Gladioli

It was that rare spring moment. The morning was cold, but the breeze felt baked. Their naked green stalks were just emerging from the dirt. In English the flower is called gladiolus, meaning little sword, from the Latin gladius, like gladiator. The word has another nested in it, glad, from the Old English for bright and shining, conditions necessary to coax the pointy tips of the leaves from their fibrous tunic, ridged planar leaves that fan out well before the blooms ascend in a snug, upright swirl. Even nude, the shoots were so showy, knocking around behind my son while he dug in the front yard with a little shovel. Far off, an ambulance sounded, then another. From the top of a cruddy palm tree down the block, a crow squawked. Still in pajamas, hair unbrushed, I marinated in the musk of my own coffee breath, eyed them with suspicion and ceremoniousness, remembering how carefully I’d buried belowground their hard little corms brought home months ago in a brown paper bag I bought in a white paper mask when nurseries were one of the few places outside our home where George and I could go. Soon they should bloom. What is soon anymore? (Soon is June). I want to like these gladioli. I don’t know yet if I will.

Maybe it was the Santa Anas stirring up strong feelings in me. Dry winds on my skin, a novelty in April and an unsettling signal of fire season down the line. But I joined a kinship of belligerence with the crow. Why should a flower be subjected to the iniquities of conventional taste? Isn’t it our important lives that could be called incidental? If every flower perished overnight, people wouldn’t last very long, but in the reverse scenario, flowers would persist. Flowers might even thrive.

Maybe it was Monet. I thought of him again, as I do lately. How he’d be up to his hips in geraniums, tending to his zinnias, his daylilies, his forsythia at that pink house with the green shutters and yellow kitchen amid the sound of gunfire falling fifty miles away in Paris.

Maybe it was a Manny Farber painting I saw at MOCA a few years ago in an intimate, associative exhibition on Termite Art, back when I went to that museum whenever I felt the urge and found the energy to confront its subterranean parking lot — which is to say, far less than I would’ve gone had I known soon I could not.

By now, I was riled up. Why should gardening get subjugated to the pejorative decorative? Approached in a spirit of reciprocity, gardening offers an antidote to the nullifying status quo. Gardening has no business being sidelined into an absorbing distraction from the chaos of life. To garden is to plunge into the undone, unpredictable, tenacious nature of things. Gardening is an act of defiance.

It’s so easy to forget. That Giverny was more than the site of masterful paintings made there, more even than Proust said: “The garden itself is like a real transposition of art, rather than a model for painting, for its composition is right there in nature itself and comes to life through the eyes of a great painter.” That the forty-plus years between 1883 and his death, in 1926, when Claude Monet concerned himself so keenly with those six acres, encompassed the upheaval and atrocities of World War I as well as the ugliness of its industrial aftermath. In occupying himself with that land so insistently, imaginatively, day after day as he had been doing for decades, Monet was enacting a long-form practice of making peace wherever you can get some. Giverny was a rebuke to violence in the face of violence.

The garden was also an access to an ongoing relationship with grief. By the time he painted his stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé, in Monet’s Garden at Giverny (1895), his first wife, Camille, had died, he had married Alice Hoschedé, and Suzanne, having become his preferred model, had already stood for his paintings often. She is the female figure in The...