Beth Kephart - Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self

Copyright 2005 by Beth Kephart
Photographs copyright 2005 by William Sulit

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Front cover and text design by Mary Ann Casler
Typography by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kephart, Beth.
Ghosts in the garden : reflections on endings, beginnings, and the unearthing of self /
Beth Kephart ; photographs by William Sulit.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-57731-498-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Chanticleer Gardens (Wayne, Pa.)Anecdotes. 2. Kephart, Beth. 3. Conduct of lifeAnecdotes. I. Title.
SB455.K449 2005

First printing, March 2005
ISBN 1-57731-498-0
Printed in Canada on partially recycled, acid-free paper
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

T his book was written in a place called Chanticleer, among thirty-some acres of hills and native streams, tall trees, false ruins, shatteringly gentle peonies, and the architecture of lotus flowers trussed by opaque water. Chanticleer is a pleasure garden, so beautiful that it suggests the alchemy of danger, and the flowers there are tangled up inside each other, except where theyve been disciplined to rows.

The first day I went to Chanticleer I would have said, about myself, that I was not yet old. The old hanging there like a gentle challenge. The not yet proof of a small talent for melodrama. It was April, my birthday; I was forty-one. I was a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and I had come to the garden alone.

There was the immediate appeal of strangeness. The oddity of being lost a few miles from home. The air was cleaner, too, and the trees were pink eruptions, and it was pleasing to me, in ways I couldnt account for, that I did not know the names of most everything around me. This was tall and terminated in yellow. This was smug and hoarding its own fruit. This hadnt lifted its head toward the sun, but it was destined for a habit of pale purple. My lack of knowledge about the names of plants and trees was oddly clarifying. I wasnt responsible for adjudicating a thing. I was just there, on my birthday. Forty-one.

Later I would dream of going to the garden at night and sitting with it under the moon. Of waiting for owls, if there were owls, or for the bravura of any sleepless bird. White would be blue, I would imagine. Red would have long since succumbed. The water above the rocks would run toward amber wherever there was the memory of stars. Touch would be a tool, not a privilege. The mind would not cleave to what the eye could not see, and the heart would follow the pulse of a wing.

That would be later, much later. That would be after I had made it my habit to visit the garden every week. To drive the ten minutes from my house and park the car and follow the narrow ribbon of macadam down around and through the blooming things. I was drawn to the changeability of things. To how the clenched fist of a bud would grow suddenly generous and unfurl. To how something limp or pale would take a stand and intensify. I was drawn to the birds that were drawn to those trees and sang songs they never sang in my backyard. I was drawn to the murmur of the people passing by, to the shameless, even vulnerable way they spoke of their own wonder.

But perhaps I was drawn most deeply to the calm that I felt in the garden. I worried less when I was there. I felt less chased by deadlines and dilemmas. I grew more concerned with gains and gratitude than with losses. In the garden my age felt like a blessing. In the garden questions that had haunted me for years found quiet resolution. I learned the many parables of seeds and finally came to understand what the Czech writer Karel apek meant when he wrote these words of winter:

Sometimes we seem to smell of decay, encumbered by the faded remains of the past; but if only we could see how many fat and white shoots are pushing forward in the old tilled soil... ; how many seeds germinate in secret; how many old plants draw themselves together and concentrate into a living bud, which one day will burst into flowering life if we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best thing of all is to be a living man that is, a man who grows.

You can walk the loop of Chanticleer in twenty minutes, or you can choose a bench or a blanket of grass and sit there and wait for a bird, a thought, a cloud. At Chanticleer I did as I pleased walking sometimes, at times almost running, often sitting on a hill of green or beneath a tree or right beside a stream. Looking, seeing, breathing, living. Being a woman who grows. I wanted, at times, to be planted in that ground. I wanted the face of a flower.

This is a book about land and about how land, like us, changes over time. It is a book about legacies and ghosts, a book about what happens when we recognize and honor the selves that, in the hurry of our lives, weve left behind. It is a book about our need to preserve the things we love, and our need to let them go. Lock a seed in a jar, and it will never grow. Nudge the seed into the soil, and if you wait and water and watch and have faith, there will be a bud.

The paradox that all writers come to is the paradox of details. Too few of them, and no story can feel true. Too many, and the story drowns inside its own conceit and expects too much from those who hear it. We want to tell stories that reverberate. We want to make our story plural. We want, as the great poet Pablo Neruda once wrote, poetry worn away as if by acid by the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of lilies and of urine, splashed by the variety of what we do, legally or illegally. We want to write as right as that. As meaningfully and as on purpose.