Rosemary Harris - Pushing Up Daisies

She used the chewed- up coffee stirrer as a bookmark, and started making my iced coffee with the dregs of this morning’s pot. I leaned over the counter on my elbows and motioned toward her book. “Whatcha reading?”

“Biography of Jim Morrison. I was just a child, of course, but he and I shared a beautiful moment once. The man was a god, if you get my drift.” She raised her voice just a bit, so the booth full of raging hormones could hear her. It had its intended effect.

“So, uh, when do you start on that thing we’re not supposed to know about?” she asked in a more natural voice.

“ASAP. I’m going over there now to get started. I’ve got research to do, and I want to make some sketches and collect soil samples first. In fact, better make that iced coffee to go.”

Stapley’s file included directions to the Peacock house. I hadn’t been to that part of town before-three-acre zoning kept out the riffraff like me, but Halcyon wasn’t hard to find. As Babe had mentioned, it was weird, not your basic New En gland saltbox. There were turrets, spires, domes, and loads of tiny windows-a drunken collaboration between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Antonio Gaudii Cornet.

Back in the day, Halcyon had been snidely referred to as “Peacock’s Temple.” More recently, it’d been dubbed the Addams family house by local kids. They’d dare each other to egg it on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if more than a few of them had done the nasty in the Peacock’s hidden, overgrown gardens. Apparently, Dorothy had been a good sport about both kinds of intrusions.

The iron gate was open, and one door was off its hinges. I rolled up the weedy gravel driveway and parked in a partially cleared spot on the right side of the house. I grabbed my backpack and took a quick inventory-plant identifier, camera, note pad, Stapley’s file, trusty Felco nippers, Ziploc Baggies, labels, trowel, gloves.

Years of broken branches, leaves, and general garden debris littered the front garden. There was old storm damage, and one enormous rhododendron had rotted out from the center, splayed open like a blooming onion, but the good bones were evident. New growth struggled against the weight of the dying branches.

Although still comfortable financially, the Peacock sisters inexplicably hadn’t engaged a landscaping service in years; and each year, Dorothy and Renata did less and less themselves. Stapley seemed to think the last time the lawn had been mowed Jimmy Carter was president. It looked it. Against the odds, scattered bulbs were coming out, peeking through the layers of leaf clutter. Another hopeful sign.

The early spring day was brilliant and chilly. It could have been fall, and I was as nervous as if it were the first day of school. “Get ahold of yourself. There’s nothing here but a bunch of half- dead shrubs,” I said out loud.

“I beg to differ” came a cool voice from behind a large arborvitae in serious need of pruning.

I must have jumped a foot. “Hi. I didn’t think anyone else was here.”

“Clearly. I used to live near here. I stop back sometimes, to see what’s become of the old place.” She looked around. “It’s hard to believe all the Peacocks are finally gone. Flown the coop, so to speak.” So much for respect for the dead.

Halcyon’s other visitor was a striking woman-of a certain age-with short auburn hair brushed off her face, the way you can wear it when you have luminous skin and perfect bone structure. Her arms were folded across her chest, holding a large clutch purse, and a woolen shawl was perfectly, effortlessly tossed over her shoulders in that irritating way that some women can pull off and I cannot, but hope to by the time I’m fifty.

“You’ve got your work cut out for you. In their prime, these gardens were lovely. So were we all, I suppose.” She lost herself in her thoughts for a moment, then recovered.

“You must have seen them in pictures, right? You couldn’t have seen them yourself.”

“Of course I did, flatterer. Dorothy Peacock was one of my teachers, and an old”-she waited for the right word to come, “-an old beau of mine used to cut their grass. Not recently, as you can probably tell.” She nodded at the overgrown meadow behind me.

“Really? I’d be very grateful for any advice or information you could give me.” I whipped out one of my cards and handed it to her, still searching for a pen and paper to get her info. “E-mail is always the easiest way to reach me. Now, if I can just get your coordinates, phone number, maybe an e-mail address…”

I jogged back to my car for a pen. By the time I’d finished rooting around in my backpack, she’d silently wandered off.

“Thanks a lot,” I muttered to the late March air.

Well, it wasn’t the Pine Barrens. She was around here somewhere; I’d catch up with her later. I wondered how she knew I was here to work on the garden. Guess I wasn’t dressed for anything else, although in this getup, I might have been a burglar.

Whoever she was, she was right about one thing: I had to get cracking. I got out my pad and Richard’s file. At some point I’d make a detailed map of the garden, but for now a rough sketch would do.

The magnificent elm in the photos was gone. Dutch elm disease, I was guessing. Sometime in the 1930s a boatload of beetles stowed away in a shipment of veneer bound for the United States. The beetles carried a fungus, and the rest, as they say, is history. By the sixties, over fifty million elm trees in the United States were dead.

The pines were in good shape. Removal of a few broken branches was really all they needed. The rest of the shrubs in the front garden-rhododendrons, azaleas, andromedas, viburnum, forsythia-and the lawn were wildly overgrown but nothing that couldn’t be pruned into submission or fertilized back to life over time. Very few things in the garden were stone- cold dead. Plants have this incredible will to live and if there’s even a glimmer of life in something, I always think I can coax it back to good health.

Oriental bittersweet and euonymus burning bush, the Connecticut equivalents of kudzu, were running rampant. I had a love- hate relationship with the burning bush, but the bittersweet would have to go. Labor intensive but not impossible. I was counting on Hugo Jurado’s help. Hugo was my own part- time gardener. Going from a fat regular income to a slim irregular one had forced me to make some economies, but I’d sooner give up food than give up Hugo. He was from Temixco, a small town about two hours south of Mexico City. A tireless worker, Hugo juggled three jobs and sent almost every penny back home to his silver- haired mother. He’d probably own the town, or be its mayor, in a couple of years.

Although a complete restoration of the garden would take numerous growing seasons, I knew Hugo and I could make a dramatic improvement in as little as sixty days. Things were looking up. I started designing new business cards in my head and thinking of an easier, less obscure name for my soon-to-be-successful company.

The Peacocks’ wraparound porch had been filled with containers and window boxes. I couldn’t tell from the faded black- and- white photos what kind of flowers they’d held, but if I stuck with the classics-sweet alyssum, petunias, nasturtiums-I’d be fine.

Like a happy puppy, I lumbered around to the back of the house. It was like slamming into a brick wall. What ever confidence I’d had a few moments before totally vanished. The back garden was a disaster area. And so much of it. A large herringbone brick terrace, cracked and choked with weeds, held about a dozen moldy planters. Guarded by two moss- covered stone dogs, a short flight of stairs led down to an allйe about ten feet wide and a hundred feet long, lined with dead or dying boxwoods. The path looked like pea gravel, but upon closer inspection I saw it was crushed oyster shells, much of it ground to dust. At either end was a garden, each approximately one thousand square feet.