Growing in Rhythm with Remembrance
Dear Friends,
The irises in the understory tell me it’s March, though it’s not March at all to the irises. Paula Merwin’s favorite flowers bloom beyond syllables, only when soil and sun suggest, and always in rhythm with our remembrance.
March is the month of Paula’s birth, and also of Paula’s death and William’s death, two years apart and one week apart. The irises pop up each March all along the meandering path from the driveway to the house. Paula called it “the avenue,” perhaps in a nod to New York City, which had been her home before her arrival on Maui in the early 1980s.
Our longtime gardener Walter tells me that the avenue, like the garden around the house with its angel wing begonias, double pink hibiscus, and chocolate orchids, was Paula’s. He recalls that she often returned from trips to town with new ornamentals, and planted them densely along the avenue or by the front lanai. In later years, as gardening became more difficult, she entrusted the avenue to Walter. Walter also recalls William and Paula’s distinct approaches to gardening. Paula favored a natural but controlled style. She couldn’t stand yellowing leaves and took to clearing them promptly; William was keen to let dying leaves fall on their own time, and content to stand back as the palm garden slipped into the natural cycles of a forest. Nonetheless, William and Paula fell into rhythm with one another, working apart but together in the garden each afternoon, and on the weekends in the mornings, too. If a garden could be said to be anyone’s, it was theirs together, from its earliest days, as William recalled in the 1997 essay “A Shape of Water:”
“Some of the things growing here now were already in the ground before we met, but it was only after it was clear that Paula wanted to live here too, after thirty years in New York, that what is around us began to be not simply an assembly of plants laboriously set into soil in conditions that had been rendered inhospitable for many of them, but a garden. Her lack of hesitation was less surprising to her than it was to me. She was born in Argentina, grew up in the tropics, and had always wanted a garden, read about gardens, imagined living in a garden. She had not been here for more than a day or two before she was out on the slope dragging long grass from around young plantings and helping to clear space for others.”
Now, five years into our stewardship, we continue to tend the garden planted by William and Paula’s hands. Along the avenue and around the house, we carefully tend the plants that line the long pool by the front door. Downslope in the forest of palms, we stand aside and marvel at endless cycles of decay and new life as witnesses to ecological succession. And while we carry forward William and Paula’s individual and complementary expressions of their shared convictions, we allow the garden and its story to evolve, and expand—as it did this March.
Just a few weeks ago, we celebrated the long-awaited germination of a small loulu native to west Maui—a Pritchardia glabrata—one full year after its seed was planted, in March 2024. This little palm, emerging at long last in this memorial month, remembers as it looks ahead here in the garden, as do we.
With warm wishes,
Sonnet
