Photography by Marie Viljoen, except where noted.
Last year, the day after the Fourth of July, in peak growing season, our landlord announced that the lease on our Harlem apartment would not be renewed. The New York Times had just sent a reporter to visit it.
July
We had moved to Harlem almost two years earlier, when our Brooklyn rent had gone through the roof.
My goal in making any garden is to create a sanctuary where outdoor living is complemented by the visiting birds, bees, and butterflies which provide as much interest as scented flowers and edible plants.
To dismantle our birch pole screen, now a favorite perch for mourning doves, I cut down scarlet runner, lablab, and purple pole beans planted for privacy. Climbing gloriosa lilies, in bloom, were unplanted very carefully.
Jewelweed had just begun to flower, planted to attract hummingbirds, as it had the previous year.
Photograph by Vincent Mounier.
Meanwhile, in a few frantic weeks of typical New York real estate panic, we found an apartment back in Brooklyn, just a few blocks south of our first rooftop terrace. It was uncompromisingly bare, with one patch of daylilies and a clump of Solomon’s seal.
To save on moving expenses, all the pots that my hero-husband could lift were packed into a U-Haul truck and taken to our new address ahead of the big move.
August
My first gardening task was to attack the weeds.
September
A sprawling spirea shrub that was hogging a choice sunny spot in the rear bed was ousted.
I dug out piles of rocks, planted my potted blueberries in-ground for the first time in their lives, ordered 20 extra birch poles to make another trellis to soften the black iron fence on one side of the garden.
I had the soil tested in the central plot, as I planned to grow edibles, there. Lead levels were elevated and we had a low pH. The significance of the latter result only dawned on me as my panic turned into research.
October
I continued clearing out stones. In the vegetable plot I sowed cold weather greens.
November
Allium and camassia bulbs came from Brent and Becky’s.
December
Winter arrived late and in the middle of the month I was picking salad greens.
Snow came at last and the concrete slab was hidden.
January
February
In winter the lower sun did not clear our building and the whole backyard was in constant shadow.
March
As soon as the soil could be worked I added crushed eggshells (a source of calcium, like the oyster shells) collected over winter to the vegetable plot.
I ordered row markers to keep order among the spring leaf crops.
April
The naturalized Solomons seal bloomed.
The early nettles were ready to eat. And our salad days began in earnest with our first crop of spinach.
May
Alliums planted in fall began to flower; beautiful, trouble-free, and tough.
Surprise irises opened, a rich and scented purple.
The vegetables plot now supplied all our salad needs.
We bought a long wooden table, room to spread out and a sun umbrella which doubles as an evening tent for privacy.
Jasmine tobacco and Formosa lilies opened, scenting our evenings.
June
July
The bare area along the fence filled out and filled in.
“What would you have said,” asked my husband one recent night, as we ate our just-dug fingerlings outside, a year after our bad news, “if I had told you then that we’d be sitting here, now, watching dozens of fire flies dance in a new garden?”
Gardeners lead a split existence. While our hands dig, weed, plant, our heads see the future, and what will be born of our work.