Four Tenths of an Acre: Reflections on a Gardening Life - Couverture rigide

One

ARRIVAL

This surprising wild joy was with me all yesterday, and it continues—a little less intense—today. . . . The high summer beauty— fields of wildflowers, the river, the dramatic hills and fields. Even the sky— sharp-edged clouds now like western ones.

August 21, 1984 It was on the last day of March when I drove up an icy hill, turned onto the main street of a Connecticut village, and parked in front of a clapboard house. I got out of the car and gave my new home a searching look. Its narrow facade had four tall windows and a doorway sheltered by a little roof, while all the ells, entrances, porches, and balconies, glittering under a layer of fresh snow, hinted at a long and enigmatic past. The day before, at my rented house on eastern Long Island, a blustery rainstorm had postponed moving day. Here, a hundred miles north of the coast, the storm had left a surface of light over the land.

At least a foot of snow covered the short walkway from the sidewalk to the nearest doorway. I had not thought to bring a shovel and, in fact, did not even own one. Crossing Main Street, I walked up a slope toward a hardware store, crunching through the brittle white crust covering delicate crystals that coated the village green. I trudged up the steps of the old store and went inside. The unpainted wooden floor creaked loudly as I walked over to a stack of bright red snow shovels. An elderly man at the cash register smiled sympatheti- cally; it had been a long winter.

Leaving the store with the shovel, I could see from my elevated vantage point on Upper Main Street many of the old colonial houses lining the green, most of them typically painted white with black shutters. My little house below looked nicely nestled in. It was so close to the sidewalk that during future snowstorms I was certain I could get mail, groceries, newspapers, books, money, or whatever else I needed on foot. By settling on a street in this small town called Sharon, I felt, above all, a sense of relief. I had been there only two or three times before, but it felt familiar, like home, because I had grown up in New England.

The red aluminum shovel had a flat, light blade, and as I shoveled the walk, the melting snow slid off easily. When I finished and went inside, sunlight was pouring through large glass panes into the empty rooms. As I walked from room to room, the moving van arrived. In came the couch with the pale cotton upholstery that my former husband and I had bought at Bloomingdale’s for our Manhattan apartment a decade earlier. Then the movers carried in the replica of an eighteenth-century corner cupboard, which my father had finished making the year I was born, and put it in the dining room. This mute mahogany personage—the height of a tall man—had always been a paternal presence that stood watch over me in childhood, even though more often than not it reminded me of my father’s absence. It was because of his recent death, as well as my divorce, that I was able to make a down payment on this property. It would be good alchemy, I thought, to try to turn sadness and deep disappointment into something different in this new place.

Chests, chairs, and other family furniture appeared, the pieces I felt I had no right to own so soon. They were mine because of earlier upheaval in the family—my mother’s divorce from my father, and then his divorce from his next wife, who had unexpectedly named me the beneficiary in her will. When I was in college she had died suddenly, so as a very young woman I became the uneasy owner of the old Vermont house where she and my father had once lived. Before that house was sold, I had saved some of its chests and chairs and even an old iron frying pan that were now with me in Connecticut. After the movers finally closed up their truck and drove away, I had a pleasant sensation of possession. As I began to unpack books and dishes and hang clothes in closets, I realized that it was now up to me to pull together fragments of broken lives into something new, and whole, and entirely my own. I had recently passed the age of forty, and I was aware of time passing.

For months I had been in a fever to find a house. It was an instinct to compensate for the collapse of my previous life, even though it was a life I no longer wanted. Those months had felt ripe with potential but a little frightening, too. Still, I might have remained in limbo a little longer except that I had a book to write. I had always liked inland hills, so one autumn day I had driven around Litchfield County in northwestern Connecticut with notebook and pen beside me. That day I drove right through Sharon to the next town of Salisbury, where I parked in front of a real estate office. I met with a realtor about my age and told her what I wanted: a village house with a wonderful room for writing and an apartment to rent out between books. When I returned a few weeks later to look at listings, it began to snow heavily, and the realtor invited me to stay overnight at her house on Sharon Mountain instead of trying to drive back to New York. After the power went out, the night was very dark and cold, and I was glad when the dawn broke clear. I drove down the mountainside amid unfolding views of snowy fields bounded by dark rows of trees and stone walls, more certain than ever that I wanted a house in a village.

It was on that wintry day when I first saw my house. The real estate agent told me about the soundness of the structure and pointed out the attractive architectural details, but what was most alluring to me was the way daylight flooded the old rooms. I also liked the little fireplace, the bedroom with balconies, the bright room I had chosen for writing, the pleasing arrangement of the rooms. Wildly excited, I made a low offer that was turned down and immediately made another, a little higher. As the negotiations dragged on, I was so nervous that I would lie motionless on my bed in the middle of the day, praying that the house would really become mine. Finally, when my bid was accepted a few days later, I was so elated that I began scribbling down a rush of decorating ideas.

The truth is that finding a house was much more important than having a garden, at least at first. I was, in fact, staking everything on the possession of this place, a house of my own, an ordinary collection of walls, doorways, and windows, which I hoped I would never have to leave or ever want to leave, either. Right after the movers drove away, I walked to the back of the house and looked out a window at the yard, which I had never seen without a camouflage of snow. All I could see was a length of cleared land with trees and buildings around it, an empty expanse of shining snow sloping slightly away to the west. It looked large to me, and while I worried if I would be able to take care of it, I also liked the idea of having a garden. I had already done a rough drawing of flower beds, patios, paths, and trees; it was an ambitious plan based on very little experience or knowledge. That March day there were only leafless bushes and trees in the backyard, just sharp sticks silhouetted against the starkness; without leaves on their branches, I could not identify any of them. I noticed that the top branches of a tree near the house almost touched the high roof, and that shrubs and saplings grew haphazardly in no evident pattern.

A neighbor’s white picket fence stuck out of the snow on one side of the yard, and on the other side stood my barn, where snow was dripping off the roof and making bright puddles below. As I looked toward the far end of the property, I became more worried. When I had seen the surveyor’s map of my less than half acre a few weeks earlier, I was shocked at how very long and narrow a rectangle it actually was; on paper, as if seen from above, it looked to me like a fairway on a golf course, and I wondered how I could turn such an awful shape into a graceful garden. I also stared with despair at a chain-link fence glinting harshly in the sunlight and severing the backyard; the realtor had told me that a previous owner of the house had dogs. Beyond the barn and barely visible from the window, a tangle of bare branches towered over one long side of the land.

Within a week the air got warmer, and the dissolving snow revealed a square concrete platform behind the house that looked like the foundation of a former kennel. Farther back the melting snow had left a long, jagged line down the middle of the yard, as if it were in the throes of a powerful tide; on the side saturated by sun, the ground was greenish brown, and in the partial shade, it stayed grayish white. As the whiteness retreated during the next few days, it left behind only soggy leaves and struggling sod, all littered with sticks and broken branches. It looked like no one had ever gardened there before, but I was determined to imagine my unprepossessing property as a garden. I knew enough about growing to watch where shadows fell and where sunlight lingered, as the sun moved from the front to the back of the yard during the day.

“The rituals of gardening give a rhythm, even rapture, to everyday life that is apart from the routines of writing and the flows of relationships. Tending my garden became the same as taking care of myself.”

When Laurie Lisle fled the city, she was in such a fever to buy a particular old clapboard house on the green of a historic New England village that she didn’t notice the awkward shape of the backyard. “When I had seen the surveyor’s map of my less than half acre,” she writes, “I was shocked at how very long and narrow a rectangle it actually was; on paper, as if seen from above, it looked to me like a fairway on a golf course, and I wondered how I could turn such an awful shape into a graceful garden.”

Thus begins this modern pastoral, in which Lisle tells us how she heaved compost, dug post holes, planted, and replanted–and how she also found herself digging into her feelings about love and loss, work and play, roots and rootlessness, solitude and sociability. Twenty years later, in these intimate essays that have sprung up around themes such as “Weather,” “Color,” “Woods,” and “Shadows,” Lisle explores the fascinating connections among one’s interior landscape, village life, and the natural world.

In “Roots,” Lisle writes about the generations of female gardeners in her family and the question of whether she has exiled herself into “a floral cage.” In “Sharon,” she traces the grand gardening history of her pre-Revolution town and notes the tensions between natives and newcomers. “Words” contrasts “the easy pleasure of gardening” with “the more elusive satisfaction of writing,” and goes on to examine the role of the garden in the lives of writers such as Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton. “Woods” tells of the “dramatic demarcation point between nature acted upon and nature left alone.” In “Outside,” Lisle battles back the deer and contemplates the mature garden that has grown up around her. Ultimately, Four Tenths of an Acre is a testament to one woman’s glorious engagement with place.