Ed Cullen
Swords to plowshares, a toy aircraft carrier reborn as thyme planter.
In the zephyrs of spring, we garden with ghosts. Rejoicing in the warm air not yet filled with humidity and bugs, we celebrate being right here with people who aren’t.
Cup of coffee in hand, plantspeople greet a new day standing before the memories of gardeners who gave the gift of information, plants, and the whirly-gig-doo-dads that make one smile when a breeze moves their propellers, wind sails and chiming pipes. We grant space in our gardens to these gifts of friends because they keep absent people with us and because the gifts give joy without the need to water, prune, or weed.
Maybe, we channel someone who has gone to his or her rest or is taking a rest where old gardeners tend plants with their eyes through immoveable windows of double-pane glass. There was an old man down the street known to walkers and cyclists by his khaki shirt, trousers, brogans, and garden close to the sidewalk. A gardener keeps the memory of that plantsman in khaki with a pair of gate hinges made from the leather uppers of expired boots.
Ed Cullen
Leather gate hinges made from the uppers of expired boots.
Leather hinges might evoke Robert Frost among the gardening literate. For the gardener in question, the hinges bring to mind his father-in-law’s genius for repurposing. Once, arriving at the old man’s garden in the woods, the then-young gardener watched as his father-in-law approached a scarecrow fashioned from an old suit coat and trousers artfully draped over a fence post.
Clever, thought young dude, who gaped as the old man exchanged his office clothes for the scarecrow’s clothing, picked up a hoe and began cultivating a row of cow peas.
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Ed Cullen
Thinker frog is behind the eight ball and a solar fountain.
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A seasonal wind chime
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Garden man made from a block of wood sports a jar lid cap, drawer pull nose and castoff sunglasses.
A sudden rattle stirs the gardener from reverie to see a pinwheel spinning madly in the wind. Useless, perhaps? Waste of good money? Why, a potted rosemary might enjoy that space. Rosemary resides in some other part of the garden and doesn’t make its presence known with startling clatter. To be sure, the rosemary announces itself with a clean, good smell. But the gardener must brush against it. The pinwheel tells him from afar that the wind is blowing from the southwest.
A wind chime, the gift of a woman named Merle, requires a stiffer breeze to make its fire gong clamor. Merle’s chime says the wind has shifted a few points since the pinwheel’s report.
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‘No poo!’ mobile (gardener does his own fertilizing)
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The ubiquitous flamingo watches all.
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Broken wall telephone reminds walkers to call their Dads.
Look around: There are the strung-together, leftover nuts and washers from the day a young friend and his wife dropped by to assemble a mail order bicycle. “I could have done that,” the gardener admits, “but I wouldn’t have the memory of Nathan and Caroline working together in the sunshine.” They did their work quickly. When they left with a handshake and a hug, no one’s fingers were bleeding.
More: A toy aircraft carrier turned into a thyme and mint planter; a concrete frog in the pose of Rodin’s “The Thinker”; a man’s head from a block of wood, drawer pull nose and castoff sunglasses; a Virgin Mary statue facing the exact spot a neighbor named Rosemae used to pass in her big, white car on the way to early morning mass at St. Aloysius.
There is the mobile of found iron and discarded Frisbee hanging from a tree limb near the street that says, “No Poo!,” a statement to dog walkers that the gardener keeps his own fertilizer schedule.
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Bicycle wheel supports rogue begonia in a pot of bok choy.
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Couch bedsprings saved from trash pile to make a garden sculpture.
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Voodoo queen wards off cataracts with sunglasses.
These objets d’art and less, things impaled on sticks or rods or hanging from tree limbs by baling wire, fishing line or twine invite questions which provide the kindling for conversation and, did we say this before, require nothing from us but notice.
Would we remember absent friends and fellow gardeners without this, let’s say it, junk? We would. Would we hear the voices of these ghosts in the wind’s clatter and bong? We would not.
Ed Cullen’s wry observations on life in South Louisiana will be familiar to readers of The Advocate, where he worked for forty years. Letter in a Woodpile, a collection of his newspaper and radio essays, was published in 2006.
