It all began when I caught my husband pruning the lilac bush with an electric saw. I protested, barely audible over the machine’s buzz, “What?” he shouted “I’m not cutting off any of the flowers!” upon which he reverted to his testosterone trance.  Even a non-gardener such as me knows that you don’t prune a lilac bush with an electric saw, and furthermore, not when it is in bloom.

That Sunday, my husband wielded his sword against our landscape in its entirety while the rage brewed within me.  I decided to declared war on the evil electric current and its carrier, castrating the helpless greenery.  I pulled the plug on the thick orange extension cord that had wound its way like an insidious snake through our front door, his party temporarily shut down.  When I walked away, he plugged himself back in, resuming his electrified post. This went on for a bit, until all of a sudden, to my good fortune, he sawed right through the cord, his day’s work irreparably thwarted.

He says I yell too much - get too excitable when we work together.  Yet when it comes to landscaping, the day isn’t complete until he’s touched on everything I have ever learned shouldn’t be done. Not that I am an expert.  I take stray advice and never apply it. I learned from my long lost interior designer, Donna, that it is far better to hand prune most shrubs, unless you are carving English pillars out of boxwoods.  Another time Al the arborist commented as he diagnosed our grounds, “Oh, look, someone here must have cut the top of this tree while it was young.  See here where the trunk splits too early? It will never know which way to grow.”  That seemed sad to me.  One act of aggressive folly and the tree will spend its life searching in futility for a trunk that doesn’t exist.

It was a bittersweet moment the spring morning I discovered the lilacs flowering in their splendor.  Though their numbers were sparse and they failed to sport any scent, I was grateful for this second year of blooms on the three year old bushes in front of our house.  When we moved into the old French Normandy Tudor, gardeners came to marvel at the sprawling grounds we had inherited when we bought.  In passing, they would comment on the young plants, so out of place among their brethren. “Maybe they just need a few years to get adapted - you know, they don’t always bloom the first few years.”

Is that true?  I have no idea.  But I have taken what I have been given.  The house, the land and the unofficial advice.  All it takes is a pass through the landscape to feel the pull of the neglected - like a child tugging your skirt when you’re in the middle of a conversation.  Duly ignored, the garden proceeds in directions I fail to designate; under the arch of the trees the grass burns gold, a washed out backdrop for the expanse of tangled vegetation that runs rampant - wispy and frail, lovely and ugly.

It is not that I do not try.  At first I apply myself halfheartedly.  Yet once my hands start moving, trepidation crescendos to gusto.  I choose to tackle the bed in between the gated pool and our brick home, a central clearing carved amid oak trees and pachysandra.  Meant to be one of the showpieces of the estate it is nothing more than weeds and dirt threaded by an epidemic of Lilies, life forms that exist despite a lack of human guardianship.  I marvel that the fifty or so blooms have survived solely by virtue of the mechanics of nature, the bees and the sun, the worms and the rain, the birds and the wind.  The thin palm-like leaves, browning at the tips, spread like stiff wings framing bloom upon bloom – orange and then orange again. I stand and stare, sensing them just a little too confident.  I vacillate whether or not to pull, for a true gardener would split the Lilies to contain them.  But beggars can’t be choosers, so I shift my focus.

I set out to set out.  And finally I begin.

I weed, I touch. I make piles, I dig.  I drive to the neighborhood garden center, take out my credit card and sign the slip with the grubby pen.  I see the same man misting his flowers time after time. I chat with the woman with graying hair at the register who encourages me to bring in a photo of the garden I am planting when it’s complete.  I smile and imagine the rows of pots sitting on the lawn drying out with each passing day.  Yet I keep buying and dreaming, driving around the lot and letting the man stuff my new plants in my trunk in the sweltering heat.  I watch the inventory of lavender and elephant ears, the plants I know by name and those familiar by sight.  They greet me and wave, the stock dwindles, some outgrow their pots, others dry out in the hot summer sun.  “Buy me bring me home”, they call out.  I cannot save all of you.  July turns to the end of August and some remain, like wallflowers at a dance.  Not that I have ever been to a dance.  I think I have a fear of being passed over.

When I finally clear the land and lay the root balls in the soil, I insist upon spoiling the plants with water from my hand, like a mother choosing  breast over bottle. Yet then it is only a matter of weeks before I leave them ultimately to wither helpless with no one to tend to them.

In my moments of abstention when I am simply “Too Busy”, my husband takes it upon himself to water the bed and I do not stop him.  He offers the efficient way.  “How can you criticize,” are the unsaid words between us, “when you are letting your plants starve?”  He sticks the sprinkler somewhere in the middle and lets it go.  I see it through the stained glass grid of the kitchen window as I load the dishwasher - the up and down back and forth kind that you ran through as a child.  I know the flowers are barely getting enough, but I turn my back on them and resume my indoor life.  Or I parade to the pool with snacks and drinks in hand, and my heart breaks for the thirsty creatures I pass.

I have noticed with me that the longer the neglect, the stronger the barrier.  So today I inject the vein of procrastination and write rather than visit them, imagining the newly anointed members in my club of abandoned undertakings at best shriveled, but more likely, just plain dead.  It is fall now. The acorns crunch beneath my feet.   I know I need to go out there.  But it is a task too great.  It is laden with psychic baggage, like the extra pounds I have to lose.

So I go, if at least just to finish this essay.  I stand in the rain at dusk and my feet step from lawn to dirt, the threshold of the gardener. I confront the reality of my wrongdoing and ask their forgiveness.  I want to cry.  I want to hide.  I want them to come back. But then I open my eyes.  I walk through the bed, greeting each plant in a non greeting sort of way, the way in the Wild West you sort of acknowledge each other from a distance, tip your hat.  Occasionally, I lean in.  What was that plant called?  FOXGLOVE, says the tag, still stuck exactly where I left it, through wind and rain.  SALVIA, LAVENDER, I cannot make out the others.  I need to get glasses, I remind myself.  I walk on, gingerly, through the territory of old friends.    Some have taken root; some are brittle and brown where their buds have failed to flower.  They meet me with the innocence of creatures seeking companionship. I do not want to leave, but it is raining and night is falling. I promise to return, if at least to tuck them in for winter.   I will pluck and trim, say my goodbyes and hope for better from myself next time around.

Tonight at my desk, I scribble figures in pen and ink for our taxes while my mind pulls on the iron ring that stands in for a doorknob and journeys through the grand medieval door to the garden.   I am reminded of the story The Little Prince.  The tale tells of a single flower and a young boy who are the sole inhabitants of a planet.  The Little Prince leaves his planet to escape the flower whose care has become too demanding.  He goes here and there searching the cosmos – curious at what people do and why they do it.  In the meantime we laugh at the folly of the universe.  But then he comes to a point of crisis, when on earth he starts to wither, like the flower he left behind. He is caught in a quandary of empathy, homesickness and immense pain.

When I first read The Little Prince, I was going through a midlife crisis of sorts, worse than most, possibly better than others; I had lost my core, even though my life seemed fine on the outside.  I remember walking home with a bunch of couples from a Friday evening dinner at friends.  Tipsy on wine and Limoncello, I relayed my epiphany to my girlfriend Dana.  One’s truest moments lay in the connection between letting something matter to you and the act of caring for it.

It has been six or some odd years since that dense night we ruled the neighborhood with our friendship and philosophy.  Elusive yet familiar, those gleaned realizations awaken and travel hazily across the tightrope of my consciousness.  Through my window the chill of autumn twilight caresses a lone white bud.  Why this hurts I will never quite understand.