This is my symphony

When I bought my house twenty years ago, one of the things I loved most was the little perennial garden that ran along the driveway from the front steps to the side. It had been professionally designed and planted and the owners left me the garden schematic beautifully plotted out on parchment-thin paper, shaded with soft penciled colors. That first summer I watched and waited and didn’t make many changes. I had hostas and needle leaf coreopsis and Russian sage and cranesbill.

But after that I got brave. (Brave for me, that is!) I made a trip to the garden market every spring and chose maybe one or two new perennials. Because I have a notorious brown thumb, many didn’t survive. But I managed to coax along some balloon flowers, stargazer lilies, sedum, and black-eyed Susans. My Shasta daisies were stunted by earwigs and every chrysanthemum I planted lasted only a season or two. It was trial and error, with the tendency towards error.

I’m a cautious gardener, you see. I like order–not necessarily rows–and my garden is pleasant and neat… but rather tame.

The meadow

This spring my husband decided to start gardening himself by growing a few annuals from seed. (I always supplement my perennials with potted annuals: marigolds, petunias, geraniums, etc.) Then I asked for a salad bowl–you know, those potted mixes of tiny romaine and leaf lettuces, some baby kale–so I could have salad at the ready. He thought he might try some perennials, just because. The result was three portable greenhouse units crammed with flats and seedlings, moved from window to window, inside to outside. I’ll admit the chaos was a bit alarming for me, someone who loves order and plants methodically.

Now you must also know that B is an all or nothing type of guy. He lives large, takes risks. Doesn’t always plan, but lets life unfold. He’s reaped a lot of highs (and lows) with this approach to life. His garden just sort of happened and there’s nothing small scale about it.

B gardens with abandon and I’ve come to love the beauty in what I once saw as disarray. There’s a lush jungle of pots upon pots on our deck and riots of roses and morning glories along the fence. He started a meadow a few years back and this year it has come into its own–a tiny patch of intentional wilderness right in our yard, complete with a grotto of phlox for my Blessed Virgin.

I still putz in my side garden, swapping out plants occasionally, dead-heading when I remember, and filling in spaces when I get some inspiration. It’s nice.

But B’s garden space is a tangle of color, exploding with annuals and perennials. It’s gorgeous.

And my heart is richer for it.

Miss Jane
Brad Watson
W.W. Norton & Company

Like so many women in the piney woods of Mississippi, Mrs.Chisolm had lost more babies than she had children. So when she found herself pregnant again–at thirty-nine, no less–she pretended she was not. Better to think it a false pregnancy than one she would lose yet again.

But Nature is a force to be reckoned with–and that baby, Jane, turned the world of her family and the doctor who tended her on end. Born with a genital abnormality, Jane wouldn’t go to school or play with other children because her condition left her incontinent, nor would she ever marry or have children.

But ignore her you couldn’t, for Jane was a bright and sensitive girl who loved life. She was fearless and independent. And although she would rather not have lived with such a difference, “she accepted it as part of who she was, no matter how unsavory. She determined that she would live like any other girl as best she could [and] would adjust her life to its terms accordingly.”

What writer Brad Watson gives us, then, is a story of Jane’s acceptance of her fate and how she dealt with the discomfort and shame of others: the mother who drifted into stony silence, the father who fell under the spell of his own moonshine, the sister who grudgingly offered her a chance at independence. Jane understood her limitations and accepted life as it was. Her family often could not.

But most touching is Jane’s relationship with two men: her doctor and the young man she loved but turned away because of her difference. Dr. Thompson’s kindness was accompanied by a gentle honesty. It was he who explained to Jane her “problem” simply meant something had gone wrong before she was born. She was “complicated, but essentially normal,” he assured her. And Elijah Key, the boy on the next farm, seemed not to understand Jane’s difference–and she came to love him in a sweet and simple way. Again, it was Dr. Thompson who stepped in, telling Jane that she must turn Elijah away because she could never have normal relations–and to help matters along, Jane’s parents sent her to town to live with her sister Grace.

One would think such a loss would turn Jane bitter. And she struggled, yes. But whatever came Jane’s way, she met with quiet strength and resolve. She buried her parents, ran the farm, and stayed close to Dr. Thompson who remained a true friend.

Writer Brad Watson based Jane’s story on that of his great aunt, and he conveyed enough about Jane’s difference to be accurate, but not indelicate. It was only after I read an article about Watson’s aunt on his website that I understood enough to search out a little more information about her condition.

But it’s really not necessary to know the specifics about her condition because Jane’s story is really about the state of her heart–and in that regard, Jane was without a flaw.