Ch.3, Pt.3: Katherine left the station and drove out of town…
Katherine left the station and drove out of town to Clara Lodge’s farm, sighing heavily and tapping her fingers on the top of the steering wheel. A younger audience for her show? How was she going to attract that and stay true to her vision of providing helpful and inspirational material? The board’s directive from on high, based on the findings of management consultants who pay attention to numbers only…she sighed again. It was infuriating when she was doing an excellent job. Why, Blaine had said so a few months ago when they were discussing her annual raise. Then she felt a stab of fear as she thought of the possibility of her show being cancelled, herself thrown out of work. The prick of fear turned into a wave of nausea as she thought of being unable to keep the stone house. She turned her head to the open car window and gulped air.
Up ahead was the sign she was looking for. Painted on the dark wood boards was the word “Sunrise” and a simple line drawing of a half circle and rays reaching up from a horizontal line. Close to the road was a little flower bed edged with stones. Turning into the driveway, Katherine slowly drove up the gentle slope toward a white clapboard house surrounded by a dense mass of plants and flowers inside a white picket fence. As she pulled up in front of a little gate and got out, a woman stood up from among the bushes, wearing a wide-brimmed hat on top of gray hair, her gloved hands holding bunches of greens. She smiled, dropped the green stuff into a wheelbarrow, removed the gloves and came down the straight centre path toward the car. “There’s always something to do in a garden,” she said, “even if you’re just waiting for someone. You must be Miss Glee.”
“Please call me Katherine. And you are Mrs. Lodge? Or Miss?” They shook hands.
“If I call you Katherine, I’d like you to call me Clara,” she said with a grin.
“You’re on. Thanks for agreeing to see me so quickly. I wanted a tour right away. Your garden is beautiful. No wonder the public wants to see it.”
“Thank you. They certainly seem to. So many visitors started asking to look at the gardens that it seemed better to get organized about it.”
“So you are now open to the public on the weekends –”
“And other times by appointment, if weekends won’t suit.”
“And you charge $2 per person.”
“That’s mainly to keep the numbers down to people who are sincerely interested. There can be wear and tear when hordes of people go through here. Not that there have been hordes exactly, but every weekend there seem to be more. And the garden is probably at its peak right around now.”
“Yes? July is the best time?”
“Well, of course I think that there’s something beautiful in every season, but most people like the colours and variety of midsummer flowers.”
“I can see why. It looks gorgeous. I love gardens of any kind, and this one is massive. How ever do you have time for it?”
“When you love what you do, you want to spend time doing it. Don’t you find that with your work?”
Katherine chose not to respond to that, to keep her side of the conversation professional. She steered the subject back to Clara. “What’s your favourite part of the garden?”
“I’ll show you, but it’ll take a little while to get there. Why don’t I take you around all the spots worth seeing right now?”
She’s her own person, Katherine noted. Won’t be led much. Might make for good radio. “Sure. I want the full tour.”
“We usually start the tour here, in the cottage garden. I’ve tried to keep it as traditional as possible, so that people might recognize it as something their grandparents might have kept. Or maybe they read about cottage gardens. This style of garden is small, close to a house, densely planted in a very casual style with common, hardy flowers, and often surrounded by a fence.”
“With a gate and a centre pathway leading up to the front door,” said Katherine. “It’s the kind of garden in children’s books or fairy tales.”
“Yes, it’s most people’s idea of a basic flower garden. But it can be a lot of work, and many people are put off gardening entirely because this kind seems too ambitious. Which is why this is only one example of a garden. Sunrise has a variety of garden ideas that people can copy or use as inspiration. I want to encourage more people to garden in some form, and so I try to show that there is a style that’ll work for almost everyone.”
“And what’s growing here in the cottage garden?”
“Lots of the basics.” Clara put her hand out to each flower as she named it, as if she were giving introductions. Which she is, thought Katherine, since I hardly know any of them. “Lilies and daylilies, of course, hollyhocks against the house, delphiniums, poppies, sweet pea, daisies, larkspur, lupins, calendula. And the little annuals, some pansies, nastursiums, petunias, marigolds.”
Katherine was dazzled by the number of different kinds. “Flowers that people recognize, at least by name.”
“Exactly. And they’re easy growers in mass.”
“And I suppose that’s the effect to aim for in a cottage garden, a mass of flowers, with all this colour.”
“Yes, but of course that happened almost by accident. Cottage gardens are intensively planted because the homeowners had little land, and wanted to make the most of it. So they just jammed in everything they could find, wherever there was room. They mixed flowers and herbs and vegetables together. That’s the true root of cottage gardens, but nowadays we think they should be flowers only, and give a lush, beautiful appearance.”
As they spoke, they walked through the narrow paths of the cottage garden, and Katherine brushed her hands gently against some flowers or leaves, stopping occasionally to bury her nose in petals.
“But this type of garden is impractical for a lot of people, and so I ask them to turn around and consider another possibility.” Clara led Katherine to the garden gate and looked out over the slope and the curving driveway. “When people drive up, they see the cottage garden and tend to ignore the small gardens they are passing.”
“Like that small garden surrounded by stones close to the road?”
Clara smiled. “The fish bed. It’s in the shape of a fish, actually. You see it better when the flowers die back. The ancient symbol of Christianity.”
Katherine stiffened slightly as she braced for some proselytizing. I don’t want her coming on the show and spouting her rhetoric.
“Like the sign for Sunrise,” Clara continued. “It suggests the resurrection. I’m afraid I’m a bit obvious about symbols. But it helps visitors find the place, and Christian visitors sometimes come from around the world.”
Katherine nodded vaguely and looked into the distance. Maybe I should leave now.
“But that’s not what you’re here for. The fish bed is one example of fun shapes you can make out of gardens, but there are other gardens close to the road. See those pockets of trees and shrubs in the lawn?” As Clara gestured, Katherine started to relax. “They’re gardens in their own right. Very low-maintenance, but beautiful, with shrubs coming into flower at different times. They can screen a house from the road or a neighbour, and will draw birds. This is all some people feel they can manage, but they are valuable and no less real a garden than any other kind. And if people feel inspired, they can underplant with annuals for long-lasting colour.”
As the tour got underway, there was no more talk of religion as Katherine and Clara began moving around the property. Katherine grew silent, listening and looking. To the side of the house was a cedar-rail fence surrounding a vegetable garden, not huge, but bursting with different kinds of plants, spreading, sprawling, climbing, and neatly-lined-up. Most wonderful, at the edge, was a sink in a wooden table at waist height. “An outdoor kitchen,” said Katherine, and Clara smiled.
“It’s useful for rinsing off produce before bringing it inside. But note that we catch the rinse water in a bucket, for watering. So we use that water twice.” Clara led the way to the back of the house.
Ch.3, Pt.4: Just outside a door was a small garden… » »