What we lost in the fire

The garden that broke my heart

I’m in a broken space but unwilling to write about the thing that has broken me. Alongside the many other reasons, there’s a certain pettiness in operation. I just don’t want to give those jerks the satisfaction.

Instead, I want to share with you the story of the garden that broke my heart: the sweet little potager with herbs and flowers that was the view from my kitchen window for far too short a time. Here’re the videos I posted on YouTube about a month before we were forced to chop it all down.

Yes, I did say we chopped this—and a whole lot more—down. What happened? In a word, bureaucracy.

Our pollinator paradise was declared a fire hazard and the landlady’s insurance adjustor refused to renew unless we cut everything within eight feet of the perimeter of the house to the ground.

As in, the peach tree and the “pink diamond” and double-file hydrangeas and the angel’s trumpet that was always the last thing to bloom before frost? To the ground. As in, the view from my kitchen window—my sweet potager? To the ground.

We’d moved to rural South Carolina because it was the only place I could find work at the tail end of the Great Recession amid the ever-shrinking possibilities in my academic field and the need to be close to my dying mother. My husband gave up his industry peers and clients and packed up in support. We arrived in town flat broke with all our belongings winnowed down to one large POD and not one but two carefully loaded box truckloads of heirloom and historic plants following in our wake…

Growing new roots is no easy thing at any time of life—still less so when the prelude to the move and the job was to be the funeral of my mother. But hope, the little feathery thing, is hard to repress. So, we gave our hearts to the land—our whole hearts—and five years later got them ripped out over … what was in essence a technicality—someone’s idea of a garden clashing with someone’s idea of a lawn.

Who gets to live in paradise? In a society like ours, with its boom and bust economic cycles and the need to move, sometimes frequently, to maintain competitiveness at work… almost nobody.

So maybe paradise is too big of an ask. Who gets to live … simply on, or close enough to be in communion with, the land? In a society like ours where land is a commodity and hoarded like every other commodity by the wealthy, again, almost nobody. Still, we dream and we desire. We watch Chip and Joanna Gaines or plug into influencers with llamas. We arrange pots on a sunny patio or sign up for a community plot— and we plan and hope, and some of us find our way to the dream.

But in a country like ours, anything can be taken from you at any time and they can do it legally whether or not it makes a lick of sense. Kind of like this situation we’re in now collectively, if you know what I mean, as the slavering doppelganger of the American Dream slouches its way to Bethlehem for an unholy second coming.

The potager—”they” took it away, and I’m in striking distance of the point so hang in there.

Had it been our place, there’s no question we’d have fought the judgment—gotten another insurer or even a lawyer if we got mad enough. But it wasn’t ours—and the landlady deserved a fair shot at getting the price she’d set for her grandfather’s place... So we steeled ourselves and cut it all to the ground.

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I’ve wanted to share the story of how we got here, to this patch of earth, for some time. But it was such a sad story, I held off.

Remembering “Old Bellaflora,” though, the beauty we made there and our leaden hearts and limbs as we were forced to destroy it, I’m oddly comforted—because the re-election of Donald Trump may have cost me all faith in humanity—and that’s been a heavy weight—but I can honestly say that losing that garden … was worse.

We’re going to lose things—possessions, sure, but also friends, love, hope, connections—and even for those who feel most insulated, it’s started. Heading into a season of greater losses and violent transition, it’s useful to know what represents the worst that could happen. And to be prepared to defend against it.

Here are a few more images of the land that I loved—and lost.