ARTWRK1
Answering life's big questions while directing garden tour traffic.
Two weekends ago I worked front of house at this garden tour my friends were hosting — Steven King (not the Steven King) and Peter Baclava (not his real last name, but what I remember it being). A call for volunteers had gone out months before in the local Democrats newsletter and being that I love Steven and Peter and love working events, I signed up for a two-hour slot.
To my surprise when I showed up at noon on the second Saturday in May, no one else had volunteered. No matter, I was ready 2 wrk.
Their house is on the way into town (Hudson) and the garden is very unsuspecting from the road. You can’t even see it behind the fence. I would later learn that the first thing any person serious about their garden does is build a fence.
My job was to direct people to park on their property’s strips of grass and definitely not on their neighbor’s grass who I gathered did not share Steven and Peter’s love of gardening or political preferences.
This particular Saturday was on the tail end of a week full of rain. Dressing for the task at hand, I wore my Bogs, my old Zara floral quilt coat and my Nana’s tulip pin. I was in my element with my eclectic look as everyone attending also showed up in their best specifically garden-adjacent uniform finished off with a strand of pearls and perhaps the subtlest whiff of patchouli.
While the conditions were not my most desirable (hot one second, cold the next, looming threat of migraine rain, giving people directions and them blatantly doing the exact opposite), I quickly realized I love this type of job. I love an event, I love a GARDEN event, I love a tour — a home tour, a bike tour — preferably with bubbles. I like “helping out.” I like having very short but friendly interactions with people. This is why I love being a cashier.
There’s just something about offering simple yet essential direction that helps a person navigate their day followed by likely never seeing them again in your entire life that just checks all the boxes for me.
Anyway, as I directed traffic I met people from all of New York’s surrounding states. They were all over the age of 60 which I thought was curious considering this seems like the exact event I would like to attend on a Saturday afternoon. One guy told me he hailed from Park Slope where he had been tending his backyard garden for 54 years.
After I logged 8,339 steps my shift was over and I got to tour the garden myself.
Walking around I couldn’t help but notice how effortlessly manicured it all was. One variety blending into the next, not a spider mite in arm’s reach. Even the soggy lawn was conveniently never intersecting with the natural walking path. My homeowners in the group will empathize the shift that happens touring a garden once you have your own garden (or one might say “yard”). How do they do it? Do they use chemicals? Is there mulch? Landscaping fabric? How mature is this tree and at what stage was it planted here? Is it native?
Did they clean all the spider webs out of this shed or do spiders simply not make webs here? What plumber put in this water source? How long did it take that ivy to grow? Are those Sharpies dried up? Where do they keep the weed wacker?
After ruminating on these and other questions for two weeks I’ve come to the conclusion that gardens like this don’t happen on their own. They are the handywork of one if not multiple teams in addition to the (usually retired) homeowner(s). This makes me feel 5% better about the state of my “garden” which is more of a “yard” currently.
Once I made the loop I decided to pop over to Copake where my friend Dave was manning the velvet rope of the second garden tour, that of Ms. Margaret Roach. I had read her book And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road. It’s all about how she quit the rat race of working for Martha Stewart just before publishing came crashing down and bought a place upstate (alone) which she lovingly tended to not really knowing anything about gardening, country lyfe, or all the other curiosities that come with moving to a new landscape. Now she has more books, a NYTimes byline, a blog, a podcast and who knows probably a Substack.
Margaret wasn’t as receptive to my gushing as I had envisioned her being, probably the fame. Regardless, the grounds were gorge. It was fun to remember the cadence of the book which took place at the beginning of her adventure and then see it now, a very developed, museumlike diorama of biodiversity.
I don’t really have any witty conclusion to wrap up this blog other than to say nature is perfect, humans are not, gardens are forever, it takes a village, time is a circle, no gods no masters, and I hope we get as much rain as the ground needs.
That last one from my therapist.
“Followed by likely never seeing them again” made me LOL. I do also love a volunteer day but for me it’s because you are given a very simple direct task and all you gotta do is nail that.