Gillian Deacon is a podcast host and author of the national bestseller A Love Affair with the Unknown: Leaning into the Uncertainty of Modern Life.
Dear Trudy,
It’s been 18 years since we met, so I would completely understand if you don’t remember me. I believe I was among the first customers for the landscape design business you ran with your two grandsons. As I understood it, the business was your way of spending time with them during their summers home from university. They were strong, hardworking twenty-somethings looking for a way to make money; you were an enthusiastic horticulturalist with an eye for outdoor spaces. I found your collaboration charming.
When I saw the handmade flyer for your little company posted near the cash at my local garden centre, the idea of supporting this multigenerational family venture warmed my heart. What could other established, pricier, certified landscaping companies possibly bring to my small backyard garden lot that could match the appeal of your delightful family venture? Hiring your little team would support not just one under-appreciated demographic, but two.
So I chose you, Trudy. I believed in you.
Ours was not an elaborate project. The goal was to extend a section of interlocking brick in our small backyard space and find a way to incorporate a couple of raised planters for a few pops of colour. The design challenge was that you had to work around the “offseason garden,” or what some in this household might have called the primary purpose of our yard: a backyard rink.
Yes, in the cold Canadian winter months, all 300 square feet of our rectangular slice of the urban outdoors was devoted to being a beloved ice-hockey playground. The rink was small, but so were the skaters at the time. Each of my boys learned to skate there by shuffling in circles around our tiny yard, fence to fence to fence. That perimeter had to be kept intact; any landscape design for the other three seasons of the year had to defer to the primacy of the ice pad.
And you did it, Trudy. You designed a plan for two small, unobtrusive raised beds, each hugging opposite fence lengths and barely breaching the rectangle, no more than 12 inches deep. The drawings you showed me, after our first on-site discussion, were a vision: simple, linear, and bursting with colourful plant life. We were sold.
Your grandsons ripped up the existing brickwork to even out the ground below before laying down the extended design. And once they had completed the simple wooden raised beds, you told them which of your selection of perennials and annuals to place where: a pop of colourful petunias spilling over the woodwork here, a lush stand of daylilies there, a dark shade-loving something-or-other to offset the soft petals of some other Latin named thingy. I know a few basics about plants, but the horticultural details I left up to you. You were the expert, Trudy. That’s what I was paying you for.
And it looked great. Your grandsons worked hard in the July heat and made good on your design vision. I paid you, thanked you for your services and said an appreciative goodbye. I may have even promised to recommend you around the neighbourhood.
And then it rained.
The archipelago of puddles that formed in the newly laid brickwork were the first sign that your grandsons hadn’t the first clue how to landscape or lay brick. The second sign was the sudden death of the beautiful tree we had treasured as the only source of shade in our west-facing yard. It began to drop leaves and grow brittle not long after you cashed my cheque. Those grandsons must have mistaken the tree’s root system for some kind of pesky underlayer that needed removing in order to prevent the brick tiles from buckling. A simple oversight, I suppose, in the company’s division of labour – you, the brain, they, the brawn. Maybe you forgot to tell your young landscapers that trees need roots in order to stay alive.
But the real trouble didn’t begin until the following May. By then, my husband had rented a roller and other heavy equipment to undo the undulations in our brickwork, smoothing out what your grandsons had considered even ground. The winter months in our backyard space had passed successfully – amateur skaters with sufficiently short strides had enjoyed hours of gleeful shinny on days when the temperatures kept our little rink frozen. With the frost risk now passed, it was time to prepare for the brief, joyous period of al fresco living.
But as we prepared to stock up on colourful perennials to populate our raised planters for their second season, my husband and I noticed that the entire north bed was sprouting what looked like new shoots of bamboo.
Your plans had called for some bamboo to take up a small corner spot in the garden, but it appeared to have migrated.
We tried our best to pull it up and fill in the space with pink petunias and orange marigolds, but the bamboo was having none of it. And within a couple of weeks, it had displaced everything else. By July, the entire 10-foot bed was a jungle of lush – and stubborn – tropical green foliage.
The following summer, we tried harder to uproot it. I’ll be honest with you, Trudy, I may have muttered more than one curse of your good name as we laid black landscaper’s cloth across the entire bed and covered it with pea gravel, trying to starve the bamboo of sunlight and water.
But even though we left that unsightly photosynthesis-blocking arrangement in place for five years, the relentless growth continued.
Spikes of bamboo shot up through the cloth and rocks faster than we could nip it back. New shoots began to take over the small patch of grass farther down the backyard garden; the invader had breached the perimeter. And then the spread travelled north, under the wooden fence and into the neighbour’s property – another perimeter breached.
It was the hours I spent trying to beat back the bamboo overgrowth in our front yard today that put me in mind of writing to you. Yes, Trudy: the front yard.
You may recall that my house adjoins the neighbour’s to the north, which means the root system of your bamboo planting has grown under not one but two concrete basement foundations, emerging victorious on the other side, nearly 60 feet away, to continue its mad frenzy of sprouting and shooting up its signature acicular leaves. (I had to look that one up. You’re the expert here, not me.)
As I hope I have illustrated by this point, Trudy, the results of your ill-advised horticultural choices in my home have been nothing short of a runaway fiasco. At least twice every summer I consider putting my house up for sale if only to escape this menace.
But here’s the thing, Trudy, and the real reason for my letter: I have realized, upon reflection, that I would do this all over again.
I have thought it through, on various sweat-drenched breaks from bamboo-digging, and decided that if the circumstances were to repeat themselves, I would still choose you. In spite of the disastrous outcome, in spite of the stress, the strain and the cost of mitigating the fallout of the brief time our paths crossed in this world, I believe in what you were trying to do. I believe in the effort you made that summer, with a caring heart and the best of intentions.
People make mistakes; we all do. I’ve tried to teach my children that. You made a really stupid mistake in my backyard, Trudy, there is no sugarcoating that. People you’ve never met – neighbours five doors up my block, whose parking pads and backyard gardens are now choked with bamboo they can’t get rid of – now curse your name, or would if they knew it.
If they knew it all started with your choice, Trudy, they’d sure want to ask you about it. Did you not notice, they might shout, that one of the first search queries to come up on an internet search of bamboo is whether it is illegal to plant? Or that the word “bamboo” in the search results is almost always paired with the word “invasive”?
It took me less than a minute to find the gardening advice to plant bamboo within a buried Rubbermaid tub in order to contain root spread. (In milder climates, a one-metre concrete barrier is recommended.)
And I would understand their outrage. In fact, I have understood it, especially when I lie arched over a coffee table in an attempt to restore blood flow to the kinks in my lower back after hours of straining to pull up the carbon-steel cables of bamboo root system in the front yard of my house, 75 feet from where you first planted it.
But then another thought occurs to me: You were trying your best.
I imagine the education your grandsons were able to pay for with the money you helped them earn in those summer jobs. I imagine the memories they carry of working with their grandmother that one summer in between their years away at school. I think about what they might be doing now, and how whatever it is it must be informed, even just a little bit, by the faith you had in them and the collaborative spirit you taught them as you helped them start their first business. I wonder about the bond between those brothers as their lives take different paths, and about how much their time working with you in my backyard and with others – and I do hope you had other clients, if only because it would mean I wasn’t the only sucker touched by your flyer – may have shaped their sibling connection.
I don’t know where you are, Trudy – if you’re alive and well, or not. Maybe you’ve long forgotten why you chose bamboo for my Ontario flower bed. But you are someone who came into my life, left a mark, and moved on. I can’t control for that. What I can control is how I think about you and what happened when our paths crossed – that’s entirely up to me.
Even as I haul up string after string of never-ending bamboo root, I try to remind myself that every experience – even the ones that seem interminable – is fleeting.
These days, my sons can walk the length of our entire yard in three or four easy strides; long of leg, towering in height, strapping lads themselves, it can be hard to conceive of how they ever cherished that wee space as their own hallowed Garden Arena.
Those freezing nights when their dad stayed awake later than his body wanted him to, shivering as he flooded the ice with a garden hose – those are gone. So too are the squeeze bottles of Gatorade we used for face-off circles and blue lines; the little blue plastic chairs on which the boys sat, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, to eat lunch just inside the back door so they wouldn’t have to waste time taking skates off and on before returning to their game; the bench their loving uncle built for them out of old hockey sticks. Those memories sustain me when I worry about other parental failings: tempers that flared, bad habits that were indulged, mistakes that were made.
When I told my young men the other day that I had been thinking of you and that fateful landscaping summer, they remembered your grandsons immediately. “Those guys gave us our very first piece of Juicy Fruit chewing gum!” they recalled with delight. My sons remember their five-, seven- and nine-year-old selves peering out the backdoor at the upheaval in the yard, marvelling at the powerful, friendly giants doing hard things.
They recall the offer of a stick of gum, how special it made them feel, like they were part of something a little outside their sphere. They describe unpeeling the foil wrapper in fascination. One of my sons is in university now, earning money at his own summer job; the older ones are busy taking flight, finding their way. Circumstances don’t allow them a lot of visiting time with their grandmother.
So really, Trudy, I guess I’m writing to wish you well. I sincerely hope that you checked your horticulture reference books after wrapping up our job, smacked palm to forehead and grimaced at your error, and vowed to never make that mistake again. But even if you didn’t, I harbour no grudge. It might be a stretch to say thank you – my back really does still hurt – but in a way I do appreciate this experience as a reminder that there is more than one way to look at everything, even that godforsaken bamboo. That tenacious beast of a plant is in my life now, and it’s clearly not going anywhere. All I get to choose is how I’m going to deal with it.
