A Dream of a Garden part one

Nearly ten years after moving to a large city, to live with my love, and explore my long held wish to live in said city… I’d had enough! Another dream that’d been percolating, farther back in time, stepped forward with a plaintive call: I must have a garden! Recovering from surgery from a serious illness, I walked about the borough with my man, to gain strength and explore outlying neighborhoods. Was there a vacant lot, a community garden perhaps? Somewhere, surely there was “a bit of earth” I could claim.

Meanwhile I satisfied my plant longings by studying herbal medicine & aromatherapy, by making weekend outings to botanical gardens, and crushing on lower Manhattan’s funky community garden lots. A few of the private houses in my area had small bits of gardens: roses, swaths of lilies of the valley or other bulbs. One even had a teeny , long narrow vegetable plot, complete with a fig tree and a few chickens! But one of my favorite gardens was known as the “ Secret Garden”, so named for Francis Hodgson Burnett’s eponymous book, for it had a fountain sculpted with statues of Mary and Dickon. This garden within the Conservatory Garden in the Northern end of Central Park was the object of a planned Sunday outing one particular weekend.

That night before I dreamt a dream of a Secret Garden and woke feeling it was a good omen for our lazy Sunday. Lazy it was, for we’d overslept far too long to have the relaxed outing intended. Instead , the man proposed to me another romantic activity: trek to a Home Depot in an unknown, rather far away neighborhood. Well, okay…another adventure.. yeah, sure. We consulted a map, a route suggested, one which I quickly saw would take us a bit on a meandering, indirect path. Okay, what the heck.

And then, at a certain moment, “Let’s turn right here, down this street”, said he. Again, I went along with it (unusual for me). Pointing at a long, tall expanse of black iron fence across the road, he said, “Look!”. We crossed and peered into the murk of afternoon shadows cast by high rise, prewar apartment buildings flanking each end of a seeming wild, empty lot. But rosebushes lined the front, and out of the thicket behind came a man. Face up to the fence he said, “Hi! Do you want to garden here? Come in and look!”

In stunned amazement , I/we entered..discussed his offer, and I left with a key and a meet up appointment to choose my garden space. There was only one other gardener. Walking away on clouds of excitement I recalled my dream the night before.

(Part one ends here. I just want to point out that the photograph shown is from my present garden, though this was from 11 years ago..things have changed a bit. But, this photo is iconic, visually depicting the kind of fairytale magic that was present in my first , second , and now third garden.)