When I was four years old, we built a new house on a hill west of town. A long, fishhook-shaped street climbed up a hill where the early settlers who first farmed the valley where I was raised would go on Easter Morning to celebrate sunrise service, and so naturally it was called Easter Hill. My parents bought one of the best lots on the street, we thought, with commanding views of the entire Grand Valley, eastward almost from the Utah state line along the spiny ridge of the Bookcliffs to the blue tabletop of the Grand Mesa , and with the Colorado National Monument behind us in all its red-rock mystery and drama.
My father was really a frustrated architect, I believe, and a huge fan of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings were to be found all over the cities of Wisconsin and Illinois, where he and my mother grew up. Together with a local architect named Bob Hightower, they designed a Wright-style house with long low lines, deep overhanging eaves, big sheets of glass for picture windows to capture the stupendous views, strong beams crossing the massive central axis beam that pointed due north, with a huge chimney made of local moss stone. It was a daring design of a house, pitched and seemingly cantilevered on its dramatic site. The whole thing, site and house together, cost only $15,000 in those days.
The building site was on a barren hilltop, with no vegetation to speak of, very poor soil and plenty of big, fat alluvial rocks that made digging almost impossible. I remember we visited the building site in August of 1959, when only the foundations had been poured and some of the window embrasures had been framed. It was very hot even in the late afternoon and evening when we were there, and my dad dug a hole in the ground where we roasted a chicken to eat with our fingers on that blazing hot summer evening. It was very primitive and overcooked, but to me was the most exotic and delicious thing in the world.
Once the house was built and we moved in, the landscaping was slow in coming and even slower in growing in that harsh, near-desert climate. We didn’t have much money for that, even though by then my dad had gotten a better job as a CPA again with Western Colorado’s main CPA firm, and my mom had not yet developed an interest in landscaping. And when she did, it was mostly for the basics: a bit of lawn and a few trees in our front yard, then gradually she became more ambitious with a desert garden, and more and more planting areas. But we did not have anything that flowered in our yard for some time, and she of course had her hands full with four young and pretty feral children. And of course we kids didn’t care. Who needed grass when you had the limitless hills behind our house to explore and play in?
The first flowers in my life were common, wild things. In the rough, hilly country around our house we had something in the wild garlic or wild onion family, with small pink blooms that caught my attention early on. More obvious was the cactus in the hills that, rarely but when conditions were just right, would erupt in pink, red or yellow flowers, to my great surprise and delight. Another very early favorite was a common and humble western wildflower called the mariposa lily. It always appeared in spring after heavy rains, usually between Easter and Mother’s Day. They looked very like what in Europe are called the Pasque Flower ( pulsatilla ) , because they appear at Eastertide. They came in two colors, pink and white, and I always hunted the hills for these around Mother’s Day, to have something to give my mother.
The first plant in our yard that I ever noticed flowering was honeysuckle, and as kids we loved its strong sweet perfume and learned how to patiently suck the nectar out of each small flower. Fairly early on my mom heard about someone who was digging out a bunch of lilacs and wanted to get rid of them, so she and I showed up and came back with a carload of them that we planted between some Carolina poplars ( populus canadensis ) that grew in a row to shade the west side of our house, and whose leaves cast dappled shadows in our west-facing rooms on late summer evenings. And so lilacs have always been a sentimental favorite of mine, as they are for many people, and though you might fairly object that they are not really worth growing because the proportion of bloom to bush is so very small, I would not want to have a garden that did not include at least one venerable lilac, for old times’ sake.
At school in those days, before the zeal for environmental awareness that came with publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Earth Day and so on, we had an annual drive to beautify our homes and towns that we called the “Fresh as a Daisy Campaign”, and so the common Shasta daisy has also always been a favorite too. Not a very sophisticated flower, I know, and some disdain to grow it, but to this day I love the fresh cool white it injects into any garden scheme, to lighten and intensify all the other colors; its height and the durability of its blooms are also considerable virtues, to my mind.
My mom was always a great one for finding and begging for plant stock, as her budget did not permit trips to the nursery. At one nursery — Arcieri’s on First Street, long gone now — she used to show up and ask Mr. Arcieri for any stock he was throwing out, and he often took pity on her and gave her some half-dead things, some of which we were able to nurse back to life and others not. I remember once we went as a family down to the Colorado River and dug up a bunch of Russian olive saplings. We brought them home, muddy and scratched by their large and sharp thorns, and planted two in our back yard and a row of them to the north of our house, where they were to grow into formidable monsters in later years. It was my job later on to cut them savagely back twice a year in a struggle that left me bloody and thorn-scratched, just to keep them from over-growing our famous view of the valley below. I pruned them in jeans, a jean jacket and heavy gloves, but they still fought back viciously. It is illegal to cultivate these beasts in Colorado now, because they are a very invasive, non-native species and consume far too much water, but how I love their handsome glaucous gray leaves and every summer their tiny yellow flowers in mid-June with their heady perfume that scents a hot midsummer day. It smells like a fragrant oil, cooking in a hot skillet.
A world away, there is a spectacular rosarium in the southeast corner of London’s Hyde Park that has a formal area where there is one large circular bed of roses divided into four sections, and in the center of each section is a single Russian olive, with its cool gray leaves providing the perfect foil for all the gorgeous riot of roses going on around it. I used to go for long runs in Hyde Park when in London on business and always ended my runs here, so I could walk through this amazing garden as I cooled down from my run.
Another time, my mom got a great deal from Arcieri’s on some small pfitzers, and it was my job to dig huge pits for them on the bare hillside in front of our house. This was brutal work, as the soil was so poor, with more rock than soil really. Each pit was then filled with healthy mountain topsoil and shaped into a big dish to hold enough water to nourish the plants in our harsh, near-desert conditions. In time, these beasts grew to overtake not only the view but to engulf most of the house too; they turned ugly, and a future homeowner finally had to resort to the extreme measure of burning them all down to finally get rid of them.
All this happened long after we moved away, and I can hardly bear to go see this childhood home now, leaving me with a lifelong antipathy to pfitzers and the whole juniper clan (except possibly for the creeping, blue variety which I think is tolerable if closely watched for any sign of getting above its appropriately lowly and obsequious station in life, but I would never completely let my guard down with one of this tribe on the premises). That home, with all its unusual and handsome landscaping, which actually won a prize while under my care as Grand Junction’s “Home of the Month” for its (then) striking and ingenious appearance, has been ruined and the house itself has fallen into disrepair. All its charm and distinctive style have been lost through carelessness and lack of attention. The way of the world, I guess.
But it is a sorry thing to see now and pains me terribly. It reminds me that the things of a garden that really last are the internal things, not the external things. The memories, the happiness, the creativity lovingly expressed, the learning, the patient watching of change and its immense variety and satisfying fulfillment. We change them overtly and they change us more subtly, interiorly, and more lastingly really. And on and on.
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