERE IS
THAT DOESN'T LOVE A WALL
By Catherine Young
The brick wall stood knee-high and was dependable if unsightly. It ran the width of our old Allentown house and harbored my family’s sub-par attempt at a front garden. The anchor of our small collection of plants (hardly a garden, actually) was a crabapple tree intended to be a dwarf but, with improper pruning, it had grown full size. In the back, aiming to mask the taller wall of our brick porch, was a spindly cluster of flame-tipped tiger lilies. The lilies had once matched our orange-red front door but, because the house had been painted, they now clashed. The third and final variety of flora was a dense row of boxy yew bushes that ran the entire length of the brick wall. The bushes were scratchy and their underbrush was a favorite litter box for neighborhood cats.
The wall and the bushes remained this way for the first twenty-two years of my life. One winter the bricks mysteriously began to crumble on the wall’s northern corner. In our family tradition, we chose to ignore the crumbling. My two sisters and I were scattered about the country, leaving our mother alone to try to look after the house. It seemed all we could do was hope that the cement and bricks wouldn’t crumble onto an old lady’s foot or a petite dog. Then, when I was twenty-three, my mom died and I was left to look after the property while my two sisters did other things. It was overwhelming, so I cajoled my boyfriend Jason into moving from New York City to Buffalo and staying in the house with me.
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The plants used in the garden
renovation included hydrangea and impatiens. |
Jason and I were now able to hide under the cloak of young, inexperienced home ownership and continued to ignore the precarious brick. But when a former neighbor (who happens to be a lawyer) dropped by to say hello and mentioned the state of the wall, I became plagued with shame and decided we had to take action. Jason offered to do the labor. The damage was severe enough that Jason would have to chop down the crabapple tree, dig up the yews and tiger lilies, and remove the dirt before he sledge-hammered the wall and tossed the chunks of brick into a rented dumpster.
It was early in the semester and an unreasonable time for graduate students to be up: 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. The dumpster was delivered by a mangy fellow raving about being so close to Canada and needing to escape to the country because Howard Stern said a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Jason and I thought the delivery man was crazy or that Howard Stern was pulling a prank, possibly both. Still, we turned on the television just in case. There was no tree, bush, dirt, or brick removal for several hours.
Thinking about his family and friends in New York but unable to get in touch with them, Jason couldn’t take the coverage anymore. In the early afternoon he headed outside to begin the job. When he began hacking away at the crabapple tree, trouble began. Neighbors who had lived on the street longer than I’ve been alive milled from their homes to give opinions. They regaled Jason with stories of the woman who had put in the wall and porch, how it had cost her more than the house itself. They were horrified that he was chopping down a perfectly good tree and digging up bushes. Jason, a mild mannered person with an aversion to confrontation, finally snapped that he was worried about his family and if they really had problems with it they should talk to me because I was the homeowner. The neighbors begrudgingly dispersed.
The saturation of television reports hypnotized me and I didn’t leave the house for two days. On Thursday Jason brought me outside to survey the results of his labor. The wall was gone and in its place was a low, sloping expanse of dirt with two of the bushes anchored by flat pieces of slate. I cringed. It was just so...low. I could never again describe the house to a friend as “the one with the brick wall and bushes in the front.” I could never use the wall to hoist myself up to the porch instead of using the stairs. What would my sisters think? What would my mom have thought? What were we going to do with all that space now that the tree and all but two of the bushes were gone? What would go in their place?
I was surprised by the dramatic sense of loss I felt because I had originally wanted to rip up all the tiger lily bulbs and throw out all the bushes, eschewing any reminder of the sad “garden” of my childhood. It seemed to mark a certain failure to prosper and I had wanted to begin anew. Mysteriously missing the way the front of the house had been, I was now glad that Jason convinced me we could not afford such a strident stab at reinvention. He saved the two bushes by protecting their root balls and replanted them farther from the sidewalk’s edge so that they were now a simple backdrop rather than a bland centerpiece. He also pointed out that, as my mom had planned in 1973 when she planted them, the tiger lilies were good for masking the monotony of the tall brick porch.
Jason also taught me about splitting plants. He used our ragged backyard and side garden as a “source nursery,” supplying the front with hostas and cinnamon ferns. At first my virulent hatred of the ferns provoked protest. But Jason argued that the fern was the most noble of prehistoric flora and, with its ingenious rhizomes and ability to cover a large area, should be given its due. So, into the ground they went before the first frost. To truly see what the garden would become, we would have to wait until the following April.
Come spring, we headed to the nursery and embellished what had been salvaged from the old plants. I campaigned for annuals while Jason voted for more non-flowering easy-care perennials. The compromise was a lilac bush, a hydrangea, an azalea, rhododendron, a row of trumpeting petunias, and heaps of impatiens to fill out the low front slope where the garden met the sidewalk. Throughout the season, I would come home to find a new little sprig popping out of the ground and Jason would casually mention that he had picked it up on the way home. Soon there were lithe white lilies, a wee juniper bush, and the slender stems and delicate petals of purple irises. Each year we add a few more things.
Although my mom only met Jason twice before she died, she liked him a great deal. I think she would love what Jason was able to do once the brick wall was taken down, though she could never have handled such an abrupt and thorough change. I can just imagine her delight in exiting the house to a blossoming pink hydrangea or stout rhododendron. I experienced that delight myself when, for the first time in my life, neighbors began approaching me at the corner deli or local bookstore just to compliment the garden. Jason and I again wait for spring, hoping that this year the lilac will bloom.
Catherine Young is an artist and writer living in Buffalo.
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