The Sunset Gardener

If Sherbet is your strain, this is your sign: the Sunset Gardener. A walled garden below the mesa, the sun touching the rim, the beds opening orange, rose and cream, and you by the west wall with a clay jar on your hip, waiting for the one nobody planted.

If Sherbet is your strain

You do your best work when the heat lets go. All afternoon you keep to the shade and say very little; then the sun gets low over the mesa, the wall starts giving back what it soaked up since morning, and you go out with your hat pushed back and a clay jar of water on your hip. Other people call the end of the day the end of the day. You call it the start of the good part.

You are slow on purpose. You plant things that take seven years to decide what they are, and you do not mind the wait, because you have seen what waiting buys. You can tell a plant that is failing from one that is only thinking, and you leave the thinking ones alone. You water at sunset, when the ground can keep it, and you would rather give a plant one deep soak than ten nervous ones.

At your best you are the one who keeps what other people would pull. The odd seedling between two beds, the cutting nobody wanted, the friend who came up in the wrong place: you give them room and see what they turn into, and more often than anyone expects, they turn into the best thing in the garden. Then you give pieces of it away, in small pots, to anyone who asks.

Your flaw is that you cannot be hurried and will not be called in. Supper waits. Phone calls wait. Somebody stands at the gate saying your name while you watch a bud decide whether tonight is the night. The people who love you have learned to bring the plate out to the bench.

What you need is a west-facing wall, a bench against it, water saved for the evening and one stubborn thing that has not bloomed yet. Give you that, and the sunset comes to you.

Your hour: Sunset, when the heat lets go
Your place: The bench against the west wall
Your object: A clay water jar on your hip
Your tempo: Cactus time: slow, and sure
Your weather: Dry heat, easing off
Your flaw: You won’t come in before dark

Your people

The Aurora Keeper (Northern Lights)The Aurora Keeper waits half the night for a sky that may not come; yours comes every evening, on time. She calls you spoiled. You send her a cutting every spring anyway.
The Mountain Elder (Hindu Kush)The Mountain Elder knows thin soil and slow growth, and is the only one who has never asked you why it takes so long.
The Funky Gourmet (Blue Cheese)The Funky Gourmet wanted a cactus for the shop. You gave him a small one and a single rule. He waters it every day, and you have decided not to know.

Things you say

Water at sunset. The ground keeps it longer.
If nobody planted it, it gets to stay.
Slow isn’t late.
Take one. Bring the pot back.
It opens when the heat lets go.

A scene from your world

The one nobody planted

The Sunset Gardener waits out the afternoon in the shade of the porch, as she always does, and goes out when the heat lets go. Not before. The garden lies below the mesa inside a low adobe wall that has been soaking up sun since morning, and by the time she opens the gate the wall is giving it back, warm against her palm as a loaf just out of the oven. She settles the clay jar on her hip and starts down the first bed.

Between the beds the ollas sit buried to their necks, unglazed clay that takes water at sundown and hands it to the roots all night. She fills each one until the water stands at the rim. She lifts a fallen pad with the long wooden tongs and sets it in a pot on the shelf by the gate; somebody will want it. Somebody always does.

The beds open in order. That is the rule here and has been for years: the orange bed first, as the sun touches the far rim of the mesa, then the rose bed, then the cream, so that the garden goes from the color of the sky to the color of the wall in about the time it takes her to walk it.

At the end of the row, in the gap where the orange bed meets the rose, sits the stray. Nobody planted it. It came up eleven summers ago, a green knob the size of a thumb, in ground she had left bare on purpose, and she guessed then that a moth had carried something from one bed to the other one night and told no one. Neighbors leaning on the wall said to pull it: it would crowd the others; it was nothing. She told them it was something, she just did not know what yet. It has grown round and ribbed since then, and it has never once bloomed.

Tonight there is a bud on top of it that was not there yesterday. She sets the jar down. She takes off her gloves and sits on the bench against the west wall, and waits. The orange bed is open. The rose bed is opening. The bud on the stray does not move, and neither does she.

It goes at the last minute, when the sun is half behind the rim and the wall has turned the color of a peach. The petals come apart slowly and then all at once, and the flower is not one color. It is orange at the edge, rose toward the middle and cream at the heart, all three beds in a single bloom, as if the moth had remembered every stop. The Sunset Gardener laughs, once, out loud, alone in her garden.

She stays until the light is gone and the flower has gone lavender with the sky. On the way out she bends to the base of the stray, where a small round offset has pushed up against the big one. Next spring it will go in a pot on the shelf by the gate, for whoever asks. She will tell them it came from a mistake. She will tell them to bring the pot back.

The garden below the mesa

The west wall: Adobe, waist-high, soaking up the sun all day and giving it back after dark. The bench is set against it, facing the mesa, because that is where the evening happens.
The ollas: Unglazed clay jars buried to the neck between the beds. They are filled at sundown and the roots draw from them all night, which is why nothing here is ever watered at noon.
The three beds: Orange, rose and cream, planted so they open in that order as the sun goes down. Walk them at the right speed and you reach the last one just as it opens.
The stray: The round, ribbed cactus that came up in the bare ground between the orange bed and the rose. Nobody planted it. Nobody is allowed to pull it.
The shelf by the gate: A plank of small pots, each holding a pad or an offset, for anyone who asks. There is no price. You bring the pot back.
The mesa rim: Flat as a table and a long way off. When the sun touches it, the first bed opens; when the sun is behind it, the garden is done for the day.