Jolly Gardens

The community garden was named ‘Jolly Gardens’ for a long-passed fire chief named John Pfluger I am told. When asked if ‘Jolly’ was some kind of nickname or a particular expression of his, none of us knew. The sign at the garden’s entrance doesn’t say.

“Now those are the gooseberry?” Mrs. Shannon asked something she already knew.

“Yes,” I’d said, squinting up into the sun and handing one over. “A little like the tomatillo you liked.”

“A good fall one?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Nice for jams.”

She was repeating what I’d told her a week before, so I’d just nodded.

Also not on the sign is the size of the garden. The township website claims it is a quarter acre in size, which is mostly true. It is actually 11,000 square feet, or 0.2526 acres. And while this difference is shatteringly inconsequential in the universal sense, it once created a not-inconsequential fuss when Jennifer Crosby realized her plot was three full feet narrower than Liz DeGrazzo’s.

This was about four years ago when a woman named Audrey-something (who grew unforgettable Lemon Verbena) brought out an actual drone and used some kind of program she had at work to map out and show the entire space, all gridded down to the half inch mark. These charts were studied for weeks and some parcels were adjusted accordingly. (Mine was not.) The discovered extra was added to the communal compost area. Everyone agreed this was best.

With the compost area, paths, two sheds, and a small gathering area in the front, there is enough remaining space for 30 plots: 250 x 250 each when Audrey-something was finished and Liz DeGrazzo had quit coming out.

Driving down toward the gardens was always another reason to visit. The bluish kale and dusty matte greens of thyme and oregano; scarlet tomatoes, peppers; rusty chard stems; bone jasmine, the graying wood of raised beds; rows of gold-plated sunflowers and zucchini blossoms; calendula… sometimes all caught in a wind together, lolling unevenly like an ocean… and the deep red-purple of my gooseberries, the sunlight making their translucent skins almost like garnet jewels in your hand.

“Sarah is building one of those new beds. Huggle…” Mrs. Shannon reported behind me as I spaded quietly.

“Hügelkultur,” I said. (Mound-style beds built on buried logs and branches.) Very trendy these days; Sarah would.

On a tour to Italy, I learned the charming term umarell – a word for an older man who spends his retired time standing around construction sites, always with his hands clasped behind his back, watching others work. With some help from the internet, I’d resolved that Mrs. Shannon was a certifiable umarelle – the female variety.

Her plot was usually underwatered zucchini, some mint and six rows of cherry tomatoes. Also, two garden gnome – or, gnomes? – and four suncatchers. Her plot was also usually ignored as she walked each weekend about umarelling the rest of us.

No real surprise, those who came out to garden, each plot was as different as the next. To my immediate left, another Garden 101: Tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, hot peppers. (Jenna Codener has spent five years among us and never yet stepped outside this particular literal box.) To my right, the local witch. (Not really; a very sweet girl named Clare.): chamomile, peppermint, lemon balm, sage, echinacea.

Directly across from my plot was Molly Klus, who did not mess around. Her garden changed with the seasons and her moods. When this all happened, she'd tended to several pumpkins, butternut squash, kale, and brussels sprouts. She’d easily talked me into a dozen sweet potatoes. I also then grew eggplant, the aforementioned gooseberry, garlic, but had recently reseeded half my plot in vetch, “resting" much of my soil for spring.

Further afield (thank goodness): the Cook Family’s bee haven: coneflowers, the sunflowers, lavender, milkweed, bee balm… And so on. Trying now to recall the few that truly stand out. This young couple named Chris and Tracy had one of the plots. They also had a dog of some sort but can’t picture it now and the twosome clearly broke up soon after (not related to the gardening or dog, one assumes, but we still made our jokes after). The young man showed up again twice like a good little soldier but the plot was now crabgrass and morning glory; and one random squash which we all named “Tracy.” (I hope their dog was better cared for.)

Here is what happened. Mrs. Shannon’s son came to visit her for a long weekend and she’d brought him out. It was, she said, to show him her garden but was, of course, to show us her son. Any expectation we had that he’d prove as tedious as her cherry tomatoes was unfounded. He – a lawyer of some sort now in Atlanta? – proved surprisingly charming and easy going. In no short order, half a dozen of us had gathered in a semicircle around him as he smartly asked more questions than gave answers.

It was all going so well when he looked over and said, “Now whose garden is this? Just… incredible.”

This was Olliges’ plot. Irene Olliges. She was, as I understand it, from Florida but spoke of being part Greek and part Croatian and part… Corsican? Something about Îles d’Hyères island. All of these various ever-shifting “parts” came from great grandparents long buried in the dirt from what we could tell. A large woman with larger hair who somehow still moved like a dandelion clock drifting in the wind.

And the Shannon son was not inaccurate. The Plot #22 he’d noticed, hers, had sported scarlet pomegranate shrubs, tall lemongrass, silver-laced cardoon, two rows of amaranth, purple basil, crimson tatsoi and Daikon radish. In the center were two stylish containers sporting her Chicago Hardy fig trees. (“I never pay for a fig,” she’d told us one afternoon.)

While the Shannon child prattled on, Molly Klus whispered to me “‘I never pay for a fig.’” and then fluttered her eyes as if going into a coma. I smiled back.

It was another two weeks before both fig trees were dead.

“You did this,” Irene Olliges said.

“And… you’re bonkers,” Molly shot back. “It’s mid-fall. We’re not in Zagreb, Irene.”

“Those trees were four years old. They survive winters. They are…”

“Hardy,” Molly finished quite cruelly. “Maybe a Chicago ‘Hardy’ only lasts four years…” she offered and then lifted both hands up in what-can-you-do position. (A well-tended Chicago Hardy lasts fifty years.)

“And look at the basil,” Olliges said, stabbing a finger at the ruined plants. The leaves were now wilted, old-bruise colored, and dusted in fuzzy mold. There was, if you got close enough, a terrible odor. “Why…” She looked to her own few allies for support: Brian, and that Sharon Kellog. “She’s always had a thing with me.”

“Wow… just get over yourself,” Molly concluded it. “It’s a community garden for crying-out-loud.”

This might have been the end of things. But Molly’s butternut squash and brussels sprouts were eaten by deer soon after. Or rabbit. (Rabbits?) Or merely torn away. Also, her kale was now seaweed green with spindly stems, floppy leaves. “Too much sun?” she asked. Or, nitrate of soda, urea. Feather meal. We even checked her soil for road salt.

“Now who’s ‘bonkers’?” Sharon Kellog asked Molly. “You think Irene did this?”

“Well, rabbits didn’t cut the hardware cloth.”

Sharon said: “Looks chewed to me.”

Sharon Kellog’s cabbage, rainbow-stemmed Swiss chard, and sugar snap peas were all brown the next time she visited. Over-watering? White vinegar, corn gluten meal, mosquito repellent…

As a known friend of Molly’s, my gooseberry was picked clean the next time I visited. The rabbits again? And my squash turned soft and sunken and the color of charcoal. Ammonium sulfate, clove oil, citrus, Dawn, pesticide…?

The rest of Irene Olligess' plot – all of it – was dead by mid-October..

“Guess she’ll be paying for figs and basil now,’ Molly grinned.

It is somewhat needless, at this time, to diagram the various loyalties. But Brian’s plot went next. Beets, cauliflower. Though it was his snapdragons and Sweet Alyssum that really set him off. Lawsuits were threatened. The police came out one day when I was not there. Two women even put up security cameras, which were both stolen by kids one night.

More parcels became… diseased. Kale drooped yellow and ragged, squash vines sagged under black-spotted fruit. Many of the others stopped coming out alltogether. The “witch” Clare harvested what was left of her beds, expressed sadness over it all, and was later missed. The squash named Tracy somehow flourished and I planted more vetch in hopes to outlast the storm. A sour smell hung over Jolly Gardens until the first snow. Mrs. Shannon’s gnomes were gone, whether stolen in spite or spirited home to safety. We never saw her or her damned son again.

By March, most plots were already tangling with weeds and patches of bare lifeless soil. Even Tracy is dead, rotted back into the earth. The Cook Family’s bee haven is still intact and shows promise of untended resurgence. It is unclear how many of the others will return throughout the spring, if at all.

One Saturday recently, Molly shook her head. “This is all my fault,” she said.

But you and I know better.