Bay and Rosemary

When I was 16, my mother took me to the Massachusetts Bay Horticultural Society’s Garden Show, set up in a echoing convention center in Boston. It was an exceptionally good year for displays—mounds of hyacinths on every corner. Daffodils in barrels. Azaleas everywhere. Rustic garden structures and sheds. I sniffed every bloom, stroked every leaf, breathed in the warm moist air that smelled of soil, reluctant to move back out into the slushy grey world of New England in late February.  The plant that I most remember, though, was an old and gnarled rosemary in a terra cotta pot. How did the owner keeps such a tender perennial alive?

For years, I nurtured rosemary plants in terra cotta pots. I set the pots into the soil in the summer, so that the plant could feel at home outside and not dry out. I brought them in for the winter, giving them the prize sun spot in my chilly old apartments. They would live for a few years, growing about half as big as the one I saw at the garden show. I would be cautiously optimistic.  Then they would grow faint, and develop mildew, and slowly fade away. I dreamed of armfuls of herbs—rosemary, bay, oregano, mint—but the climate and my rental status made it impossible.

Then I moved west, settled in the Willamette Valley and bought a house. Our first summer, after I finished painting the exterior of the house, I bought rosemary and daphne plants for under the bedroom window. The rosemary grew. And Grew. And Grew. It sprawled. Another one sprouted from the crack between the sidewalk and the steps. A third masqueraded as lavender at a plant sale and has taken over the planting strip in from of the house. Now, in order to walk down the sidewalk, or into the front door, I prune armloads of rosemary every spring.

At the same time, we bought a Bay sprig—about a foot tall—and planted it in the old rosemary terra cotta pot. It grew on the front porch for several years, then we moved it to an oak barrel in the side yard. Close enough to harvest the leaves easily, but also creating a little barrier to the neighbor’s parking space. It was a sturdy little tree for a long time. One spring day, Mark brushed his bike against it on the way to the back yard. “I think it has broken through the barrel,” he observed. “It’s Growing.” It was heading for the sky, rapidly. Bay trees, I realized, are trees. And, with our shifting climate and urban location, this bay was no longer held in check by colder winters—or by the barrel that still surrounds it. It grows, two, three, four feet a year. If I let it go, it would take over the columnar apple on one side, the gooseberry and tea plant on the other. So I prune armloads of bay, every spring.

Over time, our yard has grown up around us. We have armloads of herbs every year, bushels of potatoes, buckets of apples and plums, enough figs to feed the entire neighborhood. This growth comes, mostly, not from my skills as a garden planner, but from lucky accidents, mature plantings, time and climate—allowing my plants to take deep root in the earth, like us.