The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,45
crew of the morning. What am I doing, allowing these sweaty barbarians into my home? But no, she was taking charge of her little domestic empire again, and now there was this crew of handsome if somewhat older Mexican men, and this woman nursery manager/landscape designer who was the kind of desert bohemian you encountered in the inner Southwest. When Scott saw the finished product he’d say they should have done this years ago. She watched the uniformed workers bring a few plants that were growing inside wooden crates and plastic pots, including a specimen that resembled a tree in miniature; its thick branches had a taupe skin that looked like bark, and its fleshy petals seemed to be made of emerald clay, and the entire plant had the heaviness and simplicity of a work of sculpture.
“Isn’t this the biggest jade plant you’ve ever seen?” said the nursery manager, who had caught Maureen’s perplexed examination of the specimen, which spread out some four feet and stood about three feet tall. “In the late fall, or the early winter, whenever you get the first good rain, it’s going to give off hundreds of tiny white flowers. Most of these plants are going to flower at one time or another. Some in the spring, others in the fall.”
“It just makes so much more sense, from an ecological point of view,” Maureen said. “Down on the beach, it’s misty and cloudy right now. But up here, the sun is beating down on us—over time, it kills anything that needs water.”
“You’ve got your own little microclimate here,” the nursery manager said. “I could feel the weather changing as I came up the hill. You’re getting a hot counter-draft to the ocean breeze from those mountains. That makes this like an African savanna. You can fool the plants in the garden, you can make them think they’re really somewhere else, but it takes a lot of work.”
“I love this one too,” Maureen said. It was some sort of agave, an arrangement of concentric rosettes, one stacked inside the other, painted pale green and crimson, and all the colors in between. “It’s like a flower without being a flower.”
“It’s called Morning Light. I’ve got a whole bunch more like that for you. We’re going to do a little section of Morning Light, surrounded by some nonthreatening succulents, like this one over here, Cheiridopsis africanus, which is from South Africa, of course. In general, I’m going to put your more barbed and spiny plants away from the edges and from the path, so it won’t be so dangerous for your kids.”
“Excellent.”
“¡Con cuidado!“ the nursery manager called out suddenly, and unexpectedly, in Spanish.
A group of men were entering the backyard with a ten-foot-long plant wrapped in white canvas, rolling it on two platforms, but they had gotten the wheels stuck at the spot where the cement of the driveway ended and the lawn of the backyard began. They carried the package sideways into the backyard, straining under its weight, and stood it on its end; then they began to unwrap it slowly and its branches opened up and stretched out like a man waking from a long sleep. “This, to me, is the pièce de résistance,” the nursery manager said. “It’s the compositional anchor to the whole garden.”
“Oh, my God, it’s huge. Is that the … what is it called?”
“It’s an ocotillo. I call it ‘the burning bush’ because it looks like something from the Ten Commandments. It must be a good twenty years old. This one isn’t from the nursery, of course, it’s a transplant. We rescued it from the Palm Springs area, from Rancho Mirage, to be exact. It was on some land that was being cleared for a subdivision, a stunning stretch of desert. I got five of these from those developer gangsters, and half a dozen amazing willows too, one of which is over in the truck. They didn’t just give them to me, of course. They sold them to me. Really nice of them. They destroy a bunch of native habitat for all kinds of desert animals, they’re chasing the roadrunners into the hills, literally, but they make a little extra selling off the flora. But I only paid them a fraction of what they were worth. I got them for a song.” The nursery manager gave the quick, sly laugh of a woman claiming winnings at a poker table. “Speaking of money,” she added with a congenial, gently pleading smile.