The transplanted gardener: moving 3,000 miles to California opened up a whole new world for Joyce Maynard. But it also meant learning a different set of rules

Sunset, Feb, 2008 by Joyce Maynard

ONE LOOK at my mother's hands, and you would have known she was a gardener. Living as we did in New Hampshire, the only way she had to indulge her love of growing things from September into May lay in tending our houseplants and starting avocado seeds on toothpick stands in our kitchen window. In March, with the ground still white and the air frigid, my mother scraped back the snow on our flower beds in search of the first brave crocus and hyacinth spears to push through the frozen soil. But come Memorial Day, we'd make our long-anticipated annual pilgrimage to the nursery and fill the backseat of our Buick with that year's crop of annuals--flats of smiling pansies, three colors of marigolds, ageratum, petunias, and my mother's favorite, zinnias.

I loved the day we put the flowers in the earth--she with her trowel, I with mine. "Never stick a plant into dry soil," she'd remind me, filling each hole with a little puddle of water so the roots, too long confined, could spread out at last.

Many years later, when I was grown, with children and a home of my own, the image of my mother planting, cultivating, watering, and weeding stayed with me (after her death even) every time I'd start each year's garden. Maybe it was growing up with a gardener that taught me this lesson: Just because an experience won't last forever doesn't mean it's any less valuable.

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Still, I was greedy. If three months of garden glory were good, what would it be like to have my hands in the dirt all year? And so (not for the gardening alone but because of all the ways that life in a warmer climate might enrich my days), I moved with my children 11 years ago to Northern California. I hadn't even unpacked all the boxes when I made my first trip to Sloat Garden Center. And though I had purchased the Sunset Western Garden Book, knowing that wise California gardeners consulted it as their bible, I let my heart lead me in my plant selections. I still loved pansies and marigolds, but I didn't move 3,000 miles to recreate the gardens of my younger years.

I filled the back of my car with roses and a miniature orange tree, bird of paradise and passion flower. On my exploratory missions to the Bay Area, I had marveled at the gardens exploding with roses on Mill Valley's sunnier streets. Never mind that my house was on Mt. Tamalpais, its yard shaded by redwoods. I didn't know about microclimates then, any more than I understood why you don't make plans to travel north on U.S. 101 between 4 and 6 on a Friday afternoon. To a New Englander, it was all California. The land where growing anything should be possible.

The plant I most dreamed to grow that first summer was a gardenia, its blossoms known to me only from hothouse corsages. For $28 I splurged on a fine specimen, covered with fat buds, and for the next six weeks told all my friends back home about the bowl I kept next to my bed, with gardenia blossoms from my own garden floating in it. How my mother would have loved that.

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Then the last bud bloomed. No more appeared. I bought another, the $20 size this time. Consulted my garden book now, following instructions. Again, I watched the leaves yellow and the blooms drop, with none to replace them. By then my orange tree was looking anemic too.

TEN YEARS have passed since that first summer, when I thought that being a California gardener meant dancing out the door every morning to snip one exotic blossom after another, for the sheer reason that winter as I'd known it would never come. In those years, I've learned that gardening on the flats in Mill Valley is entirely different from on the mountain, and that San Rafael is another world from Tiburon or Sausalito, and Napa or Berkeley another world again.

Now when I come home with my groceries, the wonderful scent greeting me is of jasmine, not gardenia. I still keep a bowl of gardenias by my bed, when I can. But I buy them at the flower shop.

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I've learned that a California gardener must pace herself differently from one who grows plants, as my mother did, in a place like New Hampshire. I can make visits to the nursery in October, and there are plants I can put in the soil in December--when, back in my old life, all I could do was huddle by the woodstove reading seed catalogs. But I don't go for broke in May, either. It's a marathon here, not a 100-meter dash.

Time was, I waited for the lilac blossoms to burst forth, and when they did, I practically camped out under their boughs--I was that drunk on the smell of them. Once I was an all-or-nothing gardener. Now there is never quite everything, but always something. I no longer mark spring with a weekend of dawn-to-dusk planting, and I miss that annual ritual. But neither do I mark the fall, as I once did, with the sad task of clearing out the plants I tended all summer, killed off by a single night's frost. There is never a day I can't take out my trowel, make a little bowl in the soil, and watch a small plant take root.