The Garden Plot

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Arne, Dekyi and their garden are invented. Seattle's P-Patch community gardens are real, and what is said about slugs, tomatoes and the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

The waiting list

Arne Haugland waited two years for a garden plot. On the first Saturday in March he arrived at seven in the morning with a tape measure, a ball of string, a soil thermometer and a plan drawn on graph paper.

He was seventy-four. For thirty-eight years he had designed hydraulic systems for airliners at a plant north of the city, and he did not hold with anything that could not be drawn to scale.

The garden was a P-Patch, which is what Seattle calls its community gardens: a slope of small plots between a church parking lot and a ravine full of Douglas firs. The P, he had read, stands for Picardo, the family whose farm became the first one, and not for peas. He approved of that. It was a fact.

The plot next to his looked as if it had lost an argument. Last year's kale stood up in bare stalks like broken umbrellas. Garlic came up through the straw in no particular order. A tower of empty yogurt tubs stood on an upturned bucket. And kneeling in the middle of it all, in a faded red rain jacket three sizes too big, was a small woman, murmuring.

He assumed she was on the phone.

The beans

Her name was Dekyi. She was forty-four, had grown up in a Tibetan family in Nepal, and had lived in Seattle for twelve years. Five nights a week she cleaned offices in a tower downtown, from nine at night until five in the morning. Then she came here, at first light, before she went home to sleep.

“Gardening is how I go to bed,” she said. “Some people have a bath.”

She weeded fast, with both hands, and the murmur went on underneath, low and even, the same shape over and over, like a pump running somewhere in a building.

On the third morning Arne leaned on his hoe and asked whether she was talking to the beans.

She laughed. It was a prayer, she said: the Seven-Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, whom Tibetans remember for helping Buddhism take root in their country. Her mother had said it over the cooking. Dekyi said it over the weeds. “Seven lines,” she said. “Then you start again. Like weeding.”

“I'm an engineer,” said Arne. “I don't go in for that.”

“That's fine,” said Dekyi. “Neither do the beans.”

Frost

In the middle of April came one warm week, and Arne planted out six tomatoes. Dekyi looked at them, and then at him. The old hands at the garden said nobody in Seattle should plant tomatoes before the middle of May. Tomatoes, she said, come from somewhere warm, and they do not forgive.

He showed her his soil thermometer. She went back to her garlic.

Four nights later there was frost, and Arne, asleep at home, had not looked at the forecast. At half past five in the morning, straight from work, Dekyi folded six flattened boxes from the office recycling into six small houses, laid her own fleece blanket over the top and weighted the corners with his bricks.

Five of the six survived. Arne stood looking at the blanket for some time. The next morning he brought a second cup with his thermos of coffee and set it on her bucket without a word. After that he always brought two.

Slugs

May was slugs. Arne sank jars of cheap beer into the soil to drown them. Dekyi killed nothing. Every morning she picked the slugs off her lettuces into a yogurt tub and carried them down to the edge of the ravine, telling them it was a very good place, with lots of leaves.

Protecting life, she told him, is the first of the ten good actions her tradition teaches. “And one of the others is giving up idle chatter and saying prayers instead. So I am being very virtuous, and you are being chatter.”

Arne had been reading about slugs. The big yellow banana slugs, he said, were natives of these coastal forests, and mostly ate dead leaves. The black ones eating her lettuce had come from Europe. “Like your grandfather,” said Dekyi. “My grandfather,” said Arne, “did not eat lettuce at night.” She carried them down to the ravine anyway.

Swapping tools

In June the drizzle came every morning for nine days, the fine Seattle kind that hardly counts. They sat in the doorway of the tool shed and swapped. He lent her a steel trowel he had sharpened himself. She lent him a short, heavy, flat-bladed hoe that had come from Nepal in a suitcase and weighed as much as a brick. He said it was badly balanced. He used it all summer.

She asked what aircraft hydraulics were. He explained for twenty minutes. She said it sounded like her prayer: the same thing going round and round, and something heavy lifting at the end. He said it was nothing like a prayer. He thought about it for the rest of the day.

The third line

One morning he asked what the prayer actually said. She gave him its sense in a few plain words: where Guru Rinpoche came from, how he was born in a lotus, his name, the great gathering round him, the wish to follow him, and at the end, asking him to come.

Her favourite was the third line, which says that he gained a wondrous, supreme accomplishment. The Tibetan word is ngödrup. The tradition speaks of two kinds: ordinary accomplishments along the way, and the supreme one, which is enlightenment itself.

Arne considered this as an engineer. “So what's the deliverable?” “Enlightenment.” “Timeline?” She thought about it. “For me? Many lifetimes.” “I'd have cancelled that project,” said Arne, and Dekyi laughed so hard she had to sit down in the chard.

Tomatoes

By July the argument about tomatoes had settled into a war. Arne's five stood in a frame of steel conduit, pruned to single stems and tied every eight inches. Dekyi's grew in a heap, propped up on old kale stalks, and were told the prayer every morning whether they liked it or not.

Seattle summers are dry, and the garden was a long way from the tap. One Saturday Arne laid a drip line along his rows, and then kept going, under the string, along hers. He did not ask. She did not mention it. It was, she understood, how an engineer says something.

Quiet

In September her company moved her to a building on the far side of the lake, and her shift ended later. For two weeks she hardly came.

Arne came at seven, as always. The garden was very quiet. A crow walked along the path. It took him several mornings to work out what was wrong, and when he did he was annoyed. Once, years ago, he had worked for months beside a test rig with a big pump, and only heard its hum on the day it stopped.

He had been listening for her: not for the words, which he did not know, but for the shape of them. Seven lines, then start again. He did not take up the prayer. He was still an engineer. He only found that he was waiting for it, the way you wait for a kettle.

The harvest

At the end of the month her shift moved back. Arne weighed every tomato on a kitchen scale and wrote it in a notebook: forty-one pounds from five plants. Dekyi weighed nothing. Her heap had produced more than his, possibly twice as much, which neither of them said aloud.

They packed what they could not eat into crates for the food bank, as P-Patch gardeners do every year. Dekyi made sepen, a Tibetan chilli sauce, from both their tomatoes. Arne tried one spoonful and coughed for a full minute. “That,” he said, when he could, “is a pressure test.”

He asked whether all this counted as an accomplishment. She said she would put it under ordinary. Possibly very ordinary. He wrote that down too.

First frost

In the middle of October the forecast said frost again, and this time Arne read it. They picked every green tomato that was left. He showed her how to ripen them at home in a paper bag, and explained ethylene, the gas that ripening fruit gives off, for rather longer than was necessary. She said she would tell the tomatoes.

The next morning the kale was white and the path crunched. Arne poured two cups from the thermos and stood by the string. He heard her before he saw her: a low murmur coming up the path out of the mist, the same shape over and over.

“Morning,” said Arne. “Morning,” said Dekyi. She knelt down in the garlic and went on.