A gardening story from 2009 – by Madhuri
Southern California has so little to recommend it, though once it was golden and clear, and fragrant with orange blossom and sage. Once you could see its white-topped mountains from nearly anywhere, and bask in the blueness of its skies. It was also of course baking hot in summer and haunted in fall by insane winds that sucked the dew from your pores and left you raddled and nervous as a savaged colt.
Nowadays, as you likely know, you have to like cars’ pooting derrieres to like it at all – because that is what you’ll see, acre on acre, still or crawling, or steadily droaring before you in the endless freeways of the sun-afflicted night of the soul. You have to like identical houses with huge appetites for brown hills. You have to like profusions of stout primates in spick and span casualwear, all ignoring each other, and you, but inescapably numerous; each chained to his automobile by the right knee as if he were the yolk for a dinosaur. You have to love these things; else why go?
But even now there are pockets, wee groves well-hidden… places not seen from roads, not trafficked by sunglassed foreigners – for nearly all are foreigners here, if only from other states.
Places like the old times, if not the ancient ones.
I stood in such a grove, plucking kumquats from a large tree-bush that bounced as I pulled free each tiny, reluctant fruit. I was in the midst of bounty – tall and vigorous around me were trees offering sunny globes of grapefruit, orange, lemon, tangerine. It was February and the fruit was ripe because it always is… and blossom was there too, white and waxy, heavenly with scent which fills the back of your throat and seems to take you up into the higher spaces of your brain’s spacious lodgings, at the same time as swooping you dizzily down into your belly for a yummy expansion into yearning. Sweet, sweet; little morsels of this experience coming to you, like tiny bonbons of smell.
There was a strip of lawn with a birdbath, pansies in a border with shaggy unpruned shrub behind and native weed between. There was a long low house, grand in the 50′s, made of wood and Spanish tile, plaster and lathe, and stuccoed in the California manner. Now, though the grass was trim the house was scarcely spruce – it had left its best days and nobody had cut its hair or shaved its chin or trimmed its toenails or washed its clothes – but still it was a happy house, set in all that verdancy and warmth; shielded from the quiet road by sky-reaching trees – cedar, avocado, eucalyptus – thick and many at the edges of the yard, and massed on the hillside behind. Roses bloomed bowl-size and smelling of their own kind of paradise, filled with maidens and silky skin (though I am told that rose-odor contains a molecule of offal, which makes it come to life like salt does cake). These rubious blooms bobbed high up against the deep darkness of all that arboreal certainty like girls whispering to men.
I filled two plastic bags with kumquats, and another with lemons and tangerines, and I felt I had done everyone a favor, for so much fruit decayed in layers on the ground beneath the trees. My hostesses urged me to take as much as I wanted. I stuffed my carry-on with the weight of all this and then I bore them home to the winter Midwest like the treasure they were.
Kumquats. When I was a child in that Southern California town, I had eaten them from trees poking out over fence-tops; of course we kids walked everywhere, and fruit trees were in so many yards. Kumquats, loquats, plum and apple, pomegranate, apricot, fig… we grew up chewing these delicious, wild-tasting things as we hiked on sidewalks hopping-hot or shaded. But kumquats… are special, even amongst the general wonderfulness of fruit, my favorite food. Each is a jewel – an inch long perhaps, half an inch thick – shaped something like a tiny football with rounded ends. You eat it skin and all; the skin’s like an orange’s but very thin, the flesh is tart. There might be two seeds in each, normal citrusy sort of seeds, small, flat, and white. The fruit itself is orange but tastes unlike that fruit; it tastes like… well, like a kumquat: sweet-rinded on the surface, sour-juiced as you bite in. It’s got this special wild flavor like nothing else, carried in pucker and honey. You can pop them like vitamins, and they will do you nothing but good – fueling you with wee bursts of sunshine and the happy sour of vitamin C.
After I left that place long ago I never saw kumquats any more on all my travels, except maybe in Japan once, or Italy – I don’t remember – but I did not buy them from that chilled market, wherever it was… for I was engrossed in foreign airs, and the kumquats stuck out sideways in my mind, as if they didn’t belong. And kumquats, it seemed, should not be paid for – it would be like buying wildflowers, or rain.
Now I had a bounty, and I put them in a big pottery bowl on the stout old table in our dining area, and ate one or two whenever I felt like it, which was often. And they made my whole body feel so good I wondered how I would do without them.
So I saved and rinsed and air-dried many seeds, laying them on paper towels, and I googled, and Aussies, at least, said they’d grow. And when spring had just begun to hint that she was imminent, like dawn, I got a paper egg-carton and filled it, cups and lid, with well-aged barnyard compost, and planted those seeds in it, one per cup, and two rows in the lid. And I put the carton on top of a mirror laid flat on a table, along with my over-wintering herbs, under a grow-light in my studio upstairs, and I kept the soil damp. And by and by sprouts appeared, one per cup and some in the lid, little brave green things, and I was glad.
And as spring went on, slow and then quick, and then relapsing; the sprouts had two leaves and got taller. But – their stems were thin… could these really become bushes or trees? Stranger things had happened, were happening every day! thought I.
And the days lengthened and the sprouts grew and got more leaves which were – hmmm….
Now I had skinny plants with soft flat triple leaves and every one of them was a –
Clover!
Featured image by Levi Meir Clancy: unsplash.com
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