Backyard

by Norman Draper

  “Redwood tree!” Out it came before he had a chance to stop it. That impulsive-idiot answer proving, once again, that the mouth is quicker than the brain.

  “What?”

  “Uh, redwood tree?”

  “Redwood tree what?”

  “I guess that’s my surprise answer to your question.” George braced himself for Nan’s derisive retort.

  “What question?”

  They were cruising down Cabot Drive now. All of Nan’s attention was focused on the profusion of plant life cultivated with varying degrees of skill and on scales ranging from the paltry to the grandiose on both sides of them. In such a state, she wouldn’t be able to remember what she said ten minutes ago.

  “Slow down, George!” He let his foot off the accelerator. The speedometer tumbled from thirty to five miles per hour, Fremont garden-cruising speed.

  “Check out the bleeding hearts on the right,” Nan said. “I can’t believe they’re still in full bloom.” From out of the rock garden that had been assembled along both the east and west sides of the cement driveway of the otherwise unassuming green, wood-sided house at 3492 East Cabot sprouted a profusion of bleeding hearts, their pink, heart-shaped blooms dangling in the distance and sparkling in the late afternoon sun.

  “Well done, gardener, whomever you might be,” said Nan. That was very sportsmanlike, since the Fremonts’ own bleeding hearts were just starting to peter out. Gardeners seemed to be out in their yards everywhere.

  “What’s with all the busy bees?” Nan said.

  “No kidding,” George said. “And still planting. Shouldn’t everyone be going into maintenance mode about now?”

  At the corner of Cabot and Fourth, the roses were just coming out, a little early this year it seemed to Nan. Explosions of the deepest 3-D red daubed the greenery at 3600 East Cabot: scores of Mr. Lincolns.

  Next door were the red-orange Tropicanas and luscious pink Belle Amours. A few doors down from that, some people they knew—the Knights—were outside busily trimming their dwarf Korean lilacs now that the fragrant blossoms had faded and dropped. George tooted the horn, and they both waved to Gladys and Claude Knight, whose boys had played Livia Athletic Association Baseball with theirs back in Cub- and Midget-League days. Once they had moved on, Nan shook her head and snorted.

  “They shouldn’t trim those,” she said. “They should let them grow nice and tall. Another year or two, then they can trim to make them thicker. Now, they’re just going to look stunted.”

  3

  Backyard Undercover

  Dr. Sproot was trespassing. It was for the greater good that she did so, but the fact remained that here she was, prowling around in somebody’s backyard without first obtaining permission.

  She hadn’t trespassed since she was a little girl. That was when she ran up to that spooky old unkempt house with the peeling paint and overgrown shrubs at the end of Cullen Street to look in the window. Then, she figured, she’d be able to see once and for all if Miss Fearington really was a banshee. Marta Poppendauber and Jennie Burlingame stood back at a safe distance egging her on. Jennie had overheard her parents call Miss Fearington a strumpet, which Marta said was a type of banshee from Germany that ate small children. That confirmed their suspicions that the house, which always seemed deserted and emitted an eerie red glow, was a banshee den.

  Just as little Phyllis was poised to peek through the window into the red room, Miss Fearington, very obviously not a banshee but just as scary nonetheless, threw open her front door. She was dressed only in her bra and panties, with a filmy chemise barely draped over her shoulders, and was jiggling body parts like a Jell-O shaker jamboree. She yelled at Phyllis about being a Peeping Thomasina, and what did she think she was doing?

  Phyllis hightailed it so fast she passed Jennie and Marta, who were screaming and throwing up their hands like a couple of born-again somethings, and ran into a tree, which had left a knot on her forehead for two weeks.

  Fifty-two years later, here she was with Marta deep into the backyard of people she had not so much as been introduced to and without even an implied invitation. She knew they were the Fremonts and that what they were doing might well pose a clear and present danger to the venerable institution of gardening in Livia. As far as she could tell no one was home, so what was the harm in doing a bit of nosing around?

  She tugged on the hem of Marta’s short-sleeved blouse.

  “C’mon,” she said.

  “C’mon?” Marta said. “C’mon where?”

  “Why, we’re going to inspect this yard from top to bottom. We’re sleuths. Backyard spies. Won’t that be fun, Marta?” Marta cringed and gently pulled away from her.

  Wimp! thought Dr. Sproot. I’m stuck with a wimp who has no stomach for the gardening espionage business. If only Jennie were here with me now.

  But, of course, Jennie could not be with her now, having passed away in her garden two years ago. She had been stricken with a mortal stroke as she was weeding the area around her Asiatic lilies, balloon flowers, and purple coneflowers just as they were bursting out in all their late-July glory. Her husband, Doob, had found her lying faceup. A limpid smile creased her face. The five-inch teeth of her weed fork pointed heavenward. She was one for the ages, that Jennie was. And died with her gardening clogs on! What a trouper!

  “But can’t we just look from here? This is . . . private property.”

  “So?” Dr. Sproot clenched her jaw and clutched at Marta’s blouse again. “So? Little scruples apply to little people, Marta. We are not little people, and we are here on a higher mission. Trust me, the end will justify the means.”

  “Please don’t tear my blouse, Doc Phil,” Marta whined. Doc Phil! Doc Phil! Dr. Phyllis Sproot hated the name even worse than she hated dandelions and root rot.

  “Doc-tor Sproot, please, Marta,” she said, releasing her pinch hold. She gazed upon Marta with contempt. She had been all agog about coming with her and checking out these Fremonts, Dr. Sproot reflected angrily. Now her natural timidity threatened to ruin the whole project. Look at her, in that stupid little floral-print blouse, with renderings of five particular plants and their names in notebook script spattered over it. How presumptuous to be wearing such a thing. It was as if she wanted to tell the world she was some sort of queen of the gardeners. Why, she, Dr. Phyllis Sproot, was the one who laid out Marta’s first garden, and taught her the rudiments of soil preparation, proper mix of plants, and fertilization. And now her gardens were a mess. She had committed the cardinal gardening sin of allowing unwanted and contemptible genera to spread uncontrolled throughout her yard. It was horticultural hodgepodgery, that’s what it was!

  “What if somebody’s . . . at home?”

  Dr. Sproot flinched, as if she had just been buzzed by a passing wasp. What if they were home? What if they came running out the door armed with trowels, pitchforks, and razor-edged spades to turn these brazen trespassers into human plant mulch? Dr. Sproot squinted as she studied their back door. There was no sign of life. No lights shone through the uncovered windows. She would instruct Marta to keep a wary eye on the street in case someone pulled into the driveway, forcing them to duck for cover behind a tree or a bush. It was time to get moving and to get scared little Marta moving with her.

  “So, what are you, Marta . . . a fraidy cat?”

  Marta stiffened, then stood bolt upright on hearing that old childhood taunt.

  “I am not a fraidy cat, Dr. Sproot,” she said, a new resoluteness ringing in her steady voice. “You just go on ahead and I will follow.”

  “Watch for their return,” Dr. Sproot said. “Cars pulling up along the curb or into the driveway. Be prepared to move bunny-quick!”

  After a couple of cursory inspections over the last couple of years, Dr. Sproot had decided to get more serious about these Fremonts. She had been studying their backyard ever since the snow melted and the ground thawed.

  She would park her car a couple of blocks away to avoid suspicion, then w
alk nonchalantly past the yard on the Payne Avenue side as if she were just a neighbor out for her constitutional. For a couple of amateurs they had done extraordinarily well. It galled her to admit it. She, after all, was Phyllis Sproot, Ph.D. in horticulture from the school that pretty much wrote the book on all the modern methods of gardening and lawn care. That would be the Honey Larson-Bayles School of Agronomy, which was a branch of the American Topsoil Institute.

  When Dr. Sproot received her diploma in the mail from Honey herself after six weeks of studying mail-order materials and taking some really tough quizzes, there was enclosed as well a special letter designating her as top student of the year. The diploma came in a cardboard tube, a rolled-up parchment specially treated to look old and crinkled, and tied up with a gold-tasseled purple ribbon. She had flattened it out with the help of an iron, then framed and mounted it on the mantle over the fireplace. Dr. Phyllis Sproot. Everyone could call her that now.

  That also meant it was only right and just that she should have the most beautiful grounds in Livia. So, why was it when people in north-central Livia talked about somebody’s gardens it was the Fremonts who got all the attention?

  Who were these Fremonts anyway?

  Well, for one thing, they appeared to be ignoramuses. From what Dr. Sproot could see so far, they had not yet discovered the magnificence of yucca and the glories of the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. That comforted her somewhat. Without yuccas, and a coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend, they were just gardening hoi polloi.

  It had come down in Dr. Sproot’s family through the generations that 11 percent of your gardens, minimum, must be given over to yucca. More recently, she had added her own contribution to the gardening canons: the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend! By her own calculation, arrived at after months of arduous study, and by virtue of her own special inspiration, a garden to be considered truly hallowed needed to be 71 percent coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. She reckoned her gardens to have now reached their optimal composition of 87 percent yuccas and coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. She leavened that with a smattering of roses, and four beds given over completely to dahlias. There was no need to go further.

  Dr. Sproot realized such practices defied the conventional wisdom. They were at odds with the popular practices of the time. But that was what genius did! Those touched by genius took the knowledge available to them, ingested it, churned it around with their special enzymes, then ejected it as a moist, rich manure the likes of which had never been seen, and which sat there, steaming, for the common rabble to behold and admire.

  Now, with Mort, that bozo of a husband, thankfully gone, and a generous life insurance benefit having come her way, Dr. Sproot was able to cut in half her work hours as the expert in high-priced Parisian perfumes at Cloud’s department store, and devote more time to perfecting her gardening craft. Who knew what even more stunning wonders she could create if she could ditch that rotten day job altogether.

  As Dr. Sproot mulled over this injustice, she realized that she was getting her introduction to another one. How magnificent, but how awful! What she and Marta were walking through reared up everywhere as a threat to her gardening hegemony. The depressing fact of the matter was there was a magical symmetry to the Fremonts’ yard, a wonderful blending of styles, structures, and the short and tall and monochromatic and polychromatic that gave it a magnificence she had to acknowledge.

  She and Marta continued on up the slope—clearly interlopers at this point—to examine the gardens. Here were all manner of pedestrian flora sprouting everywhere in an explosion of riotous colors. It was really quite remarkable, and it irritated her to be upstaged in such a manner by . . . by parvenus.

  What especially bothered her was what Marta had told her after a little arm-twisting and a few veiled threats: that there was a big contest on the horizon, a contest to determine the royalty of gardening in Livia. She wanted in the worst way to win it. She deserved to win it! She was the one who had worked the hardest, at the books as well as the soil. She was the one who had her Ph.D., knew to the hour when to deadhead her finished blooms, and had taken it all so much further by pioneering the concept of yucca and coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock domination. Now, here was this!

  “Ooooh, how pretty,” Marta cooed. She and Dr. Sproot bent over to study a bed of alyssum that had just bloomed in a small rock garden and was spreading among the crevices between the carefully placed stones. A simple thing easily nurtured. But so lovely! And so well placed to appear as if it sprang naturally from between the rocks! Dr. Sproot wandered on, absorbed in her study.

  How had they gained such skill? She had quizzed others who had seen their gardens, and Marta, who knew people who were friends of people who were close to the Fremonts.

  “They’re just beginners with beginner’s luck,” Marta assured her. “As you say, they have no pedigree and no formal knowledge. It’s like the time Ham and I went bowling after we hadn’t been bowling for twenty-five years. I rolled two strikes in a row to start off, then it was downhill from there. Beginner’s luck.”

  Marta said Dr. Sproot’s own stature, her membership in the right clubs, and the path she had blazed across the new frontier of gardening would surely be good for something, maybe even first prize. And first prize would be rightfully hers! She wouldn’t stand for second place. Wouldn’t stand for it!

  Marta kept shooting worried glances over her shoulder. A car trundled by on Payne Avenue, then a clanking pickup towing a trailer loaded with lawn mowers and trimmers.

  “Maybe we should go now,” Marta whispered so close to Dr. Sproot’s ear that it tickled.

  “Nonsense! We’re too far gone now to turn back. Finish the job!” They approached a trellis. It was artfully constructed and stained with a thin, washed-looking white, smothered in pink and red roses climbing on their canes to the top, the buds ready to burst out in all their glory.

  “What a charming trellis!” Marta said. “And it will be covered from top to bottom with such wonderful roses any day now!”

  “So what?” said a testy Dr. Sproot, annoyed by Marta’s awestruck and worshipful tone. “Anyone can do roses. Just put them in bright sunshine, water them, then let nature do the rest. And no yuccas or coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend anywhere to be seen. Who can win a contest without—ouch!”

  Dr. Sproot had pushed a finger into one of the cane’s sharp thorns until it broke the skin and a drop of blood oozed out. Marta smiled meekly, as if privately enjoying the sight of her blood.

  As they continued their slow traverse of the backyard, Marta quietly exulted in the simple, expansive, and varied beauty of the gardens, while Dr. Sproot labored to commit to memory every plant, flowering bloom, and pencil point of green pushing up through the carefully raked soil, and every little arbor and rock garden.

  “The judges will see this as a cluttered mess when a carefully conceived and formatted concentration of the proper types of flowers—such as mine on yuccas and coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend—is what really matters.”

  Marta nodded noncommittally.

  With the rose trellises on their right, they inspected a luxuriant bed of hosta. Dr. Sproot shook her head in disdain.

  “The true sign of a novice,” she said. “Anyone can do hosta. You have to almost try to kill hosta.”

  It was at that point that a wonderful thought occurred to Dr. Phyllis Sproot. Since the Fremonts were obviously not connected to Livia’s gardening circles, wasn’t there a good chance they would not be informed of whatever contest it was that was coming up? Or, maybe, even if informed, they would have no interest in it? Who would be sponsoring this contest anyway? Might it be Burdick’s? Really, that would be the only possibility, as Burdick’s was the only gardening emporium of the requisite size in Livia. It wouldn’t be any of the gardening clubs; she had membership in all of those. It must be Burdick’s and why hadn’t she been told it was Burdick’s? Marta wasn’t saying. She insisted that she was bound by oath to tell no more.

  Th
ey walked on toward a split-rail fence and the rather elaborate arbor and patch of woods beyond.

  “What in heaven’s name is that thing?” said Dr. Sproot, as they both stopped to examine a lifelike, painted woodcarving that reared up suddenly between them and the house.

  “Why, it’s a tree sculpture,” said Marta. “Someone carved it out of a tree trunk. I wonder who it’s supposed to be. Isn’t that something?”

  “It is grotesque,” Dr. Sproot barked as they continued on through the swinging fence gate. “If that’s not stark testimony to these people’s bad taste, I don’t know what is. To blot their gardens with such a monstrosity. Well, I never . . .”

  Having arrived at the strip of woods that marked the end of the gardens, Dr. Sproot and Marta turned to look back in silence on what they had just passed. Spreading out across the hill that sloped gently down to the street was a wonderland of the gardener’s craft. Who could do better? Marta sighed. Dr. Sproot scowled.

  What was this? To Dr. Sproot’s left were two sweet-smelling, medium-sized shrubs, adorned with dozens of menacing, erect, white flowers that looked like wide-mouthed blowguns aiming their poison darts directly at her. And that divine, seductive, and deadly scent!

  “Angel’s trumpets!” Dr. Sproot gasped.

  “Aren’t they just gorgeous!” Marta said. “I want them for my garden!”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Marta! They are deadly poisonous, that’s what they are! And mind-altering!”

  Dr. Sproot had to catch her breath. She felt faint. She was inhaling angel’s trumpet fumes; did that mean she’d start hallucinating?

  “Get away, Marta! Quickly!”

  Marta scampered to where Dr. Sproot had moved, farther downwind of the bushes, where Dr. Sproot felt they could breathe more freely. Marta was exhilarated and breathless with the joy of discovery. That annoyed Dr. Sproot, who figured it was more appropriate that she should be shocked.

  A noisy rattletrap of a car pulled up suddenly along the Payne Avenue curbside.

  “Run!” Dr. Sproot screeched.