The death of a garden

I've told many of you about the three summers that I spent working as an assistant to Peter Lindtner, the horticulturist in the French Garden at Hagley Museum in my home state. Some of you (and I won't name names) may have thought that I was fibbing when I told you about it; a position which, though incorrect, I can entirely understand.

Anyway, I went to visit the garden two weeks ago, and everything seemed amiss; many of the once beautifully-pruned Espalier fruit trees were overgrown, denuded by deer, or were blackening with fireblight. The four planting blocks seemed unusually sparse, empty spaces that ought to have been filled with billowing sunflowers, tobacco plants, artichokes and zinnias.

It was the opposite problem in the herb garden, where the mint had made a rapid conquest, choking its neighbors beneath a mound of strongly scented leaves (Mint tends to do this. Friends, do not plant mint in your backyard, unless you want to have a mint lawn in a few years).

There was no sign of Peter. I found a groundskeeper (a new guy, since I didn't recognize him) planting a row of cauliflower in one of the blocks- unheard of; it took me almost two years before Peter trusted me to plant a row. But Peter, he told me, had retired a month ago. There was a story about it in the Delaware News Journal. Dazed, I started telling this groundskeeper about how I used to work for Peter and about all of the places in the garden that desperately needed tending. Look, I said, there's fireblight on all of these fifteen year old dwarf pear trees and if you don't prune them soon they are going to die. Make sure that you use clippers soaked in rubbing alcohol or you're just going to spread the disease. The groundskeeper was a well-intentioned fellow and followed me around the garden and promised to do what he could to take care of things.

Then I found a couple of people on the staff that I knew and spoke to them about Peter; the feeling was that he had left because was tired of being underappreciated by the management, who had for years ignored his requests for more assistance in tending his garden. It's an impossible space for one person to take care of, very difficult for two, but in the summers when I worked there I was essentially the only help that he had.

Peter gave a month's notice before he retired, and in that time, museum management made no effort to find a successor for him to train. So at the beginning of May, Peter left Hagley a garden in good shape, but took all of his expertise with him. The tour guides still bring groups through there, and they talk in vague terms about how Peter prunes the dwarf pear trees, as if he still does it.

I hear that he's home working on a book about local wildflowers. I know that it broke his heart to leave. He loved that garden.

Hagley still has no candidates for his job, and the deer, seeming to sense that the garden no longer has a guardian, have moved in. The day after I visited, I came back and planted a row of tobacco, and did a little bit of weeding- the first time I've volunteered for anything out of grief. But now I'm working 9 to 5 at DuPont and I don't have time to go back there, so I suppose it's time to accept that the garden that I've loved for five years and that Peter Lindtner loved for thirty five years is gone.

-Mike