The Main Principles of Great Gardening

Green leaves shone in the early June sun with the tears of a crying watering can and the sweat from the freckled nose of Rosalie Kurtz.

Rosalie leaned over to inspect her tomato plants, what should have been the literal fruits of her labor, but the buds on the vine remained small and jaundiced, refusing to open. The leaves’ glint shifted from playful to taunting. She stood to her full height and snapped the book she had dog-eared to page fifty-two shut, a miniature whip of air amongst the susurration of the surrounding foliage.

The Main Principles of Great Gardening, the cover read in swirling font, the same font that had drawn her in during her trip to the bookstore on the corner not ten minutes earlier. Sophistication, it had boasted. Hidden secrets enclosed within, it promised in loops of filigree. Upon further inspection, Rosalie made out fireworks of blossoming wildflowers and blurry spots of buzzing bees framing the name Gilderoy Gartner on the spine, and she simply could not ignore that. The hands of fate had spun dear author Gilderoy’s destiny, and surely someone with the gardening life thrust upon them at birth must have held some much-needed wisdom that would assist Rosalie in her uphill endeavor. She never quite learned how not to judge a book by its cover.

Conversely to Gilderoy, Rosalie was starting to believe that someone had written it in her stars long ago that the world of soil and photosynthesis would not make room for her, no matter how many Gardening For Dummies books she read or YouTube tutorials she watched. She drummed her fingers—including her two pale and colorless thumbs—along the paperback with a low, drawn-out breath. Rosalie had the romantic notion that the sigh was heavy enough to make her poor stalks droop even lower.

She shoved the book into the front pocket of her overalls with more force than necessary and utilized her now-free hands to tie her nest of hair away from her damp cheeks and neck. Summer temperatures had arrived early a few days ago, and Rosalie was desperately craving a return to sweaters and frosty breath. She moved to this city—in a sublevel studio without air conditioning, mind—with a vague understanding of the climate. She expected wind, maybe more arid conditions, but ultimately nothing too extreme in any direction. Imagine her surprise and chagrin when she awoke to her hair plastered to her neck and her phone declaring a high of eighty-nine in the first week of June. Perhaps coming out here at noon was an unsound decision on top of all of the rest that had left her with her shriveled plants.

A new but familiar gathering of heat tapped its grimy fingernails against the back of her eyes. She was suddenly tired, too tired to let the tears fall, and all too aware of the press of her clothing against her skin. Her apartment was only twenty, maybe thirty, paces away from the gate of the community garden she had two boxes in, but it felt like miles.

No sooner had the thought of finally braving the distance to stand in front of her open fridge entered her mind than the beep of the gate’s lock sounded behind her. A twist of her stomach followed because she already knew who it was by the soft crunch of boots on gravel and the familiar, simplistic tune emanating from the person’s lips.

“Howdy, Rose!”

And there it was. The same greeting, every day, every time, and now Rosalie remembered why she had chosen such an inopportune time in the first place—avoiding Charles.

Charles (Rosalie never learned, nor asked for, his last name) never went anywhere without a wide-brimmed hat and his brown gloves sticking out of his jeans pocket, a toolbelt perpetually around his waist. The gloves had long gone smooth and soft, and they put up no fight as Charles pulled them over his fingers like adorning a second skin. Rosalie had watched this routine from the half-window in her apartment that faced the garden so often that she knew Charles stopped by every single day, even when it was out of the way of his true destination.

His obsession made Rosalie teem with an emotion she couldn’t quite process. She wouldn’t let the tacky underside of the word “Jealous” stick. Watching him head to his little corner made the emotion swell and her hands crumple into secret fists behind her back.

Homes & Gardens would be put to shame at the sight of Charles’s four-by-four section of the planet nestled delicately in the front corner. It overflowed with herbs, some sort of pea, and, of course, bright red and green tomatoes. Tiny petals of yellow and white and purple wildflowers opened to the sky, lining his box. This was against their complex’s rules for the community space, since only produce was meant to be grown here, but no one could deny the curb appeal it lent to the neighborhood, so he was unlikely to get asked to remove them. Rosalie imagined what it would feel like to pluck each flower out one by one, to feel the satisfying snap of each stem from the buried root.

“Beautiful day out, eh?”

Rosalie blinked. She shook her head to clear her mind of such a heinous thought. Charles did not wait for her answer before squatting in front of his thyme and removing the trimming shears from his belt.

“Mhm,” Rosalie agreed half-heartedly. She took a step to the right, just in case he chanced a look back over his hunched shoulder so he would only see the shine of her forehead and the uncertain sway of her denimed figure instead of her failures.

A quick swipe of his forehead. The gentle clip of greens separating from their stems. The scuffle of shoes. Charles worked with an incomprehensible rhythm that seemed in time with the very air around them. Rosalie, uncomfortable, pawed at the front of her overalls and puffed out her cheeks. He was now between her and the gate, and she assessed how awkward it would be if she just made a quick exit without another word or goodbye.

“How are those tomatoes looking?” He paired the question with a signature hedging grunt.

“Oh, you know.” If she were feeling honest, she would have continued with, “I am this close to giving up on everything once again and moving back home to face my parents. Even that feels like an improvement compared to how utterly incompetent I feel here. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel like I know what to do, and these stupid tomatoes certainly aren’t helping anything!”

As it was, Rosalie was not feeling honest but prideful, so she licked her lips, puffed out her book-bearing chest, and stood half an inch taller as she said, “Getting there.”

“Y’know,” Charles finally turned toward her, “I could always take a look.”

His eyes were dark and crinkled at the edges against the sun, and his forehead was creased with age, though she had never been able to tell whether that age was comparable to hers or way older. She often conflated expertise and success with the luxury of having spent a wealth of time on the planet. Certainly, no one her age had their shit together enough to have a flourishing garden, right?

Ah, her brain supplied, but wasn’t that the entire crux of her current situation?

“No.” She threw up her hands, as if to stop the offer mid-air, then lowered them quickly and cleared the defensiveness from her throat. “I mean, thanks, but no need. I am capable of handling it all myself.”

His gaze flickered briefly down. Rosalie wiped imaginary dirt, but very real sweat, from her palms onto her thighs.

“Anyway, I was just…” Rosalie trailed off, allowing the jut of her thumbs toward the exit to communicate what her mouth refused to. If she kept talking, she would let even more prickliness seep through, and that would be embarrassing, and she needed to leave now.

Charles nodded and refocused on his gentle ministrations. Rosalie exhaled, relieved that this trainwreck of an interaction was over, and took brisk steps toward the gate, procuring her fob so she could unlock the gate. He cleared his throat. Rosalie cursed inwardly as she jumped and dropped it.

“Before you go,” he asked as she swiftly grabbed it, “can you come help me with this?”

Rosalie licked salt from her upper lip. “Sorry. I have an appointment, and I’m already late.”

“No worries.” Charles was no longer looking at her, and he didn’t turn to assess her as she so obviously lied. “Hope you have a good rest of your day.”

“You too.”

Rosalie realized her mistake when she took a step toward their building, her window staring at her with judgment. She could see the outline of her fridge even from here. She really needed to invest in better curtains. And she needed to revise her excuse-making strategies.

If she went back to her apartment now, there would be no plausible deniability, only the damning evidence of her guilt on full display for visitors to the garden.

She cursed, outwardly this time, and turned heel. It took three blocks before she realized where her feet were now taking her. Thirteen sweltering minutes later, Rosalie crossed the threshold of a local lawn and garden supply store and tried not to sob or fall to the ground with the instant relief of the cool indoor air.

Instead, she pulled out Gilderoy and let the book naturally fall open to page one-hundred and three, “Troubleshooting Tips.” Her fingertip traced down bullet point after bullet point until she reached the list of top-rated fertilizers and soil supplements. Maybe today wouldn’t be a total loss.

“Rosalie?”

She snapped the book shut, her spine into a stock straight position, and a piece of skin off of her inner lip in a blink’s time. In front of her stood a man, someone she had to sift through memories to place. He was wearing a brightly colored vest and a nametag, and the memory finally slotted into place. She pressed her lips tightly together so she wouldn’t wince.

“Rosalie Kurtz, right?” he asked, uncertainty building in his fidgeting hands and shifting weight. “I’m—”

“Simon Ledd, yeah,” Rosalie interrupted, pointing unnecessarily to the nametag. Her voice was obnoxiously chipper. Overcompensating. “From… Trig and Chem.”

“Trig and Bio,” he corrected, not unkindly.

Rosalie smiled. Forced.

“Right. What, uh, what brings you all the way out here?”

Out here, of course, meant “in the middle of nowhere, three state lines away from the university they attended together for two semesters a year ago.”

“I’m from here, actually.” He gestured down his uniform and up to his freckly face. “Got this as a summer job before I go back for my internship at Yosemite next month.”

He had acne scars that pocked the hollows of his cheeks and large glasses that magnified his dark eyes; it all made him look incredibly young. Young, but with an internship in his field lined up. An internship in the field both of them were studying for once upon a time.

“Cool.” Rosalie gathered Gilderoy into a tube, coverside hidden. “Neat.”

“Eh, you know how it is,” he said with a commiserating shrug and grin, like it was an inside joke between them. Rosalie bristled because she definitely did not know how it was. “What about you? What have you been up to? You kind of disappeared mid-semester.”

Rosalie clicked her tongue, searching for the words. “I moved here a couple of months ago.”

“Did you graduate? I thought we were in the same year, for some reason.”

“Yeah, we were, but I,” Rosalie flashed teeth in a tight grin as she interrupted Simon’s nervous tittering, “dropped out.”

“Oh! Man, that’s too bad. Did something happen?”

“I’m in a hurry. Sorry. I’m just here to grab,” Rosalie pointed to the nearest thing to her right, which happened to be the largest cement plant pot in the entire store (maybe the entire world). She quickly adjusted course so she was pointing to a simple pair of gardening gloves hanging on a hook by her head instead, “these.”

“Gloves?”

“Gloves!” Rosalie echoed with saccharine enthusiasm and tugged them free. “Ring me up?”

And this was how Rosalie ended up trudging back toward her place with fifteen dollars less in her bank account and a pair of gloves she truly did not need choked between her fisted fingers, trying not to spiral about how it was just her luck that this would happen to her today of all days when she was already feeling useless to remind her just how true that was.

She blinked back tears once more. The world came to her as if through a windshield: blurry, clear, blurry, clear. It was just like that first drive into town, stormy and terrifying and the perfect pathetic fallacy backdrop for a college dropout running away from everything she had ever known and some unnameable fear in the hopes of finally escaping its clutches.

But she never did escape it. It was here now, burrowing into each of her pockets, her shoes, and even her socks, pulling down and down and down, just like back then.

She unlocked the gate to the garden and lumbered forward, shoving the gloves onto her hands and failing to stifle her sniffles, so her breath came out as high-pitched, careening whining. Their coarse fabric scratched at the corners of her eyes and the apples of her cheeks when she swiped across them, hoping to get the downpour to finally cease.

She stood before her planter at the back of the garden. Her plants still listed dramatically to the side, caught in an invisible tempest. All she had wanted to do was build something. Make something of her own. Show herself that she wasn’t a complete failure meant only for mental breakdowns and quitting.

The pale stalks stared at her, silent and knowing. A black fly landed lazily on a leaf.

With another loud whimper, she fell to her knees and began to pull. Like hair caught in a rubber band, the roots snapped beneath her unforgiving touch, one after another, snap snap snap, until there was nothing but upturned soil and a pile of small, viridescent corpses. When she was done, she leaned back against her heels and pressed her arms and forehead to the wooden edge of the box so she could catch her breath.

“Well,” she muttered to herself, breath hot against the fine hairs of her forearm. “That was a bit dramatic.”

She took one more steadying breath and sat back up. Her eyes fell on a figure backlit by the sun directly to her right, and she jumped back with a yelp.

“Jesus,” she exclaimed. He held up his hands. “You scared me.”

“Didn’t mean to,” Charles said softly. His gaze drifted to her transgressions, and her face flushed. Mortifyingly, she thought she might start crying again. “You alright?”

Oh, yeah. She was definitely going to cry again. As two more tracks fell down her face, his eyes widened, and Rosalie chuckled.

“No.” Rosalie fiddled with a dead leaf. It curled in on itself, hiding the most dead and brown part of itself in a coil of waning green. When she tried to pull it open, it crumbled to dust. “Tomatoes were supposed to be easy. I even went with starter plants. Took all of the online advice. ‘Good soil is key, make sure they’re well-mulched, keep them in direct sunlight,’” she recited some main principles from Gilderoy’s tomato section with a half-hearted wave of her hand.

“Sure,” Charles offered simply.

“They were supposed to be easy,” she repeated. She pressed her nose into the shoulder of her t-shirt and sniffled. “I was supposed to be able to do something. Finish, for once. But I always—I can never—I’ll never be like you or Simon Ledd.”

“I see.” Charles brushed past the random name with grace. He knelt next to her, gathering the limp stalks gently in his hands. For once, he wasn’t wearing his gloves, and they were nowhere in sight. In fact, he didn’t look dressed for gardening at all—dark wash jeans, regular belt, spot-free graphic tee, no hat.

Rosalie tried to ignore what that most likely meant. How long had he been watching her mental breakdown before deciding he might need to intervene? Had his window also overlooked the garden space this whole time, giving him a bird’s eye view of her struggle from week one?

When he had them all cradled close, he looked back up into her eyes. From this close, she could tell he was at most one or two years older than her. The confirmation burned at the base of her throat.

“My grandma taught me how to garden,” he said after far too long a pause. “When I was seven, she let me choose my first addition to hers in the backyard. I chose black-eyed Susans.”

He pointed a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the yellow flowers lining one of his boxes.

“Did anyone ever teach you?”

Rosalie shook her head.

“Did someone teach you that you have to compare yourself to everyone around you all the time?”

Rosalie went to shake her head again, then paused. She thought of her last conversations with her parents before she blew up her entire life.

Why can’t you be more like—

Did you hear about the Smiths’ son? Rosalie, you should consider—

“Maybe I can teach you some tips,” Charles offered with a shrug. “On both fronts. I don’t have a book, but I might know some of the ‘main principles of great growing.’”

Rosalie laughed, a light, fluttering thing, the sound of a leaf unfurling. She reached out to touch the plants in his arms.

“Okay. I’m ready to learn.”