How I Wrote My New Book, "Garden Disruptors," 13

Her eyes roll, and her lips, half-submerged, purse. She thinks I’m saying something ridiculous. She knows me better than anyone else in the pool. 

She has ivory, baby bottom skin but you can’t see it under the paisley, full-sleeve sun shirt, and hat so floppy the rim dips. I can see only her blue eyes and pale nose. She’s gardened for 32 years, dressed to protect. She thinks I need sunblock.

But I’m busy expressing all of my current anxieties about the final stages of this new book. She’s bobbing—letting me rattle on. At some point, she’ll say something salient. If I don’t listen, she’ll say something dismissive.

I look beyond her to the flowers at the pool’s edge. A 55-gallon hot pink pot spills blue ageratum. Back in spring when she planted, I told her it was a mistake, “Ageratum makes graceless little blobs and poops out in the real heat of summer.” She didn’t skip a beat, “Not this one. We trialed it at work last year. Its big and graceful all summer.” 

Now, in August, it flows over the container, covering the hot deck with purple flossy flowers. She was right. She was right about the Bubblegum petunias that went all summer. She was right that foxtail fern is a cold hardy perennial, even in fiberglass cone planters. 

In another spot, Yucca ‘Colorguard’ thrust through prostrate rosemary, and aqua blue giant allium stars pop too. There’s a yellow coleus, ‘Jimmy’s Sunshine’, named for her late husband, my late friend, Jimmy. It’s starting to flower, which means for coleus, starting to die. Its moved into a different stage of life. A yellow swallowtail checks it out.

This entire garden is in pots. All deck, little dirt. I told her it was a mistake. “I garden all day long at work. I’m not like you. I don’t want to come home and garden all afternoon.”  She was right. Most of the hard work here happens in the spring container change out. By this time of year, when it’s too hot to garden, the only work is watering. Which Melodie does from the pool, holding a hose and squirting up from the shade of her giant hat. 

A stroke of brilliance for keeping things simple was pre-setting the color scheme. The giant pots, the art, the handpainted fridge, and the furniture fabric. It’s all ‘70s Dayglo. That means every time Melodie changes out her pots, the color scheme is already set. No discussion. Constraints like that make gardening less complicated.

 

Every single person who walks into this space feels transported to a resort in Acapulco. Melodie shares readily. Lots of people swim here. But I love our quiet after-work, late afternoon wind-down time. Melodie, besides being a professional peer, is my oldest, most intimate friend. When I said she knows me better than anyone else in the pool, that’s true no matter how big the crowd. It’s true when it’s only Mel and me in the pool. It’s possibly true when I’m swimming alone.

We’ve known each other since we were 19. She knows pretty much everyone I’ve ever known too. So when I write about people, I run things by Melodie.

I couldn’t have written this new book without her. First, because she’s one of the original garden disruptors. Second, I probably wouldn’t have come back to Columbia from Seattle if not for knowing I had one comfortable, creative, like-minded friend. She’s a main character in the book and the person who ties the work stories to personal challenges. No Melodie, no book.

In any book like this one, very few quotes are verbatim. I create quotes by stringing together memorable days, impressions, and imprinted conversations in order to convey in a person’s voice or view. If they’re alive, I ask them to read it. If not, I run it by someone else who knew them. “Would Porter have said it this way?” Or “Remember when Jimmy went on that volunteer trip with us? I know he said this to me at the bar.”  Melodie remembers.

Since we worked side by side during the two-year period, the book covers, Volunteers, coworkers, salespeople, garden club ladies, and even the monks overlapped. I remember a lot. But Melodie always paid attention to people more than I did. She’s curious. Her blue eye sparkled when a volunteer talked about their grandchildren or a gardener talked about their big birthday party. 

For people who are alive and available, I ask them to comment on their quotes. For others, I ask Melodie,

We met in college. Both creative, outspoken, rebels dressed in punk clothes. We were an obvious match given the location – an agricultural school known pejoratively as Cow College. To get into the Forestry Club, she had to chew tobacco and enter a spitting contest, which she won. I make fun of her for that, “You were Shanon Faulkner of the Redneck Lumberjacks.’

She owns that proudly. But reminds me that by letting me be her friend, way back then, she helped figure out that I liked guys and saved me from the clutches of more than one big-haired sorority girl. 

Melodie remembers. Melodie comments. She planned a transformative pool garden and plants brilliant summer flowers. She’s transformed lots of other people’s pools and gardens. There’s no other place, no moment I value more than being in this pool with her, watching for her submerged smile, waiting for her eyes to sparkle with approval. 

Jenks and Melodie with her children, who are now in their late twenties!

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