I said I wanted to know everything about everything when I took a new job as a gardener. Discovering I know little about anything has been embarrassing.
What is in the gardens that make up the garden?
Dirt. But what kind of dirt? Where does one get that dirt, and when and how does one apply it? What does one add to the dirt to fortify the plants one puts in it? Is there adequate drainage, sunlight, shade, for the garden one wishes to grow in a certain place?
There are places in Ballard and West Seattle to buy certain types of rocks and dirt. We have a giant diesel truck. To be a gardener, one has to be able to drive this giant truck and park it without crashing into and crushing other vehicles and buildings.
At the garden, one has to drive the John Deere E-Gator, maneuvering it through tight spots and dodging in and out of street traffic and pedestrians, without crashing into the bollard lights that line the pathways of the gardens.
A gardener needs the right clothes. Gardener pants have extra pockets rightly sized for gardening tools, with padded knees for all the time kneeling in gravel and dirt. His shirt should be expendable, with pockets, and long sleeves to protect against sunburn, thorns and venomous insects.
Boots should be at least somewhat waterproof, light enough to leave little trace and not weigh one down after a long day of walking around carrying heavy stuff.
Don’t forget sunscreen, a hat, and a water bottle.
Look at the whole garden, and discern the intent of the architects and the caretakers of the institution. The garden you have is the garden they want. Maybe they don’t want elaborate topiary or the meticulous precision of a Japanese garden.
What are the trees and plants in the garden? Each has a name– more than one name– and much splitting of hairs has been done among so many plants that look so similar in the shapes of their leaves, the shades of their greens, the deployment of their branches.
Which are natives, and which are invasives? What exactly are they doing in which parts of the garden?
Growing up between concrete steps that descend an immaculate green lawn, horsetail will not be tolerated, but in the bioswale along the waterfront, eradication is not an option. There, it will be watched, as we watch the fireweed, willows, and blackberries, lest any one plant become, in an unseemly way, dominant.
Dandelions proliferate in the aspen grove. One has a vision of a forest floor pocked with ugly holes after the dandelions have been uprooted, but the gardener takes care to tend to each dandelion so that the only surface disturbed is as small as the size of the root where it passes from the air into the earth.
Above one’s head, a branch from one tree has somehow tangled itself with a branch of a neighbor, so one can separate the two so there is no conflict and each tree can proceed unimpeded, the way a galaxy has its own space, though sometimes collisions are inevitable.
No one can tell that a gardener has been at work, but the trees are at peace, and dandelions and other blemishes have been removed. A cheerfully robust patch of moss springs up, no longer weighed down by dandelion leaves, and a fern is seen in its full glory, no longer crowded by faded dandelion heads.
Gravel has been raked out of the shallow dirt bowls where the grass hasn’t uniformly grown. Weeds, in their groups of three and four, have been lifted, roots and all, out of the gravel path. With a hand rake, a slight disturbance of the gravel suffices to loosen the root. Unless one knew those weeds had been there, they wouldn’t be missed. No one would know a gardener had been at work.
Unless one had seen that blackberry vine up in that Douglas fir, no one would know that a gardener had climbed into the lower tree branches and traced that vine all the way to the root, then carefully pulled it, tip first, through the tree, so as to minimize the tearing of the thorns through the fir branches.
In a green wall of snowberry, a tourist sees some lovely bright purple fireweed flowers abuzz with bumblebees, a scenario approved and left alone by a gardener who wrestles with the scorched earth policy often preached against fireweed and other invasive plants.
Late in the afternoon, a visitor notices a long steel gardening implement among a thick groundcover of kinnikinnick. “Looks like a gardener forgot his tool,” she observes. “A gardener in a garden like this must have a lot on his mind, I would think!”