If I have set down roots, it was less from intention than from the combined forces of time, circumstance, and inertia. The spirit of a vagabond still resides within me. But somehow, the years have passed, and I find myself living in a house with a lush, mature garden that I alone designed, planted, and tended. 

When the plants were small, I hadn’t envisioned how dense they would become. Nor did I foresee the scope of the effort involved in pruning and weeding or in mowing the lawn between closely spaced trees and shrubs. But my reward is a garden more peaceful than anything I had imagined.

In my younger days, I moved around a lot, so I didn’t have a chance to create a garden. For a while, I was living in an apartment that didn’t get much natural light. During one dank rainy season, I wallowed in a bad case of the winter blues. The wife of an artist I worked with told me to get some seed catalogues. She assured me that the pictures of flowers, trees, fruits, and vegetables would lift my mood. With nothing to lose, I took her advice. To my surprise and utter gratitude, she was right. It was while thumbing through one of those nursery catalogues that I discovered the Sterling Silver rose. It’s a hybrid tea rose, with large, pale-lavender blossoms and a lemony fragrance.

When I finished school, I rented a house in a pretty neighborhood. The backyard had a lawn and a couple of trees, but little other landscaping. To my delight, the nursery department of the local hardware store had the Sterling Silver rose, so I bought one and planted it near the patio with a couple of six-packs of purple pansies and Johnny-jump-ups. The first big blooms that emerged were striking.

A few years later, I moved to another house, and I planted a Sterling Silver rosebush next to the sloping walkway leading to the front door. Ten years after that, I bought a fixer-upper farmhouse in a rural area to the north. There were three orange trees and three pomegranates in the front yard, but there was more than enough room next to the porch for the Sterling Silver rose.

My rural home was a long commute from the idyllic Sonoma County village, where I worked as the master-printer and manager of a small fine-arts press. The print studio was in the back of a refurbished craftsman-style bungalow that served as the guest house of a renovated, two-story, 19th-century house. Fortunately, my boss told me that I was welcome to stay in the bungalow with my dog, whenever I was on the job. 

My boss’s main residence was in San Francisco, but he frequently came to Sonoma on Tuesday or Wednesday evening, then stayed through the weekend. He liked to interact with me and the artists and be involved with our projects. Eventually his attention would wander, and he would put on an apron, roll up his sleeves, and indulge his real passion: making sheets of Japanese-style paper. 

The garden between the two houses was lovely. A large space alongside the bungalow was defined by some massive grapevines and a few small Iceberg rosebushes, with abundant clusters of white blossoms. Another 15 or 20 Iceberg roses were planted in a neat rectangle in the front yard. 

Once or twice a week, a team of gardeners showed up to perform maintenance miracles on the large property. A couple of times, when I was returning to the studio after early morning walks with my dog, I saw them uprooting a rosebush. Once they got it out of the ground, they took an identical one from its black plastic pot, stuck it in the hole, and tamped the loose dirt around it. If I hadn’t seen them do it, I would never have known that one of the shrubs had been replaced. It made no perceivable difference and seemed like an odd exercise. Maybe the plant they removed had a brown spot on a leaf or an aphid crawling on a bud or something. Heaven forbid, there should be an imperfection.

The more I peaked behind the facade of this charming, affluent, little town, the more it reminded me of a giant Disney set. Or Stepford. As quaint as it appeared, it began to feel unreal. On my midweek walks with the dog, the neighborhood was like a ghost town, with the occasional sound of a leaf blower or lawn mower from the gardening crews. After dark, very few lights burned behind the drawn drapes. Like my boss, most of the people who occupied these houses actually lived 60 miles away in San Francisco. On the weekends, they came here to drink wine and relax under the stars in their hot tubs, living alternative lives, a world away from their real ones. 

Just like all of those absentee neighbors, my boss’s wife would drive up from the city on Thursday or Friday. When she arrived, she parked her coffee-with-cream-colored Porsche Boxster in the driveway of the big house. 

Sometimes the lady would don an apron, a sun hat, and a pair of gardening gloves. With the handle of a straw basket dangling from the crook of her arm and a pruning shears firmly in hand, she would get to work, deadheading the Iceberg roses in front of the bungalow. She looked adorable in her boho peasant dress, bending over the roses, ever so slightly, with a tiny bead of sweat dripping down onto her cheek from behind her sunglasses. Before long, some passerby would stop to praise her picture-perfect garden. She would graciously express her thanks, and acknowledge that it was the kind words of strangers that made all of her efforts feel worthwhile. 

What sort of person engages in this sort of pretense, taking credit for everything the hired help had done? I shook my head, thinking about how an undetectably faulty plant had been swapped out for for a perfect one, and now this costumed hippy princess was boosting her ego by basking in praise that she had never earned.

As it turned out, roses were not the only things that were covertly exchanged. One day my boss asked me what I thought of his wife’s new car.

“What new car?” I asked.

“The Boxster.”  A grin played on his lips, and there was a devilish twinkle in his eyes.

“She’s had that car for a few months,” I said.

“No, she just got it yesterday,” he replied.

“But it looks like the same car,” I argued.

My boss laughed. “Porsche just came out with a bigger engine for that model. She wanted it, so I bought her a new car.”

Later that day, I asked the lady of the house how she liked her new car. She scowled. “You weren’t supposed to find out!” she protested. “I got the new car in the same color so no one would know!”

I’m not overly fond of subterfuge in every day dealings. One deception always leads to another. Eventually the dream job turned sour and I moved on. 

Several years later, I sold my house and bought another. This one had a lawn in the backyard, with a couple of ornamental trees anchoring the corners. It was like a blank canvas, calling out to be filled. Unfortunately, there was not even one Sterling Silver rosebush to be had in my small town. 

I had fond memories of those Iceberg roses. Unlike the Sterling Silver, they have almost no scent, but I liked the fact that they are floribunda roses, which bloom profusely in a mild climate. I ended up planting four of them. One was a climbing rose, and the other three were shrubs.

Three years ago, after I pruned the climbing rose, I got to work on the rosebush next to it. It had become so full, that it was encroaching on my lemon tree, so I got rather aggressive in cutting out branches. I must have slipped into autopilot, because before I knew it, the shrub was showing too much of a tree-like form, resembling the climber next to it.

When the spring blooms appeared, the suckers shooting up from the base of the overly pruned shrub were producing red blossoms instead of white ones. Upon seeing them, I realized that this particular Iceberg rose had been grafted onto Dr. Huey stock, a sturdy old rose with red flowers. I isolated the red-producing stalks and cut them off as close to the base as I could get. 

Last year, once again, there were a handful of red flowers among the white ones, and once again I tried to remove the suckers. This spring, there are even more red ones. If I don’t make an effort to remove them, then it is likely that the Dr. Huey roses will overtake the Icebergs. 

The truth is, seeing the red blossoms interspersed with the white ones is magical. After a dreary and cold winter, I welcome the spring. Today I will go outside into the sun and enjoy the beauty in the blunder.