Green on the Outside

I woke this morning to the feeling of garden shears in my hand and the sound of heavy cardboard boxes sighing against the radiator outside our bedroom. The first few glugs of hot water spun up through ligneous piping by the century-old boiler down in the basement, and the sounds mixed with the tension I felt in the run-up to our house move this coming weekend, like something beneath the surface waiting to be unearthed. The old building groaned beneath me, the air thick with its age and various smells, and I found myself listening from the second floor for a silence that wouldn't come, the warmth of the pipes and the chill of the rain pulling me into the day.

These days, each of us holds our breath in turn. My husband, Jarren, takes inhale after inhale, shuffling tasks and t-shirts into boxes perfectly sized. Our two dogs, in sweetly slippery harmony, seem to exhale all day; and me, gauze behind my eyes and hands silently rehearsing the pruning that awaits me later today, preparing my own breath for what must be cut back. I’m unsure when this long exhale hitched inward, unsure when these plants and their sentimental roots started winding toward me.

Moving east this coming weekend we’ll lose some of the charm of our current 110-year-old apartment, but what we’ll miss in patina, we’ll gain in spaciousness, leafiness, neighbourliness, and quiet. After seeing the world change these last seven years through leaded single-panes, our new view will be clearer, slicker, more comfortable. But today, taking my first few waking breaths as I walk around the creaking apartment, I look out the old window, rippling sweetly in the morning light, and take in the sight of the garden that I’m about to destroy.

Back when we moved in, it was 2018 and our own roots needed tending. A couple of years in a rough neighbourhood had worn us down, and the shadow-like realities of a newly opened-up relationship had both me and Jarren clamouring for dry land. And so, invited by a beloved friend whose apartment down the hall we loved to visit, we moved into Beach Mansions with a deep yearning for solace, connection, and a place to make our own.

A few months later, my dignity was compromised by an energy worker who’d offered me touch that was meant to help the tension around my voice but instead touched me elsewhere while whispering over me to remain silent. I didn’t even realize anything was wrong until later that night, standing at the stove I was only just getting comfortable with, singing along to Jann Arden’s Good Mother, when a chicken leg in the frying pan spat grease on my arm and I collapsed in thunderous tears. It didn’t hurt that bad, the grease I mean, but I did have a lot to cry about.

In the weeks that followed, I walked around in a fallow state, neither withering nor flourishing, just performing okayness to myself and those around me, wishing not to feel what I was, what I felt I always had been. Our balcony, then barren and scabby with old taupe paint, seemed to listen from the outside, patient as a furled fiddlehead under frost. Or so, turning softly and listening back through time, leaded glass and the ache of bitter memory, I thought.

By the time spring came, the thorn of trauma had been grown over and I forgot why my heart was limping, why my fists remained clenched. I’ve always loved playing host though, so when my brother’s wife Hayley asked to lodge at our place while on the mainland for a bachelorette party, I happily said yes and went to the ferry terminal to pick her up for the weekend. Her soft eyes and listening heart were sure to help me feel safer, freer, more ready to grow.

We drove that day from Tsawwassen to the garden centre; an idea I’d suggested partly to entertain an out-of-town guest, partly to assuage the yen I felt to get my hands dirty. A red flowering salvia, some shrubs that didn’t take and I’ve forgotten the names of, and a hearty ground cover named Creeping Jenny came home with us that day.

“What kind of name is that?” we cackled on the drive home. “Does Auntie Jenny know?” That day in the nursery and the drive afterwards, with Hayley, I remembered joy and honest connection, what it felt like to express my heart to an un-interfering ally, family member, friend. I spoke openly about what had happened to me on that energy worker’s table and with tears and a generously open hand, Hayley heard me.

We drove and we laughed and we made it back to the West End with a couple of hours to spare before Hayley had to go out and before the sun went down. Outside on the balcony, I gardened with a March afternoon breathing cold down my neck and felt warmed from the inside. My voice, my heart, my strength had got me here. And each seedling I replanted felt like a drumbeat marking the tempo of how joy and sorrow rippled through my consciousness. Each small act of planting felt like a quiet agreement that I, too, was capable of new roots. So this, I remembered, is me. This, I thought, is joy.

Living across the street from the salty Pacific Ocean is great for humans nut hard on many horticultural plants. Thin layers of mineral build-up compromise the success of delicate flora, I learned in those first few years, by trial and mostly error. The Creeping Jenny, however, survived.

And so life unfolded as it does. We feathered our oceanside nest with candlelight and vibrant artwork, heard French horn performed in our living room, spoken word shouted off our balcony, held ritual after ritual in the smiling company of an ever-growing circle. Queer community spun itself around us. We spun too. Jarren and I grew back together. My heart eventually mended, and the slow-growing garden kept its own time, suggesting to me each season that I looked out, year after year, that I am powerful, that I am supportive of life, that I know how to take care. Of the garden, sure, but more importantly, myself.

Later on when the tides of pandemic flattened the outside world beyond recognition, our treetop garden kept us cloistered, and helped us connect with the natural world that the news said had turned against us. During COVID, we nurtured the garden as it nurtured us in return. Happy hour after happy hour, we cheered margaritas, ate guacamole, and smoked joints to pass the time and to slow our minds. If this is the world, we thought, so be it.

Later that summer, on our bicycles, we rode across the city to line up outside the garden centre, admitted two at a time into cavernous greenhouses to choose the plants we’d adopt and offer safe harbour to. By then I’d learned more about what care meant to me. And I took home two boxes of plants that have flourished in the five years since.

My fingers tremor as I write that, aware that today I’ll alter their storyline, and that our growing season in this place will be ended so that it may begin somewhere else. This garden has become an outward reflection of all that has healed inside me. And I wonder as I reach for my pruning shears, am I ready?

To my right, a rhododendron descends out of one corner of the balustrade. Originally given to me by my birth father, I brought this shrub with us when we moved in, completely unsure that it could live or that I could help it. Over the years of estrangement between my father and me, the rhodo’s hearty resilience and yearly explosion of pink flowers have felt like quiet, consistent reminders of love’s unrelenting drive to flourish, to express, to continue. Today, I cry, I’ll cut it back.

Off and through the other corner, a winter jasmine blooms beyond belief each December. Having grown my confidence with plants through the first couple of years of COVID, I eagerly adopted a tiny cutting of this miracle shrub from a project collaborator turned friend, Bruce, whose eccentric glasses, deep laugh lines, and soft turns of phrase helped me settle into the joyful process that is gay aging. His prized jasmine took to our garden immediately and has colonised the upper railing each year, sending yellow flowers out into winter air that just isn’t ready to receive them. Today I’ll cut it back.

Near the door in the tallest pot, green by design and grey with Vancouver’s foggy breath, is Suddenly. She’s a sycamore tree that self-planted here a few years back and has grown taller than both me and Jarren, having surprised us at first and graced us with her slender height, her choosing us marked a shift in how both of us related to our maturing garden and ourselves in it. Inspired by Little Shop of Horrors, we named her Suddenly Sycamore, and today, later, as the sun reaches around its October corner, I’ll cut her back too.

Nestled against the furthest corner, a ceramic bowl catches my eye. It rained last night and inside the bowl, black sunflower seeds backfloat up to feed the songbirds who still visit this late into autumn. After one of my favourite aunts died a few years ago, dear Aunt Sandy, I began using this vessel left behind by her caring heart as both a bird feeder and as a tangible devotion to the living world around me. The songs of black-capped chickadees and red-hooded house finches have made a home here too because of this bowl and its promised nourishment, and today, later, I’ll clean it out.

It can feel like too much for me, letting go of this place that has been one of the truest homes in my life. Seven years is the longest time I’ve ever lived anywhere. And echoes of placelessness, long forgotten, have haunted me this week as we’ve prepared for the upcoming move. Cutting back the garden sounds trivial, I’m sure, but when I push my finger a little deeper through the crust of dried and crumbling soil, I appreciate that I’ll be releasing more than just a few roots when I use my garden shears today. I’ll be clipping back a growing reflection of the love I’ve cultivated for myself, my tender parts, and my big, bold voice.

Overwhelmed by grief, I step outside onto the downstairs sidewalk. My secondhand leather jacket is warm against the cold morning wind, a scarf I just wound around myself flips in the breeze and brings my eyes skyward. I look up at our balcony with a gaze that is half trepidation, half melancholic nostalgia. Just as tears melt what I’m seeing into softer shapes, a long taken-for-granted friend waves down.

Now seven years old and heartily established around the entire balcony, Creeping Jenny is a wonder to behold, nearly six feet long now, almost the same height as me. This first garden purchase is now the star of the show from down here and from across the street at the park, curtains of yellow-green foliage trailing between banisters to flirt with the sidewalk below. Each leaf a lucky loonie, suggesting romance and an alluring mystery to those passing by, myself now included.

Few moments in my life feel simple. I’ve learned and embraced my gifts enough to have let go of clean cut anything. But in this moment, on the sidewalk below my beloved balcony, I steady my breath, remembering the way I woke this morning with the feeling of shears in my hand. I understand with perfect clarity how life holds us living beings together, how gardening is actually just being with other beings with enough presence and devotion that each of us thrives. How it’s me that has been growing, these last seven years, and the plants that tended my roots, the birds that fed me. That’s something that can’t–not today, not ever—be cut back. That’s something that I know, I exhale, I pray, will grow forever.