I am my garden.

Recently I came into possession of a garden, or, really, a backyard. I’m using the passive voice because the garden came with the property, like an extra limb. Most mornings, I sit outside and look at this garden with a mix of curiosity and trepidation. Already over the last five weeks I have watched it grow and change, succumbed to weeds and ivies that seem relentless in their quest for supremacy. The garden looks like this today:

From this vantage, it looks like a large grave. I’ve been told the previous tenants are in prison for embezzlement, which increases the possibility there are corpses in the yard, but not by much.

One thing you might notice are the tools I have attempted to deploy to tame the yard: some purple kitchen gloves and what I thought was a HOE but that turns out to be some kind of hybrid between a rake and pitchfork.

As a city kid, having a HOE for any purpose is just funny. Oh, well.

I thought I could use my richfork to pull up all the weeds, till the ground, and seed new grass. I thought this kind of manual labor would feel enlivening, the way people say. Dirt under my fingernails. A swatch of soil down my cheek.

I went out there with my dog. He dug up something, ate it, and spent several hours puking it up all over my house.

My kitchen gloves ripped immediately.

I uncovered a root system so complex and artful—so resilient and tenacious—I gave up in five minutes.

Enter: The Professional Gardeners. In fact, a parade of gardeners come to assess my graveyard and dream with me.

Without wanting to generalize—I’ve actually met only four gardeners so far—I have noticed they all seem to have something in common besides the freestyle facial hair and banjo style. They are all just really soft spoken. I mean, maybe I am just going deaf, but I don’t think I so. I think they all just spoke really quietly to me. I think this has something to do with the things they were saying.

For instance: What if we put a large azalea over there? How about a Ficus here?

To be honest, I don’t remember the names of the plants, flowers, and bushes they were suggesting, just that they sounded maybe not so much exotic and displacing—like: who was this person they were suggesting these ideas to?

My favorite gardener of the bunch, who used to be a lawyer, sat on my steps, looked out at my plot and said, very quietly: Do you want a tree?

I’ve been asked a lot of things in my life. Almost none of those questions has had to do with what I want. And not one of of them has been about a tree.

For a while, we just sat there in silence, thinking about a tree in the yard. Or maybe that is what he was thinking about. But I was stuck on the inanity of the question. Do I want a tree. Why is this question so crazy? Because nature can’t be owned? Because planting a tree is about staking a claim to immortality? Or about marking time in a way that actually precipitates mortality? Maybe the question seemed so odd because it suggested a rapport between me and this future tree I know I will never get comfortable with. How could I look at this tree with anything but sadness?

Maybe I just think the tree deserves to be free, in a forest and not in my graveyard. Maybe there is just no way to look at a tree without seeing a metaphor, metaphors being shot through with sorrow, no matter what they are.

Or maybe there’s just something melancholy about dreams in general, even if I can make them come true. With enough money, I could get an azalea. A tree and a slate rock walkway. Pea gravel. Roses. Dog-resistant clover and fescue ground cover. A pergola. Outdoor furniture, a movie screen and projector, and large Pimm’s glasses. I could hire a gardener to put in automatic irrigation channels. I could hire a gardener just to come and speak quietly to me about what can be.

I could. But I’m not sure I should.