Trickle Down Garden Cycles

October 9, 2020/Jenks Farmer

I dream gardens; gardens that I want to bring to life. When the chance comes along to turn an abandoned field into a dream garden, I make it happen. This expansive garden of floating water lily flowers may bring Monet to mind, but twenty years later, I dream of the muck and rhizomes below.

Twenty-something years after we planted it, the Low Country Lily Lake became one of the most photographed gardens in America. You’ve probably seen it on calendars, magazines, even in that Victoria’s Secrets ad that flashes across social media. An expanse of dark water studded with pastel water lily flowers, hugged by soft cypress trees on the banks. On the far shore, a little dock by a curved trunk palmetto, dripping white orchid vine flowers. Foggy. Dark. Moody. Romantic. Just what I imagined when I planted it.

Now it’s a state park or something. You can go visit but not when it’s rented out for a movie set, commercial, or photo shoot. Which is almost every day. I claim credit for the design, the vision, for planting it, babying it, feeding it, for its first ten years of life. But I left; I had nothing to do with turning it into a commercial set. I never once imagined athletic women, in lingerie and lace angel wings walking across the water. I never dreamt this water lily garden would become a scene I couldn’t stand to see.

I avoid the photos. I can’t escape the dream. Deep underwater, floating, not swimming, in swampy black water, plunging into mud, face to face with a massive, gnarly, water lily rhizome that releases black, putrid bubbles. The thick rubbery orbs that ought to surface but don’t move up or down; they’re just stuck, eyes in a tangle of water lily stems and wet back curls. I hope they are just weird heavy bubbles but I don’t want to look at them directly, maybe they are fish eyes or gator eyes or his eyes.

The crazy thing is that current politics stimulate the dream. When the prevailing politicians and tv talking heads use that term, the one he coined, the vision of that garden, the romantic Monet painting of lily flowers floating happily in morning light turns into a casket spray floating, resting on over a dark and tangled underworld.

When I built that pond there was no muck. I sat in an abandoned sorghum field and sketched out my dream. The picture you see in magazines today, we carved out from my doodles, dreams, swirls, time. I spec’d out the plants, even the depth of the pond in different places. I called in the pond building crew, Jackson & Son Earth Movers. Mr. Jackson and three hard-working, always laughing Oaxacan boys. Eventually, Jackson turned them over to me; he’d swing by Monday mornings to check progress and service his tractors. It was just me and the tractor drivers out there all summer long. The Mexican fellas eventually brought a tent and camped in the pines nearby so they wouldn’t have to spend money on a motel room. It was a fantasy job, being way, way out on an isolated swampland, making gardens, and honing my Spanish by a fire in the evening.

The owners of this extravagant, horticultural endeavor lived in Cleveland. They bought thousands of acres of swampland, near the Okefenokee, for hunting and as a place to escape if the cities failed. A certain crowd among the super-rich build gardens like they collect houses or horse farms. Once this couple found the land, they found me, flew down for 24 hours, and said, “Wildly romantic, make it like a ruin, make it layers of plants and mystery.” They’d found the perfect garden designer. I like to see plants take over, flow, move through the air and dirt, I like to make gardens that remind people that we are just part of the cycle.

Summing it up, I said, “So the design mantra is going to be ‘Georgia Swamp Meets Angkor Wat Jungle Palace?’” “Perfect,” they said. “You’re quick on your feet. Decisive. We like that.” The private jet flew away, leaving me with new credit cards, her accountant’s phone number, and 7,000 acres to play with.

Once, they came to stay in the ultra-modern, solar-powered tiny house/guest house which arrived on a truck, with a crew from California. Occasionally, their “life coach assistant” whose job seems to be making everything in the world seem perfect, would AOL Chat me to say someone else was coming for a visit. Some important cousin needed a getaway or wanted to hunt and was coming to stay. The accountant, numerous lawyers, once an artist, and once, Martha Stewart herself with some young study assistant dropped in for a night.

For each guest it was the same pattern, I’d take them on a garden walk with a glass of wine. By dark, they’d retreat to the tiny house to escape mosquitos and hot nights. They had total privacy for 12 hours. A local sheriff would pick them up early the next morning for a long drive to the agricultural airport where their private plane waited.

…

In this sweltering land, plants grow like it’s still the Paleozoic dinosaur world. In a week, a muddy flat turns into green fuzzy knitted through by bright green parasitic dodder vine. In a month, groundwater rises to turn it into a shallow pond. Soon brown water, bullfrogs, cottonmouths, and giant salamanders slither around in muck, floating algae, and head-high aquatic cladmium sedges.

To avoid that, to create the final surface picture you see today, I drew the depths, the contours of the bottom of the pond specific to certain plant’s needs. Where you see sinewy smooth, black water today, the water is very deep, inhibiting any plants. Where you see sheets of pastel water lilies the water is about 4 or 5 feet deep, perfect for them, but too deep for sedges and salamanders. For months, the boys on the backhoes dug and sculpted the bottom, finishing the deepest, 12 foot, zig-zagging channel, first. As they finished any area, they sealed it with watertight, roller-compacted white clay coating. The finished area had the texture of a rustic dish thrown by a primitive potter. That was a surprise to me; it looked more like a pool than pond bottom.

The guys had a grill for lunch and supper. They’d tell me crazy stories of the trailer they shared with six other men in Pensacola. A trailer park full of lonely, hard-working, mostly illegal guys. They had an obsessive love of laughing at the absurd. Once a month, they’d splurge, leaving Friday night for the weekend crammed into a cheap motel room at the beach. They told me about their first movie, Spiderman; their first time in an elevator; and one of them told me about his first time — his buddies chipped in for his birthday present.

…

Labor Day Friday, they left at noon. I retreated to my little trailer/office, looking forward to a weekend of movies, garden design, and quiet. By now I’d learned that some of the owners’ rich friends worked really hard not to seem rich. This one pulled up in one of those square-nosed Toyota minivans from the late 80s. He was in jeans and a Key Largo Grocery t-shirt. 65, athletic, thick salt, and pepper curls. Ridiculous thick square glasses like he was Henry Kissinger on a beach weekend. Flip flops. He immediately started making sure I understood how rich he was.

I’d heard about him. My garden owners had told me. The super-rich who make statement gardens seem to know each other. The story was this guy, a high-toned political consultant, had run from California, selling off an estate and a significant outdoor reptile collection to hide out in the hills of Kentucky where there was no income tax. Now, he just road-tripped from Miami to Maine buying plants but unlike most of his peers, without a security guard. He liked hanging out with the blue-collar fellas who managed his boat, his garden, his hobbies.

Because he’d figured out how to avoid income tax, he could afford a crew of professional horticulturists. He started telling me all about the team: their funky bunkhouse, the chef he had for them, and the trips he sponsored for them to go plant-collecting in remote jungles. He was recruiting. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t told anyone he was coming here.

We started the expected tour. Part of my job. The fact that it was Friday at 5 p.m., that I’d worked all day and just wanted to be alone in my trailer didn’t matter. I was expected to help the owners’ guests settle into the guest house and to entertain them. I think it was generally assumed a country guy like me would be thrilled to meet and hang out with any of the one-percenters.

He told me stories of all his famous political friends. Stories of Nixon’s vulgarity and arrogance. The distinction between the rude man and the polite facade of the office made him laugh at his own stories. Most of it was before my time. It still made me feel a little sick. He told this elaborate story of how he convinced Reagan to jump on trickle-down economics, “Do you know what that is?” He seemed to think my drawl meant I was stupid and lived in a cave. “We were sitting by a pool at Canyon Ranch, back in the 60s, me and Ron, I sketched it all out on a cocktail napkin.”

That was that. The course of the country was set. He’d get richer; we wouldn’t.

“By the time you were sprouting chest hair and voting, Reagan was President and making America Great.” That was his story. Told with pride. Told with expectation, that since I was working for one-percenters, I’d find it humorous and honorable.

I did not. I did not live in a cave. I read. I voted. I remembered Reagan ignored AIDS and thereby led to the death of my boyfriend, college roommate, and a cousin. I did not say anything about the other millions dead. He hit a sore spot. This flip-flopped man strolling beside me, lighting up a pre-rolled joint and thinking he’d buy me to move to his hobby farm. All I could think was, “This mother fucker. He was part of the team that killed my brother.”

The economic policies, the ones he wrote by the pool they never trickled down. While he avoided taxes and gave it that last little shake at his gold urinal, we lived on the drip that wouldn’t pay for grad school or houses or health insurance. The ones who ended up literally on a drip, silver needles in their veins tied to tubes, bills piled up under their death beds, they didn’t survive at all. Honestly, I had, I still have a lot of hurt from the 80s. Hurt. Fury. Buried inside mostly, but right now, this smug guy, trying to hire me to take care of his bushes, proudly claiming to be the brains behind the bully, made me sick.

I kept smiling. Doing my job. Touring, smiling, having cold beers laid out along the path, jumping through hoops was part of my job, part of the trade-off.

Usually, the owners would give me a heads up. But this guy was renowned for being off the grid. Rejecting rich folks security details. No cell phone. Didn’t share his plans with anyone. Followed back roads. And whims. I’d been told all this. No one said what whims though. I did my duty, got us a six-pack and we set off to the existing farm pond where I wanted him to see our collection of Victoria water lilies. It had to be the largest outdoor planting on the East Coast. I was in love with them; pride and shared plant love trumps fury.

He was truly into plants. Finally, he dropped his ego a bit, and we were just two guys talking plants. As his ego rested, mine swelled up a bit.

The dock is where he started coming onto me. I told him I often swim in the pond just so I could be close to, at level, and underneath the massive floating Victoria leaves. “Go ahead, go visit your girls, I”m going to sit back right here and have a smoke.” He pulled another pre-rolled joint out of a little metal case, offered me a hit. I declined. I hate the confusion that comes from pot. He lit up and sat on the dock.

I took off my boots, shorts, and shirt but left on my boxers. That was his in, “Do you always swim in those? When you’re alone? Seems like you’d want to be more natural, more connected with your lilies.” I knew that was the come on. The admiration was flattering. So with back to him, I leaned over, took them off, dove in.

This part of the world is known for its black water. Tannins from decaying plants color it, but the color is thin. Down there I see thick, seal skin smooth Victoria stems waving in the breeze. The current. Flexing in slow motion. Solid cords enticing and dangerous. Watching becomes like standing at a cliff, you contemplate what it would be like to swim through, to glide. But you know it wouldn’t end well. Sun rays through the black water show off slick velvet ropes and lassos. I long to swim naked into the tangled forest. Underneath the leaves, pink spines, inch-long toothpicks across the bottom of the leaf. You cannot get close to big ones.

Way out in the middle, they grew less vigorously. Out there, in the deep, we had to build special planter stands, underwater lifeguard chairs that supported massive pots of dirt, and water lily rhizomes. But water lilies are heavy feeders; they’ll get huge when they can but stay stunted in limited space so here I could grasp the pot, rest on the underwater structure before heading back to shore. He watched, tipped his beer in a distant salute.

I swam up to the dock and heaved out and spun all in one motion so I was suddenly sitting on the soaked dock. He’s studying my back — it’s sculpted from a summer of shovel work — probably fixated on the mole on the top of my ass. I feel him standing. I don’t want him to come up behind me, to rub my shoulders, so I spin around, sitting on the dock still, legs spread open. I know what he wants to see. That stops him. He grins ear to ear; now, he’s fixated. He takes one step. Now, I’m worried. Being admired is one thing but letting this old conservative fucker blow me, then probably expect me to spend the night with him is another. He’s looking straight down at it, his entire face covered in that stoned satisfaction, that wonder, that full-body engagement of a moment that seems perfect to a stoner. I bet he does this with his entire horticultural team. I wonder if the straight guys do it too, part of the trade-off, the trickle-down. Then a hard thick noise; THUD, SPLAT. He fell. Hard. I mean hard. His head’s between my legs. He is face down. Flat. Right there. Curls practically touch my sack, and he doesn’t move at all. Fuck. This old man, his body jerks. His arm lies across my thigh. One last big spasm and river of blood flows out of his mouth, right under my thigh.

I knew I should do something. I touched his head, said his name, said, “I’m going to get a phone. I still don’t move. I put my palms on his hair; I tried to turn his head. That tiny pressure, just that little, gentle turn, and the cracking, the ratchet feeling vibrates through my palms. Bone on bone. I feel, not hear, feel this huge exhale, no moan, no cry, just a blow of air onto my thigh.

The white of his eye, the one I can see, is pink with blood.

Fuck. I know enough about dying men — my brother, my roommate, the one in that wreck — to know that this man is dead. One minute he was feeling satiated in every way, the next minute he lay almost on top of me. Warm Dead.

When I helped friends die, there’d always been a group and someone would say, “Come now, he’s gone.” Someone to hug. Someone to say a prayer.

I’m alone. I could call the local sheriff. What would I tell the redneck sheriff and the bo-skeeter country boy volunteers who show up? Can you imagine that scene? It’s almost a farce, a movie. Me naked, him twisted on the dock, a dozen good old boy cops and their curious friends milling around. A sea, the largest outdoor planting of pale yellow, rare water lilies named for Queen Victoria. On the shore, a tent camp of illegal Mexican fellas.

What would the garden owners think when they learned that in their respectable garden project, an internationally acclaimed, political conservative was getting stoned and about to suck me off on a dock, but he tripped on a nail and bled out all over me?

For a minute I thought that would be an appropriate ending for the old hypocrite. The rational thing to do is jump in the lake, wash off, put on some clothes and call 911 and forewarn the “life coach assistant” whose job it is to keep everything smooth.

Her first step would be to fire the embarrassing gardener. That’s what I’d do. This would be my awkward end of making this garden.

I am not ready for that. I want to see the Low Country Lily Lake grow in, to help it become the vision. For that moment, I thought, I’m an artist painting, ever so slowly. Painting with flowers, vines, cypress, mud, manure, compost. Compost. Decomposing. It’s really the big cycle of gardening, of plant life. Growth depends on decomposition. I want to see my painting come to life.

…

I buried him in the finger of the pond that the guys had finished that morning. With that handy little compact backhoe, you know the ones they call a mini-mighty-mite, it didn’t take an hour. How did people dig ponds before diesel equipment? I smoothed out the clay, wet it down, used the hand roller over it, and finished by dark. Tomorrow, I’d run some irrigation on it and by Monday, even super observant Nacho wouldn’t see the scar.

I still don’t know exactly why or how I turned into this person who made this decision as if life were a raunchy detective novel. I want to feel guilty. The truth is, it was easy, he’d killed a lot of people, and I wanted to finish making this garden.

About 25 miles over toward the interstate, there was a massive train yard where north/south freight trains got reorganized and reconnected to go West. Dozens of sidetracks allowed men to drop and reconnect cars and then direct some onto westward tracks. I learned about it from a wild young man on a forestry crew. He’d told me about jumping freight trains there and riding to Cleveland. Yeah, it’s a thing, like hobos of old days; homeless, runaways, transients of all types have a culture built around jumping freight trains. This yard was high security, a place you were sure to get arrested if you got caught. Train-jumping is a felony. So the transients had all learned and shared info on a web page, to tell others where to jump off the train, how to walk a few miles around, and how to reconnect and hop a ride again.

I left the van where I knew it would be found by some of those very same transients. Keys in the door, I figured someone would be thrilled to get off the train and ride in 80s style; hell, they’d probably find a lot of cash in his stuff. The van would be in Baltimore by dawn. As for me, 25 miles on a bike in the pitch dark and I was in bed just after midnight.

…

Monday morning, Labor Day, we were all set to work. These guys want money, not holidays. Nacho, the leader, didn’t show up. In typical Oaxacan delight, they couldn’t tell the story for laughing so hard. They couldn’t remember their English words. They couldn’t even pour their milky white coffee without splashing, without physically convulsing in laughter. I didn’t get it. The keyword to the story, the punch line was a word I couldn’t translate: “chonis.” It wasn’t even in the dictionary. Finally, through heaving laughter, I heard, “Panties! Panties! He got arrested for stealing panties!”

Serious, reserved, observant Nacho had been arrested for stealing women’s panties off the motel balconies. I pictured Nacho stuffing into some white cotton panties with little blue flowers on them. To wear them I asked? “No, No, No! Nachos not a fag! He was sniffing them! He had them on his head when the police busted into his room!”

By the end of the day, still no Nacho. We’d practically finished the last finger of the lake. Success. No one noticed a thing. But then Until. Until I saw one of the guys driving a green work cart through the shallows of the empty lake. I watched the soil sink in as he drove over that one spot. I watch him feel the sink, gun the engine and pull out just in time not to get stuck. He gets out, walks back, and kicks in the clay. Blood pounds in my ears. My heart. Is that a dark spot, a dark stain, a stream of black blood?

He gets back in the cart, pulls round to the clay pile, drives back, fills the shallow wheel depressions, and pulls up to me. He pokes his finger in my belly, and says, “Soft spots happen! Plant a lily there!” And laughs.

The guys finish up, cleaning equipment as usual back at the barn. I think I need a beer and plenty of distraction. I turn on the TV to watch President Clinton in a Labor Day parade. No trickle-down economics in the Clinton years. I open a beer; maybe I’ll never hear that term again.

I can’t relax. So I go to the nursery and load a truck with the water lily rhizomes we’ve been growing out, heaving heavy buckets, sloshing green water, forearms coated white clay, I plant until dusk.

The next morning I insist that we’re done with pond forming, we must start filling the pond; it’s critical to get our lily rhizomes growing before winter. I hate to end this summer, this camaraderie, camping with this crew. One fantasy is over. The other dream, the one that hasn’t haunted me yet must be forming in the gray folds of my mind.

…

In April, I wade, waist deep, diving to put fertilizer tablets in beside the rhizomes. I wear shorts and a shirt. The water’s cold. The water’s no fun. I can see lily leaves piercing that clean clay bottom, snaking up toward light.

I just can’t make myself go under over there.

…

The van was found way out past El Paso. It wasn’t really big news or anything. My client mentioned it because they thought maybe some of the guys from his crew might be potential employees for our expanding garden.

Midsummer, the owners sent another dignitary. This one they planned as either a performance evaluation for me or professional development. “He is a renowned water lily specialist! Known for sniffing out rare water lilies, even ones we thought extinct!” They’d met him at some function, probably given him a huge donation for his research, and thereby roped him into coming to see their garden.

Caleb, a good-looking Spanish man with sultry eyes and a mop of curly hair reminds me of Nacho. I can’t help but see him lying naked in a motel room with his black curls popping out of white cotton panties printed with tiny blue water lilies.

We do the evening walk with wine. He teaches me so much. He teaches like a friend, “You remember from botany class, in land plants, the xylem inside the stems hardens like tubes to carry water up and to help the stem stand tall. But in water plants, why would the xylem even be important? These stems are surrounded, supported by water. Submerged stems mostly move nutrients down from the leaf in the sunshine to the starchy rhizomes anchored in the mud.”

Somehow that feels like a bit of a relief. Trickle-down at work. After those dreams, I’d worried, wondering if dark gaseous smells might come up, moving up the stems of the lilies. A putrid politician’s smell that makes guests suspicious.

We’re very relaxed together. Until. Until he’s spotted a mystery. “Why are all the lilies here so much more full, so much richer green, so much more vigorous? Did you tip the fertilizer boat over?”

“No, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t know.” Immediately the realization struck. I should have said yes and let the mystery be solved. Now the man renowned for sniffing out water lily problems strips, wades out, and dives under. My heart races. I’m not going in that water with him. He surfaces and shakes his dark curls out his face. “So many stems here. So much growth from the bottom. The bottom of the pond is sunken here. Maybe there was a stump or some organic deposit. It’s dark, but the rhizome there must be huge. It must be the size of my thigh!”

Bigger than your thigh I thought. I reached back behind my own thigh and felt just to make sure the hairs weren’t matted in blood, “Yes, indeed. There was a massive cypress stump there.”

For eight years, during the Obama administration, I didn’t hear the phrase much. Now that a new President is all about dredging up old Reagan terms, Make America Great Again and trickle-down economics, I dream the dark liquid, the curling stems of sealskin, a stem or a finger-wagging, waving, motioning for me to look down at the gray clay surface and a rhizome the size of a torso, a flip flop and Caleb’s face down there, his crazy wet Medusa curls mixed with water lily stems and I hear some crazed laughs, then that friendly teacher’s voice saying, “Water lily stems move nutrients down. Remember from class? Leaves in the sunshine, feed rhizomes in the dark. But this one, its rhizome is getting nutrients from something down in the muck, too, more than that trickle-down effect. See, this one’s the size of a man’s thigh.”