I know, it’s been like a hundred years since my last post. Well, as promised, I’m back and it’s only because I did finish my second book, Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box. It’s a memoir with recipes, illustrated by me and coming from Counterpoint Press this November, 2013.

It’s about a mother’s stifled desires, a daughter’s realized dreams, cooking and life through multiple California generations. While you wait for that in your local bookstore or at your favorite online bookseller–and might I recommend Barnes & Noble–you can visit youtube for a clip of me reading from Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes) and my guest spot on public radio in front of a live, paying, laughing audience on Sedge Thomson’s West Coast Live.

If that’s not enough, and you want to start putting your own creative thoughts to paper or online, come join me this fall for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program course Getting Started: A Beginning Workshop for Aspiring Creative Writers. We’ll meet on campus Wednesday nights from 7 to 10 p.m., starting October 2 through November 6, for 6 sessions. Go to their online catalog for more information or to register and maybe next time you come visit there’ll be a clickable link waiting.

Hey, I’ve missed you, too, and it would be great to see you there! And if you’re looking for something to read before class starts, here’s a piece I did for Arroyo less than a hundred years ago. Enjoy!

PHANTOM GARDEN SYNDROME

When I think of the garden I left four years ago when we sold our Glendale home, many images come to mind, including the annual spring freesia festival, bigger every year as the bulbs established themselves in both the terraced front and back. There were also the orange Clivia, the western redbud next to the Ceonothus’ electric-blue blooms, the wild blue iris and the heart-melting sight of the Texas dawn bougainvillea that colonized the boxwood lining my entry stairs. And I can’t forget, though I wish I could, the climbing ice berg rose lolling about the upper pergola, offering a graceful,impossibly romantic branch as though it were a French courtesan’s arm, what I called my Fragonard bower, and underlying that was the yellow Lady Banks rose, like a popcorn blanket laid comfortingly across the top of the pergola. The pergola was built to take in the “view shed,” as my landscape designer called it, or “killer” view as Sunset Magazine dubbed it. And leaving those views and that enchanted space was hard, but necessary and ultimately for the best.

It would have been harder, though, had the jacaranda tree ever bloomed in the two years it was planted at the top of the garden. The plan was that from my home office, where I was supposed to be cultivating a lush writing career, I’d take comfort in its backlit splendor as the overly demanding elder house and seductive young garden continued to drain my energy and attentions and my writing withered from neglect.

I realized that I’d buried too much of myself in the garden the spring I felt the only thing I had to look forward to that year was the Jacaranda’s bloom. It was with Herculean effort I broke the bonds of enchantment, moved to a less taxing address near wilderness that needed no maintenance from me, and filled a patio with potted darlings, a collection appropriately sized to the attention I could in good conscience grant them, while I got some other things done.

But I am surprised to find the extent to which I miss my lost paradise still. There are mornings I wake to a fresh ache of familiar longing and it’s the jacaranda I never saw in bloom with its lavender flowers and lacy green leaves gracing my mind’s eye. Of all the miraculous things I did see, it is the imagined garden of the never was that lingers.

And I’m not alone in my phantom garden syndrome. My friend Jack was working in Washington, D.C., when he and wife Jane bought an old Virginia farm on which he planted an entire orchard of carefully chosen heritage apples. Business and family concerns called them back to California before they sampled a single fruit born of all that effort. Now he buys exquisite heritage apples at a market in the city where he works and I have multiple jacarandas in astonishing bloom in my new neighborhood, so neither of us is lacking in certain aspects of our original desires. Still, we both carry in our minds the visions never fully realized.

My friend Sean has left multiple jacarandas behind over the years as he’s moved in the good-school-for-the-kids quest that so many parents do. Indeed, he’s left behind a grove of flowering trees he’s never seen in full glory, including multiple Chinese Flame trees and a eucaplyptus that’s grown to 25 feet in someone else’s care, all planted in an effort at “redressing neglected landscapes,” he writes from his current abode, where the garden is a potted, more easily transported one. We both now realize the need for gardens that may have to move along. The upside of a potted garden: The soil is less a concern, and the results are easier to control and rearrange.

I know from my friend Rosemary that garden memories can last a lifetime. Forty years out and enjoying a hydrangea filled terraced hillside in the Bay Area, she still thinks of the al fresco dining garden surrounded by flowering shrubs and artfully placed Japanese maple she installed in a blank space accompanying a newly built townhouse in Highgate, North London. She thinks fondly now of what it may have become, the pleasure it might have given those who followed along on her “elegantly paved” path. For that is the pleasure gardeners can take in what they’ve left behind, the unimaginable gifts waiting to be discovered by others while the original gardeners get on with the work of turning over new soil and putting down fresh roots.

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