Born and bred a New York City girl, with a grandmother whose garden policy was “do not touch,” I have advanced past my fear of plants nibbled in the night, my black thumb stage, a vegetable patch too far from the hose, pest attacks and learning to live with weeds. I planted Rose of Sharon, blue hydrangeas, voluptuous mallows, butterfly bushes, herbs, hopefully hardy colorful blooms inside my white picket Edgartown fence, and then we moved to Chilmark where a view took precedence over planting. There was a small herb garden and mostly hydrangeas around the house. A virtual blank slate. Visiting with gardeners, I am struck by the deep relationship of each person to their garden, and of course no two are alike.
Cynthia and Howard’s side-by-side gardens
I started going to Cynthia Riggs’s home eight years ago when I joined the Cleaveland House Poets. It would be difficult not to notice the abundance of colorful flowers that surround this 1750s home. Before Howard (Howie) Attebery’s arrival last year, Cynthia created a grape arbor one year and sure enough the first season saw a bounty of glistening grapes. Another year she trimmed the wisteria and added an arbor to the small garden outside the mudroom entrance. Five years ago, she installed a ten-foot screen fence around her 30 foot square vegetable garden and now out-produces both her sisters whose properties abut hers. Cynthia’s love of gardening and of working with her hands in the dirt was fostered by her parents, mainly her father who grew all the family vegetables. The garden she tends was initially started nearly 50 years ago. Always encouraged by her dad, Cynthia remembers going to their garden in bare feet and picking something — beans, a tomato — wiping it clean on her shorts and enjoying it fresh.
Now married to Howie for one year, Cynthia has made a few changes. Howie bought her an indoor stand for her pots and trays, plus some grow lights, so this year she started her seedlings and they did not wilt, but flourished under ideal conditions. The little fenced-in garden was started by a couple who lived on the Island temporarily last summer; Cynthia gave them a patch to plant. Since it had all been dug up, reconditioned with compost, then horse manure from Linda Alley and just filled with weeds, Howie decided to make his own garden side by side with Cynthia’s.
One of the funny things this year, Cynthia tells me, “I planted parsnips. I love parsnips, but Howie is not fond of parsnips. But I planted them anyway.” And with a look of complete surprise, she admits, “They didn’t come up. Not a one.” She continues, “I just dug up that patch, they didn’t even germinate. I’ll plant something else there.” He likes zucchini and has ten zucchini plants, then Cynthia adds, “One zucchini plant will feed a family of twelve. Howie has always grown zucchini and not much else. Howie’s grandfather had a vegetable garden and his grandmother had a flower garden in Napa, California, when he grew up, but mostly he got to take care of the chickens back then. He thinks zucchini is the easiest vegetable to grow.” Howie’s garden has a tiered, circular motif which Cynthia purchased from Gardeners Supply Company, but he put it together, installed it in the garden dead center and planted his crops, three summer and six winter squash as well as strawberries. His first batch didn’t do so well, so Cynthia pulled some of her strawberry plants for Howie to transplant into his garden and they’re doing just fine — all 35 of them.
They consider the big vegetable garden “their garden,” even though Cynthia does the work in it. They have swiss chards, kale, beets, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, pole beans, cucumbers, peas, lettuce, and spinach. Howie adds, “Cynthia is into this companionship of plants; she has two books, Roses Like Garlic and Carrots Love Tomatoes, so she has this all plotted out. She does her rows and they have to be compatible.” When I offer what I heard from Kim Rome, that coffee grounds are good around tomatoes, Howie adds, “I think they keep the snails away.” Cynthia says, “Aahh, I didn’t know that, let’s start saving them and not just putting them in compost.” I check online later to find out yes, coffee grounds keep snails, ants, and slugs away from plants besides increasing the size of vegetables when in compost.
I ask about fruit and she lets me know her tenant, photographer Lynn Christoffers, has been put in charge. Her first year, she did grapes. Cynthia says, “She mastered that, so we added raspberries. So she oversaw grapes and raspberries, then grapes, raspberries, and blueberries. Then we went on to blackberries, and now we’ve gone onto kadota figs, kiwis and hops.”
I am curious about the hops, whether Cynthia is now making beer. She tells me her grandson was here last summer and loves Offshore Ale. So her grandson harvested all the hops, took them to Offshore Ale where they went into a special brew called Hops Farm Ale and their hops were 3 percent of the brew. In payment they received two growlers to take home. One year Cynthia made wine, but it did not hold her interest the way the flowers and vegetables do. She makes “jars and jars and jars of jams.”
When I ask Howie how much time Cynthia spends in the garden, he smiles and says, “as much as she can.” And adds chuckling that he, “spends the smallest amount he can.” Howie said he’s most surprised by “the weeds that come up. You get rid of one and then there’s a different type coming up.”
Cynthia says, “I love to weed, it’s just the time it takes.”
Howie adds, “When she weeds it’s like a symphony. Her hands are moving. She picks it up, shakes the dirt off. She’s so tender. She’s so sorry to destroy that weed, it’s living and then she puts it carefully in her basket to compost it. So in a sense it keeps living. I just love to see her hands and how they go. It doesn’t matter that she has dirty hands, I grab her hands and I kiss them.”
So gardens and love do go hand in hand.
A garden for a year-round home
Kim Rome and Gary Stuber moved to their new year-round home at the beginning of June and actually got to start their first garden together one week prior. Gary has not had a garden since he was a full-time carpenter and subsistence farmer in Hillsdale, N.Y., “many years ago” and Kim, who grew up in Cincinnati, has never had her own garden. The garden came with their rental and was “presented as an opportunity, not an obligation,” but was filled with knee-high weeds. They spent the first week preening, weeding, and cleaning out the existing raised beds. One area was filled with tomato cages that have been moved to another bed.
Kim says, “Half the herbs were there — lemon balm, oregano, and the chives and we planted; the thyme, cilantro and basil, the tarragon and the mint. And we planted these lettuces.” Kim likes the way they look with the ground cover. The variety of lettuces include red-butterhead, butterhead-bliss-bib, arugula, oak leaf and bok choy. Then there is a row of alternating radishes and carrots. They learned from Liz at SBS to thin them; then the radishes make room for the carrots to get fatter. Kim points to an empty space and says, “This was a watermelon. It died and I’m putting another in the ground.” She continues pointing out nasturtium, sweet peas, haricot-vert, provider beans, cucumbers, red sunflowers, yellow squash, zucchini, and patty pans. More basil with the tomatoes. Marigolds to keep bugs away. More nasturtium. Six kinds of tomatoes.
The back wall of the garden is lined with pink and white peonies that are beginning to bloom. Though Kim admits she did not know what she was doing when she thinned them, they are hardy. Kim wonders about putting coffee around the bottom of the tomatoes. Next she is pointing out a couple of flower beds and the pepper bed: jalapeno, serrano, rosemary and sage and a fairy-tale eggplant that Kim says she had to get because of the name. As Kim talks, Gary continues weeding and prepping.
Gary has taken a “cut and paste” approach to making the irrigation system operate, as the pile of short hose pieces in the center of the garden suggest. Gary adds, “Every day I find a new section that either needs to be replaced or rebuilt. It works and has a timer.” In the back he shows me the strawberries and says, “We kind of waited to see what was going to happen. These plants are too mature to really bear fruit. They weren’t cut back at the right time; September is when they really need to be thinned out and cut back. There are a couple little strawberries.”
They are waiting to see if they have raspberries or blackberries growing. Gary had lived in one place on the island for 20 years but has moved at least 20 times just in the last four years. Kim has not had a year-round home in 30 years. Kim and Gary have been together for the last 6 years. Moving to this year-round rental and beginning the garden work one week before moving in they have noticed “a whole layer of stress just disappeared, according to Kim. “And now we feel solid and open and blooming and feel reconnected to the earth and each other.” They feel like they could spend the rest of their lives in their new home.
Kim and Gary garden together. She asks whether she can plant sweet William in a certain corner. Gary oversees their work. While Kim admits, “I love garden tools. [Laughing] I really do! I’m totally into the clippers and I’m totally into the trowel. I love the trowel, digging into the earth, it changes color, I can smell it. It’s awesome.” Everything in their garden was in a state of stagnation and they’re bringing it to life. Kim is pointing, “Those are zinnias; they’re going to come up.” The she is showing us false-indigo. “I think it’s called Baptisia. And evidently it will spread like a weed. I put this in the corner, honey, because I think it will come around and I want a big bush of it over the years, since it’s a perennial. And it’s just for beauty.” Kim has a seed packet in hand and asks Gary how far she should plant them apart. There is a package inside the envelope and she is concerned because they are minute seeds. Kim starts to plant and Gary lends a seasoned hand, poking holes in the dirt that Kim follows with seeds and covers them.
They plan to cover the black cloth that runs between the raised beds with straw. Gary adds, “The weeding was the bulk of the work,” in a garden they oversaw at their last summer rental. Kim would love to have a cherry tree and a peach tree in the future. In the meantime, she has reached out on Facebook to “anyone who knows how to make things grow from the ground.” She has learned that “lemon balm is a great natural insect repellant, is good in honey.” They discuss putting in sweet peas that need support and Gary suggests an old gate that Kim agrees will look “really cool.”
I ask if gardening together has changed anything in their relationship. Kim laughs and tells Gary to go first. He starts, “We’re really good partners in the process. So I think it really hasn’t changed since we work so well together.” Kim agrees and adds, “It’s definitely made a deepening. There is something important about working in the garden together. It’s a sweetness. It’s meditating together. Especially when we come in at the end of the day and come out here in the soft light and quietly do things, it’s growing love.”
