Simple Life

A Gentle Nudge

Mysteries of the golfing universe

 

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago, the host of a popular golf radio show asked me who I most enjoy playing golf with these days. We were discussing the various golfers and assorted eccentrics I’ve met, interviewed, and written about over a long and winding career.

“These days, I like to play golf with old guys,” I said without hesitation, “like my friend Harry.”

“So, who is Harry?” he asked.

Harry, I explained, is a gifted artist and nationally known cartoonist I’ve known for many years. He has a wry sense of humor, a beautiful tempo in his golf swing, and a refreshing take on life. Harry is 76 years old, deaf in at least one ear, losing bits of his eyesight, and battling a rogue sciatic nerve in his left leg that sometimes makes swinging a club difficult.

He was once a splendid single-digit player who now aims for bogey golf, and never gets too rattled by whatever the game gives him. He accepts that bad breaks happen and are simply part of this maddening Presbyterian game, not worth fretting about. So are aging body parts that can’t propel the ball the way they once did.

Instead, Harry plays for the occasional fine shot, the rare good break, and the fellowship of his companions that includes a good bit of affectionate needling and laughter. He’s never had an ace, but holds out hope of someday shooting his age, the proverbial goal of every aging golfer.

Though I’m almost a decade younger than Harry — he jokes that I am a pre-geezer in training — I love playing with him because he is a model of what I hope to be like in the rapidly shrinking years ahead: a man who has loved the game since he was a boy and loves it just as much, though differently, as an old man. He is living proof that the game can grow sweeter as the clock runs down.

Golf has been part of his life since he was 10 or 11 years old and an uncle allowed him to pick a club from a barrel of used irons. He chose a battle-scarred 7-iron and the set that went with it.

“It was a set of Dalton Hague clubs, really beautiful. I played with them for years bragging that I owned real Dalton Hague signature golf clubs.” He pauses and chuckles. “They turned out to be Walter Hagen clubs that had just been beaten to death. But oh, how I loved those clubs.”

We often meet late in the afternoon for nine holes at a beautiful municipal course set on a wide lake well out of town, surrounded by mature hardwood forests with no houses, streets or power lines visible anywhere. We often pause to watch the action as shadows lengthen and nature reawakens — deer crossing fairways, waterfowl in flight. We rarely bother to keep a score. We just play, talk, be.

Harry’s favorite hole is the short par-4 seventh that angles down toward the lake, with an approach over a wooded cove to an elevated green backdropped by a breathtaking view of the water. He has sketched and painted it several times, aiming to get it just right. “Isn’t this something?” he’ll say with a note of quiet wonder, pausing before his approach shot that sometimes lands in the water of the cove, sometimes just feet from the pin.

If nothing else, getting older also makes it easier to laugh in the face of Father Time. “That’s the easiest 69 I ever made,” Walter Hagen — aka Dalton Hague — playfully quipped upon turning 69.

One afternoon not long ago, as we were watching a spectacular chevron of geese heading south for the winter over the lake from his favorite spot on the course, Harry told me a little golf story that speaks of wonder and mystery.

After Harry’s mom passed away, her final wish was that Harry and his younger sister take her ashes and those of Harry’s father down to a lake in a park at Carolina Beach, where the couple first met and later married. Harry promised he would do that.

His sister was a busy surgical nurse. Her unpredictable schedule repeatedly delayed their planned journey to the coast. It happened month after month. One afternoon he was playing golf with a partner who was particularly wild off the tee.

“I was helping him look for his ball deep in the woods, when I stepped over a downed tree and saw a golf ball sitting on top of a rotting log — almost like someone had placed it there. I picked it up and tossed it over to my companion. But it wasn’t his ball so he tossed it back. It was a very old ball. When I looked at it, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

The ball’s colorful logo read Carolina Beach.

One word was printed on the opposite side — Mom.

“It sent chills down my spine. A day later, I drove my folks’ ashes down to Carolina Beach — four hours away — and spread them in the lake at a spot that meant so much to their life together. I felt real peace at that moment.”

As he told me this, he pulled the ball out of his bag and handed it to me.

“I’ve carried it with me ever since,” he explained with a very Harry-like smile. “This game, this life, is wonderfully unexplainable, isn’t it?”

Simple coincidence or a gentle nudge from the golfing universe? Harry’s not sure. And neither am I. But that’s part of the wonder of this game.

As we played on, hitting occasional nice shots and mishits that will never be recorded, it struck me that there was, as usual, a nice little message in Harry’s seventh-hole homily, perfectly timed for a couple “old” friends on a golden afternoon at the end of their golf season; yet another reason to be thankful for the game I aim to play just like Harry until I either shoot my age or simply fly away like geese in the autumn.  PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jwdauthor@gmail.com.

 

Illustration by Gerry O’Neill

Simple Life

Meaningful Happiness

When you think about it, the ordinary becomes extraordinary

By Jim Dodson

I bumped into a friend in the produce section at the market. We had not seen each other since the start of the pandemic — well over a year ago, if not longer — long enough for me to briefly forget her name, though maybe I was just having the proverbial senior moment.

In any case, when I asked how she’d been, she simply smiled. “Like everyone, it’s been pretty challenging. But, also kind of revealing. It may sound funny, but I discovered that picking beautiful vegetables to cook for my family makes me really happy. Previously, shopping seemed more like a necessary chore than a privilege. I guess I’ve learned that the ordinary things provide the most meaningful happiness.”

We wished each other safe and happy holidays and said goodbye. She went off to the organic onions and I went in search of the special spiced apple cider that only comes round during the autumn holidays — an ordinary thing, it suddenly struck me, that provides “meaningful” happiness to my taste buds. For what it’s worth, though too late to count, I also suddenly remembered my friend’s name: Donna.

Quite honestly, in all the years I’ve steeped my tin-cup soul into the works of great spiritual teachers, classical philosophers, transcendental thinkers, Lake District poets and street-corner cranks, I’d never come across the phrase meaningful happiness.

But suddenly — like an ear-burrowing TV jingle or a favorite song from the 1970s — I couldn’t get the idea of it out of my head.

Mankind’s search for happiness and meaning, of course, probably constitutes the oldest quest on Earth, beginning with a fabled naked couple in a heavenly garden, though as any ancient sage worthy of his or her plinth will tell you, true happiness is not something you can acquire from the outside world. Even a fashionable fig leaf can only cover so much.

Objects and possessions can certainly provide a shot of pleasure, but they invariably lose their power to possess us somewhere down the line as rust and dust prevail. At the end of the day, as our wise old grandmothers patiently advised, true happiness can only come from the way you think about who you are and what you choose to do. As a famous old Presbyterian preacher once remarked to me as we sat together on his porch on a golden Vermont afternoon: “What we choose to worship, dear boy, is what we eventually become.”

This curious idea of meaningful happiness, in any case, struck me as a highly useful tool — a way of defining or, better, refining — what kinds of people, things and moments in life are worthy of our close attention in a world that always seems to be beyond our control and on the verge of coming apart at the seams. For most of us, like my friend Donna’s awakening among the vegetables, the art of discovering meaningful happiness simply lies in recognizing the ordinary people, things and moments that fill up and grace an average day.

My gardening hero, Thomas Jefferson — “I’m an old man but a new gardener,” as he once wrote to a friend — was an inveterate list-maker. And so am I.

So, naturally, I began taking mental inventory of the blessedly small and ordinary people, things and moments that provide meaningful happiness in a time like no other I can recall.

I’m sure — or simply hope — you have you own list. Here’s a brief sampling of mine:

Rainy Sundays give me meaningful happiness. The heavens replenishing my private patch of Eden. No fig leaf needed.

Speaking of which, I’ve spent most of the pandemic building an ambitious Asian-inspired shade garden in my backyard, though probably more Bubba than Buddha if you want to know the Gospel. Even so, it’s granted me great peace and purpose, untold hours of pondering and planning, no small amount of dreaming while digging in the soil, delving in the soul, bringing an artist who works in red clay a little bit closer to God’s heart.

Unexpected phone calls from his far-flung children provide this papa serious meaningful happiness. They grew up in a beautiful beech forest in Maine, assured by their old man that kindness and imagination could take them anywhere in the world. Today, one lives in Los Angeles and works in film, the other is a working journalist in the Middle East. They are telling the stories of our time. This gives the old man simple joy from two directions, East and West.

Courteous strangers also make me uncommonly happy these days — people who smile, open doors for others, wear the world with an unhurried grace. Ditto people who use turn signals and don’t speed to make the light, saving lives instead of time; those who realize the journey is really the point. For this reason, I always take the back road home.

Mowing the lawn for the first time in spring makes me surprisingly happy, as does mowing it for the final time in autumn, bedding down the yard.

In summer, I love nothing better than an afternoon nap with the windows wide open; or watching the birds feed at sunset with an excellent bourbon in hand, evidence of a growing appreciation for what our Italian friends call Dolce far niente — “The sweetness of doing nothing.” Ditto golf with new friends and lunch with old ones, early church, old Baptist hymns and well-worn jeans. My late Baptist granny would be appalled.

Let me be clear, eating anything in Italy makes me wondrously happy — for a few blessed hours, at least.

Watching the winter stars before dawn makes me blessedly happy, too, along with wool blankets, the first snow, homemade eggnog, the deep quiet of Christmas Eve, the mystery of certain presents, long walks with the dogs, writing notes by hand and my wife’s incredible cinnamon crumb apple pie.

This list could go on for a while, dear friends. It’s as unfinished as its owner.

But time is precious, and you have better things to do this month — like shop, eat and be merry with the friends and family you may not have been with in years.

Let me just say that I hope December brings you true meaningful happiness.

Whatever that means to you.  PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jwdauthor@gmail.com.

Simple Life

The Last Ride

A legendary car, two old dogs and the end of the road in sight

By Jim Dodson

I knew this day would eventually come.

In recent years, I’ve pushed the thought to the back of my mind that it might be time to say goodbye and hand her off to someone who can restore her to her glory.

But every time I take her for a spin, by Jove, The Pearl works her automotive magic on me, riding like a dream, cruising the world on eight cylinders and a Corvette engine. With her roomy leather seats and patented “Dynaride” suspension system, she’s still like driving in your living room. We’ve been together a dozen years, almost half The Pearl’s life and almost one-sixth of mine. We survived the Great Recession, the end of cassette players and four teenagers. My dog Mulligan has spent most of her long life riding shotgun in The Pearl. Oh, the places we’ve been together up and down the highway!

The Pearl is a 1996 Buick Roadmaster estate station wagon, reportedly the last true production wagon that General Motors made before switching to prissy little SUVs.

The mighty Roadmaster is an American automotive icon, introduced in 1936 as the nation began to crawl out from under the Great Depression. Its creators had this nutty idea that Americans getting back on their feet might want to take the family on a road trip to see the land of the free and the home of the brave. With its oversized windows, sleek lines, wide chassis, faux wooden siding, “vista roof” and proverbial third seat facing backwards, the versatile Roadmaster wagon was just the ticket for seeing America from ground level.

The end of the Roadmaster line came in 1996 when 22,989 models rolled off the assembly line for the last time.

Mine entered the life of a nice gentleman from New Jersey who loved the car so much he kept the dashboard covered with protective felt and put only 60,000 miles on its odometer over 12 years.

Fate and quiet desperation brought us together when my children began stealing the Volvos and Subarus to go off to college. I wrote a newspaper column joking that I was shopping for a car like the one my old man drove when I was a kid — a gas-guzzling monster of the American highway that no enlightened, environmentally-minded Millennial would be caught dead riding in around town. It turns out, that car was a Buick Roadmaster wagon.

Not two days after the column appeared, a woman phoned to say, “Mr. Dodson, I am here to make you a happy man.”

Her father and mother were residents of a local senior living community. They owned a 1996 Buick Roadmaster station wagon that the daughter had fooled her father into giving up, lest he injure himself or someone else due to his declining driving habits.

“My father bought the car new and absolutely adores it,” she explained. “We all loved it. It took me off to college and helped me move several times. She has a few dings but still runs like a dream. But it has to go.”

She explained that a vintage car buff out West was interested in buying it — Roadmasters were apparently big with car collectors — but if I wanted to check it out at a local garage, she would consider selling it to me.

“If you don’t buy this car,” said the mechanic, handing me the keys for a test drive, “I probably will. They don’t make cars like this anymore.”

I purchased it an hour later. My wife laughed when she saw it pull into the driveway. “Oh my,” she said. “That really is your father’s Buick.”

No. 1 son — the Subaru thief — asked if he could take the car off to college. Not a chance, I told him.

No. 2 son pointed out that my Roadmaster model was ranked No. 7 on the “official list of Best Cars to Own in the Event of a Zombie Apocalypse.” He wondered if he could take it for a spin.

“Maybe after the zombie apocalypse,” I said.

I had, after all, my own big plans for this oversized jewel of the 20th Century American highway.

For many years — decades, actually — I’d dreamed of finding and traveling the Great Wagon Road of Colonial America, the famous backcountry highway that brought thousands of Scots-Irish, German and other European immigrants to the American South during the 18th century, including my own English and Scottish forebears.

Historians and old road experts had recently determined the Great Road’s original path from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia — an 850-mile land route that passed through some of the most historic battlefields, towns and sacred landscapes of early America.

Dan’l Boone and his family traveled it from Pennsylvania to the banks of the Yadkin River. The most pivotal battles of the Revolutionary War were fought along the highway, including engagements at Cowpens, Kings Mountain and Guilford Courthouse, leading to the British surrender at Yorktown. 

America’s first immigrant highway also bisected the killing fields of the American Civil War at Antietam and Gettysburg, where Abraham Lincoln — whose grandfather lived on the Great Road in Virginia — gave the Gettysburg Address on a hill just above the highway. By my count, in fact, no less than seven U.S. presidents were either born directly on or traveled the Great Wagon Road most of their lives. The Scots-Irish brought their balladry, fiddle music and God-given talent for fighting (and making corn whiskey) down the road, giving birth to Bluegrass in the hollers of Appalachia.

Four summers ago, after years of research and planning, my dog Mulligan and I set off along the road in our own Great Wagon, which a colleague at work nicknamed The Pearl, hoping to travel the entire route in two or three weeks.

Silly me. It took a month just to get out of Pennsylvania. The abundance of great stories and memorable people we met along the road turned an 800-mile road trip into a three-year, 3,000-mile odyssey of discovery that recently drew to a close, including a year of travel lost due to COVID.

Though she is showing her age and is more dinged up than ever, The Pearl managed to make the entire journey and then some. She brought us home with an engine that still runs like a dream.

Along the way, she provided absolute strangers with fond memories of their own childhood. “My father had a car just like that,” they would say with a note of pure wonder. “It was my favorite family car.” A man in the parking lot at Gettysburg actually offered to buy The Pearl. “How much do you want for her?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I replied. “But I might someday give her to the right person.”

He handed me a card, which I promptly lost.

Since finishing the road last autumn, The Pearl has mostly been my gardening car, hauling shrubs and mulch, though Miss Mulligan and I go out for a spin every now and then.

Mully is now 16, The Pearl is pushing 25. The last ride can’t be far away.

But what a time we’ve had, what a sweet journey it’s been. PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jwdauthor@gmail.com.

Simple Life

Golf and Marriage

True love and harmless fun on the links

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago, my wife, Wendy, and I were discussing our 20th wedding anniversary.

“So, Old Baggage,” I said, affecting the accent of a toffee-nosed English aristocrat. “Where exactly would you like to go? SkyMiles and hotel points are the limit!”

“Oh, no,” she came back with feigned horror. “I thought we’d seen the last of that old boy!”

Needless to say, I was pleased when madam suggested motoring down to a lovely old hotel and sporty golf course in South Carolina where we celebrated our 15th anniversary.

But first, friends, a word of caution.

Referring to your dearly beloved as “Old Baggage” does not come without certain risks to domestic harmony, though in this instance it was one of those affectionate inside jokes that long-married couples share to remind themselves of their matrimonial journey through the fairways and thickets of life.

At any rate, while participating in a mixed foursomes tournament during the annual Royal & Ancient Golf Club autumn meetings some years ago, we got paired with an elderly English couple straight from the pages of P.G. Wodehouse — a crusty old RAF Colonel and his long-suffering wife, Edyth, who spent an entire trip around the Duke’s Course in St. Andrews tossing colorful insults at each other.

“Alright, Old Baggage, put your considerable rump into this shot!” he urged his bride. “No half-way measures, girly! Give the old wedge a solid knock!”

“Sod off,” she muttered as she settled over the ball. “How about I give you a solid knock instead?”

Round they went, hole after hole. He grumbled about everything from “elephants buried in the green” to his wife’s choice of exotic leopard-print golf trousers, giving unsolicited advice on almost every shot.

“Try and roll this one close to the hole for a change. Remember, never up, never in!”

“You would know about that,” she snipped. “Perhaps you’d enjoy a nice nap in the bunker?”

Over drinks afterwards, we were surprised to learn they’d been married for 40 years, and that their entertaining Tracy-Hepburn routine was designed to amuse themselves and startle unsuspecting playing partners.

“Lovely way to relieve the marital tensions,” Edyth advised matter-of-factly over her raspberry gimlet.

“Just a bit of harmless fun to keep mixed opponents off balance,” Lionel chortled. “Never fails to put them off their game.”

“It keeps both golf and marriage interesting,” she added coyly.   

“True, Baggage,” he rumbled. “Damned shame, though, about that easy 10-footer for the win you missed on 17.”

“Ah, well.” She gave us an unconcerned smile. “Maybe next time you should hit the ball where you were instructed.”

To paraphrase our late friend John Derr, the CBS Sports broadcaster who worked with the inimitable Henry Longhurst for years (and quoted him frequently), the institution of marriage is only slightly older than the game of golf and not quite as fun. Golf has probably saved at least as many marriages as it’s ruined — and vice versa.

“Blessed be the man or woman who enjoys their spouse’s company on the golf course,” the ageless “One Derr” — as Wendy and I called him — declared at our supper table one evening after we told him about our encounter with the English aristos. “For theirs is a shared adventure of fond memories and pleasant disasters, an unbreakable bond of friendship forged by generous mulligans and preferred lies in a game that cannot be beaten — only endured.”

With his next breath, Derr glanced at me, smiled and added, “You’re a fortunate man to have a beautiful golfing wife, James. But I am placing you on notice that if you pre-decease me, I’m moving in on Wendy.”

He’d recently turned 96.

But John’s point was well-taken. Like many couples who share a love of the game and each other, golf has been a feature of our romance almost since our first hours together.

The day after meeting Wendy at a dinner party thrown in honor of my first golf book, we took a casual Sunday drive that took us to one of Robert Trent Jones’ early golf course designs in upstate New York.  It was there — upon the discovery that she once played in an after-work golf league and had a germ of interest in the game — that I stole my first kiss and Wendy Ann Buynak stole my heart.

The last two decades have indeed been a shared adventure of bogeys and birdies, colorful characters and memorable places, beginning with our first trip out West after we got engaged at The Lodge at Sea Island, where I threw her into the breach at Pebble Beach with a new set of Callaway golf clubs. It was her first full 18 holes of golf, as she later pointed out.

Her caddie that morning had eyes like a roadmap from hell due to an all-night bachelor party. He and half a dozen Japanese gentlemen with video cameras bore witness as Dame Wendy teed up her ball and made a fierce swing. The ball trickled a few feet off the tee.

Without hesitation, she fetched her ball and tried again. This time the ball rolled 10 feet.

“Listen, ma’am,” groaned her suffering caddie, massaging his pink eyes. “Let’s just pick it up and go.”

She blissfully ignored him, teed up again, took dead aim, and calmly swatted her drive to the heart of the fairway. The Japanese gentlemen broke into applause, and I realized this was true love on the links.

The first time my bride broke 100 was on a work trip to France. It happened at the elite Golf Club de Chantilly, a famous old Tom Simpson layout. Nary a soul was visible that drowsy summer afternoon following a leisurely lunch of crusty bread, foie gras and considerable sparkling wine.

The girl in the golf shop — buffing her nails with exquisite boredom — waved us out to an utterly empty course, cuckoos calling dreamily from the surrounding forest.

Somewhere on the back side of the masterpiece, after all that wine and no relief station in sight, nature summoned me into the forest, after which I joked that the lone advantage God gave man over woman at the dawn of creation was the ability to make water on an empty golf course, if need be.

A few holes later, I heard someone call my name and turned to see my new wife squatting behind a clump of bushes, grinning like a schoolgirl. “What was that about man’s advantage on the golf course, monsieur?” she teased.

I had to laugh. “Monsieur is certainly enjoying the view,” I pointed out.

Through a gap in the foliage directly behind her, an elderly gentleman in a blue beret was raking out his veggie garden. He was grinning like a teenager, too.

“Bon soir!” he called out, waving.

“Wee wee,” I replied in the American vernacular.

We’ve had many memorable golf journeys since that incredible week of our early married days, but that time in France ranks atop both our lists of favorite moments.

  Which is why it was no surprise that our anniversary interlude in South Carolina was such a quiet success, a reflective moment that scored well under par as both a golf getaway and a marriage milestone.

The only “baggage” we brought with us was a dozen new golf balls, 20 years of great memories — and a hope for 20 years more of the same.   PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Miss Mully’s Garden

It may be unfinished, but what in life is not?

By Jim Dodson

When COVID-19 shut down the world as we know it last year, I decided this was a sign from on high to finish building my backyard shade garden.

The cosmic joke, as any gardener worth his composted cow poop knows, is that, while no garden is ever really finished, it may well finish (off) the gardener.

That said, I set myself a goal to have the garden fully laid out and growing by the time the dog days of August rolled around. Beneath ancient white oaks, I began to see elegant stone pathways winding through beds of cool ferns, colorful hostas and other shade-loving trees and plants — the ideal place to sit and read a book when the oppressive heat of late summer lays upon us.

You might say I worked like a dog — and with a dog — from February to July, hoping to get the job done. After clearing out the last of the weeds and some forlorn, overgrown shrubs of the property’s former owner, I drew up plans and constantly revised them, laying out pathways and building beds for young plants.

Alas, August is here, and while I toiled and toiled away, my ambitious shade garden is yet unfinished.

Still, my old dog, Mulligan, never missed a day of work. She’s 16, and either deaf or simply uninterested in whatever her owner has to say. We’ve been together since I found her running wild and free in a park where I’d just given a talk at a festival, a joyous black pup with the happiest eyes I’d ever seen.

Workers in the park told me she was a stray that nobody could catch, had been around for weeks, either a runaway or a pup someone simply dumped. She was living off garbage and small critters she chased down in the woods. The girl was a hunter.

To this day, I’m not sure whether I found her or she found me. She raced past me as I was preparing to leave, heading back for the woods across a busy highway where I’d seen her cross into the park an hour before, somehow just missing the wheels of a truck.

I simply called out, “Hey, you! Black streak! Come here.” Something remarkable happened. The pup stopped, looked back, then ran straight into my arms. I named her Mulligan, a second-chance dog. Mully, for short.

We’ve been together ever since.

Any time I’m working in the garden, she’s there. Every trip to the plant nursery, the grocery store, or any errand around town, she’s along for the ride.  It’s been like this for a decade and a half. She’s my constant travel pal — my best friend and the best dog ever — always ready to hit the road.

Four years ago, Miss Mully was along for the ride when I started down the Great Wagon Road for a book about the Colonial Era “highway” that a couple hundred thousand Scots-Irish, English and German immigrants, including all three wings of my family, took to this part of the world during the 18th century.

As I laid out this long-planned journey in my mind, Mully and I would simply breeze down the mythic road together from Philadelphia to Georgia over the span of three or four weeks, meeting colorful characters, diving into frontier history and gathering untold tales from America’s original immigrant highway. The book would almost write itself. I’d finish it in no time flat.

Evidently, God and wives both laugh when foolish men make plans, to paraphrase an old Yiddish proverb. From the beginning, my wife, Wendy, thought it would take me five years to complete my mighty road book.

She was right. Ditto God.

Like my backyard shade garden, my mighty road tale is not yet finished. The sweeping scope of its history and people, not to mention the motherlode of remarkable folks Miss Mully and I encountered along the road, argued for a much deeper dive and more thorough approach to my subject. An unplanned bit of plumbing surgery and a worldwide pandemic that shut down the globe for more than a year hardly helped to shrink the time horizon.

But that’s life.

We all have unfinished business. We are all works in progress.

With a little luck and continued work, I hope to complete both my book and my backyard garden around the same time, maybe by Thanksgiving.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I understand that the day is growing late for my old dog and her master.

She still walks a mile with us every morning, and her dark eyes still shine with the happiest light.

Every afternoon, she takes a slow walk around the garden as if inspecting my work or memorizing the plants. I often catch her just sitting alone in the middle of the garden, thinking God knows what.

For the moment, our journey together is unfinished. But someday I hope to sit in the middle of Miss Mully’s Garden, reading a book and thinking God knows what, too.

Something tells me that won’t be the end of the journey. Maybe just the beginning.  PS

His all-time favorite book: James Salter’s Light Years.   

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Death of a Green Dragon

A gardener’s bittersweet reminder of life’s impermanence 

By Jim Dodson

Last month, I returned from my first trip since the start of the pandemic to discover a baffling mystery at home.

The leaves of a beautiful Green Dragon Japanese maple I’d raised from a mere seedling appeared to suddenly be dying. Arching gracefully over the side driveway, the rare seven-foot beauty was the star of my garden. It had never been more vibrant than the day I departed for a week out West, lush and green with lots of bright spring growth. But suddenly, inexplicably, those delicate new leaves were limp and withering.

A friend who knows his ornamental trees pointed out that a freakish, late-season cold snap might be the culprit. The leaves of nearby hydrangea bushes were also severely burned, but with the return of seasonal warmth, were already showing signs of recovery.

“I think you should simply leave it alone. Give the tree water and maybe a little spring fertilizer and let things take their course,” he said. “Nature has a way of healing her own.”

His theory seemed plausible. I’ve built and maintained enough gardens in my time to know that nature always holds the upper hand. Sometimes unlikely resurrections happen when you least expect them.

So I waited and watered, trying to push the thought of losing my spectacular Green Dragon out of my mind. Perhaps by some miracle it would come back to life.

As I went about other tasks in the garden — mulching and weeding perennial beds and transplanting ostrich and woodland ferns to my new shade garden — I thought about how the sudden death of a spring pig provided writer E. B. White intense grief and something of a personal epiphany, inspiring one of his most affecting essays in 1948.

Following a struggle of several days to heal his mysteriously ailing young pig — such an ordeal blurs the passage of time, the author expressed — White, accompanied by his morbidly curious dachshund, Fred, walked out one evening to check on the patient, hoping for the best:

“When I went down, before going to bed, he lay stretched in the yard a few feet from the door. I knelt, saw that he was dead, and left him there: his face had a mild look, expressive neither of deep peace nor of deep suffering, although I think he had suffered a good deal.”

The young pig was buried near White’s favorite spot in the apple orchard, leaving his owner surprised by the potency of his own grief. “The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig,” White recounts. “He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.”

Life, of course, is full of unexpected compensations. It’s possible that the guilt and grief E. B. White suffered with the loss of his pig was the literary world’s gain. Four years later, the author’s tale of a female barn spider that saves a charming young pig from slaughter by crafting upbeat messages about Wilbur the pig in her web became an instant American classic. Over the decades, Charlotte’s Web continues to rank among the most beloved children’s books of all-time.

I don’t know if a failed effort to save a spring pig bought “in blossom time” is anything like trying to save a young Japanese maple I’d raised from a seedling, but the sadness of its sudden loss combined with a palpable sense that I’d somehow failed my tree followed me around like Fred the dachshund for weeks, a reminder of life’s mystery and bittersweet impermanence. It didn’t help matters, I suppose, that I couldn’t even bring myself to dig up the deceased tree and cart it out to the curb for the weekly refuse crew. At this writing, as lush summer green explodes all around, the beloved tree stands like a monument to my botanical incompetence or simple bad luck. The autopsy is incomplete. The verdict is still pending.

Gardeners and farmers, of course, experience dramas of life and death — and sometimes unexpected rebirth — on a daily basis. Pests and disease are constant threats that interrupt the cycle of life at any moment with little or no advance notice. Too much rain or not enough, violent winds, summer hailstorms and unwelcome diners in the garden are simply part of the process of helping living things grow.

My longtime friend and former Southern Pines neighbor, Max Morrison, who is justly known for his spectacular camellias and probably the most abundant vegetable garden in the Carolina Sandhills, solved his deer and rabbit problem decades ago by transforming his edible landscape into something resembling a Soviet Gulag with ten-foot wire fences and electric monitoring systems.

On one of the first evenings I dined with Max and his wife, Myrtis, a gifted Southern cook, I noticed a large jar of Taster’s Choice instant coffee going round on the lazy Suzan. Attached to it with rubber bands was an index card covered with tiny dates written in pencil.

“What’s this?” I asked, picking it up.

Myrtis laughed. “Oh, that’s Max’s record of all the squirrels he’s dispatched with his pellet rifle over the years in order to keep them out of his garden.”

The death count went back decades.

Among other surprises, this cool, wet spring brought a noticeable uptick in the squirrel and chipmunk populations around the neighborhood, which made me briefly consider picking up an air rifle of my own.

For the moment at least, our young female Staffordshire Bull Terrier has taken matters into her own paws, nimbly standing guard over the back garden from atop a brick terrace wall, ready to leap into action at the sight of a furry invader. Our in-town neighborhood is also home to a sizable community of rabbits that appear at dawn and dusk to feed in the front yards along the block. The dogs pay little or no attention to them. For the most part, ours seems to be a remarkably peaceful kingdom with no need to resort to sterner measures of defense.

At the end of the day, this may be my form of post-pandemic compensation. My garden has actually never looked better, save for the untimely passing of a lovely green dragon.

This morning, after I set down a few closing words, I’ve made up my mind to go out and do what I should have done weeks ago — dig up my dead maple and send it on to the town mulch pile. At least its remains may eventually enrich someone else’s garden.

In its place, I’ll plant a border of peonies that will fill in nicely in a year or two.

I shall miss that lovely green dragon, though.  PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Kid of Wonder

Just as my father did, I’ll try to keep my child’s heart

By Jim Dodson

For years, I’ve joked that my late father was an adman with a poet’s heart. He never failed to quote some ancient sage or dead philosopher when you least expected it.

As a know-it-all teenager, alternately amused and mortified by his endlessly upbeat personality, I gave him the nickname “Opti the Mystic.”

It took me growing up to finally realize what an extraordinary gift he was to me and anyone lucky enough to know him.

When I was still pretty small, he hung two framed items on my bedroom wall.

One was the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, maybe the best life and career advice a father ever gave his son or daughter on how to walk with kings but keep the common touch.

The other was a quote by the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, a student of Confucius: “The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart,” which confused me until my dad explained:

“Philosophy is designed to make you think. Some might think it simply means you should guard your child’s heart from growing cynical about life. I think it means that it’s wise to keep your own child-like sense of wonder — whatever age you are.”

My parents also gave me a set of the How and Why Wonder Books, a popular illustrated series designed to teach history and science to young people in the 1960s. The volumes made me take the idea of wonder quite seriously.

My mother said she always “wondered” what I was going to ask her next. In truth, I was something of a wondrous pest.

I wondered typical kid things, like why the sky was so blue and why I had to wear shoes to church in summer — why I even had to go to church in summer when the outdoor world was so green and inviting.

Naturally, I wondered about what made the seasons change and the stars move and where hurricanes come from. When a mountainous press foreman at my dad’s newspaper informed me that we lived smack in the middle of something called “Hurricane Alley” in Mississippi, I ordered a hurricane emergency kit from National Geographic in case one struck our coast.

To my regret — though probably good fortune — no hurricane came.

Thanks to the How and Why Wonder books, I became an avid reader at age 5.

But I often wondered about things the wonder books couldn’t explain.

Like why Mr. Sullivan, who lived alone two houses down, was suddenly building a bomb shelter in his backyard — and why he believed “Russian spies were everywhere.” Or what the vacation Bible school teacher was talking about when she said, “Jesus sees everything you do and writes it down for later.”

It made Jesus sound like a Russian spy, not a prince of peace. When I asked her what “for later” meant, she explained that the list Jesus keeps would determine who would — or wouldn’t — be “saved from eternal hellfire.”  I wondered why Jesus would keep such an awful list.

About that same time, during the presidential election of 1960, I wondered why my mother voted for Senator Kennedy and my father for Mr. Nixon. “Someone had to cancel out your father, honey,” my mom explained with a laugh. “Every now and then, even he makes silly decisions.”

On a beautiful Friday afternoon three years later, Mrs. Brown, my favorite teacher, suddenly left the room and returned with red and swollen eyes, dismissing us an hour early. Someone had shot and killed the President. I spent the next week glued to the TV set, wondering.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if that’s the moment modern America began to lose her innocence, as some historians like to say, and if that’s when I decided I would become a journalist like my old man — if only to find out how and why.

No wonder I spent the first decade of my career writing about the terrible things human beings do to each other, reporting on everything from unrepentant Klansmen to corrupt politicians, Atlanta’s status as America’s murder capital to the South’s growing racial tensions.

As I approached 30, I feared I might be prematurely burning out — i.e. losing my sense of wonder.

But something saved me in the nick of time. One spring afternoon I went out to write a simple story about an inner-city baseball league and got recruited to coach a team called the Orioles for the next two seasons. More than half the kids on my team were African-American and came from one of the city’s bleakest housing projects. I made a deal with their parents and grandparents to drive them home after every practice and game. I also bribed them with milkshakes from a local joint called Woody’s CheeseSteaks if they learned to behave like gentlemen on and off the field.

They did just that. I bought a lot of milkshakes over those two years. We never lost a game.

Those kids — the “Mob that Became a Team,” as Reader’s Digest would call them — restored my lost sense of wonder.

After that second season, I turned down a dream job in Washington for a much simpler life on the bank of a winding green river in Vermont, where I got a pup, taught myself to flyfish, read every book of philosophy and poetry I could lay my hands on and lived in a small cottage heated by a woodstove for a year.

It was my private Walden Pond. My heartbeat slowed. I fell in love with the winter stars again. And that next spring, I recovered my passion for golf by playing the same course Rudyard Kipling played when he lived in the town, not long after he wrote “If.”

I realized that life truly is a wondrously circular affair — that everything you’ve loved is always with you, waiting to be born again, and that nobody — not even Jesus — is keeping a list like a Russian spy.

Here’s proof of the universe’s wondrous circularity. Not long ago, one of the players from the team that saved me, called out of the blue. “I’ve been trying to find you for years,” Pete said. “I finally found you and your books on the Internet.”

Pete and his teammates are in their early 50s now, grown men with their own careers and families. We’re planning a reunion. A few weeks ago, Pete sent me a photograph of himself standing in front of Woody’s CheeseSteaks. His hair is gray but he looks the same.

I may look a little older, I told him, but I’m still a kid of wonder, too.  PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Simple Gifts

The secret to a good life? Less is more

By Jim Dodson

A friend recently wondered why I named this column “Simple Life.”

I joked that it was better than the original name I came up with — “Frankly, My Name Escapes Me.”

In truth, the title is as aspirational as it is functional, a useful reminder that the longer I live, the more I grow to appreciate the value of simplifying my life.

In her recent column, “Simplicity: The Neglected Value,” author and communications coach Bruna Martinuzzi points out that we time-enslaved, stressed-out, overworking humans simply don’t know what’s good for us when it comes to where we place our focus in life.

“We read and hear enough about its benefits in just about every facet of our lives,” she writes, “yet we walk past it, every day, in pursuit of the more complex, complicated, tangled and sometimes puzzling. There is no glitter in simple, not enough buttons to play with. We fear that simple equates with easy, light, too basic — unsophisticated.”

Leonardo da Vinci, in fact, declared simplicity the ultimate form of sophistication. As did the likes of Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Walt Whitman, Lao Tzu, Yogi Berra, Marcus Aurelius, Leo Tolstoy and Maya Angelou. Rumi called it the dust that hides the gold.

Whether planning a wedding or a war, simplicity is key to a successful outcome, knowing what’s not essential and eliminating it before things get out of hand.

A year ago, the combination of the pandemic and wedding plans that had grown far more complicated than expected prompted my daughter, Maggie, and her fiancé, Nate, to postpone and rethink how they wished to tie the knot. They’ve since envisioned an intimate gathering of close friends and family to celebrate their union when the moment is right, somewhere in nature, stress-free and away from the madding crowd.

One unexpected benefit of this strange year of distance and isolation, social scientists and trend-watchers report, is a broad refiguring of how we Americans live, work and appropriate our time.

While churches and bars — the yin and yang of modern cultural society — still struggle to stay open, life-enriching activities like meditation, Zoom yoga, home gardening, golf and bird-watching have mushroomed in popularity. According to more than one expert on the American workplace, mobile workspaces and home offices will be the engine that produces the next Industrial Revolution, spawning a vast new generation of home-grown entrepreneurs and inventive visionaries.

History holds some encouraging parallels. During the Great Depression and Second World War, an era of severe economic dislocation and public self-sacrifice, a generation of self-made engineers, tinkerers and inventors — many working in the isolation of their own garages and backyard sheds — managed to create everything from frozen foods to the first computers, color TV to dialysis machines, jet engines to Tupperware. That boom became the foundation for the consumer revolution and space age of the 1950s and ’60s. Your smart phone is the godchild of that time.

A couple years ago, while traveling the Great Wagon Road for my current book project about America’s original immigrant highway, I paid an afternoon call on a lovely Amish family, the Lapps, who live in the heart of Pennsylvania’s lush Lancaster County.

The “plain” ways of America’s Old Order Amish — such as their unadorned clothing, use of oil lamps instead of electricity and reliance on horses for transportation and farming — are an echo of our vanished agrarian past and a living reminder of the virtues of simplicity.

Amish and Mennonite farmers were the first European settlers to answer William Penn’s call to Lancaster County in the late 17th century, using their wise farming practices and love of the land and their animals to transform the county’s rich limestone soil into the most productive farmland in the nation. The so-called “Garden Spot of the Nation” is now regarded as the birthplace of American agriculture.

The Lapp family’s ancestors had been on their land since before the American Revolution, living as comfortably in accord with nature and the Divine as anyone I’ve ever met. After Mervyn showed me around his immaculate barns, we sat with his wife, Catharine, in the evening light, sipping delicious meadow tea — a drink made from boiling fresh mint gathered from surrounding fields — beneath a grove of old trees. They talked about their three grown sons, all of whom worked in the family’s masonry business, and how devotion to God, family and the pleasure of doing good work with their hands were the pillars of a rewarding life. It was one of the most pleasing interviews I’ve ever conducted.

For the record, there were even a few myth-busting surprises, including the fact that the Lapp men were all crazy about playing golf, and that Mervyn was a lifelong L.A. Dodgers fan who often watched games on his neighbor’s television.

“If you’re smart,” he told me during our walk through his beautiful stone barn, “you take stock of what’s really important in your life . . . and other things you can simply live without.” He paused and gave me a wry look. “Simple things are always best. That’s a key to happiness. But I do need my Dodgers.”

As I drove home to North Carolina on a winding backcountry road, I was reminded of my own aspirations of simplicity, beginning with my chosen route home. Getting anywhere fast is one thing I can do without.

In his 1939 classic, The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang points out that beyond the noble art of getting things done, there may be an even nobler art of leaving things undone. “The wisdom of life,” he writes, “consists in the elimination of nonessentials.” 

During this year of distance from friends and family, in place of going out to movies or dinner, an older couple I know took up reading to each other every morning from their favorite books, a practice they plan to continue indefinitely. “It’s been a wonderful discovery,” Harry reports. “A simple gift that’s brought us closer than ever. It’s now part of our lives.”

Over this same interlude, I began work on a large garden I have dreamed of making for many years, one that will probably take me many more years to complete. As any gardener knows, of course, a garden is never finished, so my education as a man of the soil — and my wonder at its constant gifts — will never cease, until I do.

Simply put, what a lovely thought.   PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

My Wife’s Secret Life

And why I’m happily married, blissfully in the dark

By Jim Dodson

I recently discovered that my wife, Wendy, enjoys a secret life.

Actually, I’ve known about it for years. I just never let her know that I knew about it.

It’s also possible that she’s always known that I know about it (and has chosen to keep that a secret, too).

Either way, the woman is a master at keeping her husband happily married and blissfully in the dark.

Consider the high drama of our recent unplanned kitchen makeover.

One evening last spring, our fancy German dishwasher blew up like the Hindenburg and flooded the kitchen of the charming mid-century bungalow we’ve spent the last five years faithfully restoring.

I suggested we move to Scotland.

Within days, however, Wendy had rallied a small army of specialists with industrial driers, fans and blueprints for a complete renovation.

Curiously, they all seemed to know my wife by her first name.

Though I’m hardly the suspicious type, such fraternal bonhomie did make me momentarily wonder if Dame Wendy might have a private, second career as a kitchen subcontractor and home makeover artist.

One of her not-so-secret pleasures, after all, are the makeover programs playing around the clock on HGTV, brick-and-mortar dramas where — in the span of 45 minutes — unspeakably decrepit houses are transformed into suburban show palaces by clever couples who make witty remarks about shiplap and infinity tubs.

Not that I’m the jealous type, but my bride speaks so casually about home-rehab hosts Joanna and Chip Gaines or the dorky Property Brothers or that sweet, folksy couple redoing the entire town of Laurel, Mississippi, it’s as if she actually knows them. And I can almost picture the Good Bones gals whispering sweet nothings about rare Victorian beadboard or vintage crown molding in Dame Wendy’s wise conch-like ear.

Unlike the unreality of these home makeovers, our massive kitchen “reno” took nearly a year to complete, including endless delays due to COVID-19. We upgraded the subflooring, wiring and plumbing; installed a beautiful Tuscan tile floor; searched two counties for new granite counters; and outfitted the entire kitchen with new appliances. We also ordered so many takeout meals that I considered moonlighting for Grubhub.

I’ll confess, there were moments when I had beguiling dreams of misty Scotland — specifically a rather fetching one in which I am rowing a dinghy across Loch Lomond with a provocatively dressed (and pre-crazy) Kim Basinger sitting in the bow.

Strictly between us, I have no idea what this dream could mean. But I’m not dinghy enough to tell my wife about it because she’ll know exactly what it means, and I really don’t want to spoil the surprise if Kim and I ever reach the other side of the loch.

Besides, doesn’t a bloke deserve a few healthy secrets of his own?  Sadly, I don’t have many others. Unless you count the fantasy about being the first man in history to ride his John Deere lawn tractor across America. Of course, that dream died when Wendy sold my tractor at a yard sale in Maine right before we moved to Carolina. She claims there was no room for it on the moving truck, meaning I couldn’t at least drive it home to the South and make a few bucks mowing lawns along the way.

I recently heard a top marriage specialist on the radio insist that the secret to a long and happy marriage is “not having too many secrets, but enough to keep a marriage interesting.”

The specialist, a female psychologist, didn’t specify how many secrets keep a marriage interesting, or conversely, how many keep a marriage from collapsing like a $2 beach chair.

Fact is, I am perfectly happy operating on a strictly “need-to-know” basis. She knows that what I don’t know won’t hurt me, which may be the key to our own long and happy marriage.

Besides, we have an enviable distribution of domestic duties and responsibilities.

Wendy runs the house, pays the bills, makes most of the important decisions and never fails to find my missing eyeglasses/wallet/car keys or TV remote when it’s clear some thoughtless nitwit has mistakenly put them somewhere just to make me go crazy.

Suffice it to say, I know my proper place in our happy domestic realm, outside in the yard quietly missing my beloved John Deere lawn tractor.

On an entirely separate front, I have no idea how much money I earn from my so-called literary career. I simply put together words that amuse me, send them off to editors I’ve never met who (sometimes) like and (eventually) pay me real folding money for them.

It’s a sweet mystery how this magic happens. I frankly never know my precise material worth, year to year, but I assure you it’s no mystery to Dame Wendy how much money I make — or am due — down to the last farthing.

Home and family, however, are where Wendy’s secret life truly excels.

Our four fully grown and theoretically independent children constantly call up from faraway places to share their endless existential crises or ask her advice on all manner of discreet topics, confiding things they wouldn’t dream of telling the old man, whom they only call when they need more farthings to cover the rent.

But that’s OK with the old man in question. The older he gets, the less he knows and the happier he is.

For it’s all about perspective — i.e. my wife’s clever design for our happily married life.

One final example shall suffice.

The other afternoon, I popped into the house from trying to start up my walk-behind mower for the first lawn-cutting of the spring and discovered that my multitasking domestic Chief Executive was putting the final touches on our brand new fully renovated kitchen in a manner most unusual.

She’d just assembled an elaborate rolling cart she’d ordered from some chic West Coast design house and was dancing rumba-like to South African reggae music as she decorated Easter cookies for neighborhood kids.

“I’m thinking of painting the den a lovely new green for the spring,” she blithely announced, sashaying past me. “It’s called Mountain Air. What do you think?”

As our elegant new dishwasher purred away, she waved the sample color on her smart phone, which isn’t remotely as smart as she is but probably a good deal smarter than her husband.

After 20 years of happy marriage, I’m no April fool.

I simply told her that I loved it and headed back to my stubborn lawn mower, secretly dreaming about Kim Basinger riding a John Deere tractor through the misty Scottish Highlands.   PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

In the Beginning

A grande dame, an old beech and other memory-keepers on the path to this gardener’s genesis

By Jim Dodson

Fifteen years ago, a grande dame of English gardening named Mirabel Osler smiled coyly over a goblet of merlot and said something I’ll never forget. “You know, dear,” she declared, “being a gardener is perhaps the closest thing you’ll ever get to playing God. Please don’t let on to the Almighty, however. He thinks He gets to have all the fun.”

The café in Ludlow, Osler’s Shropshire market town, claimed a Michelin star. But the real star that early spring afternoon in the flowering Midlands of England was Dame Mirabel herself. Spry and witty, the 80-year-old garden designer had reintroduced the classic English “cottage garden” to the mainstream with her winsome 1988 book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos.

The intimate tale of how she and her late husband transformed their working farm into a botanical paradise where nature was free to flourish became a surprise bestseller that fueled a worldwide renaissance in cottage gardening. It’s actually what inspired me to create my “faux English Southern Garden” on a forest hilltop in Maine.

My visit with Osler was one of several stops I was making across England in the spring as part of a year-long odyssey through the horticulture world while researching a book about human obsession with gardens – including my own.

When I asked Dame Mirabel why making a garden becomes so all-consuming and appealing, she had a ready answer.

“I think among the most valuable things a garden does for the human soul is make us feel connected to the past and therefore each other,” she said, sipping her wine.

“We’re all old souls, you know, people who love plants. Especially trees.”

She was delighted that I shared her enchantment with trees, mentioning a gorgeous old American beech that stood beside our house in Maine and how it became the centerpiece of my own wild garden.

When my children were still quite young, we carved our initials into the beech — as one must do with its smooth, gray bark — hoping our names and the tree might reside together forever, or at least a couple hundred years. Unfortunately, our great beech was visibly ailing, which sent me on an odyssey to try to save it. That quest ultimately became a book called Beautiful Madness.

“I think that’s the alchemy of a beautiful tree,” Dame Mirabel agreed. “They speak to us in a quiet language all their own. They watch over the days of our lives and will long outlive us. No wonder that everyone from Plato to the Druids of Celtic lore believed divinities resided in groves of trees. Trees are living memory-keepers.”

Mirabel Osler passed away in 2016, age 91. Not long after Beautiful Madness was published in 2006, however, she wrote me a charming note to say how much she enjoyed reading about our visit in Ludlow. True to form, as my wife, Wendy, and I discovered on that unforgettable spring day, Dame Osler’s final garden was a chaotic masterpiece, a backyard filled with beautiful small trees and flowering shrubs arching over a narrow stone pathway.

Not surprisingly, as this long, dark winter of 2021 approached its end, Dame Mirabel was on my mind anew as I began serious work and planning on what will be my fourth — and likely final — garden.

Five years ago, Wendy and I purchased a handsome old bungalow in the neighborhood where I grew up, allowing me to spend the next three years transforming its front and side yards into my version of a miniature enchanted forest — my tribute to Dame Mirabel’s Shropshire garden.

I nicknamed the long-neglected backyard dense with overgrown shrubs and half-dead trees “The Lost Kingdom.” Reclaiming just half of this space was another odyssey, but more than a year later — and thanks to the assistance of a younger back and a Bobcat — a promising shade garden of ferns, hostas, Japanese maples and a handsome Yashino Japanese cedar now flourishes there. It reminds me of the many Asian-themed botanical gardens I’ve visited.

That left only a final section of the “Lost Kingdom” to deal with, which I began clearing late last fall, resulting in a nice blank canvas half in shade, half in sun.

Since Christmas Day, I’ve spent hours just looking at this space the way the author in me stares at a blank white page before starting a new book.

Creating a new garden from scratch is both addictively fun and maddeningly elusive — a tale as old as Genesis. It’s neither for the faint of heart nor skint of wallet.

Gardens, like children, mature and change over time. At best, gardeners and parents must accept that we are, in the end, simply loving caretakers for these living and breathing works of art. Although the Good Lord may have finished His or Her garden in just six days, I fully expect my new final project — which, in truth, is relatively small — to provide years of work and revision before my soul and shovel can rest.

No complaint there, mind you. As the Secretary of the Interior (aka, my wife) can attest, her garden-mad husband enjoys few things more than getting strip-off-before-you-dare-come-into-this-house dirty in the great outdoors, possibly because his people were Orange and Alamance county dirt farmers stretching back to the Articles of Confederation. Their verdure seems to travel at will through his bloodstream like runaway wisteria.

After weeks of scheming and dreaming, sketching out elaborate bedding plans and chucking them, it finally came together when a dear old friend from Southern Pines named Max, renowned for his spectacular camellia gardens, gave me five of his original seedlings for the new garden. I planted them on the borders and remembered something Dame Mirabel said about old souls and trees being memory-keepers.

Surrounded by Max’s grandiflora camellias, this garden will be a tribute to the trees and people I associate them with.

A pair of pink flowering dogwoods already anchor a shady corner of the garden where a peony border will pay tribute to the plant-mad woman who taught me to love getting dirty in a garden, my mom.

Nearby will be a pair of flowering crab apple trees like the pair that bloomed every spring in Maine, surrounded by a trio of Japanese maples that I’ve grown from sprouts, linked by a winding path of stone.

A fine little American beech already stands at the heart of this raw new garden, a gift from friends that recalls the old beech tree that sent me around the world.

For now, this is a good start. There will be more to come. For a garden is never really finished, and I’ve only just begun.  PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.