Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

29. Sunflower

146 & 29. Sunflower i’m dipping the red plastic bucket into a large blue container of water. As I pull the bucket up filled to the brim with clear lukewarm water I slosh a bit on my hands. Did Ann Bartram have a well where she drew her water those early years on her farm? I can’t remember. Or did the Bartrams draw water from the river? I know there was a well later. John Bartram mentions it in his will. Goldfinches hang from a cluster of purple sunflowers near me,and when I carry the bucket down the path to my plot in the community garden,I brush against the rough,sharp stalks of an ornamental grass grown to eight feet in my neighbor’s a garden. It’s almost a hundred degrees, and the air sucks the water from the earth immediately. I dump ten or more buckets on the tiny roots of cosmos and coreopsis, miniature Indian corn and peony,a boxwood bush I’ve rescued from the adoption plot, and the tall bent figures of the sunflowers my son loves. A tall man dressed in black yells from the sidewalk, “You know where the owner is?” “No, I don’t,” I yell back. Now I’m talking to George, who’s stopped by to take a look at things. I hand him my clippers and say, here cut yourself some flowers. The tall man comes through the new fence and says,“An Italian man that lives over there wants to rent a plot.” “It’s Steve,” I say,“who does that.” “Oh yeah, I know, I told him that.” “He’s not the owner, he just signs people up.” I can see how he might think Steve owns the place. Steve is an architect who strides sunflower 147 around much of the time in a kind of African bush outfit directing gangs of men as they pave the sidewalks or position the fence. But he’s doing it all for free, I think. The tall man disappears and then comes back.“Got a bag?”he asks. I pull a plastic bag from under a pile of weeds I’ve set aside for the compost heap. “I found this one,” I say. And I hold it as he plops his large ripe tomatoes into the wet interior. “Sure you don’t want some?” “No, I’ve got tomatoes on my deck.” “I grow melons on my windowsill, little ones, like this,” he says, and holds his large hands in a cup. “That’s a fig tree,”George says and points to a low, leafy tree in the middle of a neighbor’s plot.“You can eat them ripe off the tree.” We’ve been examining water these hot days. No water to swim in near us unless we plunged into the Schuylkill with the geese and ducks and skinny heron. A few days ago we followed the river to Hawk Mountain,where in the fall raptors fly quite close to the ledge that points north.In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, hundreds of men would stand on the long ridge and kill thousands of migrating birds as they flew close to the rocky edge. John Bartram took the same trip on his way to Onondaga, the council seat of the Six Nations,in NewYork in 1743.It was a hot day in early July.He followed the river north and west past Indian towns like Shamokin and the house of one of his companions,a negotiator named Conrad Weiser, who called himself “an ambassador to the Indians.” Bartram’s first version of the narrative of this journey was lost in 1744 on its way to Peter Collinson in England, when the ship that carried the manuscript was captured by the French. Two other copies of the work disappeared. The book was finally published in England in 1751:“made publick without the author’s knowledge.” Bartram swam in rivers “so clear one might have seen a pin at 148 kingsessing the bottom” and hung up his“blanket like a hammock.” He passed old Indian fields with “excellent soil” surrounded by the footsteps of deserted towns—peach trees, plums and “excellent grapes.” He was accompanied by Weiser, who spoke Iroquois, cartographer Lewis Evans from Philadelphia, and Shickellamy, a man they met in Shamokin,“the chief man in the town, which...