The first thing I learned out here is that seeing a garden isn’t the same as seeing what’s growing.
If you stand in the yard today, you’d see a plain rectangle of mowed grass, a few spindly saplings, a pergola hovering over nothing. Tidy. Mostly empty. Kept that way by the numbing circuit of a lawnmower.
But a garden is not just whatever happens to sit on its surface. I’ve learned to look for what could be here.
I see rows of apple trees, their blossoms turning the driveway into a tunnel of pale pink and white. I see a flagpole standing over a bed alive with bees, butterflies and wildflowers. I see a long table under a pergola, friends and family lingering over drinks pressed from fruit we coaxed into being.
Possibility is the gardener’s first tool: belief in what isn’t here yet. The second is acceptance: none of it will stay.
The moment I stop tending, the place will tilt back toward wilderness. As it should. I work with humility, knowing anything I shape will eventually shape itself.
Once, many years ago, I gave up on gardening. Yet here I am again, learning that some roots I thought were gone were only sleeping, waiting for me to notice.
When I was 12, my parents bought a house in Middleport, down the street from the old Sunset Drive-In and across from the FMC plant. It was small — a one-story ranch with three bedrooms, one bathroom and a single-car garage. My dad was determined to make it beautiful.
The front yard soon filled with baubles and bushes: a metal bench wrapped around an evergreen trunk, a concrete birdbath, a row of prickly shrubs to separate the lawn from the road. And beneath it all, the conspicuous bright orange cedar mulch that my dad adored.
He had vision but little stamina. The labor always fell to me. He stood still and silent, making noise only to sigh and grumble when I made a mistake. I dug holes, planted flowers, watered the earth, and, at his loud insistence, stomped the mud flat. My protests fell on deaf ears. “We’ll buy you new shoes, dammit.”
Many afternoons, after daydreaming all day at school about Majora’s Mask or Resident Evil 2, I’d step off the bus to find my dad waiting in the yard, shovel in hand.
What drove me crazy wasn’t the work itself but the constant reversals. One season we’d line the front with shrubs; the next, we’d dig them up and replant them on the side. We rearranged foliage like furniture.
After a childhood spent digging holes and picking dirt from my fingernails, I came to hate yardwork. College couldn’t come soon enough. Between classes, my grocery store job and hours at my girlfriend’s house, I stayed away from home as much as I could. My little brother picked up the slack in the yard.
“We’ll leave the light on for you,” my dad cracked.
Most people return to what they know. You’d better hold on to something. My plans to plant apple trees predated my dad’s death. But when I thought about home, I thought about old friends, family and, yes, despite everything, dirt.
Maybe the signs were there all along. Years ago, when we still lived away, the foliage of Western New York began to call to me like a stray in the alley. Florida has its own beauty, but New York holds shapes and hues that feel like home to me: greens so deep you can fall into them, blues so crisp they seem artificial, yellows and oranges and reds that flare from the trees like wildfires before sinking into chocolate-milk browns. The Niagara Plateau has a way of insisting on itself.
On our trips home, I’d press my forehead to the plane window, taking in the region from a rare vantage point.
I began to see bits of New York everywhere: a fern in the shadow at Blarney Castle, a break of light over Reims. Suddenly I’d be back in Gasport again, lying in the grass beneath a ceiling of sugar maples.
Now that I’m here for good, I’m learning I barely knew this place at all — like a lovesick teenager who finally gets a date with the girl of his dreams and realizes he’s fallen for his own imagination.
The maples and white pines are native keynotes, sure, but the marigolds my family planted come from Mexico. The sweet-smelling lilacs drifted here from eastern Europe and Asia. Even my beloved apples arrived with settlers from the Old World.
If everything flows, as the old philosopher Heraclitus says, then belonging is earned slowly.
I’ve been working to reintroduce the yard to some of its old locals.
A burr oak will live out back near the old burn pile. Augie’s little hands planted a couple dozen acorns my father-in-law gathered from the golf course in Lockport, tucked beneath a mesh net so the chipmunks and squirrels can’t dig them up. Come spring, I’ll choose two or three of the strongest and fence them off from the deer and the lawn mower.
I’ve sown a melange of new-old locals — milkweed, asters, bergamot — under the flagpole, in a bed where my grandparents once kept a garden. It’ll be a small meadow of native pollinators — a gathering place for bees, butterflies and whatever else calls this land home — just a stone’s throw from the apple trees.
They won’t look like much until 2028. Next year they’ll take root, send up tentative shoots, then die back. The year after that, they’ll grow bushy and uncertain — the teenage years. By the third spring, they’ll settle in, fill out and hum with insects and birds.
Sleep, creep, leap.
To prepare the flagpole bed, I smothered the weeds with old cardboard boxes, a few still stamped with the Amazon arrow. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I weighed them down with rocks I’d dug up while planting the apple trees, turned the soil until it loosened, edged the bed, pressed the seeds in with my boots.
It’s late enough in the season that the birds shouldn’t do much browsing, but I scattered shredded leaves for cover anyway. Most of them blew off in the wind. So it goes. Come spring, the first green shoots will rise through whatever litter remains, reaching for light as the season turns.
After eight months out in the yard, I still know nearly nothing. But I have a few tools. Sore muscles. Dirt on my boots. Enough.
I used to think I’d escaped this kind of work. Now it feels like the one place where he keeps finding me. If I’m lucky, the garden will keep reminding me of the things — and the people — I thought I’d lost for good.