When I was 11, we moved from the hot, bright, subtropical Bahama islands to the cold, wet, windy Isle of Man. In the Bahamas, being cold was a novelty. In the Isle of Man, it was a given. I had never experienced autumn or winter before. I had never seen snow falling out of the sky. I didn’t know what it was like, frankly, to witness that whole Persephone myth thing in action, when it looks like the whole world dies come October.
It was cold and damp and honestly pretty miserable. The three years we were there, 1985-1988, were like a mini ice age. I’ve been back to the Island many times since and never witnessed such a run of awful weather, but there was something just depressive about the mid-eighties, what with Thatcherism and the Cold War, and I guess the weather was mirroring that. My adoptive parents were going through a rough spot in their marriage, and I remember them constantly bickering and frequently sequestering themselves in the master bedroom of the 700 year old stone farmhouse we were living in to hold tense “discussions.”
My response to all of this—suddenly being deprived of green and growing things for half the year, and having to share a damp stone cottage with two extremely unhappy people, was to start my own little pet jungle. I missed the Bahamas badly, but I noticed that here in the upper latitudes, people kept little bits of the tropics inside their dwellings. I began to spend all my pocket money at the garden center on things like potting soil and fertilizer and little clear gel cups for rooting cuttings.
I hardly ever spent money on plants. Mostly I just filched cuttings from houseplants I’d encounter at restaurants or at the hotels or bed and breakfasts we stayed at during our road trip holidays around the UK in the driving rain. Sometimes I would ask to take a cutting, but often I’d just snip one clandestinely. I grew out my right thumbnail and kept it sharp for this purpose specifically. I always had a ziplock baggie in my purse, and I’d wrap the cutting in damp paper towel from the bathroom to keep it from wilting. I got tradescantia and impatiens and ivy and kangaroo vine and even a golden pothos this way.
I also grew potatoes from the grocery store that had started sprouting, and avocado pits, and whatever else I could persuade to create vegetation. I filled every used yogurt and cottage cheese container with rooted cuttings and sprouted seeds, and when I’d run out of pocket money I begged my mother to buy me larger plastic pots from the garden center. I idolized Anne Tetley-Jones, our landlady, who kept the most amazing gardens around our cottage. She grew monkshood and gigantic poppies and fuchsia and sunflowers and heirloom roses and a riot of smaller flowers and trailing vines of all descriptions. It was cold and wet on the Island, but at least in (theoretical) summer, things really GREW. Anne had a magic garden outside our cottage, and I did my best to create my own inside it.
I have kept houseplants ever since, and when Trent and I moved into our house in Salt Lake City 16 years ago, I finally had a chance to apply myself to the skill of temperate zone gardening, though I admit I’m still not very good at it. The wish to create a magic garden has never faded, and over the years became more and more compelling until during the madness of the early COVID lockdown, I decided to hell with it, let’s just build a fantasy right in the front yard. I had some giant Amanita muscaria mushroom sculptures I’d started building out of trash, and without any particular venue available for them, I realized I could just put them in our garden. I’m Alice, so I’m going to build my own Wonderland. Take that, global pandemic!
The neighbors love it. The sculptures light up at night, and they’ve made it through two winters so far, a fact of which I’m proud. The mushroom on the parking strip is participatory—we have a little hutch with some weatherproof tags and sharpie markers in it, and a little notice asking people to write answers to the questions “what would you do if you were larger?” “what would you do if you were smaller?” and hang them on the mushroom. I have not yet figured out how to make a weatherproof trash Caterpillar to pose these questions more formally, but I’ve been mulling over the engineering.
It’s nice to have a no-deadline participatory art venue that’s just for fun, no pressure. I get to use the space as a lab to test out new build methods and new prompts. And our garden is finally thriving.
