Excerpted from Moments in Nature Chronicled by a Convalescing Brooklynite by Mollie Gordon
There have been two gardens (thus far) in my life. One is in Brooklyn only five minutes away from where I am now (in quarantine with my parents); it is my godmother Linda’s garden. Linda is an expressionist painter and a gifted gardener. I often wonder if those talents are linked somehow, if she learned to grow flowers by painting them first. I can neither paint nor garden, but sometimes in the summers I used to come over and tend to Linda’s garden while she, Ethan (my godfather), and Cora (my godsister) vacationed in Florida. This task terrified me; I worried that Linda would return home to find the only living flowers in her house to be those in her paintings.
Linda paints primarily still life pictures -- of the boardwalks at Coney Island, or her flowers (usually orchids), or her dead son. The last summer I tended the garden, Linda was growing only one orchid and it was kept apart from the rest of her plants, sequestered in a small clay pot in her dead son’s room. When Linda paints orchids she paints them leaning towards each other as if engaged in private conversation. They are distinctly feminine, with titles like “gossiping old maids” or “conferring ballerinas,” but Linda’s living orchid lives alone, a ghost in a ghostly room. About a week ago I investigated the symbolism of orchids (as I thought about her) -- they stand for both femininity/fertility and death. A haunting combination.
In Linda’s instructions she always asked that I watered the orchid first. I appreciated her specificity, I myself did not know where to begin. How do you garden when the garden isn’t yours? For both Derek Jarman and Mary Sarton, gardening was a desirable solitude, a personal Eden. They went to their gardens for peace from the pangs of heartbreak, the pressures of artmaking, their insidious demons. But when I walked the few blocks to Linda’s apartment (which she’d been renting temporarily for twenty years now), I never felt fully at ease. I spent several minutes just wrestling with the front door, then I would fill the watering can in the sink, the water reverberating against the peeling tin like the ringing of chimes. Then to the shadowy orchid, then to the cactus she kept for herself in her bedroom. The indigenous people that Linda rents her apartment from believed that cacti represented the unconditionality of a mother’s love (I think she is proof of this) and I am careful with the cactus.
After, I would leave the door unlocked and go outside to water the exterior plants, where Cora’s butchered Barbie dolls usurped the places of the more traditional garden gnome. To reach these elusive flowers (asters and irises, protected and exhibited by a fence like Juliet by her balcony) I had to maneuver the watering can through a gap in the fence and shake it aimlessly. The result looked like the sprinklers Linda’s son and I used to run through together in sweat-soaked bathing suits at Van Voorhees park down by the highway.
When I felt that I’d approximated the rain, I would go back inside and dump any remaining water in the sink. Then I would lock up and walk home. I never turned the lights off because I never turned them on. I felt a little like a burglar, and based on how long it took me to get the door to open and close, Linda’s neighbors probably thought I was one. Or maybe they just didn’t worry about it, knowing Linda. Her doors are open to everyone.
Hey, Linda? Don’t tell Aunt Julie this but your garden is my favorite. That other garden (Aunt Julie’s) is located in Washington D.C., and Julie is incredibly possessive of it. She does not share her gardening duties with anyone, therefore my job was not to water the plants but to chase the rabbits away. Julie and the rabbits had been at war ever since they had eaten through half of her cucumber plants, ruining a perfectly planned summer salad. Julie appointed me her general, renowned as I was for tearing up gardens rather than growing them, an upset to my feminine ancestors.
It does not escape me that only the women in my life have been particularly inclined to garden. I don’t know what this says about us. Is it because we as women have been conditioned to nurture, to tend, to preserve? Or is it that ever since Eve got us kicked out of the garden we’ve been fighting to get it back? Whatever the case, I do not (nor I never have) fit that mold of womanhood. I used to dig up grubs in the yard behind my preschool, and my mud-drenched dresses earned me infamy as a not very good little lady.
But maybe Linda just doesn’t see me that way (I can’t be sure). What I know is that she trusts me to water her orchid just enough, to help her bake sugar cookies that vanish as soon as they emerge from the oven, to keep an eye out for bats as we walk by the pier at sunset, to hand out the goodie bags at her son’s birthday parties and (now) to watch over her daughter. While Linda labors in the kitchen to produce the perfect butternut squash casserole, I lead Cora through endless games of hide-and-go-seek. The little girl is as wild as I was, but Linda doesn’t seem to mind. She is too busy cooking with the fruits of her garden, striving to squeeze as much life out of those plants as she can.
Linda invited Ellis over the first time she met them. We stopped outside her door on a tour of my neighborhood, the exertion making me lean forward on my crutches like the drooping head of her orchid. At the first ring of the bell the door swung wide open and she said, “Come in, come in!” face flushed with excitement at a chance to play the host. Ten minutes in and she’d already invited Ellis to dinner, featuring her homemade mushroom moussaka. Her shoulders sagged a little when I admitted that we already had plans for the evening, but we agreed on a rain check. I am still waiting for the day (post-pandemic) when I can make good on that promise, when I can usher my beloved into the warmth of your garden and your home.