An Astoria Garden

Mrs P and her husband own a laundromat in Astoria, a business that leaves her little time for her garden, and so she apologizes for the disarray on the rooftop outside her kitchen door. I have come for the gardenia plant whose pot has broken, a gift she had offered a few weeks ago, when she came to her annual visit bearing their fragrant blossoms as a summer offering. (When I had called her today, her first sentence to me, before I even had time to give her her sonogram results, had been “When are you coming for the gardenia plant?”…)

But I hardly notice the pots and dirt piled around the table, because I am too busy imaging I am on an island in Greece, which is where most of the enormous and beautiful plants in her garden are from. How she got them here is a miracle, as is the fact that her gardenias, which cover an entire wall, have made it through every winter since she started the garden, sheltered in the large rooftop shed.

Everything and anything is used here as a container, from kitty litter boxes to paint buckets to blue steel drums.  Mrs P waters the garden herself using the hose in the corner, feeding the plants with Miracle Gro and using sulfer powder occasionally to battle fungal spots on the leaves. And despite what Mrs P calls neglect, her garden, while not exactly groomed, is healthy and thriving. So much so that an intertwining of three separate vines threatens to overwhelm the satellite dish hanging from the brick wall.

She gives me large cuttings from the enormous and sturdy basil plant that she tells me is from Israel, a basil whose leaves are tougher, shinier and smaller than those of the sweet basil I have known. The smell is like no basil I have ever smelt – pungent, yet almost flower-like, but she promises me that I can use it in cooking, along with the leaves of the small Greek globe basil plant that she gives me because she has not found the time to pot it herself.

We lament that her duties downstairs prohibit us sharing a coffee, and yet she keeps lengthening our visit as she heads to make me yet another cutting to take home, going from pot to pot to be sure I have a sampling of every color of the low succulent that grows anywhere she has a bare spot in the garden. (What name is it again? And that yellow one? Why did I not write them down?…)

Finally I have to make her stop. I am so worried that I will not be able to nurture all these children she has given me, afraid that her gift to me will be wasted. After all, it is I who have not fed my apple trees once this summer, who have let the rhodedendrun overgrow into the azalea and negelected to trim the dead limbs from the dogwood. But her faith in me renews my faith in myself, and my promise to her to take care of these cuttings is also a promise to my own neglected garden.

We walk downstairs and spend a few minutes with her husband in the laundromat, lamenting the state of the economy, and comparing their fast-paced, no rest for the weary life here in America to the life in Greece, where instead of mopping the floors at 8 pm, Mr P might instead be shutting up shop to head to a Taverna, and where Mrs P would have time to take care of her garden the way she would like. But there is the mortgage on their building to pay, and the business to run, and a grandchild on the way, and they cannot understand how their fellow countrymen find time to eat out in the evenings when there is so much work to be done.

We promise to meet again, next time for a coffee, and I tell her that I will bring a pie. As we stand outside saying goodbye, a neighbor walks up to ask if Mrs P can spot clean an evening dress, a job she gladly agrees to, telling the young woman bring it by first thing in the morning. “We open at 7:30 am” she says.

Later that evening, as I place my cuttings into water and put them on the kitchen windowsill,  I find myself wishing that the American Dream had just a little more time set aside for gardening.