Gardening

Jean-Louis was leaning out of his second-floor window. “Bonsoir, Dan!” I could hear the rumblings of a social gathering behind him – no music, just a cacophony of French voices battling for supremacy. I bonsoired him back and that would have been that, only my dog took the opportunity to evacuate by his front gate. “Montes boire un verre!” Jean-Louis was clearly drunk, but after 12 years of cordial nods, I momentarily allowed myself to believe I’d cracked the inner circle of village winemakers. And so, poop bag in hand, I politely accepted. Right away, it was clear that the vibe was off. Everyone had stopped talking and was looking at me as I stepped into the kitchen.

I adore broccoli, but I despise seeing it shrink-wrapped and kidnapped in the grocery store. The sight of those slightly compressed, yellowing florets sweating under fluorescent morgue lighting is a rude tap on the shoulder from dystopia. That’s why I was in my basement in late August, cleaning out the propagation tent while everyone else was still at the beach. My goal each year is to enjoy homegrown broccoli with Christmas dinner. In this corner of the Mediterranean, that’s about as likely as a French civil servant answering the phone after lunch. But with precision timing and bloody-mindedness you can pull it off. And after years of suffering those supermarket specimens, I’m determined to.

Véronique arrives 45 minutes late, a vision of practiced nonchalance and rustic affectation in a loose-fitting linen smock dress, clutching a wicker basket suspiciously devoid of wear. She regards my zucchini seedlings with mild distrust and incredulity, the way the French eye giant Spanish strawberries when they first start appearing in the local supermarket. The plants’ robust stems and glossy leaves look almost too healthy, especially given their minuscule nursery pots. Something is amiss. “C’est bio, ça?” she asks, though her tone suggests this isn’t really a question –more an ideological verbal tic than a genuine inquiry into my choice of potting mix. “Ben oui!” I smile with the practiced ease of a man who has told this particular lie many times before.

“C’est ma faute,” I called up to the local old boys as they strolled past my potager, chuckling among themselves. I tried to match their levity, but it was obviously affected; they could sense my panic. It was late-April and my garden resembled an eccentrically out-of-season Halloween scene, with tomato plants standing eerily motionless like infant ghosts, wrapped from head to toe in protective fleece. Everyone knows that 41°F is too cold for tomatoes, but spring had been deceptively warm, and I couldn’t help myself. AccuWeather had issued a grim prediction for the night’s minimum temperature. Only a few days previously, I had been openly proud that my plants had been in the ground for two weeks. I felt foolish and impetuous.

Nothing beats befuddling my French garden neighbors each year with ridiculously early, cold-resistant tomatoes. I live in a tumbledown village in the Languedoc, population just shy of 1,000, and come spring each year I make it my business to confound the local gardening orthodoxy. My secret weapon is a full-spectrum LED grow light in my basement. Shhhhh! It’s not as illicit as it sounds – yes, they really are tomatoes that I’m growing, officer. While the local vieux garçons are still sharpening their spades and waiting for the Tramontane wind to stop scaring the dogs, I’ve been working in my subterranean lair since January, coaxing my Solanum lycopersicum into early adolescence.

Let nobody sneeze at the horticultural arts. Francis Bacon devoted a moderately famous essay to the topic, beginning by pointing out that the very first garden designer was Almighty God. The garden, Bacon argues in his 1625 treatise, offers the purest of human pleasures. As a civilization approaches its peak, its creative geniuses tend to focus on perfecting architecture before finally, at the apex of its development, turning to the art of the garden. With a name like Bacon, Sir Francis might be pardoned for devoting especial attention to the kitchen garden, whence hail so many excellent pairings for salt-cured pork — roasted cabbage with bacon and pine nuts, for instance, or the inseparable bacon, lettuce and tomato.

They were neighbors and friends. Harold Loeb, an economist, writer and heir to the Guggenheim and Loeb fortunes, and his wife Vera lived down the Saugatuck River from us on Snake Drive, at the end of Buttonball Lane. Harold was better known as having been betrayed by Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 1930s — Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises was modeled after him. Harold got even in The Way It Was, published in 1959. He asked my father to sketch him for the book’s back cover. Among other things they had in common a gift for gardening. My father, known for his charcoal sketches of celebrated locals of Weston, Connecticut, planted a large, Walden-inspired plot surrounded by a white picket fence, where weeds were allowed as long as they didn’t interfere with the crops.

It is never easy to live next door to a retired Department of Agriculture employee. Quarantine has made it intolerable. I had always reassured the missus that our yard would look just like Mr Ray’s if I too spent all day at home. Coronavirus has exposed me as a liar. For four years I enjoyed my coffee and cigarette on the porch, digesting the New York Post’s reports of the calamities that had befallen the Mets in the previous 24 hours. Without baseball I spend my mornings staring out into the yard, reckoning with the fact that I am the New York Mets of landscaping. My wife has worked from home since 2011 and must have known all along. There’s a reason her office overlooks the front yard.