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The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D.,
Ph.D. (8/13/2013)
I
met my plumber’s wife, Lanie Criner, about ten years ago when I called her
husband, Dennis, to repair a leaking pipe.
She accompanied him, carrying several buckets of plumber’s tools, as he
wended his way through our garage.
Dennis is a big guy with blue eyes that look straight at you, letting
you know that what you see is what you get.
Lanie is petite, but not delicate, strong, a woman full of life and love. As Dennis wrestled with the leaking pipe, she
handed him tools as he asked for them, something like a surgical nurse handing
instruments to a surgeon.
After
Dennis repaired the pipe, he introduced Lanie as his wife and began telling us
of the history of their relationship. While
a bachelor, he had regularly eaten at her restaurant, My Thai Kitchen, and had enjoyed
long conversations at the restaurant with her husband, Walt. After her husband died, Dennis began working as
a part time waiter in the evenings. Subsequently,
they married, and now work together as a team in their plumbing business, Good
Neighbor Plumbing Company.
After
several visits to fix leaking pipes, Dennis told us about Lanie’s gardens, showing
us several photographs. Later, I visited
them and her gardens. Dennis proudly
showed me a two page note left anonymously at their door. The first page was drawings of flowers and a
greeting, “Dear Garden Lady.” The second
page read, “Whenever I walk past you house, your garden is very pretty, and it
makes me smile. I just wanted you to
know that it is a lovely garden. Have a
good day.”
And
a lovely garden it is. Their house sits
high above the street on a plateau so that the front garden is a series of tiers,
rising from the street to the plateau. The
soil is rich. The plantings are random,
not chaotic, but random. Many gardeners
follow the French model with geometrical gardens, following the rationalism of
René Descartes, the 17th century French mathematician and
philosopher.
Lanie’s front garden
isn’t Cartesian with precise patterns, but rather beckoning, resembling the
patterns of nature. The effect is that of
an organic union, much like a meadow of flowers. When Lanie finds a flower she particularly
likes, she finds a place for it. One can
see why a passerby left the note. Her
front garden would cause a walker to pause, take in the beauty, and then sigh,
feeling better for having feasted on the sights, textures, and aromas of her
garden.
All
of this brings us to rationalism and gardening.
Botanists are rationalists and orderly, and they need to be. Gardeners are romantics and sometimes a
little off-hand because life and gardens aren’t tidy.
Dennis’
work in the garden is to build the block walls for the terraces and raised beds
which he seems to be delighted to do. A
sign of a good marriage is where the husband and wife are happy fostering their
partner’s delights.
The
plateau on which the house sits is host to a series of isolated beds. Two of the beds are dahlias which Lanie triumphantly
announced stay the winter in their beds without being dug up in the fall,
stored during the winter, and replanted in the spring. This is an accomplishment worth noting. The dahlias are lush, bold, and bountiful
which is proof of the pudding.
There
are some apple and peach trees which produce fruit about every ten years which
is SOP for Flagstaff Flagstaff
And
then there is a vegetable garden where everything is rational with straight
rows, bursting with good things to eat.
One test of a garden is that it is refreshing to the eye and rewarding
to the palate.
Lanie
comes by her gardening honestly. Raised
on a farm near Cebu
City
Copyright
© Dana Prom Smith 2013
Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening
Etcetera for the 
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