![]() The single clue that I had any future as a gardener was in the long hours I spent in the woods alone, so many that my neighborhood nickname was Nature Boy. ![]() As a child I helped my mother garden, but I recall very little of it, except for placing pine needles and Styrofoam cones around her roses at our home in Maine, insulating them for winter. I already feel like it is my home, and that the first thing I must do is plant a garden.īefore I grew roses, I had no talent for gardening that anyone knew about, including me. As she does so, the winter mud, the dead grass, the snow, these all seem like lies. I follow her into the yard and then back into the apartment while she talks through the apartment’s qualities, a short list: the rent is cheap. They appear and then are gone by the time I am fully inside the apartment, as if painted on a curtain someone has now drawn back. I don’t respond to the broker right away, because, as I enter the apartment and the sun fills the back window, I see, like an apparition, roses tossing in the air like a parade, pink, orange, red, white, all lit up by the sun. Wooden seven-foot-tall picket fences line the sides, and a chain-link fence closes off the back. Beyond that, a sliding glass door shows a small wooden deck that leads to a yard at least as large as the apartment, a mud slick striped by a stone walkway. We walk into a large studio with high ceilings, the wood floor buffed to a high gloss. “It’s small,” she says, looking away, as if the sight of such a small place offends her and possibly also me. My career as a rose gardener begins in December of 1995, when I am shown an apartment in Brooklyn by a broker who apologizes for it as soon as she opens the door.
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