The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,24
very much.
Wandering deeper into the stacks, she came upon a book titled The Wonders of the Desert Garden. Its cacti and assorted succulents caught her interest, as did a chapter called “Southern California: the Sonoran Possibilities” that carried several photographs of the agave, aloe, and the Golden Barrel cacti in the Huntington Gardens in San Marino. In another she found a map that showed the Sonoran Desert reaching to a mountain range in California: on a clear day, you could see these mountains, the Palomars, from the toll road that cut through the hills behind her home. We’re practically on the fringes of the Sonoran and the Mojave. It made so much more sense to try to re-create an ecosystem that was native to this part of California, rather than one native to Southeast Asia or the Amazon. Desert gardens, by definition, needed very little water. The moisture that came from the occasional ocean breeze or from the fog bank that climbed up from the sea into their hillside cul-de-sac was more than enough.
They arrived at a nursery, Maureen leading the way with Samantha in her arms, Araceli and the boys trailing after, walking through the narrow spaces between the tables with plants.
“Yeah, your tropicals are high-maintenance, no doubt about it,” the nursery manager concluded, after hearing Maureen describe her garden’s decline. “Probably your succulents are something you wanna look at.” The nursery manager was a sun-blanched woman of about thirty in jeans and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and she led Maureen and her retinue through aisles of potted vincas and roses underneath a canopy of translucent fabric, to a section at the back of the nursery where the sun blazed down on a crowd of mini yucca plants and other succulents filling several tables, alongside some potted cacti that were as tall as Samantha. “Over at our Desert Landscaping location in Riverside we’ve got a spectacular saguaro, five feet tall. A majestic plant, really, a centerpiece to an entire garden. With your succulents, drainage is key. Of course, it’s all low-maintenance once you get it in … For a small fee, we’ll do the landscape design for you.” When you first encountered them, Maureen thought, these plants possessed a menacing aura: the armor of their spines, the short hair of barbs. But their architecture was graceful and sturdy, especially the baby saguaros, with their interlocking arches. Pastel-green was the predominant color, but when you spent time looking at them you noticed subtle variations in hue. Maureen examined a plant that looked something like a desert sea urchin, and detected orange-red highlights in the tips of its spiky arms. They soaked up the noonday rays with the same gusto with which the banana trees soaked up water. “You’re gonna save a ton on your water bill, no doubt about that,” the nursery manager said, as if reading Maureen’s thoughts. “And you’ll save on labor too, because these things practically take care of themselves.”
“Brandon, cuidado,” Araceli said.
Maureen turned to see her oldest shaking his finger and mouthing the word Ouch, and then laughing. “Didn’t hurt,” he said. Yes, Maureen would have to build some small barrier to discourage the boys and Samantha from wandering into the desert garden—if she decided to go ahead and follow her instinct, which told her that replacing the water-starved tropicals with a succulent garden was the perfect solution to her problem. Their thick, sunproof skins would forever remove from her property the humiliation of the Big Man reciting lines about weeds and “gross nature.”
Walking up alongside Maureen, getting a glimpse of her from the side while trying not to stare, Araceli saw her employer’s eyes focusing. Clearly her patrona was planning some big, dramatic statement with these plants. The nursery manager was explaining things and studying Maureen, examining her reactions. The nursery manager could see la señora was a moneyed person: Araceli’s Mexican presence trailing behind the children was equivalent to that of a German luxury vehicle, or a piece of gaudy jewelry hanging from Maureen’s neck. Add to the picture Maureen’s regal bearing, the long languorous crescents of her recently styled hair, and her air of pampered distraction, and it came as no surprise to Araceli that the nursery manager was giving her that special treatment norteamericanos reserved for people with serious money to spend. She answered Maureen’s questions with “Sure,” “Of course,” and “We could probably do that.” For a moment the unctuous manager added to Araceli’s lingering, growing, and not entirely explicable sense