Garden Ghosts

The first garden ghosts I encountered were in the woods.

I grew up next to an enormous park called Hell Hollow, nearly a thousand acres of woodland within and surrounding an enormous ravine at the base of which runs Paine Creek. Despite the somewhat ominous-sounding names, it is a stunningly beautiful, magical place.

The woodlands that make up the park had been cleared and settled many years before – an early community that failed and faded. The fields returned to forest, leaving behind little traces that I learned to spot as I explored every inch of the park, wandering far from the established trails.

As I hiked and explored, suddenly, amid the trilliums and Virginia bluebells, there would be a clump of daffodils. Always rather ugly daffodils, truth be told. A double-flowered variety, I think probably the extremely old cultivar ‘Van Sion’, with murky greenish-yellow petals that somehow managed to keep putting out a bloom or two despite the deep shade. (There is an excellent article about the variety here: https://oldhousegardens.com/MoreAboutVanSion) They were often accompanied by a little patch of Vinca minor, and occasionally a few clumps of daylily leaves. Once I found a straggly apple tree, and on one sunny bank next to an abandoned road cut, there was an old rose that marked the start of each summer with a few richly fragrant blooms.

Those lingering plants were my signal to start scanning the ground carefully. Soon enough, I’d spot the rows of stones surrounding a slight depression in the ground, all that remained of a home’s foundation.

Whenever I found one of these long-abandoned homes ringed by flowers that some forgotten person had planted, I would sit and wonder about who had lived there. One of the homes was just a stone’s throw from the most spectacular waterfall in the park. I loved to sit and imagine was it was like to wake up each morning to the roar of that water.

I remembered those lingering traces of lost gardens when my husband and I moved into our current home just over three years ago. It had sat empty for a couple of years and the garden was an utter mess. A dead ash tree hung over the power lines coming up to the house, and the back was choked with Amur honeysuckle and Japanese knotweed. If you are familiar with either of those particularly awful invasive species, you are shuddering with sympathetic dread.

The first summer we were here I cut down and hauled out three truckloads of brush as I fought to reclaim the space.

Under the brush and weeds there were no ‘Van Sion’ daffodils, but I did few remnants of a faded, ghostly garden. Clumps of snowdrops here and there. Some sad, wispy peonies that had were alive but had been too shaded by weeds for too long to produce any flowers. Riotous clumps of rose campion that had thrived on neglect and still bloom with abandon.

I knew what those plants meant. A gardener had lived here. Not recently, but at some point, someone had planted these things, and probably many more that had died from the years without any care.

And unlike those abandoned foundations in the woods, I could do more than just speculate on who had lived here. My best guess, thanks to public tax records and a very helpful local librarian, is that one Charlotte Foster planted those peonies and snowdrops. From what I can find, she was the longest owner of the home since it was built in the 1940s. I have found just a few facts about her, but I know she never married and owned her own home at a time when it was quite unusual and difficult for a single woman to do so. When this home was built, it was illegal for a woman to have a mortgage in her own name. I like to imagine her as a strong, independent woman who didn’t let society tell her who she was. She feels like a good kind of ghost to have around the garden.

I talk to her, sometimes, when I’m out weeding and digging.

I had a whole discussion with her, in fact, about the peonies she left behind.

I like peonies, but only sometimes. A lot of old-fashioned varieties have huge, double flowers that flop everywhere unless they are staked. Single-flowered forms that can stand up on their own are more to my taste. And though the peonies Charlotte my garden ghost had left behind didn’t flower my first spring there, I could guess what they’d look like just given their age.

I wanted to get rid of them.

But Charlotte wouldn’t let me. Every time I went to dig them out, I imagined her saying how she’d planted and loved them, and wasn’t it amazing that they had survived despite all the weeds and neglect.

So I moved them to a sunnier spot, gave them a nice top dressing of compost. Last spring, they finally recovered enough to flower and they proved to be exactly what I expected: not my usual thing, and absolutely requiring staking to stand up.

They’re also, to be frank, absurdly beautiful.

I’m glad I let Charlotte persuade me to keep them.

I wonder, sometimes, what sort of gardening ghost I’ll be someday. Or already am, possibly. I’ve moved a lot in my gardening life, leaving a trail of odd plants behind me. I think every garden I’ve touched in the last decade has at least one clump of the indispensable Crocus ‘Ruby Giant’, and I’ve planted an absurd number of the nearly perfect native columbine, Aquilegia canadensis. I wonder how many of my former gardens still have some of my favorite roses, which are easier to take cuttings of than to try and dig up and move. Those are good ghosts. I’ve also left some mistakes behind: Lysimachia nummularia which threatened to eat one of my former gardens alive, and the very beautiful but very vicious Ononis spinosa.

Hopefully, someday, the ghostly remains of my current garden will be a pleasant discovery for some future gardener.