My career as a rose gardener begins in December of 1995, when I am shown an apartment in Brooklyn by a broker who apologizes for it as soon as she opens the door.
“It’s small,” she says, looking away, as if the sight of such a small place offends her and possibly also me. We walk into a large studio with high ceilings, the wood floor buffed to a high gloss. Beyond that, a sliding glass door shows a small wooden deck that leads to a yard at least as large as the apartment, a mud slick striped by a stone walkway. Wooden seven-foot-tall picket fences line the sides, and a chain-link fence closes off the back.
I don’t respond to the broker right away, because, as I enter the apartment and the sun fills the back window, I see, like an apparition, roses tossing in the air like a parade, pink, orange, red, white, all lit up by the sun. They appear and then are gone by the time I am fully inside the apartment, as if painted on a curtain someone has now drawn back.
I follow her into the yard and then back into the apartment while she talks through the apartment’s qualities, a short list: the rent is cheap. There is a garden. That’s about it. As she does so, the winter mud, the dead grass, the snow, these all seem like lies. I already feel like it is my home, and that the first thing I must do is plant a garden.
Before I grew roses, I had no talent for gardening that anyone knew about, including me. As a child I helped my mother garden, but I recall very little of it, except for placing pine needles and Styrofoam cones around her roses at our home in Maine, insulating them for winter. The single clue that I had any future as a gardener was in the long hours I spent in the woods alone, so many that my neighborhood nickname was Nature Boy. There I picked bouquets of wild black-eyed Susans, lilacs, and Queen Anne’s lace—whatever I found—to bring home for my mother. But I would not even dream of gardens until after I planted this one.
“Are you sure?” the broker asks me, as I fill out the application.
In the first days after I move in, I read books on garden design. In the previous months, I worked extra jobs like a demon to get the money to move, and it’s as if the effort has burned off all desire for conversation. I stay in, read my books, and make calls only when I need to, from a pay phone. When I am questioned by police, who suspect I’m a drug dealer, I get a line installed, but it feels like a concession.
The books all agree that proper gardens are planned to be different in every season, and seem to advise against the garden from my vision. The spring garden should have early color; the summer garden, a circus of full blooms; the fall, a harvest of deeper shades. The winter garden is a shape under the snow, or evergreens and the occasional mahogany red of a rose cane. Many gardeners try to match the colors and ground types and sun exposures; others compose with the scents in mind, as well, in the manner of a perfumer. One book instructs on how to layer bulbs at different depths, so that the crocus is replaced by the tulip, then the lily, the iris, the canna, and so on, with a last set of lilies to emerge in the fall. Some are planted to be seen at night, with fragrances only in the evening. Too much of a single variety, the books warn, will make the garden dull outside the season of the chosen plant’s blooming, and draw a dense number of pests.
I make my plan, sketching out a garden I do not want, and then my original idea asserts itself.
“I am planting a rose garden,” I tell a friend at what I chose as my local bar shortly after moving in, testing out saying it. It is January, dark and cold.
“Do you have a lot of sunlight?” he asks me.
“Yes,” I lie, unsure.
The next day I don’t have to work, and so I stay home all day and watch the sun move across the ground. One of the books recommends keeping a garden diary, tracking the sunlight exposures, the rains, the seasons starting and ending, and so I do. I record the first sunlight hitting my windows at seven-thirty and touching the ground in the back around eight. The sun leaves the last patch of dirt at 4 P.M. All roses, a guidebook said, need a good six hours of sunlight. I have more than enough, and the summer promised to have even more. The next morning, I turn back to my record of the sunlight and begin another entry.
The center of this block is an “H” of adjoining yards, variously planted and tended or, as in the yard on my right, abandoned. By spring, it will be clear that the bare wintry trees in the back will remain like this all year. The only living tree is a silvery magnolia, still dormant and inexplicably alive amid its dead cousins. “They were root-poisoned by the landlord,” my neighbor says when she emerges one day and introduces herself. Their taproots had endangered the pipes and foundations of the buildings. My neighbor is a young woman, roughly my age, living off of Social Security Disability Insurance due to AIDS, she tells me. I like her right away. She is new also, and almost always at home. She has plans for a lawn and a vegetable garden, and keeps a compost pile in the back corner of her yard, but she worries about the poison in the ground. “I’m testing the soil,” she says. “You should, too.”
The yard to my right is all trash bags of dead plants, an old bicycle, and a smashed fence, and is home to feral yard cats, a mother cat and her new brood. The three yards, my young neighbor’s, mine, and the abandoned one, are like variations on the theme of habitation: my neighbor’s yard is the neat one; mine, half spoiled; the last, a ruin. What appear to be metal ladders ascend from the yards, several stories high, notched with pulleys to hold laundry lines, strung over the yards with panties and sheets and towels hung to dry. Occasionally a sock or a panty falls into my garden. No one ever comes to ask for them, and, eventually, I throw them away. The only other neighbor I see for the first few months is an older woman opposite me, her hair a combed and brassy hat, who occasionally appears and leaves large metal bowls of cat food for the yard cats, who tumble nightly through my garden in yowling fights.
A good place to begin a garden is to undo the mistakes of previous owners. I tear up a stone walk, which occupies patches of ground feasting on sunlight. The mother cat, nursing her kittens, looks at me as if she has seen this happen before. I make a figure-eight path, irregular in the manner of handwriting, hollowing out the spaces for the stones before I water them into place and hop on them as they set.
My neighbor and I have conversations over our fence, each of us standing on a bench. We talk about getting the yard cats adopted. The tomcat suitors of the mother cat pass through the missing teeth of the fence at a high run, and we discuss whether repairing the fence will slow them down. She is also concerned about which pesticides and fertilizers I will use. I assure her I will not use chemicals without consulting her. She tells me she has planted dandelions, and I studiously do not laugh at her, instead quietly remembering summers spent pulling them out of my mother’s yard.
Roses, I discover in my research, appear delicate but have adapted to most climates. They can be made to bloom all through the year until winter. The more they are cut back, the faster they grow, and the stronger they are. I understand, as I read this, that I have found my role models.
Having decided that I will have the dull garden with just one type of plant, I begin with just ten roses—shrubs and climbers, a few floribundas and everbloomers. All are chosen for being described with words like “hardy” and “disease-resistant.”
As I wait for the order to arrive, I gather all the dead wood and giant dead stalks left from the sunflowers of the previous inhabitants. I bundle the wood branches with the idea that I’ll use them to stake the roses, until I remember that they’re poisoned.
The roses arrive, bare roots wrapped in a brown paper bag, looking like the sticks I cleared from the yard, except, touching the bag, I can feel they are alive, a halo of force against my fingertips. I understand immediately why people speak to plants as I draw a bath of cool water for them. I set the roots in the tub and step back, feeling crowded out of the bathroom.
I get into bed and can feel them still, in there, drinking the water. In the morning, I rush to put them in the ground.
Before the planting, I walk around the garden and set the tags of various roses in different spots, trying to decide on the final design. I dig three of the holes in quick succession. With the fourth, my spade hits cloth, and I put it down. Briefly, I imagine that I have discovered the murders that made the rent cheap. I go back and dig until I pull from the ground a pale blue cotton housedress, flecked with a flower-bud print and stained from the pale mud tea soaking the wet ground. It is light, the size of a small pillow. I set it down gently and with the spade’s blade push the folds of the dress back. At the center is a small crucifix and rosary, wrapped around a pile of small, thin bones. Among them are sharp fang teeth, one still attached to a piece of jawbone, reassuring me that this was once a cat or small dog. I place it all carefully into a trash bag, go to the corner bodega, and look for a saint’s candle, settling on Our Lady of Guadalupe, the avatar of the Virgin Mary, always painted surrounded by roses.
I light the candle and set it by the hole. In the rest of the garden, I find more bones. Some look to be birds, others the remains of a hundred feral-cat feasts. A dead rat is under the deck—I use the spade to remove it. I uncover piles of magazines that seem to have been put in the ground as landfill. I let the candle burn for hours, the way you’re supposed to, and when I put it out I consider the possibility that I’ve disturbed some kind of spell. I’ve never heard of a cat being given a Catholic burial—I imagine a small girl or boy doing such a thing. A private religion, a child’s insistence on the animal’s soul. Much like the nonbeliever who goes to the corner to buy a saint’s candle, just in case.
The more I think about the word “rosary,” the more I understand it must be related to “aviary,” “topiary,” and so on. When I check the definition, I see the first meaning is for the prayer, and then, in italics, that it meant “rose garden” in Middle English. How did the word for a rose garden come to connote a prayer? It begins, I learn, in the thirteenth century, when Albigensian dissidents claimed that the body belonged to the devil and the soul to God. There was no need, they said, to worry about carnal sins—they belonged, with the body, to the devil. The heresy spread, and France was soon in moral turmoil. As the story goes, Saint Dominic, concerned for the future of the Roman Catholic Church, prayed for guidance at Notre-Dame in Prouille. When the Virgin Mary appeared, she instructed him on the Angelic Psalter and told him he was to use this weapon against the heresy. It was Thomas of Cantimpré, a Dominican scholar in Flanders and a contemporary of Dominic’s, who, in a book he wrote on the lives of bees, described the Angelic Psalter as being like a circlet of roses to be offered up to the Virgin Mary. Shortly after the book’s publication, “rosary” earned and kept its current meaning.
Mary and roses have been linked since her death. On the third day after her burial, mourners at her tomb were said to have found her body gone and her shroud full of roses. The scent of a rose where none should be is now formally one of the signs of Mary’s presence. As a result, Catholics have tried to keep the number of rose varieties limited to a hundred and fifty, the number of beads on a rosary and the number of psalms in the prayer. The dead are often honored with roses, either left at their graves or planted there, and cemeteries are often home to some of the best heirloom varieties. It’s an old rose gardener’s trick to take cuttings from these roses, but I can’t allow myself to leave a cemetery with anything I didn’t bring in.
The rose I plant in the hole where I dug up the cat bones gives me no flowers for the first two years. In the catalogue it was listed only as “special climber,” and so I wonder if it is a mutant dud sold on the cheap. As a joke to myself, I rename it the Voodoo rose, after its first mute year. For two years it only grows stalky and huge, whipping in the wind with seven- and eight-foot canes. The absence of blossoms feels like a sulk at the garden’s corner.
In the third year, when it finally buds, I feel forgiven. Thick clouds of teacup-size pink blossoms appear. My neighbor stares. “They’re so beautiful,” she says. “What did you do?”
I shrug. I do not feel at all responsible.
The Voodoo rose soon becomes the garden’s bully, alluring and cruel, often looking as if it’s reaching for the Climbing Blaze I planted at the garden’s center, or whipping at the Thérèse Bugnet next to it. Its thorns are especially long, and sometimes I find clots of cat fur on it. Occasionally, when I’m working in the garden, it smacks my head lightly, as though mocking me, and sometimes it draws blood.
The two Rosa rugosas I’ve planted seem not to take to the rich diet I feed them, and are perhaps more accustomed to the briny stones of a beach in Maine. They have long, woody, spiny stems, with a kind of hat of blossoms at the top. They always seem to want to leave.
They are on my mind when I drive to Maine, at the beginning of my garden’s first summer, with my brother and sister and her husband, who all laugh when I ask to stop at plant nurseries. We are going to celebrate our cousin’s wedding and visit my aunt, a lifelong gardener who has become a florist and landscaper in Rangeley, near the border of Canada. My aunt’s yard is full of plantings, many vigorous roses among them. I explain to her my garden and ask for her help. She offers me a ten-pound bag of manure. “Roses love manure more than just about anything,” she says. My siblings refuse to allow it in the car. “I’ll mail it,” she says, and laughs, and then sends me home instead with something called seaweed tea, a noxious brew of seaweed and what I grew up calling “gurry”: the remains of gutted fish.
“It has a smell, too,” she says, “but not until you put it in the pail. And this might be the one thing roses love more than manure.”
We stop at the beach on our way back to New York, near our mother’s new place in Biddeford. I stroll the boardwalk of Kennebunkport, the beach lined with sea-rose hedges. These are the sea roses of my childhood, the ancient variety that seems to me the hardiest of them all. I follow a line of greenery out along a spit of sand and rock to a sandbar, where I come across a sea rose perched on, or, really, around, a granite boulder. The rock has tumbled into the beach, so the rose is growing at an angle, reaching for the sun, new buds flourishing. The ocean and the rose compete to break the boulder apart.
When I return from Maine, home again, I open the door to my apartment, afraid my roses will be withered, fainting, dead. There’s been no rain for four days. I rush to the back, where I find them giddy, hurling color up from the ground.
I test everything I hear about a rose. I try the seaweed tea my aunt gave me. It has the rank, terrible smell of a fish left out in the sun. Not even the feral cats approach while the scent is in the air. I plant garlic and onions at the feet of two bushes to make the roses too bitter for aphids, and when the summer arrives they smell hotly of garlic and onions, and the aphids continue eating them all the same. I use soda water for some of the feedings, to aid the greening, and it seems to work. I take a pitchfork and stab at the earth to aerate the roots. Every so often I pee into a pint glass and shake it along the garden’s edge, to keep the worst of the cats at bay. Or, at night, alone, or seemingly alone, I leave it there myself. The cats do seem to come less.
My neighbor peers over my yard to check my progress. “Gorgeous,” she says. Her yard is still impeccably neat, whereas the kindest thing you can say of mine is that it is an untidy cottage garden, a mix of what I meant to plant and what was left behind by others. Sunflowers have come up, uninvited guests from the previous tenants, along with a miraculously large phlox and peppermint flowers, pearly tines at the end of the fragrant spirals of green I pull from the ground every week.
On the deck in the morning, I admire the blossoms’ whirl. It is not yet as high as I’d like. I want to feel surrounded by them, to feel that someone left a hundred bouquets in my yard while I slept. I dead-head the spring blossoms and am gratified by the thick summer blooms that follow. I notice the Joseph’s Coat roses at the back of the garden and decide it’s time to see them up close. As I near, the largest bloom quivers, and the shiny backs of nine Japanese beetles emerge, combing the petals with their horned mandibles, oil black and oil green, chomping hard.
I run to the house and return with my pyrethrin spray, foaming the rose until the beetles slide to the ground. Pyrethrin is my favorite bug killer. Nontoxic to humans, it is a paralytic agent. The bug cannot move and dies as its metabolism burns its very spare stores of energy.
It occurs to me, sweeping beetles from the ground, that I never had the urge to kill a thing until I started growing roses.
I become someone who takes his own roses to dinner parties, usually the Voodoo roses, as the plant provides the vast number of blooms needed to make such a gift. When I walk past the new flower shop next door with one such bouquet, the owner is shocked, praises them, and asks where I got them. Soon I am providing her with a bucket of them to sell.
I throw my own parties, and the garden fills with people drinking around the roses. I have affairs, boyfriends. One summer I learn about garden feng shui, and map my body onto the garden. Shortly after, an outbreak of cane borer seems to predict exactly a case of crabs.
I eventually take pity on the sea roses and remove them. In an unscientific gesture that I also feel very sure of, I take them to the beach in Maine and leave them out on the rocks to fend for themselves.
When I first arrived to the apartment, I was trying to write my first novel. After eight years, after I finish and publish it, I become restless, and talk about moving. People say, “What about your garden?” They mean the roses. They arrived by truck, I tell them. They can leave that way, as well. I speak as if I could take them with me. In the end, though, when I do move, I leave them there, deciding they belong to the place and not to me.
Now, when I am back in the neighborhood and I pass my old apartment on the street, I like to think that, if I were to go in, I would find my roses, huge from their seaweed tea and the many years of six hours’ sunlight, perhaps having grown legs, ready to push down the building and walk out to the street, striking cars out of their way and slicing the blacktop to ribbons. I want to think that they miss me, their erstwhile tormentor, cutting and soaking them in the blazing sun from spring to winter. From the street, from across the river, I can feel them still, the sap pulsing in their veins, pushing their way to the sky.
This is an excerpt from “How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee,” to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.