Mine was a childhood exploring the woods, believing that fairies lived in the teacup flowers of the lily of valley. My memories were a web of discovering green and growing wonders, of smelling earth, the taste of wild raspberries, the sting of nettles. I was always good at growing things.
Unbidden, I cleaned out my mother’s garden, hauling wheelbarrows of debris up the hill to the compost heap. My scrawny child-arms sore with the work of it. But then the soil would be uncovered, cool and wet, and I delighted in the fresh green buds emerging with the first light of spring. They were something to take care of, to nurture, to protect from careless feet or nosy pests. And if you cared for them well enough, they would reward you with beauty or food, or a bit of both.
At some point along the way, I began to see the garden as an extension of myself. When I met my future husband, we decided to grow plants in pots along our apartment balcony in Boston. Every tomato we harvested that year was a triumph. We had grown them ourselves, those perfect red fruits, from tiny dead-looking seeds and that was something to celebrate. We learned to cook together with that balcony garden. We learned to grow. Every place we lived over the coming years, we found some way to plant a garden. It only felt like home when there was a mess of plants twining towards the heavens.
Eventually we found our way here, with seven untouched acres, a barn that didn’t appear to be in danger of collapse, and a drafty but solid old house. The place had, as our realtor said, good bones. The price tag we paid was mostly for the bones, the rest would be earned with sweat equity.
We planted a garden, our biggest one yet. By now, we had the hang of it. By now, we were towing along two boys who played in the dirt alongside us as we toiled over tilling and composting and stringing up trellises. We did it together, side by side. It had become a part of us.
We were invigorated by the untouched land. We wanted to become more. We acquired a small flock of hens and planted lilies of the valley so our boys could search for fairies like I did when I was young. We began to call ourselves farmers, tenuously at first, trying it out on the very tips of our tongues. We grew food, we were farmers.
But that year, the first year we called ourselves farmers in our new home with the good bones, the garden failed to thrive. Maybe the soil lacked nutrients, maybe there was too much clay. Perhaps we were too distracted with everything around us to listen to the plants. After all, we didn’t really know what we were doing. Our dog went lame, our ash trees died. A fox killed half our flock, fourteen hens, in one heartsick day. Then, of course, there was the issue of the tree.
Standing less than a hundred feet from our garden was a magnificent walnut, a tall and graceful sentinel watching over our little farm. Its trunk was straight and thick, the limbs growing at nearly perfect geometric angles. The magic of nature’s architecture. But it wasn’t long before I discovered that walnuts harbor an insidious secret: they seep poison. Walnuts produce juglone, a chemical, in their leaves, nuts, and roots that is toxic to many other plants. The poison accumulates over time, concentrating its toxicity within the drip line of the canopy and carrying it as far as the leaves fall.
Was it poisoning the garden? Our plants were outside the canopy, fully in the sun. It had seemed to be the perfect spot for a garden; close enough to the house that I could pick my way out there in bare feet every morning, coffee in hand, to watch the bees on the borage. I needed that garden where it was, to be a sanctuary as we worked on reviving the house, which still didn’t feel like home, and fretted over how much everything cost. How could it ever get done with so little time and so little money in our bank account? We were hoping that year to have another baby.
The next spring, I built raised beds to elevate our plants above the poisoned soil. I remember doing it alone, standing the planks on end. My husband was busy at work or maybe fixing something, I don’t know. We were drifting. The tree had a bumper crop that year. Big green tennis ball nuts, a spicy sweet scent laced with venom, like wasp spray. My tomato plants perched in their raised beds showed promise but yellowed and wilted before ever producing fruit. Angrily, I gathered the nuts in a bin and threw them out with the trash week after week. That winter, our roof began leaking in earnest, dripping on our heads in the bathroom until the ceiling collapsed. Our insurance company cancelled our policy. We went to sleep every night full of worries, together but apart, drowning in quiet desperation. Another baby seemed like a dandelion wish blown off by the wind. We were floundering.
There are many ways a marriage can fall apart, countless transgressions and sins each individual can make. A marriage, after all, is two souls agreeing to live together, to love together, to grow together. When plants influence each other’s growth, when they talk to one another, they call it allelopathy. It is a complex, often misunderstood phenomenon usually associated with negative consequences. Sometimes, the slow seep of an unseen poison works its way through the roots, and you are never quite sure if it’s the toxin itself or the lack of care that causes the withering of a once-living thing.
But allelopathy can also act in curious ways. In some cases, plants send messages through the wind to one another, warning of coming danger, signaling that something isn’t right. Plants observed in nature have been found to change their chemistry in reaction to these signals. They pivot their growth to adapt to a changing environment. And in so doing, survive.
I don’t understand the language of plants, but I believe they can teach us something. The following spring, I carefully cleared every remnant of walnut debris from the garden. My husband hauled in compost. Together, we potted our plants in big fabric pots that we placed on top of the raised beds. Every week, we scrupulously picked out leaves and stray nuts that threatened the garden. I don’t remember exactly when, but my husband was there again, beside me. And that year, we harvested all of it. Finally, we were farmers.
Farmers are a tenacious lot, eternal optimists. Every year, they assert, will be better than the last. It must be better. It can only be better because it will be different. And they are building on knowledge learned from failure; they will work harder and not make the same mistakes. They will tend to their plants with care, making sense of the signals they observed last season when they floundered and almost gave up. They will pay closer attention to the wind. They will buffer the transgressors that threaten their harvest. They will listen.
Unspoken, we agreed to never cut down the walnut tree. It was part of the farm, staking its claim long before we were there. And besides that, it was beautiful, and it helped us grow. It gave us hope and made us whole once more.
