AT THE GENTLE MERCY OF PLANTS -- ESSAYS AND POEMS

Roots and Hedges

AFTER MY MOTHER lost her home to the Berkeley fire, we settled in southern California, where by 1926 she had bought an old garden home in the foothill suburbs above Pasadena. It was not a likely property for my mother to purchase. She was used to a substantial home in a conventional setting, and this consisted of three old cottages hidden in a garden that was hidden by a cypress hedge eight feet tall. An old-fashioned and romantic air of seclusion, almost of secrecy, moved her to want the place. After the shock of losing her home and the loved furnishings of years of domestic life, she was drawn to an environment that seemed to offer a ready-made and secure welcome. Once inside the gate and down the long path, she was surrounded by a private world. So she bought the old garden -- almost half an acre, including three ancient, rustic redwood close-to-dilapidated cottages. Such dwellings, usually called bungalows, were not too hard to find at that time in southern California. People had built lightly and lightheartedly for a warm climate, and no building codes had bothered them. What was obligatory was bougainvillea on the roof. Of her trio, my mother chose the largest for our domicile. One was to be rented and one was be a studio -- a vague, exploitable title.

By the time we moved into our house, we had acquired a little furniture, and as we were putting books into a bookcase at one end of the living room a bright streak caught my mother's eye. "What was that?" she asked. "It looks like sunlight."

I knelt beside the bookcase and investigated. "It is sunlight, Mother," I assured her guardedly.

"What do you mean, it is sunlight? How could it be? That's a wall."

Still more cautiously, I said, "Mother, it's a wall with a big crack in it."

It was only after this discovery that Mother had the condition of the property investigated. It was a stunning surprise to her to learn that, typical of many modest old houses in California, ours was constructed without studs, and of walls somehow assembled of thin redwood planks nailed top and bottom to horizontal two-by-fours. Building codes and permits were still cordial, easygoing, or nonexistent when my mother's bungalows were constructed. At that early period, anybody who could hit a nail with a rock could put a house together, and often did. No proper foundations were required -- a few boulders from the nearest arroyo would do. Such houses were expected to perch. It would have been difficult to locate three houses so near the brink still perching, and, I add with affection, still so beguiling in their strangle of shrubbery and shaded paths. Style was no consideration in houses of this kind, as only the builder's desire for the picturesque or the quaint mattered, and in any case they would soon be obliterated by bougainvillea, banksia roses, and yellow jasmine, their interiors ill lit and smelling oddly -- a faint stink that came from the redwood. On the drawing boards of architects like the Brothers Greene, redwood was used for fine designing, but these others, almost spontaneous handmade structures, had their place until the thirties and forties in the historic environment of southern California. They all also had an honest place in the personal memoirs of an occupant who enjoyed their charms and suffered their haphazardness, including the carefree custom of scattering the essential parts of the bathroom hit-or-miss through the house -- perhaps just outside the house. The first control my distraught mother exerted on her new home was to assemble the stray parts of the bathroom into one location, where in the service of modesty propriety could close the door.

One colossal curiosity dominated my mother's house: the front door. Instead of functioning on hinges, it hung like a barn door on an overhead metal track, which operated like a trolley. The door contained two windows -- one right, one left -- both integral to the total creation. The thing was damnably heavy. Getting it even to budge was a challenge, and when at last it unexpectedly did roll, the sound of its thunder was dreadful. To enter the house, there was a smart step up from the porch with a treacherous sill; on this a visitor, already startled by the opening of the door, could trip and fall flat on his face into the living room. We asked each other who in God's name ever thought up such a ridiculous way to get in and out of an old house. Then we heard from a neighbor that the first known owner of our place had been a lady by the name of Miss Fortune who had travelled ardently in the Orient, particularly in Japan. She brought back with her the concept of the Japanese sliding screen, and from her description some mystified carpenter had made our monstrous version of an elegant thing. There were, without doubt, Japanese artisans in southern California who could have done it perfectly, but it appeared that she had relied upon herself (a born obstructionist dedicated to a morality of defeat). She had paid for that, and now we were also paying for it. The roof, too, was her contribution -- almost without pitch except for a little point in the middle which may have been intended to make it look like a pagoda but in fact suggested the hat of a peasant planting rice in a Hiroshige print. The sun on the roof created a stifling heat. A conventional front door and a cooling gable were alterations that followed the bathroom. I can count twelve major improvements over the years, all consoling to my mother, who with each became a little less humiliated by her original faulty judgment.

Very happily, both for my own life and our immediate circumstances as abashed householders, we had not lived in our delightful slum for more than half a year when I married. My husband, Frederick Monhoff, brought his conspicuous talents as artist and architect to this scene, which he regarded with suppressed astonishment and a sense of humor. For years to come, he and my mother, who was good at visualizing and loved floor plans, remodelled the kindling of the old houses into durable and attractive bungalows. In becoming desirable, they could no longer be laughed at. If this was a loss, we were well comforted by the presence, over all, of five respectable bathrooms, two fireplaces, French doors for Mother, and for us walls of glass, and a contemporary style in the house and studio my husband and I now occupied. The one thing we were never able to impose our will upon was the population of foothill opossums that for scores of generations had lived under the three cottages. They took kindly to newcomers. They saw no reason to move on. Whatever our improvements, they continued to make it clear that the place was theirs. Even when we added a furnace for our own comfort, it added principally to theirs. One night in winter, we heard a savage scratching under the floor. By morning, the house was very cold. An opossum of more than usual intelligence and skill had clawed the furnace duct apart at a joint, crawled into the cozy interior, and, just big enough to fit, had filled it, completely stopping the flow of heat to the registers above.

***

WE DID NOT know that we had settled with a permanency phenomenal in those days. In southern California, most old homes grow old in a succession of ownerships, while we set a record by remaining for thirty-six years in one place that had been old to begin with. The restlessness that animated many people and inspired the operatic aggressiveness of the real-estate market did not touch us -- perhaps we were lethargic in some ways. Still, we were busy. My mother attached herself to the Pasadena Community Playhouse with a habitual reverence for the drama and language spoken clearly behind footlights -- occasionally by herself, as she achieved a role. Fred went back and forth daily to the city for his teaching of design at the Otis Art Institute and his architectural work. I stayed at home and cultivated a sense of place and poetry. The big solid hedge shut us all in psychologically. The years brought to our family group the usual events of birth and death and the pleasures and strains of existence. Always there was the earth, nature, and the elements that demanded scrutiny.

We had been ignorant of the foothill wind that blew seasonally from the interior, beginning with autumn and going on through the late winter. It had a name we learned with dread -- Santa Ana. It blew through the canyon of Santa Ana and was capable of putting enough sand into the air to take the paint off your car and pit the windshield if you were coming through the Guasti vineyards en route to San Bernardino. At home, it made sleep impossible, it blasted the nerves, it could ruin the roof. It had its own attendant, rhythmic weather. Toward evening, the air would become clear and glassy, and a paw of wind would reach into the garden and shake the trees and scuffle with any loose foliage on the ground. Then silence. A little later we could hear it approaching down the canyons of the Sierra Madres above us. And more silence -- silence almost as menacing as the sound of the wind itself. When night fell, it settled down to its real performance -- hours or possibly days of buffeting, thrashing, and banging. It might blow only as far as the valley plain or it might get as far as the coast. Some communities it might jump over. Wherever it blew, it had no observers more attentive and taut than ourselves. We learned every sigh and roar, every whack of its repertoire, and especially the long frightening slide and spring of power as it came down the mountain and landed on top of us with a vibrating hoot into the chimney. The old cypress hedge was always bruised in these storms and gave off its pungent smell. During our first years in the garden, we sometimes fled in alarm to an inexpensive hotel in Pasadena. There, although we had been spared the sound of the wind, we would get up in the morning to see broken plate glass on the sidewalk, and on the way home trees flattened during the night, or the steeple of a wooden church wrenched crooked, with a revival meeting sign at an angle calling the city of Pasadena to "Come and live with Jesus." Finally, we grew ashamed of our timidity and stayed home while the storm raved. We never learned to take it without cringes: cringes and the raking up of the mess and the return of other people's property -- often the cat's house that flew over the hedge from the premises of two apologetic maiden sisters.

Having learned so disastrously about Western foothill fires in our brief stay in Berkeley, we might have thought ourselves entitled to immunity from even the smell of burning brush. However, the Sierra Madres burned regularly and within smelling distance nearly every summer, and sometimes directly overhead. More than once, when wind brought the fire into the outskirts of our community and we were less than a mile from flying embers, my husband spent the night packing two cars with what he decided was most valuable among his collection of architectural designs, books, Chinese scrolls, Japanese prints, and Navajo rugs. Onto this pile I always added his own etchings and paintings, which he characteristically delayed in gathering. As I helped him through the exhausting hours, I wailed, "Again? Surely not again!" and he answered with cynical sympathy, "Yes, again." Early the next morning, the wind would stop and the fire be declared under control, leaving in its wake a row of homes destroyed on the street highest up. People who come to California to live with the exhilarating joys of scenery and climate must learn to pay for the privilege, faithfully and painfully.

Our garden was typical of an era when many gardens were still inspired by the mission enclosures -- notably that of San Juan Capistrano. The padres had planted for use and nostalgia, bringing with them cuttings, cereals, seeds of vegetables, herbs, and fruits as well as of flowers. Paths imposed a kind of formality in the mission patio, with beds between them. The model was easy to copy and perfectly suited to horticulture passions that were unable to resist donations of slips and pinches, and the plain theft of something just too tempting hanging over the fence. All available space was soon filled with a rabid jungle of plants madly embracing each other and suffocating their mates out of existence. In form, our garden was of this genre, but the last owner, a retired schoolteacher who slept with an old BB gun by her bed and got up early to scare the finches raiding the fig tree, was inclined more toward fruits than flowers. We had persimmon, plum, apricot, pear, peach, pomegranate, guava, orange, lemon, grapefruit, and lime -- some of them many years old. There were also huge oleanders and an ancient jasmine on my mother's cottage. There were roses, daphne, crape myrtle, and trumpet vine, to begin with. We soon added azaleas, camellias, hibiscus, the dark, chic hardenbergia like a miniature wisteria and, among others, the night-blooming cestrum of wonderful heavy scent that choked my mother in her sleep, gave her nightmares, and had to be removed. Eventually, we had three kinds of the so called orchid tree -- lavender, yeIlow, white. The last grew to be tall, and its snowy, lilylike flowers that delicately straddled the boughs produced seedpods of considerable tensile strength when they split, which they did with a cracking sound. The seeds were thrown far and wide, and I enjoyed finding them, shining brown and squarish in shape, perhaps sixty feet from the tree. Of bulbs we had the elegant ivory freesias; a congregation of them gave off clear ethereal perfume. We had exotics like tigridia and alstoemeria from Mexico and South America, and companies of pink amaryllis, agapanthus, crinum, spider lily, stylosa, and other iris. We had beds of succulents and rosetted sempervivums, and a cereus that, as darkness approached, opened an enormous bud into a mammoth, angelic white flower, whose eerie, brief mechanism of inflorescence collapsed at dawn. These plants are now common in southern California. They represent not botanical knowledge or specialization or even success in gardening but a wistful, hilarious hunger for plants that is stimulated by a radiant climate and an earth cordial to the ever newly revealed floral wealth of other countries.

The Monterey cypress hedge that surrounded our place was elephantine, and we loved the elephant, but we found it no small chore to climb a ladder and, with aching arms and shoulders and shears always growing dull, tidy up a green monster eight by six by hundreds of feet. It was with such tough labor that I learned the wages of work -- values I paid myself in pleasure, pride, and honest fatigue. We hired help for only one day a week, and no memory of our garden would be complete without the inclusion of James Nicolopulos.

Nicky was Greek -- a smiling, dependable orb of warm light clothed in blue denim, with a watch chain swinging across his broad stomach. He worked for a number of property owners in the community and he took an interest not only in their aphids and snails but in their personal problems as well. He was not a gossip -- or not an accomplished gossip -- but a man whose kindness and good cheer could not be contained in ordinary limits of communication; rather elaborately he kept a web of discreet, or sympathetically indiscreet, information, just taut enough to entangle his employers with him and with each other. We might be social strangers, but through Nicky an expectancy bound us together. Behind our hedge we had news of what was happening to other people, although news of what was happening to other people's plants was often of more interest to me.

"That man who lives up where the street curves and his drive with the palms goes back to where his house is?" I might inquire in a twisting sentence resembling the drive referred to.

Nicky would say, "She's all right. His wife came home from the hospital all right." (I had not met his wife.)

"And the palm at the front that was injured in the wind storm?" (It was a good Livistona chinensis, and I suspected that its owner did not prize it highly enough even before the storm blew its head off.)

"The palm's all right," Nicky assured me. "So he threw it down into the arroyo, so I pulled it out of the arroyo, so I told him, 'Never throwaway a dead palm. A dead palm is never dead.'"

"Good, good," I said, and this information relieved my mind of an item of worry and indignation.

Another day: "Nicky, I need a really fine white oleander. That man who sells cars --"

"He's drinking all the time. He never stops drinking all the time. He never stops women all the time."

"Just the same, I want a cutting from his best white oleander along the street."

"Help yourself. She has a hard life." (This wife I did know and could agree.)

Only rarely were names included in these exchanges, but identities were established by plants known to me. Were other people treated to brief, vivid views of our lives? Probably.

All of Nicky's employers profited from his immediate recognition of the usefulness of any materials he might spy in a dormant or restful state. In a suburban economy during the war, it was sometimes difficult to find or buy what one needed, and Nicky kept his eye open for such needs. There was a section of the old hedge that had died and left a gap. When our son was beginning to walk and could get far enough to wander off the property, this had to be patrolled. One morning, I saw with surprise that across the hole in the hedge had been stretched precious and unprocurable chicken wire.

"From Mrs. Pier's chicken yard," said Nicky.

"Doesn't Mrs. Pier need it?"

"Not just now. She got tired of chickens. And she looks better without chicken wire."

I was grateful for our neighbor's ennui toward chickens. Then I noticed the absence of a good seedling Ochna multiflora, a shrub listed as rare in my favorite handbook of ornamental plants. The seedling had come up at the bottom of our garden just above our neighbor's driveway. I was watching it with covetous pleasure. "What happened to my ochna?" I asked Nicky.

"She likes it," Nicky said succinctly. "She thinks the seedpods are funny. So I took it to her." His sense of justice in exchange could operate quickly.

Then there was the old wheelbarrow. My mother, who never would have used it, happened to miss it one day. "Nicky," she said, "I thought there was an old wheelbarrow here when I bought this place."

"Oh, yes," he said cheerfully. "Mrs. Eddy needed it."

"Eddy?" my mother asked vaguely.

"Down on Mariposa Street, the big brown house," Nicky said. "You know the three big brown houses? Mrs. Eddy lives in the biggest big brown house."

"Yes, yes." Mother brightened. Her wheelbarrow had advanced socially. But her conscience was at once involved. "It was broken. How can they use it?"

"No matter," said Nicky. "Mr. Eddy is very nice repair man. He had good time fixing it. When you get it back it will be better yet."

Then there was Mrs. Kellogg's clump of cuphea. This affair did not turn out so well for us. Nicky, knowing of a blank spot in our garden, came one day bearing a clump of cupheas in full flower, and plenty of roots and good earth -- a gift in itself. I admired the red tubular blossoms. Nurseries had only recently introduced the cupheas. They were fashionable. As the blank spot disappeared under the expanding cuphea, I wondered what the toll of exchange was going to be. For several months, I was allowed ignorance, until one day the plant, very handsome under my care, vanished. One of its popular names was "fire-cracker." "The Cuphea ignea has exploded'" I cried to Nicky.

Nicky was calm. "She thought she didn't want it and then she wanted it bad" was his untroubled explanation.

With the passing of time, there came a day when I heard the sound of busy cackling, and I sauntered down to the bottom of the garden to take a look. Sure enough, the fence had gone. A few years had passed and the child was now a boy in school. Mrs. Pier's hens were back and the chicken wire had been replaced where it was needed.

It was fascinating to live under Nicky's cycles of use and restoration. Just as we began to feel the lack of a wheelbarrow, ours came rolling home in a splendid condition of repair -- better yet, as Nicky had promised. Mother sat on her porch and watched with approval as Fred and I hauled used brick to border a bed of herbs. Plainly she was flattered by Mr. Eddy's resuscitation of the fitness of things in her daily life.

Nicky loved my mother. It may have been her dignity and bearing that drew his respect, or perhaps it was her occasional confusion, which seemed to bring her down to the level of his own inadequacies. In any case, Nicky felt about Mother as I felt about the quail in the garden, of whom I said, because I loved them, "Quail can do no wrong." Even when she indulged in an obviously human breakdown at a stray parrot that ate her sweet tangerines (she threw stones at the robber, called him names, and swore at him), Nicky applauded and bent double with amusement -- not easy for a fat man.

***

THE TIME CAME when we did away with the big hedge to which we had clung past its years of health and usefulness. To chop, saw down, or somehow vanquish a perishing cypress hedge is a major job. The wood was hard and dense. And then to break into a symbol of containment as old and strong as our hedge, even though it was impaired, took more than axe and saw -- it required melancholy determination. A family does not lightly destroy the fortress of its privacy. Already three quarters of a century old, it could never in our generation be replaced. In the end, the job was too mournful for us, too demanding, and we called in a company of powerful black brothers who specialized in such destruction.

We knew at once that enclosure had been a good feeling, that we could never live exposed to public and street, with no privacy in front of daily life. We must build a wall, and Fred designed one -- handsome and original. As the trench was being dug and the footing poured, it became evident to our next-door neighbor, Annie, that he was about to perpetrate a peculiarity. A wall should be straight and stand within the property line. If it did not do so, something weird was taking place.

"Just where is your wall going to?" Annie inquired.

I responded with pride in Fred, "Our wall is designed with certain formal irregularities. Have you ever seen a serpentine wall?"

"I have not," she said, "but I can see by the foundations that yours is going to wiggle."

A short portion of our wall was straight, then beyond the gate it broke into angles at regular intervals just long enough to give grace to its composition. The materials were a pale yellow-rosy concrete block, and redwood horizontal fencing on top. It was good, it was distinguished, and I no longer mourned the hedge. On the day when it was finished and the mason was driving off with his rattling equipment, we stood in the street admiring it.

Our enjoyment was broken into by Annie at her end of the wall. "Did you know that you have built your wall way out into the street?" she said. "That's county property, and the County of Los Angeles will sue you, and probably," she continued with satisfaction, "make you take the wall down."

"Just a minute before you start wrecking the wall," Fred said. He disappeared through the gate and came back with his steel tape. If the creative calculations of his designing contained a shade of mystification, he was never flustered by a lack of comprehension in a conventional mind. He unreeled the end of his tape and handed it to Annie, "Step on it."

She did so, and he continued to unreel the long tape past the projections of the wall to our corner mark. It was plain that, instead of encroaching, we had actually donated footage to the County of Los Angeles.

Annie sighed and stepped off the tape. "I might as well have kept my fat mouth shut," she remarked amiably. Afterward, she proved herself a really good sport and paid half the cost of constructing the portion of wall between our two properties.

***

SOMETIMES, AS FRED and I were climbing the trail up Mount Wilson, we would hear far above us the sound of a bell. We knew we were about to meet the Hermit of the Mountains, as he was called, coming down with his burro and his police dog for provisions. Somewhere on the chaparral-covered heights he had a shelter, somewhere he lived in a chosen place that was safe from the city. But even at that distance he could not escape the sight of what was happening in the valley and on the plain. Increase -- a prodigality of increase. Increase of people whose lights shone up at him in thousands of radiant earthly stars, increase of boulevards and freeways whose blazing progress burned all night, increase of the smokes of industry, increase of planes overhead and, if unseen from here, increase of ships at San Pedro, and on some days an increase of the wandering smog -- a floating, polluted substance that hid the earth from the hermit's mountain and his mountain from the earth. As we met, we exchanged greetings, patted the burro, and respectfully said hello to the big serious dog -- five of us who paused for a moment in the fragrant pigmy forest, where mountain and nature seemed inviolable and yet afforded a superb view of stupendous change in Western history.

Summer, and ripe figs to preserve, and the dark triangular visages of honeybees clustered on the kitchen screen, drawn there by syrup and cloves. Winter, and drenching storms that fell in second showers while wind shook the wet bamboo dripping and heavy with the original rain. Spring, and the slow release of fragrance from the buds of freesias. At all seasons, there occurred in the studio in the old garden the disciplines of form and rhythm, a labor loosely and mysteriously called "creativity," but accomplished only by strict vision and tightening of thought as pastel, charcoal, brush, or tool lifted a building, a design, an etching from tracing paper, canvas, or copper plate; if there was mystery involved, it was the presence of a unique intelligence working patiently until late hours while the mockingbird sang strenuously in the loquat tree overhead. And the garden continued to be filled with its own events, indifferently turning in upon itself and unaware of the human beings who occupied it.

As the coming of a young life had been an absorbing joy, so the departure of the old life was soon to be at hand with heartache. One day, my mother, who had been losing strength and vitality, stood in her living room and cried in a voice of terror, "What is happening to me?" I could give her no answer, but I shared her terror and the cruel extremity of the moment. I suffered what she was suffering and, in addition, my own anguish of ignorance and confusion. Hers was to be a slow way of dying -- not of agony but of great tedium and frightening nervousness. "How long, O Lord, how long?" she implored each night before the drug took effect and she thankfully fell asleep. One evening, I brought her a saucer of apricots that I had cooked. "How good these apricots are," she said. They were her last words to me -- nothing to put on a monument but consoling to remember, because they were simple and natural and spoken in conscious possession of her cultivated voice. Her grandson had come to her bedside to say good night. Now, as a man, he recalls that she said to him not good night but goodbye. Before morning, she died softly in her sleep.

When an old hedge dies, you can replace it by a wall and the commitment of life within is undisturbed. When people die, the strangeness of inhabited emptiness takes over. The person is gone, but the person is still there, must be accommodated, must be believed in. Mother was dead, and although I had inherited the old garden and all that was in it, and although our own marks -- my husband's and mine -- were deep on the place, still, possession must be divided with the late owner in ways difficult to define. It had to do with a fragile spiritual leftover, the staple of immortal essence, personality. Death has no power.

The yellow jasmine on her cottage was in heavy bloom, a huge vine that let fall a sheet of small gold flowers fresh every day. Usually I swept them up in yellow heaps, but at this moment I let them lie on the bricks of the walk, growing deeper in rich gold, and one could look down from the gate and see the solid stretch of blossoms, long and wide. To leave them there was not sentimental; it was practical and comforting -- even therapeutic in its daily restoration of continual brightness. Mother was gone in a lingering, plaintive way. Nicky was not well. He could no longer take a pint of red wine with boiled sheep's head and grape leaves stuffed with rice and garlic for breakfast. We all, both dead and living, needed to be cheered up, if only by the sight of something so bright. Even at noon in the broad light of southern California the old garden felt dark.

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