Lawn Magic

Three years after I moved to the country house, I hired a gardener.

Before that, I pushed a dinky mower through the near reaches of the grounds and left the perimeters to themselves. I planted an azalea bush or two out front and lopped the hedges in the back into a sloping display of hopeful maintenance. But when the third spring rolled around and revealed a lawn half mud and half clover, my neighbour tut-tutted, sympathetic, and handed me the number of a local outfit. I put it in a kitchen drawer. A week later my grandson, hurtling up from the creek pursued by a swarm of hornets, tumbled into an inexplicable little-person trap and split his lip. I applied ice and sent him home to his mother. Then I fetched the number from the drawer and dialed.

A sonorous voice on the third ring said: “Lawn magic. This is Merlin.”

I told Merlin that I needed a hand in the yard.

“A hand.” He sounded appreciative.

“Well, two more than I have.” (Sometimes I jest.)

“For a total of …?” (Did he think I was grasping?)

I explained that I had made a good start of it. I told him about the azalea bushes and mentioned some flagstones that I bought with the idea of a pathway from the back terrace down to the boggy area where the spring pooled into the creek. I mentioned that my pushmower was fairly ancient and my grandson no help at all.

“You want a labourer, then.” There was no judgement in the word. (No magic either.)

I hurried to clarify. “Well, you see, there is quite a lot to work with, beyond the work to do. I mean to say — potential. But of course, one needs a certain vision to draw that potential out. And so I hoped…”

“For eyes. To see that vision,” Merlin offered.

“The bottom of the garden is completely wild,” I said. I thought I heard the scratch of a pen. “I did manage to evict a tribe of parakeets from the conservatory. Their décor was, I assure you, appalling.”

“Funky naturalism?” asked Merlin.

“Quite.”

“We do landscaping, madam, not interiors.”

“Well of course,” I said. “I’m calling about the lawn. The land. The scape of it. The scope of it. I just mention the conservatory because …” I stopped there. I’m not a stupid woman, but sometimes, the sheer number of things that I know seems to make me stupid. And at that moment, this was the case. How was it that the conservatory, as I had been calling it since that was what the estate agent had called it, was really just a glass shed? Surely conservatories were meant to house musical instruments. Or, at least, music.

“They do not have a pretty song, wild parakeets,” I finished.

There was a longish pause while Merlin considered.

“So, you are in need of more hands. Also, eyes. Vision. And a better sound in the conservatory.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s it.”

He came around a few days later. He was tall and slim, with terrific posture and a perfectly bronzed bald head. He wore striped culottes, and under them, athletic socks pulled right up to the knees. His feet were in muddy boots, strangely old-fashioned things with buckles. His T-shirt read “I RODE THE WORMHEAD,” and there was a tattoo of a comet on his right bicep and a mason’s trowel on the left. He had a young face, covered by a startling snow-white beard — a long flowing accomplishment, groomed and garnished with turned up mustaches. His eyes were what bad writers called sparkling. They were blue. I took him to the conservatory.

“Oh –it’s a greenhouse,” said Merlin.

I had to agree. “They called it a conservatory when they sold it to me. Maybe they hoped I would conserve the parrots.”

“Parrots, carrots,” said Merlin. He looked at me with those sparkling eyes and said: “Shall we grow some green things in your greenhouse?”

I must have hired him, because he came around the next day with a riding mower. Rather, he came around the next day ON a rider mower; he just cruised right on up the driveway, gave a short wave to where I was sitting on the porch and kept going. I worried he would have an accident on the steep incline down to the creek, what with the boggy spring, so I hurried around to warn him. But when I reached the back, his head was already setting over the hill’s horizon. Ten minutes went by and I heard the incoming sound of the motor. The sight of Merlin rising was really quite dramatic. His beard was flowing, the mower was snorting, and the rake strapped to his back at a sort of warrior angle — well, it was all a bit swoony.

Later, after he had dismounted and accepted a glass of lemonade and promised to return with seeds for the conservatory, I slipped off my sandals and tread all over my freshly mown lawn. It was as soft as a carpet, all the way down to the creek. Later still, when I was standing at the kitchen sink in the golden hour, I saw that there was a pattern to the knap of the grass between the hedges, as though an undulant creature had snaked or raked its way through morning dew. But when I went out to inspect further, the light had shifted, and the marks were gone.

The next time Merlin came around he appeared, rather magically, at dusk, pulling a child’s wagon full of seedlings. I paused the movie I was watching and followed him down to the greenhouse which I no longer called a conservatory. As he handed over the small pots, two at a time, he named them — godlike.

“Rhubarb and dill; marigold and capsicum; fennel and nasturtium.”

I hadn’t brought a marker with me and there were dozens and dozens of the little pots, so I stopped him and asked how I was to know which was which.

“You will know, dear lady, by their taste,” Merlin explained. “Radishes taste quite different from carrots. Chard is nice with raisins while spinach is best with garlic.”

Then he handed me “sunflower and runner bean,” at which point I began a desperate on-the-fly attempt to alphabetize my nascent greenhouse. An ex-librarian’s habit, perhaps. My memory is quite good. Sadly, it seemed that Merlin’s was not. When I asked if we had placed three or four pots of parsley he nodded. “Yep. Three or four.”

The wagon was remarkably copious: the moon was up by the time we had unloaded it and the greenhouse shelves were covered with identical pots of soon to be green. Merlin and I stood in the doorway, hands on hips, both of us pleased. I was counting and trying to decide whether the back shelves were endive through gherkins or quince through radicchio; Merlin was humming a tune. “A cup of tea would be the thing,” he said, and so we went back up to the house.

At the back door Merlin removed his boots and when he sat my kitchen table drinking jasmine tea, I couldn’t help thinking that he looked … right. At home. I prattled on about ornamental shrubs until I realized he had fallen asleep and then I sat across from him and watched dreams running across his handsome face. I found myself humming the tune he had brought into my garden and when I paused, I could still hear the melody. It was coming from Merlin’s lips, but it was less of a hum than a buzz. My auto-tuned gardener, I thought. Just then his bright eyes snapped open, startling me but not him. He put a grubby finger to his mouth. Tweaked his bow-tie of a mustache and then plucked from his lips — a bee.

“Oh!” I said. It was a good trick.

“Almost forgot this,” he said. He deposited the bee in my empty tea cup, where it continued its melodious buzz. “Take him down to the greenhouse,” Merlin said. “He’ll bring the green.” Then he stood, stretched and shook my hand, which seemed a funny thing to do. When he and the wagon had disappeared down the drive, I took the tea cup with the bee to the greenhouse. Then I went back to the house and finished my movie, without paying any attention to it.

The next time my grandson came to visit, I brought him down to the greenhouse and opened the door with a flourish. He was impressed. The green was abundant — in shades from asparagus to zinnia leaf. The odour, too, was redolent. “Like vegetable soup!” he exclaimed, though the honeysuckle, it seemed to me, was showing off. I plucked a ripe cherry tomato and popped it into his mouth. “Notice anything else?” I asked. Because the sight and the smell of my wonderous week-old crop was not the real magic. I put a finger to my lips and my grandson’s eyes grew wide. The plants were humming.

That night we had a symphony for supper and we invited Merlin. He arrived by bicycle this time and he wore a three piece suit in Donnegal tweed, becomingly tailored to show his fine physique. My grandson played with his food, by which I mean he played his food. He’s no prodigy, my grandson, but he can find his way up a chromatic salad. Merlin got a kick out of it. He grabbed the tongs for a raucous coda.

When I came back from putting my grandson to bed, Merlin had done the washing up and was back at the table, watching a pot of jasmine tea brew.

“It’s not jasmine from the greenhouse,” I said.

“Well, at last, a bit of peace and quiet,” he said, and he smiled under his mustache.

“How do you explain it?” I asked.

“I don’t,” he said. “I just provide.” He dropped his eyes from mine. The smile was gone, and I saw something I had never seen: Merlin was overcome with shyness. So I told him I thought he was the bees knees. And he offered me his. This was all shocking of course, but quite natural. I sat on his lap, drinking tea while he dozed and dreamed. I would have stayed all there all night, but a large owl flew in when the clock struck ten and knocked over the tea pot at which point Merlin thanked me for a delightful dinner and pedaled away into the darkness. A silver wake followed him, as though he was a great ship at sea and not a bearded gardener on a country lane.

The next morning, I told my grandson I needed his help. “I’ve lost my heart to Merlin and his magic,” I said. “I don’t want him to leave my land. Like ever.” He’s a clever one, my grandson. He went to the bookshelf and pulled out a battered copy of Morte D’Arthur from the shelf. While he read, I watched Merlin weave a tangle of ivy into a lovers’ swing. It was a good sign, I thought. My grandson slammed the book shut. “Do you still have that plastic wading pool I used to play in?”

It was a long wait till the summer solstice, but I accepted the logic of doing so. Merlin came and went freely, often spending hours on the other side of the creek, piling rocks into plinths. This too, I took as a good sign.

“Are they standing stones?” I asked once, from the near side of the creek.

“Stacked,” he said. He leaned down and pulled a single stone from the bottom of the pile and it toppled to the ground in a delicious clatter. “I’ll have to try again tomorrow,” he said, twirling his mustaches. Then he came up to the house for a piece of rum cake.

Finally, the longest day arrived and so did my grandson, with an oversized duffel bag. From it he pulled a fog machine and his giant Skeletor sword, which he handed to me solemnly.

We dragged the paddling pool up from the cellar and scrubbed the pink mold from its surface. Then we carried it down to the creek and positioned it in the reeds. In the late afternoon I washed and dried my hair and brushed it straight down my back. My grandson pinned a white rose behind my ear and handed me a silk kimono he had borrowed from his mom.

When dusk fell, the fireflies were abundant down at the creek. My grandson took my hand, and said, “it’s perfect. We don’t need the fog machine.”

I agreed and stepped into the pool. He handed me the sword. “Listen for my cue.”

Merlin’s tune is one I could hear anywhere: in a blinding rain, on a factory floor, or under the thin water of my ersatz lake. When I heard it whistled on the summer solstice, I arose, blinking and in love, my sword at my side. There on the bank stood Merlin in a kaftan, a rose tucked in his beard. He was bent over with laughter that I had never heard and that’s when I knew — I, the first woman to make the wizard laugh, had won him.

“Oh Vivian,” he said, and there were tears in his sparkling eyes. “Where have you been all my life?”

“Cleveland,” I said, because sometimes I jest.

The third summer after moving to the country house, I married a gardener. He’s down by the creek now, sunbathing. And he looks fantastic in a speedo.