I have wanted a garden since I was a child, and one of the great pleasures of imagining my life as it might be once we had a bit of land was the vision of a verdant and luxurious vegetable garden, overhung with laden fruit trees, dotted about with fragrant herbs like lavender and rosemary, with a little pond and a grape arbor nearby for warm afternoons. I elaborated on this dream for years, and when my spouse & I were still thinking we would end up in Mendocino, I planted it in my mind with everything a ten-month growing season might support. I did no research on gardening whatsoever, and knew nothing about it beyond my own ability to keep houseplants happy (this is because I buy the easy ones like pothos, and never bother with anything that needs special soil or pebble trays or extra humidity and so on), and so, of course, gardening in my imaginary garden seemed easy as pie, with nothing to worry about but a simple deer fence and an occasional bout of aphids.

In the two summers before we moved here, I practiced gardening in our limited rented spaces by trying ineffectively to grow kale and tomatoes and potatoes in pots. The kale was bitter, the tomatoes didn’t fruit, the potatoes wilted…but this was just situational, I reasoned: the balcony didn’t get enough light, the weather was odd that year, the pot I chose wasn’t quite big enough. Just get me somewhere with enough space and sunlight, I thought, and I will have the bursting and enormous garden of my dreams, full of waving corn and sprawling melons, huge green-blue fans of lacinato kale, chamomile flowering three feet tall – the kind of crammed and colorful patches sometimes glimpsed in community gardens, where every square inch seems full of the red-and-yellow veins of chard and the peas positively drip from the vines.

Perhaps you have guessed by now that this is not a story of accomplishing that dream.

In fact, this is a story about failure. But it has a happy ending, more or less.

To begin with, we did not move to a place with a ten-month growing season. We moved to the far northeast of the state, where – to my astonishment – the leaves turn utterly gold in autumn and the snowflakes are lacy and perfect as a dream in winter. The quality of the seasons here is very magical to me. All the twee Victorian books I loved as a child about magical places seemed to involve four distinct and delightful seasons, each with its proper clothes and food and diversions, but I never thought I would live anywhere like that in reality; I thought that was just one more bit of charming but stuffy British nostalgia, like saying “jolly well” or wearing frock coats. My heart belongs to California, and California, I thought, has no such thing as seasons. I grew up in the East Bay, in USDA Zone 11, where you can grow practically anything year-round and temperatures under 40°F are unusual, and the “seasons” are wet, dry, and fire. And so I was startled and delighted by the seasoniness of the first five months we spent here, and felt that it would quite make up for having to do things like check plant labels to see what could survive our winter and waiting until May to plant peas.

I am an optimist by nature, sometimes to a fault, and because I grew up in a place which never freezes and have no actual experience gardening, I thought spring would arrive as charmingly as autumn and winter had arrived, and I would plant all my seeds and in no time at all I’d have a splendid garden. Come spring, however, my attempts to establish a garden proved to be such an unmitigated series of disasters that at last I had to resign myself to the whole affair being a kind of cosmic joke.

Part of my imaginary garden was a sort of Mediterranean terrace, and I therefore brought along a number of potted trees I had hoped to establish in our new home, including a fig, two olives, a kumquat, and a pot containing freesia bulbs a dear friend had given us as a housewarming gift. In a fit of hopeless naiveté, I bought a cheap vinyl greenhouse about the size of a large closet, stood it on our back patio, and tucked all my tender little trees into it. Within weeks of the first frost, of course, the entire thing was practically invisible under several feet of snow. The supports buckled under the weight, so that the whole thing looked like a shipwreck in a frozen waste.

Well, I thought, perhaps the snow will act like a little igloo and insulate everything inside – so I’ll just leave it as it is, and maybe the trees will survive!

January and February brought not one snowflake or drop of rain, and the snow began to melt, enough for me to dig down into the fluffy white ice and see that my little trees had buckled and split along with the greenhouse supports. I felt terrible and foolish…but surely, I thought, I had learned my lesson. (Cue maniacal laughter.) Come March, it began to rain. There was still snow everywhere, and the nights were still frosty, so I planted nothing, but I did get another little vinyl greenhouse, and thought about seeds, and agonized over where to put the garden. Our bit of land is part of an open graze range for a local herd of cattle (in the fall we would often wake up to cows under our windows, looking very ethereal in the blue light before dawn) and anything I planted would need to be fenced off; the question was how to spend the least time and money doing so.

Now, there is in fact a fenced enclosure already in our meadow. One would think this was the logical place for the garden – but the trouble is that this fenced spot has been built in the worst possible location. It is in the least sunny part of the meadow, and it is placed in exactly such a way that anything tall – sunflowers, say, or corn, or even an overly tall beansprout – would cast its shadow directly on the solar panels that power the house. (I have no idea if the enclosure was built first and then the panels were installed or vice versa, but it is a truly inexplicable arrangement.) I agonized over whether or not to use it anyway. If not there, then where? Wouldn’t it be a colossal lot of work to build something else? And as I agonized, the snow receded further and grass began to green the meadow – and that, dear friends, is when we discovered the ground squirrels.

Our ground squirrels are plump bounding gray-brown creatures, with bodies rather the shape and size of large fluffy pinecones, and  they burrow endlessly in the soft dusty fairly barren volcanic soil of the meadow. They also adore tender young plants, as I learned immediately and to my great chagrin, as one by one the first vegetable starts I had set out in little pots on the back patio began to vanish: first the kale, then the cilantro and the parsley, then the lettuce. It happened so quickly I didn’t have time to protect them. Nor was it only ground squirrels; soon we discovered a truly adorable Douglas squirrel living in our shed roof, and an entire cheerful family of tremendously charming and ravenous tiny chipmunks scampering about under the patio.

Anything I grew, therefore, had to be protected from these delightful little creatures. That meant not only fencing out the cows but fencing underneath the soil – otherwise the squirrels would simply dig down and pop up in the middle of the vegetables like a horde of moles, only fluffier and bouncier. My heart sank. There went the dream of half-a-dozen bright beds of flowers and vegetables growing willy-nilly wherever I put them. I dreaded the effort and time and money involved in building one squirrel-proof garden bed, let alone several.

But build it I did, and as it went up, slowly, I tried planting wildflower seeds and pollinator-friendly beds as well – with no luck whatsoever. Large, mature, well-established plants – plants that can withstand a little nibbling – cost a great deal of money, so we had to buy the young and tender babies instead: redbuds six inches high, foot-tall lilacs, vines with just a few new leaves and tendrils. The squirrels were thrilled. They chewed the young leaves, devoured every wildflower shoot the second it broke the earth, and stripped new branches from the salmonberry and the spicebush. Without quite realizing I was doing it, I began buying plants simply to test what they would eat. My husband shook his head every time they devoured something new, and asked me why I didn’t just fence it all off with hardware cloth, like the vegetables.

Because, I said, I want to have a garden, not a series of cages, and the only way to know what they won’t eat is stick it in the ground and see. I was crestfallen every time something new got nibbled, of course, and the more they gnawed the more my dream-garden seemed to recede into the distance. Would there ever be anything but spiky grasses in the meadow? The wildflower seeds we scattered thickly – a birthday gift from my husband and a number of beloved friends – seemed to have vanished without trace. Tomato plants I almost killed by leaving them out through not one but two unexpected frosts survived just long enough to put forth leaves before being stripped bare. Two calendula plants I am certain that I planted disappeared so completely overnight that I wonder occasionally if I simply imagined planting them at all. Every time I stepped outside I felt dismayed, even panicky. I had a growing sense of foreboding, overwhelm, impossibility – and, beating like a grim heartbeat under all of it, of failure.

It was not exactly that I felt that I had failed; I knew I was doing the best I could, even if I had been rather naïve. No, it was the horrible feeling that the dream had failed. I nourished my spirit for years by imagining this garden, and now – after all the work and time and money and struggle and help that brought us here – it had turned out to be impossible after all.  

But I kept going, doggedly, perhaps out of desperation or obsessiveness. I finished the vegetable enclosure at last – a messy, silly-looking, shambling affair made out of old split logs, staples, zipties, and paperclips, because I was determined to spend as little money as possible; all I bought for it were six sturdy wooden stakes and a few rolls of wire netting. Of course, it took me several weeks to decide on a location and order the netting and then build the darned thing, and meanwhile I tried to start a few vegetables in my new greenhouse, which was approximately the size of a public toilet stall. The seeds I planted in this dinky little vinyl hut variously froze, wilted, and refused to sprout, but I managed to coax a few to actually put out leaves. Then one day a big wind arose and knocked the greenhouse flat, spilling every successful seedling onto the ground.

This was the last straw, spiritually; at that point I simply accepted my fate. The garden of my dreams was not to be. The plants I managed to get into the completed enclosure were almost six weeks past their proper planting date – straggling peas which should have been bearing in April are reluctantly setting one or two blooms now, in the heat of July; my beans are only a few inches tall, my potatoes are just sprouting. (My mother, meanwhile, is already enjoying minted new potatoes from her garden for dinner, and friends in the Bay are making salads of their radishes and cucumbers…)

And yet.

The garden I imagined will not come to be, because I imagined it when I did not live here and knew nothing about this place. But a garden has come to be. All the while I was sweating and struggling with disappointment, plants were growing merrily and well – only I hadn’t planted them. Not one but fourteen kinds of daffodil appeared like magic out of the snow, and bloomed for weeks all around the house. When the daffodils began to wilt, great feathery masses of bleeding-heart began to grow. Wild woolly mullein, yarrow, and penstemon sent up great flower spikes. A delicate misty green plant called milk kelloggia scattered tiny starry pink flowers over the grasses. A hedge of Rose of Sharon began to bloom. California stickseed made meadows of white blossom. And a tall plant with the delightful name of Tall Tumblemustard began to appear in great quantities in the dull fenced place beyond the solar panel, where I set out blueberries and raspberries and current and thimbleberry and asparagus, all of which, to my surprise, have survived. (None of them have berries this year, but I hold out hope for them for next year if only they grow tall enough.)

In other words, the picture of the garden I had imagined filled my vision so distractingly that I couldn’t see the garden I actually had.

It’s a funny thing: my husband & I have struggled constantly since we arrived here with the sensation that the human-built elements of this place are terribly ill-suited to the landscape in which they sit. The house and garage and sheds are painted a drab, unattractive, dusty brown, and they sit around a barren gravel drive as if they had been dropped there like so many scattered dice. The back patio, an even more unattractive brown that the house, is completely uncovered and broils in the sun all afternoon. The solar panels and the fenced bit of the garden and even the house itself (which sits in a hollow at the bottom of a slope, just where all the rainwater washes down off the meadow) seem to have been placed with such carelessness, without thought or love or tenderness, that it almost hurts to look at them. The human elements seem to have no connection or relation to the graceful trees and the soft sweep of meadow that surround them; they seem alienated, lonely, cut off, like plastic jewels in a setting of silver filagree. There is something colonizing about this – the way the human pieces have not been created in response or relation to the land, but simply pasted over it, to the detriment of both the land and the humans who live on it. Some human idea was insisted upon, over and in spite of the reality of what is here. What the land holds, how it flows, what it wants – these things seem to have been ignored completely.

And yet – surely I too am guilty of this.

I came here with an idea in my mind that had no reference to this place, an image poached from Sunset Magazine and Pinterest and gardens glimpsed in wholly different places. And I was miserable for several months because I kept failing to make my actual bit of earth look like the picture in my head. I felt that I would never have the thing I wanted, not realizing that something worth wanting was already here.

Yesterday I made my first salad from the garden – lettuce, baby kale, spinach, dandelion greens (the dandelions have been springing up in the garden enclosure, and I leave them everywhere they aren’t actively choking something else) and a tiny handful of peas. It is mid-July; most gardeners I know have been eating their baby greens for months already. But so what? Who cares? It was a delicious salad. The fig tree didn’t survive the winter, and I thought that the kumquat and the olive were dead as well…but when I scratched the bark in spring there was still green, so I put the bare dried sticks into the ground and watered them – and lo and behold both of them have new leaves! My corn is two feet tall. Some of the tomato plants regrew after I fenced them off, and I expect fruit next month. The squirrels, I have learned, don’t seem to eat the strongly-scented plants – my marigolds, sage, wormwood, hyssop, rosemary, and lavender are all doing fine. Out in the meadow, the long grasses shake with the nibblings of squirrels and birds. Hummingbirds and swallowtails visit the bleeding-hearts. A tiny fragile patch of wildflowers has appeared in one corner – pinkladies and toadflaxes, wonderful names for dainty tiny blossoms.

It is not what I had imagined – but then, I never imagined watching a tiny chipmunk twirling a stem of grass like a baton, or the fine whiskers of Scuffles, the Douglas squirrel, glimmering in the morning sunlight as she washes her nose on top of the vegetable enclosure.

Why, I wonder, did I cling so stubbornly to the image in my head? Perhaps wanting something for too long makes it difficult to let go of the longing. And yet even the word longing implies distance from the thing longed for. When I look at my husband with love, I am not comparing him to an image in my head of ideal husbandship; I am admiring what he is, his suchness. And yet it is easy, in love or any relation, to want things to be a way that they are not. Sometimes this is a good thing: desire drives change and transformation, and wanting things to be different can be what leads us to better and more beautiful situations. And yet sometimes it precludes, or occludes, the pleasure that is there for the taking. What makes the difference? Perhaps it is a question of how one thinks things could be, with enough work and time and love and effort and care, as opposed to how one thinks things should be, already, with a sense of doom and failure if they aren’t.

I thought I should be able to have a bursting and abundant garden with almost no effort at all, and felt like more of a horrid failure with every setback and deviation from the idea in my head. Now, however, I think (hope!) I have extricated myself from the glossy idea, and have, instead, a sense of how things could be here, one day, with enough time and tending and listening. After all, I don’t want the ground squirrels to go away. If rosebushes will be eaten overnight, I won’t plant them. If I can’t grow lemons here, so be it. But I can paint the house a soft sage green and surround it with trellises, and if I allow myself to live at the tempo of honeysuckle and grapevine instead of at the speed of the everything-should-be-already-perfect timeline in my head, one day our house will be as soft and green as the meadow and as leafy as any cottage in an old beloved story – and, better yet, it will seem to belong at the foot of the cedars and the pines, instead of standing out and apart from them like a plastic bag in a riverbed. It has not been a fun lesson to learn; but I am glad, nevertheless, to be learning it.