WORDS
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Not long ago I got an email from an old friend, part of it about the time he spends working in his garden. Both of us were born in Toronto, city boys, though my family moved to a small town when I was ten years old. He has spent his life in big cities, most of the time in Toronto, but now he passes the summers in an old house in a town in the Ottawa Valley, a house that has been in his wife’s family for well over a hundred years. And I am settled here on PEI in the village of Eldon. Both of us live in big Victorian frame houses, and both of us have space for gardens that are a pleasure, a distraction, even an obsession.
Some of the peonies in his garden came from Ireland with his wife’s family in the 1830s. In my garden are some moss roses that were given to my parents in the 1950s by two old bachelors who lived near the Niagara River, the ancestors of these roses brought from the British Isles by the ancestors of the two old men.
Like my friend in Ontario I have even planted trees, a couple of new ones this year planted with the knowledge that they will almost certainly outlive me. “Whatever I am doing in this garden I am doing ultimately for other people,” my friend writes. “Or maybe for its own sake.”
Is it a strange thing that gardening, an activity focussed on the future, is often the pursuit that men and women take up as they grow older? You look at an iris in bloom and notice that the flowering stems are few this year. Time to split the tubers, which may mean a year or two without blooms, and then a renewed burst of energy. Eventually the time will come when I’m not here to see the results of the work I’ve done in the years before, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter.
And at the same time as we are planning for summers yet to come, we must be aware of how rapidly the season passes in a Canadian garden. We wait through a long winter and a cold spring, and finally we see the vivid colours of crocuses, daffodils, tulips, then iris, lupins, peonies, the season hurtling forward, the birds that arrived in spring now raising the first of their young.
In the midsummer there is perhaps a moment when the rush of seasons slows, when annuals flower over and over, roses continue to produce blooms. We feel ourselves in good shape from all the activity, eat vegetables that we have grown. Or perhaps that moment of stillness is only imaginary. Certainly it isn’t long before the colours show a hint of change, black-eyed susans leading the way into a new range of tones.
I remember being in Ontario in a summer of fierce heat and drought, the grass dying, a hint perhaps of what the long hot summer is like in places further south. Trees, with their deep roots, find just enough water to survive. Perhaps, with the changes that are taking place in the climate, we may know more of this.
Soon enough it’s early fall, and I dig up the garlic, just a few weeks before it’s time to plant for next year. Bulbs go into the earth to wait for that brief and inspiring spring flourishing. When the trees drop their leaves we notice the inches of height they have added, skinny saplings beginning to develop thick trunks, spreading branches. My friend writes about a scrawny horse chestnut he moved from his old house in Toronto. Now it is taller than he is.
Both of us, grandfathers now, work the ground in our spare hours, plant, weed, watch the new flowering, continuing on the benign assumption that someone will always be here to enjoy the result of our labours. Us for a while yet.
David Helwig serves as the current Poet Laureate of Prince Edward Island. Visit www.peipoetry.com
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